The Story of the American Legion: The Birth of the LegionWheat, George Seay
History
The Story of the American Legion: The Birth of the Legion
Wheat, George Seay
American Legion; World War, 1914-1918 -- Societies, etc.
This advanced delegation, two from each State, had been requested to
come beforehand to meet on the morning of Tuesday, May 6th, so as to
formulate a working order of business on which the caucus might
proceed as soon as it assembled. There was another reason for this
meeting also. The temporary committee wanted to avoid any appearance
of having "framed up the caucus." By this it is meant that the
committee wanted to be able to say to the caucus that its working
procedure had been determined by a thoroughly representative body, a
democratic, advanced delegation composed of men from every State in
the Union. There were those critics of the Legion, who, had the
temporary committee formulated the caucus procedure, would have been
only too glad to have attempted to make trouble by saying it was a
controlled and made-to-order caucus--controlled and made-to-order by
the men who had taken the lead in it. In fact, during the early
morning of the first day the advanced committee met one delegation
arrived with blood in its eyes determined to wage a fight against
universal military training. One of the stories circulated at the time
was to the effect that the entire Legion was nothing but a blind
whereby a mysterious "Military Clique" was to gain supreme power over
the Legion's policies. It took but a very short while to convince the
would-be obstreperous delegation that the caucus was not the
convention and was empowered solely to organize a veterans'
association and not to adopt policies.
The temporary committee in America determined at the very beginning
that no policies would be adopted at the caucus, that the Legion at
this time should follow in the footsteps of its comrades abroad in
stating that neither the men here nor the men there could, as
different units, adopt broad policies until a convention could be held
truly representing all men who had fought in the Great War.
Colonel Roosevelt called the advanced committee to order a little
after two o'clock in the afternoon, in a small and very noisy parlor
in the Hotel Statler. The gavel which he used was made from wood from
the rudder of Admiral Peary's North Pole steamship _The Roosevelt_,
which had been presented to him by Colonel E. Lester Jones of
Washington, D.C.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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