The American Legion

In the reading by Ed Paulson he discussed the American Legion and their brutalization of Hobos, Bums, and Traps and I wanted to find out more about this. When I was a senior in high school I was selected to attend Boys State, I had no idea what it was and figured it would be a good thing to put on college applications and such. When I got there I was shocked to see how conservative it was the other kids there and the people who gave speeches throughout the week. Needless to say I didn't enjoy it, but I never really considered where they had come from and what they stood for. My research into them for this blog were not comforting, founded in the early 1900's they as a group for veterans after WWI it quickly became an extremely conservative organization. In 1923 the Legion Commander citied Italian Fascism as his model for combating the forces of the left. It went on to discuss the role the Legion had in strike breaking during the early 30's. It also said that chapters who supported unions or had a significant membership of unionists were expelled from the Legion. They were clearly not a group friendly to the working population. In 1952 the Legion called on congress to investigate the ACLU to determine if they were communists.

This is clearly an organization with no sympathy for workers or their struggles.