Radicalism, Counter-Radicalism and the American Legion, 1919–1940

George Lewis

doi:10.14324/111.444.ra.2016.v1.1.011

Abstract

The means by which the United States sought to identify radicals and radicalism in the inter-war years has been largely hidden by a scholarship that has, instead, chosen to focus on processes of Americanization. By analysing hitherto hidden and underused archival sources, this essay examines the ways in which the American Legion positioned itself to become the single most important lobbying force in the identification of inter-war radicalism in the USA, used its considerable resources to sustain a vigorous programme to identify radicalism which served its own organizational interests, and, therefore, had a significant and meaningful impact on debates over radicalism and Americanism at local, state and national levels. The Legion reacted to a changing climate which saw radicalism identified first as an external, immigrant-led threat in the early 1920s, and then as an internal, home-grown menace as the 1930s drew on. That saw the organization grapple with questions including the innate intelligence of immigrants, as debates raged over whether radicals were lured unwittingly into that radicalism or chose radicalism because of a fiendish acumen. Throughout the period, the Legion’s view of radicalism was deeply subjective, but was disseminated – and all too regularly accepted – with a polished veneer of objectivity that belied the often vituperative national debates that surrounded ideas of radicalism.

Highlights

For a growing cadre of racial nationalists who sought to base immigration and naturalization policies on a hierarchy of racial and ethnic groups which included the establishment of difference between Europeans, the issue was no simpler: the Germans who had been the nation’s wartime enemy were held to be ‘superior’ to the Catholics, Jews and Eastern Europeans who were increasingly classed as incapable of successful Americanization
Too, Butler faced increasing concerns as he sought to deal with the challenge presented not by the geographical origin of immigrants themselves, but by many of the social, political and economic forces that had coalesced into the United States’ first major Red Scare, which, beginning in 1919, witnessed an increasingly nativist constituency mount a series of counter-attacks against what was perceived to be a hydra of multi-headed radicalism, led by communists, syndicalists, anarchists and radical socialists
RADICAL AMERICAS 2–1 designed to aid both state and local programmes in their attempts to ‘Americanize’ the nation. Butler and his Bureau acknowledged that education technically remained the devolved responsibility of the individual states of the union, but believed that the federal government should retain a commitment to helping individual states to Americanize any recent immigrants living within their borders

Summary

Introduction

For a growing cadre of racial nationalists who sought to base immigration and naturalization policies on a hierarchy of racial and ethnic groups which included the establishment of difference between Europeans, the issue was no simpler: the Germans who had been the nation’s wartime enemy were held to be ‘superior’ to the Catholics, Jews and Eastern Europeans who were increasingly classed as incapable of successful Americanization.

Results

Conclusion