100 PERCENT AMERICANS

“I hope that you have not arrived too late.”

With these words, the American ambassador to France welcomed Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, when he arrived in 1917. For nearly three years, an officially neutral United States had agonized over how to respond to the increasingly brutal European war. “The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what American citizens say and do,” President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed when the war began in August 1914.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr., William Donovan, Eric Fisher Wood and Hamilton Fish III – all future founders of The American Legion – took this message to heart, even though they had no intention of remaining impartial.

The four wanted to do more than wait patiently for the war to run its course. They chose different paths, reflecting the range of available options. Roosevelt (firstborn son of the 26th U.S. president) and Fish helped organize the Plattsburgh Movement, a series of summer military training camps for men with the means and inclination to fund their own military educations. Wood also joined the Plattsburgh Movement, then volunteered to fight with the British and was wounded at Arras three days after the United States declared war on April 6, 1917. Donovan had traveled overseas to facilitate shipments of donated food to civilian refugees before rejoining his National Guard cavalry unit along the Mexican border in 1916.

It would be Wilson’s war, but these men embodied the spirit of former President Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of their adolescence. The elder Roosevelt constantly reminded America’s privileged sons that they had a responsibility not only to enjoy their good fortune but to render service to their communities. “Let them remember that, as much has been given to them so much will be expected of them,” he preached in 1917.

Humanitarianism offered one opportunity to serve. 

In German-occupied Belgium and northern France, starvation and disease loomed as German authorities not only confiscated food but destroyed livestock and crops to punish Belgians for their armed resistance. Herbert Hoover became a national hero for his work organizing the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Other philanthropic groups, including the American Red Cross and the Rockefeller Foundation, also participated in a massive American relief effort that fed millions of civilians throughout war-torn Europe. 

Donovan, a 33-year-old lawyer from Buffalo, N.Y., was recruited by the Rockefeller Foundation’s War Relief Commission to help refugees in Poland. Mostly ignored in the American press, ferocious fighting along the 600-mile front between Russia and Austria-Hungary engulfed more than 10,000 towns and villages, sending millions running for cover in the cities. 

In 1916, Donovan traveled to London, where he met Hoover. He went on to occupied Belgium to ferret out opportunities to assist for the foundation. He made an impromptu trip to the city of Louvain, whose renowned library and Catholic university had been burned to the ground by invading German troops. In the eyes of the world, such senseless destruction mimicked the 5th-century rampages of Attila the Hun; henceforth the Germans were called the “Huns.” Revealing where his own sympathies lay, the Irish-Catholic Donovan returned with a request from Louvain’s cardinal bishop for Rockefeller Foundation funds to rebuild the city. 

Donovan’s training as a lawyer made him an ideal candidate to approach the British and German governments for permission to transport relief shipments past the British blockade into areas occupied by the Central Powers. Despite the overall success of American wartime philanthropy, Donovan’s particular mission failed. He made no headway with the British, and in Berlin he received a telegram from the War Department recalling him for service along the Mexican border.

Donovan rode his men hard during Pershing’s unsuccessful campaign to capture the Mexican rebel Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Having seen the European war up close, Donovan knew the American army was unprepared to fight. Hill Jones, one of Donovan’s troops, remembered complaining constantly about the extra work imposed by him. “But you made us realize what lay ahead of us, you got us to quit playing around at being soldiers,” Jones acknowledged. 

Donovan was not alone in his concern about the nation’s deficient preparations for war. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had long campaigned to strengthen the armed forces and as president had begun modernizing the Navy. There were practical reasons for bolstering the Navy once the United States acquired colonies following the Spanish-American War and built the Panama Canal. The question of expanding the Army was more contentious.

The U.S. Regular Army was woefully ill-equipped to fight the type of modern, industrial war being waged overseas. A force of approximately 100,000 men made it the 17th largest in the world, with only enough ammunition on hand to fight for a day and a half along the Western Front. For preparedness advocates, the nation’s vulnerability to invasion was even more troubling. 

In addition to a stronger Army, they wanted the War Department to establish universal military training, a U.S. version of the compulsory peacetime military service required in numerous European nations. Military training could serve as a school for the nation, Roosevelt argued – a way for upper-class men to develop a sense of duty and manly courage, for immigrants to assimilate and for Americans from all walks of life to discover what they had in common.  

However, these were not popular arguments at the time. A large standing army was traditionally seen as a potential danger to Americans’ liberties, it would be expensive to maintain, and it might even encourage future governments to regularly wage war, many argued. 

The political calculus changed dramatically on May 7, 1915, when a German submarine torpedoed the British passenger liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland – the 9/11 of its time. The ship sank in 18 minutes, killing 1,198 passengers – including 128 Americans. Because Lusitania sank close to shore, bodies washed up for days, keeping the tragedy on the front page. One particularly heart-rending story described the corpse of a drowned woman clutching her months-old baby. “Her face wears a half smile. Her baby’s head rests against her breast. No one has tried to separate them.” Artist Fred Spear envisioned the pair sinking to their deaths in the war’s first U.S.-produced propaganda poster. He captioned it with a single word: “Enlist.”

Five days after the sinking, the British released the Bryce report that contained eyewitness testimony detailing atrocities by German soldiers during the 1914 invasion of Belgium. Military preparedness, in a matter of a few days, became a movement in the United States.  

Roosevelt Jr. joined Ivy League-educated businessmen lobbying for the creation of summer military training camps not just for college students but for older men, too. “It was only a question of time until we would be called to the colors, and (we) realized most keenly the fact that it is one thing to be willing and quite another to be able to take your part,” he later wrote.

Roosevelt Jr. attended the first 1915 camp near Plattsburgh, N.Y., and helped found the Military Training Camps Association to keep the momentum going. In 1916, two national defense acts authorized a gradual increase and stricter professional
standards in the armed forces, a victory for the preparedness movement.

Wood was also a key player in the Plattsburgh initiative. He had been studying architecture in Paris when the war began. He volunteered his services to an overwhelmed U.S. Embassy, visiting the front and carrying dispatches to governments on both sides of the conflict. Upon returning to the United States, he wrote one book detailing his adventures and another, “The Writing on the Wall,” advocating national preparedness. 

By January 1917, Wood had waited long enough. He resigned his commission in the Officers’ Reserve Corps and returned to Europe to serve in the British Army. He joined thousands of other volunteers who had come from America to fight in the trenches, fly for the Lafayette Escadrille, drive ambulances and tend the wounded.  

Ultimately, the Plattsburgh camps proved their worth by training the cadre of white, native-born citizen-officers who led Americans into battle along the Western Front in 1918. As a battalion and regimental commander in the 1st Division, Roosevelt Jr. fought at Cantigny, Soissons, St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. Wood served as assistant chief of staff for the 88th Division and was gassed during the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

Achieving the military rank they coveted wasn’t all smooth sailing for Plattsburgh graduates. Fish, a former Harvard football captain, encountered a Regular Army officer who felt he was too young and inexperienced to sit for a promotion exam. Not long after, a dejected Fish ran into Col. William Haywood, who was organizing the New York 15th Infantry Regiment, an all-black National Guard unit. “He asked me if I wanted to join the regiment as a captain,” Fish recalled. “I accepted his offer on the spot and became one of the first officers of what was later designated the 369th Infantry Regiment, the famed Harlem Hellfighters.” 

Fish criticized the Plattsburgh movement for its elitism, arguing in favor of broadening its ranks beyond “sons of people of means.” Commanding black troops opened Fish’s eyes to another self-imposed limitation of the preparedness movement: never contemplating the desirability of training African-American officers or integrating units to erase the racial divide.

After the war, Fish, a 12-term congressman from New York, waged a lifelong campaign to secure black soldiers equal rights and recognition.

Roosevelt Jr., meanwhile, left the wartime Army convinced that military service had unified his generation. “During the war, every man in the service did something for his country,” he wrote in his 1919 autobiography “Average Americans.” “Those who served became straight Americans, one hundred percent Americans and nothing else.” 

As Roosevelt wrote these words, the founding of The American Legion was underway, and Fish was chairing the committee drafting the preamble of the Legion’s constitution. Key elements included pledges “to foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism”; “to inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, state, and nation”; and “to make right the master of might.” These phrases were not slogans baked up in committee meetings. They were principles reflected in the lived experiences of the Legion’s founders during the first world war.

These men began as concerned citizens who were dedicated to humanitarianism and preparedness. They became officers who showed tremendous personal bravery while leading their men to victory in the world’s deadliest war to date. They returned as heroes committed to perpetuating an ethos of service. They were determined to advance their values, confirmed by their experiences as wartime veterans, under the auspices of an American Legion they would found.  

Jennifer D. Keene is a professor of history at Chapman University and president of the Society of Military History. She is author of several books on U.S. involvement in World War I, including “Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America,” “World War I: The American Soldier Experience,” and “The United States and the First World War.”