"The World War Dead Did Not Die in Vain": Veteran Organizations Debate U.S. Involvement in World War II, 1939–41

Military veterans play a vital role in shaping popular conceptions of the nation’s wars, and by extension, in American political life as a domestic pressure group focused on national security issues. In recent years, for example, one veteran organization, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), has been thrust into the national spotlight in profoundly political ways. On August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech to the VFW’s national encampment drew wide publicity as the most assertive statement of the Bush Administration’s controversial policy of “pre-emptive” war, a policy that would ultimately lead to the Iraq War. Since veterans and veteran organizations are viewed as a historically receptive audience for a bellicose foreign policy, Cheney’s choice of the VFW encampment as the arena to articulate his foreign policy vision received little comment. Yet, had Cheney addressed a veterans gathering from 1939 to 1941, he would have encountered a sharply divided audience over the issues of war and national security priorities.
In the scholarship on the interwar period, a voluminous body of literature investigates isolationism and the road to US involvement in World War II, but veterans’ participation has been overlooked. For example, the literature on isolationism, or more precisely, anti-interventionism, effectively explains that Depression-era isolationists ran the political spectrum, but no studies make special reference to veterans as a foreign policy pressure group that routinely weighed in on these issues. This paper explores how the two major veteran organizations, the American Legion and the VFW, entered the public debate over involvement in World War II from its outset to American entry into the war. During those two years, I argue, veterans redefined and re-fought the Great War, continually battling over its memory and how that memory should inform the national security debates over the vital matters of war and peace.