A veteran Representative who sat next to me covertly dashed a tear from his eye and tried to pass a wounded soldier a ten-dollar bill under the table. The soldier, private with a family to keep, declined the gift.

a

Within forty-eight hours the Sweet bill, increasing the monthly compensation of the disabled from $30 to $80 a month, passed the Senate under a suspension of rules and without a roll call, the first time anything of the kind had occurred since the Civil War. Later the Legion obtained the passage of legislation raising the pay of veterans taking vocational training from $80 to $100 a month, obtained an appropriation of $125,000,000 for the payment of death and disability claims, and another of $46,000,000 for new hospital facilities.

In the spring of 1920 the recalcitrant Vocational Board came into line. With their affairs in a more hopeless tangle than ever the Board appealed to the Legion to help it out. Mr. D'Olier asked National Adjutant Bolles, Gerald J. Murphy, director of the Service Division at headquarters, and the writer to make a study of the situation and submit recommendations. Murphy, who had a remarkable grasp of the subject, did most of the work. This committee submitted a plan for the decentralization of the Board and for co-operation in the field with the Legion. The Board accepted the plan and put it into effect with energy and intelligence. The situation improved at once.

The welfare of the disabled required continuous effort throughout the year. Vast improvements were made, but the underlying evils persisted until the conclusion of Mr. Galbraith's memorable offensive a year later.

CHAPTER VIII

BOLSHEVISM: THE CENTRALIA MASSACRE

THE AMERICAN LEGION had its inception, first in the A. E. F. and then at home, amid troubled times. The world quivered from the effect of energies running riot before they could be diverted into sane courses.

The first after-the-war dislocations were essentially political and destructive in character and had their inspiration in the terrible Russian revolution. In the remaking of the world the opposing forces of constructive economics and destructive politics sprang into instant conflict. With their year head start in Russia the forces of destruction were able to deal the first blow and carry the battle to their adversary for a long time. Delirious with their sudden power, the bolsheviki proclaimed the "world revolution" and set out to make it a fact. The Red tide made startling advances before it began to recede. Austria was permeated and Hungary fell under its sway. The Balkans tottered. Germany wavered. Italy trembled on the brink. Old England was shaken. Victorious Red armies carried the revolution on their bayonets from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. They marched east again and battered the gates of Warsaw, where only Weygand, chief of staff to Foch, saved Poland from annihilation.

In the United States voices were raised and forces asserted themselves which had been stilled by the stress and vigilance of the great national effort. Soviet agents appeared mysteriously from the depths of Russia. Native agitators flocked to sit at the feet of these wise men and learn the miracle methods of Russian revolution-making. The rank and file of the radical groups swung in line. Backed by money and brains, plans and organization, the project of the revolution in America was launched.

It was calculated that the movement should draw its

numerical strength from two sources-from the ranks of the newly discharged soldiers and from the ranks of labor. Both groups were skillfully and effectively approached. Some elements of labor became extensively permeated, and some elements of ex-service men no less so. In 1919 and for a while in 1920 the country was full of ex-service groups of radical propensities. One of these societies achieved something like a national organization, claiming (probably with great exaggeration) 500,000 regular members before it began to crumble. This organization is no longer a factor for anything; it is little more than a name. Its contemporaries are all gone.

By creating a wholesome diversion for the restless energies of a million men and by its determined stand for law and order, the Legion was able to cut a great deal of ground from under the feet of the proponents of revolution. There was naturally a good deal of resentment against the Legion on the part of the radical conspirators who saw their efforts thus confounded. Agitators spurred their followers on with violent philippics against the Legion.

I met a radical in New York about this time who assured me the ascendancy of the Legion would soon pass; that the mass of ex-soldiers and sailors would see the light and, flocking to the Red standard, put the revolution across in fine shape. He was as positive of this as anyone could be. This man was a quiet, scholarly young Russian, a revolutionist of the intellectual or tea-room type, whose forte was writing incendiary literature designed to stir others to the bombthrowing pitch, but whose own timid nature would have shrunk from such intemperate exercise. What he told me was said without heat or emotion, but simply as a statement of what he was convinced to be a fact. He had selected the mansion on Fifth avenue that he and his wife would occupy when the proletariat should rise and conquer. It was unfortunate, he said, that the Legion in its blindness should seek