ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to locate the origins of American counter-revolutionary violence from 1919 to 1921 in veterans’ experiences in the First World War. By examining the rhetoric employed by the weekly magazine of the American Legion, the largest of the interwar veterans organisations and one of the primary perpetrators of right-wing violence, I will argue that veterans engaged in counter-revolutionary action largely understood and justified their struggle against radical labour and the Left in terms of their war-time service. From their comparisons of radical unionists to their erstwhile German enemy, to their allusions to trench warfare and invocations of comrades lost in the war, Legionnaires drew explicit connections between combat in Europe and the violence they unleashed at home. For these veterans, the war did not end with the November 1918 armistice. Their fight to preserve their conception of the American way of life simply entered a new phase, one that would transpose the savage violence of foreign battlegrounds to the coal fields and lumber yards of the United States. Building on work by William Pencak and Robert Gerwarth, this research aims to interrogate the processes by which veterans’ economic grievances were channelled into violence against immigrants, labour unions and leftist activists. With US troops now returning from brutal imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the role of First World War veterans in Red Scare violence offers crucial insights into the ways in which war violence, previously confined to foreign lands, can explode onto the domestic scene.
