What had happened to Bill?  The little, quiet, timid youth of the past was now a big, burly, strong-bodied, clear-minded man.  As we entered the taxi he was telling me that he “intended to raise hell if they didn’t take some action against this blank Bolshevism, and furthermore that this new Legion was going to be the most tremendous organization that the U.S.A. had ever seen.”  If he had told me that Swinburne’s Faustine was written in iambic hexameter it would have sounded more like old times.  But here was a new man, strong and virile, intensely interested in the future of his nation.

What had happened to Bill?  Eighteen months in the army was the answer.

The advanced delegation began to arrive in St. Louis, the afternoon of May 5th.  The Statler and Jefferson Hotels were packed because there were two other conventions in progress.  But our delegates needed no badge to be distinguished from the others; there was a difference between them and the other conventionites.  There was the same difference between the two as between the old Bill and the new Bill.  They too had had eighteen months in the army, and a coat of tan on each one’s face, his ruddy frame, and general atmosphere of a healthy mind and a healthy body were unmistakable emblems.

This advanced delegation, two from each State, had been requested to come beforehand to meet on the morning of Tuesday, May 6th, so as to formulate a working order of business on which the caucus might proceed as soon as it assembled.  There was another reason for this meeting also.  The temporary committee wanted to avoid any appearance of having “framed up the caucus.”  By this it is meant that the committee wanted to be able to say to the caucus that its working procedure had been determined by a thoroughly representative body, a democratic, advanced delegation composed of men from every State in the Union.  There were those critics of the Legion, who, had the temporary committee formulated the caucus procedure, would have been only too glad to have attempted to make trouble by saying it was a controlled and made-to-order caucus—­controlled and made-to-order by the men who had taken the lead in it.  In fact, during the early morning of the first day the advanced committee met one delegation arrived with blood in its eyes determined to wage a fight against universal military training.  One of the stories circulated at the time was to the effect that the entire Legion was nothing but a blind whereby a mysterious “Military Clique” was to gain supreme power over the Legion’s policies.  It took but a very short while to convince the would-be obstreperous delegation that the caucus was not the convention and was empowered solely to organize a veterans’ association and not to adopt policies.

The temporary committee in America determined at the very beginning that no policies would be adopted at the caucus, that the Legion at this time should follow in the footsteps of its comrades abroad in stating that neither the men here nor the men there could, as different units, adopt broad policies until a convention could be held truly representing all men who had fought in the Great War.