"Citizens First"

Nobody dropped water bombs from a hotel window. Nobody set fire to the furniture. There were no fist fights in the lobby, no naked women running through the corridors, no drunks hell-raising in the streets. Delegates to the first convention of the American Veterans Committee, lustiest & loudest of the scores of burgeoning World War II-born veterans' groups, were too busy for horseplay.

Since it was organized in 1944, A.V.C. had tried hard to be different from the stodgy, conservative American Legion and the oligarchic Veterans of Foreign Wars. For three days in the muggy Iowa heat, 840 delegates, representing some 60,000 members, shouted, sweated, thumped and swore as they hammered out their future aims.

When the proceedings began in the Hotel Fort Des Moines, nobody could be sure what the end would bring. Up until then A.V.C. had followed a loose, sweeping "Statement of Intentions" with a notable, laudable motto: "Citizens first, veterans second."

"Why Don't You?" A.V.C. accepted as members men & women from all World War II armed services, in & out of uniform, and from the Merchant Marine. It had plumped noisily for FEPC, OPA, the minimum-wage bill, federal housing subsidies, other allied issues. From inside & out it had been damned as Communistic, boosted as liberal, dismissed as just another fly-by-night collection of hotheads. Even its leaders admitted they didn't know what the rank & file thought.

But the delegates were not hesitant about making their views known. In the tempestuous uproar of policy-drafting committees, political ideologies and regional prejudices clashed in wide-open, no-holds-barred debate. Cried one exasperated woman to her husband: "Oh, why don't you just join the American Legion?"

In the evenings they piled into the big Shriner auditorium to hear Harold Stassen blast U.S. Communists, Walter Reuther blame U.S. labor troubles on insufficient "consumer capacity" (i.e., too low wages). Most Rev. Bernard J. Sheil, Chicago's famed radical Catholic bishop, brought down the house with a savage attack on racial inequalities and congressional dawdling.

Veteran newsmen wondered how anything could ever come out of the wild confusion. One delegate mistook a two-star admiral for a Yugoslav observer. Reporters themselves caught the fever. One thought he was buttonholing Walter Reuther, embarrassedly found he was talking to a Chicago Tribune staff writer.

The Moderates. But when the weary delegates packed up their bags and headed for home they had constructed a determined, deadly serious, left-of-center plan of action. It called for: international control of atomic energy, Big Three unity, a guaranteed annual wage, expansion of TVA-style river projects, solid opposition to antilabor, Jim Crow* and anti-Nisei legislation. True to the motto, it vetoed the idea of a veterans' bonus.

The election of national officers was a smashing victory for A.V.C. moderates, a resounding defeat for Communist-led delegates. Acting National Chairman Charles Bolte, who lost a leg fighting with the British Eighth Army at El Alamein, was re-elected to the top spot with only one dissenting vote, A.V.C.-Founder Gilbert Harrison as vice chairman. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., looming large in behind-the-scenes politicking, did not run for office.)

Its first hurdle passed, A.V.C. began a drive for a million dollars to solicit a million members.

* Translating theory into action, A.V.C. members picketed a tavern which refused to serve two Negro veterans, had the proprietor arrested for violation of the Iowa state civil-rights law on charges backed by onetime Willkie-man Oren Root Jr. Next day, the New Yorker's E. J. Kahn Jr. drafted a full-page ad complimenting the city of Des Moines on prompt police action.

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