The Battle of Broadway

Greedy Manhattan can gulp up a convention crowd as easily as a sword swallower taking an aspirin tablet. But last week, as 250,000 members of the American Legion poured in for their biggest national convention since Pearl Harbor, the Big City cleared for action. It moved everything movable out of hotel lobbies, boarded up plate-glass windows, ordered its cops to be especially paternal, and then, as resignedly as Cleveland, Miami or Omaha, waited for the first big bang.

Only a scattering of the Legion's 2,000,000 World War II veterans came to the big party. But the paunchy and greying ex-doughboys of the old guard were determined to keep their end up, in spite of the steely face of the metropolis and their own arthritis. Having already captured more U.S. cities with water pistols than Grant, Lee or Cornwallis ever took with gunpowder, and fortified by Bourbon and memories, they poured into Times Square by the noisy thousands and made it theirs.

For four days & nights, the Great White Way echoed to the sound of invasion. Bugles squalled and drums rattled above the piteous honking of stalled traffic. Explosions boomed; sirens howled. Police whistles trilled madly as Legionnaires decoyed harried truck drivers to the curb. One night, hundreds of shirt-sleeved Legionnaires hung out the windows of the Taft and Victoria Hotels, fired barrages of water-filled paper bags across 51st Street at each other, howled with vulgar glee as the missiles fell short and plummeted into the crowd below.

Something for the Girls. Above all other sounds came the penetrating squeal of indignant women. No female was too young or too old to be considered a target. Unwary old ladies were conked by water bags. Until the police called a halt, hundreds of women were rumped by electrified canes and battery-powered "jump boxes"--instruments which made them leap like gazelles. Thousands of women--even the tarts who gathered expectantly near hotel exits--were soaked by the Legion's merciless squirt guns, by a truck-mounted spray machine, and even, at times, by streams from the jugs which the water-gunmen used to refill their weapons.

Though it was only necessary to avoid Broadway to avoid the Legion's muscular humor, many a New Yorker was less than charmed by the spectacle of baying, middle-aged men cavorting through the streets. The New York Post's "Saloon Editor" Earl Wilson predicted: "New York will never tolerate the American Legion again." A World War II combat infantryman wrote a letter to the New York Daily News: "A warning to any Legion clown who approaches me: you must have paid plenty for those store teeth, Pop. . . . No sense getting them all mashed in."

As the convention wore on, women began arming themselves with water pistols of their own (a favorite weapon: a pistol guaranteed to produce a hundred and fifty 25-ft. squirts) and engaged in duels with their tormentors. A Legion prankster who waved a dry but dangerous-looking red paintbrush in women's faces was clouted with an umbrella, several handbags, and a high-heeled shoe. But the Legionnaires welcomed competition with disconcertingly uproarious laughter, went right on gulping from pint bottles, dropping water bags and emitting an odd war cry: "Hya, Queenie, Queenie, Queenie--best old dog you ever saw!"

Cheers for General Ike. By contrast, there were few fireworks in the convention hall. Guest speakers included New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Mayor William O'Dwyer, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, General Carl Spaatz, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, but almost every man spoke on the same subject--universal military training. Though there were 12,000 people in Madison Square Garden for the opening moments of the convention, the crowds dwindled after that.

The convention hall's one real moment of excitement followed the spontaneous burst of cheering with which General Dwight D. Eisenhower was hailed. But when Kansas delegates thronged forward in an attempt to set off an Eisenhower-for-President boom, National Commander Paul Griffith waved them back. The ovation ended after only 30 seconds, and with it the theory that the convention would play a major part in presidential politics. (Presidential Aspirant Harold Stassen, a delegate to the convention, got a thunderous ovation when he spoke in behalf of the "Marshall approach.")

The Legion's own politicking was as cut-&-dried as before World War II. No revolt of young veterans materialized to balk the "kingmakers" of the old guard in their efforts to elect a national commander. The kingmakers' choice for 1948 was James F. O'Neil, police chief of Manchester, N.H. (pop. 77,685), a greying, 49-year-old veteran of the Mexican Border campaign and of World War I. O'Neil, a onetime newspaperman and a Republican, also saw action in the South Pacific during World War II as a civilian assistant to John L. Sullivan, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air. He was elected national commander--a post which pays $10,000 plus $40,000 in expense money--by acclamation.

The Drums Went Bang. But in one sense the speechmaking and politicking were simply groundwork for the Legion's parades. They blossomed by the scores. There were informal processions by rigid but hilarious ranks of pajama-clad men. There were exploratory tours by bands and drum & bugle corps. On the first night there was a monster demonstration of that peculiar production of American fantasy--the 40 & 8 locomotive. There were 38 of them in all, many of them amazing machines which emitted real smoke, towed boxcars and whistled like Old 97. About 200,000 people jammed sidewalks and rooftops to cheer them down Eighth Avenue, and to goggle at things like a bucking automobile.

Climax of the convention was the Legion's big parade up Fifth Avenue. It was held at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, when most businesses were shut and thousands of New Yorkers out of town. But though there was little cheering or confetti throwing, two million people turned out to watch. For noise, costumes, endurance and cessation of cross-town traffic, it beat anything Manhattan had seen for many years.

The first of 52,000 marchers, of 400 bands and drum & bugle corps, started uptown at 9:30 a.m. They kept coming & coming, liveried as British grenadiers, cowhands, tropical explorers and Indians. They wore scarlet, green, purple, blue and the purest white. There were Irish pipers, Revolutionary fifers, drill teams, floats and apparently almost every girl in the U.S. who had learned how to twirl a baton. The bugles never quit blowing and the drums never quit beating. It got dark, the street lights were turned on, and still the parade went on. It was 10:37 p.m., 13 hours after the first tootle, before the procession ended.

As the Department of Sanitation's grey, hump-backed trucks fell humbly into action behind the last band, many a New Yorker and many a Legionnaire breathed a deep sigh. The invasion had ended in something like a draw.

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