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Launching a Political Career
Paul V. McNutt and the American Legion, 1919–1932
DEAN J. KOTLOWSKI
| Paul Vories McNutt was both a towering figure in Hoosier politics during the 1930s and a "substantial political figure in the Roosevelt Era."1 As governor of Indiana from 1933 to 1937, McNutt backed the New Deal while he revamped his state's government, emerging as the nation's strongest and best-known governor in the mid-1930s. He later served under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as federal security administrator (1939–1945), high commissioner to the Philippines (1937–1939 and 1945–1946), chair of the War Manpower Commission (1942–1945), and ambassador to the Philippines (1946–1947). McNutt saw himself as a successor to FDR, until the president decided to run for a third term in 1940. He then sought the Democratic nomination for vice president, until Roosevelt declared his preference for Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. A possible candidate for president and a viable candidate for vice president, McNutt showed what was and what might have been in American politics in the mid-twentieth century.2 Yet, he still lacks a scholarly biography.3 |
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Interestingly, McNutt did not enter public life through the traditional means of partisan politics. He started out as an academic and a university administrator, becoming a professor of law at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington in 1919 and then serving as dean of the IU School of Law between 1925 and 1933. More importantly, it was veterans' politics in general, and the American Legion in particular, that launched McNutt's political career. He won election as commander of the Legion's Indiana Department in 1926 and became national commander of the organization two years later. At the same time, the American Legion's beliefs in patriotic service, anti-pacifism and anti-communism, a strong national defense, and benefits for veterans coincided with those of McNutt, who became one of the most charismatic figures in the organization over its first two decades. |
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The topic of McNutt and the American Legion is significant in two respects. In a narrow, biographical sense, McNutt's rise in the organization exemplified much of his life's pattern. He succeeded at winning offices in the Legion, and that raised his confidence and fueled his ambition—his most commented-on character trait. He also labored hard to promote the Legion's agenda. And yet, McNutt advanced beyond the organization, into the realm of electoral politics. Through the Legion, he learned how to express his intentions, mobilize supporters, plot strategy, and prevail at conventions. At the same time, in a much larger historical sense, McNutt's experience in the Legion allows one to examine the internal politics, ideology, and early years of the best known veterans' organization to emerge in the U. S. following the Great War. |
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Involvement in the Legion proved, for McNutt, a generally positive experience. Joining the organization satisfied a range of personal needs, including an ideological one. McNutt's experiences reinforced his realistic views on foreign and defense policy, and may have encouraged his later embrace of the welfare state. Moreover, the Legion, because of its youth, organizational structure, and revolving-door leadership, became a road to distinction and later on to a political career. McNutt's rise in the outfit made him a state and national figure just as the Grand Old Party (GOP) was beginning to decline politically in both Indianapolis and Washington, D.C. The Legion played a vital role in McNutt's election as governor of Indiana in 1932. Yet such successes also fed McNutt's belief that, having advanced swiftly in the field of veterans' politics, he could do likewise in national, elected office. That did not happen. |
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