Everything Wrong with the American Legion
And How to Fix It
The American Legion wrote the GI Bill on hotel stationery and a cocktail napkin. That is not a metaphor. In 1944, Harry Colmery, a former national commander, sat in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and drafted the legislation that would eventually send nearly eight million veterans to college, finance four million home loans, and reshape the American middle class. He did not have a committee of consultants. He did not convene focus groups. He had a pen, a napkin, and a clear sense of what veterans needed.
That was eighty years ago.
Today, the organization Colmery represented has 1.27 million members, down from a peak of 3.3 million after World War II. It is losing ground every year. As of May 2025, the Legion sat 43,087 members below its count from the same period the year before. Posts are closing. Meeting rooms are empty. Young veterans who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan are joining running clubs and kayak groups instead of showing up at the bar on Thursday night. The organization that once moved Congress to create the most consequential social legislation in American history now struggles to get its own members to show up for meetings.
This is not primarily a demographic problem. It is a leadership problem. It is a structural problem. It is, in more than a few documented cases, a culture problem. And it is a problem that the people in charge of fixing it keep refusing to name directly.
Elizabeth Hartman, a Marine Corps veteran, former post commander of American Legion Post 539 in New Bern, North Carolina, and one of the more useful critics currently writing about veterans organizations, has been documenting these problems in real time. Her Substack publication, All Due Respect, describes the Legion’s inner workings with the subtitle “Welcome to the Circus.” That is not hyperbole. Hartman has reported on internal power plays, legislative inconsistency, the Legion’s awkward relationship with advocacy, and what she calls the slow death of a 100-year-old institution. She has watched the Internal Affairs Commission vote 30-1 to preserve a gender restriction on Auxiliary membership that has no legal basis in IRS code, while simultaneously receiving reports on declining membership numbers. She has tracked how Afghan allies support disappeared from the Legion’s messaging without explanation. She has documented gaming companies circling veteran posts like, in her words, vultures, pushing “new revenue streams” at national conventions while the organization’s community mission quietly erodes.
Hartman eventually left the Legion. Her antics, as she put it, reached their limit. She is not the only one.
This article is about why she and thousands of others are right to be frustrated, what the specific failures are, and what a serious organization would do about them.
The Membership Collapse Is Not Primarily Demographic
When Legion officials are asked about declining membership, they reach first for the demographic argument. Matthew Herndon, the Legion’s membership director, said it plainly in a Fox News interview: the organization has lost more than 700,000 members over the last decade, and the decrease is primarily tied to a shrinking pool of veterans. In 1945, twelve million people served in the U.S. military. Today, there are about 1.3 million active-duty service members. Fewer veterans, fewer potential members. Simple math.
It is not simple math.
The demographic explanation is real, but it is incomplete. If the veteran population shrank and the Legion’s share of that population held steady, the numbers would fall proportionately. What is actually happening is different. Post-9/11 veterans, who now number in the millions and are the largest cohort of living veterans, are joining the Legion at dramatically lower rates than previous generations joined after their wars. These veterans exist. They are eligible. They are choosing not to join.
They are choosing not to join because the Legion has, in many places and in many respects, given them no compelling reason to.
Young veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan came home from a different kind of war than their parents or grandparents did. They came home to a country that had a complex and often uncomfortable relationship with the conflicts they fought. Many of them dealt with visible wounds and invisible ones. They built communities around shared experience, but the communities they built, by preference, looked different from what their grandfathers built. They joined Team Red White and Blue for pickup basketball. They joined GORUCK for ruck marching with strangers. They went kayaking. They built informal peer networks online. What they did not do, in large numbers, was walk into a building that smelled like old carpet and stale beer, sit through a meeting run by Robert’s Rules of Order, and listen to a 74-year-old argue about whether the post should buy new chairs.
That description is unfair to a lot of posts. There are American Legion posts that run excellent programs, attract veterans of all generations, and do serious work in their communities. Hartman’s own Post 539 was one of them. They added a 22-mile hike to raise awareness about veteran suicide. They ran kayaking trips. They built something genuinely useful. What Hartman found when she joined in 2019 was not what the stereotype promised. But the stereotype exists because it is accurate often enough. And what is true is that the national organization has done insufficient work to change the culture that produces it.
The posts that are surviving and growing share one identifiable characteristic. They build their programming around what veterans in their community actually want, rather than what the national organization’s templates suggest they should want. They treat membership as something earned through relevance, not something owed by virtue of having served. They act like organizations that understand why they exist.
The posts that are failing are often the opposite. They have aging leadership that has been in place for a decade. They hold meetings that produce nothing. They rely on bar revenue to keep the lights on and then wonder why they feel like bars. They have nominal membership rolls and active membership that is a fraction of that number. One post member quoted in a 2024 California American Legion op-ed put it plainly: “My current post has a membership of 104, but only 15 to 20 active members.” That is not unusual. It is close to standard.
The national organization could respond to this with urgency. It could study the posts that work, understand what they have in common, and build programs and resources that help struggling posts do the same thing. It has done some of this. It has not done nearly enough.
The Structural Problem: A Confederation That Governs Like a Suggestion
The American Legion is, structurally, a federation. The national organization sets broad policy and has a lobbying apparatus in Washington. Departments operate at the state level. Posts operate locally. Authority flows in a complicated direction.
This structure made sense in 1919 when transportation and communication were primitive and local autonomy was genuinely necessary. It makes less sense now. What it produces, in practice, is an organization where the national body can issue guidance, pass resolutions, and set membership dues, but has limited ability to enforce standards on the posts that actually interact with veterans every day. A post can be dysfunctional, exclusionary, or simply useless, and the national organization’s tools for intervention are limited.
The result is extreme inconsistency. The best Legion posts are genuinely excellent. The worst ones are embarrassments. And there is no real quality control mechanism between those two poles.
Hartman’s reporting on the Internal Affairs Commission is a clear illustration of this structural dysfunction. In early 2026, the Departments of Maryland and Pennsylvania submitted formal resolutions asking the national organization to remove the word “female” from Auxiliary eligibility requirements. The legal argument was straightforward. IRS rules for 501(c)(19) auxiliary organizations permit membership for any relative within two degrees of consanguinity regardless of gender. The Legion had already amended this language in 2019 to replace “wife” with “spouse,” opening ALA membership to male spouses. The precedent for amendment existed. The legal path was open. The VFW expanded its own auxiliary to include male family members in 2015; the VFW Auxiliary now represents nearly 49 percent of VFW membership strength.
The Internal Affairs Commission voted 30-1 to reject the proposal.
This is the same commission that receives regular reports on declining membership. The same commission watching the Auxiliary, with approximately 506,000 members, contract year over year. They looked at the membership numbers, they looked at a legal and precedented path to expansion, and 30 of 31 members voted to leave the wall in place.
The reasons given were not explained publicly. That is a structural problem too. Major governance decisions in the Legion often happen in rooms where the deliberations are not transparent, and the results are communicated as conclusions without reasoning. Members who want to understand why the organization is making the choices it makes are frequently left with nothing but the outcome.
This is not a recipe for member confidence.
The Advocacy Failure: Soft Lobbying Where There Could Be Pressure
The American Legion’s lobbying arm is its most publicly claimed source of institutional value. The case made to every potential member is essentially this: join us, add your number to ours, and together we make Congress listen. The GI Bill is the founding evidence for this claim. The PACT Act, which extended health care coverage to veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic hazards, is a more recent one. The Legion, alongside other veterans service organizations, pushed hard for the PACT Act when it stalled in 2022, and the pressure worked. President Biden signed it into law.
That is real. The advocacy apparatus is not fictional.
But there are significant gaps between what the Legion claims to stand for and what it is willing to fight for. Hartman identified one clearly in 2024. The Legion’s “Know Before You Go” video for the Washington Conference, which previews the legislative agenda, had quietly removed Afghan allies support from its priorities. There was no explanation, no resolution changing course, no public acknowledgment that the Legion was stepping back from a commitment it had made. The Legion had co-signed letters to Congress calling Afghan allies a “sacred obligation” and a “national security imperative.” Then that language disappeared from the agenda without comment.
Hartman asked the question that should have been asked: since when do veterans run from a fight?
The answer, in the Legion’s case, is: when the fight becomes politically uncomfortable. This is not a new pattern. The organization has, throughout its history, modulated its advocacy based on what it calculated it could win rather than what it believed was right. Elizabeth Hartman made a pointed observation about this in a 2023 LinkedIn post: she heard someone argue at a Legion meeting that the organization should only prioritize legislation that can easily be passed. She called it gut-wrenching. She was right.
The argument for only pursuing easy legislation is the argument of an organization that has forgotten what it is for. The Legion was not founded to pursue legislative victories. It was founded to fight for veterans. Those are not the same thing. A legislative win that comes at the cost of abandoning a harder fight is not a victory. It is a compromise that teaches Congress that the Legion can be waited out.
The organization also has a documented problem with inconsistent messaging on claims fees. Hartman flagged this at the 2024 Washington Conference, urging members to bring that concern directly to Senator Jon Tester’s staff. The Legion’s position on whether veterans should pay fees for initial disability claims has been unclear enough that veteran advocates have had to note the inconsistency publicly. For an organization whose primary legislative function is protecting veterans’ benefits, this is not a minor editorial problem. Clarity on fees for claims is the minimum.
The deeper advocacy failure is cultural. The Legion has, in recent years, adopted the tone and pace of an organization that is more concerned with maintaining access to congressional hearing rooms than with actually using that access to move legislation. Access is not advocacy. Testifying before a committee is not the same as winning. The Legion built its reputation by being willing to fight hard for things that were genuinely difficult. The GI Bill nearly died in conference. The Legion tracked down a congressman in the middle of the night and flew him to Washington to cast the decisive vote. That is what real advocacy looks like.
That version of the Legion would look at the Afghan Adjustment Act, which carried 90 percent public support in polling but kept dying in Congress, and would not quietly remove it from the agenda. It would put it back on the agenda and make Congress uncomfortable.
The Culture Problem: Bars, Cliques, and Bad First Impressions
When a post-9/11 veteran walks into an American Legion post for the first time and feels immediately unwelcome, that veteran rarely comes back. That is not a guess. It is a documented pattern described by Legionnaires themselves. One piece published in the Legion’s own dispatch described the experience: “Some Vietnam War veterans tell of a time when they were not welcomed in posts after they came home.” The problem of bad first impressions is old enough that the organization has written about it at length in its own publications. The understanding that a failed first impression can mean a member lost forever is not a secret inside the Legion. It is written into the narrative of how post-9/11 veterans can and should be welcomed.
And yet it keeps happening.
The culture in too many posts is one of established hierarchy, insider loyalty, and passive resistance to newcomers who do not fit the existing social template. Cliques form around the people who have been there longest. New members show up, are not particularly welcomed, find that the post’s social life centers on a bar where the regulars already know each other, and conclude that the organization is not for them. They are not wrong about the specific post. They may be wrong about the Legion’s potential. But potential does not join organizations. Experiences do.
The bar culture question is genuinely complicated. For many posts, bar revenue is the financial foundation. Without bar income, the post building could not remain open, and without the building, the post could not run programs or host community events. This is a real constraint. The Legion’s reliance on bar and canteen income to subsidize everything else is not irrational given the financial position of most posts.
But the bar has also become a liability. It defines the public perception of what the Legion is. “Just a bunch of old guys at a bar” is a cliche, but cliches exist because they are frequently true. Posts that have deliberately restructured around community programs rather than bar culture, like Post 504 in Lafayette, Louisiana, which removed its bar and shifted focus to veteran services, are growing. Posts that remain primarily bar-centered are often stagnant or declining.
Elizabeth Hartman observed this pattern at the national convention level too. Gaming companies were present in force at the vendor halls of both the VFW and American Legion national conventions, including Arrow International, which sells electronic gaming machines. These companies were pitching slot machine-style technology to veteran posts as a revenue solution. The pitch is understandable from the business side. The concern is organizational. A veteran service organization whose financial survival depends on gaming revenue is an organization that has substituted a revenue model for a mission. Those are different things, and eventually they become incompatible.
The more fundamental culture problem is one of generational friction. The people who run most posts have been doing it for a long time. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are territorial. Hartman encountered a member in North Carolina early in her Legion career who advised her that to be successful, she would need to remove all Korean and Vietnam veterans from her board. He was not joking. She did the opposite, kept three Vietnam veterans as senior advisors, and the post thrived. But the fact that advice like that is given at all, by established members to newcomers, reflects a culture that in some cases values control over effectiveness.
The Legion’s own history illustrates this dynamic at scale. When Elizabeth Hartman arrived and built something good, it was because she refused to take bad advice. Not everyone refuses. Not everyone is persistent enough to find the good posts after a bad first experience. The organization cannot rely on the stubbornness of its best members to compensate for the inhospitability of its worst ones.
The Historical Weight the Legion Refuses to Fully Carry
The American Legion has a complicated relationship with its own past. It wrote the GI Bill, which was one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history. It is also true that the GI Bill’s administration was structured in ways that systematically denied its benefits to Black veterans. State-level administration, backed by a Congress that included virulent segregationists like Representative John Rankin, who chaired the House Veterans Committee, meant that the bill’s promises were broken for a significant portion of the people it was supposed to serve.
The Legion did not cause the discriminatory administration of the GI Bill. It did, in documented cases, push back against attempts to gut the bill’s provisions on racial grounds. The midnight flight to bring Representative Gibson to Washington to break a deadlocked conference committee is real, and the intent there was to prevent the unemployment provision from being stripped, which would have harmed Black veterans disproportionately.
But the Legion also built posts on segregated lines for decades. Black veterans who showed up at certain posts were told they had the wrong address. The historical record from the early decades of the organization is not clean. A century of passing resolutions about equality did not produce a century of equal welcome.
A 2021 investigation by The New Republic found that the Legion’s national headquarters had a hallway displaying the portraits of 101 past national commanders, none of whom were Black. The organization had never elected a Black national commander. Black staff at headquarters had been counseled, according to sources in the piece, to be careful when dealing with anyone in Indianapolis. Former legislative director Melissa Bryant, a Black veteran and second-generation Legionnaire, had documented conflicts with headquarters leadership over how to respond to racial justice issues.
The organization’s official line on its racial history is that it passes resolutions affirming equality. It passed such a resolution in 1923. It passed it again in 2017. Passing a resolution is not an acknowledgment. It is not an accounting. And it does not fix a culture in which, well into the modern era, Black veterans and other veterans of color have reported feeling like guests in an organization that is supposed to serve all veterans equally.
This matters for the membership question. The veteran population is not the demographic it was in 1946. It is increasingly diverse. Women now make up approximately 17 percent of active-duty service members. Hispanic Americans serve in the military at rates above their share of the civilian population. The Legion’s leadership structure has historically been overwhelmingly white and male. The first female national commander was not installed until 2017. These are not accusations of intentional exclusion in the present tense. They are documented facts about an organization that has been slow to reflect the population it serves.
An organization that wants to grow its membership has to appeal to the people who might join it. The people who might join it look increasingly like the military itself: diverse, geographically spread, serving in a range of occupations, and not necessarily interested in an organization that feels like it was designed for a specific kind of veteran from a specific era.
The Auxiliary Problem: Gender Restrictions in 2026
The situation with the American Legion Auxiliary is one of the cleaner examples of an institution being wrong about something it has been told it is wrong about, and refusing to change anyway.
The Auxiliary, which has approximately 506,000 members, restricts membership to female relatives of veterans. Sons, fathers, brothers, and grandfathers of veterans cannot join. In 2019, the Legion amended its constitution to replace “wife” with “spouse,” which allowed male spouses of veterans to join the Auxiliary. That amendment required a two-thirds vote at the national convention. The precedent for amending the eligibility language, in other words, exists. It has already been used.
The IRS tax code governing 501(c)(19) organizations, which is what the Auxiliary is, permits membership for any relative within two degrees of consanguinity regardless of gender. There is no legal barrier to expanding Auxiliary membership to male family members of veterans. The VFW expanded its Auxiliary in 2015 to include male family members. Their Auxiliary now represents nearly 49 percent of VFW membership. The practical evidence that expansion works is sitting right there.
In May 2026, the Internal Affairs Commission met to consider resolutions from the Maryland and Pennsylvania departments requesting this change. They voted 30-1 against it.
Hartman’s analysis of this vote is worth noting. The commission that voted to preserve the restriction is the same commission that receives regular reports on declining membership. The people making decisions about who can join are the people presiding over the contraction of the organization. They know the numbers. They voted against expansion anyway.
The Legion’s Auxiliary is a voluntary organization in a voluntary membership market. It is competing against organizations that do not restrict membership by gender. It is losing members. The pool of eligible members is artificially constrained by a rule with no legal basis and no principled justification beyond tradition. The organization that passed a resolution affirming equality in 1923 is in 2026 maintaining a gender restriction on its own auxiliary because a commission voted 30-1 to leave it in place.
Hartman noted that the Internal Affairs Commission’s recommendation is influential but not binding. The Departments of Maryland and Pennsylvania are pursuing the amendment through the national convention, where a two-thirds vote could override the commission. Whether they succeed will depend on whether enough delegates decide that the demographic math matters more than the inertia.
The National Headquarters Problem
An organization’s national headquarters is a useful indicator of where its priorities actually are, as opposed to where it says they are. The American Legion’s headquarters in Indianapolis is, by most accounts, an institution that has had persistent internal culture problems. Leadership at the national level has, according to staff accounts documented in serious journalism, been inconsistently attentive to the concerns of staff members who are not from the demographic majority that has historically run the organization. Decisions about how to respond to major public moments in American life, like the killing of George Floyd in 2020, became internal conflicts in which staff who wanted a clearer statement ran into resistance from national leadership that was reluctant to say anything that might alienate its membership base.
This is not uncommon in large member-driven organizations. When your membership is older, disproportionately white, and broadly conservative, leadership tends to avoid statements that might generate backlash from that base. The political calculus is not irrational. But an organization that manages its public voice primarily to avoid offending its existing members is an organization that has made a decision to stop growing. You cannot attract veterans who do not see themselves reflected in the organization’s public identity if the organization’s public identity is managed to appeal to the members it already has.
The national body also has a documented problem with transparency. When members try to understand why decisions were made, they often cannot find out. Hartman, when she requested on-record comments from the Legion’s internal communications operations about pieces she was writing, did not receive responses that explained the organization’s reasoning. The standard practice appears to be silence, or brief statements that do not engage with the substance of the criticism.
For an organization that has spent decades claiming to speak for veterans and claiming the authority that comes with that claim, the resistance to scrutiny is notable. If the Legion is doing good work, it should be able to explain what it is doing and why. If it cannot explain, or chooses not to, the people asking questions are going to draw their own conclusions.
The Dues and Access Problem
In 2024, the American Legion raised national dues by five dollars. The reaction among members, documented in the comments of the California American Legion’s op-ed on membership, ranged from resignation to open frustration. One long-time member pointed out that a Legion life membership now costs approximately $865, compared to roughly $385 for a VFW life membership. The national organization, members argued in those comments, is completely out of touch with the financial situation of local posts.
The complaint has a specific structure worth noting. The dues go partly to the national organization, partly to the department, and partly to the post. When national raises dues, it takes a larger share of a limited pool of money that members are willing to pay. Posts, which bear the cost of operations and must keep the lights on and the programs running, feel that pinch directly. From the post’s perspective, the national organization is extracting revenue while not providing commensurate value. From a member’s perspective, they are paying more to belong to an organization that is demonstrably smaller and less influential than it used to be.
The national organization’s response to this criticism is to point to programs, services, and advocacy. Some of those things are real. The Legion’s System Worth Saving program, which monitors VA healthcare quality, is genuinely useful. The Washington Conference lobbying effort moves some legislation. The Boys State and Girls State programs have been running for decades and produce real civic education.
But access to actual benefits and services at the local level is highly variable. A member in a well-run post gets a lot. A member in a post with fifteen active members and a leaking roof gets significantly less. National dues are uniform. Value delivered is not.
The Bright Spots, and What They Indicate
It would be dishonest to write this piece without acknowledging that there are American Legion posts doing excellent work. There are also departments that are functioning well, and the national advocacy apparatus, at its best, remains more capable than most alternatives for pushing veterans’ legislation.
Post 539 in New Bern, under Hartman’s command, ran a 22-mile hike for veteran suicide awareness, organized kayak trips for members, held weekly Thursday evening gatherings, and built a board that deliberately included Vietnam-era veterans whose perspective the post needed. The post thrived. Hartman herself, five years out of the Marine Corps and initially skeptical that the Legion was anything more than old men at a bar, became a post commander and then a district commander.
Post 504 in Lafayette, Louisiana, removed its bar and reoriented entirely around veteran services, claims assistance, and community partnerships. It is growing.
Post 1 in Anchorage, Alaska, built family-oriented infrastructure, including a playground and a covered barbecue area, that made the post a genuine destination for veterans with children. The post developed a bond between older and younger veterans that both groups found valuable.
These posts share something. Their leadership decided that the post existed to serve veterans, not the other way around. They did not wait for national to tell them what to do. They looked at their community, figured out what veterans in that community needed, and built programs to meet those needs. They treated membership as a product that had to be earned through value, not claimed through obligation.
The national organization should study these posts with the same seriousness it brings to lobbying. What specifically do they do? What did they change? What did they stop doing? What resources did they need that were not available? The answers to those questions are the reform agenda. It is not complicated. The successful examples exist. The task is to understand them, replicate what can be replicated, and build national programs and support structures that help struggling posts move in the same direction.
What the Legion Should Actually Do
Here is a concrete list. Not a values statement. Not a strategic vision document. Specific things the American Legion’s national leadership and department leadership should do, some of which would require formal action and some of which could begin immediately.
1. Pass the Auxiliary amendment.
The Maryland and Pennsylvania resolutions should be brought to the national convention floor and passed. Male family members of veterans should be eligible to join the American Legion Auxiliary. The IRS code permits it. The VFW has done it. The precedent within the Legion itself exists from the 2019 spouse amendment. The Internal Affairs Commission’s 30-1 vote is not binding. Override it.
2. Stop managing advocacy for comfort.
The Legion’s Washington office should be given a clear mandate: pursue the organization’s stated legislative priorities with the urgency those priorities deserve, regardless of whether the legislation is easy or politically comfortable. Afghan allies support should be back on the agenda. The GUARD Act and related GI Bill parity issues should be front-line priorities. If the Legislature asks what the Legion wants and the Legion equivocates, the Legion gets nothing. If the Legion asks for exactly what veterans need and fights for it, it sometimes gets it. The GI Bill is proof. Fight for the hard things.
3. Build and enforce minimum post standards.
The national organization should develop a clear set of minimum operational standards for active posts. These standards should include baseline programming requirements, financial transparency, meeting regularity, and member outreach activity. Posts that do not meet standards over a defined period should not receive national support resources. Departments should have tools, and the obligation, to intervene in posts that are dysfunctional. The current model, in which a failing post can continue to exist on paper while delivering nothing to veterans in its community, is not acceptable.
4. Create a post evaluation and turnaround program.
Alongside enforcement, there should be support. The Legion should identify its highest-functioning posts, document what they do, and use that knowledge to build a structured turnaround program for struggling ones. This means sending actual people to struggling posts, not just pamphlets. It means giving post commanders access to resources, training, and examples they can actually use. It means treating the revitalization of failing posts as an organizational priority rather than a department-level problem that national doesn’t think about.
5. Redesign the first-impression experience.
Every new member’s first experience with a Legion post matters enormously. The Legion should invest in structured onboarding. When someone walks in the door for the first time, or joins online, there should be a defined process for connecting them to the post, introducing them to programming, and following up. This does not have to be complicated. It has to exist. Right now, too many new members join, hear nothing for months, and quietly let their membership lapse.
6. Diversify national leadership, on purpose.
The pattern of national leadership that has been documented in multiple outlets, overwhelmingly white and male for most of the organization’s 107 years, does not reflect the veteran population. It does not reflect the military. It does not reflect the country. The Legion should make explicit commitments to mentoring and advancing leaders from underrepresented backgrounds, because the kind of organization that is still fighting the same battles about racial history and gender inclusion 50 years from now is not an organization that deserves to survive. And it won’t.
7. Get serious about the bar culture.
Posts that rely primarily on bar and canteen revenue to survive should receive structured support for diversifying their revenue model. The Legion’s national organization should develop resources, including grant guidance, partnership templates, and program design tools, specifically for posts that want to shift their programming orientation. The goal is not to eliminate bars from posts that want them. The goal is to ensure that the bar is not the only thing keeping the post alive, and that the post’s identity is not defined by it.
8. Be transparent about governance decisions.
When the Internal Affairs Commission votes 30-1 against a proposed amendment that has public support among members, the reasoning for that vote should be published. When the national legislative agenda changes, the change should be explained. When headquarters takes a position on a contentious internal matter, that position and its basis should be communicated to members. An organization that asks veterans to trust it with their membership dues and their collective voice owes those veterans enough respect to explain what it is doing with both.
9. Compete for young veterans like they have other options. Because they do.
Every post commander and department leader should internalize one simple fact: a post-9/11 veteran who is not a member of the American Legion is not a member for a reason. That reason can be changed or it cannot, but it has to be identified and engaged. The Legion cannot assume that veterans will join because they served. It has to give them a specific, concrete reason to show up. That means community. It means programming that reflects their lives, not their grandparents’ lives. It means events that families can attend. It means being present in the places where veterans actually are, not just waiting in a hall for them to find you.
10. Recommit publicly to the mission and be honest when the organization falls short of it.
The Legion’s preamble commits to maintaining law and order, promoting peace and goodwill, and defending democracy. Those are not small commitments. They are worth taking seriously. When the organization falls short of them, internally or in its public advocacy, the response should not be silence or press releases. It should be an honest accounting and a credible plan. That is what veterans respond to. Competence and honesty, not branding.
What Is Actually at Stake
The American Legion is not going to disappear tomorrow. It has 1.27 million members and an endowment. The national convention still draws several thousand delegates. The Washington Conference still gets senators in rooms. The organization still has institutional weight that took a century to build.
But weight is not permanent if you stop earning it. The organizations that speak for veterans in Washington carry authority because they can demonstrate that they represent a significant and organized constituency. If the membership number falls far enough, and the member engagement drops far enough, that authority erodes. Congress stops taking the calls as seriously. The hearings still happen, but the pressure behind them diminishes. Legislation that might have passed with a strong Legion push instead dies in committee.
The political consequences are not theoretical. The PACT Act almost failed. Veterans who were exposed to burn pits and toxic chemicals almost did not get the healthcare they were owed. What saved it was organized pressure from veterans service organizations and the veterans themselves. That kind of pressure requires organizations that are large enough, credible enough, and motivated enough to generate it.
An American Legion that is well-run, genuinely inclusive, and seriously committed to its advocacy mission is an organization that has enormous potential to do good. Not inspirational-poster potential. Concrete potential. GI Bill potential. PACT Act potential. Potential to walk into congressional offices with 1.5 or 2 million members behind it and make Congress pay attention.
An American Legion that keeps managing its membership decline with demographic excuses, that keeps voting 30-1 to preserve gender restrictions on its own auxiliary, that keeps softening its advocacy when the fights get hard, that keeps generating bad first impressions for the veterans who walk in the door, is an organization in the process of becoming irrelevant. It will not happen all at once. It will happen post by post and year by year until the organization that wrote the GI Bill on a cocktail napkin is a historical footnote.
That would be a waste of something that still has the capacity to be valuable. The Legion at its best is one of the few institutions in America that bridges generations of veterans and gives them shared institutional voice. That is not a small thing. But you do not preserve it by treating it as a given.
Elizabeth Hartman went through enough with the Legion to eventually leave it. She went on calling herself a Legionnaire who left, not someone who quit. There is a difference. She is still writing about the organization because she believes it matters what happens to it. That is a more generous position than the organization’s current leadership has sometimes deserved.
The question is whether the people inside the institution are willing to do the work that would make that generosity warranted. The answer will not come from a press release or a rebranding exercise. It will come from the 107th National Convention in Louisville, where delegates who understand that the organization is losing will either do something about it, or vote to keep doing what they have been doing.
History does not wait for organizations to figure themselves out. The veteran population is not standing still. The problems veterans face, from VA claims backlogs to predatory claims companies to inadequate mental health resources, are real and ongoing. There is work to be done. The Legion built itself to do that work. Whether it still can is a question only the people inside it can answer.
The napkin and the pen are still on the table.