Preamble
-
For God and Country
we associate ourselves together for the
following purposes:
- To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America;
- To maintain Law and Order;
To foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism;
To preserve the memories and incidents of our associations in the Great Wars;
To inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the Community, State and Nation;
To combat the autocracy of both the classes and the masses;
To make right the Master of Might;
To promote Peace and Goodwill on earth;
To safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of Justice, Freedom and Democracy;
To consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by our devotion to mutual helpfulness.
At
the St. Louis Caucus in May of 1919, the Committee on Constitution
presented a simplified temporary constitution that incorporated the Paris
draft. This constitution defined local units as posts, prescribed a form
of state organization and listed membership criteria. But its greatest
feature went unnoticed at the time.
A subcommittee consisting of John C. Greenaway of Arizona, Hamilton Fish
of New York and George N. Davis of Delaware had spent long evenings
discussing a preamble to the constitution. Each man went into seclusion
the night before the St. Louis Caucus to write a draft of the preamble
that would include the principles on which they had agreed. Early the next
morning, they met to compare their drafts. The version that they adopted
later was adopted by the entire committee and by the caucas. It finally
was adopted at the Convention in November of 1919.
Incredibly, over the years the preamble has changed only once. In 1942 the
word "war" (Great War) was changed to "wars." (Great Wars)
