Luke Lea, the Legionnaires, and the Legacy of Two Wars: The Politics of Memory in the Mind of a Nashville Progressive, 1915-1945

Over the Christmas and New Year's holidays of 1918–1919, Luke Lea, colonel of the Tennessee-raised 114th Field Artillery, tried to capture Wilhelm II, the former German kaiser, and take him to Paris as World War I's prize criminal. Although Lea had no orders to make this attempt, he was a well-placed, old-money white southerner used to taking matters into his own hands. He had raised the 114th himself when war was declared by the United States in 1917, and he had led the unit with distinction during the worst fighting in America's major battle—the Meuse-Argonne offensive. When the armistice process began, Lea learned that the German emperor had absconded to Holland, and, as the colonel saw it, this attempt to flee was shameless. Lea believed that the kaiser had headed a militarist system in an atrocious war and now, in defeat, was trying to escape the consequences of his acts. As Lea later said, "the American soldier in his heart demanded punishment of the Kaiser for his crime against civilization."¹

Despite the odds, the adventurers came closer to succeeding than one might presume. When the war ended, Lea's unit was stationed close to Holland, and through fortuitous local contacts the colonel learned of the kaiser's location. He quickly recruited a few volunteers from his unit, procured two automobiles, and made the try. His party actually made it to the estate where Wilhelm was staying. However, because Lea wanted to persuade the emperor to go rather than kidnap him, the mission failed. The kaiser refused to surrender. Thus, the colonel and company had nothing else to do but retreat. In a superb anticlimax, U.S. Army authorities chose not to court-martial Lea, though they concluded he had committed "a most indiscreet act for any officer of the [American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)]." Officially, the incident ended here.²

Thus began the curious journey of a memory. At first glance, the raid seemed to call the result of the entire war effort into question. Lea would hardly have been so reckless or self-indulgent unless he had severe doubts about the peace, and his private war diary certainly reveals as much.³ And, of course, he was not alone. Thus, the kaiser incident was actually a dark episode, or at the least an indication of dangerous loose ends left by the war. But Lea did not use the event in this way, at least not at first. Quite the contrary, he seemed to forget it entirely, burying it underneath his career as a southern Progressive politician. And he did have an important career to pursue. He had become a major figure in state politics before the war started. He had founded the Nashville Tennessean in the twentieth century's first decade, using it to advance a Prohibitionist and Progressive agenda, and then was selected for the U.S. Senate in 1911. Returning to Tennessee from France after the war, he became Governor Austin L. Peay's right-hand man. As part of his role in this capacity Lea officiated at public commemorations of what he described at this point as America's total victory in the war. Apparently, for Lea, Jazz Age prosperity had filed off the sharp edges from the events of 1918.⁴

However, the memory journey took a turn. The kaiser story suddenly became important when Lea's personal and political life collapsed. During his time as Peay's assistant, Lea earned the reputation of being a boss, and his enemies got their moment at the end of the 1920s to topple him. Then, during the Depression, he endured a prison term, because he was charged and convicted of bank fraud (he was later pardoned).⁵ Like the country itself, he fell a long way after the high of the 1920s. It was at this juncture that Lea turned his mind back to his odd moment in history, writing while in prison a long narrative...