The American Legion is celebrating its hundredth anniversary by launching a new recruitment campaign. “We Believe” ads have popped up across the country featuring younger and African-American Legionnaires, as the organization tries to strike a more modern pose to stem its declining membership.

The once-mighty veterans’ group faces a bleak future. The Legion still claims 2 million members, but its membership peaked at much higher than that after World War I, and it has closed a large number of branches or “posts” across the country over the last two decades. How successful the new recruitment campaign will be in revitalizing one of the United States’ oldest and, at one time, most powerful veterans’ organizations is yet to be seen.

The hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American Legion gives us an opportunity to reexamine its post–World War I origins, when the world tottered on the edge of an international workers’ revolution. The Legion was formed not as a harmless group where former soldiers could meet others like them and swap stories, but an authoritarian mass movement of combat veterans — shock troops of the counterrevolution.