AMERICAN LEGION FOUNDER

AMERICAN LEGION FOUNDER

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas W. Miller did not have a gavel when he assumed the

chairmanship of the Paris Caucus on March 17, 1919, so the former congressman from

Delaware pulled from his pocket an 1873 silver dollar that he always carried and rapped it on

the table and the first gathering of what became the American Legion was under his command.

Miller was no ordinary doughboy. He was a Yale graduate who had received military

training at the Plattsburg, New York camp for college educated men during the Preparedness

Movement at the same time he was serving Delaware in the 1915 U. S. house of Representatives.

Thomas Miller was the son of a Delaware Governor and had been the Delaware Secretary

of State. In 1916 he lost his bud or a second term in Congress and enlisted in the Army when

America declared war in April 1917. He started out as a private in an infantry company and due to

his previous military training was soon made corporal. His eyesight caused him to be passed by for

combat and he was commissioned a Signal Corps captain. In 1918 he was assigned to the 79^th

Division in France, was in the Meus-Argonne battle where hs was wounded and received a Purple

Heart and demoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

March 1919 Miller was still in France with the American Expeditionary Forces occupying

Europe and heard of a group of troops in Paris wanting to start a veterans organization and

went to their meeting to check it out.

There he met with others he knew from the Plattsburgh Readiness Movement and another

WW I office he had known in Washington, D. C., Bennett Champ Clark, who selected Miller

chairman pro-tempore of the Paris Caucus. The final day of the caucus when the name of the organization and it's Constitution were discussed Clark was called away Miller presided.

Miller went on to serve as first National Legislative Committee co-chairman of the new American

Legion and was Delaware's first National Executive Committee member.. He and Luke Lea, co-chaiman, worked together to obtain the organization's federal charter on September 16. 1919.

During the beleaguered Warren Harding administration he served on a committee to form the

Veterans Administration, member of the American Battle Monuments Commission and as the Alien

Property Custodian, which while in that capacity Miller was convicred and served 18 months in Federal prison over the sale of German enemy property . He was later pardoned by President Herbert

Hoover.

Miller ten moved to Reno, Nevada, where he oversaw CCC camps and a organized the

Nevada State Parks System and was representative of the Veteran's Employment Service.

Thomas W. Miller died in 1973, and was known as a 'chaacter' and fun loving but became very serious when it came to veteran issues.

Source: www.legion.org / by Jeff Stoffer / March 3018 Delaware Legionnaire

Abstract: by Harrison H. March 8, 2018 for www.iinni.blogspot.com

**

Thomas Woodnutt Miller, born 26 June 1886 in Delaware and died in Reno, Nevada on

5 May 1973 at age 87, a son of Delaware Governor Charles Robert Miller and Abigail Morgan

Woodnutt Miller. On October 4, 1913, at age 27, he married Katherine Marie Tallman in Wilmington where he was a lawyer, and had two children, son Thomas Lloyd and a daughter., Katherine Katherine, his wife, died 26 April 1945 in Wilmington.

Source: Ancestry Parkin Family Tree by jpwilks54, Lindsay, Ontario