author
George Seay Wheat
1886–1937
A journalist and early historian of the American Legion, his best-known work captures the energy and urgency of veterans organizing after World War I. His writing offers a close-up look at a formative moment in American civic life.
1 Audiobook
The Story of the American Legion: The Birth of the Legion
by George Seay Wheat
About the author
Born in 1886, George Seay Wheat was an American writer and journalist whose surviving reputation rests mainly on The Story of the American Legion: The Birth of the Legion, published in 1919. The book records the founding of the American Legion soon after World War I and helped preserve the atmosphere of the movement while it was still new.
Contemporary biographical sources describe him as having worked in public information during the Paris Peace Conference, supplying President Woodrow Wilson with news from the United States. That background helps explain the brisk, reportorial quality of his writing and his interest in public affairs.
Wheat died in 1937. Little widely verified biographical material appears to survive online, but his work remains of interest to readers looking for a firsthand-era account of the Legion's beginnings and the civic world that shaped it.