On an unusually bright, faintly springlike morning in mid–February of 1919 in New York City, a huge crowd of perhaps a million people gathered along Fifth Avenue all the way from Madison Square Park to 110th Street and from there along Lenox Avenue north to 145th Street. Along with Governor Al Smith, ex-Governor Charles Whitman, Acting-Mayor Robert Moran, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War Emmett J. Scott, William Randolph Hearst, Rodman Wanamaker, and other notables, they had come to welcome home the men of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment of New York's National Guard, who had fought so well in France as the 369th Infantry Regiment of the American Expeditionary Force (Figure 1).