Lewis A. Young Post, No. 3152, Veterans of Foreign Wars
Look at those faces. These are just a few of the men who enlisted in the Navy in May 1917. Not the Portuguese Navy; the United States Navy. It’s a stirring testament that men with intimate ties to their seaside town but almost no cultural bonds to the nation in which they lived should have responded so quickly a month after President Woodrow Wilson declared war. (By the end of World War I, 319 residents of this small town had enlisted in the armed forces.) The ethnic composition also set the tenor of this post, which has long ranked among the more important Portuguese-American social institutions, though it is by no means exclusively so.