American Legion's Jeff Stoffer on America at 250 and Passing the Torch

Jeff Stoffer, Director of Media and Communications at the American Legion, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast to discuss the July issue of the American Legion magazine, which includes a deep dive into the nation's founding values, timed to the country's 250th anniversary.

Stoffer discussed two featured books: the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary mission statement, what the founders would make of America today and the importance of teaching civics and constitutional understanding to the next generation. He also introduced his successor, Henry Howard, deputy director of the Legion's media and communications division, who will carry the monthly American Legion segment forward beginning next month.

• The American Legion's July magazine issue centers on the nation's 250th anniversary with a deep dive into the Declaration of Independence. It’s a document of 1,458 words that Stoffer described as an absolute miracle in global government, establishing natural human rights, consent of the governed and representative democracy as foundational principles. And it was completed at a moment when the signers were losing a war and every one of them faced execution if captured.
• Stoffer discussed two books featured in the issue — The Making of the American Mind by Dr. Matthew Spalding and A Land of Hope by Wilfred McClay. Both argue that America's founding values, far from being a source of shame, have guided every major civil rights movement in the nation's history from the abolitionist cause through Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. Both also suggest that the path forward requires better civic education rather than a retreat from those principles.
• Henry Howard, deputy director of the American Legion's media and communications division and a 14-year colleague of Stoffer's, will take over the monthly AWF segment beginning next month. Howard has led the Legion's Be the One veteran suicide prevention initiative, created the 100 Miles for Hope COVID-era wellness program and is a former newspaper editor with a deep background in both journalism and advocacy for veterans’ mental health.

A Partnership That Started in 2009 — and a Farewell Well Earned

Jeff Stoffer has been a fixture on America's Work Force Union Podcast since 2009, representing the American Legion across hundreds of conversations about veterans’ employment, mental health, career transitions into the skilled trades and the legislative fights that shape veterans’ lives. After 26 years at the Legion, he is stepping away to move west and be closer to his mother, describing it as trading one important job — being a good dad — for another, being a good son. He called it half exciting and half terrifying. Anyone who has listened to him over the years knows both reactions are earned.

His final segment arrived with something worth celebrating: America's 250th birthday and the American Legion magazine's most ambitious issue in years.

The Declaration of Independence at 250

The July magazine centers on a deep dive into the nation's founding values and principles, anchored by a Q&A with Stoffer, conducted by Dr. Matthew Spalding, author of The Making of the American Mind. The Declaration of Independence, Stoffer noted, is 1,458 words. It was approved by people who, at the time of its drafting, were losing the war they were fighting. Every signature on it was a death sentence if the British prevailed. And yet those 1,458 words established something that had essentially no precedent in global government at the time. The idea that human rights predate and supersede the authority of any monarch, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that representative democracy is not a privilege granted by rulers but a natural condition of free people.

Spalding's book traces how those concepts became the conceptual DNA of American identity. It delves into how they were not just words at the time, but a genuine departure from a world of monarchies, oligarchies and servitude classes in which most people had no meaningful say in their own governance. The Declaration did not invent those ideas, but it codified them in a way that made them portable. It became a mission statement that has been invoked again and again throughout American history whenever the country has fallen short of its own ideals.

A Land of Hope, Not a Land of Lamentation

The second book featured in the July issue is A Land of Hope, by Wilfred McClay, a member of the federal commission overseeing the nation's 250th anniversary commemoration. McClay's book, now in multiple editions including a classroom version, tells the story of America's history with full acknowledgment of its faults and failures while maintaining a central argument that this has always been, and remains, a land of hope.

Stoffer described the through-line that connects both books. It centers on the fact that the founding values did not belong only to the founders. They belonged to Frederick Douglass, who invoked them to condemn slavery. They belonged to Martin Luther King Jr., who invoked them to demand civil rights. They have guided every major moral reckoning this country has undertaken. The problem, as Spalding articulated in the Q&A, is not that those values are wrong. The problem is that each new generation has to be taught them, and that civic education, in Stoffer's view and in the American Legion's mission, is something the country has not been doing well enough.

Passing the Torch to Henry Howard

Stoffer introduced his successor with the kind of warmth that comes from 14 years of shared work. Henry Howard, deputy director of the American Legion's media and communications division, is a former newspaper editor who has spent his time at the Legion doing exactly the kind of substantive journalism that Stoffer described as the best the press can offer. Howard led the Legion's Be the One campaign to reduce veteran suicide. He created the 100 Miles for Hope initiative during COVID — a wellness and community program for Legion members that has since evolved into the American Legion Family USA 250 Challenge, currently underway for the anniversary year.

Howard joined the final portion of the segment and offered his first extended remarks on America's Work Force Union Podcast. He addressed the July issue's article by writer Alan Dowd titled “What Unites Us,” which is a piece that uses survey data to examine whether the cultural and political divisions dominating public discourse actually reflect how most Americans feel about their country's core values. The data, Howard noted, suggests they do not. Despite the vitriol visible in social media and partisan media, 77 percent of Americans still describe freedom of the press as extremely important — a finding Howard connected to a broader argument that the loudest voices on both extremes represent a small minority. That means the vast majority of Americans continue to share more fundamental values than the current environment would suggest, he added.

Howard also addressed the decline of community newspapers and what that loss means for civic life. He will carry the monthly American Legion segment forward beginning next month.

More information on the American Legion is available at legion.org.

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