With the close of World War I, the League became stridently anticommunist and reactionary. Honorary president Charles Lydecker, a New York state national guard colonel and the League's new executive director, began advocating an extreme form of property rights. Lydecker soon began attacking progressives and unions for being communists. Lydecker's successor, New York businessman , subsequently pushed the League to advocate a quasi-fascist centralization of the national economy to further ensure the nation's security. Orth proposed even more repressive and less democratic measures, such as demanding "education campaigns" to indoctrinate Americanism into immigrants and children and a pogrom to drive radicals out of the nation's institutions of higher education. As more longtime League supporters, such as Samuel Gompers and Albert Bushnell Hart, withdrew their support, the League sank further into extremism and irrelevancy.