Part 28
In the main the debate was conducted with marked decorum. Little acrimonious discussion developed. The supporters of the resolution calmly and seriously declared that a state of war really existed as a result of German violations of American rights, while the opponents of war insisted that the German submarine campaign was forced by the illegal British blockade, which was as much a violation of American rights as submarine warfare.
The same apathy which characterized the situation on the floor in general marked the reception of the speeches. Applause at best was scattered, and the absence of patriotic display was noticeable. Members were in a serious mood and talked and voted with great solemnity. Kitchin, before delivering his stirring anti-war speech, had spent six hours in consultation with proponents and opponents of war, and decided to oppose the resolution only after he had carefully weighed his action.
The only member from Texas who voted against war was Representative McLemore, the author of the famous McLemore resolution, whose adoption was intended to forestall the possibility of war with Germany.
In the House the opening speech against the resolution was delivered by Representative Cooper, of Wisconsin, who made an eloquent plea in behalf of his contention that the United States should proceed against England as well as against Germany, as both had equally acted illegally and indefensibly in violating American rights. If we had cause for war against one we had as just cause against the other offender. Mr. Cooper was the ranking Republican member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House.
The only vote against war from Ohio, out of a total of 24 in both Houses, including Nicholas Longworth, the son-in-law of Theodore Roosevelt, was cast by Representative Sherwood of Toledo. He enlisted in the Union Army April 16, 1861, as a private and was mustered out as Brigadier-General October 8, 1865; was in 43 battles and 123 days under fire and was six times complimented in special orders by commanding generals for gallant conduct in battle; commanded his regiment in all the battles of the Atlanta campaign, and after the battles of Franklin and Nashville, Tenn., upon the recommendation of the officers of his brigade and division, he was made brevet brigadier general by President Lincoln for long and faithful service and conspicuous gallantry at the battles of Resaca, Atlanta, Franklin and Nashville.
=War of 1870-71.=--What may be expected from the process of rewriting our school histories of American events by the friends of England is patent from the manner in which some of the most vital historical data of the world’s history was distorted during the war. For example, it has been persistently dinned into the minds of Americans that France was trapped into war with Prussia in 1870 by the subtle diplomatic strategy of Bismarck, who is represented as having forged a dispatch. The facts are easily accessible in “Bismarck, the Man and the Statesman,” published by Harper Brothers in 1899, in which the episodes and events, including the manner of the alleged dispatch, are treated with a degree of candor that can leave no doubt as to the responsibility for the war. It can be found in Chapter XXVII, entitled “The Ems Dispatch.”
The facts in the case are that France desired war with Prussia, but was taken by surprise when it found the South German states allied with Prussia, instead of rushing to the aid of France, as Napoleon III had confidently expected. If a nation can be inflamed to go to war by a dispatch which simply recorded that King William of Prussia had refused to intermeddle with the succession to the Crown of Spain and declined to continue the discussion of the subject with the French minister, Benedetti, it is hardly probable that the war could have been prevented under any circumstances. Accordingly, France declared war, not Prussia. Napoleon III at the time was regulating affairs throughout the universe, in Italy as well as in Mexico, where he set up a throne supported by French arms, which violated the Monroe Doctrine and almost brought us to grips with France.
The popular description of France as a peace-loving nation is not borne out by many centuries of her history, as even Frenchmen admit. The Cock of Gaul is a fighting cock, declares Deputy Pierre Brizon in a recent (1919) issue of the French periodical, “La Vague:”
They fired cannon to announce Peace!
What would you have done? They are used to blood! They are the sons of the “Cock of Gaul.”
And the “Cock of Gaul” through the centuries has carried war over the whole world--into Italy, into Germany, into Spain, into England, into Switzerland, into Austria, into Ireland, into the Scandinavian countries, into Russia, into Syria, to the Indies, to Mexico, into Algeria, into Tunis, to the Antilles, to Senegal, into the Congo, to Madagascar, into China, to Morocco, to the Ends of the Earth.
No people for a thousand years have been more warlike than the French. No one has had to an equal degree with them the silly vanity of “glory” and of “victory.” No one has caused more blood to run over the earth.
Of course, this does not furnish an excuse for the Vandals, the Mongols, the Turks, the Russians, the English or the Prussians.
No, but--they fired cannon in Paris to announce Peace!
The absurdity that Prussia lured France into a war in 1870 is repudiated by no less an authority than Premier Georges Clemenceau. In an article which he contributed to the “Saturday Evening Post,” of October 24, 1914, under the title, “The Cause of France,” (p. 1, col. 2), he states:
In 1870 Napoleon III in a moment of folly declared war on Germany [should be Prussia] without even having the excuse of being in a state of military preparedness. =No true Frenchman has ever hesitated to admit that the wrongs of that day were committed by our side. Dearly we have paid for them.=
=War Lies Repudiated by British Press.=--The following article deals with venerable subjects that have done much to inflame international hatred and misunderstandings. It is taken from the Glasgow “Forward,” of Glasgow, Scotland (1919), and will have a tendency, it is hoped, to enlighten the minds of many who have believed everything that was printed about war’s atrocities:
We are continually receiving requests for information about the Lusitania, poison gas, aerial bombs, corpse fat, and other popular stock-in-trade of the warmonger. We cannot keep repeating our exposures of wartime falsehoods and delusions, and we ask our readers to keep the following facts beside them, and refrain from subjecting us to a continual stream of postal queries.
“Was the Lusitania armed?”
No. But she was carrying munitions of war. Lord Mersey, chairman of the Court of Enquiry into the sinking of the Lusitania, said: “The 5,000 cases of ammunition on board were 50 yards away from where the torpedo struck the ship” (Glasgow “Evening Citizen” report, July 17, 1915).
“Did the German people rejoice?”
No. There was neither hilarity nor medals nor school beflagging. The London “Times” reported that “Vorwarts” “deeply deplored” the sinking. So did the German naval critic, Captain Persius.
Mr. John Murray, the publisher, issued last October an authoritative book from the pen of the correspondent of the Associated Press of America in Germany, Mr. George A. Schreiner, who was in Germany during the Lusitania period. Mr. Schreiner’s dispatches were extensively quoted in the patriotic British press, and his testimony is above suspicion. His book, “The Iron Ration” (pp. 291-2), says:
The greatest shock the German public received was the news that the Lusitania had been sunk.
For a day or two a minority held that the action was eminently correct. But even that minority dwindled rapidly.
For many weeks the German public was in doubt as to what it all meant. The thinking element was groping about in the dark. What was the purpose of picking out a ship with so many passengers on board? Then the news came that the passengers had been warned not to travel on the steamer. That removed all doubt that the vessel had been singled out for attack.
The government remained silent. It had nothing to say. The press, standing in fear of the censor and his power to suspend publication, was mute. Little by little it became known that there had been an accident. The commander of the submarine sent out to torpedo the ship had been instructed to fire at the forward hold, so that the passengers could get off before the vessel sank. Either a boiler of the ship or (they continued) an ammunition cargo had given unlooked-for assistance to the torpedo. The ship had gone down. Nothing weaned the German public so much away from the old order of government as did the Lusitania affair. The act seemed useless, wanton, ill-considered. The doctrine of governmental infallibility came near to being wrecked. The Germans began to lose confidence in the wisdom of the men who had been credited in the past with being the very quintessence of all knowledge, mundane and celestial. Admiral Tirpitz had to go. Germany’s allies, too, were not pleased. In Austria and Hungary the act was severely criticized, and in Turkey I found much disapproval of the thing.
“The ‘Old Contemptible’ Lie.”
The “New Illustrated” (Lord Northcliffe’s latest journalistic venture) declared, in March of this year:
The story that the Kaiser called General French’s force a “contemptible little army” served a useful purpose in working up fierce anger against the enemy in Britain, but it was an invention. The Kaiser was not so foolish as to say what the German General Staff would have known to be nonsense.
“The Corpse Fat Lie.”
The “Times” started the lie that the Germans had built factories for extracting grease from the bodies of dead soldiers. This grease was used as margarine.
Lord Robert Cecil latterly admitted in the House of Commons that there was no evidence of the story; but, of course, he believed the Germans capable of it. The London comic (?) papers issued cartoons of a German looking at a pot of grease and soliloquizing: “Alas! my poor brother!” But the lie was finally exposed and disappeared even from the stock-in-trade of the British Workers’ League--and, God knows, they were loth to let anything go.
“Who first bombed from the sky?”
The National War Savings Committee issued synopses of their lantern lectures last year for propaganda purposes. Here are the synopses of the two slides dealing with the first bomb dropped on towns:
A lantern picture, entitled “War in the Air,” by C. G. Grey (editor of “Aeroplane”), issued by the National War Savings Committee, Salisbury Square, London, E. C. 4 (page 7).
“Slide 32--The navy’s land machines went over to Belgium and it is to the credit of the R. N. A. S. that =the first hostile missiles which fell on German soil were bombs dropped by R. N. A. S. pilots on Cologne and Dusseldorf=....
“Slide 35--=It is interesting to note that these early raids by the R. N. A. S. were the first example of bomb-dropping attacks from the air in any way=, and the only pity is that we had not at the beginning of the war enough aeroplanes.”
“Priority in poison gas.”
The Glasgow “Evening News” (January 26, 1918) frankly admitted that:
It appears that mustard gas, generally believed to have been invented by the Germans, was discovered by the late Professor Guthrie at the Royal College, Mauritius.
The London “Times,” on August 2, 1914, reproduced from the French government organ, “Le Temps,” a paragraph reporting that M. Turpin has offered to the French Ministry of War a shell filled with a chemical compound discovered by him, and called Turpinite. Numbers of these shells seem to have been used by the French artillery, and they were essentially such gas shells as the Germans are now using. Numerous correspondents, claiming to be eye-witnesses, reported their terrible effects in the British press during October and November, 1914. We learned that the gas liberated from the explosion of one of these shells was enough to asphyxiate an entire platoon of Germans. After death they were observed to be standing erect and shoulder to shoulder in their trenches, and, after killing them with this marvelous celerity, the gas would roll on and stifle entire flocks of sheep feeding in fields in their rear. The British press writers saw nothing to blame in the use against Germans of Turpinite; on the contrary, they openly exulted in its terrible effects. Subsequently, much to their regret, Turpinite was given up, because it was so dangerous to the munition workers who had to pour it into the shell cases. Some weeks later the Germans began to use with more success the same expedient.
The London “Illustrated News” (May 13, 1915) published a “thrilling” picture of 5 German officers asphyxiated by British lyddite. The descriptive lines below the picture say:
“One of the correspondents at the front tells a thrilling story of the havoc wrought by lyddite shells used by our artillery in Flanders. The fumes of the lyddite are very poisonous, so much so that some of our troops wore masks for the nose and mouth. After one battle, in which the German trenches had been shelled with lyddite, an officer found a card party of five officers stone dead. Looking at them in the bright moonlight, he was struck by their resemblance to waxwork figures. They were in perfectly natural poses, but the bright yellow of their skins showed the manner of their death--asphyxiation by lyddite.”
The first inventor of poison gas was Lord Dundonald during the Crimean war (see “The Panmure Papers,” published in 1908 by Hodder & Stoughton, and the “Candid Review,” August, 1915). It was at the time of the Crimean war rejected by the English as “too horrible.”
There were, of course, atrocities during the war--German, Austrian, Italian, British, Serbian, French. All war is an atrocity, but =the hate= was fanned and the murder kept going by the steady press campaigns of mendacity in every country, and here in Britain we were subjected to more than our fair share of it.
=Washington’s Bodyguard.=--At the outbreak of the war of independence Herkimer, Muhlenberg and Schlatter gathered the Germans in the Mohawk Valley and the Virginia Valley together and organized them into companies for service. Baron von Ottendorff, another German soldier, recruited and drilled the famous Armand Legion. And when Washington’s first bodyguard was suspected of treasonable sentiments and plans it was dismissed and a new bodyguard, consisting almost entirely of Germans, was formed. This new bodyguard was supported by a troop of cavalry consisting entirely of Germans, under the command of Major Barth von Heer, one of Frederick the Great’s finest cavalry officers. This troop stood by Washington during the entire war, and twelve of them escorted him to Mt. Vernon when he retired.--(“The European War of 1914,” by Prof. John W. Burgess, Chap. IV, p. 115.)
=Washington’s Tribute.=--The Philadelphia German Lutherans held a memorial service on May 27, 1917, made doubly impressive at Zion’s Church, by the circulation of a letter written to the congregation by George Washington, in reply to congratulations on his first election as President of the United States. The letter concludes with the following words:
From the excellent character for dilligence, sobriety and virtue which the Germans in general, who are settled in America have ever maintained, I cannot forbear felicitating myself on receiving from respectable a number of them such strong assurance of their affection for my person, confidence in my integrity, and real zeal to support me in my endeavors for promoting the welfare of our common country.
Similar expressions are contained in a letter written by Jefferson, which see elsewhere. The church to whose congregation Washington’s letter was addressed, is the most historic church in the northern part of the United States, since it was built in 1742, under the direction of the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America, Heinrich M. Muhlenberg, father of General Muhlenberg, of Revolutionary fame. For 178 years the service has been conducted in the German language.
=Weiser, Conrad.=--Along with Franz Daniel Pastorius, Jacob Leisler and John Peter Zenger, the name of Conrad Weiser deserves to be commemorated as one of the outstanding figures of early American history, for no man of his period exercised such influence with the Indians or did so much to promote the peaceful development of the settlements by insuring the friendship of the Six Nations. The following sketch of this famous character in American history is taken from “Eminent Americans” by Benson J. Lossing:
“One of the most noted agents of communication between the white men and the Indians was Conrad Weiser, a native of Germany, who came to America in early life and settled with his father in the present Schoharie County, N. Y., in 1713. They left England in 1712 and were seventeen months on the voyage. Young Weiser became a great favorite with the Iroquois Indians in the Schoharie and Mohawk valleys, with whom he spent much of his life. Late in 1714 the elder Weiser and about thirty other families who had settled in Schoharie, becoming dissatisfied with attempts to tax them, set out for Tulpehocken in Pennsylvania, by way of the Susquehanna River, and settled there. But young Weiser was enamoured of the free life of the savage. He was naturalized by them and became thoroughly versed in the language of the whole Six Nations, as the Iroquois Confederacy in New York was called. He became confidential interpreter and messenger for the Province of Pennsylvania among the Indians and assisted at many important treaties. The governor of Virginia commissioned him to visit the grand council at Onondago in 1737 and with only a Dutchman and three Indians he traversed the trackless forest for 500 miles for that purpose. He went on a similar mission from Philadelphia to Shamokin (Sunbury) in 1744. At Reading he established an Indian agency and trading post. When the French on the frontier made hostile demonstrations in 1755 he was commissioned a colonel of a volunteer regiment from Berks County, and in 1758 he attended the great gathering of Indian chiefs in council with white commissioners at Easton. Such was the affection of the Indians for Weiser that for many years after his death they were in the habit of visiting his grave and strewing flowers upon it. Mr. Weiser’s daughter married Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, D. D., the founder of the Luthern Church in America.”
One of his grandsons was General Muhlenberg, another was the first Speaker of the House of Congress. General Washington said of him: “Posterity will not forget his just deserts.”
=Wetzel, Lou.=--The present generation is not too old to recall the flood of Indian stories of their youth, for in the ‘70s the Indian was still a factor in the contest for the development of the West and the papers at times contained thrilling accounts of battles with Indians on our frontier. Cooper was still a much-read novelist, and less famous writers still sought their inspiration in the French and Indian wars, the wars which the English and Tories, with their Indian allies, carried into the valleys of the Schoharie and the Mohawk, as well as in the bloody conflicts in Kentucky and Ohio. In these stories no names were of more frequent occurrence than those of Lou Wetzel, the scout and Indian fighter, and Simon Girty, the renegade. Both these names are strictly historic. Wetzel, was next to Daniel Boone, the most famous frontiersman of our early middle west history. His father was born in the Palatinate and came to Pennsylvania, settling afterwards in Ohio, where each of his four sons won fame as frontiersmen, scouts and guides, but above all, Lou, who after an eventful career and many hairbreadth escapes, died in Texas and was buried on the banks of the Brazos. Other noted Indian fighters of the period who were of German descent were Peter Nieswanger, Jacob Weiser, Carl Bilderbach, John Warth and George Rufner. The Poes, too, were well known in early border history, and were the sons of German settlers from Frederick County, Md. The elder, Frederick Poe, who moved west in 1774, and died in 1840 at the age of 93, was, like his younger brother, Andrew, a typical backwoodsman, contesting for every foot of ground with the native Indian.
=Wirt, William.=--Famous jurist and author. During three presidential terms Attorney General of the United States; appointed by President Monroe to that office in 1817-18; resigned under John Quincy Adams, March 3, 1829. Born at Bladensburg, Md., November 18, 1772, becoming a poor orphan at an early age. Learned Latin and Greek and studied law at Montgomery Court House, being licensed to practice in the fall of 1792. Commenced his professional career at Culpeper Courthouse, Va., the same year and soon became eminent socially and professionally. In 1802 received the appointment of chancellor of the eastern district of Virginia. Wrote his beautiful essays under the name of “The British Spy” and in 1807 prosecuted Aaron Burr for treason. His great speech on that occasion made him famous. Was a member of the Virginia Legislature in 1808, and from that time until after the war pursued his profession successfully until summoned into the Cabinet of President Monroe. In 1832 he was nominated by the anti-Masonic party for President of the United States, but received only the electoral vote of Vermont. He died February 18, 1834. The most famous production of his pen is a “Life of Patrick Henry.” Mr. Wirt never forgot his German antecedance and during 1833 engaged in founding a colony of Germans in Florida, but the venture was not successful. Lossing says “he was greatly esteemed in Richmond for his talents and social accomplishments.”