Part 3
It should also provide for subsidizing the best men to write books and articles on special subjects, to be published in cheap editions or distributed free to classes interested. Authoritative opinion on current controversial topics should be prepared both for the daily press and for magazines; histories and text books upon literature should be revised. New books should be added, particularly in the primary schools. Hundreds of exchange university scholarships should be provided.
In this manner the article continues, revealing, in defiance of all sense of delicacy and discretion, the English attempt to undermine the foundations of our national life by tampering with the children of the public schools and the young men and women in the universities.
The English campaign of propaganda invades the home, the school and the church; and has already assumed a degree of appalling boldness in denying to America any substantial share in the issue of the World War. Protesting against a pamphlet, “Some Facts About the British,” said to have been published “at the suggestion of the War Department,” District Attorney Joseph C. Pelletier, of Boston, addressed Secretary of War Baker as follows:
I cannot believe that this pamphlet has come to your notice, for I cannot believe that you would suggest, far less authorize, any statement regarding the war which unduly lionized Great Britain and absolutely omitted any mention of the decisive share of the United States in the triumph of the Allied Powers.
If the sinister plot, with its ramifications in our churches and universities, our publishing houses and newspapers, is to be checked, it will be necessary to act so as to make it unprofitable for these interests to pursue their plans in quiet, and to seek by every means available to arouse something of the good old spirit of 1776 that prevailed throughout America until the advent of the late John Hay as the first American ambassador to forget the traditions of his country and its experiences at the hands of England.
How painful, how humiliating to every American, it should be to have the history of our national life for 144 years declared a forgery and to see it rewritten at the dictates of the champions of a foreign power who repudiate the stand of their forefathers. (See “Propaganda in the United States.”)
=Astor, John Jacob.=--“The inborn spirit of John Jacob Astor made America what it is,” is the judgment passed upon this famous German American by Arthur Butler Hurlbut. Popular conception of John Jacob Astor’s personality and work is based upon a collossal underestimate of his tremendous service in the cause of the commercial and economic development of the United States. More interest attaches to those things which appear adventurous in Astor’s life than to the genius which inspired all his undertakings in pursuing unsuspected aims and converting into accomplishments objects that seemed impossible of accomplishment. Many picture him as a sort of Leatherstocking with an eye to business, a hunter and trapper, boldly invading the wilderness and making friends of the Indians, and who finally amassed an immense fortune from the fur trade.
Truth is, only two millions represented the share of his fur trade in the total of twenty or thirty million dollars which constituted his fortune at the time of his death. The mythical John Jacob Astor was a creation of those who came after him; the real one appeared quite different to his contemporaries. His bier was surrounded by the leading statesmen, financiers and scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century, for they knew what today is either little known or forgotten, that his methods were those of a true pioneer and pathfinder.
None other than John Jacob Astor found the way of making American commerce independent of England by getting around the English middleman in New York for the disposal of his products and shipping direct to the London market. It was he who opened the ports of China, then the foremost trading country of the Orient, to the American ships, by securing this privilege direct from the East India Company. It was Astor who made possible trans-continental intercourse and who opened the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific by the founding of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River. It was at the cost of a fortune, it is true, but, with a spirit of enterprise which remained unrivaled for sixty years after he had blazed the way. Knowledge is power; and Astor, equipped only with an education such as a village school afforded, had a genius for imbibing knowledge from every source and direction, and then to employ it to the full bent of his exceptional ability.
His life (“Life and Ventures of the Original John Jacob Astor,” by Elizabeth L. Gebhard, Bryan Pub. Co., Hudson, N. Y.) was crowded with anecdotal incidents of his ability and manner of gathering information, always in the form of confidential chatter, or a simple plying of questions. In this he was materially aided by a winning personality, an open manner and inherent modesty, characteristics which clung to him even after he had become one of the leading and most influential figures in the country, and which remained with him until his death. He was a man of natural nobility, who achieved great results during his life-time and left his descendants to complete what he had no time to complete himself.
The author quoted, who is a great granddaughter of the Rev. Dr. John Gabriel Gebhard, pastor of the German Reformed Church in Nassau Street, New York, during the Revolution, and who was driven out of his pulpit through the machinations of the influential Tories then in New York, and forced to preach in Claverack in Van Rensselaer County, on the Hudson, declares that however fondly attached Astor was to his adopted country, he never abandoned certain ideals instilled in him in the old German home and of which neither his experiences nor the radical changes surrounding one so young could ever divest him, ideals translated into German thoroughness, German love of industry and efficiency and German honesty, judgment and foresight, confidence and the guiding principle that knowledge is power.
He enjoyed the friendship of many eminent men, and was very intimate with Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck, at the suggestion of the former leaving $400,000 to found the Astor Library in New York City.
He was born in Waldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany, came to New York at the age of twenty with a few musical instruments, which he sold and the proceeds of which he invested in furs. He died March 29, 1848. His descendants only in part remembered the racial origin of the founder of their fortune, and one of them expatriated himself and in December, 1915, was made a baron by the King of England in recognition of his loyalty to the British Crown.
=Titled Americans.=--The correspondent of the New York “Evening Post,” writing from Paris after the armistice, commented on the power of propaganda through the medium of decorations bestowed on Americans by some of the foreign governments. The war has assuredly added a long list to the roll of titled Americans, Knights of the Garter and of the Bath and Chevaliers and Commanders of the Legion of Honor. Except Secretary Daniels and former Senator Lewis, practically all accepted the dignities with which they were invested at the hands of royalty. The cross of the Legion of Honor was established by Napoleon and historically is an imperial decoration.
Prominent among those who had knighthood conferred upon them at the hands of the King of England were General Pershing, General Dickman, former Ambassador James W. Gerard, Oscar Straus, Col. C. Cordier, Brigadier General C. B. Wheeler and Major General George W. Goethals (Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George). Lieutenant General Robert L. Bullard was decorated by the King of Belgium with the Order of Leopold and made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. General Joseph H. Kuhn, former military attache at Berlin with the American embassy, was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. James M. Beck, a famous Wall Street corporation lawyer, was made “a Bencher,” an honor never before bestowed on an American, and he also received the Order of the Crown from the King of Belgium; Alfred C. Bedford, chairman of the board of directors of the Standard Oil Company, was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; Lieutenant Laurenc C. Welling of Mount Vernon received the order of a Chevalier of the Crown of Belgium; the Legion of Honor Cross was conferred on Dr. William T. Manning, rector of Trinity Church, New York; Otto H. Kahn was appointed by the King of Italy, Commander of the Crown of Italy, as was Major Julius A. Adler; J. M. Nye, chief special agent, in charge of King Albert’s train in the United States, was given the order of Chevalier of the Order of Leopold; Elizabeth Marbury was decorated with the Medal of Queen Elizabeth of Belgium “in recognition of services rendered to Belgium since 1914.”
Others named to be Knights Commanders by the King of England were Brigadier General George Bell, Jr., Major General William Lassiter, Brigadier General John L. Hines and Brigadier General Charles H. Muir; Commanders of the Order of the Bath, Brigadier General Malin Craig and Brigadier General Harry A. Smith; Commanders of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, Col. John Montgomery, Col. David H. Biddle, Col. William P. Wooten, Col. Horace Stebbins. Several American naval officers were “promoted” and nominated in the Legion of Honor.
Admiral Benson promoted to receive the Grand Cross of the Legion, while Admiral Mayo and Rear-Admirals Sims and Wilson are advanced to the grade of Grand Officer. Rear-Admirals Gleaves, Usher, Long, Griffin, Welles, Taylor and Earle become Commanders of the Legion.
Dr. Henry van Dyke, former American ambassador to the Netherlands, and Alexander J. Hemphill were made Chevaliers of the French Legion of Honor.
Companion of the Order of Bath--Major General William L. Kenly. Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George--Brigadier General William Mitchell, Brigadier General George S. Diggs, Colonel Walter Kilmer and Major Harold Fowler.
The widow of Col. Robert Bacon, who fell in action, was invested with the insignia on behalf of her husband of the order of British knighthood; Edward R. Stettinius was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor; the Order of the Crown was conferred on Elliot Wadsworth of Boston; Mrs. James Hamilton Lewis received a French decoration; Jacob A. Riis received the order of Danneborg from the King of Denmark. This list is only a partial one of Americans distinguished in the manner indicated, which prompted Arthur Brisbane in his column in the New York “American” to observe:
We shall have our little titled class in America, thanks to the British King’s action. General Pershing is now “Sir John”--in England, anyhow, and here if he chooses. Our General Dickman, commander of the Third Army, is made a Knight Commander of the Bath. He will be “Sir Joseph” and his wife “Lady Dickman.” Those that “dearly love a Lord” or a Knight are not all English.
In England such men as Gladstone, Carlyle and others refused any title, setting too high a value upon their own dignity. Some American soldiers have missed an opportunity to take democracy seriously.
=Atrocities.=--It is easily conceivable that had Germany been invaded early in the war by the joint world powers, instead of the reverse, there would have been a decided sentiment in favor of Germany instead of an increasing hatred which in a short time was extended to people of German ancestry in the United States; it held them morally responsible for the alleged atrocities of the German armies in Belgium. When a paper like the New York “Sun” holds that “the Germans are not human beings in the common acceptation of the term,” it cannot avoid the responsibility which that verdict imposes on every person of German lineage in America. It is therefore a matter of duty to investigate the testimony of responsible persons whether the Belgian atrocities had any existence in the light in which they were presented. The administration shares this responsibility in having steadfastly ignored demands for the publication of the report on Belgian atrocities made by the British government early in the war and transmitted to the State Department by Ambassador Page at London. These atrocities were alleged to consist of cutting off of hands of Belgian children, cutting off tongues, of mutilating the breasts of women, of outraging nuns and violating nurses, crucifying soldiers, etc.
Now and then a conscientious voice was heard out of the universal cry of accusation such as represented by the following self-explanatory letter addressed to the New York “Evening Post:”
To The Editor of the “Evening Post:”
Sir: Every man who has had a connection with the honorable British journalism of the past ought to thank you for your just and moderate rebuke of the pretended censorship which has passed off such a mountain of falsehoods on the public of both hemispheres. I suppose I am the Doyen of the foreign editors of London, and well I know that under Gladstone and Beaconsfield it would have been impossible to find either writers or censors for the abominable fictions which have been spread in order to inflame the British masses against their German opponents. The tales of German officers filling their pockets with the severed feet and hands of Belgian babies, and German Catholic regiments deliberately destroying French Catholic Cathedrals, would decidedly not have been accepted by any editors of the “Times” or “Morning Post” in the days of Queen Victoria.
The worst part of these infamous inventions has been that they have stirred up the blind fury of the English populace against tens of thousands of inoffensive and useful foreigners who have done nothing but good in a hundred honest professions, and who are now, in the midst of savage threats and insults, torn from their industrious homes and thrust into bleak and miserable prisons without a single comfort on the brink of the wintry season. The spectacle is a hideous one, and the military censorship which has spread the exciting calumnies has gained no enviable place in truthful history.
F. Hugh O’Donnell.
Formerly foreign editor on the “Morning Post,” “Spectator,” and other leading journals.
Melville E. Stone, general manager of the “Associated Press,” in an address before the Commercial Club of St. Louis, early in 1918, as reported in the St. Louis “Globe-Democrat,” of March 25, 1918, among other things made the following statement:
One of the many rumors which I have investigated since the beginning of the war is that “the hands of Belgian children have been cut off.” This is not the truth. Aside from all other proof, a child whose hands had been cut off would die if not given immediate medical attention; any surgeon or physician will bear me out in this.
The rumor was given currency by pro-Germans in this country, I believe, because it was so easy to deny it; they could assume on the strength of the proof of that denial that all other atrocities, of which there were innumerable instances, could be denied.
I have investigated forty or fifty of such stories, and in every case have found them untrue. One of these statements came from the wife of a leading banker in Paris. She was asked where she had seen the child, and mentioned a certain railway station. Asked if she had seen the child, she replied she had seen a little girl with her hands wrapped up. She did not know the little girl. In reply to another question she admitted she had been told the child’s hands had been cut off by Germans by a woman who stood on the platform near her. She had never seen the woman before or after, and did not know her or know her name.
“There is a little band of Catholic priests,” he said, “who have been going into Belgium and Holland and hunting out children who have lost one or both parents or in the great excitement have become separated from their parents. They informed me in a letter that they had taken between 5,000 and 6,000 children from these countries and found homes for them, and that they never had seen such a case and didn’t believe they existed.”
On December 16, 1917, the Rev. J. F. Stillimans, a pupil of Cardinal Mercier, director of the Belgian Propaganda Bureau in New York, made a similar statement, singularly assigning the same reasons for the currency of the reports, namely, that they were inspired by “Germans.” He said:
I believe that the rumors as to mutilated children being in this country are started and circulated by the Germans themselves for the sake of being able to declare them erroneous and to claim victoriously, though illogically, that all other accusations are to be judged untrue, since in this particular case no proof is forthcoming.
Because the proof was not forthcoming, the campaign was abandoned, thus leaving in the lurch a great many supposedly honorable persons who had sworn to “the truth of what they had seen with their own eyes.”
B. N. Langdon Davies, an Englishman, speaking at Madison, Wis., as reported under date of December 5, 1919, said among other things, that the public had been fed on a great deal of misinformation, and that most of the German atrocities were manufactured by Allied press agents for the purpose of stirring up hate.
The London “Globe” of November 1, 1915, said:
In regard to the stories about German war atrocities, which are as mythical as the Russians in France, the “Globe” has received numerous letters. Those who have until now given credence to these stories must realize that reports concerning atrocities which were never committed will tend to shake confidence in the accuracy of reports concerning innumerable barbarities which have been committed. These reports are still credited in many circles, and what is the result when investigations are instituted? It can be expressed in one sentence which an official of the Committee on Belgian Refugees stated to a reporter of the “Globe” today:
“We have not seen a single mutilated Belgian refugee in this country, nor have we found anyone who had ever seen one.”
The following extract is from the “Universe,” London:
A correspondent writing from Amsterdam states that a friend of his, a Catholic, who has visited many convents in Belgium with the object of testing stories of ill-treatment of nuns, makes the following statements. After careful examination it is evident that, with the exception of one or two isolated instances of rough treatment, Catholic nuns have nowhere suffered violence; on the contrary, this witness cites many examples of humane and excellent behavior on the part of the Germans, both officers and men. It is not to be assumed from the above that the gentleman quoted has made an exhaustive examination of all the convents in Belgium, but his evidence is noteworthy since he explicitly denies, on the authority of the nuns themselves, the stories of violence that were spread abroad regarding two convents, one of which was at Malines and the other at Blaunpal.
John T. McCutcheon, special war correspondent of the New York “World” and Chicago “Tribune,” made this declaration in September, 1914:
In that time from Louvain to the French frontier at Beaumont, there has not been a single instance of wanton brutality which has come under my observation. The widely disseminated stories of German atrocities were found to be groundless, and I am sincerely convinced, after my association and the observation of the officers and private soldier of the German columns with which I have traveled, that no army could go through a hostile country with fewer exhibitions of brutality.
In a special dispatch to the New York “Times,” dated London, October 16, 1914, Irvin S. Cobb, writes:
In all my travels in the theater of war I have seen no atrocities committed by either side. I have seen men led away to execution, but only after thorough and ready justice of a drumhead court martial had been administered. Germany is full of stories of German Red Cross nurses with their breasts slashed by Belgians.
A highly important witness in this connection is Emily Hobhouse, the well-known English philanthropist and writer. In October, 1916, Miss Hobhouse wrote an article for a British periodical, giving her impressions of her visit to Belgium. She emphasized her astonishment at seeing so little of the terrible devastation which she had been led, by English newspaper reports, to expect. From her experience in the South African war she was well aware that soldiers rule with fire and sword, but she found nothing in Belgium to compare with the devastation of South Africa. While but 15,000 houses out of a total of 2,000,000 had been destroyed in Belgium, the houses of 30,000 farmers had been destroyed in the Boer war out of a relatively much smaller total, and whole cities and towns with their schools and churches had been made level with the ground. Even in cities like Liege and Antwerp, where the fighting had been fierce, she could discover no evidence of any extraordinary destructiveness on the part of the Germans, and the conditions in Louvain, which she had pictured as a place of ruins, fairly astounded her.
In May, 1915, on his return from Europe, Ex-Mayor and Ex-Representative McClellan of New York, gave out a statement correcting the view so prevalent in American circles that Belgium was devastated.
The following correspondence will speak for itself:
Rev. J. F. Matthews, Glossop Road Baptist Church, Sheffield.
Dear Sir:--A correspondent informs us that on Sunday morning you stated in the course of a sermon delivered in Wash Lane Church, Latchford, Washington, that there is a Belgian girl in Sheffield with her nose cut off and her stomach ripped open by the Germans and that she is still living and getting better. I am anxious to investigate stories of German atrocities and should be grateful if you could send particulars to me by which your statement could be authenticated. Faithfully yours,
A. FENNER BROCKWAY, Editor of “Labor Leader.”
The Editor the “Labor Leader.”
Dear Mr. Brockway: I enclose our consul’s letter, which I have just received. I am writing a letter to my old church at Latchford, to be read on Sunday next, contradicting the story which I told on what seemed to be unimpeachable authority. I am glad I did not give the whole alleged facts as they were given to me. With many thanks for your note and inquiry, I am, yours sincerely,
JOHN FRANCIS MATTHEWS, March 12, 1915. (Enclosure.)
Dear Mr. Matthews: Replying to your letter of the 9th inst., enclosing a letter which you have received from the “Labor Leader,” although I have heard of a number of cases of Belgian girls being maltreated in one way or another, I have on investigation not found a particle of truth in one of them, and I know of no girl in Sheffield who has had her nose cut off and her stomach ripped open. I have also investigated cases in other towns, but have not yet succeeded in getting hold of any tangible information. Yours very truly,