Part 7
No compromise now seemed possible. The Senate was determined to take charge of the treaty, and the President prepared to appeal to the country by a series of speeches which carried him through the West as far as the Pacific Coast. During the trip he denounced the opposition Senators with strong invective, culminating in violent outbreaks of temper. But apparently his spell over the public mind, the seduction of his phrases, had been broken. Suddenly came the news of his physical breakdown, followed by his immediate return to Washington under the care of physicians, and a long period of confinement with the attendance of various specialists. Still he continued to direct the fight in the Senate for the ratification of the League of Nations and the treaty with Germany without the crossing of a “t” or the dotting of an “i.”
On November 19, 1919, the question came to a vote on a resolution of Senator Underwood, resulting in the defeat of the administration measure by a vote of 38 for and 53 against it. The only Republican voting with the administration was McCumber of North Dakota, seven Democrats voting against ratification with the Republicans. They were Gore of Oklahoma, Reed of Missouri, Shields of Tennessee, Smith of Georgia, Thomas of Colorado, Trammell of Florida and Walsh of Massachusetts.
=English Opinion of Prussians in 1813-15.=--The British, as is well known, revise their opinions of other nations according to their own selfish interests. The ambition of England to crush Prussia is in strong contrast to England’s gratitude to Prussian military genius for saving Wellington from annihilation by Napoleon at Waterloo. The sinister years of 1806-13 speak an eloquent language. The Corsican conqueror thought he had crushed Prussia for all times. He had stripped Prussia of half her territory and trampled the rest under the hoofs of his cavalry. But Prussia was not dead, and from 1813 to 1815 Prussia was the wonder of the world. The London “Times” said: “Almost every victory that led to the fall of the conqueror was a Prussian victory. At Lutzen and Goerzen always the Prussians. At the Katzbach, always the Prussians; at Grossbeeren and Leipzig, always the Prussians; in the battles in France, always the Prussians, and finally at Waterloo, always the Prussians. The Prussian soldier has proved himself the best soldier of these campaigns.”
=Espionage Act, Vote on.=--By a vote of 48 to 26, the Senate, on May 4, 1918, adopted the conference report on the Espionage Act. It accepted all recommendations of the conference, even to the extent of rejecting the France amendment, designed to protect from prosecution newspapers and other publications whose criticism of the Government was shown to be not based on malice.
The actual count showed the result as follows:
AYE: Democrats--Ashurst, Bankhead, Beckham, Chamberlain, Culberson, Fletcher, Gerry, Guion, Henderson, Hitchcock, Hollis, Jones, of New Mexico; King, Kirby, Lewis, McKellar, Myers, Overman, Owens, Phelan, Pittman, Pomerene, Ransdell, Salisbury, Shafroth, Sheppard, Shields, Simmons, Smith, of Georgia; Smith, of Maryland; Smith, of South Carolina; Swanson, Thompson, Tillman, Trammell, Underwood, Walsh and Williams.
Republican--Colt, Fall, Jones, of Washington; Lenroot, McCumber, McLean, Nelson, Poindexter, Sterling and Warren. Total, 48.
NO: Democrats--Hardwick and Reed--2.
Republicans--Borah, Brandegee, Calder, Curtis, Dillingham, France, Gallinger, Gronna, Hale, Harding, Johnson, of California; Kenyon, Knox, Lodge, McNary, New, Norris, Page, Sherman, Smoot, Sutherland, Wadsworth, Watson and Weeks--24. Total, 26.
=Exports and Imports to and from the Belligerent Countries, 1914.=--The following figures are taken from the “Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1915.”
Exports to-- Imports from--
Austria-Hungary 1913 $ 23,320,696 $ 19,192,414 1915 1,238,669 9,794,418
France 1914 159,818,924 141,446,252 1915 369,397,170 77,158,740
=Germany 1914 344,794,276 189,919,136= 1915 28,863,354 91,372,710
Italy 1914 74,235,012 56,407,671 1915 184,819,688 54,973,726
Russia 1914 31,303,149 23,320,157 1915 60,827,531 3,394,040
United Kingdom 1914 594,271,863 293,661,304 1915 911,794,954 256,351,675
1913 415,449,457 120,571,180 Canada 1914 344,716,081 160,689,790 1915 300,686,812 159,571,712
The table shows that the normal trade with Germany was the largest next to that with the United Kingdom, and that Germany took more of our products than Canada. It shows that Germany was not only one of our best customers but that the balance of trade was largely in our favor, the excess of American exports to Germany over imports in 1914 amounting to $154,875,140, or nearly as much as our entire exports to France in 1914.
The following table shows how the British arbitrary rule of the seas cut down our trade with the Scandinavian countries, all but that of Norway, whose neutrality was largely in favor of England. The figures are for the nine months ending March.
1915 1916 Denmark, exports and imports $ 63,103,962 $44,046,752 Netherlands, exports and imports 101,892,382 72,469,008 Norway, exports and imports 32,401,556 37,259,135 Sweden, exports and imports 65,880,749 43,156,027
=Under the Espionage Act--A Chapter of Persecution.=--The sudden decision of our government to enter the European war, on April 6, 1917, found the German element wholly unprepared for the outburst of bitter hate which in the course of a few weeks threatened to overwhelm every standard of sense and justice. Though a minority element, it approximated closely the dominant Anglo-American element; it far outnumbered every other racial element, and it was not conscious of anything that justified its being relegated to a class apart from the American people as a whole.
The German element had fought for the independence of America in the Revolution to the full limit of its quota, which was considerable; it had outstripped every other element in furnishing troops for the Union army; it had stood loyally by the government in every other crisis of its history, and it was not aware that the Germans living 3,000 miles away under a government of their own had ever followed any policy save one of pronounced friendship for the United States.
Having no political adhesion among themselves, having never contemplated the possibility of being turned upon by their fellow citizens, fostering the spirit of conviviality, sociability, and cultivating song and art rather than politics, they had relied confidently on the impartiality of laws of the land to protect them in their rights as well as to exact the performance of their duties as American citizens.
Their forefathers had been foremost in the winning of the West; more than any others they formed the far-flung battle line that encountered the invasion of the red hordes in the French-Indian wars; more of their number had perished in Indian massacres, from Canajoharie to New Ulm, than of any other race; they could defiantly challenge any other element to show a greater influence in educational, cultural and general academic directions, and in the words of that truly great American woman, Miss Jane Addams, the German American element was entitled to be heard.
It is unfortunately an Anglo-American trait to be easily lashed into a fanatical mob spirit by prominent spokesmen, in singular disregard of its avowed democracy. The history of our country teems with examples of unbridled violence against any non-conforming spirit that ever developed. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote:
The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be the leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen, the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day, stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.
It began with the hanging of witches; it was continued in the mobbing of Quakers; at one time we mobbed English actors, and in the Astor Place riots of New York, because we abhorred an English actor, Macready, eighteen persons were killed. There were the anti-Masonic riots, the anti-Catholic emeutes, the Know Nothing riots; later the anti-abolitionist riots in Boston and elsewhere; the Copperhead mobs, the Sandlot riots, and dozens of others, down to the burning of negroes by demonstrative communities charging themselves with the administration of savage justice.
It happened to be the turn of the Germans, forming 26 per cent. of the total population, and so intermixed that nothing can ever segregate the cross-currents of blood that courses through the veins of the American people.
In the Revolution Prussia had given refuge to American cruisers at Danzig, the port which, under the treaty we are helping to distrain from her German motherland, and had bribed Catherine the Great’s minister to prevent the sending of Russian troops to help England fight the American colonists; in the Civil War, besides giving their sons to the cause of the Union, the Germans had come to our rescue with their money when most needed. Was it astonishing that the so-called German element was stunned and staggered by the sudden reversion of sentiment from one of complete spiritual and national accord to one of vindictive malice by neighbor against neighbor and friend against friend?
It is perhaps true, as has been assumed, that certain influential members of the administration received an inordinate shock at the suggestion, from whatever source it came, that the German Americans would be likely to rise in revolution, and that a panic seized Washington at such a prospect, so that all measures were considered fair that would tend to put down the Germans and keep them in complete subjection by a system of terrorism. It is certain that no evidence has been disclosed by the endless investigations that have been going on which tended to establish the guilt of any member of the race as to plots against the government.
The Attorney General called for 200,000 volunteers to act as agents of the Department of Justice to report all disloyal talk or on the identity of persons suspected of being “pro-German.” To be known as having sympathized with the Central Powers, no matter what one’s action was after we entered the war, was to insure one’s footsteps and movements to be dogged by spies. No home was sacred, and the least indiscreet utterance was ground for a report, arrest and indictment under the so-called Espionage Act, which the New York “American” of February 24, 1917, described as “simply the infamous Alien and Sedition laws under another name,” passed in 1789, during the presidency of John Adams, which consigned the party that passed it to eternal oblivion.
Senator Cummings of Iowa said:
This measure is the most stringent and drastic law ever proposed to curb a free people in time of peace or war. The Government would have absolute power in war time to suppress newspapers and prevent debate in Congress. It might even be held a criminal offense for two citizens to discuss with each other questions of military policy.
The New York “Call” of July 2, 1919, described the effect of the law in no exaggerated language when it said:
Free discussion became a memory, and rubber stamp opinions became a badge of “patriotism.” Men and women were hunted out of their homes for having an idea higher than a rat. In some states a White Terror raged which deported whole families to adjoining states. Blood flowed. Men were mobbed and some lynched because they insisted on using their brains, instead of the brains of others. Public officials applauded, refused to interfere, and newspapers glorified the carousal of hate and terror.
Spying upon your friends became an honorable calling. The coward who hated his fellow man in packs became the popular “hero.” Papers and magazines had their mailing privileges withdrawn and some were suppressed. Libraries were repeatedly ransacked for “seditious” literature. The schools became a refuge of servile teachers, who taught what was told them, no matter how absurd it might be. Censorship barred the masses from the real news of the world. The “news” was manufactured in government bureaus and in the editorial offices of the daily newspapers. The theater and the “movie” became agencies for enforcing standardized opinions. The churches tied their creeds to the chariot of the imperialists and made their Christ speak for reaction. The lecture platform became defiled. The reversion back to the primitive permeated politics. The blackest enemies of human progress had the public ear; its friends were damned and assaulted. Historical works were “revised” or suppressed to make them square with the brutal mania of the hour.
All this was glorified in the name of “democracy,” in the name of “liberty,” in the name of “freedom.” A shadow fell upon the intellectual life of the nation. For the time being it was blotted out. All thinking had ceased, except for a courageous few, and they were mobbed or sent to the penitentiaries. Yet the editors, politicians, preachers, capitalists, bankers, exploiters, profiteers, patrioteers, “labor leaders,” all, looked upon their work and called it good. Missions went abroad to tell the European yokels of our “ideals.” The masses were intellectual prisoners, marching in the lockstep of capital’s chain gang.
There was a phase of this spy activity that went even beyond this: The invasion of the homes of German Americans whose sons were fighting in the ranks and dying in France--there were 17,000 of the latter. They were harried by ill-bred patriots of the sort we read of in the history of the French revolution, who, disregarding the fact that these parents were citizens, treated them as suspects and kept them under surveillance because they were not rushing out into the open and shouting “Huns.”
Many a case occurred in which a lad in the American army was fighting against his own brother in the ranks of the German army and his mother over here was harrassed by members of the National Security League, the American Defense Society or the American Protective League, while the father was cast out of employment for being of German blood.
Many a crippled boy returned from France to find that his family had been impoverished and persecuted by secret agents or self-constituted spies. In the breast of many a young German American were then and there planted the seeds of hate for his tormentors, and, sad to relate, doubts of the virtue of American liberty. He had given his blood to make the world safe for democracy and found his home in the grip of despotism.
There are those who account for the persecution of the German element by the reminder that the war offered the first opportunity for Southern-thinking Americans to repay the German element for its share in the Civil War in aiding the Union to win the final victory in 1865. Be that as it may, in the end this element was gloriously vindicated by ample proof of its loyalty, no matter what the test. Despite the most unrelenting enforcement of every phase of the objectionable act, mass meetings were held in twelve cities during Lincoln’s birthday in 1919, to protest against the law and demand its repeal. The meetings were called in the name of Lincoln, the liberator, but not by German Americans.
Reviewing the prosecutions under the Espionage Act, the Civil Liberties Bureau, 41 Union Square, which itself was repeatedly raided, on February 13, 1919, issued the following summary:
The bureau has had, since the beginning of the war, a standing order with a newspaper clipping company covering all references in the press of the United States to disloyalty, sedition, espionage and the Espionage law. As a result, we have the most illuminating record of cases which it has been possible to complete without access to the records of the Attorney General. We have no record of a single instance when a spy has been imprisoned under this law.
Furthermore, in the cases cited in the Attorney General’s report as typical of those prosecuted under the Espionage law, there is not one case in which the prisoner was convicted of being a paid German spy, or of even trying to find out military secrets. All the convictions which are reported arose under section 13 of the Penal Code, under which the maximum sentence is two years. So far as we have any record, cases of this nature which have arisen under the Espionage act have been terminated by the internment of the accused, without imprisonment. On the other hand, American citizens exercising (perhaps without discretion) the right of free speech in war time have been sentenced to as high as twenty years in the penitentiary. According to the data in our possession, about two-thirds of the convictions have been for remarks in private conversation. The remainder have been for statements made in public speeches and in literature publicly circulated.
The daily press, with the very rarest exceptions, was in accord with the mob and the spirit of the Espionage Act. If ever it was evident how little the German Americans had been taken into consideration by their fellow citizens, it became undeniably patent in the refusal of the press, though largely dependent on the support of this element, to cry a halt to the persecutions. Every man arrested on some charge was glaringly pictured in the character of a dangerous spy, and fanatical women were given much space in their columns for organized assaults on German toys and German music. The German people were described as moral lepers. The New York “Herald” advocated the hanging of German Americans to lamp posts. The New York “Sun,” late in October, 1918, soberly printed this:
Yet by not a few are we ominously told that the German is a man of like nature with ourselves and that as such we must be prepared to live with him after the war. This is not the truth; it is rather the most menacing lie upon the horizon of the conflict and its conclusion.... Scrutinized historically and presented boldly, the German cannot be but recognized as a distinctly separate and pathological human species. =He is not human in the sense that other men are human.=
Societies were formed for the Suppression of Everything German, and there exists at present in all parts of the United States a secret society pledged not to buy of any German American or to give employment to any member of that race.
The German Americans manifested an utterly helpless spirit in the situation. No uniform demand was formulated to be presented to Congress demanding the repeal of the Espionage Act after the excuse that called it into existence had ceased to exist, or calling on the authorities for protection. Some formed a society known as “The Friends of German Democracy,” under Mr. Franz Sigel, which adopted resolutions pledging complete and unreserved loyalty. It was rewarded with a letter from a woman heading an anti-German movement who subsequently was shown to be an English subject, in which the Friends of German Democracy were roundly told that “the only good German-American is a dead one.”
Another woman, the daughter of German parents, Mrs. William Jay, gained great notoriety by her campaign against German music, and was instrumental in stopping German plays, operas and symphonies in New York before and after the armistice had been signed, and also in sending many well-established German musicians into exile, or to an internment camp. Many, courting favor and recognition from persons having some social standing, seeing their own race utterly helpless in counteracting the feeling of contempt, joined with their detractors in order to remove all doubt as to their own loyalty.
In many States the teaching of the German language was prohibited by the legislatures. In New York City, though the Germans have a total vote of 1,250,000, including the women, they were unable to prevent--and made no attempt to prevent--an order forbidding the teaching of German or the introduction of new books of history in the schools in which their race is described as Huns and made responsible for every atrocity ascribed to it in the heat of war.
The only outstanding resistance to the spirit of Anglicising the country was recorded in New Jersey, where the German language was put under the ban in the Masonic lodges, and where John J. Plemenik, Master of Schiller Lodge, in Newark, refused to comply with the order of the Grand Lodge on the ground that for fifty years the lodge had worked in German, under the sanction of the Grand Lodge. Rather than submit to the edict of the Grand Lodge of the State the master walked out of the lodge room, followed by 200 Masons, some of them from English-speaking lodges. The example found a near parallel in one of the twenty-seven German lodges in New York City, one of them above 125 years old, after which an order extending the time for discontinuing the German language of the lodges was promptly issued. All the lodges were, however, unanimous in support of steps against obedience to the edict.
The New York Liederkranz Society, one of the largest German social organizations in the United States, cheered the late Col. Roosevelt to the echo in his attacks on their race. The New York “Times” of October 16, 1918, says that although all members of the club are of German descent, every statement made by Col. Roosevelt, and the other speakers, William Forster, president of the club, and Ludwig Nissen, chairman of the Liberty Loan Committee, were cheered again and again. Col. Roosevelt said there was room here for but one language, meaning, of course, the King’s English.
A few months later we read a dispatch from Philadelphia (New York “Tribune,” April 26, 1919): “President Wilson’s attitude on the Fiume situation has so aroused Italians in this city that they will not hold their Victory Liberty Loan parade.... Leaders here fear that the attitude of the Italians toward President Wilson will result in cutting down their subscriptions to the loan.”
Before one Justice Cropsey, of the Queens County Supreme Court, ten Germans out of eleven who applied for citizenship one day in May, 1919, six months after the signing of the armistice, had their petitions denied. A girl who was earning her living as a stenographer was included in the list because she had not invested in the first two Liberty loans, though she was unemployed at the time. The learned Justice dismissed her petition with the statement: “You get the benefit of this country and increase your pay through its entrance into the war, and yet you will not support it.”