Part 4

It was to me a matter of sincere regret to have the Non-Partisan League play the part it did at St. Paul in connection with the meeting which Senator La Follette addressed. They held what was in effect a disloyalty day festival. When the Non-Partisan League movement was first started, I was inclined to hail it, because I am exceedingly anxious to do everything in my power to grapple with and remedy every injustice or wrong or mere failure to give ample opportunity to the farmer. With most of the avowed objects and with some of the methods of the Non-Partisan League I was in entire sympathy, although there were certain things it did which I felt should be condemned, and certain ways of achieving its objects which I believed to be mischievous. But when the League, on the disloyalty day in question, ranged itself on the side of the allies of Germany and the enemies of this country, it became necessary for every loyal American severely to condemn it. Morally, although doubtless not legally, it thereby came perilously near ranging itself beside the I.W.W., the German-American Alliance, and the German Socialist party machine in America.

When I spoke in Minneapolis three men spoke from the same platform with me. One was that fine and loyal American, Governor Burnquist, of Swedish ancestry. One was a blacksmith, born in Sweden, a former member of the Socialist party, who left the party within the last six months when he became convinced that it was the tool or ally of German autocracy. The third was another working-man, of German birth.

At the meeting in Wisconsin I was on the platform with the Mayor of Racine, an American citizen of German birth. My companions throughout the trip were Judge Harry Olson, of Swedish parentage, and Mr. Otto Butz, of German parentage, both of whom represent that kind of Americanism to which we all must subscribe if we are to be good Americans.

The Americanism of all these men is the Americanism I profess, and it is the exact antithesis of the attitude of the Shadow Huns, who, under the lead of native-born Americans like Messrs. La Follette and Townley, by their utterances, stir dissensions among our own people and weaken us in the prosecution of the war.

The two working-men of whom I speak, the man born in Sweden and the man born in Germany, spoke with rugged emphasis of their devotion to this country, and of their sense of the duty of every man fit to be called an American in this crisis. They emphasized the fact that Germany’s social system was based upon the duty of the average man to cringe before the insolence of his superiors and his right himself to behave with insolence to his inferiors. It is for this system of cringing abasement before the powerful, and of brutal insolence to the weak for which the Shadow Huns in this country stand when they directly or indirectly talk against our Government for going to war or talk against any step which it takes for the efficient waging of the war; and, above all, when they directly or indirectly apologize for or champion Germany.

It is the duty of every American citizen fearlessly, but truthfully, to criticize not only his Government but his people, for wrongdoing, or for failure to do what is right. It is his duty to obey the injunction of President Wilson by insisting upon pitiless publicity of inefficiency, of subordination of public to private considerations, or of any other form of governmental failure to perform duty. Such criticism is absolutely indispensable if we are to do our duty in this war, and if we are to adopt a permanent policy of preparedness which will make this Nation safe. But the men who oppose the war; who fail to support the Government in every measure which really tends to the efficient prosecution of the war; and above all who in any shape or way champion the cause and the actions of Germany, show themselves to be the Huns within our own gates and the allies of the men whom our sons and brothers are crossing the ocean to fight.

I do not admire these Shadow Huns. But least of all do I admire those among them, whether Senators, Congressmen, or public officials of any other kind who, although on Uncle Sam’s pay-roll, nevertheless seek to stab Uncle Sam in the back.

SAM WELLER AND MR. SNODGRASS

OCTOBER 2, 1917

Readers of “Pickwick,” if such there still be, will recall the time when Mr. Pickwick was arrested and some of his followers resisted arrest. Sam Weller made no boasts; but he spoiled the looks of various opponents. Mr. Snodgrass began ostentatiously to take off his coat, announcing in a loud voice that he was going to begin. But he gave no further trouble.

Over eight months have elapsed since Germany went to war with us, and we severed relations with Germany as the first move in our sixty days’ stern foremost drift into, not going to, war, but admitting that we were already at war. During those eight months we have paid the penalty for our criminally complete failure to prepare during the previous three years by not having yet to our credit one single piece of completed achievement. The Administration has unwisely striven to cover this past failure to prepare, and present failure to achieve, by occasional grandiloquent pronunciamentos as to the wonderful things we are going to do in the future; and usually the language used is designed to convince ignorant people that these things have already been done.

One day it is announced that we have discovered an infallible remedy against submarine attacks; and the next day it is announced that the toll by submarines is heavier than during any previous month. We read that the British drive is successful, but stubbornly resisted; that some thousands of prisoners have been taken; and that the losses have been terribly heavy. We read at the same time that we are going to have an immense army of aircraft--some time next spring. And actually there is less boasting over the former statement than over the latter! We read of the valor and suffering of the French in some heroic assault; and the Administration proudly announces that, after eight months, the drafted men are beginning to assemble in their camps--and omits to mention that they have neither guns nor uniforms, are short of blankets and sweaters.

So far the Sam Wellers who have done things are our allies. Uncle Sam is still complacently engaged in taking off his coat, like Mr. Snodgrass. Under such circumstances it is unwise for him to announce overloudly what he is going to do when at last he begins. Let him wait until he has done it; and meanwhile bend all his energies to doing it, and doing it soon. Brag is a good dog. But Holdfast is a better.

BROOMSTICK PREPAREDNESS

OCTOBER 4, 1917

At present we Americans have two prime duties.

The first is to make the best of actual conditions; to prepare our army, navy, merchant marine, air service, munition plants, agriculture, food conservation, and everything else as speedily as possible, so as to fight this war to a completely victorious conclusion.

The second is not to fool ourselves, but to face the fact of our complete and lamentable unpreparedness. And to inaugurate a policy of permanent preparedness which will prevent our ever again being caught in such a humiliating condition.

The men of the national guard and of the drafted army are of admirable type. I do not believe that any other great nation can produce quite their equals on such a scale as we can; the zeal, energy, and adaptable intelligence with which they are doing all they can in the various camps must be a matter of pride for all Americans. There is all the more reason why such first-class material should be given a first-class chance for speedy and efficient action. It has not been given that chance. The steps we as a nation are now taking ought to have been taken three years ago. Failure to take them then has meant broomstick preparedness now. Failure to take them as a permanent policy now means broomstick preparedness in some future vital crisis when we may not have allies willing and able to protect us while we slowly prepare to meet the enemy.

The Ordnance Bureau of the War Department admits that we have not rifles for our national army, but attempts to excuse matters by saying that it is of no consequence because we shall have rifles a few months hence when our men are ready to go abroad. The admission is correct. The excuse is not. Even for training, it is better to arm infantrymen each with the weapon he is to use rather than to give each man a broomstick or to give every four men an antiquated rifle which cannot be used in service, and most of our artillery regiments at present either have no guns or wooden guns or, in rather rare cases, old-style guns which cannot be matched against any present-day artillery. Moreover, and this is the vital point, we now have the time to prepare only because the English and French fleets and armies protect us. Eight months have passed since Germany openly went to war with us. As yet we have not rifles for our infantry. As yet we have not guns for our artillery. It will be at least a year after we were dragged into the war before our army will have received the weapons with which we are to wage the war.

This is broomstick preparedness, and there is not the slightest use in trying to justify or excuse broomstick preparedness.

THE BONDHOLDERS AND THE PEOPLE

OCTOBER 7, 1917

Not many years ago one of the favorite cries of those who wished to exploit for their own advantage the often justifiable popular unrest and discontent was that “the people were oppressed in the interest of the bondholders.” The more ardent souls of this type wished to repudiate the national debt, to “wipe it out as with a sponge,” in order to remove the “oppression.” The bondholders were always held up as greedy creatures who had obtained an unfair advantage of the people as a whole.

Well, the Liberty Loan now offers the chance to make the people and the bondholders interchangeable terms. The bonds are issued in such a way that the farmer and the wage-worker have exactly the same chance as the banker to purchase and hold as many or as few as they wish. No matter how small a man’s means, he can get some part of a bond if he wishes. The Government and the big financiers are doing all they can to make the sale as widely distributed as possible. Some bankers are serving without pay in the effort to put all the facts before the people as a whole, and so make the loan in very truth a people’s loan. It rests with the people themselves to decide whether it shall be such.

The Government must have the money. It is a patriotic duty to purchase the bonds. And they offer an absolutely safe investment. The money invested is invested on the best security in the world--that of the United States; of the American Nation itself. The money cannot be lost unless the United States is destroyed, and in that case we would all of us be smashed anyhow, so that it would not make any difference. The people can, if they choose, now make themselves the bondholders. If they do not so choose, and if they force Wall Street to become the largest purchaser of the bonds, which must be bought somehow, then they will have no right in the future to grumble about the bondholders as a special class. We can now, all of us, join that class if we wish.

FACTORIES OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP

OCTOBER 10, 1917

The training camps for the drafted men of the national army are huge factories for turning out first-class American citizens. Not only are they fitting our people for war; they are fitting them for the work of peace. They are making patriotism, love of country, devotion to the flag, and a sense of duty to others living facts, instead of unreal phrases. The public schools are laboratories of Americanism for our children; the training camps are laboratories of Americanism for our young men.

I have just seen a party of drafted men from the East Side of New York City start for Camp Upton with a band playing, an American flag flying. And two of their number in front, one dressed as Uncle Sam, and the other as the Kaiser, dragged along in manacles. There is no fifty-fifty Americanism in men with such spirit. A captain at this camp, a Plattsburg man, told me that his company of East Side New Yorkers showed all the intelligence and the zealous desire to learn which the fine young college graduates at Plattsburg have shown. Another captain told me that one of his men, a young Jew, had come to him and said that at first the East Siders had hated coming, not knowing what was ahead of them, but that now they felt that they were in a University of American Citizenship. A surgeon in the camp told me that men also, proved physically lacking after a week’s trial, were in most cases bitterly chagrined at being sent away. A colonel from a Southern camp has reported that already his country boys from the remote farms are straightening and broadening morally, mentally, and physically, and that the improvement is really incalculable. From every camp we hear of the eagerness with which the men are doing their duty, of their resourcefulness and of the real patriotism which is being rapidly learned. All this means not merely good soldiers in war, but good citizens in peace; it means an immense growth in the spirit of Americanism.

The young men are learning to be efficient, alert, self-respectful and respectful of others; they are learning to scorn laziness, slackness, and cowardice. All are serving on a precise equality of privilege and of duty and are judged each only on his merits. The sons of the foreign-born learn that they are exactly as good Americans as any one else, and when they return to their home their families will learn it, too.

Let all good Americans insist that now, without delay, we make this state of affairs our permanent national policy by law. We have built the camp, we have encountered the failures to provide army uniforms and blankets and all the other exasperating delays which are inevitable when a nation like ours has foolishly trusted to broomstick preparedness. We shall avoid all these things for the future if we continue these camps, as permanent features of the life of all our young men, and change the selective draft unto a system of universal obligatory military training for all our young men of nineteen and twenty, it being understood that they are not to go to war until they are twenty-one. We are now suffering, and the whole world is now suffering, from the effects of our broomstick preparedness. Let us do away with broomstick preparedness for the future and substitute real preparedness.

PILLAR-OF-SALT CITIZENSHIP

OCTOBER 12, 1917

When Lot’s wife was journeying to safety, she could not resist looking back to the land she had left and was thereupon turned to a pillar of salt. The men from the Old World who, instead of adopting an attitude of hearty and exclusive loyalty to their land, try also to look backward to their old countries, become pillars-of-salt citizens, who are not merely useless, but mischievous members of our commonwealth.

The dispatches of the German Government, just published by the State Department, give us an illuminating glimpse, not only of German methods and of German conduct towards this country, but also of certain phases of our own citizenship. The German Government proposed to use this country as a basis of operations for wrecking the Canadian railway. It also proposed to use and pay its agents and certain of our citizens for “sabotage in every kind of American factory for supplying munitions of war,” and for “a vigorous campaign to secure a majority in both houses favorable to Germany.” The German staff, in issuing these directions and in naming certain American citizens as tools for the treacherous work, insisted that the embassy should not be compromised and that “similar precautions must be taken in regard to Irish pro-German propaganda.”

Good citizens who have been misled by false counsel must now clearly see that the campaign of dynamite against our industries, with the attendant wreckage and murder, was a deliberate act of secret war by the German Government; that the attempt by Americans to secure an embargo on sending munitions to the Allies was an effort to aid Germany in thus making war on the United States; that the Irish pro-German movement in this country was financed and guided from Germany, and that our citizens, whether of foreign or native birth, whether of native American or German or Irish origin, who took part in pushing these movements, were doing substantially the same kind of work that Benedict Arnold once tried to do.

Some of them were doubtless paid, others were doubtless not paid, but the paid and the unpaid alike were serving Germany against the United States. These matters are now all of public record. The excuse of ignorance can no longer avail any one. Henceforth the citizens of German or Irish birth who take part in such activities as those of most of the German-American alliances and the like, are at best standing in the position of pillar-of-salt citizenship; at worst they, and above all their native American associates, who now indulge in pacifist movements or demand a peace without overwhelming victory or ask for a referendum on the war, or in any other way serve the brutal and conscienceless ambition of Germany, stand unpleasantly near the lonely eminence occupied by Benedict Arnold.

BROOMSTICK APOLOGISTS

OCTOBER 14, 1917

The chief of the Ordnance Bureau of the army, in commenting on the shortage of rifles, has said that it is of no consequence, because “every soldier will be supplied a rifle when he starts for France.”

Of course he will, otherwise he cannot start. One of the leading papers of New York backs up the statement by saying that the “drilling in the camps without rifles is ended now” and that “General Crozier delayed the work so as to get rifles with the same ammunition our allies are using.”

Neither statement is correct. The last is the reverse of truth. On October 2 in one camp there were still only one hundred rifles for twenty thousand men and other camps were scarcely better off, and the delay in getting rifles during the last eight months has been due primarily to the refusal of the Ordnance Department to get rifles using the ammunition of our allies.

If during the two years preceding our entry into the war the Government factories had been run full speed, we would have had over two million of Springfield rifles instead of under one million. Our shortage was due solely to our policy of dawdle. Our factories produced a mere dribble of rifles and no big field guns until the inevitable happened.

War came. Having no rifles of our own for the new army, the War Department decided to adopt the English rifle, the Enfield, which was being built in this country at the rate of nearly nine thousand a day in private plants, and by speeding them up the number could have been immediately increased to fourteen thousand a day. But the authorities insisted that the Enfields should be changed to take our ammunition, and that certain parts should be standardized and made interchangeable. As regards this excuse, it is sufficient to point out that in the first place it was a very grave error, while making the parts of our Enfields interchangeable, at the same time to make their ammunition not interchangeable with that of the British Enfields, for the number of Springfields on hand was negligible compared to the millions of rifles we would ultimately need, and in the second place the delay even for this purpose was wholly inexcusable. The German submarine note came on January 31. An alert War Department would have had its rifle programme minutely mapped out within two weeks. The delay in furnishing final specifications to the factories was such that they could not begin on the complete rifle until the latter part of August. Six months is a “perfectly endurable delay” only if we are content to accept the speed standards in war of Tiglath-Pileser and Pharaoh Necho. The United States must learn to adopt the war speed standards of the Twentieth Century, A.D., instead of those of the Seventh Century, B.C.

If in April we had been ready to proceed with the Enfield rifle, we would now have about two million of the new rifles instead of about one-fiftieth of that number. General Crozier says that we have only had to wait “two or three months--a perfectly endurable delay.” Surely if there is anything this war teaches it is the vital importance of time. Two or three months’ waiting in order to get a rifle which does not carry the ammunition of our allies represents not merely an undesirable delay but grave unwisdom.

General Crowder handled the draft to perfection because he appreciated that the difference between sending a telegram at 5 or at 4:45 might be of momentous consequence. General Crozier has bungled the rifle situation because of the attitude which makes him regard two or three months as “a perfectly endurable delay.”

For two years and a half before entering the war we relied upon broomstick preparedness. For the first eight months of the war we have followed the same policy as regards the vital matter of rifles for our troops.

THE LIBERTY LOAN AND THE PRO-GERMANS

OCTOBER 16, 1917

Mr. Victor Berger, the Socialist leader of Milwaukee, is reported in the press as sneering at the Liberty bonds, berating the Administration for, as he says, appointing thirty-three wealthy capitalists on the National Council of Defense, and in effect seeming to persuade his hearers that they ought, at this crisis of foreign war, to be hostile to those of their countrymen who are “capitalists” instead of the Kaiser.

This is natural. The Socialist party machine in this country is run by Germans. Socialists, who were sincerely desirous of social betterment and who were sincere in this hatred of tyranny and wrongdoing, have left the Socialist party. Those who remain in it have turned it into a mere tool of the brutal militaristic autocracy which now threatens the world. These men are completely dominated by the Germans, and German Socialists in America have shown in this crisis that they are Germans first, Socialists a long way second, and not Americans at all. In fact, they are venomously hostile to the country in which they dwell and claim citizenship, and are eagerly ready to sacrifice Socialism itself to the interests of the Germany of the Hohenzollerns. They stand well to the front among the Shadow Huns who, within our gates, are the allies of the Huns without our gates.

While in Wisconsin I was told that the German-American Alliance, in its efforts to persuade American citizens to betray their citizenship in the interests of Germany, had relatively as many adherents among the Socialists as among the two great parties.

When the Socialists under such leadership oppose or sneer at the Liberty Loan, it is proof positive that all patriotic citizens should buy Liberty bonds up to the limit of their ability. The Socialists attack the Liberty Loan in order to hurt America and help Germany. The domination of “American capitalism” is a mere blind to obscure the service they are trying to render to the capitalists and militarists of Germany.