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.”
Out of 215 staff officers named among the personnel of the new
general staff of the army, announced October 3, 1918, only nine bore
German names. Of the service men aboard an American ship destroyed in
action during the war, 36 per cent. bore German names. The highest
distinction conferred on any American aviator during the active
fighting was given to Capt. Edward V. Rickenbacker, popularly called
“the American Ace of Aces,” of Columbus, Ohio.
Any one resisting the current of hatred and abuse, as Henry Ford,
whose contribution to the success of the American army is certainly
incontestible, was exposed to the same attacks as those directly
of German descent who were everywhere summoned before boards of
inquisition; a headline in the “Evening Sun” of July 2, 1919, runs
like this: “Ford Kept 500 Pro-Germans--Staff Men Say They Worked
at Plant During the War--Motor Defects Were Passed--Didn’t Try to
Correct Errors.”
That citizens of German origin were assigned a status independent of
other citizens is apparent from a statement filed with the United
States Senate by Mr. George A. Schreiner, the war correspondent of
the Associated Press, who, upon his return here for a visit, was
refused a passport for two years to go back to his post of duty. He
writes:
I will terminate my report with a few remarks that seem
greatly in order. These remarks concern the status of the
naturalized citizen. On the very report issued to me on
August 30, 1919, there appears personal data denouncing
me which was formerly not placed on passports, =and
which during the last two years has done much injury
to naturalized citizens=. I refer to the fact that in
the lower left-hand corner of the passport is noted the
citizen’s place of birth and former nationality. As things
are constituted and as they have been for some time, the
notice referred to constitutes a discrimination against
citizens of the United States of immigrant origin. The
passport is given to the citizen as a means to identify
himself as a citizen of the United States, =not as signal
to those hostile to his racials elsewhere, that the
Government of the United States sees a distinction between
native and those of foreign birth=.... The elimination of
all personal data from the passport would be the first
step on the part of the Government in serving notice
upon foreign governments that there is but one class of
citizens in the United States, and that all of them are
equally entitled to protection, as was the stand taken by
the Senate when some years ago it abrogated the commercial
treaty with the Imperial Russian Government, because that
government had refused to recognize fully the American
passports given to citizens of the United States of Jewish
origin.
Men in the Department of State have thought it presumptuous
on my part that I should claim the rights of a native-born
citizen, and do that in the manner in which I was forced
to do it. To that I will reply that no other avenue was
open. In the first place, =I am either a citizen of the
United States in every sense of the word, and in every duty
and right, or I am not=. So long as there is not set up,
let me say, immigrant citizens, or whatever designation
may be deemed proper, which class a person can join, fully
cognizant of what he or she is doing, the citizen admitted
on the basis of full citizenship, the reservation of the
presidency duly considered, would show his utter unfitness
for his national status did he relinquish, in the least
degree, his rights and guarantees, as constitutionally
fixed and legally defined.
One German American army officer was sentenced to 25 years at
hard labor at Leavenworth for having written a letter to the War
Department, declaring that as his sympathies for Germany did not fit
him to act a soldier in the fighting line, he desired to resign. He
was nevertheless sent to France in the hope that it “would cause his
sense of propriety to reassert itself.” Later, when Pershing reported
that there had been no change, he was sent back to the United States
for trial, with the above result. The “Times” said the papers and
documents seized in his home would not be published. “These papers
are said to show that the convicted man was an active friend of
Germany in this country (his wife was born there), and that in the
early part of the war he subscribed to one of the German war loans,
paying his subscription in installments.” This was the extent of the
proof, so far as known. Another officer of German descent could not
be confirmed when his name was sent in for promotion to brigadier
general.
One of the most sensational trials was that against Albert Paul
Fricke, in New York, charged with high treason. Delancey Nicol,
a famous attorney, was specially engaged to prosecute the case.
Fricke was acquitted by a jury. This result was noticed in an
obscure part of the papers, whereas Fricke’s arrest, indictment and
the details of the case at many stages was spread under screaming
headlines invariably. Paul C. H. Hennig, holding a responsible
position as superintendent in the E. W. Bliss Co. plant in Brooklyn,
was announced to have been caught red-handed tampering with the
gyroscopes for torpedoes manufactured by the company for the
Government. It was described as a plot so to manipulate the gyroscope
as to reverse the course of the torpedo and discharge it against
the vessel from which it was released, thus blowing the ship out of
the water. At the trial it was testified that Hennig could not have
accomplished any such purpose had he desired, as the torpedoes passed
through numerous other hands after leaving his and were carefully
inspected at every stage of their manufacture. He was acquitted by a
jury, but the trial had ruined him financially.
Two years before the war, a Lutheran minister, Rev. Jaeger, was
assassinated in his home in Indiana for being pro-German. On April
5, 1918, Robert B. Prager was lynched by a mob of boys and drunken
men at Collinsville, Illinois, for being a German. The acquittal of
the men was received with public jubilation, bon fires and concert by
a Naval Reserve band. At West Frankfort, Ill., according to a press
dispatch of March 25, 1918, “500 men seized Mrs. Frances Bergen, a
woman of Bohemian birth, from municipal officers, rode her on a rail
through the main street of the town, and compelled her to wave the
American flag throughout the demonstration. At frequent intervals the
procession paused while Mrs. Bergen was compelled to shout praise for
President Wilson.”
A law evidently designed to hurt citizens of German descent was
passed in Chicago, and a dispatch of March 26, 1918, gleefully
announced that “six thousand aliens will lose their rights to conduct
business in Chicago, May 1, when the ordinance passed by the City
Council refusing licenses to all persons not United States citizens
takes effect. Brewers, saloon keepers, restaurant keepers, tailors,
bakers, junk dealers and others for whom a license from the city is
required will be affected by the new law.” In this manner judges were
forced from the bench and even compelled to fly for their lives,
teachers were ousted out of their places, and professors frozen out
of their professorships in universities. Citizens to the number
of thousands were made outcasts in the country of their birth or
adoption, and they were asking themselves “why?” without getting
an answer. The German plotters spoken of by leading officials of
the government as menacing the safety of the government, had not
materialized; the danger of the “hyphen” had been exaggerated.
Under the extraordinary power given to irresponsible organizations
and individuals by the repressive legislation enacted by Congress,
the abuses which ensued were harrowing to any one with the least
conscious regard for the institutions of his country. In New York a
boy was sentenced to three months in jail for circulating a leaflet
containing extracts from the Declaration of Independence, emphasis
being laid on the fact by the court that certain passages, construed
to be an incitement to sedition, were printed in black type. An
appeal to a higher court fortunately nullified the verdict. A woman
was knocked down in the streets of New York by a man for speaking
German, and the court discharged the brute without a reprimand. From
all parts of the country reports of outrages against citizens with
German names were of daily occurrence. Men were carried off by groups
of hooligans, stripped and whipped, or tarred and feathered. The same
individuals who had themselves expressed sympathy for the cause of
the Central Powers in conversations with their neighbors, suddenly
turned informers, and professed to be proud of their betrayal of
confidence. Everywhere men were indicted for treason who on trial
were acquitted by the juries who heard their cases.
Not until the mob spirit everywhere assumed such a menacing aspect
that no citizen dared trust his own friend, and bloodshed and
violence began to run rampant, came any utterance from administration
sources designed to check the reign of terror, and then the warnings
were couched in such conservative language that they could be applied
as a rebuke only to extreme cases of fanatical madness.
Not only was the press doing yeoman’s duty in the suppression of
human rights, but the pulpit, the bar and the theaters and film
companies combined to lash the ignorant into a state of maniacal
fury and incited them to further outrages. A few judges, here and
there, stood out in bold relief for their attitude in defense of
constitutional government and the right of the individual under the
same.