language newspapers should have a time limit act, after which it
should not be lawful to publish them save in English. A few of their
newspapers have a most honorable past and are doing excellent work in
the present. A number of English language newspapers have preached
moral treason to the American people, often covering it by zeal in
denouncing all honest and truthful men who point out the delays and
inefficiencies in government, actions which make those responsible for
them enemies of the American people and aids to Germany; but moral
treason in English is at least open, whereas in a foreign language
it is hidden. Moral treason is not necessarily legal treason, but it
may be as dangerous, and from senators to school teachers, all public
servants who deal in it should promptly be removed from office.
The organizations, newspapers, and public servants who thus betray
the honor of America in the interest of Germany wrong all their fellow
citizens. But above all they cruelly wrong those loyal Americans,
the great majority of our citizens who are in whole or in part of
German blood. The loyal majority should lend their utmost energies to
securing the condign and summary punishment of the disloyal minority
of Americans of German blood who are a disgrace and a menace to this
country. Gustavus Ohlinger is an admirable example of the Americans in
whole or in part of German blood who is an American and nothing else.
All good Americans, and especially all good Americans of German blood,
should actively and heartily back him. There is no room in this country
for fifty-fifty Americanism.
QUIT TALKING PEACE
MARCH 5, 1918
The experience of Trotzky, Lenine, and the other Bolshevist leaders
in their peace negotiations with Germany ought to be illuminating to
our own people. Germany encouraged them to enter peace negotiations,
spoke fairly to them, got them committed to the abandonment of their
allies, used them to demoralize Russia and make it impossible for her
to organize effective resistance, and then threw them over, instantly
invaded their land, and now holds a part of Russia.
Let our people take warning and insist that all peace talk cease
forthwith. Germany is the enemy of humanity generally and in a special
sense is the enemy of the United States. She has introduced into
warfare horrors which not another civilized nation would have dreamed
of using. Her conduct toward Belgium stands out on the high peak of
infamy. She has murdered innocent women and children wholesale on the
high seas and hundreds of Americans have thus been slain. She has
organized murder, rape, robbery, and devastation on a gigantic scale in
every conquered territory. Our own sons and brothers are at this moment
facing death by the awful torture of the poison gas because Germany has
invented methods of warfare more cruel than those of the Dark Ages.
Peace on equal terms with such a foe would mean black shame in the
present and the certainty of renewed and wholesale war in the future.
To talk peace means to puzzle the ignorant and to weaken the will of
even the stout-hearted. It is hailed with evil joy by all the men in
this country who have opposed war and have wished us to submit tamely
to German brutality. When there comes from Washington an announcement
about peace terms which the pacifists and pro-Germans are able to
interpret as favorable to their views, the Hearst papers gleefully
champion it as undoing the effect of previous declarations that we
are in this war to the end, and Mr. Hillquit, the New York mayoralty
candidate of the Germanized Socialists and the pacifists, expresses
his hearty approval and says that the President has now taken his (Mr.
Hillquit’s) position.
Let us quit talking peace with a foe who, if we entered into peace
negotiations, would, according to his ability, trick us as he has
already tricked the Bolsheviki of Russia. Let us not put ourselves on
the moral and intellectual level of Trotzky and Lenine. Every peace
utterance pleases the Germans, renders our allies uneasy, strengthens
the pacifists, the pro-Germans, and the various seditious elements in
our own country, and bewilders, disheartens, and weakens our honest
citizens.
The time when words about peace were useful passed a very long time
ago. Let us now merely announce that we are in this war to fight until
Germany is beaten to her knees. Then let us bend our entire energy
to building ships and more ships at the greatest possible speed and
putting a couple of million men on the firing line at the earliest
possible moment. That is the effective way to bring a just and lasting
peace.
THE WORST ENEMIES OF CERTAIN LOYAL AMERICANS
MARCH 10, 1918
The army and navy of the United States in the training camps, on
the high seas, and at the battle front, are at this moment proving
themselves the most potent agencies of Americanism that our country
contains. All good Americans should feel a peculiar pride in the fine
and gallant loyalty with which the great majority of the Americans of
German descent have come forward to do their part to win this war
against the brutal and merciless tyranny of the Prussianized Germany
of the Hohenzollerns. As regards able-bodied men, this service must be
rendered in the army, for in war-time no other form of activity can be
accepted as a substitute for the fighting work of the fighting man.
I continually meet officers from the front. A captain recently out of
the trenches called on me the other day. His father and mother were
born in Germany. He himself, after going through a small American
college, had spent three years at Heidelberg. He mentioned that
one of his lieutenants was born in Norway, and that another was
of Irish parentage, and then continued by saying that already his
brief experience of the war had given him a horror of the Germany of
to-day, had convinced him that our only safety lay in the complete
Americanization of all our people and therefore in the insistence
that English should be the only language of this country and the only
language taught in any primary school, and that he regarded such
organizations as the German-American Alliance as guilty of moral
treason to America as the worst and most dangerous foes of good
Americans of German blood, and as richly deserving to be promptly
suppressed and punished.
An officer from our destroyer squadron across the seas informed me that
our destroyers had accounted for nearly a score of submarines; that
about a quarter of their crews were, as indicated by their names, of
German descent, but straight-out Americans and nothing else; that his
own best gun-pointer was named Fritz Heinz; and that their keenest
indignation was reserved for the German officials in Germany and the
German-American Alliance in America whose actions tended to make a wall
between them and their fellow Americans and who inflicted the most
cruel wrong possible upon them by exciting among other Americans an
indiscriminate distrust and anger toward all men of German origin.
These men were absolutely right. We speak in the name of all good
Americans and on behalf of Fritz and Adolph and Gustav exactly as
on behalf of Bill and Harry and Edward, when we demand the prompt
suppression of the German-American Alliance and of all similar
organizations. The German blood is exactly as good as any other blood,
but exactly as, under the corroding influence of slavery, masses of
Americans of the best blood once became the enemies of the Union
and of humanity, so under the debasing and brutalizing influence of
the _kultur_ of the last fifty years, Germany has become the cruel
and treacherous enemy of the United States and of all the other
liberty-loving nations of mankind.
GIRD UP OUR LOINS
MARCH 16, 1918
The Bible warns us to gird up our loins if we wish to win a race. Most
certainly we cannot expect to do well in the present struggle unless
we bend every energy to the task and exercise all our forethought in
instant preparation.
Russia’s betrayal of the Allied cause under the foolish and iniquitous
lead of the Bolsheviki has been a betrayal of the United States and of
the cause of liberty and democracy and justice throughout the world.
Above all, it has been a betrayal of Russia herself, and it has, of
course, absolved us of every obligation to her. Our duty is to stand
by England and France and Belgium and Serbia, who have stood by us.
Russia has ruined herself in Germany’s interest, and has immensely
increased the peril for the rest of us. This simply means that we
ought to re-double our effort. We should be building the cargo ships
in three eight-hour shift days and should treat work on them as being
equivalent to work in the army. We should speed to the utmost the work
on the cannon and flying machines so that our army may cease having to
rely on the French for artillery and airplanes. The army should copy
the wisdom of the navy in regard to the Lewis auto rifle and should use
this weapon to the utmost limit now, even although it prove wise later
to supersede it with the Browning weapon.
We ought at once to introduce obligatory universal military training
for our young men between nineteen and twenty-one. They would not
be sent to war until they were twenty-one. This would be the most
effective step in preparing to get ready an army of five million men.
Such an army would be relatively no larger than the four hundred
thousand men which gallant Canada, to her eternal honor, has already
raised. Let us begin now to prepare ourselves for a three years’ war.
If we had prepared as we ought to have done during the two and a half
years before we at last reluctantly faced our duty and went to war, we
would have put a couple of million of fighting men into Europe last
June. Russia would never have broken, and in all probability the war
would have ended at once with almost no fighting. There is no use in
crying over the enormous quantities of milk we have already spilled,
unless it becomes necessary in order to prevent us from continuing
to spill it in the present and future. Failure to prepare as above
outlined may cause us as much trouble in the future as our past failure
to prepare has already caused us. General Pershing’s gallant little
army has already made the entire United States its debtor. But it is
not as yet as important a military factor as the army of Belgium or of
Portugal or of Serbia. Let us back it up and equip it and reënforce it
to the utmost of our strength. Let us quit talking peace and bend all
our energies to winning the war, and thereby winning the only kind of
peace that will be safe, honorable, and lasting.
BOLSHEVIKI AT HOME AND ABROAD
MARCH 19, 1918
The answer of the Bolsheviki to the President’s message was an example
of mean and studied impertinence. There was no gratitude, no apology
for their betrayal of America and of the cause of liberty, and no
expression of hostility to their German masters, but there was a
gratuitous and insulting expression for a class war in America against
what the Bolsheviki with ignorant folly speak of as capitalism.
A couple of days afterward the Bolshevist authorities definitely
concluded with Germany their peace of ignominy and treachery.
There is now no possible reason for our Government to draw the sharp
distinction they have drawn between the Bolsheviki abroad and the
Bolsheviki at home. The Government is prosecuting Victor Berger and
has suppressed the paper of Max Eastman. But Berger and Eastman are
essentially the same as Lenine and Trotzky. All four have played
Germany’s game; all four have been the enemies of the cause of the
United States and of liberty. The utter ruin which the Bolsheviki have
brought on Russia offers an illuminating example of the destruction
which would befall the United States if it ever submitted to the
leadership of men like Messrs. Hillquit, Townley, Haywood, and Berger.
We have had many evil capitalists in the United States, but on the
whole the worst capitalists could not do the permanent damage to the
farmers and working-men in America which these foreign and native
Bolsheviki would do if they had the power. Our people should keep
steadily in mind that the Russian Bolsheviki have not attacked the
big Russian capitalists who were in alliance with the autocracy of
the Romanoffs and they have been the tools, paid or unpaid, of the
German militarists and capitalists. They have spent their energies
in attacking the revolutionists who overthrew the Romanoffs and
in persecuting the peasants who have become small farmers and the
working-men who are skilled mechanics and the small shopkeepers. They
hate and envy those thrifty and self-respecting workers who in this
country make up the great majority of our people and who are our most
typical and characteristic Americans.
The Bolsheviki have concluded a peace with Germany which includes
handing back to the Turks, or, in other words, plunging back into
brutal savagery, a district in Asia in which there are multitudes of
Armenians and other Christians. Our Government has been derelict in
its duty to the Armenians, to the Christians of Syria and to the Jews
of Palestine, by its failure to declare war on Turkey. It is a grave
error to coddle the Bolsheviki and support them in any way against our
allies unless we are also willing fearlessly to condemn their betrayal
of us and of the Allied cause, and unless we are ready to war to the
end against both Germany and Turkey in order to rescue from tyranny and
to give independence to the unfortunate people whom the Bolsheviki have
abandoned to a cruel fate.
THE FRUITS OF OUR DELAY
MARCH 26, 1918
The shameful betrayal of the Allies’ cause by the Russian Bolshevists
and the delay and incompetence of the American Government have given
the Germans a free hand for their drive against the British army.
England is at this moment fighting our battles just as much as she
is fighting her own, yet, although three years have passed since the
Lusitania was sunk and a year since Congress declared that we had
“formally” entered the war, America is still merely an onlooker.
We owe this ignoble position to the folly and the procrastination of
our Government and its inveterate tendency to substitute rhetoric for
action. We have a gallant little army across the ocean, but it is
smaller than the Belgian army. We are not holding a greater extent of
the battle front than the army of little Portugal. We have at the front
no airplanes or field artillery and very few machine guns except those
we have gotten from the French. Even the clothes of our troops are
mainly obtained from the English. Yet we are the richest nation and one
of the most populous nations on the earth.
Our Government is responsible for our dreadful shortcomings, but
the responsibility is shared by all the foolish creatures who have
willfully blinded themselves to these shortcomings and have clamored
against the faithful public servants, like Senator Chamberlain, who
laid bare the shortcomings for the purpose of remedying them. The truly
patriotic men in this crisis have been the men who have fearlessly told
the truth in order to speed up the war. The other men who have decried
the truth-telling as “crying over spilt milk” have been profoundly
unpatriotic. It was the failure to point out how much milk had been
spilt which was primarily responsible for the failure to stop further
spilling of milk.
In the face of the terrible battle which our English allies are now
waging, and in view of the fact that for three years and a half we have
owed our safety to the British fleet and to the French spirit typified
by Premier Clemenceau, let the American people now demand that the
Government recognize the need of instant and efficient action. Let
our Government quit flirting with the Bolshevists at home and abroad.
Let it declare war on Turkey at once. Let it acknowledge its dreadful
failures and delays and henceforth act with all possible speed. Let it
manfully endeavor to make our weight felt in the war this year. Let it
stop boasting about the future and begin to act in the present.
Let the Government use common sense. It has talked magnificently about
having twenty thousand airplanes ready in June, but it has not one
American war plane at the front to-day. Let it quit boasting and act.
Let it push the shipping programme by night and day. Let it give France
and England the men they so sorely need.
Our Government has delayed until the Allies have been brought to the
brink of destruction. Let it act at once lest the chance for action
pass completely by.
HOW THE HUN EARNS HIS TITLE
MARCH 31, 1918
THE CURSE OF THE SYSTEM
BY D. THOMAS CURTIN
I
A scene in Schabatz, when the Austro-Hungarians attempted to flank
Belgrade in early August, 1914, has seared itself into my memory. I
was in the shambles of an overgrown village. The blood of both armies
flowed in the streets and the wine from broken casks and bottles flowed
in the cellars, soldiers walking in it up to their knees.
The street was deserted save for an _Unteroffizier_ who was passing.
An old woman, bent and shriveled, her white locks escaping the yellow
sash around her head, tottered from a whitewashed mixture of mud and
thatch, saw the enemy soldier, started back, thought better of it, and
sank to her knees while she extended her bony arms for mercy. He drew
his saber--still a relic of war. “A little despicable stage play and
magnanimous pardon,” I thought. I was mistaken. The saber whistled and
slashed the outstretched arms, the woman’s shriek cut me like saws and
knives, and I turned away bewildered.
I came face to face with the man a few minutes later. He was not drunk.
Nor did he look like a wild man from the hills. He was a Viennese, the
kind of man I had seen on scores of occasions lolling in a café, mild
and gentle as a kitten. He looked mild and gentle now.
“Why did you do it?” I had to ask.
“She was a pig-dog Serb, an enemy of my country. I did my duty.” And he
said it in a manner which showed him satisfied in his conscience that
he had done what was right.
I realize now that I had had my first war-time example of the German
system of education. The code is that anything done in the name of the
Fatherland is correct. A man can be educated in such a manner that he
will wipe out “crawling verminous pests of his country” with as little
compunction as a farmer would rid his field of potato bugs.
II
On Thanksgiving Day, 1914, I visited the American Hospital in Munich,
a military hospital supported by contributions from the United States.
While talking with three men in one room I was actually saying to
myself that such as these could not be guilty of atrocities, when one
of them told me a story which forced me to change my mind.
“I was a member of a relief company marching in the Vosges,” he said.
“As we were about to halt for lunch, we came upon a French priest in a
wood who was judged quickly to be a spy by our officers. These turned
him over to us and we had great amusement after we had finished eating.
I laugh still whenever I think of it. We tied a rope around his neck
and threw it over a limb of a tree. Some comrades pulled and up went
the priest while the rest of us stood around and jabbed him with our
bayonets. ‘Higher, higher!’ we shouted. And then we had a jumping
contest to see which could thrust his bayonet highest.”
The man told me the story because he thought it funny and his eyes
danced with happy recollections as he told it.
NO GUNS
_General Pétain, commander, French army, said: “Send guns; so that
some of us may be alive to fight by your side, when at last America is
ready.”_
What! in France and no guns!
Have I sent forth my sons
With proud boasts of great deeds--
And fallen down at plain needs?
Who proclaimed to the world
With my banners unfurled
The dread foe will succumb,
I, America, come!
In France, and no guns!
And I’ve sent forth my sons
With those wolves of the Huns at their throats,
While the Kaiser and Hindenburg gloat,
And France, stricken France,
Fills the breach, while my lance
I sent flaming with pride
Hangs behind, not beside!
In France! and no guns,
Empty hands, and my sons
Who would tear out their hearts for my fame,
Are held up to derision and shame,
Because statesmen so small
Hew out roads to a wall
While the fire bells of death
Crash souls out, and breath!
In France, and no guns!
Why, you’re worse than the Huns,
You men who are shaming my honor
When the stress of the Nation’s upon her.
With your quibbles and greed
Can the trampled be freed?
Oh, my heart’s sick with scorn,
I, America, suborned.
In France, and no guns!
Let’s forever be done
With our boasts and our brags, and succumb
To the scorning before which we’re dumb.
When at last France is free
And her glory acclaimed
Let none look at me,
At America, shamed.
Henrietta Keith, Minneapolis
We live such sheltered lives here, three thousand miles away from the
war, that most of us don’t even yet realize what Germany has done
and has stood for in this war and what a terrible menace she is to
us and to all civilization. The other day I met a very able writer
and observer who at the outbreak of the Great War spent many months
with the German and Austrian armies and then lived in Germany until
it became impossible for a self-respecting American longer to stay
there. He is Mr. D. Thomas Curtin. His father was born in Ireland.
He is himself a Catholic. I mention these facts merely because they
refute the cheap and vicious falsehoods so often promulgated by the
pro-Germans to the effect that the accounts of the German atrocities
are due to English propaganda.
I ask all good Americans, whatever their creed, and I especially ask
American women, to read these two straightforward statements by Mr.
Curtin, the account of the killing by torture of the priest who fell
into the hands of the German soldiers and the account of the fearful
brutality of an Austrian German to a poor old woman. These were not
isolated cases of brutality. They were both part of the policy of
deliberate horror, which Mr. Curtin speaks of as “the system.” All
in America who have played the game of Germany, from Hearst and the
Germanized Socialists and the German-American Alliance at one end of
the line to foolish pacifist preachers at the other end of the line,
have been, according to their power, working to bring about the day
when we here in this country would see our own women and helpless
non-combatant men and our own children exposed to such hideous wrongs
and torture as is described by Mr. Curtin. I very seriously ask our
people to read what Mr. Curtin says and to ponder the full meaning of
the facts he sets forth.
In the next place, I ask them to read the poem--and it is a real poem,
not merely verse--of Mrs. Keith, a Minneapolis woman, called “No Guns.”
Well-meaning, foolish people, and some people who in ordinary relations
of life are not foolish, are fond of telling us not to point out the
defects in the army, because this encourages Germany, and because
anyhow it is a case of spilt milk, and there is no use of crying over
spilt milk. The answer is twofold. In the first place, Germany knows
all our shortcomings. Inasmuch as we have wickedly refused to go to
war with Turkey and Bulgaria, we have left open avenues by which it
is absolutely certain that Germany gets full knowledge of everything
she wishes to know about this country. It is only our own people who
are kept in ignorance. In the next place, as regards the spilt-milk
proposition, the trouble is that we have kept on spilling the milk
and that only by pointing out that it has been spilled is it possible
to solder the milk cans and stop further spilling. Until Senator
Chamberlain and his committee boldly and truthfully pointed out the
evil caused by the delays and shortcomings of the War Department, the
Administration made not the slightest effort to remedy them. Some of
the more salient of these shortcomings have been remedied, and this
fact is primarily due to the courage and patriotism of these public
servants, Senator Chamberlain and his committee.