and to listen to those who told the truth, we would at this moment have
four times the force we now have in France; and we would have guns and
airplanes, and auto rifles of our own make with it; and we would have
had plenty of ships to carry our men across and to give them food and
munitions. The reason why our fighting army at the front in France is
no larger, and the reason why we have had to get the necessary field
guns, airplanes, and auto rifles for that army from the French, is
because we, as a people, were not willing to insist upon knowing the
truth. It is precisely because certain men are now telling the truth
that there is reason to hope that gradually the milk spilling will be
stopped; that gradually we shall get the guns, the airplanes, and auto
rifles for our men, and above all the ships that are vitally necessary.
I ask the mothers of this country whose sons are now in the army, or
may go into the army, to read and ponder this poem by a woman, and to
cast the weight of their great influence in favor of demanding that
every ounce of energy we as a Nation possess be used to speed up the
war, to relieve our allies of the burden of supplying us with weapons
of war, and to see that the American troops abroad are furnished from
this country with American-made weapons of the highest type.
The don’t-cry-over-spilt-milk appeal represents unpardonable wrong to
America and to civilization.
THANK HEAVEN!
APRIL 2, 1918
At last, thank Heaven, comes the news that our little American army
at the front has been put absolutely at the disposal of the French
and English military leaders for use of any kind in the gigantic and
terrible battle now being waged. All Americans who are proud of the
great name of America will humbly and reverently thank Heaven that at
any rate the army we have at the front is not to remain in the position
of an onlooker, but is to be put into the battle.
The wanton and cruel bombardment of Paris, undertaken for no military
reason and with its characteristic slaughter of women and children
in a church, proves that the German barbarity is as deliberate and
as infamous now as at the beginning of the war. The Allies in this
battle are fighting for humanity and civilization. They are fighting
the battle of the United States. Any man in the United States who at
this time directly or indirectly expresses approval of or sympathy with
Germany in this battle or in this war, should be arrested and either
shot, hung, or imprisoned for life, according to the gravity of his
offense.
Thank Heaven that our sons and brothers are now to stand at Armageddon.
Thank Heaven that American soldiers are now to fight in the great
battle against the bestial foe of America and of mankind. Words count
for little at this time and for nothing whatever except in so far as
they are of help to the men of deeds who are at the front.
It is these men at the front who are now making all Americans, born
and unborn, forever their debtors. They are the men who have paid with
their bodies for their soul’s desire. Let no one pity them, whatever
their fate, for they have seen the mighty days and have risen level to
the need of the mighty days. And let no one pity the wives and mothers
and fathers whose husbands and lovers and sons now face death in battle
for the mightiest of all high causes. Our hearts are wrung with sorrow
and anxiety, but our heads are held aloft with pride. It is a terrible
thing that our loved ones should face the great danger, but it would
be a far more terrible thing if, whatever the danger, they were not
treading the hard path of duty and honor.
CITIZENS OR SUBJECTS?
APRIL 6, 1918
In a self-governing country the people are called citizens. Under a
despotism or autocracy the people are called subjects. This is because
in a free country the people are themselves sovereign, while in a
despotic country the people are under a sovereign. In the United States
the people are all citizens, including its President. The rest of them
are fellow citizens of the President. In Germany the people are all
subjects of the Kaiser. They are not his fellow citizens, they are his
subjects. This is the essential difference between the United States
and Germany, but the difference would vanish if we now submitted to the
foolish or traitorous persons who endeavor to make it a crime to tell
the truth about the Administration when the Administration is guilty
of incompetence or other shortcomings. Such endeavor is itself a crime
against the Nation. Those who take such an attitude are guilty of moral
treason of a kind both abject and dangerous.
Our loyalty is due entirely to the United States. It is due to the
President only and exactly to the degree in which he efficiently serves
the United States. It is our duty to support him when he serves the
United States well. It is our duty to oppose him when he serves it
badly. This is true about Mr. Wilson now and it has been true about
all our presidents in the past. It is our duty at all times to tell
the truth about the President and about every one else, save in the
cases where to tell the truth at the moment would benefit the public
enemy. Since this war began, the suppression of the truth by and about
the Administration has been habitual. In rare cases this has been
disadvantageous to the enemy. In the vast majority of cases it has
been advantageous to the enemy, detrimental to the American people,
and useful to the Administration only from the political, not the
patriotic, standpoint.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has just recommended the passage
of a law in which, among many excellent propositions to put down
disloyalty, there has been adroitly inserted a provision that any
one who uses “contemptuous or slurring language about the President”
shall be punished by imprisonment for a long term of years and by a
fine of many thousand dollars. This proposed law is sheer treason to
the United States. Under its terms Abraham Lincoln would have been
sent to prison for what he repeatedly said of Presidents Polk, Pierce,
and Buchanan. Under its terms President Wilson would be free to speak
of Senator-elect Lenroot as he has spoken, but Senator Lenroot would
not be free truthfully to answer President Wilson. It is a proposal
to make Americans subjects instead of citizens. It is a proposal to
put the President in the position of the Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs.
Government by the people means that the people have the right to do
their own thinking and to do their own speaking about their public
servants. They must speak truthfully and they must not be disloyal to
the country, and it is their highest duty by truthful criticism to make
and keep the public servants loyal to the country.
Any truthful criticism could and would be held by partisanship to
be slurring or contemptuous. The Delaware House of Representatives
has just shown this. It came within one vote of passing a resolution
demanding that the Department of Justice proceed against me because, in
my recent speeches in Maine, I “severely criticized the conduct of our
National Government.” I defy any human being to point out a statement
in that speech which was not true and which was not patriotic, and
yet the decent and patriotic members of the Delaware legislature were
only able to secure a majority of one against the base and servile
partisanship of those who upheld the resolution.
I believe the proposed law is unconstitutional. If it is passed,
I shall certainly give the Government the opportunity to test its
constitutionality. For whenever the need arises I shall in the future
speak truthfully of the President in praise or in blame, exactly as
I have done in the past. When the President in the past uttered his
statements about being too proud to fight and wishing peace without
victory, and considering that we had no special grievance against
Germany, I spoke of him as it was my high duty to speak. Therefore,
I spoke of him truthfully and severely, and I cared nothing whether
or not timid and unpatriotic and short-sighted men said that I spoke
slurringly or contemptuously. In as far as the President in the future
endeavors to wage this war efficiently and to secure the peace of
overwhelming victory, I shall heartily support him. But if he wages it
inefficiently or if he should now champion a peace without victory,
or say that we had no grievance against Germany, I would speak in
criticism of him precisely as I have spoken in the past. I am an
American and a free man. My loyalty is due to the United States, and
therefore it is due to the President, the Senators, the Congressmen,
and all other public servants only and to the degree in which they
loyally and efficiently serve the United States.
WOMEN AND THE WAR
APRIL 12, 1918
A Kansas woman has just written me in part as follows: “I have given
my all, my two sons, gladly and proudly, as volunteers to my country,
for they enlisted last August. But my heart grows sick at the confusion
and blunders and apathy. I thank The Star for printing that poem of the
Minnesota mother. It appeals to all of us mothers who stay at home and
pray and work as we can.”
I think more continually of such mothers of soldiers as this Kansas
woman, than I do even of the soldiers themselves. They have high and
gallant souls. They are the spiritual heirs of the mothers and wives of
Washington’s Continentals and of the mothers and wives of the soldiers
of Grant and Lee. I am proud beyond measure that I am their fellow
countryman. In everything that I do or say, I seek to make and to
keep this land a land in which their daughters can dwell in honorable
safety and to make our common citizenship such that both their sons and
daughters shall hold their heads high because they are Americans.
But exactly as I revere such women, so I condemn the women whose
short-sightedness or frivolous love of ease and vapid pleasure or whose
timid fear of danger and labor makes them fit companions for those
unworthy men whose lives represent merely the shirking of duty. The
mother who, by perpetual complaint and lamentation about unavoidable
hardships and risks, seeks to weaken the heart of her soldier son
stands no higher than the money-getting or ease-loving man who dodges
the draft. The woman who cares so little for the honor of America and
the interests of civilization as now to wish a peace without victory
is no better than the men in uniform who seek soft positions of safety
among the slickers and slackers.
The things that are best worth having in life must be paid for whether
by forethought or by toil or by downright facing of danger. This is
true in peace. It is even more true in war. It is just as true of women
as of men.
All wise and good women and all wise and good men abhor war. Washington
and Lincoln abhorred war. But no man or woman is either wise or good
unless he or she abhors some things even more than war, exactly as
Washington and Lincoln abhorred them. We are none of us fit to be free
men in a republic if we are not willing to fight when the Republic is
wronged as Germany has wronged this country. We are none of us entitled
to say that we love mankind if we are not willing to do battle against
the Turk and the German in order to right such wrongs as have been
perpetrated on Belgium and Armenia. And we deserve to be brayed in a
mortar if we are ever again guilty of such folly as that of which we
have been guilty by our foolish failure to prepare our strength in
efficient fashion during the last three and a half years.
The women of this country who love their husbands and sons should
realize now that only by thorough preparedness in advance can war be
avoided, if possible, or successfully waged if it has to come. Recently
men in high position whose own bodies are safe have stated that they
are glad that we were not prepared in advance to do our duty when this
war came. These men have purchased their own safety and advantage by
the blood of our sons at the front. Let the women who do not wish to
see their men go up against the cannon see that hereafter all our sons
are well trained in advance. If America’s strength is fully prepared in
advance, she will in all probability never have to go to war and will
be a potent factor in preserving the peace of justice throughout the
world, and the first step in securing such a peace is to devote all
our energies to speeding up the war until it is ended by the complete
triumph of our allies and ourselves.
TO MY FELLOW AMERICANS OF GERMAN BLOOD
APRIL 16, 1918
Hermann Hagedorn, an American whose father and mother were born in
Germany, an American of the best and bravest and most loyal type,
has just written a little book called “Where Do You Stand? An Appeal
to Americans of German Origin.” I wish it could be read by every
individual of those to whom it is addressed, and by all other Americans
also.
I am, myself, partly of German blood, and I make my appeal as an
American does, to and on behalf of all other Americans who have German
blood in their veins. We have room in this country only for Americans
who are Americans, and nothing else. They must be loyal to only one
flag; they must speak one language; they must serve only American
ideals. I mean literally what I say, that every man who bears even
the smallest allegiance to any other country should be sent out of
this country. The native American who, during this war, directly or
indirectly, assails any of our allies, notably England, but also
Japan, is a traitor to America and should be promptly imprisoned. The
German-American, and especially the German-American editor, guilty
of such conduct or of any exaltation of any German victory should be
instantly interned and then sent back to Germany. The Sinn Feiner who
attacks England should be immediately interned and then sent back to
Ireland. The German-American Alliance and all similar organizations
should immediately be broken up by Congress and by the state
legislatures. Our people would do well to remember that even when such
organizations keep quiet for the moment, they are certain to revive and
to work against America with the utmost malignity when peace comes.
The time to crush them is now. Foreign language newspapers should be
required to follow the example of the New York Herald and begin the
change, which is to convert their newspapers into English, the language
of the United States.
As for spies, preachers of sedition, men who practice sabotage, and all
other such persons, the Government already has much power, but should
be given any needed additional power to proceed against them, and this
power should be used in drastic fashion, if necessary under martial
law, and after a summary trial the guilty men should be shot.
So much for the men of German blood, or of any other blood, who are
not good Americans; but remember that it is also our highest duty from
the standpoint of Americanism to stand by the good American of German
blood, just exactly as we stand by any other American. We must refuse
to permit any division along the lines of blood or ancestry. We must
demand whole-hearted Americanism, and if a man gives this, we must
treat him exactly on his merits, like any other American. In other
words, we must give every man a square deal. Shoot the spy or the
traitor, whether of native American, Irish, or German blood; whether a
Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. Stand by the good American of any creed,
no matter where he was born or whence his parents came.
It is an outrage to discriminate against a good American in civil life
because he is of German blood. It is an even worse outrage for the
Government to permit such discrimination against him in the army or in
any of the organizations working under government supervision. Let us
insist on the immediate stopping of such discriminations, which cruelly
wound good Americans and tend to drive them back into the ranks of
the half-loyal. In return let good Americans of German blood band
together and take the lead in organization action against all disloyal
or half-loyal citizens of German blood and against all German language
or English language newspapers which are not whole-heartedly loyal and
against all such organizations as the German-American Alliance.
AN EXTRAORDINARY ACHIEVEMENT IN HUMAN UPBUILDING
APRIL 17, 1918
Major E. C. Simmons, of St. Louis, the manager of the Southwestern
Division of the American Red Cross, has just returned from our army
in France. He relates a really extraordinary achievement of the
division of orthopædic surgery with the army under the direction of
Surgeon-Major Joel E. Goldthwaite.
All the divisions of troops sent across, of course, contain a number
of men who show physical shortcomings under the strain of actual
campaigning. In General Edwards’s division these men numbered in the
neighborhood of fifteen per cent, not an unusual proportion in the
history of past wars. Dr. Goldthwaite got permission to try his hand on
the treatment of a body composed of somewhat over five hundred of them,
and instantly began vigorous but careful work to build up all their
physical defects.
As his work for each man was finished, he was put in one of four
classes. Class A included those to whom the training gave such vigor
that they were fit to go right to the front as battle units. Class B
included those who could be made fit for hard physical labor back of
the front, although not for the tremendous strain of the trenches.
Class C included those fitted for clerical and similar duties. Class D
included those whose physical condition would not be improved and who
had to be sent home.
Dr. Goldthwaite was able to place over eighty per cent of the men
in Class A, and all the remainder in either Class B or Class C. Not
a man had to be sent home. Remember that the physical shortcomings
of these men were all present before they entered the army and were
not acquired in the army. The work done for them made them not only
fit to be soldiers, but fit to be citizens. Moreover, it affected
them morally exactly as much as physically. They had become utterly
dispirited and downcast. After Dr. Goldthwaite was through with them,
they were all self-reliant, energetic Americans, vigorous, upstanding,
and self-respecting, having lost all trace of either moral or physical
crooked back and stooping shoulders.
When we get universal obligatory military training for all our young
men, this is what will happen everywhere and the benefit to our people
will be incalculable. Such training will minimize the chance of our
ever having to go to war and will render it certain that hereafter we
shall always be able to defend ourselves instead of trusting to our
allies to defend us. Moreover, it will do us even more good as regards
the tasks of peace than as regards the tasks of war, for it will turn
out every young man far better able to earn his living and far better
fitted to be a good citizen.
FREEDOM STANDS WITH HER BACK TO THE WALL
APRIL 20, 1918
This is a terrible hour of trial and suffering and danger for our
war-worn allies, who in France are battling for us no less than for
themselves. If shame is even more dreadful than suffering, then it is
a no less terrible hour for our own country. Our allies stand with
their backs to the wall in the fight for freedom, and America looks
on. The free nations stand at bay in the cause that is ours no less
than theirs; and after over a year of war the army we have sent to
their aid is smaller than that of poor heroic, ruined Belgium, is
hardly more than a twentieth the size which gallant and impoverished
Italy has in the field. And this great wealthy Nation of ours has
not yet furnished to our own brave troops in the field any cannon
or airplanes, and almost no machine guns, save those which we have
obtained from hard-pressed France--and let our people remember that
every gun thus made for us by hard-pressed France is a gun left unmade
for hard-pressed Italy.
Our few gallant fighting men overseas have won high honor for
themselves, and have made all other Americans forever their debtors;
but it is a scandal and a reproach to this Nation that they are so
few. If in this mighty battle our allies win, it will be due to no
real aid of ours; and if they should fail, black infamy would be our
portion because of the delay and the folly and the weakness and the
cold, time-serving timidity of our Government, to which this failure
would be primarily due. If those responsible for our failure, if those
responsible for the refusal to prepare during the two and a half years
in which we were vouchsafed such warning as never nation previously
received, if those responsible for the sluggish feebleness with which
we have acted since we helplessly drifted into the war--if these men
now repented of the cruel wrong they have done this Nation and mankind,
we could afford to wrap their past folly and evil-doing in the kindly
mantle of oblivion. But they boast of their foolishness, they excuse
and justify it, they announce that they feel pride and delight in
contemplating it. Therefore, it is for us, the people, to bow our heads
on this our penitential day; for we are laggards in the battle, we have
let others fight in our quarrel, we have let others pay with their
shattered bodies for the fire in their burning souls.
The trumpets of the Lord sounded for Armageddon; but our hearts were
not swift to answer nor our feet jubilant; coldly we watched others die
that we might live. Our rulers were supple and adroit, but they were
not mighty of soul. They have shown that they will not lead us, and
will ever stand in front only if we force them forward. Therefore, the
reason is all the greater why we, the American people, must search our
own hearts and with unflinching will insist that from now on not a day,
not an hour, shall be wasted until our giant but soft and lazy strength
is hardened, until we ourselves take the burden from the shoulders of
others, until we pay whatever price our past shortcomings demand, and
with heads uplifted and spirit undaunted stride forward to the great
goal of the peace of victorious right.
A SQUARE DEAL FOR ALL AMERICANS
APRIL 27, 1918
There is no room in this country for the man who tries to be both
an American and something else. There can be no such thing as a
fifty-fifty loyalty between America and Germany. Either a man is
whole-hearted in his support of America and her allies, and in his
hostility to Germany and her allies, or he is not loyal to America at
all. In such case he should be at once interned or sent out of the
country. But if he is whole-hearted in his loyal support of America,
then no matter what his birthplace or parentage he is entitled to stand
on a full and exact equality with every other American.
Therefore the obligation is twofold, and one side is just as important
as the other. Every American of German birth or parentage must act
as an American and nothing else, and if he does not so act he should
be treated as an alien enemy. But if he acts exactly as other good
Americans act, then it is a shame and a disgrace not to treat him
absolutely like these other good Americans. The immense majority of
Americans who are in whole or in part of German blood are as stanch
Americans as are to be found in the land. They are serving in our
armies precisely as other Americans serve. They are exactly as fit as
any other American to fill the highest positions anywhere in our armies
or in civil life. Any discrimination against them, active or passive,
military or political, social or industrial, is an intolerable outrage.
Moreover, such a discrimination is itself profoundly anti-American in
its effects, for it not only cruelly wounds brave and upright and loyal
Americans, but tends to drive them back into segregation, away from the
mass of American citizenship.
America is a Nation and not a mosaic of nationalities. The various
nationalities that come here are not to remain separate, but to blend
into the one American nationality--the nationality of Washington and
Lincoln, of Muhlenberg and Sheridan. Therefore, we must have but one
language, the English language. Every immigrant who comes here should
be required within five years to learn English or to leave the country,
for hereafter every immigrant should be treated as a future fellow
citizen and not merely as a labor unit. English should be the only
language taught or used in the primary schools. We should provide by
law so that after a reasonable interval every newspaper in this country
should be published in English.