THE GERMAN- 
 AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE 
 
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 THE GERMAN- 
 AMERICAN PLOT
 
 Vol. II, No. 16— May 26th, 1915 
 
 Price 5 Cents 
 
 famarland 
 
 A Weekly 
 
 (TWe Ret. U. S- P»t. OS I 
 
 AMBASSADOR BERNSTORFF 
 
 WHO SWCCESSFUU.Y HOLDS THE HARDEST JOB IN THE UNtTEO STATES 
 
 AMERICANS. BE ON GUARD! 
 
 [Reproduction of front page of the notorious German organ in New 
 York. The caution to Americans refers to a brazen leading article 
 concerning the Lusitania]
 
 THE GERMAN- 
 AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 THE RECORD OF A GREAT FAILURE 
 
 THE CAMPAIGN TO CAPTURE 
 THE SYMPATHY AND SUPPORT 
 OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "MEN AROUND THE KAISER" 
 
 LONDON 
 
 C. ARTHUR PEARSON LIMITED 
 
 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. 
 
 1915
 
 TO 
 
 MY FRIENDS IN AMERICA 
 
 WHO SO TIRELESSLY ASSISTED ME IN 
 
 OBTAINING THE INFORMATION WITH 
 
 WHICH THIS UNPRETENTIOUS VOLUME 
 
 DEALS
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP, PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 7 
 
 I. THE PLOT 9 
 
 II. THE PRESIDENT I5 
 
 III. THE GOVERNMENT 21 
 
 IV. HYPHENIZATION 28 
 V. ORGANIZATION 37 
 
 VI. MOBILIZATION 46 
 
 VII. TERRORIZATION 55 
 
 VIII. DEMORALIZATION 64 
 
 IX. LOYAL IRISH-AMERICA 71 
 
 X. " THE SYSTEM " 78 
 
 XI. PROFESSORS OF KULTUR 89 
 
 XII. CHICAGO. THE GERMAN STRONGHOLD 99 
 
 XIII. " SAFETY FIRST " 105 
 
 XIV. THE AMERICAN MUNICH 113 
 
 XV. A RETROSPECT 120
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 On November 6, 1914, at the end of eight weeks spent 
 in the United States immediately after the outbreak 
 of the war, it was my privilege to describe before the 
 festive spirits who comprise the American Luncheon 
 Club of London some aspects of the world crisis on the 
 peaceful side of the globe. My little talk ended as 
 follows : 
 
 " Knowing Germany as I do ; knowing her plans, 
 her strength, and her ambitions, I have more than once 
 uttered to myself during the last three months a silent 
 prayer than some contingency might arise whereby we 
 of the United States could wade into this fight ; for I 
 am as convinced as I am that we are gathered here 
 to-day that the vital interests of America are bound up 
 with the cause of the fighting AlUes." 
 
 My prayer was answered. The United States has 
 waded into the fight. As I write, in the third week of 
 June, the issue of war or peace with Germany still 
 hangs in the balance. Before these pages leave 
 the press, the die may have already been cast. But 
 whatever its visage, the red of war or the placid white 
 of the only peace the American people will accept with 
 honour, the intervention of the United States in 
 Armageddon has become an accomplished historical 
 fact. If the hard-bcsct Fatherland prefers a bel- 
 ligerent America to an America which coerced it without 
 war into abandonment of piracy. President Wilson will 
 have behind him forty-eight really United States, 
 whose power to throw into the balance military and 
 naval weight of no mean value can and will be speedily 
 demonstrated. To the hst of Germany's miscalcula- 
 tions there will then be added her contempt for 
 America's war-making capacity in conflict with a 
 European foe. 
 
 7
 
 8 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 P The purpose of this booklet is to explain the amazing 
 ramifications of the German-American plot to capture 
 the sympathy and support of the United States. It is 
 the record of a great failure. No propaganda crusade 
 in history was ever organized with such thoroughness 
 or carried on with such effrontery. Only when its 
 diabolical comprehensiveness and steam-roller methods 
 are realized, can Europeans measure the magnitude of 
 the service which the Government and people of the 
 United States have rendered to the Allies' cause in 
 standing like Gibraltar against the onslaughts of 
 Bernstorffism cum Dernburgism. 
 
 The German raid on the pro-civihzation sentiment 
 of America has not ended in fiasco because of any 
 material contribution toward that end by England 
 and her friends. I do not mean the lack of a counter- 
 agitation along German lines — that would have been 
 indisputably reprehensible. I refer to what pro-ally 
 sympathisers consider the invincible shortsightedness 
 which has characterized certain aspects of British 
 poHcy toward the United States during the war 
 — unimaginativeness and departmental inflexibility, 
 which have only by a miracle failed to convert 
 America's red-blooded sympathy into sullen dis- 
 affection. No record of the German campaign in 
 the United States will be complete without some 
 mention of how British disinclination to stoop to 
 conquer has poured water on the Teuton mill. The 
 chapter dealing with the final collapse of the Plot, and 
 touching briefly on this point, concludes a series of 
 articles written originally for, and published in the 
 Daily Mail, by whose courteous permission they are 
 herewith reproduced. The articles were the result of 
 the author's special trip of investigation to the United 
 States in February and March of this year. For the 
 purposes of compilation in book-form, they have been, 
 as far as possible, revised in accordance with subsequent 
 events. p ^ ^ 
 
 London, /wn^ 15, 191 5
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PLOT 
 
 " Frightfulness " — the strategy of Louvain and 
 Scarborough — did not long remain merely a feature 
 of German military and naval warfare. It was formally 
 adopted as a political weapon in and against neutral 
 America. Foiled in the initial attempt to win the 
 sympathy of the country or force the hand of the 
 Government by mere power of persuasion, it was 
 decided to give the German propaganda in the United 
 States the form of a systematic and deliberate cam- 
 paign of terrorization. It abandoned argument and 
 went over to Black-Handism. What Kaiserdom openly 
 threatened to do in the Land of the Free and Home of 
 the Brave, in the course of its desperate Rule or Ruin 
 crusade, was to punish financially, commercially, 
 politically, and socially any man, newspaper, firm, 
 corporation or party which dared oppose German 
 bidding. Like everything German, the punitive expedi- 
 tion was magnificently organized. It was to be 
 planned and executed by nothing less than a great new 
 national society, a sort of Association of German (and 
 Irish) Associations, with the machinery and power, if 
 not the name, of a mighty political party. 
 
 Americans — unhyphenated Americans — were not 
 blind to the meaning or the peril of such a movement. 
 Employing the idiom popularized by their political 
 party platforms when national evils are under dis- 
 cussion, they " viewed with alarm " the increasingly 
 
 9
 
 10 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 brazen antics of the German protagonists. They did 
 not hesitate to excoriate them as mischievous, offensive, 
 and dangerous. Men of sane judgment and moderate 
 speech declared that the long record of American 
 patience and good humour offered no parallel to the 
 equanimity with which the German propaganda early 
 in the war was tolerated. But by the spring of 1915 
 it had reached a stage which caused Americans to 
 look upon it as an intolerable outrage upon their 
 hospitality and an affront to their dignity ; they 
 began to wonder how long, even making due allowance 
 for the exigencies of American party politics, they 
 could endure it, if national self-respect was not to be 
 stricken from the roll of the Republic's virtues. 
 The Lusitania massacre merely precipitated the 
 definite revolt of the United States against German 
 devilry. 
 
 What is above set forth is the crystallization of two 
 months' impressions gathered in a tour across eastern 
 and middle-western America, the fountain-head of the 
 nation's life and thought. The terms in which these 
 impressions are epitomized are strong, but no stronger 
 than the words actually dinned into my ears. In 
 the " friendly " country of the' Atlantic sea-board, 
 pro-Ally sympathy is strongest. English readers 
 frequently fail to grasp the meaning of that state- 
 ment, when American sentiment is under the micro- 
 scope. They forget that New York is only an island 
 off the American coast. New York sentiment un- 
 doubtedly reflects the view of the country's ruling 
 classes, as represented by wealth, finance, and much 
 of the nation's intellect, but it does not always reflect 
 American national opinion. Atlantic coast opinion, 
 Maine to Florida, represents only itself. The views 
 of New England are not necessarily those of the
 
 THE PLOT II 
 
 Mississippi Valley. Thus it was that I was warned, 
 while absorbing early impressions on Manhattan 
 Island, that as I trekked across the Alleghanies into 
 the iMiddle West — past such Teutonic strongholds as 
 Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee — I must 
 prepare myself to find an atmosphere of benevolent 
 indifference toward the German campaign, which would 
 at many points rise to the crescendo of whole-hearted 
 sympathy. 
 
 The premonitions with which I was inspired were 
 to be verified, as will later be recounted. East is 
 East, and West is West — as vividly so in America 
 to-day, apparently, as in the sense in which Kipling 
 has immortalized the sentiment. And " right there," 
 as Americans put it, they scent danger ; for they tell 
 you that the ferocity and magnitude of the German 
 propaganda at one time were such that it threatened to 
 sow the field of domestic peace with the seeds of bitter 
 sectional strife. Certainly the New England " Aboli- 
 tionists " who fought for the freedom of the southern 
 slaves in Lincoln's day campaigned in whispers and 
 battled with the weapons of chaos compared to the 
 Niagara of noise and the systematic clamour with which 
 Germanism went to work to intimidate and stampede 
 the American nation. ]\Iore than one American whom I 
 encountered murmured in accents of real concern the 
 fear that Germany's adherents would not shrink from 
 embroiling " the land of their adoption " in civil war if 
 thereby their "Fatherland's" needy cause could be 
 bolstered up. 
 
 Stated in broad outline, the German campaign in 
 America was concentrated on an attempt to force the 
 United States Government to abandon its attitude of 
 uncompromising neutrality, not directly in favour of 
 Germany, but by action designed directly to embarrass
 
 12 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 the Allies. The campaign set itself three cardinal 
 purposes : 
 
 (i) To bring about an embargo on the exportation of 
 munitions of war, 
 
 (2) To embroil the United States with England on any 
 possible pretext — contraband, ship-seizures, flag " viola- 
 tions," or any other issue which arises naturally or can be 
 artificially manufactured. 
 
 (3) To inflame Far Western antipathies to Japan and the 
 Japanese, with a view to a Japanese-American war. 
 
 All the efforts of the vast German propaganda 
 machine were bent in the directions indicated. The 
 efforts, of course, were subtle — as subtle as anything 
 connected with German diplomacy can be — for their 
 real objectives would have become as unattainable 
 as Paris or Calais if Herr Dernburg's speeches and 
 Mr. Ridder's leading articles had blurted them out. 
 The crusade was waged in flamboyant terms of American 
 patriotism and sentimental susceptibilities. It was 
 " American neutrality " which must be safeguarded, 
 shrieked the German propagandists ; it is " American 
 honour " and " freedom of American commerce at 
 sea," which pirate England menaces ; it is " inhumane 
 Great Britain " which seeks to " starve " Germany 
 and Austria into a submission which the Allies cannot 
 enforce with the sword; it is America which the 
 Yellow Peril will next attack ; it is British " navalism " 
 not German " militarism," which threatens the world's 
 liberty ; it is America which is prolonging Europe's 
 agony by selling guns, shells, rifles, aeroplanes, and 
 motor-cars to England, France, and Russia. The 
 German campaign, in other words, was organized to 
 make Americans believe that it is in their holy interest, 
 in the name of American freedom, ideals, and self- 
 respect, that Kaiserdom is waging with all the forces 
 and ingenuity of man and hell this fight for right,
 
 THE PLOT 13 
 
 justice, and liberty. It is always as " American 
 citizens " that Germany's protagonists wage their 
 agitation. It is always their disinterested naturalized 
 patriotism which spurs them. It was that phase of 
 the German crusade which impelled unhyphenated 
 Americans bitterly to resent so clumsy an affront 
 to their intelligence. Abraham Lincoln said : " You 
 can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of 
 the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all 
 of the people all of the time." Substitute " the 
 Germans " for " you " in the Great Emancipator's 
 historic epigram, and you come very near to the 
 estimate of the Teutonic bedlam which perspicacious 
 America soon placed upon it. 
 
 It was natural for Englishmen to ask whether the 
 time had at length not come to abandon their tradi- 
 tional reserve in the face of such sinister provocation, 
 and retaliate in kind against German machinations 
 in the United States. England's best friends there 
 strongly deprecated " reprisals " of any sort. Counter- 
 agitation, one was assured, would have been certain 
 to defeat its own purpose. The Americans, with sure 
 intuitivcness, bom in this case of their own " horse- 
 sense," were convinced that the Germans would hang 
 themselves if they were only given " rope enough." 
 
 Earl}' failure — failure either to influence public 
 opinion decisively or blackmail the Government — only 
 incited the Germans to redouble their efforts. America 
 elects a new President and another Congress in the 
 autumn of 1916. Events of such magnitude cast their 
 shadows long before. The Germans, therefore, deter- 
 mined ruthlessly to exploit the quadrennial opportunity 
 of the national political situation for their own purposes. 
 The " German vote " is the best-organized " foreign 
 vote " in the country. It has always been considered
 
 14 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 the only one which can be " delivered " en bloc to 
 party managers, thanks to its compact organization. 
 Teetotalism, now a big political issue in America, has 
 solidified it still more. The market-value of the 
 " German vote " will be heralded from the house-tops 
 in stentorian tones between now and November a year 
 hence. With their " professional Irish " allies the 
 Germans claim to be 5,500,000 voters strong. That is 
 one-third of the total presidential electorate. That 
 Kaiserism expects to wield the balance of power in 
 American politics during the next two years is amply 
 evident from the remarkable resolutions adopted by 
 the new German Party at its constituent assembly in 
 Washington on January 30, of which I shall say 
 more.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PRESIDENT 
 
 On his return from the " nominating convention " of 
 his party in the State of Minnesota, a RepubUcan 
 pohtician was once asked by a neighbour, " Well, whom 
 have they nominated for Governor ? " 
 
 " Ole Larson/' was the reply, 
 
 " And for Lieutenant-Governor ? " 
 
 " Karl Buchholz." 
 
 " Who was nominated for State Treasurer ? " 
 
 " Patrick O'Donnell." 
 
 " And for State Auditor ? " 
 
 " Ivan Orloffsky." 
 
 " Well, who got the nomination for State Geo- 
 logist ? " 
 
 " Thomas Jefferson Smith " 
 
 " Great Heavens ! Why'd they put Smith on the 
 ticket ? " 
 
 " Oh," responded the man who knew, " they want 
 to capture the American vote." 
 
 That is a classic story illustrating the ethnological 
 eccentricities of United States politics. It puts the 
 " foreign vote " problem in a nutshell. It is a phase 
 which no European who desires to understand the 
 attitude of America toward the present world crisis 
 must overlook or underestimate. EngHshmen are 
 fond of saying, and they say it with justice, that the 
 average American is constitutionally incapable of 
 understanding the English character. Americans may 
 
 \
 
 i6 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 retort with equal justice that the average Britisher 
 is hopelessly ignorant of the true inwardness of that 
 strange phenomenon known as American politics. 
 
 The cardinal error of the Englishman who attempts 
 to gauge American opinion toward the war is in 
 thinking that England is still looked upon as America's 
 " mother country." Until European immigration 
 flooded the Republic with a hyphenated population 
 (foreign born) which amounted at the last census 
 (1910) to 13,500,000, there was some justification for 
 calling Britain America's motherland. But England 
 is not, for instance, the " mother country " of Mr. Roose- 
 velt, though it happens to be of Mr. Wilson. It is not 
 the " mother country " of United States Senator Knute 
 Nelson of Minnesota, who was born in Norway, nor of 
 Mr. Oscar Straus, ex- Ambassador and Cabinet Minister, 
 who was born in Germany. Senator Robert Latham 
 Owen of Oklahoma, who is proud of the Red Indian 
 blood in his veins, would undoubtedly dispute the right 
 of a political opponent to saddle an English " mother- 
 land " on him. And so it goes through the whole list of 
 present-day American citizens, public men of national 
 renown as well as humbler persons. 
 
 Look at the question from the " mother tongue " 
 standpoint. The Census Bureau in December 1913 
 published a table showing the mother tongue of the 
 foreign-born population and natives of foreign-born 
 parents in the United States, according to the census 
 of 1910. Together the two elements totalled 32,243,282 
 inhabitants. Those whose mother tongue was tabu- 
 lated as English (including Irish, Scotch and Welsh) 
 aggregated 10,037,420. But those whose mother 
 tongue is either Germanic, Scandinavian, Latin, 
 Greek, Slavic, Lettic, Yiddish, Finnish, Armenian, 
 Magyar, Syrian, Arabic, Turkish or Albanian totalled 
 ^2,205,962.
 
 THE PRESIDENT 17 
 
 The population of the United States at the last 
 census was 91,972,266, so that the statistics above- 
 quoted, comprehending only the first and second 
 generations of " foreign white stock," account for 
 less than 25 per cent, of the grand total. But it 
 is large enough, in the case of the 22,000,000 whose 
 mother tongue is not English, to make the " English 
 mother country " theory less tenable, to say the least, 
 than it once was. 
 
 I tire readers with these figures merely for the 
 purpose of clearing their minds, in a general sort of 
 way, as to polyglot conditions in America. I would call 
 them especially to the attention of Englishmen, of 
 whom I met many in London before sailing for the 
 United States, of whom I met dozens in the White Star 
 liner which took me to those shores, of whom I found a 
 generous sprinkling settled in the United States as 
 residents, and who are inclined to scold America for her 
 failure long ago to beat her undoubted sympathy for 
 the Allies into something more tangible than platonic 
 affection. I will not labour the point, except to remind 
 Englishmen that President Wilson is not the chief 
 magistrate of the United States of Great Britain, 
 France, Russia, and Belgium, but of the United States 
 of America. His position, in the midst of the crisis 
 convulsing belligerent Europe and Asia, has never been 
 an easy one. One did not need to be in Washington 
 very long, or to study for very many days the counter- 
 currents of race, section and special interests through 
 which the United States ship of state must be steered 
 by its skippcr-in-chief, to realize that Mr. Wilson, hke 
 the piano-player in one of America's best " stories," 
 has been " doing the best he can," and deserved to have 
 as few " things " as possible " thrown at him." He 
 not only merited this immunity in his own country.
 
 i8 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 but he was entitled to it in a very special degree at the 
 hands of warring Europe. 
 
 For accurate information as to the quality of Presi- 
 dent Wilson's " neutrality," I went to his political 
 opponents. I applied to his supporters, too. And I 
 feel warranted in saying, as the consensus of the opinion 
 gathered in both Administration and anti- Administra- 
 tion circles, that Mr. Wilson has contrived throughout 
 the war to make a successful effort to observe neutrality 
 not only in motive and act, but in spirit. It did not 
 always seem possible that he would be able permanently 
 to maintain his uncompromising attitude. That he 
 has consistently desired to do so is generally believed. 
 But it was acknowledged on all hands that the Demo- 
 cratic Administration — what is known in England as 
 the " Government " — are in an extremely bad way. 
 They have been facing for a year or more something 
 approaching certain doom at the presidential elections 
 of 1 91 6. They are believed by keen political observers 
 of unbiased judgment to have lost caste with the 
 country on a scale and at a rate comparable only with 
 the precipitate slide of Mr. Taft's Government down 
 the political toboggan, a descent which led in 191 2 
 to the most disastrous defeat ever suffered by an 
 American president in quest of re-election, Mexico, 
 injurious effects of the new tariff, and other causes 
 have seriously undermined President Wilson's prestige. 
 His firmness with Germany on the Lusitania case very 
 considerably resuscitated it. 
 
 What to do to be saved was the paramount issue 
 confronting the Democratic Party, and the German 
 organization required no occult vision to realize that 
 in Democracy's extremities lay hope. It said to 
 itself : " Cannot mere anxiety as to the potential 
 power of the German vote be turned into positive terror
 
 THE PRESIDENT ig 
 
 and cause Democratic knees, now but quaking, to bend 
 in craven ser\-ility ? " That was the question which 
 Americans three months ago were asking themselves. 
 Those of them who favoured the maintenance of strict 
 American neutrahty in the war, or at least no deviation 
 from it which could conceivably accrue to German 
 advantage, interrogated themselves with no little 
 concern. The exigencies of the domestic political 
 situation were full of menace. 
 
 I have said that Mr. Wilson was looked upon by 
 his countrymen as wishing to remain neutral in the 
 strictest possible interpretation of the word. In 
 Washington one was assured he has hardly even 
 talked about the war to a living soul outside of the 
 members of his cabinet and his family circle. He soon 
 came to realize, as most Americans did, that discussion 
 of the crisis in their Cosmopolis from any standpoint 
 meant acrimony. If he could, Mr. Wilson would 
 probably have resorted to the practice in vogue in the 
 home city of the Vice-President, Indianapolis, Indiana, 
 where a placard is displayed in the tramcars, theatres, 
 restaurants, shops and hotels, adjuring the populace to 
 refrain from " war conversation." Mr. Wilson was, of 
 course, much more successful in suppressing his own 
 emotions than in repressing those of his countrymen ; 
 for every American who is proud that he is one — and 
 that means the entire population — had his opinion about 
 the war from the beginning, and expressed it. The 
 possibility of keeping the American public " neutral " 
 was commensurate with human capacity to restrain 
 the winds which sweep the Sahara. 
 
 I may not quote the President's own views about 
 the German attempt to overthrow American intelli- 
 gence, of which details follow in subsequent chapters 
 But I believe that a certain Lutheran gentleman of
 
 20 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 St. Louis, a fervid " German- American," coiild tell an 
 interesting story of what the President thinks about 
 Dernburgism. The gentleman had been arguing in 
 favour of a Senate Bill proposing an embargo on 
 the exportation of arms. He held forth eloquently 
 before Senators on the " duties " of American citizen- 
 ship, the " dictates " of American patriotism, and even 
 dilated for their edification upon what George Washing- 
 ton would have done, had he been alive at this witching 
 hour. Next day the leading German member of the 
 United States Congress, Dr. Richard Bartholdt, took 
 his Lutheran constituent to the White House. The 
 lecture before the Senate Committee on Foreign 
 Relations was forthwith repeated for President Wilson's 
 edification. Things leak out even from the most 
 neutral precincts of the Executive Mansion, and 
 Washington heard that what Mr, Wilson told Dr. 
 Bartholdt's fellow-townsman would not look well in a 
 German propaganda pamphlet.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE GOVERNMENT 
 
 If Washington is ever rebuilt, the architects ought to 
 take a leaf from the blue-prints of the men who em- 
 blazoned Liberie, Egalite, Fraternite upon the public 
 buildings of Paris and display a legend reading " Frank- 
 ness in exchange for anonymity " over the portals of 
 the Public Departments of America. For this is the 
 principle on which the business of the world's greatest 
 Republic is apparently conducted. At least that was 
 the outstanding impression left on the mind of an 
 itinerant observer bent, as I was, on soliciting the con- 
 fidences of the Government's makers and leaders. 
 Communicativeness as a return for preservation of con- 
 fidence is Washingtonian law and custom. I lived 
 beneath its enlightening shadow for a week. I found 
 that all doors fly open to one who may be trusted to keep 
 faith ; from such a one Washington withholds no secrets. 
 I went there to ascertain, if I could, the actual position 
 of the United States Government toward the great 
 issues raised in and for America by the war. For the 
 reason already set forth I may not give chapter and 
 verse, but I may assure readers of these reflections that 
 they are authoritative and authentic. They will go 
 further, at obvious points, than ofiicial exchanges of 
 Notes between the American and British Governments 
 have ever gone, or even verbal communications between 
 their respective representatives in Washington or 
 London. Washington is a confirmed believer in 
 
 21
 
 22 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 presenting certain aspects of diplomatic questions in the 
 broad daylight of the public prints. That is why the 
 brilliant corps of Washington correspondents of 
 domestic and foreign newspapers is unquestionably the 
 " best informed " in the world. 
 
 At the risk of confirming the worst fears of the 
 German Government and the most violent accusations 
 of its naturalized American agents, I am impelled to 
 pronounce Washington sentiment overwhelmingly pro- 
 Ally. Everybody thereabouts has been elected or ap- 
 pointed to something and expects to be re-elected or re- 
 appointed, so there is great circumspection in expressing 
 views for domestic consumption, but my own attempts 
 to probe sentiment only infrequently encountered 
 caution and taciturnity. Turn where you would in 
 that " city of magnificent distances." Investigate, as 
 I did, at both ends of stately Pennsylvania Avenue — at 
 the far Capitol end, where one of the most beautiful 
 domes in all the world towers above the marble halls in 
 which the Senate and the House of Representatives and 
 the Supreme Court sit ; or at the town end, where the 
 White House and the Treasury and the State, Navy and 
 War Departments are. You would have found, if you 
 were fortunate enough to be the repository of such con- 
 fidences as were mine, that Washington, though it is 
 " officially neutral," is almost as pro- Ally at heart as 
 London, Paris, Petrograd, Rome, or Brussels. There 
 are exceptions, and I came in violent contact with them, 
 but they were rare, lonely and traceable to special cir- 
 cumstances seldom detached from personal interest. 
 Advance information led me to expect that atmosphere, 
 but its universality and passionate intensity were a 
 revelation. Presidential proclamations of neutrality 
 unmistakably failed to still the hearts, even if they 
 restrained the tongues, of the governing set of the Ameri-
 
 THE GOVERNMENT 23 
 
 can people, and their hearts have from the outset beat 
 almost in unison for the cause for which Great Britain 
 is fighting. Dernburgism has not moved them except 
 to offend them. Belgium alone put Kaiserism beyond 
 the American pale for ever. On that indictment 
 Germany stands irreparably convicted in the United 
 States. She has, indeed, hardly attempted to answer 
 the charge. On all the " original issues " of the war, 
 as a Senator who is considered " the master mind " of 
 American politics describes them, public opinion is 
 almost unanimously anti-German — by which I mean, 
 always, that section of the population which does not 
 confess to being " German- American." Men as diver- 
 gent in point of view as Massachusetts and Mississippi 
 utterly condemn German militarism in general, German 
 responsibility for the war in particular, the burglariza- 
 tion of Belgium, and German war methods ashore and 
 afloat. It is on the international issues raised during 
 the war that American sentiment has to a certain extent 
 fluctuated ; it is those, with special regard to the 
 position of the United States Government, that I shall 
 now proceed to discuss. 
 
 In Washington I found undisguised satisfaction that 
 Great Britain considered American diplomatic remon- 
 strances on controversial questions "frank and friendly" 
 in tone and motive. There is a studied effort at the 
 White House and the State Department to give that 
 hallmark to every communication to England which 
 the American Government is constrained to make. 
 The frame of mind in which the United States is in- 
 clined to approach negotiations with Great Britain and 
 Germany, as reflected by the famous simultaneous Notes 
 to those Powers in February, respectively, on the 
 Lusitania flag episode and the " war zone," was 
 branded by Dr. Bartholdt, the German congressional
 
 24 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 mouthpiece, as " sycophantic to Great Britain and in- 
 sulting to Germany." More correct was ex-Senator 
 Chauncey M. Depew, who called both Notes " State 
 documents which accord with the best traditions 
 of American diplomacy " ; but I have no quarrel 
 with Dr. Bartholdt as to the basic difference in point of 
 view which he excoriates. Englishmen may be abso- 
 lutely certain that nothing but extraordinary circum- 
 stances or an overt act will at any time ever impel 
 the United States Government to depart from the 
 determination to deal with England in the spirit of old 
 friends. Germany, which aims to disrupt that spirit, 
 may derive such satisfaction or otherwise as she pleases 
 from this state of affairs. Mr. Bryan's disappearance 
 from the State Department will certainly not alter it. 
 It exists and it will 'continue to prevail except under 
 duress. It is that aspect of the situation to which 
 attention needs to be, and cannot too strongly be, 
 directed. 
 
 The United States Government has always felt, and 
 feels now, that it is entitled to ask Great Britain to 
 recall the former's inherent difficulties. Undismayed 
 by certain deplorable British periodical and poetical 
 charges that America hoisted the banner of protest 
 in the world war only when its pocket was affected — 
 that the eagle slept when Belgium was ravished and 
 screamed when the Almighty Dollar was imperilled — 
 Washington insists upon the duty of the American 
 Government to intervene when America's vast material 
 interests are jeopardized. The German propaganda, 
 except, perhaps, in the single case of the submarines 
 which Mr. Schwab was prevented from shipping to the 
 AlHes, has stormed the citadel of Neutral Washington 
 in vain and raged in impotence. But Great Britain 
 is urged by her best friends in America not to feed and
 
 THE GOVERNMENT 25 
 
 nourish the German propaganda by unnecessary, pro- 
 crastinating, or arbitrary action. There is a con- 
 scientious conviction in sober-minded United States 
 quarters, of whose partiality for the British cause 
 there is no question, that England's conduct of the 
 sea-law issues of the war has not been devoid 
 at times of sheer arrogance. A jurist who is con- 
 sidered America's ablest legal mind, and who is one 
 of the legion who regard British victory in the war 
 a vital necessity for America, told me that England in 
 more than one respect insists upon an interpretation of 
 contraband law which is sorely trying to American 
 patience, and will not stand the test of unbiased judg- 
 ment. 
 
 The Washington Government points out that 
 what England considers " necessary " in the interest of 
 self-defence and British sea policy may not always 
 appear " necessary " to Neutral America. Americans 
 declare that while belligerents have necessities, 
 neutrals have rights. England is asked to remember 
 that the demands of a belligerent, however urgent for 
 him, cannot command the meek assent of a neutral if 
 the latter's common privileges are trampled upon, or his 
 interests ruthlessly molested to the point of destruction. 
 When the outbreak of war sent cotton down a cent a 
 pound, the South was £16,000,000 poorer. When it 
 sank another cent, Dixie's loss was £32,000,000. When 
 British cruisers essayed to stop copper exports to 
 Germany and Austria, vast American industries in 
 Michigan and Minnesota and Montana were disastrously 
 affected. When petroleum shipments to Hamburg and 
 Bremen ceased, a trade worth £10,000,000 a year 
 collapsed. Three million pounds' worth of American 
 packing products are at this writing " held up " in 
 British prize ports.
 
 26 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 America does not expect to be immune in every 
 respect from the ravages and demoralization which 
 Armageddon has wreaked upon Europe. But she 
 thinks the annoyance and the cost to her of otJicr 
 people's troubles ought to be reduced to the minimum 
 consonant with the principles of international law. She 
 does not think she is unreasonable in demanding more 
 expeditious treatment of war claims — ship seizures and 
 the like. She complains that controversies originating 
 in October ought not to be dragging along unsettled in 
 the succeeding June. England knows that America 
 sincerely resented the use of the Stars and Stripes for 
 the protection of British merchant shipping threatened 
 by German submarines. It was made very manifest to 
 me in Washington that that was an unfortunate 
 blunder. Sentiment against Germany happened to be 
 increasing at the moment the ill-starred Lusitania 
 hoisted the American flag in connexion with the pirate 
 war-zone proclamation. The incident was exactly one 
 of those things which inevitably " feed " the German 
 agitation. America has earnestly desired and intended 
 to " keep out of the war." It is not disposed to view 
 with favour any act which, in its consequences, might 
 embroil the United States under circumstances for 
 which the American people themselves could in no 
 way be held responsible. 
 
 The topic of topics on which excitement in Washing- 
 ton was as good as non-existent was the prospective 
 seizure of the Dacia* I asked Cabinet Ministers, 
 Senators, Representatives, and others in authority 
 what would be the effect on public opinion of the 
 " capture " of the late Hamburg- American liner. 
 " None at all," was the almost universal response. A 
 famous Alabama Democrat explained that the Dacia 
 
 * Later seized by a French cruiser,
 
 THE GOVERNMENT 27 
 
 affair had fortunately been the victim of " too much 
 advance advertising " ever to hope to attain the 
 dimensions of an explosive incident. People had had 
 time fully to discount the inevitable fate of that ship 
 of adventure. Americans, I was told, would await with 
 composure the adjudication of the seizure by a prize 
 court. They would await it, moreover, with confidence 
 that the decision would be in strict accord with the 
 recognized canons of international law. Only in the 
 event that those are overridden roughshod (and past 
 events conjured up such a possibility) did the affair 
 suggest the likelihood of a serious conflict.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 HYPHENIZATION 
 
 What are " German- Americans " ? How many are 
 there ? What is the secret of their power ? 
 
 These and kindred questions have been asked in 
 England times innumerable since the war began. 
 Only exceptionally does one encounter reliable in- 
 iormation in reply. It is primarily, of course, on the 
 hyphenated offspring of Germany that Kaiserism has 
 depended for the execution of its plot to overthrow 
 America's natural sympathy for the Allies' cause. 
 Bernstorff and Dernburg only commanded the German- 
 American forces. They were in being years before 
 their war leaders arrived on the field. Before attempt- 
 ing to sketch German- Americanism in detail, let me 
 answer tersely the three questions above put : 
 
 (i) " German- Americans," for the purposes of the 
 war, are United States citizens born either in Germany, 
 Austria, or Hungary. 
 
 (2) According to the last census (1910) there were 
 4,171,705 " German- Americans," — 2,501,181 Germans, 
 1,174,924 Austrians, and 495,600 Hungarians. The 
 pro-German claim of " 20,000,000 German-Ameri- 
 cans " gratuitously includes the second, third, or 
 fourth generations of American-born children of 
 Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. It is notori- 
 ously untrue that one-fifth of the present population 
 of the United States is or considers itself " German- 
 American." Millions of Americans whose parents or 
 
 28
 
 HYPHENIZATION 29 
 
 grandparents were horn in Germany or Austria-Hungary 
 are ardently pro-Ally. A total of 10,000,000 pro- 
 German sympathizers probably represents a more 
 correct estimate of the " German- American " element 
 in the war. America is nine-tenths pro- Ally. 
 
 (3) The secret of " German-American " power and 
 influence is cohesive organization. Numerically it is 
 much stronger than any other foreign-born element in 
 the United States, as will be indicated by the foUowmg 
 census statistics : 
 
 Born in : 
 Germany, Austria, and Hungary 4,171,705 
 Russia . . . 
 Ireland .... 
 Italy .... 
 Scandinavian kingdoms 
 England, Scotland, and Wales 
 France .... 
 
 1,602,752 
 
 1,352.155 
 1.343,070 
 1,250,662 
 1,219,968 
 117,236 
 
 These figures show that the " allied nationalities " 
 aggregate 5,635,181 as against the German-Austrian- 
 Hungarian 4,171,705 ; but as the German contingent 
 is an organized pohtical force, and has been augmented 
 during the war by thousands of irreconcilable Russians 
 and Irish, it wields far greater influence than mere 
 numerical superiority implies. 
 
 It has long been a commonplace to say that "German- 
 American " citizens are among the best the United 
 States has ever had. That is literally true, but the 
 zeal with which many of the present generation have 
 waved two flags and protested unblushingly two 
 allegiances during the war will make the statement 
 less axiomatic in future. 
 
 Germans, of course, had no such part in the founding 
 of America as the English and the Dutch had. Yet
 
 30 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 German participation in the establishment of the 
 RepubHc was not insignificant. Generations of Ameri- 
 can schoolboys have been taught that Frederick the 
 Great refused to allow England's hired Hessians to 
 cross Prussia on their way to the rebel colonies across 
 the ocean ; and Baron von Steuben, an accomplished 
 Prussian officer, was a valiant lieutenant of General 
 George Washington in organizing victory against 
 George HI. Pennsylvania, the cradle of American 
 liberty, for years was almost as German as British. 
 One of its oldest and honoured names is Miihlenberg, 
 of Revolutionary hneage. Philadelphia's most famous 
 suburb is still called " Germantown." The German 
 family of Pennypacker has been settled in Penn- 
 sylvania for generations and given able men to the 
 community. The present Governor of the State is 
 named Brumbaugh, and the mayor of Philadelphia 
 is the German-born Blankenburg. Mr. Charles M. 
 Schwab, the celebrated steel and iron king, who has 
 just given splendid evidence of loyalty to the Allies' 
 cause by refusing to transfer his vast armaments 
 interests to German capitalists, is a descendant of 
 " Pennsylvania German " stock which contributed 
 so largely to the " Keystone State's " growth and 
 prosperity. 
 
 In 1848, the year of Prussian revolution, tens of 
 thousands of Germans went to the United States. The 
 leading German-Americans of the day are the sons or 
 grandsons of hardy " Forty-Eighters." A Prussian 
 revolutionist who made a revered name for himself in 
 American history is the late Carl Schurz, who became 
 a Cabinet Minister. Go where you will in the United 
 States, and you will encounter German names which 
 hold high place in American estimation. In the 
 greatest domestic crisis of American history, the War
 
 HYPHENIZATION 31 
 
 of the Rebellion in 1861-65, naturalized Germans 
 played a creditable role. Schurz was a general, and 
 General Franz Sigel, NN-ith his German brigade, be- 
 came one of the popular heroes on the Northern side. 
 There were thousands of German soldiers in the Union 
 army. Count Zeppelin served as Wuertemberg's 
 military attache with General Grant, and made his 
 first balloon ascent in a United States army observa- 
 tion-gasbag. 
 
 There is hardly a branch of public or private activity 
 in America which has not been adorned by Germans, 
 hardly a community which they have not helped to 
 build up. Schurz, Freylinghausen, and Sigel in 
 politics and war ; Seligman, Hallgarten, and Villard 
 in finance ; Ottcndorfcr, Mayer, Pretorius, Rapp, and 
 Hesing in journalism ; Ruppert, Anheuser, Busch, 
 Schlitz, Pabst, Seipp, Lemp, Uihlein in the brewing 
 industry which Germans in the United States have 
 traditionally monopolized ; Straus and Uhl in diplo- 
 macy ; Morris, Schwarzschild and Sulzberger in the 
 great packing industry ; Weyerhaeuser, the lumber 
 king ; Guggenheims, the copper magnates ; Mandel 
 and Altman, merchant princes ; all of these are names 
 which Americans — real Americans — honour as those of 
 nil n who had much to do with the creation of the 
 United States of to-day. The history of the com- 
 merce and industry of America's greatest cities — New 
 York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, to mention but 
 a random quartette — is, to no inconsiderable extent, 
 the history of German-Americans who carved their 
 way to fame and fortune in their adopted country. 
 Milwaukee could almost be stamped " Made by 
 Germans." 
 
 For the most part the Germans who played con- 
 spicuous roles in the upbuilding of the United States
 
 32 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 were European-born. Those of them still alive — they 
 are a vanishing race — are, I suppose, without excep- 
 tion ardently pro-German in the war. In many cases 
 their American-born sons — the so-called " second 
 generation " — are pro-German, too. In less numerous 
 cases, the children of the third and fourth genera- 
 tion also sympathize with the land of their ancestors. 
 But during my recent trip to the United States 
 I discovered that for every pro-German among the 
 American-lorn descendants of native Germans, there is 
 at least one pro-Ally supporter. Two of New York's 
 greatest newspapers, both pro-Ally, are owned by the 
 sons of Germans. Another, also pro- Ally, is owned by 
 the sons of a Hungarian. I know personally half a 
 dozen prominent New York bankers whose fathers were 
 German, but who are themselves enthusiastically pro- 
 Ally Americans. I know the pro-Ally vice-presidents 
 of two great American life-insurance companies, whose 
 fathers were Germans. I know a brilliant New York 
 rabbi, who, though born in Hungary, is pro-Ally to the 
 core. East and West I know merchants, manu- 
 facturers, and professional men — university professors, 
 surgeons, physicians, barristers, journalists — all of 
 them the direct offspring of German fathers, yet as 
 unreservedly pro-Ally in their full-hearted sympathies 
 as Mr. Garvin or Lord Fisher. Ask these men, as 
 I did, why they have not answered the call of the 
 blood and come out for Hohenzollernism. They will 
 tell you that they disavow the label of " German- 
 American " for themselves and their children. They 
 are Americans, born and bred, and nothing but that. 
 Their fathers, they will explain, came to the United 
 States in many cases either as babes in arms or as 
 mere lads who fled from the oppressing and obnoxious 
 influence of German militarism and autocracy. They
 
 HYPHENIZATION 33 
 
 will tell you that they imbibed no love of anything 
 German \vith their mother's milk. Their parents 
 came to America in order to exchange bondage for 
 liberty. In withholding support to-day from Ger- 
 manism's cause, they are true, not recreant, to the 
 memory of their progenitors. This is how millions of 
 Americans wrongly considered " German- Americans " 
 talk. I do not know exactly how large a force they 
 represent numerically, but it is immense, and it 
 bitterly resents inclusion in the throng which has been 
 dancing to the crack of Bernstorff's and Dernburg's 
 whips. 
 
 I have said that German- Americans are a power in the 
 United States because they are organized. It is they 
 who constitute the " German vote." It is a force in 
 American poHtics which has more than once proved 
 of decisive influence on State, county, and municipal 
 elections. It can quite conceivably also be a " pivotal " 
 influence on national, or Presidential elections. United 
 States Presidents, as everybody knows, are not elected 
 directly by the people, but by the " electoral college,'- 
 or " electors " voted for by the citizens of the in- 
 dividual States. Thus it could easily happen that 
 the " electoral vote " of States hke Illinois, Wisconsin, 
 Ohio, and Missouri (aggregating 84 out of a total of 
 435), where the German-American element is strongest, 
 could be swung for this, that, or the other candidate 
 by the hundreds of thousands of " German voters." 
 It would only have taken, for example, the ^^ " elec- 
 toral " votes of New York State (37) to defeat Grover 
 Cleveland for the Presidency in 1884. A couple of 
 thousand Roman Catholic votes defeated Mr. Blaine 
 on that occasion. Ten or fifteen thousand German 
 votes might overthrow a candidate for the Presidency 
 next year.
 
 34 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 I must not leave the general subject of " German- 
 Americanism " without a few words about the Jews 
 of the United States. In England there is a dis- 
 position to classify that element sweepingly as part 
 and parcel of the German millions in America. No- 
 thing could be more inaccurate. There are 2,000,000 
 Jews in the United States. The best-known of them, 
 Mr. Jacob H. Schiff of New York, happens to be pro- 
 German. His American-born son and partner, 
 Mortimer H. Schiff, is pro-Ally. Dr. Hirsch, the gifted 
 Chicago rabbi, whose native Luxemburg probably 
 thinks differently, is also pro-German, and though no 
 man knows better the humiliating position occupied 
 by Jews in Germany, he is one of her most rabid 
 advocates in the United States. But for every Schiff 
 and Hirsch, I found hundreds of truly American Jews 
 who are ardently pro-Ally. The country's most 
 brilliant Jewish clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Stephen S. 
 Wise of New York, declares that American Jewry is 
 cruelly misrepresented by the allegation that it is 
 " with Germany." He says that the Allies are fighting 
 exactly for those ideals of liberty and civic righteous- 
 ness which Judaism stands for. 
 
 American Jews know too well the story of brutal 
 social ostracism to which members of their race are 
 traditionally subjected in Germany to induce them now 
 to espouse her cause. American Jews know that 
 European anti-Semitism, born in Prussia under Bis- 
 marck and fomented by Treitschke, is still rife, even 
 at this hour, for word has come that though army- 
 officerships were conferred on a handful of Prussian 
 Jews as a sop at the beginning of the war, they are still 
 almost social outcasts among their comrades, who refuse 
 to associate with them, even in the trenches, on terms 
 of equality. The most outspoken friend of the Allies'
 
 HYPHENIZATION 35 
 
 cause in the American Press is a New York news- 
 paper owned by an American Jew of German descent. 
 He sees no reason for supporting Kultur's cause. 
 And like him, hundreds and thousands of other 
 American Jews. The pro-German American Jews arc, 
 in nine cases out of ten, not anti-Ally, but anti- 
 Russian. The German System has exploited Kishineff 
 for the purpose of alienating sympathy from France 
 and Britain. It started a Yiddish war paper in New 
 York, The Day, for the express purpose of fomenting 
 anti-Russianism in America, Yet not even all the 
 Russian Jews in the United States are pro-German, 
 no more than are the Jews of Whitechapel. They 
 have heard that one-half of the Jews fighting for the 
 Tsar are volunteers. If I had the ear of the Russian 
 Government, I would venture a suggestion that their 
 intention, as it is understood in America, really to 
 emancipate the Jews after the war, should be forthwith 
 given some categorical, binding form. I believe it 
 would rally to the AlHes' cause in the United States 
 almost unanimously that minority of Jews who are 
 now supporters of Germany, out of Russophobe 
 motives. The Jews are a tremendous factor in the 
 United States, and their sympathy and influence, 
 moral and otherwise, ought not to be ignored.
 
 Vol. II, No. is—May 19th, 1915 
 
 Price 5 Cents 
 
 Fattieilaiid 
 
 A Weekly 
 
 (TUIeRtr v.s. p»i.o,n.i 
 
 
 
 
 DR. BERNHARD DERNBURG 
 
 WHOSE MASTERLY EXPOSITION OF GERMANY'S JUST CAUSE HAS ANGERED THE AMERICAN TORIES 
 
 HOW TO SAFEGUARD AMERICAN LIVES AT SEA 
 
 [The Fatherland honours Dernburg for condoning the destruction of 
 the Lusitania.}
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 ORGANIZATION 
 
 Roughly speaking, Germanism has been organized 
 within the United States in the form which reached its 
 crescendo three months ago since the Spanish-American 
 War, a period of seventeen years. The project to 
 league into one concrete, compact, centrahzed whole the 
 countless singing societies, bowling-clubs, rifle associa- 
 tions, veteran unions, editorial associations, Lutheran 
 congregations, gymnastic clubs and all the other varie- 
 gated Vereine in which German life in America found 
 expression originated during the ambassadorship of the 
 late Doctor Baron von Holleben. Hitherto " German- 
 Americans " had been a negligible political quantity in 
 the land of their adoption, as well as an element of 
 contempt in the country of their birth. In the United 
 States their political ideals never rose above a protest 
 against " personal liberty," by which is meant un- 
 restricted beer-drinking nights and Sundays. In 
 Germany " German- Americans " were looked upon as 
 hyphenated pariahs and renegades, and in many cases 
 as cravens who in their tens of thousands had fled the 
 l-'atherland either in terror of or abhorrence of mili- 
 tarism. Many of them may never go back. The 
 Mmperor William II, in confidential moments, more 
 than once during the first decade of his turbulent reign, 
 excoriated " German- Americans " in terms which left 
 no doubt of the obloquy in which he held them. 
 Ambassador von Holleben perceived an opportunity
 
 38 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 to alter the status of his hybrid compatriots, both as a 
 factor in the United States and a poHtical asset for 
 Germany. He ascertained that the " German vote," 
 organized and labelled, could be made so valuable a 
 feature of American politics that neither of the two 
 great parties could afford to ignore it. Simultaneously 
 he recognized that the " German vote " could be used 
 as a perpetual weapon in Washington with which 
 to intimidate, Damocles sword-like, any Administra- 
 tion which dared on occasion to adopt an " anti- 
 German policy." The Spanish-American War had 
 broken out. Continental Europe, notably Germany, 
 was almost solidly arrayed against " Yankeeism." 
 The officially-inspired Press of the Fatherland yelped 
 and yawped at America's heels and German public 
 opinion was forthwith lashed into cordial support of the 
 project of the Kaiser's Government for European inter- 
 vention on behalf of Spain. Great Britain foiled that 
 scheme, just as Admiral Dewey and all Americans 
 know that it was the attitude of Admiral Sir Edward 
 Chichester at Manila, which prevented war between 
 Germany and the United States, following the officious 
 interference of Admiral von Diederichs in the American 
 blockade of the Philippine Islands. 
 
 Von Holleben now saw the urgent necessity of 
 leaguing Germans in the United States together for 
 German political purposes at Washington. If American 
 Governments were not predisposed in Germany's favour 
 on the basis of Germany's " rights," they must be made 
 to feel the lash which could be wielded by naturalized 
 German citizens at the polls. The Ambassador knew 
 the breed. He knew that their absorbing passion is 
 craze for titles and decorations. He knew that 
 half the life and energy of the average Teuton is 
 spent in scheming for an Imperial smile in the shape
 
 ORGANIZATION 39 
 
 of a new handle for a name or a ribbon and a medal for 
 a lapel. He knew that the sentimental loyalty of the 
 naturalized German to the Vaterland could be exploited 
 by the most insignificant token from the War Lord 
 from whom allegiance had been forsworn. The 
 German Embassy at Washington having obtained 
 Berlin's Imperial sanction to the grandiose plan 
 proceeded to carry it into effect. Renegade Germans 
 suddenly found themselves persona grata. Formerly 
 snubbed, they began to be " cultivated." The 
 Ambassador's door, previously slammed in their 
 faces, now stood wide open. Recognition at the hands 
 of the Old Country, long withheld, became theirs for 
 the asking. Did the Veteranen-Bund of Sioux City, 
 I-owa, want a set of royal battle standards from the 
 Kaiser ? Nothing easier. Did the Verband der Kegel- 
 vereine want a Kaiser-prize for the national bowling 
 championship? " Delighted," said von Holleben. Did 
 the President of the India.na.poMs'^ S a enger- Bund want 
 to give a concert at Potsdam, with the usual marks of 
 royal recognition to follow? " Jawohl ! Can be 
 arranged without any trouble," wired the German 
 Ambassador. " German- Americanism " had at last 
 come into its hyphenated own. 
 
 The enthusiasms of the myriad of German Vereine 
 throughout the States — Bismarck called the besetting 
 sin of his people Vcreinsnieierei, the cult of " joining " 
 something or other — having now been successfully 
 stirred, Baron von Holleben set himself the task of 
 exploiting the American Press. Busch's memoirs had 
 just appeared in an English translation and excited 
 a profound sensation in the United States ; but, 
 unabashed by their revelations of German journalistic 
 corruption, von Holleben proceeded to "work" the 
 newspapers of the United States on Bismarckian lines.
 
 40 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 For the purpose, by his own pubhshed confessions, a 
 certain Emil Witte, who had recently arrived from 
 Germany, was employed. Witte became HoUeben's 
 Busch, He was assigned the task, first of all, of creating 
 a more favourable attitude toward the German Em- 
 bassy on the part of three daily newspapers in Washing- 
 ton. The mission was partially accomplished. Then 
 Witte was told off to curb the anti-German tone of a 
 certain influential New York journal hitherto noted for 
 its acerbity toward the War Lord and his works. In 
 this direction, too, von HoUeben's efforts were not 
 fruitless. The vast German Press of the United States 
 — comprising to-day about 140 daily and weekly 
 periodicals spread over eighteen States, with an aggre- 
 gate circulation running into the millions — was not 
 difficult to " approach." American political managers 
 have " approached " them for years. Newspapers 
 printed in the language of Goethe in the United States 
 are traditionally venal, not perhaps through inherent 
 dishonesty, but because the struggle for business 
 existence against " Anglo-American " rivals puts a 
 premium on their corruptibility. Consular appoint- 
 ments abroad are among the politicians' favourite 
 method of " influencing " German- American editors. 
 
 Presently von Holleben turned his attention to the 
 centralization of all branches of organized German life 
 in the United States. Town and city branches of this, 
 that or the other Verein, clubs, veteran unions, church 
 societies, rifle associations, must be turned into State 
 organizations, and State organizations, again, into 
 National leagues. Vereinsmeierei could be relied upon 
 to promote the scheme, and soon the idea bore 
 fruit. On April 16, 1899, the " German-American 
 Central Alliance of Pennsylvania " was founded " to 
 give impulse to the idea of the consolidation of the
 
 ORGANIZATION 41 
 
 German-American element." On June 19, 1900, there 
 took place at Philadelphia, the cradle of the United 
 States of America itself, a preliminary meeting of 
 delegates from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and 
 Minnesota. On October 6, 1901 (October 6 is now 
 known throughout America as " German Day "), there 
 was held in the hall of the German Society of Pennsyl- 
 vania at Philadelphia the first " convention," or con- 
 stituent assembly, of the " National German- American 
 Alliance of the United States." Represented at the 
 convention were California, District of Columbia, Idaho, 
 Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, 
 New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and 
 Wisconsin. The first president was Dr. C. J. Hexamer, 
 a prominent civil engineer, of Philadelphia, who is still 
 in office. Dr. Hexamer is a native-born American of 
 German parentage. The aims of the Alliance were set 
 forth in a flamboyant set of " principles " as a desire to 
 " awaken and strengthen the sense of unity among the 
 people of German origin in America with a view to pro- 
 moting the useful and healthy development of the power in- 
 herent in them as a united body for the mutual energetic 
 protection of such legitimate desires and interests as are not 
 incoyisistent with the common good of the country and the 
 rights and duties of good citizens ; to check nativistic en- 
 croachments ; to maintain and safeguard the good and 
 friendly relations existing between America and the old 
 German Fatherland." And thirteen other paragraphs, 
 distinguished by equally long-winded, high-sounding 
 sentences, were added for the purpose of proving 
 that the Alliance had no other goal except to assure 
 the German- Americans " the shortest road to, and 
 the surest guarantee of, the attainment of the aims set 
 forth in this constitution." Dr. Hexamer, in a pleasant 
 half-hour interview accorded me while I was in Phila-
 
 42 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 delphia, defined the broad, general object of his AHiance 
 as " the spread of German culture throughout the United 
 States, particularly the German language, the German 
 spirit and German manners." 
 
 As to the superiority of German " culture," Dr. 
 Hexamer is, of course, in no doubt, for a precis of the 
 Alliance's " principles and aims," which he handed me, 
 begins with this frank, if not over-modest, manifesto : 
 
 " We stand and strive for the maintenance and 
 assimilation of the best in German culture and in 
 German idealism ; because it is that which is more 
 advanced than any other, and, as it is broad and liberal, 
 it has assimilated that which is best in the culture of all 
 times and nationalities, German culture has always 
 recognized the achievements of other peoples and it has 
 been able and willing to add that which is best in the 
 cultural treasures of the universe in the interest of pure 
 knowledge." 
 
 The Alliance celebrated its tenth anniversary by 
 holding the most successful convention in its history at 
 Washington in October, 191 1. President Hexamer's 
 annual report is summarized in the official record, as 
 follows : 
 
 "Excellent progress towards the aims of the Alliance. Ex- 
 cellent work being done by German- American element everywhere. 
 Reports and proposals are impressive, anticipating success and 
 upholding of German- American ideals ; many important 
 achievements are communicated from all the States of the 
 Union. Public opinion takes approving interest in Alliance. 
 The broad masses begin to understand the value of the German 
 element in general and the aims and principles of the National 
 German-American Alliance in particular. Monuments erected 
 to commemorate memory of Steuben and Muehlenberg (Ger- 
 man participants in American Revolution) . . . Establish- 
 ment of Press Bureau recommended. Exchange of professors 
 (originated by the Kaiser seven years previous), of teachers and 
 scholars, visits by financial and industrial commissions, etc.,
 
 ORGANIZATION 43 
 
 bring excellent results. Repeated urgent appeal to parents to 
 help their ofEspring retain the German language. . . . Aim of 
 the Alliance : to strive for and maintain the highest culture 
 and ideals for the common good of our Nation." 
 
 Since then the Alhance's progress has steadily 
 continued. To-day its membership is over 2,000,000, 
 including German-born citizens of the United States 
 and their American-born descendants. It is by far 
 the most powerful, numerically, of all German-American 
 national organizations, which now include the German 
 War Veterans Society, the Evangelical Lutheran Church 
 of North America, the North American Gymnastic 
 Association, the German Editorial Association, the 
 German Roman Catholic Central Union, the German 
 Historical Society, the German Singers League, the 
 Academic League of Former German University 
 Students, and the German Evangelical Synod of North 
 America. These are the various national organizations 
 of the thousand and one village, town, city, county and 
 State organizations which are sleeplessly promoting 
 Deutschtum under the guise of American citizenship and 
 patriotism in their respective individual communities. 
 They represent, according to a German-American boast 
 which errs on the side of exaggeration, a round one- 
 third of the voting strength of the United States 
 in a presidential election. Dr. von Holleben, now 
 gathered to his fathers, might well be proud of his 
 pioneer labours in the closing hours of the preceding 
 century. 
 
 It was in the winter of 1902 that Dr. von Holleben 
 played his trump-card with German-Americans. For 
 many months he had been systematically consorting 
 with them on terms of unwonted intimacy. A Cin- 
 cinnati Sacngerfest, which never aspired to anything 
 in thcr way of a celebrity above the rank of the Governor
 
 44 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 of Ohio, now found it easy to secure the presence of the 
 Kaiser's Imperial Ambassador in Washington. It was 
 not too much even for an humble Illinois Schutzenverein 
 to hope to have its annual shoot graced by his attend- 
 ance. But something far more effulgent and inspiring 
 than an Ambassador was soon to be dangled before the 
 German-Americans ; they were to be brought face to 
 face with a prince of the Prussian blood royal — the 
 Kaiser's sailor-brother, Admiral Prince Henry. Nobody 
 invited Prince Henry to honour the United States with 
 a visit. He just came. Whatever Washington's emo- 
 tions may have been when Baron von Holleben con- 
 fronted the Government with the glad tidings, German- 
 Americans were transported to the seventh heaven of 
 delight. Mr. Herman Ridder, proprietor of the New- 
 Yorker Staatszeitung,SiVTa.nged a monster banquet for the 
 Prince at the Waldorf-Astoria, which was attended by 
 all the prominent advertisers of New York City. Osten- 
 sibly the Kaiser had dispatched his brother to launch 
 an American - built racing - yacht. Few Americans 
 reaHzed the underlying purpose of Prince Henry's 
 visitation at the time, but events meantime have amply 
 convinced them that he was sent to cement the internal 
 German- American structure reared by Von Holleben ; 
 to apply the royal touch which the German who under- 
 stands his own people's frailties knows is positively 
 designed to fire their devotion ; to demonstrate that 
 the seal of the approval of the War Lord at home was 
 now set upon the great scheme to build up a German 
 State within the " adopted " American State ; to show, 
 as far as lay in his power, that William II saw only 
 good for the Fatherland in any movement which 
 promised to turn war between Germany and the United 
 States into an American civil war. 
 Thus Germany, even in far-off 1902, when Prince
 
 ORGANIZATION 45 
 
 Henry of Prussia arrived in America, was preparing 
 for " The Day " — this day. The part German- Ameri- 
 can leaders were expected to play was doubtless assigned 
 them in the course of the Prince's spectacular junket 
 across the continent. It will be my task, in the succeed- 
 ing chapter, to describe how Germany proceeded to 
 capitalize her investment of twelve years previous.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MOBILIZATION 
 
 August, 1914, found the American field, it was confi- 
 dently believed in Berlin, well and truly planted for 
 Germany's purposes. Teuton organizations through- 
 out the States had thirteen years of centralized activity 
 behind them. Dr. Miinsterberg and Professor Kuno 
 Francke were installed at Harvard, Jastrow at the 
 University of Pennsylvania, and a host of minor pro- 
 fessorial fry was strategically distributed at Columbia, 
 Yale, Cornell, Chicago, Madison, Ann Arbor and 
 other centres of American academic life. The 
 Kaiser's " exchange professorship," initiated ten years 
 previous between Harvard and Berlin Universities, had 
 now a dozen or more offspring in the shape of " ex- 
 change " chairs at as many other German and American 
 universities. Mr. James Speyer's " Roosevelt Pro- 
 fessorship," exchanging an American scholar annually 
 for a German savant, had been in operation nearly 
 as long. There were at this time at least fifteen 
 American university leaders of the stamp of President 
 Hadley of Yale, Dr. Peabody of Harvard, Dean Burgess 
 of Columbia (who delighted the Kaiser by publicly 
 attacking the Monroe Doctrine in Berlin), Professor 
 Paul Shorey of Chicago, Dr. Coolidge of Harvard, Pro- 
 fessor Alphonso Smith of Virginia, President Wheeler 
 of California, and Drs. Sloane and Adler of Columbia, 
 who had each in his turn had six months of Imperial 
 
 adulation and academic veneration at Berlin, Leipsic, 
 
 46
 
 MOBILIZATION 47 
 
 Munich and other founts of Kultur, and who were 
 looked upon in Potsdam as grateful apologists for the 
 German cause in the United States in any emergency 
 which might arise. Potsdam has " guessed " wrongly 
 in most of these cases. 
 
 Two popular Ambassadors of the Kaiser since von 
 Hollcben had valiantly perpetuated the latter 's policy of 
 courting the once despised " German- American," while 
 at the same time assiduously currying favour with the 
 unhyphenated citizenry of the Republic. Baron Speck 
 von Sternburg in his day was quite the most captivating 
 figure in Washington diplomatic society and probably 
 the most generally liked in the country at large. He 
 rode and played tennis with President Roosevelt, they 
 called each other, respectively, "Specky " and "Teddy," 
 and von Sternburg was in incessant demand as a public 
 speaker at dinners and University commencements. 
 He died in the midst of an admittedly successful career. 
 Then came Count von Bernstorff , like his predecessor the 
 husband of an American woman and a fluent speaker of 
 the " American " language. He never quite contrived 
 to worm himself into American confidence as effectually 
 as von Sternburg, yet until a few months ago Wash- 
 ington would unquestionably have voted him the most 
 genial and congenial foreigner at the Capitol. 
 
 The Kaiser had not left his " American policy " en- 
 tirely in the hands of professorial and diplomatic co- 
 adjutors. He had been playing the game strenuously 
 all these years himself. Americans by the [^score 
 came back from Germany gratitude and effusiveness 
 personified, as a result of honours showered upon them 
 and their womanfolk at the exclusive Court of Berlin. 
 Many came burdened with Red Eagles, Crowns of 
 Prussia, and other marks of royal esteem which only 
 the exceptionally democratic American citizen has the
 
 48 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 fortitude to resist. Prussian orders and decorations 
 were not strewn about indiscriminately upon Americans, 
 whom aristocratic Germany privately considers a race 
 of vulgar money-grubbers. Each one bestowed had a 
 purpose. The head of a powerful American news- 
 gathering and news-distributing agency, for example, 
 was one of the selected few. The most eminent 
 University president in the country was another. A 
 great New York newspaper proprietor was still another, 
 and when the late Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan presented 
 Emperor William with a priceless original Luther 
 document, the Kaiser retaliated by decorating the 
 financier with the highest order attainable by a non- 
 Prussian. 
 
 Kiel Week, the German Cowes, was now almost as 
 much of an American as a German festival. " Ameri- 
 can MilUonaires and their Private Yachts Specially 
 Welcome " became the trade-mark of the Woche. A 
 millionaire New York yachtsman-archaeologist, a gentle- 
 man of particularly engaging personal qualities, was 
 allowed to be described in both the German and Ameri- 
 can Press as the Kaiser's " best American friend." 
 Harvard's Germanic Museum was filled with valuable 
 gifts presented by the War Lord. Washington received 
 a bronze statue of Frederick the Great. The German- 
 Americans, practising the eye-for-an-eye theory, gave 
 the Emperor in return a statue of General Baron von 
 Steuben, George Washington's lieutenant, exercising 
 pressure enough on Congress to cause the gift to be 
 made in the name of the people of the United States. 
 
 Colonel Roosevelt had been to Berlin, received the un- 
 precedented honour — for a civilian and a private citizen 
 of a foreign country — of holding a review of German 
 troops at the side of the Kaiser, and only narrowly 
 escaped being the guest of his Majesty under the latter's
 
 MOBILIZATION 49 
 
 own roof, Court mourning over the death of King 
 Edward precluding the extension of royal hospitality 
 to the distinguished stranger from the United States. 
 Mr. Carnegie, bleating eternal peace, had been American 
 Special Ambassador to the Kaiser's Silver Jubilee in 
 June, 1913. All which German thoroughness, far- 
 sightedness and obsequiousness could do to create in 
 the United States a favourable American setting for 
 " The Day " had been done. 
 
 Then came the Great War. Von Bernstorff , snatched 
 from the midst of his summer vacation in Bavaria, 
 hurried to New York ; in his train Dr. Bernhard 
 Dernburg, graduate of Wall Street's frenzied school of 
 finance in youthful days, glib talker of " United States 
 Enghsh," the only successful political campaigner, 
 as campaigning is carried on in democratic countries, 
 which Germany had ever produced. The twain 
 arrived in New York on August 24. They set up their 
 headquarters at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, in New York. 
 
 Four important counsellors, domiciled in America, 
 were called into conference — Mr. James Speyer, 
 brother of Sir Edgar Speyer, Bt., the New York 
 partner of the London — Frankf ort-on-the-Main banking- 
 firm of his name ; Dr. Miinsterberg of Harvard, and 
 Herr Julius P. Mayer, resident American director 
 of the Hamburg-American Line. Each of this trinity 
 had his role to play in the impending mobilization 
 of Germany's fighting forces in the field of American 
 public opinion. Mr. Speyer's expert advice on the 
 finances of what was to be the most comprehensive 
 " campaign of education " on record was of indis- 
 pensable value ; Dr. Miinsterberg, who had for twelve 
 (jr thirteen years been credited with devoting as much 
 of his time to underground German propaganda in the 
 United States as to teaching psychology at Harvard,
 
 50 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 was ready with intimate knowledge of the ways and 
 means for spreading German culture broadcast ; Herr 
 Mayer tendered the vast agency system of the Hamburg- 
 American Line, extending to every county in the 
 United States, as a ready-made organization for dis- 
 seminating German gospel to American unbelievers ; 
 and last, but not least, there was Mr. Herman Ridder, 
 native of New York and proprietor of the leading 
 German daily newspaper of the nation, who knew all 
 about how German editors throughout the United 
 States could be " approached." I met persons in 
 America who were unkind enough to suggest that Mr. 
 Ridder was himself " approached " early in the war 
 from the direction of Berlin. 
 
 For many days and nights after their arrival in 
 New York on August 24, Bernstorff and Dernburg saw 
 much of Speyer, Miinsterberg, Mayer, and Ridder. 
 It was recognized that American public opinion, already 
 unanimously incensed over Belgium, must be " edu- 
 cated " forthwith if it was not to run amuck. The great 
 newspapers of New York, almost without a single ex- 
 ception, were anti-German. The unfeeling British Navy 
 had cut the German-American cable and there was 
 nothing but the inadequate Nauen-Sayville wireless 
 by means of which to get even a glimmer of the " truth 
 about Germany " to American readers. George Syl- 
 vester Viereck, long-haired boy-poet and erotic littera- 
 teur by trade, the American-born son of a German 
 father, was thereupon asked to undertake the editorship 
 of The Fatherland, a new weekly launched for the pur- 
 pose of securing " Fair Play for Germany and Austria- 
 Hungary." The Vital Issue was also started. It was 
 hoping for miracles to expect shrapnel like Mr Ridder 's 
 New-Yorker Staatszeitung and Mr. Viereck's Fatherland 
 to make headway against the 42-centimetre high-
 
 MOBILIZATION 51 
 
 explosive fired at Germany from day to day in the 
 editorial columns of the great American Press ; but, 
 nothing daunted, Ridder and Viereck took their orders 
 and went valiantly to work. Their subsequent excesses 
 will live as proof of America's toleration of sedition in 
 its midst, for both of them produced on numerous 
 occasions diatribes against the United States Govern- 
 ment and insults to the American people without 
 parallel even in a Democracy. 
 
 While a hundred subsidized pens and typewriters 
 now set themselves to the task of grinding out German 
 propaganda literature, with which the country was pre- 
 sently to be drenched from Maine to California, Count 
 Bernstorff talked. He talked by day and by night, 
 and always too much. New York newspaper reporters 
 came and went from his quarters in the Ritz-Carlton as 
 they are accustomed to stream in and out of an Ameri- 
 can presidential candidate's hotel " headquarters " in a 
 convention city. Interviews with the German Am- 
 bassador could be had for the asking. If they were 
 not asked for, they were volunteered. 
 
 It was not many weeks before the German campaign 
 was in full swing. I speak now of mid-September, 
 1914. But Bernstorff' s interviews terminated suddenly 
 after he had talked incessantly for three weeks. He 
 contrived in that brief period not only to lecture the 
 American people in the most unseemly manner, but to 
 arrogate to himself the right of speaking of and to the 
 United States Government in terms which could easily 
 have justified his expulsion from the country. Ameri- 
 cans " read " him at first in a spirit of genuine anxiety 
 to " give Germany a square deal." Gradually his 
 press-agent chatter was recognized as that of a man 
 who doth protest too much. Then American in- 
 telligence began to be offended. Bernstorff had over-
 
 52 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 done the thing. It soon became apparent that he 
 had dug his own grave. Within a month he had proved 
 himself, as a distinguished New England Senator 
 described it, "a positive godsend to the Allies." 
 
 Dernburg's General Staff was now summoned for 
 a hurried council of war at the Ritz-Carlton. Up to 
 that hour Dernburg had posed successfully as a philan- 
 thropic gentleman who had come to America to solicit 
 funds for the German Red Cross. All his correspon- 
 dence was written on noteheads bearing the touching 
 legend of " German Red Cross Delegate." It was 
 decided that the horn: had come for him to enact on 
 American soil the role in which he had achieved 
 meteoric fame at home. He must take the stump 
 for the Fatherland's dishevelled cause. He must 
 accept invitations to speak at universities and colleges, 
 at specially arranged German meetings, before Cham- 
 bers of Commerce and on every other occasion when 
 an audience could be drummed up. If he were not in- 
 vited to speak, he must do as Prince Henry of Prussia 
 had done — invite himself. The General Staff, doubt- 
 less on the professional advice of Mr. Ridder, evolved the 
 idea of " syndicating Dernburg stuff " — American jour- 
 nalese for distributing to a vast number of newspapers 
 for simultaneous publication on a given day some at- 
 tractive special news or editorial feature. Ridder also 
 " syndicated " an English leading article printed daily 
 in his own German newspaper. It was about this time 
 that Ridder offered a couple of million of " somebody's " 
 dollars for immediate possession of a certain New York 
 daily — which he did not get. Dernburg prepared 
 a series of page-wide articles setting forth " Ger- 
 many's Case." Important newspapers throughout 
 the country at first accepted them on their merits as 
 good " copy." Then, impatient for more results, Dern-
 
 MOBILIZATION 53 
 
 burg articles were offered in profusion, just as Bern- 
 storff's interviews had been, but they began to prove 
 less and less desirable, and " Germany's Case," except 
 in the columns of Mr. Ridder's Staatszeitung, was 
 obUged to content itself with constantly decreasing 
 space. Dernburg, like Bernstorff, was soon a drug on 
 the glutted market. 
 
 He now took to the lecture platform, where he was 
 destined to play a more imposing and a longer-lived 
 role. At first he drew big audiences. Germans and 
 German-Americans comprised the vast bulk of those 
 who went to hear him, but newspapers in the various 
 cities he toured were accustomed to report his speeches 
 at some length, and they created an undoubted effect. 
 Americans are a business race, and the spectacle of a big, 
 bluff, broad-shouldered German business-man arguing 
 his country's case in passionately convincing fashion, 
 appealed even to those portions of the American public 
 which were predisposed in the Allies' favour. Germany 
 was winning incessant land victories in those days, 
 pushing her way deeper and deeper into Russian Poland, 
 accomplishing the conquest of Belgium and sinking 
 British warships by daring submarine attacks. Great 
 Britain, in the relentless pursuit of her naval policy of 
 strangling German commerce and shutting off the 
 Fatherland's food-supply, was compelled to seize 
 American cargoes and send them to British Prize 
 Courts as contraband. Dernburg, whose platform 
 manner combines that of an imperturbable company 
 chairman warding off attacks by heckling share- 
 holders, with that of a crafty solicitor ready to take 
 instant advantage of the opposition's errors, was not 
 slow to exploit the day-by-day events of the war. 
 Having argued " Germany's Case " threadbare and 
 quoted only the third or the half of international
 
 54 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 treaties, when quotation of the whole might have 
 been embarrassing, and having dodged the Belgian 
 issue altogether, except to harp on the " secret docu- 
 ment " found at Brussels, Dernburg now turned his 
 guns on England. He dwelt in lachrymose accents on 
 the piratical methods of war to which Britain was re- 
 sorting not only against belligerent Germany, but 
 neutral America. His " exposure " of British 
 " navalism " made a deep impression. 
 
 Scores of German campaigners, minor Dernburgs, 
 were now at large in the United States. All took 
 their cue from the propagandist - chieftain. Each 
 arriving Dutch, Scandinavian or Italian, steamer 
 brought new ones, women as well as men. They 
 were mostly of the " intellectual " type and came 
 armed with entreating letters of introduction from 
 German savants to the American colleagues on whose 
 affections Germany and the Kaiser had so long been 
 working. To a couple of American exchange pro- 
 fessors William II sent autographed letters of gratitude 
 for zeal in his cause. By Christmas time it was esti- 
 mated that not less than one hundred German speakers 
 were " spell-binding " (speechifying) in the United 
 States. They travelled hither and thither, up hill and 
 down dale. Meantime the United States mails were 
 freighted with tons of German literature such as that 
 with which the country is familiar during presidential 
 elections. Experienced American campaigners, men 
 who know the dollars and cents of such crusades, 
 estimated that the campaign was costing Germany 
 £50,000 a week.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 TERRORIZATION 
 
 " We shall simply obliterate the Democratic Party in 
 the North at the presidential and congressional elections 
 of 1916, unless President Wilson's administration 
 maintains stricter American neutrality in the war." 
 
 Thus was the real aim of the " American Indepen- 
 dence Union," the newly formed German-Austrian- 
 Irish political party, epitomized for me by one of 
 its progenitors and late spokesmen in the United States 
 Congress, the Honourable Henry Vollmer, member of 
 the House of Representatives for the second district of 
 the populous and prosperous Middle- Western State of 
 Iowa. 
 
 There is nothing subtle, subterranean or mysterious 
 about the object of the " epochal " organization called 
 into being for the purpose of terrorizing the American 
 Government into action deliberately designed to pro- 
 mote Germany's cause as a belligerent. For by 
 " American neutrality " Mr. Vollmer 's associates mean 
 "American «;/neutrality," They do not call it that, but 
 that iscxactly what they want. They clothe it in lan- 
 guage which conceals its actual nature, just as many of 
 them are suspected of being agents of Germany masquer- 
 ading in the garb of " neutral American citizens." Let 
 Mr. Vollmer talk. He talks well, and his voice is the 
 voice of his millions of fellow German-Americans. When 
 he paid me the courtesy of an interview in the lobby of 
 
 55
 
 56 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 the House, he created the impression — whatever the 
 motives firing his soul — of being genuinely sincere. 
 
 As the American-born son of a German, he began by 
 saying that he did not feel called upon to apologise for 
 his frank pro-German sentiments. 
 
 " There are in the United States, roughly speaking," 
 said Mr. Vollmer, " 30,000,000 German-Americans ; 
 10,000,000 Austro - Hungarian - Americans, and 
 15,000,000 Irish- Americans.* That makes a total of 
 considerably more than half the present population of 
 the Republic. These people are not all natives of 
 Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ireland. They in- 
 clude first, second and third generations. American 
 politicians are accustomed to calculate that one in every 
 five of the population is a voter, so that we may estimate 
 that the foreign element under discussion represents a 
 voting strength in a presidential election of 5,500,000. 
 This is one-third of the probable aggregate vote which 
 will be cast at the next election in 1916. It constitutes, 
 therefore, a decisive balance of electoral power. 
 
 " Consider the circumstances, for example, under 
 which President Wilson was elected in 1912. He is 
 what we know as a ' plurality,' or ' minority ' president ; 
 that is to say, he failed to receive a majority of all the 
 votes cast, having only 6,292,670 out of a total of 
 15,039,300, or 1,226,981 less than a majority. Yom will 
 gather from these figures that even if my calculation 
 of 5,500,000 as the German- Austrian-Irish vote were 
 scaled, for the sake of conversatism, by 1,500,000, it 
 would still be a ' balance of power ' sufficient easily to 
 sway the National election in whichever direction it 
 pleased. 
 
 " For the purpose of organizing this great political 
 influence into a compact and cohesive force my con- 
 * These figures are gross exaggerations.
 
 TERRORIZATION 57 
 
 gressional colleague from Missouri. Dr. Richard Bar- 
 tholdt (unlike myself, he is a native of Germany) in- 
 vited fifty-eight American citizens to meet in Washing- 
 ton on January 30 and form a great new party. The 
 object of the association, as announced in the call, is to 
 promote, during the present war, a policy of uncom- 
 promising neutrality on the part of the United States, 
 and to initiate a national movement for the protection 
 of American commerce. At this meeting there were 
 represented not only all leading German-American, 
 Austro-Hungarian-American and Irish-American organ- 
 izations, but several universities of strictly Anglo-Saxon 
 tinge. 
 
 " Five members of the House of Representatives 
 were among the delegates, who also included such well- 
 known men as the Rev, Dr. Thomas C. Hall of the 
 Union Theological Seminary of New York and Professor 
 William R. Shepherd of Columbia University. The 
 majority of the delegates, however, consisted of officials 
 of organizations like the National German-American 
 Alliance, the German War Veterans Society, the 
 Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the German 
 Roman Catholic Central Union, and the German 
 Gymnastic Society of North America. Mr. John 
 Devoy, editor of the Gaelic American, represented the 
 Irish element, and a dozen men were present as dele- 
 gates of the German Press of the United States. 
 
 " The principal object of the ' constituent assembly ' 
 at Washington was to adopt the following ' platform ' 
 for the new organization : 
 
 " Whereas : The spirit of absolute neutrality toward foreign 
 nations at war with one another is a basic tradition of the 
 American people, which in justice to all it is not only a privilege 
 but a duty to uphold, and 
 
 " Whereas : In the course of recent events it has become 
 evident that this cherished attitude has been endangered
 
 58 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 through a foreign control of our news service and of our 
 communication by sea, and 
 
 " Whereas : Our commerce and our citizens have been com- 
 pelled to endure violations of the principles of international 
 law, and 
 
 " Whereas : The ships of our country in common with those 
 of other neutral nations, having on board the property of 
 citizens of the United States, have been arrested on the high 
 seas by a belligerent Power, conveyed into its ports and there 
 subjected to a process of search involving delays and losses, 
 and 
 
 " Whereas : Citizens of the United States, and of nations 
 friendly to us, have been forcibly taken off of our ships, in 
 defiance of the protection accorded them by the American flag, 
 and put into prisons or detention camps, and 
 
 " Whereas : Articles hitherto considered absolutely free in 
 international trafi&c have been arbitrarily made contra- 
 band, and 
 
 " Whereas : The rules of international law governing neutral 
 commerce have been altered or disregarded in the special 
 interest of one set of belligerents, to the manifest injury of the 
 United States as an independent nation with rights to be 
 respected and with citizens to protect, and 
 
 " Whereas : The shipment of arms, ammunition and muni- 
 tions of war under conditions now prevailing is unfair, un- 
 neutral and in violation of America's ethical ideals, tends to 
 prolong the war and is irreconcilable with our prayers for 
 peace, and 
 
 " Whereas : This condition of affairs is intolerable to all 
 American citizens who believe in the principles of neutrality, 
 fairness and friendship applied to all nations alike, and in the 
 noble mission of this country as a promoter of peace and a 
 champion of justice and humanity, 
 
 " Therefore, in order to re-establish genuine American 
 neutrality and to uphold it free from commercial, financial 
 and political subservience to foreign Powers, be it 
 
 " Resolved, That we, citizens of the United States, agree to 
 effect a national organization the objects and purposes of 
 which may be stated as follows : 
 
 " (i) In order to assume the possession of an independent 
 news service we favour an American cable, controlled by the 
 Government of the United States. 
 
 " (2) We demand a free and open sea for the commerce of
 
 TERRORIZATION 59 
 
 the United States, and unrestricted traffic in non-contraband 
 goods as defined by international law. 
 
 " (3) ^^ c favour as a strictly American policy the imme- 
 diate enactment of legislation prohibiting the export of arms, 
 ammunition and munitions of war. 
 
 " (4) We favour the estabhshment of an American merchant 
 marine, and 
 
 " (5) ^^^^ pledge ourselves individually and collectively to 
 support only such candidates for public office, irrespective of 
 party, who will place American interests above those of any 
 other country and who will aid in eliminating all undue foreign 
 influences from American life. 
 
 " This ' platform ' (continued Mr. Vollmer) was 
 drawn up by Dr. Hall and Professor Shepherd — so much 
 for the charge that our project is a ' German scheme ' — 
 with the exception of the ' plank ' dealing with an 
 embargo on arms, for which I am responsible. The 
 framing of this clause devolved upon me as the author 
 of the Bill introduced into the House of Representatives, 
 ' to prohibit individuals, partnerships or corporations in 
 the United States from selling arms, ammwiition, artillery 
 and explosives of any kind for exportation during the 
 existence of war except upon proof that said arms, ammuni- 
 tion, artillery and explosives are not to he used in said 
 war against a country with which the United States is at 
 peace.' 
 
 " I freely admit that an embargo on exportation of arms 
 to Germany's and Austria-Hungary's foes is the desidera- 
 tum at which all German- Americans fervently aim at the 
 moment. It is not a comforting thought for us that 
 American machine-guns, shrapnel, naval artillery, high- 
 explosives, rifles and cartridges should be killing in 
 Europe thousands of men of our own flesh and blood. I 
 have a constituent in Iowa, a veteran of the American 
 Civil War on the Union side, who has seventeen nephews 
 fighting in the German army. That old man fought, 
 bled, and nearly died to save this Republic. Is he not
 
 6o THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 entitled to ask that this country desist from action 
 which is contributing directly to the slaughter of his 
 kith and kin on the other side of the Atlantic ? And 
 there are hundreds of thousands of good American 
 citizens, of ' anti-Ally ' ancestry, who cherish exactly 
 the same susceptibilities for the very same reason. 
 They are inspired by ties of blood in calHng for an 
 embargo on munition shipments to Germany's foes. 
 But the American spirit of fair play, apart from racial 
 prejudices, calls for an embargo, too. If Germany had 
 an equal chance to import the sinews of war from the 
 United States, we should not seek to deprive the Allies 
 from getting them. That is just the point. The 
 chances are not equal. The situation, thanks to 
 British command of the sea, is unfair. Until it is 
 equalized, we believe the dictates of American sports- 
 manship and impartiality — qualities of which the 
 Anglo-Saxon is accustomed to proclaim a monopoly — 
 demand that the Allies should be prohibited from en- 
 joying advantages beyond the reach of Germany. 
 President Wilson's ' neutrality proclamation ' set forth 
 that ' the United States must be neutral in fact as well 
 as in name, and must put a curb on any transaction 
 which might give a preference to one party to the 
 struggle over another.' I submit that our ' platform ' 
 interprets in letter and spirit that particular portion 
 of the President's proclamation." 
 
 I interrupted Mr. VoUmer to ask him if he, as a 
 native-born American, did not object to so palpable an 
 introduction of alienism into purely American politics ; 
 I told him I had been assured on all hands that this 
 latest, and boldest, phase of the extensive German 
 propaganda in the United States (the formation of an 
 out-and-out German party) was considered offensive 
 and reprehensible in the highest degree.
 
 TERRORIZATION 6i 
 
 " Our activities are not offensive," he replied. " They 
 are only misrepresented as such by the pro-British 
 Press and publicists. You must not forget that 
 England, in the existence of the common language, has 
 a ' pro- Ally ' agency at work in this country, compared 
 to which any other propaganda, no matter how syste- 
 matic or vehement, is insignificant. It is necessary for 
 friends of Germany to resort to heroic measures and 
 unusual tactics to resist so all-powerful an anti-German 
 factor as the English language. The United States has 
 been the playground of English ' propaganda ' or agi- 
 tation, or whatever else you care to call it, for years. 
 England has long had Dernburgs and Miinsterbergs of 
 her owTi at work here. They are working now. The 
 only difference between their propaganda and the 
 German is that the English agitation has been subtle 
 and less vocal, but correspondingly more effective. 
 Take our popular English fiction. I employ my 
 summer vacation, as a rule, reading this particular kind 
 of literature. In recent years I have become accus- 
 tomed to two stock figures — the German villain and the 
 intriguing German diplomat. That sort of thing has 
 its effect on the imaginative and receptive American 
 mind. It has helped enormously to raise up and propa- 
 gate the bogey of German ' militarism.' It has laid the 
 foundations for the distorted view which the average 
 American holds in regard to the war. 
 
 " I am a Democrat, and supporter of President 
 Wilson. But I am persuaded that the Administration, 
 yielding to the pressure of our British-influenced Press, 
 has unfairly discriminated against Germany and inter- 
 preted the laws of neutrality in a way designed dis- 
 tinctly to favour her enemies. If the Administration 
 cannot be brought back to a position of genuine im- 
 partiality and observation of neutrality, which is neither
 
 62 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 pro-Ally nor pro-German, but simply pro-American, 
 we shall not hesitate to use our voting power relentlessly 
 on behalf of what we believe to be not Germany's 
 interests, but the real interests of America. In the 
 South the Democratic Party is so invulnerable, and the 
 foreign element among its electorate so insignificant, 
 that it is impervious to the attack we purpose making. 
 But in the great Northern States of New York, Penn- 
 sylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Illinois, 
 Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri, and generally 
 throughout the East, Middle-West, North-West and 
 West, where the German and Irish vote combined, or 
 even in some cases by themselves, can easily sway 
 elections for congress and for president, we can, and 
 intend to, make our strength felt. The concluding 
 ' plank ' of our ' platform ' means exactly what it says 
 in that respect — that we shall oppose tooth and nail 
 any candidate for public ofhce, regardless of his party 
 label, who declines to view the questions raised by the 
 World War from a purely American standpoint. We 
 resent the groundless aspersion that our new organiza- 
 tion is conceived in Germany's interest. That is a pro- 
 Ally fabrication." 
 
 On February 20 the American Independence Union 
 perfected its organization and elected the following 
 officers : 
 
 Honorary President, Herman Ridder, of New 
 York. 
 
 President, Richard Bartholdt, of Missouri. 
 
 First Vice-President, Dr. Thomas C. Hall, of New 
 York. 
 Mr. Ridder 's identity is well known. Mr. Bartholdt, 
 for years one of the representatives in Congress of the 
 great German-American community of St. Louis, 
 Missouri, has been the genial German-born spokesman 
 of German interests in the Lower House. He will not be
 
 TERRORIZATION 63 
 
 a member of the next congress, having reputedly with- 
 drawn in order to devote himself to the management of 
 the new German political party. Dr. Hall, a native of 
 Co, Armagh, Ireland, is a well-known theologian. His 
 enthusiasms for Germany, apart from Celtic irre- 
 concilability, are probably not entirely disconnected 
 with the fact that several weeks before the outbreak of 
 the war he was designated as " Roosevelt Exchange 
 Professor " at the University of Berlin for the year 
 1 915-16, and will enter upon the office during the 
 coming autumn. He is in Germany now. Dr. Hall's 
 estimable wife is a Gottingen (Germany) woman. 
 
 The " American Independence Union " promulgated 
 the following resolution on the occasion of " perfecting 
 its organization " : 
 
 The American Independence Union has been organized 
 upon the declaration of principles adopted at a conference of 
 representative American citizens (sic), held in the city of 
 Washington on January 30, 1915. Its membership will be 
 confined exclusively to American citizens, irrespective of their 
 descent, but of unquestionable loyalty to the Government of 
 the United States ; a loyalty which would remain absolutely 
 unshaken and undiminished in case of war between the 
 United States and any other country on the face of the globe. 
 We hold, however, that loyalty to the Government neither deprives 
 a citizen — of whatever lineage or descetit — of his right to scrutinize 
 the action of public officials — no matter how high their station — 
 yior does it absolve him of his duty to do so, and to discuss with his 
 fellows the affairs of Stale and nation. 
 
 The Union is not, and will not be, a segregation, pohtically, 
 of one or more elements of our people from the other. Our 
 work will be confined to a peaceful but determined effort to 
 educate public opinion in the United States in favour of the 
 liberation of our country from all undue foreign influences, and 
 to bring all lawful pressure to bear upon our public servants so 
 as to cause them to conduct our international affairs in a spirit of 
 real and not mere paper neutrality in times of war between 
 friendly Powers and of complete independence of foreign in- 
 fluences in times of peace. Our country must, in its inter- 
 national relations and in its ])iiblc spirit and public opinion, be 
 American only.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 DEMORALIZATION 
 
 " If I were President of the United States, I would 
 instruct the Federal law officers to deport Richard Bar- 
 tholdt and his brother German- Americans on the ground 
 that they obtained naturalization under false pretences ; 
 for, though they own allegiance to the United States, they 
 are practising allegiance to the German Emperor." 
 
 Thus spoke a distinguished American pohtician, who 
 may be the next President of the United States, when 
 I sought his opinion of the methods adopted by 
 Germany to blackmail the American people into 
 sympathizing with " Kultur's " cause. I have not 
 quoted his terse commentary because of its radical 
 language or on account of the importance of the man 
 who used it, but because it epitomises what the vast 
 majority of intelligent and self-respecting Americans 
 have thought and said about Dernburgism. Six 
 weeks in the United States, in constant contact with 
 men of affairs of all sorts — statesmen, bankers, editors, 
 merchants, manufacturers, university presidents and 
 lawyers — left on my mind the indelible impression that 
 the German propaganda has had but one tangible, 
 definite result. It has, in consequence of its vehement 
 impudence, outraged the feelings of five-sixths of the 
 people of the country who are not of German extraction 
 or " pro-German " for reasons of self-interest. 
 
 For six months following the outbreak of the war, 
 
 64
 
 DEMORALIZATION 65 
 
 roughly up to February i, the Germans waged " a 
 whirlwind campaign " throughout the country at an 
 expense believed to have been not less than ^^200,000 
 a month. Tliat represents for the period named a total 
 outlay of £1,200,000, which is equal to the greatest 
 " slush fund " ever raised for national political purposes 
 in the United States, during the celebrated McKinley 
 " gold standard " campaign conducted by the late 
 Senator Mark Hanna against Mr. Bryan in 1896. Mr. 
 Roosevelt's campaign in 1912 cost only £"160,000, and, 
 with the new reciuiremcnt to publish campaign con- 
 tributions, it is doubtful whether more than £400,000 
 or £600.000 will ever again be spent on the election of a 
 United States President. The Germans, in their six 
 months of lavish crusading, have therefore broken the 
 " campaign " record in America. 
 
 But their colossal effort to stampede American 
 opinion, launched like a thunderbolt with a view to 
 sharp and decisive results, just as the German General 
 Staff planned to storm Paris in six breathless weeks, 
 failed. Their hard-working henchmen, from Dr. 
 Dernburg all the way to Prof. Kuno Meyer, ex-professor 
 of Celtic literature at Liverpool, talked, wrote, mis- 
 quoted, slandered and cajoled in vain. Business men, 
 scholars, clubmen, householders, everybody with an 
 address accessible by mail, had been bombarded in- 
 cessantly from August to February with free copies 
 of the Fatherland, The Vital Issue, " The Truth 
 about Germany," the facsimile proofs of Belgium's 
 " secret plottings " with France and England, with 
 private and stereotyped communications from personal 
 and business friends in Germany, with marked copies 
 of " truthful " German newspapers, with the German 
 Information Service (the daily news-sheet issued by 
 the United States branch of the Imperial German Press
 
 66 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Bureau, conducted since the war by Herr Claussen, late 
 advertising manager in New York for the Hamburg- 
 American Line ; with shoals of documents, booklets, 
 press-cuttings, speeches — everything, in short, in the 
 shape of the persuasive word which printing-presses can 
 turn out or the United States mails will transport. 
 
 Broadcast circulation was given to the statement 
 addressed by Professors Haeckel and Eucken of the 
 University of Jena to the Universities of America. In 
 the beginning Americans listened to the German speech- 
 makers and perused the German campaign literature 
 with interest and with the patience born of their in- 
 herent love of fair-play. The German point that the 
 cutting of the Emden cable to the United States had 
 deprived them of the floor seemed well made ; it was 
 true that war news and views were coming almost 
 exclusively from the capitals of the Allies. " Give the 
 Germans a chance " was the spirit in which Americans 
 at first received the German case. But Americans are 
 people of canny perception as well as of rugged fair- 
 mindedness. It was not long before it dawned upon 
 them that Germany's case was not argument, but defence, 
 whine and explanation. The vociferousness with which 
 it was advocated suggested first of all a bad conscience, 
 and, when to mere noise and volume were added 
 insolence and effrontery, when Dernburgism, in other 
 words, took America by the hand like a child and sought 
 to stuff the German case down her throat, America 
 recoiled. It refused absolutely to tolerate any extenu- 
 ation of the crime against Belgium. Presently 
 the Belgian " argument " was dropped. Americans' 
 minds were irrevocably made up ; they had had time 
 to weigh the evidence, and Germany was found guilty 
 on the two gleaming, essential things of the war — • 
 responsibility for the Austrian Note to Serbia, which
 
 DEMORALIZATION 67 
 
 directly ignited the world conflagration, and the 
 ravishing of Belgium. German attempts to under- 
 mine American conviction on these points have been 
 continued only at the cost of offending American in- 
 telligence and exhausting American patience to the 
 point of exasperation. 
 
 I asked almost every American of importance whom 
 I met why, in view of the impertinence of the German 
 propaganda, its menace to internal peace and its almost 
 treasonable manifestations, responsible authorities 
 took no steps to stamp it out. I went carefully into 
 that phase in authoritative quarters at Washington. 
 It was admitted that Count Bernstorff conducted him- 
 self, in the loquacious weeks after his arrival from 
 Germany last summer, in a manner which would easily 
 have justified such action as President Cleveland took 
 in connexion \Nith a certain British Ambassador years 
 ago for reasons far less grave. It was conceded that 
 Count Bernstorff violated flagrantly the fundamental 
 duty of a foreign ambassador, viz., the obligation to 
 support, at least passively, the declared domestic policy 
 of the Government to which he is accredited — in 
 America's case, a policy of strict neutrality in the war. 
 Bartholdtism and Ridderism, it was acknowledged, 
 had indulged in excesses which would have excused 
 Government interference even in the sublimated Hyde 
 Park which is the United States. But Washington was 
 convinced, and astutely so, as events have proved, that 
 the German agitation was eradicating itself ; that 
 Bernstorft had effectually " talked himself to death " ; 
 and that the same inevitable process of self-destruction 
 was going on in what rt^mained of the German pro- 
 paganda. 1 hus, Washington explained, it was simple 
 expediency which preserved the Bernstorffs, the Dern- 
 burgs, the Miinsterbergs and their hyphenated satellites
 
 68 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 like Bartholdt and Hall from being forcibly sup- 
 pressed. 
 
 But just as the Kaiser's forces have not withdrawn 
 from France and Flanders in spite of their inability to 
 make further progress, so his legions in the United States 
 now entrenched themselves in the United States for a 
 campaign along fresh lines. Political terrorization 
 became the new strategy of the American von Klucks. 
 But the Bartholdt-Ridder-Hall " American Inde- 
 pendence Union," with its insolent threat of reprisals 
 against candidates for ofhce who refuse to support the 
 German conception of American " neutrality," is, 
 unless all signs deceive, the straw which will break the 
 German camel's back in the United States beyond all 
 possibility of repair. There was once an " American 
 Protective Association," " A. P. A." was its popular 
 title. Under the cloak of " true Americanism " it 
 combated acrimoniously, especially at the polls, every- 
 body associated, by membership or sympathy, with the 
 Roman Catholic Church. For a while it prospered. 
 Then its name became a byword ; its support of candi- 
 dates for public office was something to be shunned, 
 not sought. To be tagged with its label meant aliena- 
 tion of sympathy and solidification of opposition. 
 That, in the judgment of the sanest observers, is the 
 certain fate toward which the impudently named 
 " American Independence Union " is headed. If it 
 survives even during the sixteen months which will 
 intervene between this summer and the presidential 
 election of November 1916, it will surprise many men 
 whose knowledge of American political psychology is 
 expert. It has been eloquently inactive thus far. 
 
 There was danger, three months ago, in the new 
 German campaign — the campaign of domestic political 
 terrorization in the United States. But events have
 
 DEMORALIZATION 60 
 
 marched fast since then ; the Lusilania worked 
 wonders in America, as it happily did in England itself, 
 in the direction of aggravating public temper and 
 stiffening the Government's back. Some of Mr. 
 Wilson's political opponents had been openly expressing 
 the fear that his political exigencies would drive him 
 into a bargain with the " German vote " which might 
 be disastrous to the Allies' cause. One of his most 
 distinguished foes went so far as to declare that the 
 President had even made certain overtures to the 
 " German- Americans." You would hear, in such 
 quarters, that " the President did not protest against 
 the seizure of American copper shipments by British 
 cruisers until Germany began to feel the pinch " ; that 
 the copper industry in America is in the hands of 
 German- Americans ; that the secreting of cargo 
 manifestoes for thirty days by Mr. Wilson's son-in- 
 law and Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. McAdoo, 
 was done with a view to placating German-American 
 susceptibilities ; that " Mr. Charles M. Schwab was 
 prevented from selling submarines to England be- 
 cause Mr. Herman Ridder and the New-Yorker 
 Staats-Zeilung foamed at the mouth over that pro- 
 ject." These are the things, I say, which were said 
 to one when one visited the camp of the President's 
 political antagonists. Yet even there you are told, 
 as I was, that stubbornness is and has always been 
 Mr. Wilson's chief source of strength. He was a 
 stubborn university president at Princeton. Demo- 
 cratic politicians who elected him Governor of New 
 Jersey found him the most unpliable chief magistrate 
 the State had ever had. The nation has found him 
 stubborn. His stubbornness with Congress wore down 
 opposition in the Panama Tolls fight. It has won to 
 date all the congressional battles he has ever initiated
 
 70 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 except the Ship Purchase Bill ; and his friends insist 
 he will win that before he is through. Having, there- 
 fore, set his stubborn Scotch Presbyterian heart upon 
 maintaining American rights inviolably, one may be 
 assured that he will do so. Germany will have a con- 
 vincing taste of tenacity before she is through with the 
 present Squire of the White House. Let the Wilhelm- 
 strasse cherish no illusions on that score.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 LOYAL IRISH-AMERICA 
 
 German attempts to capture the sympathy of Ameri- 
 cans in general have completely failed to ensnare the 
 Irish-Americans in particular. Reckoning the native- 
 born Irish and their American-born children at, roughly, 
 10,000,000, as is done by competent authorities, it is 
 declared that probably not more than 100,000 of them, 
 or I per cent., have yielded to irreconcilable anti- 
 British prejudices and aligned themselves with the 
 German war cause. Dr. Dernburg was once the guest 
 of a distinguished Irish-American jurist of New York, 
 who interrogated the Kaiser's agent as to his opinion 
 of Irish sentiment in America in the light of seven or 
 eight months' personal experience. Germany's pro- 
 tagonist acknowledged, in disheartened accents, that 
 it appeared to be almost unanimously in favour of the 
 Allies. 
 
 So much for the boastful claims of Dr. Bartholdt, the 
 president of the " American Independence Union," and 
 Dr. Hexamer, the president of the sister German organi- 
 zation, the National German-American Alliance, that 
 " the Irish are with us, almost to a man." Allegation 
 to that effect is clearly one of the most preposterous 
 of Dernburgism's pretences. German designs on 
 Irish- American support were more subtle than their 
 asphyxiating - gas methods of propaganda in the 
 United States at large, but they proved not a whit 
 less abortive. 
 
 7'
 
 72 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Irish agitators' anti-British campaign in the United 
 States happened to be in merry swing in the month im- 
 mediately preceding the outbreak of war. The Ulster 
 fight was being fought there as well as in the Emerald 
 Isle. " Jim " Larkin was at large on hospitable Ameri- 
 can soil, and that other eminent patriot, Sir Roger Case- 
 ment, had toured the country in behalf of his " Irish 
 Volunteer movement " and succeeded in raising con- 
 siderable funds for it. As a matter of passing interest, 
 I was informed that the £5000 worth of German arms 
 and ammunition with the aid of which blood was spilled 
 in Dublin on the Sunday preceding war between 
 England and Germany was supplied by one of Sir Roger 
 Casement's plutocratic New York sympathizers. Up 
 to the hour of war. Casement's talk in the United States 
 had been exclusively of " oppressed Ireland." When 
 the Kaiser challenged Europe, Casement suddenly be- 
 came a fiery advocate of " oppressed Germany." He 
 dropped the theme of Britain's tyrannical yoke round 
 Erin's neck, and flamed forth about Germany's right to 
 enjoy " the freedom of the sea " and about " the iron 
 ring " with which the English Navy essayed to strangle 
 German political and economic development. His 
 swan song in New York, before proceeding to Berlin, 
 where he is now an honoured guest of the German 
 Government, was a pamphlet dated September i and 
 entitled " The Crime Against Ireland and How the War 
 May Right It." The pamphlet has since been issued 
 officially in Berlin. It ends like this : 
 
 " Let Irishmen in America get ready. The day a 
 German sea victory tolls the death knell of British 
 tyranny at sea, it tolls the death knell of British rule 
 in Ireland. 
 
 " Let Irishmen in America stand ready, armed, 
 keen, and alert. The German guns that sound the
 
 LOYAL IRISH-AMERICA 73 
 
 sinking of the British Dreadnoughts will be the call of 
 Ireland to her scattered sons. 
 
 " The fight may be fought on the seas, but the fate 
 will be settled on an island. The crippling of the 
 British fleet will mean a joint German-Irish invasion of 
 Ireland and every Irishman able to join that army of 
 dehverance must get ready to-day." 
 
 Then came ]\Ir. John Redmond's historic and clarion 
 call for Irish loyalty to the British cause. Practically 
 every Irish- American who for decades supported Home 
 Rule and contributed so many dollars to Mr. Redmond's 
 constitutional programme for its attainment rallied un- 
 questioningly round his leadership on the crucial issues 
 raised by the war. They rallied, they admit, after 
 recovering from the electric shock Redmond had 
 given them. There were exceptions, like the 
 younger Messrs. Ford, sons of the late Patrick Ford of 
 the Irish World, who inherited their father's uncom- 
 promising antipathy to the ancient foe, but they were 
 conspicuously few. Another was a highly-respected 
 Irish-American member of the Supreme Court of the 
 State of New York, Mr. Justice Cohalan. But the anti- 
 Ally violence and vehemence vomited by Casement 
 were shared, for the most part, only by the " dynamite " 
 Clan-na-Gael organization and the clique headed by Mr. 
 John Devoy, the editor of the Gaelic American. The 
 most prominent Irish- American association, the An- 
 cient Order of Hibernians, lent the Casement plea for 
 Germany no countenance. 
 
 Dr. Dernburg was now on the scene. Doubtless 
 having studied carefully, en route to America. General 
 von Bernhardi's strictures on the military value to 
 Germany of anti-British sentiment among the Irish both 
 at home and in the United States, the commander-in- 
 chief of the German propagandist army lost no time in
 
 74 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 getting in touch with the hoped-for ally on American 
 soil. Before his lecture and interview season set in, 
 Dernburg often practised that other favourite method 
 of German propaganda — what is known in Berhn as 
 " dinner diplomacy." Friendly personages in New 
 York made it possible for him to meet leaders of all 
 classes of opinion at private dinners, either in homes or 
 in clubs ; and some of the most effective " log-rolling " 
 accomplished by Dernburg during his entire stay in the 
 long-suffering United States was in the course of these 
 prandial evenings. He made many converts in those 
 days, partially because he was at first somewhat defer- 
 ential and his special pleading was less offensive ; also 
 because Germany's case had not yet been thoroughly 
 undermined by events of the war itself. Dernburg 
 contrived to come in contact with many Irish- American 
 leaders in this confidential way ; they listened, 
 patiently and smilingly, in the manner of their best- 
 natured of races, but, as far as I could learn by penetrat- 
 ing inquiry, few of them were induced by his Berlin 
 blarney to turn their backs on the attitude recom- 
 mended to Irishmen by Mr. Redmond. Once they 
 had recovered from the astonishment with which his 
 pronunciamento first filled Irish- America, their loyalty 
 to the Allies' cause became firm and impregnable. It 
 has remained impervious to attack ever since. 
 
 Meantime another German agent. Professor Kuno 
 Meyer, deposed from the chair of Celtic Languages at 
 Liverpool University, arrived. The advocacy of the 
 German cause by this long-time resident of England and 
 expert in Celtic lore was expected by his superiors in 
 Berlin to be immensely potent among the Celts in the 
 United States. It was arranged that Meyer should 
 make his debut among the American Irish at a great 
 public dinner in his honour, at which he would have the
 
 LOYAL IRISH-AMERICA 75 
 
 opportunity of presenting Germany's claims to a dis- 
 tinguished and influential assemblage. The Gaelic 
 League, an organization which aspires to revive the 
 Gaelic language for what Professor Miinsterberg would 
 call " cultural " purposes, was prevailed upon to stand 
 sponsor for the Meyer function. But when one Irish- 
 American of prominence after another declined to join 
 the organizing committee or attend the dinner, if 
 organized, the project was ignominiously dropped. 
 
 Professor Kuno Meyer was thenceforth compelled to 
 rely exclusively on the minority known as the " pro- 
 fessional Irish," the disappearing Fenian element repre- 
 sented by the Clan-na-Gaels. Such " Irish " meetings 
 as the late Liverpool scholar has addressed in the 
 United States have been attended only by adherents of 
 the irreconcilable class, which has never supported Mr. 
 Redmond in the past, owing to his disinclination to 
 substitute force for constitutionalism in the light for 
 Home Rule, and which remains the one Irish section of 
 Irish- Americanism now opposing him. Perhaps it was 
 his fiasco at the hands of the American Irish which have 
 led Professor Kuno Meyer, in the course of his talk tour 
 of the country, to identify himself with one of the most 
 persistent German- American campaign lies, viz., that 
 the New York Times, America's most prominent and 
 influential newspaper, is one of the most pro-Ally organs 
 in America because it is " owned and controlled " by 
 the proprietors of the Times of London. The most 
 categorical assertion of this sort was made at a " war 
 symposium " in Buffalo by Dr. Edmund von Mach, a 
 minor Miinsterberg, operating, like the latter, from 
 the precincts of Harvard University. Von Mach is 
 evidently a disciple of thoroughness, which eschews 
 generalities, for he even knows the e.xact size and 
 character of the Times' hold on the New York Times.
 
 76 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Until the latter, he said, had paid off an obligation of 
 £400,000 to the owners of the Times, its pro-British 
 attitude would be resolutely maintained. When 
 pinned down, which is a heartlessly cruel procedure 
 against a German propagandist. Von Mach probably 
 took refuge in some irrelevant and inconsequential 
 circumstances which proved nothing but his own 
 mendacity. The entire story is sheer fabrication. 
 
 Sweeping allegations that the great daily and 
 periodical Press of the United States is so overwhelm- 
 ingly pro-Ally because it is " British-owned " or 
 " British-controlled " are favourite German- American 
 " arguments." Of course, anybody with a scintilla of 
 imagination, which does not, naturally, mean a Teuton, 
 knows that nothing of the sort is true. A " British- 
 owned " or " British-controlled " American news- 
 paper is the last word in practical impossibility. 
 Twisting the lion's tail has long since ceased to be 
 a potent political dodge in the United States, and to 
 be Anglophile no longer subjects Americans to the 
 censure of their fellow-citizens ; but it will be many 
 Fourths of July before an American newspaper will 
 consider it meet to surrender to " British control." 
 The Germans and German-Americans know that per- 
 fectly well. The vast bulk of the American Press is 
 pro-British, pro-Ally and anti-German because it does 
 its own thinking. Also because it is pro-American. 
 It always has a mind of its own and it was made up 
 in regard to the war with such staggering rapidity 
 and finality that there was nothing left for Dern- 
 burgism to do but to abuse it and lie about it. 
 
 It is necessary, in considering the Irish-American 
 attitude toward the war, to draw a distinction between 
 the Irish and the Roman Cathohcs in the United States. 
 The latter include several million Germans and Aus-
 
 LOYAL IRISH-AMERICA 77 
 
 trians. The attitude of the Church of Rome, as far as 
 manifested in the L^nitcd States cither pubhcly or 
 privately by its ecclesiastical representatives, is 
 generally neutral. The Pope's interview with my old- 
 time Berlin colleague, Mr. Karl Heinrich von Wiegand, 
 who has reaped so many journalistic honours during 
 the war, suggested that His Holiness himself may not be 
 adamant to German influence. Thousands of American 
 priests, filled with sentimental memories of student 
 days in Louvain, cherish views about Germany which 
 do not accord strictly with the provisions of Presi- 
 dent Wilson's neutrality proclamation. Germany's 
 dragooning of Cardinal Mercier intensified their resent- 
 ment, and the oppression under which the Catholic 
 Poles have always suffered in Prussia is not forgotten. 
 But the Roman Catholic world in America has not 
 altogether forgiven France, I gathered, for the expul- 
 sion of the Orders ; and I encountered some animosity 
 in connexion with the alleged compulsion of 30,000 
 French priests to take up arms as common soldiers in 
 the Republic's army. 
 
 As far as the Irish in the United States are concerned, 
 however, the Allies' cause is safe. " They have not 
 in any respect separated themselves from the rest of 
 Americans," is the pungent manner in which Mr. W. 
 Bourke Cockran, a great New York Irish lawyer, whose 
 silver tongue is famous throughout his adopted country, 
 summarizes the situation. 
 
 " And what about the German Government's 
 ' pledge ' to Sir Roger Casement to give Ireland ' inde- 
 pendence ' when Britain is crushed ? " I asked. 
 
 " That," he said, " is the one amusing feature of this 
 giant tragedy."
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 " THE SYSTEM " 
 
 When Mr. Thomas W. Lawson, crusader against 
 " Frenzied Finance " in America, began pulling the 
 props from beneath mismanaged life-insurance com- 
 panies, illicit industrial organizations and buccaneer- 
 ing banks, he assailed them all and sundry as part and 
 parcel of " The System." Varied as were their activi- 
 ties, divergent as their nominal purposes, the Boston 
 matador tilted at them conjointly as agencies working 
 in one unswerving direction, to one resolute, common 
 end— aggrandisement of the Money Power. Whether 
 they insured men's lives, or monopolized the country's 
 oil supply, or " reorganized " railway corporations, 
 they belonged to, and had, but one master — " The 
 System." Everywhere one looked were " The Sys- 
 tem's " minions — quoth Lawson. The thriving city 
 in a New England State with municipal bonds to float ; 
 the local " national bank " in a Middle-Western region, 
 without whose aid the county's crop could not be 
 " moved " ; the street-railway corporation in that 
 growing town in the South ; those oil-fields in Okla- 
 homa, those copper-mines in Northern Michigan, those 
 lumber-camps in Wisconsin, those sugar-cane planta- 
 tions in Louisiana, those blossoming cotton-fields every- 
 where in " Dixie," those shafts up which silver and lead 
 were hoisted in Colorado and Montana, those golden 
 acres oi wheat and corn in Iowa, Minnesota and the 
 Dakotas — ^^^ these, " divided like billows, yet one as 
 
 78
 
 "THE SYSTEM" 79 
 
 the sea," were flesh and blood, bone and sinew, of " The 
 System." 
 
 So it is with the German organization in the United 
 States. You must not look for it in the Hamburg- 
 American Line's forlorn New York offices in Lower 
 Broadway, nor in another part of that seething highway 
 where Dr. Dernburg, Naval Attache Captain Boy-Ed, 
 the Imperial German Consulate-General, the German 
 Literary Defence League and the Chamber of German- 
 American Commerce have had their headquarters ; nor 
 should you trace your steps to the sanctum of Mr. 
 Herman Ridder at the New-Yorker Staatszcitung, or to 
 the editorial rooms of the Fatherland, or even to the 
 United States branch of the German Government's 
 official Press Bureau at 30 West 42nd Street. You 
 would seek in vain, too, if you went to Luechow's, or 
 Herr Muschenhein's Hotel Astor, or the Kaiserhof, or 
 the Hofbrau, or any of the other official German eating 
 and drinking places of the metropolis. The organiza- 
 tion's base is not in the marble offices of German bank- 
 ing houses near Wall Street, the laboratory of psy- 
 chology at Harvard University presided over by 
 Professor Miinsterberg, or in the congressional com- 
 mittee-room of Dr. Bartholdt at the Capitol in 
 Washington. The palatial clubhouse of the Deutscher 
 Verein in New York contains it not. " The System " 
 of Germany is not to be located in any of these places, 
 any more than the thing of far-flung tentacles, of all- 
 embracing activities, which Mr. Lawson assailed, could 
 bo found in some particular counting-house in New 
 York's " City." To seek the Kaiser's " System " in 
 Amr-rica onn has to go octopus-himting. 
 
 Somr'body once said that the three mightiest examples 
 of organization the world had yet seen were the Church 
 of Rome, the Standard Oil Company and the German
 
 8o THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 army. I venture to add a fourth — the men, women 
 and children of German birth and milHons of others of 
 German blood in the United States. Not all Americans 
 of German blood are pro-German by any means. Vast 
 numbers, especially among the great Jewish class, are 
 aggressively pro-Ally. But, speaking broadly, where 
 to look for the headquarters of Deutschtum's " System " 
 in America is in the hearts of these myriads of 
 emigrated, naturalized, but never fully expatriated 
 Germans. The boast of the organizers of the " Ameri- 
 can Independence Union," the new German political 
 party, that the Germans in the United States " are as 
 united as the Germans at home," is, with the reserva- 
 tions above emphasized, fully justified. I never any- 
 where encountered such amazing, single-minded, blind 
 unanimity. It is a quality which I fancy the Germans 
 themselves never until this war believed they possessed. 
 It infects all classes. Let me cite a few examples, all 
 characteristic. 
 
 In Washington lives a lady, who, now that President 
 Wilson is a widower, is, in a way, the " first lady of the 
 land." She, like many thousands of American women, 
 spends spare time knitting for the Red Cross. Not 
 long ago she suggested that her German maid, too, 
 might occupy herself in leisure moments with the needle. 
 Bertha, who hails from fair Westphalia, was willing — 
 on terms. " Madame must promise me it is not for the 
 hated English I sew," was her astonishing rejoinder. 
 That is the German " System " at work. 
 
 I was breakfasting with a United States Senator at 
 Washington's most famous club. Looking up from 
 our coffee and rolls, we observed the waiter — a German, 
 of course — standing at the window five or six feet away, 
 ostensibly concerned in nothing but the morning sun 
 streaming brilHantly across H Street. The Senator,
 
 " THE SYSTEM " 8i 
 
 talking low — the war, of course, was our theme — re- 
 marked : " That's a strange thing. Waiters in this 
 club never stand about after serving one." My host 
 gradually became irritated at the menial's impertinence, 
 and presently ordered him to be off. That episode 
 ended, another ensued. To the table next to ours 
 presently came a gentleman, who sat with back turned 
 toward us, but close enough to follow conversation. 
 As we left the breakfast-room the Senator whispered 
 to me : " That's still funnier ! I breakfast in this 
 club daily, and, as I am irreligious enough to be here 
 by eight o'clock, I have not in months had a com- 
 panion in the room. We must find out who the fellow 
 is." " Herr Haniel von Haimhausen, counsellor of the 
 German Embassy," imparted the obliging head waiter. 
 That was the German " System " at work, too. 
 
 There is a place in New York to which society folk 
 who give large dinner-parties are accustomed to go 
 when they need extra waiters. Last winter a strange 
 phenomenon was observed — the establishment supplied 
 only German waiters whose conversational knowledge 
 of English is perfect. Something else was noted by 
 careful observers. These waiter-spies had a habit of 
 hovering ceremoniously round the host, hostess, and 
 chief guests, and a distinguished New Yorker vows that 
 there have been few important dinners during the war 
 at which German waiters, attentive in other than the 
 usual sense, have not passed the soup for the Father- 
 land. That is the " System " in operation. Un- 
 doubtedly it is the primary task of German waiters in 
 the United States just now to listen, but some of them 
 are not above a bit of terrorization too. A Fifth 
 Avenue hostess who hired four extra serving-men 
 was waited upon by them at the end of the dinner 
 and informed that if her next party was marked by
 
 82 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 such violently " anti-German " conversation at table, 
 they would create a scene by deserting the dinner in 
 the middle ; they would, indeed, not come to the 
 house again unless guaranteed in advance immunity 
 from such affronts to their patriotic sensibilities ! 
 
 St. Louis, Missouri, is a great German community. 
 The late Carl Schurz, the most famous of German- 
 Americans, lived there, and it is the seat of the world's 
 biggest brewery. A year or two ago a hitherto pros- 
 perous dry-goods establishment, one of the oldest and 
 largest in the city, failed for some mysterious reason. 
 It came out that the Germans, who are a very influential 
 element of the retail purchasing-power of St. Louis, 
 heard that the firm had given £200 to a temperance 
 party's campaign-fund. A boycott was forthwith 
 decreed against a house which was obviously a foe of 
 " personal liberty," German synonym in the United 
 States for freedom from laws restricting beer-drinking. 
 The boycott proved so deadly that the sinning firm was 
 eventually forced to the wall. It was a victim of the 
 " System." 
 
 Instances of the " System's " methods and successes 
 can be multiplied almost at will. Stegler, whom 
 Captain Boy-Ed, the Naval Attache of the German 
 Embassy in Washington, is said to have engaged to do 
 spying work in England under the protection of an 
 illicit American passport, told the New York law 
 authorities that he belonged to a " secret German 
 organization in New York, whose duty it was to watch 
 and report upon every departing cargo." It must 
 have been the dockers enlisted in this organization 
 who obtained such an upper hand at the wharves 
 and warehouses of the great " Bush Terminal " in 
 Brooklyn, that non-German workmen entered a formal 
 protest to the management against the " almost ex-
 
 " THE SYSTEM " 83 
 
 elusive employment " of Germans for shiploading 
 purposes. That may also explain some of the strange 
 revelations which have come to light during the war 
 with regard to clandestine shipments of contraband 
 from America to " neutral " destinations, such as 
 munitions hidden in cotton. It is the ubiquitous 
 Boy-Ed who is strongly suspected by the American 
 Secret-Service of holding perjured proofs that the 
 Liisitania was " armed." Perhaps, too, he knows 
 something of the plot to promote emigration of 
 malcontent Irishmen to America, so that they may 
 not enlist. Fomenting of strikes in American muni- 
 tion works, and blowing up of Canadian-American 
 bridges may also be in Boy-Ed's department. He is a 
 very able seaman, besides being an agreeable and 
 courteous gentleman. 
 
 The activities of the "System" in respect of American 
 passports have been carried on with almost brazen 
 openness. This scandal finally reached proportions to 
 which the long-suffering United States Government 
 could no longer close its eyes — a scandal in which, I was 
 assured at Washington, the German Embassy and its 
 naval and military attaches were implicated " up to 
 their chins." In New York details were obtained as 
 to how the " System " works this particular branch of 
 its nefariousness. United States passports are wanted 
 by the German authorities for two reasons — to facilitate 
 the transfer of reservists back to the Kaiser's army and 
 navy, and to promote the operations of spies in England, 
 France, and Russia. Karl Hans Lody, the German 
 naval spy who was convicted and shot in London, 
 practised his profession in England as an American 
 citizen duly armed with a United States passport 
 stolen for liim by his superiors in Germany. Kuepferle, 
 the other German spy who was trapped in England and
 
 84 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 committed suicide on the eve of his conviction, was also 
 the possessor of an American passport. EngHsh pass- 
 ports are not despised, though American are preferred. 
 Agents of the " System " have actually been seen 
 operating brazenly outside the very doors of the 
 British Consulate-General and the Cunard Line in New 
 York, in quest of British sailors, impoverished or in- 
 toxicated, who might be induced, by hook or by crook, 
 to part with their citizenship papers. Passport agents 
 are also on constant duty outside the Sailors' Home, 
 on the look out for men whose papers might be useful 
 in eluding the vigilance of the United States secret- 
 service men at the water's edge. 
 
 When these illicitly-obtained passports are acquired, 
 they are distributed among selected German reservists, 
 whose English or American appearance and fluent com- 
 mand of the Enghsh (or " American ") language will 
 subject them to little or no suspicion. 
 
 There is, of course, no ruse too low for the " System " 
 where damage to the Allies, ashore or afloat, is possible. 
 I understood in New York that the Cunard Line's 
 agents were solemnly warned from a friendly quarter 
 never to coal outgoing vessels at night or in dark 
 weather, lest explosives might be smuggled into the 
 bunkers. I can imagine nothing to which the "System" 
 would not stoop to bring the Lusitania to grief on the 
 high seas.* 
 
 It is as cynically callous towards such a fiendish 
 notion as it has been toward the certainty that hundreds 
 of innocent American lives would have been destroyed 
 if certain incendiary plots in American works making 
 munitions for the AlHes had not been frustrated. 
 A prominent New York pro-Ally sympathizer declared, 
 after the discovery of the pro-German plot to explode 
 
 * Written in March.
 
 " THE SYSTEM " 85 
 
 the French steamer Rochamhcau on the eve of her 
 departure for New Orleans, that the need of the hour 
 was not a counter anti-German propaganda in the 
 United States to meet German mendacity, but a 
 " League to Abohsh Criminal Abuse of American Hospi- 
 tality."' He said such an organization's most im- 
 portant department ought to be a detective bureau to 
 run down the German " System's " openly felonious 
 practices. 
 
 In New York I was assured over and over again that 
 I would get no real idea of the " System's " magnificent 
 comprehensiveness and relentless thoroughness till I 
 crossed the Alleghanics and reached the Valley of the 
 ^lississippi. I was told that there were leading news- 
 papers in the great cities of the Middle-West " afraid 
 to call their souls their own," lest the power of the 
 German advertiser and the German reader be hurled 
 against them and strike them down. 
 
 On reaching Chicago a fortnight later I was destined 
 to find that I, myself, had apparently fallen a victim to 
 the German terrorization " System " in that throbbing 
 " German-American " metropolis. For five or six 
 months previous I had acted as London editor of a 
 certain prominent Chicago daily newspaper. The journal 
 in question, ever since the war began, had subjected 
 itself, so Chicagoans said, to the suspicion that it 
 cherished pro-German sympathies. 
 
 This paper published numerous letters from readers 
 directly charging it with German leanings. When I 
 arrived on the scene I found waiting for me notice 
 of the termination of my contract. It set up what 
 I have always regarded a quibbling technicality as 
 justification for tearing up that scrap of paper. 
 
 In a very "frank and friendly " conversation, 
 the chief proprietor at any rate left no doubt that
 
 86 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 my marked pro-British sympathies incurred the paper's 
 displeasure, and it was that, in my judgment, which 
 precipitated my dismissal. The " System," it looked 
 to me, had demanded my head on a charger — and got it. 
 It was about this time, too, that the Democratic 
 Party in Chicago yielded to German pressure by re- 
 fusing re-nomination to Mayor Carter H. Harrison, who 
 had served the city for more successive terms 
 than any of his predecessors in office. Instead of Mr. 
 Harrison, a " German- American " named Sweitzer was 
 nominated. Sweitzer's candidacy was hailed by the 
 Fatherland, the notorious German organ, as " the first 
 successful fruit of the organization of the American 
 Independence Union," but when the votes were counted 
 six weeks later, it was discovered that unhyphenated 
 Americanism in Chicago had risen in its outraged might 
 and elected Herr Sweitzer's Republican opponent, Mr. 
 William Hale Thompson, by the most overwhelming 
 majority ever received by a successful Mayoralty 
 Candidate — 139,000. Sweitzer's managers made brazen 
 use of the German war-cry in their campaign, and 
 deluged the voters with petitions bearing the German 
 and Austrian Emperors' pictures. The Chicago muni- 
 cipal election, I fancy, has given the leaders of the 
 American Independence Union furiously to think. It 
 indicates in no uncertain way that the temper of real 
 Americans in the very heart of the German-American 
 region has been aroused by the arrogance and effrontery 
 of the Kaiser's agents in the United States, and that, far 
 from being terrified by Teuton " f rightfulness," they 
 are determined to throttle it. 
 
 The " System's " campaign of intimidation against 
 Americans in public office has been going on ever since 
 the hour the German legions violated Belgium's neutral 
 soil. Orders went forth, for example, that a regular
 
 " THE SYSTEM " 87 
 
 scheme of protests by petition was to be inaugurated 
 in all parts of the country, with a view to bringing 
 pressure to bear upon congressmen, in both the Senate 
 and the House of Representatives. On every possible 
 occasion — whenever a ship would be seized by British 
 cruisers, whenever the newspapers would announce that 
 this, that or the other American manufacturer of war 
 supplies or food-stuffs had received an order from one of 
 the Allies, or whenever anything of even remotely con- 
 troversial character cropped up — the mails would be 
 freighted with enormous rolls of signatures, asking 
 Representative Smith of Texas or Senator Jones of 
 Pennsylvania to " protest " at the White House or 
 the State Department against the latest " breach of 
 American neutrality." Petitions ai^e long-recognized 
 features of America's highly representative form of 
 government, and the German " System " has " played 
 it for all it is worth," in the picturesque language of one 
 of its victims in the Senate. 
 
 Petitions of protest to newspapers are another 
 favourite practice of the " System." A leading New 
 York journal, which has the temerity fearlessly to 
 espouse the Allies' cause, gets yards of this intimidatory 
 autographed literature daily. It bears the signatures 
 of " constant readers," who will no longer take in the 
 paper, if its tone toward Germany is not changed, etc. 
 In smaller towns there are cases on record of merchants 
 who advertise, and who have gone to newspaper pro- 
 prietors and confessed that their " German customers " 
 threaten ruinous reprisals if the merchants do not 
 cease advertising in "anti-German" newspapers. 
 Thoroughness, the leave-no-stonc-unturncd idea, is the 
 " System's " Leitmotif. 
 
 I hope Englishmen will not mind my saying that there 
 are features of Germany's " System " in the United
 
 88 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 States well worth emulation. I do not recommend that 
 America be turned by the Allies, as Germany has turned 
 it, into a wholesale base for military and naval opera- 
 tions — for spying, for passport frauds, for incendiarism, 
 for coaling of and provisioning of privateers, or for other 
 acts which violate American laws and offend American 
 susceptibilities. But one could wish that the great 
 heart of England were pulsating in the United States as 
 the great German heart is beating in the breasts of all 
 the Fatherland's exiled sons and daughters there. It 
 is there, in their patriotic bosoms, that the" System" 
 has its roots. I cannot conceive greater unity or more 
 ardent and concentrated practical love of country than 
 exists among the listening German waiters and barbers, 
 the eavesdropping German housemaids and bar-tenders, 
 the contributing German merchants, bankers, editors, 
 professors and brewers domiciled in America. They are 
 the " System." Their knavish tricks are now pretty 
 well confounded and their politics effectually frustrated, 
 but I hold up their one-heartedness, their unconquer- 
 able loyalty to their old country, and their eagerness 
 to serve it to the fullest extent of their individual powers 
 as something which deserves more of admiration than 
 contempt.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PROFESSORS OF KULTUR 
 
 Harvard is America's oldest university. It will 
 celebrate its 300th birthday in 1936. It has 700 pro- 
 fessors and instructors, 25,000 alumni, an endowment 
 of £5 ,000 ,000 and the largest university library in the 
 world. To the United States it has given three 
 Presidents, one of whom, the redoubtable Mr, Roose- 
 velt, is still alive. Ask Americans who is their first 
 citizen, and nine out of ten will name Harvard's 
 President Emeritus, Dr. Charles W. Eliot. He is the 
 Allies' most eloquent and most fervid advocate in the 
 United States — a fact symptomatic not only of the 
 sentiment of Harvard and of New England, of which 
 it is the intellectual capital, but of the intellectual 
 aristocracy of the nation. Of that, too, Harvard is 
 the citadel. 
 
 When the Emperor William, following the in- 
 auguration of his " American policy " fourteen or 
 fifteen years ago, was in quest of a " cultural " base of 
 operations, it was natural that his eagle eye should 
 fix upon the great institution named after John Harvard 
 of Stratford-on-Avon. William II was not daunted by 
 the fact that Cambridge is across the river from Boston, 
 which, as one of the rock-ribbed centres of genuine 
 Anglo-Saxonism, seasoned with a hardy sprinkling of 
 Irish, has probably less in common with Teutonism 
 than any other single community in the United States. 
 Harvard is the Nestor of American colleges ; for the 
 
 89
 
 90 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Kaiser, that was enough. So it was beneath its historic 
 elms that he decided to plant the seeds of Kultur on 
 transatlantic shores. 
 
 Intensive spade work had been in progress for seven 
 or eight years previous. Psychology had become a new 
 theme of scientific research, thanks to the pioneer 
 efforts of America's own gifted William James. Hear- 
 ing that a young professor named Hugo Miinsterberg 
 was doing original experimental work in the new field 
 at the little German university of Freiburg-in-Breisgau, 
 James extended him a call to Harvard and made him 
 the first director of its " laboratory of psychology." 
 That was in 1892, when Miinsterberg was twenty-nine 
 years old. He has been at Harvard ever since, so that 
 in 1917 he will be able to celebrate the festival dear to 
 the heart of a German, his silver jubilee. 
 
 Presently there came another German to Harvard, 
 Professor Kuno Francke, a distinguished savant whose 
 specialty was Germanics. Under his able administra- 
 tion there sprang into being a Germanic Museum which 
 to-day has no rival outside of the Fatherland itself. 
 The Kaiser bestowed his quite special favour on this 
 newest emblem of Deutschtum at Harvard, and, later, 
 when Mr. Adolphus S. Busch, the lately deceased multi- 
 millionaire German-American brewer of St. Louis, who 
 had a castle on the Rhine and sons-in-law in the 
 German army, endowed the university with opulent 
 funds for the museum, William II filled it with an 
 elaborate gift collection of Germanic trophies. He has 
 replenished it generously from time to time, and, with 
 the exception of the great German National Museum 
 in Nuremberg, I suppose there is no more representative 
 display of Germanics anywhere in the world than 
 Harvard now has. 
 
 A third German prop at Harvard was a graduate of
 
 PROFESSORS OF KULTUR 91 
 
 the university itself, a certain Edmund Robert Otto 
 von Mach, native of Pomcrania, who after receiving a 
 Ph.D. degree at the graduate school became an in- 
 structor in the history of art in the university and, 
 later, an instructor in the history of sculpture at 
 Welleslcy, a prominent Massachusetts college for 
 women. He married an American woman in 1903 
 and now assists her in the conduct of " Mrs. von 
 Mach's School for Girls " in Boston. 
 
 When Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia came to the 
 United States in 1902, he visited Harvard, was the guest 
 of Dr. ^liinstcrberg, and was able to take back with 
 him to the Fatherland glowing accounts of the ap- 
 parently successful inauguration of the " German 
 spirit " at the " hub " of American culture. It was not 
 long after Prince Henry's return to Germany that the 
 Kaiser announced the foundation of the " Exchange 
 Professorship " scheme, whereby distinguished men 
 from the faculties of Harvard and Berlin universities 
 were to lecture annually in each other's country. I 
 may mention, in passing, that the war and the ani- 
 mosities it has engendered in the United States have 
 probably wrecked the Exchange Professorship, at least 
 as far as Harvard is concerned. The scholar designated 
 to be Harvard professor in Berlin during 1915-16 has 
 declined the appointment, and it is probable that there 
 will never be another Ausiauschpm/cssor in Berlin from 
 the university of which Charles W. Eliot is President 
 Emeritus. 
 
 Though Miinsterbcrg has never been the only German 
 professor at Harvard, he has been tlie most advertised 
 and the most advertising one. He speedily made a 
 name for himself as an interesting lecturer on experi- 
 mental psychology. He presented the novel subject 
 with rare attractiveness and his classes soon became —
 
 92 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 and still are, I believe — among the best-attended in the 
 whole university. Of Miinsterberg's professional abihty 
 no one has ever said a disparaging word. By 1902, 
 within ten years of his arrival in the country — though 
 at the time he could hardly speak English — he had 
 acquired a national reputation, thanks to the many 
 opportunities offered him to bask in the seductive lime- 
 light of American publicity. His was a familiar name 
 in the newspapers, in the magazines and among after- 
 dinner speakers at public banquets. He developed 
 that inestimable quality known in United States 
 politics as " mixing " — the capacity for making one- 
 self agreeable in all sorts of society. Roosevelt, for 
 example, is a capital " mixer." Miinsterberg's fond- 
 ness for moving among influential people with no 
 visible interest in either psychology or Harvard 
 induced many people to think that £1000 a year, his 
 salary at Cambridge, ought not to be the only source 
 of income enjoyed by a man of such restless and 
 multifarious activities. Unfeeling souls even sug- 
 gested that if he were not a paid agent of Ger- 
 many in the United States, he at least deserved to be. 
 Certainly the Kaiser's cause, when it needed plead- 
 ing before the American public, never had a more 
 earnest supporter than the Director of Harvard's 
 psychological laboratory. Whether it was Samoa, 
 Manila, Venezuela, or any of the other issues which 
 periodically clouded the German-American horizon, 
 Miinsterberg was always in the forefront of the fray 
 with arguments in behalf of his native land. He was 
 listened to, too, for he is a persuasive man, and the 
 voice of a Harvard professor is never raised in vain. 
 
 Miinsterberg is an inveterate letter-writer. News- 
 papers and reviews could always count on an inter- 
 esting contribution from his controversial pen when
 
 PROFESSORS OF KULTUR 93 
 
 dispute was in the air. He made a speciality 
 of " cultivating " the acquaintance of influential 
 politicians of all parties and all sections. He made 
 frequent trips to Washington, and the White House 
 door was always open to him. Not always to the 
 gratification of Germany's accredited diplomatic re- 
 presentatives at the capital, Miinsterberg was fond of 
 posing as an unofficial ambassador of good relations - 
 " cultural relations " is his favourite euphemism — 
 between Germany and the United States. His ac- 
 tivities in that direction gradually became so pernicious 
 and so pronounced that, whether he deserved it or 
 not, many people thrust upon him the reputation of 
 being a professional German lobbyist in America. He 
 has been known to boast that succeeding Administra- 
 tions at Washington were accustomed to " consult " 
 him on German-American topics, and on one occasion 
 to my personal knowledge, he took something very 
 like credit to himself for the appointment of United 
 States Ambassadors to the German Court. 
 
 With such an officious past, it was, of course, morally 
 certain that the Great War would provide Miinsterberg 
 opportunities for unprecedented labour in the Kaiser's 
 vineyard. Harvard is jealously proud of its reputa- 
 tion for free expression of opinion, and its professor of 
 psychology knew he was on safe ground in airing 
 freely his biased views on the subject of Armageddon, 
 despite President Wilson's neutrality proclamation. 
 Miinsterberg's first outburst was a book called " The 
 War and America " in which, with characteristic 
 dogmatism, he essayed to lay down the lines of 
 thought which should guide Americans into support of 
 Ciermany's cause. It became one of the German 
 organization's principal propaganda weapons, the 
 author's national reputation helping to give it wide-
 
 94 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 spread circulation. Then Miinsterberg inaugurated his 
 underground propaganda work. He began visiting and 
 writing prominent newspaper editors in Boston and 
 New York, remonstrating vigorously with journals 
 which espoused the anti-German cause, and exhibiting 
 no discouragement in the face of constant rebuff and 
 failure. He made almost regular visits, often ac- 
 companied, I am told, by Dr. von Mach, to the German 
 official headquarters at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New 
 York, for consultation with Ambassador Bernstorff and 
 Dr. Dernburg. A few months ago Miinsterberg even 
 had the temerity to write a letter to the President of the 
 United States, complaining that Germany's interests 
 were not being fairly considered by the Government 
 from the standpoint of strict neutrality. Miin- 
 sterberg set forth his grievances in the name of " Ger- 
 man-Americans," whom he represented as being greatly 
 embittered over the Administration's attitude toward 
 various questions raised by the war. President Wilson 
 sent a courteous reply, asking Miinsterberg to submit 
 a bill of specifications, which the professor did. The 
 President acknowledged receipt of his letter, and there 
 the incident ended. A story was in circulation to the 
 effect that the President sent a distinguished Demo- 
 cratic politician and Administration supporter to 
 Miinsterberg, to ask wherein the Government's attitude 
 was displeasing to German-Americans — ostensibly 
 with a view to amending it in their favour — but I 
 believe the version above given is the accurate one. 
 
 It was about this time that the American news- 
 papers had a fresh Miinsterberg sensation — he has 
 provided them with a great many during his twenty- 
 three years in the country. Published statements 
 announced that a certain Harvard alumnus, of the 
 class of 1900, had threatened to " disinherit " Har-
 
 PROFESSORS OF KULTUR 95 
 
 vard University to the extent of a £2,000,000 endow- 
 ment if it did not forthwith dismiss Miinstcrbcrg as 
 punishment for his pernicious activities in Germany's 
 behalf. Although the said alumnus was well known 
 in student days on what Harvard calls the " Gold 
 Coast," a part of the campus famed for luxurious 
 entertainment by undergraduates of wealth, nobody 
 at the university ever heard that his post-graduate 
 actixaties had been crowned by such success as to 
 permit him to bequeath his Alma Mater £2,000,000. 
 I ascertained a strange fact about this episode. Al- 
 though Harvard University has never, to this hour, 
 received official information of the alleged bequest 
 and the terms on which it might be withdrawn. Dr. 
 Miinsterberg, acting entirely on newspaper mention of 
 the circumstances, precipitately tendered his resigna- 
 tion to the faculty. The only announcement made by 
 the university authorities was to the effect that, at their 
 instance, Miinsterbcrg's resignation was withdrawn, 
 " and that the university cannot tolerate any sugges- 
 tion that it would be willing to accept money to abridge 
 free speech, to remove a professor, or to accept his 
 resignation." Dr. Miinsterberg, I believe, came to the 
 faculty meeting at which the incident was discussed, 
 prepared to instigate a full-dress debate and secure a 
 spectacular "vindication" for himself. He did divest 
 himself of a grandiloquent plea of self-defence, but, if 
 my information is correct, it was followed immediately 
 by the heartless announcement from the President : 
 " Gentlemen, we shall now proceed to the next 
 business." 
 
 Miinsterberg makes no secret of the fact that he has 
 been carrying on what he calls " political work " in the 
 United States for twenty years. He claims the goal 
 of his ambition was to effect an Entente Curdiale
 
 96 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 between Germany, America and England, though his 
 references to the Enghsh in his war book lend poor 
 support to the contention. Miinsterberg brags, without 
 hem or haw, that he has enjoyed the most " con- 
 fidential " relations with American politicians, and, 
 when one challenges the assertion, he is fond of referring 
 to mysterious " deskfuls " of correspondence in his 
 possession, which would, if he cared to reveal their 
 contents, verify beyond doubt the intimate character of 
 his " relations " with men of affairs in the United States. 
 
 Early this year there was a meeting at Cambridge 
 of the overseers of Harvard University. Mr. Roosevelt 
 is one of them. Hearing that he was coming to the 
 meeting, Miinsterberg decided to organize a luncheon 
 in his honour. Mr. Roosevelt accepted the invitation. 
 At Dr. Miinsterberg's charming residence in Ware 
 Street, whose walls, no doubt, could many a tale unfold, 
 the ex-President found a distinguished company of 
 Harvard intellectuals awaiting him, among them 
 Professor Kuno Francke and Dr. von Mach. There 
 were some pro- Ally representatives present, too. 
 Mr. Roosevelt evidently " smelt a rat," or perhaps 
 recalled Miinsterberg's notorious meddling propensities 
 in the realm of high politics. At any rate, as he was 
 about to be presented to his fellow-guests, the colonel 
 burst forth, in his typically breezy way, all his pearly 
 teeth aflash, and said : 
 
 " Miinsterberg, I'm delighted to be here ; delighted. 
 And I appreciate the courtesy of your invitation all 
 the more, because my attitude toward the war must 
 be perfectly well-known to you from my writings on 
 the subject." 
 
 I understand the luncheon conversation was devoted 
 almost exclusively to burning topics like the moth- 
 eaten elms on Harvard campus. Dr. Miinsterberg, 
 asked later by reporters to discuss the luncheon,
 
 PROFESSORS OF KULTUR 97 
 
 remarked that it " was quite without pohtical signi- 
 ficance." 
 
 While on the subject of Mr. Roosevelt and the war, 
 I cannot refrain from repeating what he is quoted as 
 having said to a friend who assured him that his de- 
 fection from the Kaiser's cause was to Germans a 
 matter of particular poignancy. 
 
 " Well," exclaimed Mr. Roosevelt, " what did they 
 expect ? Did they think that just because I was once 
 the recipient of courtesy at the hands of their Emperor, 
 I would be governed, in a crisis like this, by considera- 
 tions of snobbishness ? " That is a Rooseveltian 
 pronunciamento. His attitude on the war has not 
 diminished " T.R.'s " popularity among Americans, 
 of whom, when all is said and done, he remains the 
 arch-type. 
 
 Miinsterbergism, let me say in conclusion, is not the 
 spirit or sentiment of Harvard on the war. Harvard 
 is, like the rest of the United States, officially neutral, 
 but its great heart is pro-Ally. I suppose a census of 
 its faculty and students would reveal 99 per cent, of 
 anti-German sentiment. Harvard men are fighting 
 in Ally trenches, and Harvard ambulances are at work 
 in France and Flanders. There, in classic Cambridge, 
 within gunshot of Bunker Hill, is no place to look for 
 sympathy with the cause of Kaiserism and Macht- 
 -politik. I believe only two of Harvard's American 
 professors are pro-German. One of them was the 
 first Exchange Professor at Berlin and fell easy victim 
 to Imperial blandishments. What is true of Harvard 
 is probably true of nine-tenths of American univer- 
 sities. A private poll has indeed been made of them, 
 and if I were permitted to detail the result, it would 
 verify, broadly, the assertion I have just made. A 
 man who stands almost on the level of Dr. Eliot in 
 academic America, Dr. Andrew D. White, an ex-
 
 gS THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Ambassador to Germany, is against her. Profoundly 
 fond of almost everything German, the violation of 
 Belgium drove him into the enemy's camp. Only five 
 of the fifteen or twenty American exchange professors 
 who have been to Berlin are pro-German. The rest 
 are heartily pro-Ally. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, 
 President of Columbia, another giant of the American 
 university world, is pro- Ally. Dr. John Grier Hibben, 
 who succeeded Mr. Wilson in the presidency of Prince- 
 ton, is pro- Ally. So are President Hadley of Yale (him- 
 self an ex-exchange professor at Berlin), Dr. David Starr 
 Jordan, the chancellor of Leland Stanford JuniorUniver- 
 sity in California, Brander Matthews of Columbia, Albion 
 W. Small of Chicago, and J. William White of Penn- 
 sylvania. Look down the whole long list of American 
 savants, and of eminent Americans in general — Choate, 
 Root, Lodge, Morgan, Beck, Armour, Carnegie, Wicker- 
 sham, Whitridge, Johnson, Williams, Hillis, ad libitum 
 — and the names of outspoken German sympathizers, 
 though some of them are wearing the cloak of neu- 
 trality, loom prominent only because they are conspicu- 
 ous exceptions. University presidents and professors do 
 not wield the same sway in America as in Germany, but 
 they are leaders of thought and public opinion. They 
 have been the target of incessant persuasion at the 
 hands of famous German colleagues like Eucken and 
 Haeckel. The persuasion has taken the form of 
 endearing and entreating personal letters. But it 
 speaks volumes for these American scholars' belief in 
 the invulnerable righteousness of the Allies' cause 
 that they have rebuffed, almost to a man, the 
 attempts of Germans once their revered masters in 
 German universities, and are lending the whole weight 
 of their influence to the cause of civil liberty and 
 genuine Freiheit for which Great Britain and her 
 Allies are fighting.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CHICAGO, THE GERMAN STRONGHOLD 
 
 If the great Teutonic ideal of a German State within 
 the United States were ever to be realized, Chicago 
 would be its capital city. At the last Federal 
 census (1910) Chicago's population of foreign birth 
 or parentage was 1,693,918 out of a total population 
 of 2,185,283. The German element in this vast alien 
 leavening numbered 501,832 inhabitants, or 29.6 per 
 cent, of the aggregate ; the Austrians totaled 227,958 
 (13.5 per cent.), and the Hungarians 37,990 (2.2 per 
 cent.), making altogether 767,780 Germans and 
 Austrian - Hungarians, or 45.3 of the total foreign 
 element in the second largest and altogether most 
 cosmopolitan city in the United States. 
 
 In no community in the country, with thJ solitary 
 exception of Milwaukee, which has only 375,000 inhabi- 
 tants, are the Germans in such overwhelming evidence 
 as in the throbbing polyglot Western metropolis. 
 Chicago has three German daily newspapers and live 
 weekly periodicals. The defeated Democratic candi- 
 date for mayor in the recent elections was named 
 Robert M. Sweitzir. The late Chicago City Council 
 included aldermen named Lindheimer, Richert, 
 131(x:k, Klaus, Kerner, Kunz, Franz, Fick, Geiger, 
 Krause, Schaeffer, Bauler, Krumholz, Haderlein, 
 Lipps, Pretzel, and Trebind. In the affairs of Cook 
 County, which is dominated by the 191 windy square 
 miles which are Chicago, the inlluence of the Ger- 
 
 99
 
 100 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 man element is even more pronounced. The chief 
 county official (the President of the Board of Com- 
 missioners) is named Reinberg ; the county clerk is 
 the late mayoralty candidate, Mr. Sweitzer ; the county 
 treasurer is Mr. Henry Stuckart ; the superintendent 
 of public service is Mr. Henry Zender ; the president 
 of the jury commission is Mr. William A. Amberg ; 
 the board of assessors includes Messrs. Weber, Pfaelzer, 
 and Wolf ; and on the board of tax review sits Mr. 
 F. W. Blocki. The county architect is Mr. Richard 
 E. Schmidt, the county agent is Mr. William H. 
 Ehemann, the coroner's name is Peter M. Hoffman, 
 and the sheriff, a far more important functionary in 
 the United States than the title implies in England, 
 is Mr. John E. Traeger. On the bench of Cook County 
 the German- Austrian element is represented by Messrs. 
 Justices Theodore Brentano, Hugo Pam, Henry Horner, 
 Charles M. Foell, and George Kersten. I know many of 
 these men personally, and they are " good Americans " 
 and excellent citizens. 
 
 Walk down Chicago's State Street, one of the finest 
 shopping thoroughfares in all the world, and you will 
 find that some of the greatest stores are owned by 
 persons named Lehmann, Mandel, Siegel, Spiegel, 
 Netcher, Hartman, Hillman, and Rothschild. Many 
 of the eminent names at the Chicago Bar are lawyers 
 of German birth or direct German descent. On the 
 Board of Trade, which regulates the world's grain 
 market, one of the most important firms bears the 
 name of Rosenbaum. Two of the four or five great 
 houses which control the famous Stock Yards and the 
 meat-packing industry of the world are owned by 
 the sons of German immigrants. In the American 
 clothing trade, of which Chicago is the centre, 
 German names prevail exclusively. Chicago breweries
 
 CHICAGO, THE GERMAN STRONGHOLD loi 
 
 are, of course, practically all German. In the world of 
 finance, art, letters, science, music — in every avenue 
 of civic activity without exception the Germans of 
 Chicago are either predominant or in the front rank 
 of those who lead. 
 
 It will be manifest from these figures and facts why 
 pro-Ally supporters in such centres as Washington, 
 New York, Philadelphia, and Boston warned me that 
 I should strike " the enemy's country " when I landed 
 on the breeze-swept shores of Lake Michigan. In the 
 sense that I found more Germans in Chicago than in 
 any of the other cities named and, therefore, a stronger 
 German or pro-German sentiment, numerically con- 
 sidered, my friends in the sympathetic east were right. 
 But if they believed, as many of them did, that because 
 the Teutonic element in Chicago is 45.3 per cent, of 
 the city's total foreign population that great and most 
 typically American of United States cities is " pro- 
 German," they were mistaken. It is nothing of the 
 sort. Sympathy with Germany is confined with 
 almost invisible exceptions to German-born inhabitants 
 and their children ; and not all of them, for I dis- 
 covered a great many American-born Chicagoans, 
 German only to the extent of having parents who 
 happened to be born in Germany or Austria, who 
 themselves are as whole-heartedly pro-Ally as any 
 descendant of " Mayflower stock " in the country. In 
 the east I found this to be almost invariably the case. 
 Similar conditions undoubtedly exist throughout the 
 country. 
 
 An observer fresh from England might have expected 
 to find Chicago a maelstrom of unreasoning anti-Ally 
 prejudice not only because of the omnipresence of 
 Germans, but because Chicago is principally associated 
 in the world's mind with cold and calculating business
 
 102 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Its foreign commerce is vast. Its export trade in food- 
 stuffs runs into the tens of millions per annum. Its 
 eading manufactures, such as agricultural implements, 
 are sold all over the earth. The American cargo ships 
 which have been intercepted by British cruisers have 
 carried, in a great number of instances, wheat, oats and 
 maize consigned by Chicago grain shippers, or meat 
 products dispatched by Chicago packing-houses. Those 
 are circumstances which led me to believe that if any- 
 where in the U.S.A., I should encounter anti-Ally 
 sentiment, based on " arrogant British interference 
 with America's neutral trading rights," it would be in 
 the Chicago region. 
 
 The Chicago business man is not only one of the 
 shrewdest in all the world, but also one of the most 
 practical and reasonable. He prides himself justly on 
 being "broad-gauged"; and I found him an idealist, 
 too. He claims, and with truth, to be infected with 
 the breath of the bounding Western prairies, and with 
 a range of vision correspondingly broader than that 
 of his confrere accustomed to look upon life from the 
 narrower area of the New Yorker who dwells on Man- 
 hattan Island. Chicago pretends, in other words, to 
 be more really American, more redolent of true Ameri- 
 canism, than the Atlantic sea-board. Being that, 
 Chicago takes a liberal view of the effect on American 
 commerce of the British Navy's conduct of the war. 
 " This is an extraordinary war," says your typical, 
 hard-headed, Chicago man of affairs, " and it must be 
 fought with extraordinary methods. England's neces- 
 sities have proved to be of abnormal nature. She is 
 justified in resorting to abnormal measures to meet 
 them. That's our way of looking at the thing. Some 
 of us are very hard hit by it. But when we sit down to 
 thinik it over, we seldom fail to conae to the conclusion
 
 CHICAGO, TPIE GERMAN STRONGHOLD 103 
 
 that, when all is said and done, \vc would do pretty 
 much the same thing ourselves. But all that doesn't 
 excuse shabby treatment of our just claims." 
 
 Chicago, an American commercial city par excellence, 
 is an ideal vantage-point from which to examine the 
 suggestion so strongly emphasized in President Wilson's 
 Note to Great Britain on December 29, 1914, to the 
 effect that the war played havoc with United States 
 business. The President's " frank and friendly remon- 
 strance " was written before the country's trade returns 
 for January, 1915, were available. They show that 
 America's credit balance on its foreign commerce, 
 8145,536,103, was the biggest ever known. American 
 merchants and manufacturers sold war-mad Europe 
 the tidy sum of $267,801,370 worth of goods during 
 the first month of this year of travail, while Europe is 
 so immersed in man-killing that she could sell to 
 America only $122,265,267 of wares. I had an oppor- 
 tunity to ask a banker, who is looked upon as Chicago's 
 leading financier, what the business interests of the 
 Great West, as representative of America at large, 
 thought of the war from the standpoint of its effect 
 on American commerce and trade. I reproduce his 
 reply herewith : 
 
 " It is hardly going too far to say that the war saved 
 the United States from grave economic depression. 
 It has not prevented depression, for times cannot be 
 described as good, but it undoubtedly staved off 
 what would have proved extremely dangerous condi- 
 tions. I refer, of course, to the swollen business 
 derived from Europe's war necessities by the American 
 manufacturer and farmer If agriculture, as we are 
 fond of saying, is really the backbone of American 
 prosperity, then the war has been a positive boon. 
 Our farmers never experienced such bountiful days.
 
 104 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Before the war wheat sold at 75 to 80 cents a bushel. 
 It was worth $1.50 a bushel this week. The war found 
 us in possession of the largest wheat crop we had ever 
 produced — with a round 1,000,000,000 bushels on our 
 hands instead of the 650,000,000 we customarily harvest. 
 Instead of becoming a drug on the market, war raised 
 wheat to the level of a luxury. Conditions in our 
 manufacturing industry were also such that the huge 
 orders which producers of all sorts of war munitions 
 received proved to be absolutely life-saving in their 
 effect. The country was suffering from over-production 
 due to excessive extension of ' plant.' The new Demo- 
 cratic tariff had proved injurious to many of our 
 staple trades. Taking one consideration with another, 
 America was unquestionably on the brink of semi- 
 calamitous economic conditions when Europe's war 
 came. That we have averted catastrophe I think can 
 safely be put down to the war's credit. It did more than 
 that. It provided our banking institutions, in the cities 
 and in the country districts, with a first-class pretext for 
 ' putting on the brakes ' all along the line. It enabled 
 us to slow down the ambitious and aggressive factory 
 owner who was ' spreading ' beyond his capacities, and 
 it permitted country bankers to demand that farmers 
 should quit buying new land and pay up old obligations 
 incurred for purchases in the past. So there was a 
 general house-cleaning process. I do not mean that 
 the war has enabled America to put its financial house 
 in order. The situation is by no means ideal. Un- 
 employment in a great many lines, especially industries 
 dependent on regular export business to Europe, is 
 extremely large. But on the whole the war has done 
 us incalculably more good than harm. We should not 
 be understood as wishing for its prolongation on that 
 account. Real American business interests all lie in 
 the direction of a speedy and permanent peace."
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 " SAFETY FIRST " 
 
 Everywhere in the United States nowadays one en- 
 counters the slogan " Safety First ! " It has become 
 a national motto. Its intent is to popularize the 
 notion that speed at any price is not the highest ideal 
 worth striving for. In 1913, 10,964 persons were killed 
 and 200,308 injured in American railway accidents. 
 The statistics with regard to motor-cars are not avail- 
 able. At any rate, by inculcating the " Safety First ! " 
 principle, the United States hopes to curb the obsessing 
 passion of her people for haste at the cost of an annual 
 casualty list which dwarfs American losses in the war 
 with Spain into utter insignificance. 
 
 " Safety First ! " has a meaning all its own in IMiddle 
 Western cities like Chicago just now. It has no refer- 
 ence to railway accidents or motor-smashes. It con- 
 cerns the war exclusively. It has been formally 
 adopted as the guiding principle of every man, woman, 
 and child of the 1,800,000 non-German inhabitants of 
 the Chicago community of 2,500,000 souls. Though 
 they constitute the vast majority of the population, 
 they realize that they arc confronted by an organized 
 phalanx of 700,000 odd Germans and Austrian- 
 Hungarians, who possess not only the power, but 
 apparently are determined to punish, unhesitatingly 
 and effectively, any person, business-house, corporation 
 or political party which espouses the anti-German cause. 
 
 So the vast non-Teutonic element of Chicago, including 
 
 105
 
 io6 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 such numerically important factors as the 231,346 Poles 
 and the 146,560 Irish, are engaged in a more or less 
 successful effort to suppress their emotions and their 
 sympathies, lest the vengeance of the German " Sys- 
 tem " be visited upon them to their economic ruin or 
 political annihilation. " Safety First ! " 
 
 All this explains why a stranger, dropping into 
 Chicago in quest of Chicago's point of view about the 
 war, fails to obtain it from a perusal of the city's most 
 excellent daily press. In many respects the newspapers 
 of Chicago are the best in the United States. They 
 are a typographical delight. Their leading articles 
 radiate the breeze of Lake Michigan and the spirit of 
 the daring West. They are owned without exception 
 (I am referring to the seven published in the English 
 language) by men who are " real Americans," and of 
 whose aggressive patriotism and civic courage there 
 is no manner of doubt. Yet an impression is abroad 
 in Chicago— unless the statements of men of affairs, 
 who ought to know, are wrong — that there is hardly a 
 journal in that vast community which dares, openly, 
 frankly and fearlessly— as unafraid, for example, as 
 great dailies in New York— to preach in its editorial 
 columns what it feels in its heart. When an American 
 politician is perched ungracefully on the horns of a 
 dilemma, torn by the conflicting emotions of doubt 
 and despair, he takes refuge in mental gymnastics 
 known as " straddhng." That is to say, he espouses 
 both sides of the controversy, while apparently identi- 
 fying himself with neither. In German politics they 
 call this " egg-dancing "—treading lightly lest one be 
 broken. That is undoubtedly the position of the 
 Chicago Press on the war. Like the rest of the city, 
 the newspapers believe in " Safety First ! " The 
 " gonservatism " and "impartiality" of some, ol
 
 " SAFETY FIRST " 107 
 
 course, go further than others. The majority, under 
 cover of President Wilson's neutrahty proclamation, 
 pretend to do nothing but remain in the middle of the 
 road. One or two of them, at least, reveal now and then 
 the courage to give the pro- Ally case something more 
 than its half-and-half share. Another, greatly daring 
 in the opposite direction, is under suspicion that, while 
 eloquently protesting merely " pro-Americanism," it 
 is actually pro-German. I believe its German cir- 
 culation-manager acknowledges that the great increase 
 in the number of its readers since last August is 
 directly due to the large space it gives to pro-German 
 matter. It was this same omniscient gentleman who 
 " staked his reputation " last August, on returning 
 from Berlin, that the Germans would be in Paris on 
 a certain date in September ! 
 
 The Germans watch the Chicago papers like hawks. 
 Let me cite a case in point. If one of them has the 
 temerity to give space to one or two pro-Ally com- 
 munications in the column of " Letters to the Editor," 
 the latter is forthwith deluged with pro-German 
 letters — at the ratio of about seventy-five to one, 
 I am told — most of them couched in terms more 
 abusive and dictatorial than pleading. The German 
 letter-to-the-editor scheme is regulated. Lutheran 
 pastors seem to be told off to specialize in that depart- 
 ment. Hitherto famed merely for long-windedness 
 in the pulpit, they have developed epistolary vitu- 
 pcrativcness during the war as one of their note- 
 worthy accomplishments. It was a committee of 
 German clcrg^'men who once asked a certain United 
 States Senator to vote against a bill to restrict im- 
 migration ; their petition was written on official hotter- 
 paper of the local offices of a German steamship 
 line.
 
 io8 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 It was my privilege, during a fortnight in Chicago, to 
 come in contact with the city's most eminent men of 
 affairs. They have a remarkable grasp of the situation 
 produced by the war, in its international, national and 
 purely local aspects. I would be inviting trouble for 
 more than one bank-president, railway-manager, cor- 
 poration-lawyer, merchant-prince and manufacturer 
 if I gave name, chapter, and verse with regard to the 
 confidences in which they had the courtesy and frank- 
 ness to indulge with me. But I hope I am committing 
 no breach of faith when I summarize their views in 
 composite, and that is that they, too — almost every one 
 of them — feel themselves compelled to yield to the same 
 dictates of self-restraint as the newspapers and politi- 
 cians of Chicago. They fear the retribution of " The 
 System " if they come out into the open. Their 
 sympathies are where British friends will be glad to 
 know they are. But they are voicing them in Chicago in 
 whispers. " Safety First ! " 
 
 There is no " organized " effort in the strictly tech- 
 nical meaning of the word to terrorize Chicago news- 
 papers, politicians, and businessmen into pro-German- 
 ism. There is no Gesellschaft filr Bekdmpfung von 
 deutschfeindlichen Stromungen (Society for Combating 
 Anti-German Tendencies) in the sense of official head- 
 quarters, with noteheads, managers, and telephone 
 numbers. That is not " The System's " way. But the 
 pressure is being exercised just the same, and merci- 
 lessly. Sometimes it is subtle, like a leading article in 
 Das Wochenhlatt, a German weekly, " recommending " 
 firms which, by their advertising in German news- 
 papers, indicate that they are inspired by " friendli- 
 ness " to the German cause. Sometimes pressure is 
 direct and frontal, like German military attacks. A 
 great merchandizing-house may be connected by re-
 
 " SAFETY FIRST " lo 
 
 lationship, no matter how remote or indirect, with 
 admirals or generals fighting against Germany in 
 Europe ; or some of the younger members of the family 
 which founded the house may have once attended 
 school in England. That is enough for " The System's" 
 purposes. Word goes forth from some mysterious 
 central headquarters that John Smith and Co. are no 
 longer worthy of the patronage of " German- American " 
 customers. Or a great meat-packing firm, which has 
 hitherto done a large business with German butchers (a 
 vast percentage of butchers in the United States is 
 German) may have given expression, as far away as its 
 London offices, to pro- Ally sentiments. " The System" 
 clears for action. ' ' No German- American is henceforth 
 to buy meat from Jones and Co., or will he patronize any 
 butcher who derives his supply from them." One of 
 my journalistic colleagues in Chicago, lately the editor 
 of a great daily newspaper, publishes a monthly maga- 
 zine devoted to politics. The call of the blood im- 
 pelled him from the start of the war to align himself 
 unreservedly with the Allies' cause. He told me that 
 his circulation and advertising dropped 50 per cent, 
 since August 4, 1914. He says " The System " is 
 responsible. 
 
 On February 7, a mass-meeting was held in Chicago 
 under the auspices of the so-called " American Neu- 
 trality League." It was made up of a crowd of howling 
 Germans, Austrian-Hungarians, and Fenian-Irish — 
 four-fifths of the Irish of Chicago are anti-German — 
 who turned the meeting into Bedlam. Calk-d as a 
 demonstration on behalf of " true Americanism," the 
 gathering at the Coliseum was converted, before it 
 was ten minutes old, into an orgy of pro-Germanism, 
 pure and simple. One of Chicago's most prominent 
 clergymen, the Rev. Dr. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and a
 
 no THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Swedish politician, Dr. August Schvan, who had been 
 invited to speak, deserted the meeting in disgust, 
 protesting against its unblushingly partisan character, 
 its violence and its insulting attitude toward the 
 American flag and the American Government. The 
 name of Secretary of State Bryan was hissed. When 
 the meeting was over, the stamp of its real character 
 was placed upon it by a procession of several thousand 
 members of German societies, who went marching 
 through the principal streets, singing " Deutschland, 
 Deutschland iiber AUes," and " Die Wacht am Rhein." 
 Chicagoans of experience said there had not been such a 
 violent demonstration of public feeling in their com- 
 munity since the Civil War. The Coliseum meeting 
 was characteristic of the unbridled extremes to which 
 the German sympathizers in Chicago go on every 
 possible occasion. Their chief organs, the Illinois 
 Staats-Zeitung and Abend-Post, often read as if they 
 were published in Hamburg instead of Chicago. 
 
 But in the heart of the Great West, even in the 
 citadel of German- Americanism, as in other parts of the 
 United States, " The System " undoubtedly overplayed 
 its hand. It has caused an unmistakable revulsion of 
 feeling against its adherents. Chicagoans,who are always 
 typically and representatively American, say " this 
 cannot go on." They call it offensive. A well-known 
 publicist who is at the moment carrying on a certain 
 reform crusade, for the purposes of which he originally 
 chose a German model, had had to abandon that illus- 
 tration, and talk about the success of the same system 
 in Switzerland, Sweden and Holland. People gave 
 him to understand that they had no patience left for 
 made-in-Germany institutions. One of the leading 
 clubs of Chicago recently elected a new president. A 
 native-born American of great popularity, but with a
 
 " SAFETY FIRST " in 
 
 German name, was a candidate. He was defeated by 
 the votes of men who had nothing against him or his 
 origin except that German agitation in Chicago has 
 taken an obnoxious form. 
 
 Chicago is the seat of a great university, as well as of 
 the world's pork-packing industry. German professors 
 have campaigned with special zeal, to the end of 
 securing the support and sympathy of the University 
 of Chicago. It contains two or three scholars who 
 have been " exchange professors " at Berlin, or enjoyed 
 other intimate academic relationships with the 
 Fatherland. I thought one of these men summed 
 up, with characteristic Chicago terseness, the American 
 " intellectual's " point of view about " Kultur's " de- 
 signs on American sentiment in the war. He had 
 shown me some correspondence with a German pro- 
 fessor, overflowing with the sophistry whereby Eucken, 
 Haeckel, and the rest have sought to cajole their 
 " honoured colleagues " of the United States. " This 
 is a sample," he said, " of the predigested baby-food 
 which the Germans are trying to stuff down the throats 
 of Americans who had their milk-teeth at least fifty 
 years ago ! " 
 
 It would be a mistake to leave the great subject of 
 Chicago without a word as to the position of her 
 Irish and Polish elements in the war. They are over- 
 whelmingly pro-Ally. They are cautious of public ex- 
 pression, for reasons already given, but they are solidly 
 anti-German at heart. The Sinn-Feiners, the Clan-na- 
 Gaels, and the Irreconcilable Irish generally, as a 
 previous chapter records, arc anti-British, They are 
 nothing but a very noisy minority in Chicago. It is 
 only their clamour which leads the public to believe 
 that they are really numerous and to trust the German 
 claim that " Britain's Irish enemies are with us." I
 
 112 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 have the authority of the first Chicago Irishmen for 
 the statement that the sons of Erin in the Great West, 
 Hke their confreres in the East, are behind Mr. John 
 Redmond's attitude toward the war to the extent of an 
 overwhelming majority. In Chicago it is estimated 
 that only 20 per cent, of the Irish are " with the 
 Germans." 
 
 So it is with the Poles, who are a strong factor in the 
 community. One of their trusted spokesmen, the late 
 City Attorney, Mr. N. L. Piotrowski, said that although 
 Russia, Germany, and Austria are all " our tradi- 
 tional foes," they look upon Prussia as the arch-enemy, 
 whose oppression of the Poles has been the most 
 brutal and intolerable of all, and they want Prussia- 
 Germany crushed. Ninety per cent, of the Poles of 
 the United States, I am assured, cherish that wish 
 and hope.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE AMERICAN MUNICH 
 
 " Have you ever been in Germany before ? " inquired 
 the Kaiser of a United States general who was attending 
 the Imperial manoeuvres in Silesia. " Only in Mil- 
 waukee, Cincinnati and St. Louis," was the American's 
 reply. 
 
 Milwaukee is on the western shore of Lake Michigan, 
 and is the chief city of Wisconsin. Cincinnati is one of 
 the principal cities of Ohio, and St. Louis is the metro- 
 polis of Missouri, but in no other communities in the 
 world outside of the Fatherland itself is German so 
 iihcr allcs as in these three great Middle- Western centres 
 of the United States. Chicago has more Germans than 
 Milwaukee, Cincinnati and St. Louis combined, but in 
 the three latter cities they are immensely more promi- 
 nent because their proportion of the total population is 
 probably larger. I have selected Milwaukee to describe 
 in detail, because though the conditions in Cincinnati 
 and St. Louis are identical, they fmd their vividest 
 expression in the " Cream City." 
 
 At least half of Milwaukee's 400,000 inhabitants arc 
 German by birth or direct descent. Many will tell you 
 that the proportion is nearer two-thirds than fifty 
 per cent. Whatever it is, it is ubiquitous and domina- 
 ting. During the war it has been almost domineering, 
 because Germanism in the States is noisiest and boldest 
 where its battalions arc strongest. It was Teutonic 
 influence which impelled the Wisconsin legislature the 
 
 113 H
 
 114 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 other day to defeat a resolution expressing the con- 
 fidence of the people of the State in the integrity of 
 President Wilson's efforts to. preserve neutrality. The 
 legislature of Iowa, where there is a strong German 
 farming element, took similar action. 
 
 Milwaukee nomenclature and ordinary life almost 
 make one think one is in Munich. The best hotel is the 
 Pfister. The leading bank was founded by a brewer 
 named Pabst and is still " controlled " by his family. 
 The biggest shop is Gimbel's, the leading confectioner's 
 is Weber's, the city's parks are named after their donors, 
 Schlitz and Pabst. If I required to be taken in charge, 
 it would undoubtedly have been by a policeman who 
 speaks better German than English, and I should have 
 been tried under municipal laws administered by the 
 following city officials : 
 
 Mayor, Dr. Gerhard Bading. 
 
 City Engineer, Stadl. 
 
 Secretary of Park Board, Shumacher. 
 
 Tax Commissioner, Arnold. 
 
 Health Commissioner, Ruhland. 
 
 Superintendent of Sewage, Leidel. 
 
 Smoke Inspector, Poetchke. 
 
 Supt. of Fire and Police Alarms, Kleinsteuber. 
 
 Supt. of Water-works, Bowman. 
 
 Chief of Child Welfare Dept., Lobedan. 
 
 The political jobs which Uncle Sam has to confer 
 in Milwaukee are, of course, mostly in the hands of 
 Germans. The judge of the Federal district court is 
 named Geiger, the collector of customs is Schultz, and 
 the postmaster's name is Schutz. Even in death the 
 Germans are with you, for the registrar of probate is 
 Schelein. I asked a non-German Milwaukeean to 
 scribble at random a list of the principal citizens. He
 
 THE AMERICAN MUNICH 115 
 
 might have torn it from the BerHn telephone directory, 
 for it reads hke this ; Uihlein, Nunnemacher, Vogel, 
 Pabst, Blatz, SchUtz, Pfister, Trostel, Brumder, Freschl, 
 Galkm, Falk. Adler, Schlesinger, Goll, Lange, Pritzlaff, 
 and Schoenleber. There are other prominent " bur- 
 ghers," too — names hke Oiiarles, Spence, Sivyer, 
 Markham, Alhs, which were not made in Germany — 
 but they do not leap so quickly to memory. 
 
 In a community where you pay your fare to a German 
 tramway conductor, receive your morning letters from 
 a German postman, and can shop as easily in German 
 as in English, you are likely to be circumspection itself 
 in ventilating views about the war if they happen to 
 be pro-Ally in tinge. The Germans of IMilwaukee are 
 at present almost more Teutonic than the Teutons. 
 They have absorbed all the cocksureness, hates, 
 unreasonableness and intolerance of the Germans who 
 have not left home. They are as impatient with any 
 one who dares to oppose their cause as if they were in 
 Diisseldorf, and stand ready to visit vengeance on 
 men and institutions not in agreement with them on 
 questions of the war. That there have been no general 
 or violent manifestations of this spirit is due solely 
 to the fact that the non-German element in Milwaukee 
 has emblazoned " Safety First " on its banner, just like 
 the people of Chicago. Certainly "The System" has 
 no votaries anywhere more determinedly devoted than 
 the Germans of the city which (so runs the advertise- 
 ment) was " made famous " by Schlitz's beer. 
 
 It would not be possible in many places in America, 
 I imagine, for a prominent citizen to revile the Stars 
 and Stripes in the midst of a vituperative pro-German 
 war argument, yet that is what happened not long ago 
 at the Fox Point Country Club, Milwauk(X''s smartest 
 social organization. The episode is noteworthy, not so
 
 ii6 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 much on account of its intrinsic merits as because of 
 the Hght it throws on the audacity of the German in his 
 strongholds in the Middle-West. If Milwaukee may 
 fairly be considered a criterion, German-Americans 
 are German first, and American afterwards, if at all. 
 If Germany and the United States go to war, they say 
 they will be " for America." 
 
 An ordinary day in Milwaukee suffices to show how 
 the " System " works wherever it feels itself strong. A 
 man walked angrily out of a haberdasher's shop because 
 when he asked for a pair of motor-gloves a salesman 
 exhibited a pair made in England. A butcher wanted 
 an insurance policy, and he rejected it when it turns 
 out to be issued by the Liverpool and London and 
 Globe Insurance Company, A Silesian " slavey," 
 who has worked in a Milwaukee family ever since she 
 arrived in the country twelve years ago, withdrew her 
 money from the bank and sent it to the German 
 Historical Society in New York in return for an 
 " iron cross " worth sixpence, and her sister, who had 
 no savings, sent earrings, rings, a watch or other 
 trumpery " gems," to be melted into gold for Germany's 
 diminishing war-chest, just as the Prussian women of 
 Queen Louise's day gave their jewels in exchange 
 for iron rings. These are little things which are 
 happening every day not only in Milwaukee, Cincinnati 
 and St. Louis, but throughout the districts in the 
 States where Teutonism is rampant. They show us, 
 such unconsidered trifles, that the Allies are not only 
 fighting all the Germans in Europe, but millions of them 
 in the United States as well. 
 
 It is significant that these " German- Americans " 
 accept meekly the domination of the Kaiser's authorized 
 officials in the United States. It is under the aegis 
 of the German Consul in Cincinnati that the local
 
 THE AMERICAN MUNICH 117 
 
 Teutonic organ, the Volkshlatt, conducted a campaign 
 to oust Dr.Dabneyfrom the presidency of the University 
 of Cincinnati for the crime of holding pro-Ally views 
 like the vast majority of American academic leaders. 
 It was the same Consul who, early in the war, made 
 himself so obnoxious in Cincinnati newspaper-offices, 
 with his imperious demands for more favourable 
 treatment of the German cause, that representations 
 to the German Embassy at Washington became 
 necessary, in order to curb his pernicious activities. 
 It was the German Consul in Chicago who had the 
 effrontery to rebuke one of the city's prominent business 
 leaders for " daring " to give public expression to pro- 
 Ally sympathies. 
 
 In St. Louis, the stamping-ground of Dr. Bartholdt, 
 president of the new German political party, pro-Ger- 
 man impudence is on all fours with the pretences set 
 up in Chicago, Milwaukee and Cincinnati. I am 
 reliably informed that Dr. Bartholdt himself found 
 the courage to caution Representative George E. Foss, 
 a famous Illinois congressman and advocate of a strong 
 American naval policy, " not to talk too much about a 
 big navy," at St. Louis in the course of an address 
 on Lincoln's birthday. " They are not ripe down there 
 yet for big navy talk," said Bartholdt. 
 
 Although the German propaganda in America has 
 failed lamentably and conspicuously to influence the 
 country at large, it has efficiently instmcted the anti- 
 Ally German-Americans, They have learnt the 
 sophistry of l:5ernstorff, Miinsterbcrg, Dcrnburg, Kuno 
 Meyer and Mach with parrot-like faithfulness. Judg- 
 ing by the line of " reasoning " which came to my ears 
 in Milwaukee, the Kaiser's supporters in the United 
 States have adoptt-d as their catechism a weird preach- 
 ment called " The British lilack Book — by an Ameri-
 
 ii8 THE GERM AN- AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 can." This is the table of contents [textually repro- 
 duced] : 
 
 The Giant Octopus. 
 
 England, a Destroyer of Nations. 
 
 Germany's Wonderful Rise and Success, the Real 
 
 Cause for England's Present War. 
 
 The Unholiest Conspiracy in History. 
 
 Honi soit qui mal y pense. 
 
 The Tentacles and Ink-sac of the Giant Octopus 
 
 and how it Uses them. 
 The German Emperor, Lord of War, or Prince of 
 
 Peace ? 
 
 German Atrocities — Made in England. 
 
 German Militarism or British Navalism — 
 
 Which is the Menace ? 
 
 Does America Need a Third War for Independence ? 
 
 It was my pleasure while in Milwaukee to hold 
 " heart-to-heart " confab with a typical German- 
 American. He is a native-born citizen of Wisconsin 
 and the bearer of a name honoured throughout the 
 State. For more than an hour he pleaded Germany's 
 cause in terms of which the above table of contents 
 gives an almost literal idea. There was much em- 
 phasis on the " spirit of jealousy of German com- 
 petition " which inspired King Edward to " encircle " 
 Germany and thus directly instigate the war. Belgium, 
 I was assured, was the pretext for, not the cause of, 
 England's stabbing Germany in the back. Hate is not 
 a German trait. It is born in this war of resentment 
 of the monstrous stain put on German honour by 
 attributing to the race the characteristics of the Hun. 
 Germans must campaign for American sympathy 
 systematically because England controls the cable, has 
 the priceless advantage of the common tongue, and
 
 THE AMERICAN MUNICH 119 
 
 " dominates " the American Pr(?ss. President Wilson 
 is " unneutral " because he insists on censoring German 
 wireless and letting off English cable scot-free. The 
 United States Government is neutral in name only, 
 because it permits the Allies to get arms and food from 
 America, which Germany can buy but not ship. Thus, 
 the German of Milwaukee, ad libitum et nauseam. And 
 like him, of course, the Germans in the U.S.A., every- 
 where. They repeat it hour by hour to all who will 
 listen, and, I doubt not, at intervals to themselves as 
 well, for the catechism has been mastered to a degree of 
 perfection attainable only by sleepless practice.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 A RETROSPECT 
 
 During a period of roughly six weeks I traversed that 
 part of the United States lying between the Atlantic 
 and the Mississippi, a region accounting easily for sixty- 
 five to seventy per cent, of the population of the entire 
 country. On the basis of painstaking inquiry I pro- 
 claim confidently that the cause of the Allies in America 
 is invulnerably safe. 
 
 Against it the German campaign of cant, bluster, 
 intrigue, and intimidation has roared and stormed as 
 impotently as the onslaughts of the Kaiser's Guards 
 at the iron lines of Joffre and French. Sanctified at 
 the start by almost universal sympathy with the 
 ideals for which the Allies went to war, their case has 
 meantime withstood the greatest possible and only 
 real shock to which it could have been subjected — 
 the danger of violent interference with American 
 commerce through enforcement of the belligerents' 
 vital requirements at sea. There are controversial 
 commercial questions still unsettled. Procrastination 
 and interdepartmental muddle in England have created 
 no little ill-feeling among the interested American 
 claimants — and they are an influential group — but 
 I do not believe they or anything else either would or 
 could undermine the United States' great and idealistic 
 faith in the Allies' cause. 
 
 Let me summarize the ramifications of the German 
 campaign, in order that the full import of its failure 
 
 I20
 
 A RETROSPECT 121 
 
 may be visualized. German designs to destroy 
 American sympathy for the Alhes were entrusted 
 to an organization subdivided, roughly, into three main 
 branches as follows : 
 
 Diplomatic and Secret Service. Executive director, 
 Count Bernstorft, German Ambassador. Chief assist- 
 ants, Captain Boy-Ed, naval attache, and Captain von 
 Papen, military attache. Subordinate assistants, 
 German Consuls throughout the country, officials of 
 German shipping lines, and 20,000 German army 
 and navy officers and reservists unable to leave 
 America for active service in Europe. Principal 
 duties of this branch are to explain and apologize 
 for Germany in the Press on given occasions and to 
 agitate public opinion wherever possible against the 
 Allies in general and England in particular ; to facilitate 
 the procuring of American passports for German spies 
 and reservists ; to obtain false declarations for ships 
 carrying German supplies ; to spy vigilantly on all 
 activities of the Allied Governments and their agents, 
 and on all American citizens known to hold, or suspected 
 of holding, pro-Ally sympathies ; to evolve ways and 
 means for promoting the German cause in America by 
 hook or crook, regardless of American neutrality or 
 susceptibilities. 
 
 Propaganda and Publicity. Executive director. Dr. 
 Bernhard Dernburg, ex-German Colonial Secretary, who 
 was charged with the same sort of co-ordinate official 
 mission to the United States as Prince Biilow attempted 
 to carry out in Italy. Chief assistants. Professors 
 Miinsterbcrg and Von Mach of Harvard ; Professor 
 Kuno Meyer, late of Liverpoc;! ; Herman Kidder, pro- 
 prietor of the New-Yorker Staatazeitung, in charge of the 
 Department of the East, and Horace L. l^^rand, pro- 
 prietor of the Illinois Slaatazeilung, Chicago, in charge of
 
 122 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 the Department of the West ; George Viereck, editor 
 of the Fatherland, and Dr. Hexamer, president of the 
 National German-American AlHance. Subordinate 
 assistants, editors of the 140 German newspapers and 
 periodicals in the United States, German professors and 
 tutors at American universities and colleges, and presi- 
 dents of local German societies of all sorts throughout 
 the country. Chief duties of propaganda and publicity 
 division are to maintain a sleepless crusade on behalf of 
 Germany by both the printed and spoken word, and to 
 foment feeling against newspapers, politicians, private 
 citizens, and business houses which oppose the German 
 cause. 
 
 Political Terrorization. Executive director, Dr. 
 Richard Bartholdt, ex-member of the House of Repre- 
 sentatives for St. Louis, Missouri, long-time German 
 spokesman in Congress, and president of the " American 
 Independent Union," the new pohtical organization 
 formed by "5,000,000 German voters" for the purpose 
 of " obhterating " President Wilson and the Demo- 
 cratic Party in 1916. The " union " aspires to defeat 
 any and all candidates for public ofhce who exhibit 
 antipathy to the German cause. Chief assistants, 
 Herman Ridder and Professor Thomas C. Hall, of 
 Columbia University, native of Ireland, forthcoming 
 " exchange professor " at Berlin, and husband of a 
 Gottingen lady. 
 
 For a while during last winter American public 
 opinion seemed on the verge of veering rather con- 
 siderably in Germany's favour. The British Orders 
 in Council did not immediately make clear the 
 " reality " of the blockade they contemplated in 
 effect. Their failure to grant what Americans held 
 to be legitimate and indispensable concessions to 
 heutral commerce produced an undeniably unfavour-
 
 A RETROSPECT 123 
 
 able impression. Even in the always friendly East, 
 and still more markedly in the more pro-German Middle- 
 West, I detected an atmosphere which, while in no 
 sense hostile, was visibly less cordial than that which 
 I had encountered on my arrival in those respective 
 districts some weeks earlier. The papers were filled 
 with the texts of the Notes exchanged by the State 
 Department with the British and German Govern- 
 ments, and many people were inclined to read into 
 Berlin's answers a spirit of conciliation which could 
 not be discovered, they said, in Sir Edward Grey's 
 courteous but unyielding replies. The country's anti- 
 German prejudices had been fanned afresh by the 
 piratical destruction of America's finest sailing ship, 
 the William P. Fyye, by the Eilel Fricdrich, yet that 
 incident, to the intense satisfaction of the German 
 organization, appeared almost " blanketed " by the 
 apparent menace to American commerce offered by 
 the British Orders in Council. 
 
 Mr. Hearst's newspapers in New York, Boston, 
 Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, with their 
 circulation of 3,000,000 and their 15,000,000 " readers," 
 were shrieking in a simultaneous page-wide editorial 
 about " repetition of the conditions " which provoked 
 the war of 1812. Even the Anglophile New York World 
 talked gravely about " Rights We Must Maintain," and 
 in more than one ardently pr©-Ally quarter, as I had 
 personal occasion to observe in opinion-moulding 
 centres like Chicago and New York, Americans were 
 saying to England : " You have crowded us to the 
 edge of the pavement and we have not 'kicked ' very 
 strenuously. But be careful now not to push us into 
 the gutter." 
 
 America wants the Allies to win — to win soon and 
 decisively. I did not gather that she desires to see
 
 124 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 Germany crushed in the accepted sense of the term, 
 though the Lusitania massacre has since occurred and 
 filled Americans with violent indignation. There 
 is everywhere in the United States, despite all, an 
 undercurrent of admiration for the skilful struggle the 
 German war-machine is waging. America wants to trade 
 with Germany again some day, and will need a Germany 
 able to buy goods and pay for them. She does want 
 Prussian militarism shorn for ever of the power again 
 to plunge the world in blood, fire, and tears. Yet 
 America desires the perpetuation of a Germany virile 
 enough to confer those features of genuine Kultur 
 which have admittedly contributed their share to the 
 progress of modern mankind. America wants Belgium 
 richly compensated. No settlement extorted from 
 Germany to that end will be considered too fabulous. 
 And finally, and positively, America wants Germany 
 to emerge from her adventure chastised to the point 
 of impotence so far as her hungering designs on 
 South America and against the Monroe Doctrine 
 are concerned. Thinking America knows that a 
 Germany triumphant over Europe and Asia will in- 
 evitably seek her next field of aggression and conquest 
 in the Western world. There are records at Washington 
 to testify that Germany has already negotiated behind 
 America's back for a foothold in the Galapagos Islands 
 off Ecuador and that German merchants in Nicaragua, 
 seeking compensation for claims of more or less legiti- 
 macy, have suggested that territorial concessions to 
 their Fatherland would be the most agreeable form of 
 adjudication. 
 
 Americans know that the German menace caused 
 Great Britain to lavish £40,000,000 a year on the up- 
 keep of a supreme Navy. They have no desire that the 
 spectre of the goose-step should some day compel them
 
 A RETROSPECT 125 
 
 to saddle themselves with the burdens of a gigantic 
 Army and Navy as the price of security. They believe 
 that this war, resolved into bed-rock essentials, is as 
 meaningful for posterity as CharlesMartel'sdefeat of the 
 Saracen hordes on the plains of Tours eleven hundred 
 years ago. That decided whether Mohammedanism or 
 Christianity was to prevail in Europe. To-day, in 
 American estimation, men are bleeding to death across 
 the Atlantic in order to determine whether mediaeval 
 militarism or civil liberty shall be the ideal of the 
 human race for the next thousand years. On no 
 single point of the war is American vision clearer 
 than on this. The man in the street is not all-lucid 
 about it, but the leadership of American thought is 
 eminently so. 
 
 Englishmen will ask, in the light of all this and in the 
 name of common consistency, why America is not on 
 the firing line instead of the merely sympathizing line. 
 If Mr. Roosevelt were President, America would un- 
 doubtedly have been in the war months ago. Dr. 
 Eliot, of Harvard, represents an element less belligerent 
 by nature than Mr. Roosevelt, which would also 
 probably welcome active American intervention. But 
 America is participating in the war, I submit, to a 
 degree which only the thoughtless can fail to 
 grasp. For the Allies are fighting the Germans 
 not only in France, Flanders, Russia, Austria and 
 Turkey, but in every State of the American Republic 
 as well. 
 
 I n Europe Germany is bombarding forts and trenches. 
 In the United States she is assailing public favour, to 
 the definite end of alienating it from the Allies. In 
 rolling back the attacks of Field-Marshal Dernburg and 
 his lieutenants, Americans arc fighting for the Allies, 
 I feci, in a way more directly beneficial than the
 
 126 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 participation of the Army which America has not got 
 or her ships which the AlHes do not need. For what is 
 the great outstanding thing at which the whole German 
 Plot in the United States aims ? Nothing but the 
 coercion of the American Government into action de- 
 signed to neutralize the Allies' command of the sea : 
 to bring about an embargo on arms, ammunition, pro- 
 visions, and all the other variegated sinews of war 
 which the AUies are drawing in such unceasing 
 Pleasure from this side. " How long," asks Uncle 
 Sam, " could the Alhes fight without our grain, our 
 meat-stuffs, our shot and shell, our motor-lorries, 
 our cotton, our petroleum, our copper, and our 
 general good- will 7 " 
 
 It will not do for Englishmen to retort that self- 
 interest is behind this sort of American " participation " 
 in the war. America, it is true, is reaping rich material 
 profit from the war, but doing so in the face of stupend- 
 ous opposition, intimidation, political terror ization, and 
 private blackmail on the part of the German organiza- 
 tion. President Wilson— the man of burdens, as the 
 Chicago Herald calls him— has walked the floor at night 
 more than once since August 4, racked to distraction by 
 the impudent and menacing demands of the German 
 claque in the United States. So, it seems to me, 
 Americans are doing their full share to make the Allies' 
 victory speedy and certain. To no one who has not 
 seen the German system at work can the full value 
 of American " moral support "—call it commerciahsm, 
 if you will — be apparent. 
 
 It is the duty of Englishmen, I think, to bear in mind 
 the ethnological exigencies of America and eschew 
 religiously sentiments calculated to cast aspersion on 
 the American " commercial spirit." That happens to 
 be a spirit of which Americans have never been ashamed.
 
 A RETROSPECT 127 
 
 They even think history may perhaps finally diagnose 
 this war as essentially a conflict between militarism and 
 commercialism. 
 
 If I may be so bold as to suggest a pungent British 
 programme for the preservation of American sympathy 
 in its present almost unalloyed form I would put it 
 thus : 
 
 (i) A cessation of imperious verse by British poets. 
 
 (2) No more truculent admonitions to " sordid 
 America " by British weekly periodicals mistakenly 
 looked upon in the United States as responsible organs 
 of British popular opinion. 
 
 (3) A saner and more liberal Press censorship, with 
 particular regard to the legitimate demands of the 
 American Press. Increased facilities to representative 
 American journalists (including the London Corre- 
 spondents of the great United States newspapers) 
 for reporting the war at first hand and popularizing 
 the AUies' side of it among American readers. 
 Germany's generous facilities to American pressmen 
 has done more than ten Dernburgs in creating 
 sympathy for her in the U.S.A. 
 
 (4) A constant striving by the British Government 
 to construe sea law in a manner which sins on the side 
 of liberality, with due regard to the vital necessities of 
 the Allies' cause. 
 
 (5) The adoption of a tone in diplomatic communi- 
 cations to the United States Government which does not 
 confine concessions to philological pleasantries, and a 
 policy of imaginativeness instead of bureaucracy. 
 Punctilious politeness from Downing Street un- 
 accompanied by what Americans call "the goods" 
 — tangible concessions — is without effect.
 
 128 THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PLOT 
 
 If there is adherence to this simple set of guiding 
 principles it is my conviction that Commander-in-Chief 
 Bernstorff can hoist the white flag of distress over the 
 crumbling ramparts of the German campaign in 
 America and keep it flying. 
 
 Their doom will then be sealed. 
 
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 At the Ballantyne Press 
 
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