CONSPIRACY GROWS BOLDER
These public acts mentioned above, however, are stated by the Federal Government to have been merely a cloak, covering a more extensive conspiracy financed by von Rintelen. By a series of strikes in munition factories, humming with the Allies’ war orders; on railroads carrying the articles to the seaboard, and on steamships, von Rintelen, it is alleged, sought to cut off commerce among the United States and the Allied countries. Von Rintelen and several others are accused in the Federal indictment of doing six different acts in a conspiracy in restraint of foreign commerce. They are charged with conspiring to use “solicitation, persuasion and exhortation” to influence the workers to go on strike or to quit work, to bribe officers of labour unions to get the men to strike, and “by divers other means and methods not specifically determined upon by the defendants, but to be decided as the occasion arose.”
Von Rintelen was busy now jumping from town to town, sending orders under one name, then another, and paying out money. There took place in June and July, 1915, many strikes which, the national labour leaders of the respective trades said, were absolutely unauthorized by the national bodies. The German agent was delighted to read in the newspapers of strikes at the Standard Oil plant in Bayonne, N. J.; of strikes at the Remington Arms Company in Bridgeport, Conn., and in the General Electric Plant in Schenectady, N. Y. His agents would approach him gleefully with the newspapers containing these accounts, and immediately would receive another bundle of bills with the exhortation, “That is fine. Go out and start some more.”
Another projected strike in connection with which Germans were mentioned in correspondence, but in which von Rintelen is not named, is presented here because it fits in the general scheme of the German plotting. That is the conspiracy on part of moneyed representatives of Germany in May and June, 1915, to start a strike simultaneously among the 23,000 ‘longshoremen on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Such a walkout would absolutely have paralysed American shipping, completely stopped the movement of explosives to the Allies at a most critical moment. A leader of the big ‘Longshoremen’s Union told Chief William J. Flynn, of the United States Secret Service, that $1,035,000, or $45 for every man, was offered to keep the men out on strike for four weeks. After the sinking of the Lusitania, the man who approached the ‘longshoremen wrote under the name of “Mike Foley,” asking if an “S.” (strike) was to be called, that because of the “L. (Lusitania) affair,” his people were not going to do anything at present, and because the “Big Man” (who preceded von Rintelen) was going away. It will be recalled that after the sinking of the Lusitania, Dernburg was dismissed from the country because of his comments concerning the attitude of Germany towards submarine warfare.