THE WORST ENEMIES OF CERTAIN LOYAL AMERICANS
March 10, 1918
The army and navy of the United States in the training camps, on the high seas, and at the battle front, are at this moment proving themselves the most potent agencies of Americanism that our country contains. All good Americans should feel a peculiar pride in the fine and gallant loyalty with which the great majority of the Americans of German descent have come forward to do their part to win this war against the brutal and merciless tyranny of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns. As regards able-bodied men, this service must be rendered in the army, for in war-time no other form of activity can be accepted as a substitute for the fighting work of the fighting man.
I continually meet officers from the front. A captain recently out of the trenches called on me the other day. His father and mother were born in Germany. He himself, after going through a small American college, had spent three years at Heidelberg. He mentioned that one of his lieutenants was born in Norway, and that another was of Irish parentage, and then continued by saying that already his brief experience of the war had given him a horror of the Germany of to-day, had convinced him that our only safety lay in the complete Americanization of all our people and therefore in the insistence that English should be the only language of this country and the only language taught in any primary school, and that he regarded such organizations as the German-American Alliance as guilty of moral treason to America as the worst and most dangerous foes of good Americans of German blood, and as richly deserving to be promptly suppressed and punished.
An officer from our destroyer squadron across the seas informed me that our destroyers had accounted for nearly a score of submarines; that about a quarter of their crews were, as indicated by their names, of German descent, but straight-out Americans and nothing else; that his own best gun-pointer was named Fritz Heinz; and that their keenest indignation was reserved for the German officials in Germany and the German-American Alliance in America whose actions tended to make a wall between them and their fellow Americans and who inflicted the most cruel wrong possible upon them by exciting among other Americans an indiscriminate distrust and anger toward all men of German origin.
These men were absolutely right. We speak in the name of all good Americans and on behalf of Fritz and Adolph and Gustav exactly as on behalf of Bill and Harry and Edward, when we demand the prompt suppression of the German-American Alliance and of all similar organizations. The German blood is exactly as good as any other blood, but exactly as, under the corroding influence of slavery, masses of Americans of the best blood once became the enemies of the Union and of humanity, so under the debasing and brutalizing influence of the kultur of the last fifty years, Germany has become the cruel and treacherous enemy of the United States and of all the other liberty-loving nations of mankind.