Now all over America came a marvellous spiritual awakening. The sacrifice of the President’s noble life, and his wife’s thrilling effort to shield her husband, was not in vain. Once more the world knew the resistless power of a martyr’s death. Women and men alike were stirred to warlike zeal and a joy in national sacrifice and service. The enlistment officers were swamped with a crush of young and old, eager to join the colours; and within three days following the President’s assassination a million soldiers were added to the army of defence and a million more were turned away. It was no longer a question how to raise a great American army, but how to train and equip it, and how to provide it with officers.
Most admirable was the behaviour of the great body of German-Americans; in fact it was a German-American branch of the American Defence Society, financed in America, that started the beautiful custom, which became universal, of wearing patriotic buttons bearing the sacred words: “The Union! The Flag!”
“It was one thing,” wrote Bernard Ridder in the Chicago Staats-Zeitung, “for German-Americans to side with Germany in the great European war (1914-1919) when only our sympathies were involved. It is quite a different thing for us now in a war that involves our homes and our property, all that we have in the world. When Germany attacks America, she attacks German-Americans, she attacks us in our material interests, in our fondest associations; and we will resist her just as in 1776 the American colonists, who were really English, resisted England, the mother country, when she attacked them in the same way.”
I was impressed by the truth of this statement during a visit that I made to Milwaukee, where I found greatly improved conditions. In fact, German-Americans themselves were bringing to light the activities of German spies and vigorously opposing German propaganda.
In Allentown, Pennsylvania, which has a large German population, I heard of a German-American mother named Roth, who was so zealous in her loyalty to the United States that she rose at five o’clock on the day following the President’s assassination and enlisted her three sons before they were out of bed.
In Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities women volunteered by thousands as postmen, street-car conductors, elevator operators and for service in factories and business houses, so as to release the men for military service. Chicago newspapers printed pictures of Mrs. Harold F. McCormick, Mrs. J. Ogden Armour, Mrs. J. Clarence Webster and other prominent society women in blue caps and improvised uniforms, ringing up fares on the Wabash Avenue cars for the sake of the example they would set to others.
In San Francisco, Denver, Portland, Oregon, Omaha, and Salt Lake City a hundred thousand women, at gatherings of women’s clubs and organisations, formally joined the Women’s National War Economy League and pledged themselves as follows:
“We, the undersigned American women, in this time of national need and peril, do hereby promise:
“(1) To buy no jewelry or useless ornaments for one year and to contribute the amount thus saved (from an average estimated allowance) to the Women’s National War Fund.
“(2) To buy only two hats a year, the value of said hats not to exceed ten dollars, and to contribute the amount thus saved (from an average estimated allowance) to the Women’s National War Fund.