A bond salesman earning $10,000 a year was only two weeks under thirty-one years of age on the 5th of June, 1917. A report came in from a former sweetheart who had been jilted. Operatives found where the subject had made application for two insurance policies, taken out two or three years previous, in another city, which gave his age and place of birth. When brought into the office, the man stated that no authentic birth record was in existence, and that his birth was recorded in the family Bible in a Southern city, in the custody of his mother. Not having the address of his mother, that angle not having been covered, we anticipated that he would attempt to communicate with his mother. The wires were covered and a message was picked up about thirty minutes after subject had left the office instructing the mother to destroy the family birth record page in the Bible and to send him an affidavit that he was born a year earlier than he was. Needless to say, the local operatives in that district where his mother lived secured the necessary legal data. We hope that this young man has done more for his country during the months he has been in France than he did previously as far as being a patriotic American is concerned. Incidentally, he felt so secure in his position that during the spring months of 1918 he had married.
A man and woman occupying a small cottage in the outskirts of the city were reported as acting in a very suspicious manner, keeping the windows carefully covered, not allowing anyone to come into the house, and not even allowing the meter readers to get in until after considerable delay. Boxes of glass of a small size were delivered very often, and investigation at the glass house showed that they always paid cash, would not give any name, and always received the supplies at the front porch, and that the same practice was indulged in about the delivery of hardware, small orders of lumber, and other materials. The house was carefully watched for a couple of weeks, and many attempts were made to get in. The sound of machinery could be heard and one of the operatives who finally got in as a meter reader reported a small electric motor in the basement which seemed to be some sort of a work shop. The man and woman who lived there kept so close to his heels that he was not able to do much without exciting suspicion. At regular intervals the couple visited the post office, where they shipped packages to different addresses throughout the Northwest. These packages were registered, and they seemed to be very careful in their handling of them. It was decided that we had best pick them up on the street and bring the couple to the office when they had these packages in their possession, and the operative would follow. Examination of the packages in the office disclosed the fact that there were small framed pictures which this man and woman were manufacturing and sending to the woman’s husband, who was on the road selling them. This satisfactorily explained the mysterious packages which were thought to be infernal machines. The queerness of this woman in always carrying a small leather traveling bag prompted us to examine the contents of the bag, which proved to be a large amount of money which this woman was carrying openly through the street of Minneapolis, part of it in coins. When reprimanded for this matter of taking the money around with her, she explained that they were Danish and did not understand American customs very well. While living in Chicago they had deposited the savings of several years in a private bank which failed, and ever since that time they had kept their savings constantly on their persons. We explained the banking system to them and sent them to a fellow countryman, who is the vice-president of one of our large banks. They left their money in his custody, except a considerable portion which they invested in Liberty Bonds.
CHAPTER XIV
THE STORY OF NEW ORLEANS
The A. P. L. in the Sunny South—Strong Division of the Crescent City—How the League was Organized—Rapid Growth and Wide Activities—Curbing of Vice—Cleaning Up a City.
There is not in all the United States a more lovable city than that founded by Iberville, in an earlier century, above the Delta of the Mississippi. At first French, then part Spanish, part American, all Southern and yet all cosmopolitan, New Orleans has what we may call a personality not approached by any other community on this continent. Up to the time when, a decade or so ago, the once self-contented South began to reach out for a commercial future, so-called, New Orleans was the true Mecca on this continent of the Northern tourists. No need to go to Europe if one wanted different scenes. Here existed always the glamour of old-world customs, an atmosphere as foreign as it was wholly delightful. As the home of easy living and good cooking, as the place of kindly climate and gentle manners, all flavored with a wholesome carelessness as to life and its problems, New Orleans was, to use a very trite expression, in a class quite by herself. She never has had a rival, and more is the pity that the old New Orleans has succumbed to the modern tendency towards utilization and change which has marked all America.
Of such a community it might be expected that none too rigid a view of life and law would obtain. This would not be true of the better elements of New Orleans, yet it was in part true of all the life along the old Gulf Coast, where Lafitte and all his roisterers once lived, and where all the gentleness and ease of nature tended toward what we might call loose living—or at least joie de vivre. The soul of New Orleans came out annually in her Mardi Gras—the exuberant flowering of a spirit perennially young and riante.
And yet to New Orleans came the sobering days of the war, as to all the rest of America. The conscription fell upon her as upon every other city in America; and she also was asked to open her purse for the furtherance of the war and its purposes. How she responded need not be asked, and need not really be recorded, for New Orleans has always maintained beneath her laughing exterior as stern a sense of duty as may be found anywhere in all the world. To be French is to smile—but to be firm. Indeed, New Orleans showed one of the strange phenomena of American life which is not always known in the North—the truth that the South is more Puritan than ever New England was. Texas, supposed to be a bad border state, to-day has stronger laws regarding vice and liquor than New England ever has had since the time of the Blue Laws, and more strictly enforced. Louisiana also, gentle and kindly, has a stiffer code of morals than any commonwealth of the stern and rockbound coast. She smiles—but stands firm.
These reflections become the more obvious as one reads the main story of the activities of A. P. L. in New Orleans. The division does not pride itself ever so much upon its promptness with Liberty Loans, its activity in slacker drives, its firmness as to sabotage and propaganda, as it does upon other phases of work which at first were incidental to the prosecution of the Government war activities. The great boast of the New Orleans division is that it has kept young soldiers away from bad women, and kept women, once evil, away from themselves and gave them a chance to reform and to live a different life. So, therefore, one who shall study all the manifold activities of the American Protective League in this country will see that it had many ways in which it rendered service to the people. Perhaps, long after the League shall have been dissolved, in part forgotten, the New Orleans rehabilitation home, ten miles out from the city, will remain as a monument to the activities of that singular organization which, like King Rex himself, ruler of the Carnival, came from some mysterious region and vanished thence again, leaving behind only good memories.
On January 29, in 1918, the New Orleans division of A. P. L. had only thirty-eight members. At that time Mr. Charles Weinberger became manager, there being associated with him as assistant chief Mr. Arthur G. Newmyer. There were at first but limited office quarters, but in a very short time new headquarters were established and the plant installed covering approximately ten thousand square feet of space. This was on April 1, 1918. On February 1, 1919, the total membership was 2,097.
League operations were distributed under a Bureau of Investigation and a Bureau of Information, each in charge of an assistant chief. The investigation work was divided by Special D. J. Agent Beckham as follows: Headquarters bureau, handling enemy alien activities, disloyalty, sedition, propaganda, etc., had two units, a staff of eighty-three headquarters lieutenants, and also a ward organization. In each of the seventeen wards of New Orleans there was a lieutenant who had enough operatives under him to cover his neighborhood thoroughly.