Oswego, Kansas, reports succinctly: “One hundred percent patriotism—no aliens.”
White City, Kansas, says: “Ours is a community of loyal citizens. We spoke to a few about talking too much. Nothing serious.”
Council Grove, Kansas, proved to be a great deal quieter than it used to be in the days of the Santa Fé trail. The Chief says: “We had a few pro-German sympathizers whose cases we turned over to the Department of Justice to investigate.”
NEBRASKA
The A. P. L. Division at Omaha, Nebraska, was organized at a rather late date, July 1, 1918. The Armistice shattered the activities at a time when there were three hundred members of the League, each man ready to do what was asked of him. The Omaha Chief reports sixty cases of disloyalty and sedition, and several thousand investigations made in conjunction with D. J. as a result of the slacker raids, as well as 700 in connection with the Department of Labor.
The Chief at Hastings, Nebraska, says: “I did not know the work would be so extensive, or that there would be so much to do. We have investigated some cases for Omaha, and have done a great deal of work on draft cases for the state and county boards. We have been glad to do this work, and I am thankful that I could help my country this much.”
Callaway, Nebraska, has a grievance: “I had one genuine case of seditious utterance, but we did not get the evidence. This man was elected State Senator by the Non-Partisan League. He worked against the Liberty Bond drive. Fortunately, this year our Senator is not of his sort politically.”
David City, Nebraska, reports the usual routine work. One pro-German was taken into custody for making seditious remarks, and was bound over to the grand jury for trial. The local Chief reports that his organization is being held intact against any future emergency.
CHAPTER III
THE STORY OF THE SOUTH
The South is, in its percentage as to population, the finest, cleanest, truest and most loyal part of the United States to-day. It holds more of the native born Americans, fewer of the foreign born, and fewer alien enemies than any like extent of our National possessions. The only pure-bred American population, sufficiently so to entitle it to a distinct origin-color of its own on the government census maps, lies along the crest of the southern Appalachians. There, in parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, lower Virginia, there are Americans who for generations have known no admixture of any foreign blood. You will find illiteracy there, poverty, small industrial development. That has come about by reason of a topography which has left transportation undeveloped. The people have been held back from the westbound progress of the nation almost as though caught by the cleats of the great flume through which poured our early Scotch-Irish, Indian-fighting, wilderness-conquering ancestry. But it is the finest of gold that those cleats have caught—a clean-bred, persistent type, of the highest honor, the highest courage, the highest intellectual quality, the highest physical qualities. Here and here alone you will find a true American type, come down with little change from our Colonial days. Would God that every state in the North and West had these men as the real inheritors of America, and not the snarling mob of foreigners who in the last few decades have come to be called American citizens. We have seen in some part how loyal these last have been, how much they cared for the flag of America.