The stock of our Highlands has furnished us many strong men, many of our greatest leaders, our greatest statesmen. Above all, it is fierce fighting stock. It has been held back by lack of education. These stark mountaineers are far more illiterate than were their grand-parents. To-day, in a Cumberland cabin, you may find a Latin grammar, or a tragedy in the original Greek, of which the owner will say, “I kaint read none of hit. Grandpap fotched it across the mountings when he come.” “Across the mountains” lay the Carolinas and Old Virginia, seats of the most cultured and aristocratic life this country ever knew, and equal to the best of any land. When we lost that, we lost the flower of the American civilization. We never shall replace it. There is no America to-day. There never can be, unless the seed of the old American stock—never lacking in leaders—one day shall raise its voice as of old in councils where it will find hearkening.
The South is a wide country, covering a certain diversity of nature, but it remains singularly like throughout its borders. Politically it is still the slave of the color question, whose end no man can see. That same question restricts the South largely to agriculture. Of late, Northern money and methods have been reaching out for the raw wealth of Southern mines and forests, even farming lands. It is in respect of these later slight changes in the character of the southern life that the A. P. L. has found its main function there. Had it not been for imported labor, the A. P. L. would have had no alien and seditious cases, no propaganda and no disloyalty to report, because it is absolutely true that our Southern States, which once thought themselves constitutionally justified in secession, to-day are more loyal to the American flag man for man, town for town, state for state, than any or all the remaining states in this Union.
This is true; and yet it is also altogether true that a few Southern States furnished more cases of desertion or draft evasion than thrice that number of states in any other portion of the Union, even though with heavy foreign-born population. How can these two statements be reconciled?
It is easy, and the level-headed A. P. L. chiefs time and again have made it plain in their reports. A large percent of the selective service work had to do with brave young fighting men to whom liberty and personal freedom made the breath of their nostrils. Many of them were ignorant—more is the pity. While we have coddled the treacherous European immigrant, we have forgotten our own children. Better had we thrown the maudlin Statue of Liberty into the sea, or turned its face about the other way!
The young Southerner who could not read grandpap’s Latin book, or any other book, who saw no daily paper and knew nothing of the outside world, knew only that he did not want to fight in a war of which he knew nothing and in which he did not think he or his had any stake. Nobody had threatened him, no men had stolen anything of his, he did not know where Germany was, and he had never seen a German to learn to hate him. Why should he fight? He concluded he would not fight. He would just hide till this war was over, because it was none of his war.
Very much of the A. P. L. work in the South had to do with getting into the young man’s comprehension that our Flag was in danger; that our women and children had been killed by men that did not fight like men but like brutes. Once that got into the mountain man’s mind, the day for desertion was past and gone. There are no braver or more skilled fighting men in the world than in these Southern hills. There are none more loyal. They did their part and were ready to do it wherever called. They helped win the war for America as well as those from richer states. Now that the war is over, let America forget Europe’s sordid sycophants, the grinning reservists of the “unbeaten” German Army, and turn attention to these, her own children—no cuckoo product without an ancestry to claim, who have no love for this country beyond their love for this country’s easy money.
MARYLAND
Largely Southern in its population, traditions and political sympathies, yet Northern in its aggressive spirit and industrial enterprise, the city of Baltimore perhaps is entitled to be called “American” more than any other big city on the Atlantic seaboard. It has always been American, and in this war has only proven anew what has always been known by those who knew Baltimore. A hundred years or so ago, in the War of 1812, its citizens fought and fell gloriously in defense of their city before the British. A beautiful monument commemorates their heroism. In this war, there was no city in the country more loyal to our Government and our Allies.
Let it not be thought, however, that the enemy was inactive in Baltimore. Trouble, active and potential, was present at all times. That it did not flare up into open destruction was no fault of the trouble-makers. Like all ports of entry, Baltimore has a considerable foreign element. Thousands of foreigners were employed in its shipbuilding plants, on its docks, and in the Bessemer steel works located near the city. Of pro-Germans and alien enemies there was a plenty. Many of them, indeed, remembering the landing of the Deutschland at Baltimore before the war, would have welcomed and aided a wholesale submarine raid by the enemy—were this possible.
However, this did not come to pass, nor did many other things come to pass that were justifiably feared. The pro-German, the alien enemy, the agitator, the Bolshevist were held safe at all times. Baltimore’s many industries were guarded well. Happily, that industry which has given her world-wide fame—the oyster industry—required no protection, and it is a pleasure to record that the nation’s supply of sea-food was uninterrupted during the war.