What saves a country in its need? Its loyal men. What reinforces an army called on for sudden enlargement? Its volunteers. What saved San Francisco in its days of riot and anarchy in 1850? Its Volunteers for law and order. What brought peace to Alder Gulch in 1863 when criminals ruled? Its Volunteers for law and order. America always has had Volunteers to fight for law and order against criminals. The law itself says you may arrest without warrant a man caught committing a felony. The line between formal written law and natural law is but thin at best.
There was, therefore, in the spring of 1917 in America, the greatest menace to our country we ever had known. Organized criminals were in a thousand ways attacking our institutions, jeopardizing the safety, the very continuity of our country. No loyal American was safe. We did not know who were the disloyal Americans. We faced an army of masked men. They outnumbered us. We had no machinery of defense adequate to fight them, because we foolishly had thought that all these whom we had welcomed and fed were honest in their protestations—and their oaths—when they came to us.
So now, we say, an imperious cry of NEED came, wrung from astounded and anguished America. It was as though this actual cry came from the heavens, “I need you, my children! Help me, my children!”
That cry was heard. How, it is of small importance to any member of the American Protective League, whose wireless antennæ, for the time attuned, caught down that silent wireless from the skies. No one man sent that message. Almost, we might say, no one man answered it, so many flocked in after the first word of answer. No one man of the two hundred and fifty thousand who first and last answered in one way or another would say or would want to say that he alone made so large an answer to so large a call. None the less, we deal here with actual history. So that now we may begin with details, begin to show how those first strands were woven which in a few weeks or months had grown into one of America’s strongest cables of anchorage against the terror which was abroad upon the sea.
CHAPTER II
THE WEB
Methods of Work—Getting the Evidence—The Organization in Detail—The Multifold Activities of the League.
It is to Mr. A. M. Briggs of Chicago that credit should go for the initial idea of the American Protective League. The first flash came many months before the declaration of war, although, for reasons outlined, it long was obvious that we must eventually go to war.
The Department of Justice in Chicago was in a terribly congested condition, and long had been, for the neutrality cases were piling up.
“I could get ten times as much done if I had men and money to work with,” said Hinton G. Clabaugh, Superintendent of the Bureau of Investigation. “There are thousands of men who are enemies of this country and ought to be behind bars, but it takes a spy to catch a spy, and I’ve got a dozen spies to catch a hundred thousand spies right here in Chicago. They have motor cars against my street cars. They’re supplied with all the money they want; my own funds are limited. We’re not at war. All this is civil work. We simply haven’t ways and means to meet this emergency.”
“I can get ten or twenty good, quiet men with cars who’ll work for nothing,” said Mr. Briggs one day. “They’ll take either their business time or their leisure time, or both, and join forces with you. I know we’re not at war, but we’re all Americans together.”