Cheradame, who was received and treated in a very friendly way by Woodrow Wilson, moved that “highly paid propagandists be sent at once to the United States to get in touch with President Wilson’s opponents, in particular with those who are membersof the Senate, as the Constitution of the United States gives that body power to veto any treaty signed by the President.”
To this extent had the success of anti-German propaganda in our country encouraged the agents of the French government! In the New York “Evening Post” of March 3, 1919, David Lawrence, the regular correspondent of that paper, then sojourning in Paris, speaks of “propaganda bureaus, known to the public of America, however, as ‘bureaus of education’ or ‘committees on public information,’ are conducted by most of the Allied governments in different parts of the world.” He points out that in Paris the method largely followed was that of bestowing social attention and decorations “on American civilians to make them support all sorts of causes.”
The Vienna correspondent of the “Germania,” Berlin, writing the latter part of June, 1919, refers to “the utterances of a French general staff officer, who asserts that every intelligent person in France knows that Germany did not desire the war. Germany could not have wished anything better for herself than the preservation of peace, but France was obliged to make propaganda for her own cause, and it had served the purpose of gaining the accession of the Americans.”
While English and French propaganda was thus conducted openly in the American press, a Committee of the United States Senate headed by Overman, was filling the newspapers with alarming accounts of German propaganda—conducted before the United States declared war on the Imperial German Government, the net result being a report of glittering generalities accusing everybody indiscriminately and convicting no one.
To what extent our own novelists, musical critics, film producers and “belles chanteuse” were tainted, it is not intended to discuss in this place. That some of our writers were hard put to find cause for describing the German people as Huns, a menace to civilization and a blot on humanity, is evidenced by a remarkable letter written to the New York “Times” by Gertrude Atherton, one of the most outspoken enemies of Germany, in the issue of July 6, 1915 (p. 8, cols. 7 and 8). Not to print it were an unpardonable omission, as it constitutes an indictment of German civilization which none should miss reading. She writes:
During the seven years that I lived in Munich, I learned to like Germany better than any State in Europe. I liked and admired the German people; I never suffered from an act of rudeness, and I was never cheated of a penny. I was not even taxed until a year before I left, because I made no money out of the country and turned in a considerable amount in the course of a year. When my maid went to the Rathaus to pay my taxes (moderate enough), the official apologized, saying that he had disliked to send me a bill, but the increasing cost of the armycompelled the country to raise money in every way possible. This was in 1908. The only disagreeable German I met was my landlord, and as we always dodged each other in the house or turned an abrupt corner to avoid encounter on the street, we steered clear of friction. And he was the only landlord I had.
I left Munich with the greatest regret, and up to the moment of the declaration of war I continued to like Germany better than any country in the world except my own.
The reason I left was significant. I spent, as a rule, seven or eight months in Munich, then a similar period in the United States, unless I traveled. I always returned to my apartment with such joy that when I arrived at night I did not go to bed lest I forget in sleep how overjoyed I was to get back to that stately and picturesque city, so prodigal with every form of artistic and aesthetic gratification.
But that was the trouble. For as long a time after my return as it took to write the book I had in mind I worked with the stored American energy I had within me; then for months in spite of good resolutions, and some self-anathema I did nothing. What was the use?
The beautiful German city, so full of artistic delight, was made to live in, not to work in. The entire absence of poverty in that city of half a million inhabitants alone gave it an air of illusions, gave one the sense of being the guest of a hospitable monarch who only asked to provide a banquet for all that could appreciate. I look back upon Munich as the romance of my life, the only place on this globe that came near to satisfying every want of my nature.