Reviewing the prosecutions under the Espionage Act, the Civil Liberties Bureau, 41 Union Square, which itself was repeatedly raided, on February 13, 1919, issued the following summary:
The bureau has had, since the beginning of the war, a standing order with a newspaper clipping company covering all references in the press of the United States to disloyalty, sedition, espionage and the Espionage law. As a result, we have the most illuminating record of cases which it has been possible to complete without access to the records of the Attorney General. We have no record of a single instance when a spy has been imprisoned under this law.
Furthermore, in the cases cited in the Attorney General’s report as typical of those prosecuted under the Espionage law, there is not one case in which the prisoner was convicted of being a paid German spy, or of even trying to find out military secrets. All the convictions which are reported arose under section 13 of the Penal Code, under which the maximum sentence is two years. So far as we have any record, cases of this nature which have arisen under the Espionage act have been terminated by the internment of the accused, without imprisonment. On the other hand, American citizens exercising (perhaps without discretion) the right of free speech in war time have been sentenced to as high as twenty years in the penitentiary. According to the data in our possession, about two-thirds of the convictions have been for remarks in private conversation. The remainder have been for statements made in public speeches and in literature publicly circulated.
The daily press, with the very rarest exceptions, was in accord with the mob and the spirit of the Espionage Act. If ever it was evident how little the German Americans had been taken into consideration by their fellow citizens, it became undeniably patent in the refusal of the press, though largely dependent on the support of this element, to cry a halt to the persecutions. Every man arrested on some charge was glaringly pictured in the character of a dangerous spy, and fanatical women were given much space in their columns for organized assaults on German toys and German music. The German people were described as moral lepers. The New York “Herald” advocated the hanging of German Americans to lamp posts. The New York “Sun,” late in October, 1918, soberly printed this:
Yet by not a few are we ominously told that the German is a man of like nature with ourselves and that as such we must be prepared to live with him after the war. This is not thetruth; it is rather the most menacing lie upon the horizon of the conflict and its conclusion.... Scrutinized historically and presented boldly, the German cannot be but recognized as a distinctly separate and pathological human species. He is not human in the sense that other men are human.
Societies were formed for the Suppression of Everything German, and there exists at present in all parts of the United States a secret society pledged not to buy of any German American or to give employment to any member of that race.
The German Americans manifested an utterly helpless spirit in the situation. No uniform demand was formulated to be presented to Congress demanding the repeal of the Espionage Act after the excuse that called it into existence had ceased to exist, or calling on the authorities for protection. Some formed a society known as “The Friends of German Democracy,” under Mr. Franz Sigel, which adopted resolutions pledging complete and unreserved loyalty. It was rewarded with a letter from a woman heading an anti-German movement who subsequently was shown to be an English subject, in which the Friends of German Democracy were roundly told that “the only good German-American is a dead one.”
Another woman, the daughter of German parents, Mrs. William Jay, gained great notoriety by her campaign against German music, and was instrumental in stopping German plays, operas and symphonies in New York before and after the armistice had been signed, and also in sending many well-established German musicians into exile, or to an internment camp. Many, courting favor and recognition from persons having some social standing, seeing their own race utterly helpless in counteracting the feeling of contempt, joined with their detractors in order to remove all doubt as to their own loyalty.
In many States the teaching of the German language was prohibited by the legislatures. In New York City, though the Germans have a total vote of 1,250,000, including the women, they were unable to prevent—and made no attempt to prevent—an order forbidding the teaching of German or the introduction of new books of history in the schools in which their race is described as Huns and made responsible for every atrocity ascribed to it in the heat of war.
The only outstanding resistance to the spirit of Anglicising the country was recorded in New Jersey, where the German language was put under the ban in the Masonic lodges, and where John J. Plemenik, Master of Schiller Lodge, in Newark, refused to comply with the order of the Grand Lodge on the ground that for fifty years the lodge had worked in German, under the sanction of the Grand Lodge. Rather than submit to the edict of the Grand Lodge of the State the master walked out of the lodge room, followed by 200 Masons, some of them from English-speaking lodges. The example found a near parallel in one of the twenty-seven German lodges in New York City, one of them above 125 years old, after which an order extending thetime for discontinuing the German language of the lodges was promptly issued. All the lodges were, however, unanimous in support of steps against obedience to the edict.