“It was bully while it lasted,” they declared. “Anyway, they’d have got us sooner or later.”
Before noon next day the youthful pseudo-captain was wiping his tears away and explaining why he had been impersonating an officer. There was a group of musical comedy girls in the foreground and a trail of forged checks and unpaid club and hotel bills in the background. He is learning in Leavenworth prison, now, that the lion’s skin is dangerous apparel and that discretion is the better part of a masquerade.
The League files are crammed with reports which have blacker themes—or the scarlet motive which stands for constructive treason. There are folders that deal with reported graft in the purchase of materials for Army camps and subsequent fires which covered up the scanting of buildings. There are others on cases of undue influence brought to bear on members of exemption boards; and sickening instances of “quacks” who have ruined strong but cowardly young bodies for blood money. There are tales of extortion by shyster lawyers for filling out questionnaires—and other tales of money paid by enemy aliens to disreputable “fixers” for pretended protection against the draft.
The mere classified index of the master file at Washington intrigues the imagination. Just a glance at the main “guides” will indicate the range:
Enemy aliens
Unfriendly neutrals
“First-paper” aliens
Disloyal citizens
Pro-German “radicals”
Native-born
Naturalized
Disloyal Government employees
Possible spies or German agents
Pro-German applicants for Government positions
Citizens or aliens living in luxury without visible sources of income
Suspicious foreigners
Enemy propaganda
(Twenty sub-heads here)
Enemy alien funds
Alien extortion cases
I. W. W. agitators
Check of jury panels to keep out pro-Germans
Incendiary fires in war-material plants
Wireless stations
Bomb and dynamite cases
Passport applicants
Seditious utterances
Seditious publications
Seditious meetings
Anti-military activities
Organizations to resist draft
Attempted draft evasions
False exemption claims
Physical disability
Dependent relatives
Desertion of wife to enlist in Army
Fraudulent claims of marriage
Army deserters
Impersonation of officers
Sale of liquor to soldiers and sailors
Sale of narcotics to men in service
Hotel surveillance of doubtful transients
Liberty Bond and Red Cross slackers
Theft of Red Cross supplies
Hoarding of foods
Destruction of foods
Character and loyalty of applicants for commissions
In making these investigations the League has coöperated, not only with the Department of Justice, but also with Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, the Alien Property Custodian, the Food Administration, the Shipping Board, the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., and with various other offices at Washington.
The number and variety of cases handled have not constituted the major service of the League, however. Rather, it has been the character and intelligence of the membership—the ability to enter and comb any social, professional, or business circle for information without betraying that an inquiry was afoot. From this angle alone the original idea was pretty close to an inspiration, since it improvised in the hour of need such an organization as not even a generation of effort and many million dollars could have built up.
Just because it was improvised and its personnel kept secret, the League could meet the most dangerous German agents on their own ground and paralyze their efforts by keeping them guessing. Propaganda dies on the lips of the man who can’t be certain that his listener is not making mental notes for an official report of the conversation. And the most subtle scheme of spying or sabotage is bound to drag when the plot master is harassed by doubts of the native-born or naturalized accomplices he must enlist for its execution.
One instance to show how much a local organization must depend upon its specialists. Last summer it became necessary to know beyond question whether or not a prominent young German-American in a seaboard city was supplying the funds for the local agitation against the draft. Suspicion attached to him because he spent many evenings aboard his fast-racing schooner in the yacht club harbour, and could not be induced, in any polite and casual way, to invite any of the League’s yachting members aboard. His crew, two Scandinavians, were as voluble as oysters.
The schooner was being tuned up for the annual club cruise late in July. Two extra sailors would be needed for the race. The League provided one of them. An upstanding young American, too young for the first officers’ training camp but in line for the second, was taken into the League, carefully coached, and turned loose in the harbour with a loaned cat-boat to impress the German-American skipper with his sailing skill. The boy finessed his approach successfully and was asked to train with the crew. But he found nothing material to report until the schooner had actually won the big race.