On April 2nd came President Wilson's message demanding war. I was in the opera house that night. Between the acts extras appeared. I telephoned Swope of the World who confirmed the news. While I was receiving this information one of the directors of the Metropolitan Opera Company came in the room. I told him what had happened and asked if he was not going to do something—order the news read from the stage—for example, and the "Star Spangled Banner" played. He said, "No, the opera company is neutral."
I returned to the box where I was sitting and stepping to the front called on the house to cheer President Wilson. There was, for a moment, surprise at such unconventional action, but the whole house soon broke into cheers.
Conventionalism was gone.
The opera was DeKoven's "Canterbury Pilgrims" and a few minutes after the curtain rose on the last act Frau Ober, a German singer, who was taking one of the principal parts, keeled over in a faint,—rage, perhaps, that the Yankees were at last daring to cheer, to assert themselves against the Kaiser!
As I spoke in Albany, Buffalo, Harrisburg, Trenton and Boston, in Philadelphia, Providence and many times in New York and other places, I noted always an eagerness to learn about Germany, the war and foreign affairs. We Americans had travelled, but not with our eyes open—"seeing, we saw not."
The first great, great question we faced was that of universal service for the war—or the selective draft—again how farsighted our President then proved himself. What would be our situation now if we had tried to go to war under the volunteer system? This question once solved, our President led us with a breadth of vision, an efficiency, and on a scale commensurate with the size of the undertaking in which we at last had become partners.
Perhaps we are a little over indulgent, however, in the treatment of the German enemy alien within our gates. No American singer or musician could travel about Germany at will, unwatched by the police, collecting money from Americans to be used in propaganda, or things much worse, against America. Americans in Germany are compelled to report twice daily to the police and cannot leave their homes at night. November 17, 1917—seven months after we went to war with Germany—I met Hugo Schmidt, a director of the Deutsche Bank, riding in Central Park. He lived at the German Club, saw whom he liked and only reported to the police when he changed his residence. In January 1918, he was finally interned.
Long before our break with Germany, American consuls and officials were insulted in the street and in opera houses because they made use of their own language, not at all because they were taken for British for every one knew that all British had been interned.
The wife of our naval attaché attended a reception presided over by a German admiral's wife. She was presented to this high personage by the wife of a German naval officer, who, in making the presentation, spoke in English. The admiral's wife rebuked both the wife of our attaché and the officer's wife for daring to talk English. I am thankful to say that Mrs. Gherardi immediately left the house to receive later the officially ordered apologies of the admiral's wife.
And while Americans did not dare use their own language in Berlin in time of peace between the two countries yet after the outbreak of war, newspapers in the United States, printed in German, owned by Germans and German sympathisers, dared to attack America and her President.