However opinion may differ as to the blame for the inability to peg the exchange, we know it was a bonanza to the speculators. Ponzi ought to have been there to compete with the whiskered money sharks. And we know there were Americans as well as British, French, Russians and other nationals who were numbered among those speculators.
After all is said we must admit that the money situation was one that was exceedingly difficult to handle. It was infinitely worse in Bolshevikdom. The doughboy who used to find pads of undetached counterfeit Kerenskie on the dead Bolsheviks, can well believe that thirty dollars of good American chink one day in the Soviet part of Russia bought an American newspaper man one million paper roubles of the Lenine-Trotsky issue, and that before night, spending his money at the famine prices in the worthless paper, he was a dead-broke millionaire.
During the time American soldiers were in Russia they were paid in checks drawn on London. During the war, this was at the pegged rate ($4.76-1/4) which had been fixed by agreement between London and New York bankers to prevent violent fluctuations. But at the end of the war, after the Armistice, the peg was pulled and the natural course of the market sent the pound sterling steadily downward, as the American dollar rose in value as compared with other currencies of the world. To those who were dealing day by day this was all in the game of money exchange. But to the soldier in far-off North Russia who had months of pay coming to him when he left the forests of the Vaga and Onega this was a real financial hardship. Many a doughboy whose wife or mother was in need at home because of the rapidly mounting prices put up by the slackers in the shops and the slackers in the marts of trade, now saw his little pay check shrink up in exchange value. He felt that his superior officers in the war department had hardly looked after his interests as well as they might have done. Major Nichols did succeed at Brest in getting the old pegged rate for the men and officers, but many had already parted with the checks at heavy discount for fear that the nearer they got to the land for which they had been fighting, the more discount there would be on the pay checks with which their Quartermaster had paid them their pittances. Soldiers of the second detachment came on home with Colonel Stewart to Camp Custer and were obliged (most of them) to take their little $3.82 per pound sterling of the British pound sterling paid them by Quartermaster Major Ely in North Russia, at $4.76-1/4. Later, through the efforts of the late Congressman Nichols, many of those soldiers were reimbursed. Of course complete restitution would have been made by the war department if all the soldiers had sent their claims in. Hundreds of American veterans of the North Russian campaign lost ten to twenty per cent of their pay check’s hard earned value.
XXIX
PROPAGANDA AND PROPAGANDA AND—
Propaganda Two-Edged Tool—From Crusaders To Carping Cynics—Be Warned—Afraid To Tell The Truth—Startling Stories Of Bolo Atrocities Published—Distortion Disgusts Brave Men—Wrong To Play On Race Prejudices—Our Own Government Missed Main Chance—Doughboy Beset By Active Enemy In Front And Plagued By Active Propaganda Of Hybrid Varieties—Sample Of Bolshevik Propaganda Used On Americans—Yanks Punched Holes In Red Propaganda—Propaganda To Doughboy Connotes Lies And Distortion And Concealment Of Truth.
“Over there, over there, the Yanks are coming,” sang the soldiers in training camp as they changed from recruits into fighting units of the 85th Division at Battle Creek. And the morale of the 339th was evidenced, some thought, by the fervor with which the officers and men roared out their hate chorus, “Keep your head down, you dirty Hun. If you want to see your father in your Fatherland, Keep your head down, you dirty Hun.” Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe morale is made of finer stuff than hate and bombast. Maybe idealism does enter into it. Of course there are reactionary periods in the history of a people when selfishness and narrowness and bigotry combine to cry down the expression of its idealism. Not in 1918.
No secret was made of the fact that the Americans went into the war with a fervor born of an aroused feeling of world-responsibility. We must do our part to save Christian civilization from the mad nationalism of the German people led by their diabolic Hohenzollern reigning family and war bureaucracy. Too much kultur would ruin the world. Germany must be whipped. We tingled with anticipation of our entrance to the trenches beside the bled-white France. We were going “Over There” in the spirit of crusaders.
What transformed a hesitating, reluctant, long-suffering people into crusaders? Propaganda. Press work. Five-minute men. Open and secret work. It was necessary to uncover and oppose the open and secret propaganda of paid agents of Germany, and woefully deluded German-Americans who toiled freely to help Kaiser Bill, as though to disprove the wisdom of the statement that no man can serve two masters. We beat their propaganda, uncovered the tracks of the Prussian beast in our midst, found out, we thought, the meaning of explosions and fires and other terrible accidents in our munition plants, and turned every community into vigilant searchers for evidences of German propaganda or deviltry of a destructive kind and we persecuted many an innocent man.
And now we sadly suspect that in fighting fire with fire, that is in fighting propaganda with propaganda, we descended by degrees to use the same despicable methods of distorting truth for the sake of influencing people to a certain desired end. England and France and all other countries had the same sad experience. Doubtless we could not very well avoid it. It is part of the hell of war to think about it now. Propaganda, fair one, you often turn out to be a dissipated hag, a camp follower.
Many years from now some calm historian going over the various Blue Books and White Books and Red Books, with their stories of the atrocities of the enemy, ad nauseam, will come upon the criminating Official Documents of various nations that sought to propagandize the world into trembling, cowering belief in a new dragon. Bolshevism with wide-spread sable wings, thrashing his spiny tail and snorting fire from his nostrils was volplaning upon the people of earth with open red mouth and cruel fangs and horrid maw down which he would gulp all the political, economic and religious liberties won from the centuries past. The dragon was about to devour civilization.