"E. Ruskay, Room 700 B, Sherman Hotel, Chicago.
"Party who receives $12,500 monthly from competitors is now interfering with business in hand. Do you know of any way and means to check him? Wire.
"F. Brown."
"Ruskay" was Lamar. Later in the day the German sent this message:
"Twelve thousand five hundred now at capitol. Conference here today plans to guarantee outsiders and settlement possible within few days. New issue urgently needed. Notify B."
The "party" mentioned in the first despatch was the code designation for Gompers, and he was indicated in the second message as "Twelve thousand five hundred." "B" was Buchanan, upon whose connection with labor Rintelen told Meloy the success of the plan rested. Lamar hurried to New York, arriving July 19, and met Rintelen in a limousine at the 100th Street entrance to Central Park; on the ride which followed the "Wolf" told Rintelen that a strike then going on among the munitions workers at Bridgeport was "only a beginning of his efforts," and that within thirty days the industry would be paralyzed throughout the country. Meloy advanced the information that Gompers had just gone to Bridgeport to stop the strike, to which Lamar replied:
"Buchanan will settle Gompers within twenty-four hours!"
The clippings kept coming in as testimony to the vigorous work being done by the organization's press bureau: the Council attacked the Federal Reserve Banks as "munitions trusts," it cited on July 8 nine ships lying in port awaiting munitions cargoes, and attacked Dudley Field Malone, then Collector of the Port of New York, for permitting such ships to clear; it claimed to represent a million labor votes, and four million and a half farmers; it listened eagerly to an address by Hannis Taylor, a disciple of the late warmhearted Secretary of State, Mr. Bryan, in which Taylor criticized President Wilson and was roundly cheered by the German-American element in the audience. Semi-occasionally during the midsummer heat Charles Oberwager, attorney for the Council (whose firm had received handsome fees from von Papen), rose to deny any German connection with the organization. The Council assailed Secretary Lansing as a man "whose radicalism was liable to plunge this nation into war." The Council assailed, in fact, any project which furthered the interests of the Allies. Rintelen began to have his doubts of the effectiveness of Lamar's work. The bank account in the Trans-Atlantic Trust Company had dwindled from $800,000 to $40,000, and Rintelen admitted that his transactions with Lamar cost him several hundred thousand dollars. Labor's National Peace Conference died quietly, Lamar flitted away to a country estate at Pittsfield, Mass., and Rintelen started across the Atlantic Ocean.
August wore on. The Council was getting ready for a second gaseous session, when Milton Snelling, a representative of the Washington Central Labor Union, who had been elected a first vice-president of the Council, withdrew from its membership, because he "discovered persons participating in the meetings who have been hanging on the fringe of the labor movement for their own personal aggrandizement, men who have been discarded ... others never having been members of any organization of labor," and because Jacob C. Taylor, the cigar-making delegate from East Orange, N. J., said, in answer to a query as to the Council's purpose: "We want to stop the export of munitions to the Allies. You see Germany can make all the munitions she wants." Then—and it may be coincidence—about one week later the New York World began its publication of certain of the papers found in the brief case which Dr. Heinrich Albert, of the German Embassy, allowed to escape him on a New York elevated train; on August 19 Buchanan resigned the Council, and Taylor was elected to succeed him.
Indictments were returned against Rintelen, as well as against Lamar, Martin, Buchanan and their associates, on December 28, 1915. Buchanan at once exploded with a retaliatory demand for the impeachment of United States District Attorney Marshall, upon which Congress dared not take action. Marshall gracefully retired from the trial in May, 1916, lest he prejudice the Government's case, and Lamar, Martin and Rintelen were convicted of infraction of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and sentenced to one year each in a New Jersey prison. Thus ended Labor's National Peace Council, thanks to David Lamar.
The project for an embargo looked attractive to the Embassy, however—so attractive that while the Council was at the height of its activity, Baron Kurt von Reiswitz wrote on July 22, 1915, from Chicago to Dr. Albert:
"Everything else concerning the proposed embargo conference you will find in the enclosed copy of the report to the Ambassador. A change has, however, come up, as the mass meeting will have to be postponed on account of there being insufficient time for the necessary preparations. It will probably be held there in about two weeks.