Copy of a check from Count von Bernstorff to the Fair Play Printing
and Publishing Company
Motion pictures appealed to the Germans as a practical and graphic means of spreading through America visual proof of their kindness to prisoners, their prodigious success with new engines of war, and their brutal reception at the hands of the nations they were forced in self-defence to invade. So Dr. Albert financed the American Correspondent Film Company, two of whose stockholders were Claussen and Dr. Karl A. Fuehr, a translator in Viereck's office. As late as August, 1916, Karl Wunnenberg and Albert A. Sander, of the "Central Powers Film Company," which was also subsidized to circulate German-made moving pictures, engaged George Vaux Bacon, a free-lance theatrical press agent, to go to England at a salary of $100 a week, obtain valuable information, and transmit it in writing in invisible ink to Holland, where it would be forwarded to Germany. The two principals were later indicted on a charge of having set afoot a military enterprise against Great Britain, and were sentenced to two years in prison; Bacon, the cat's-paw, received a year's sentence. (Sander, a German, had been involved in secret-agent work on a previous occasion when he assaulted Richard Stegler for not disavowing an affidavit explaining his acquisition of a false passport.) The secret ink they gave Bacon was invisible under all conditions unless a certain chemical preparation, which could be compounded only with distilled water, was applied to it.
At the start of the war there began in Congress a vehement debate over the question of imposing a legislative embargo on the shipment of arms and ammunition to the Allies. In these debates participated men who undoubtedly were sincere in the convictions they expressed. Nevertheless, in the late winter and early spring of 1915, a hireling of the Germans began to seek secret conferences with congressmen in a Washington hotel and to outline to them plans for compelling an embargo on munitions. His activities bring us to the affairs of the National German-American Alliance, Germany's most powerful and least tangible factor of general propaganda in the United States.
The organization had a large membership among Germans in America; it has been estimated that there were three million members, who constituted a great majority of the adult German-American population. It received a Federal charter in 1907. The Alliance, to quote Professor John William Scholl, of the University of Michigan, (in the New York Times of March 2, 1918), "strives to awaken a sense of unity among the people of German origin in America; to 'centralize' their powers for the 'energetic defense of such justified wishes and interests' as are not contrary to the rights and duties of good citizens; to defend its class against 'nativistic encroachments'; to 'foster and assure good, friendly relations of America to the old German fatherland.' Such are its declared objects.
"All petty quibbling aside, this programme can mean nothing else than the maintenance of a Germanized body of citizens among us, conscious of their separateness, resistant to all forces of absorption. It is mere camouflage to state in a later paragraph that this body does not intend to found a 'State within the State,' but merely sees in this centralization the 'best means of attaining and maintaining the aims' set forth above.
"All existing societies of Germans are called upon as 'organized representatives of Deutschtum' to make it a point of honor to form a national alliance, to foster formation of new societies in all States of the Union, so that the whole mass of Germans in America can be used as a unit for political action. This league pledges itself 'with all legal means at hand unswervingly and at all times to enter the lists for the maintenance and propagation of its principles for their vigorous defense wherever and whenever in danger.'"
Professor Scholl, himself a teacher of German, continues: "A little attention to the context of the sentences quoted shows that these Germans demand the privilege of coming to America, getting citizenship on the easiest terms possible, while maintaining intact their alien speech, alien customs, and alien loyalties. That is 'assimilation,' the granting of equal political rights and commercial opportunities, without exacting any alteration in modes of life or 'Sittlichkeit.' 'Absorption' means Americanization, a fusing with the whole mass of American life, an adoption of the language and ideals of the country, a spiritual rebirth into Anglo-Saxon civilization, and this has great terrors for the members of a German alliance.
"A glance back over the whole scheme will show how cleverly it was made to unite the average recent comeoverer with his beer-drinking proclivities, with the professor of German, who had visions of increased interest in his specialty, and the professor of history, who hoped for larger journal space and ampler funds, and the readily flattered wealthy German of some attainments, into a close league of interests, which could be used at the proper time for almost any nefarious purpose which a few men might dictate.
"Add to this the emphatic moral and financial support of the German-language press as one of the most powerful agencies of the organization, and we have the stage set for just what happened a little over three years ago."
The Alliance, long before the war, had been active in extending German influence. Among other affairs, it had arranged the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia. Its president, Dr. C. J. Hexamer, whose headquarters were in Philadelphia, had received special recognition from the Kaiser for his efforts—efforts which may be briefly set forth in a speech addressed to Germans in Milwaukee by Hexamer himself: