The Government was confronted with a stupendous problem. How to handle with its normal peace-time police force the great unwieldy flow of the alien population presented a constantly baffling question, yet it was absolutely essential to the control of internal affairs that the Government know the comings and goings of the enemies within its gates. The date of February 13, 1918, was eventually set as the last on which citizens of enemy countries living in the United States might set down their finger prints and names and file their affidavits of residence and condition.
What facilities had the United States provided for transacting this great volume of additional protective duty? There existed, first of all, the Department of Justice, whose chief function in peace-time had been the enforcement through its investigators and prosecutors of acts of Congress, such as the so-called Mann "White Slave" Act, and the Sherman "Anti-Trust" Act. There was the United States Secret Service, a bureau of the Treasury Department, whose chief function had been the detection of smuggling and counterfeiting and the protection of the person of the President. There was the Intelligence Bureau of the War Department, and a similar Bureau of the Navy Department, both undermanned, as was every other branch of our military forces at that time. The advent of war brought a complicated necessity for coordination of these four branches and of several other Federal investigating bureaus.
The German did not wait for coordination. He inspired food riots among the poorer classes of the lower East Side in New York. He opposed the draft law, rallying to his support the Socialist, the Anarchist, and the Industrial Worker of the World, under whose cloak he hid, not too well concealed. He celebrated the declaration of war by blowing up a munitions plant at Eddystone, Pa., on April 10, 1917, and killing 112 persons, most of whom were women and girls. He sneaked information into Germany through the Swedish legation. He tried to promote strikes in Pittsburg, but his agent, Walter Zacharias, was arrested. He tried to dynamite the Elephant-Butte dam on the Rio Grande, but his agent, Dr. Louis Kopf, was caught. He caused a serious revolution in Cuba until his agents were expelled. He tried to block the Liberty Loans, in vain. He tried to obstruct the collection of Red Cross funds. He caused strikes in the airplane-spruce forests of the Northwest. He assisted Lieutenant Hans Berg of the captured German prize Appam to escape from Fort McPherson with nine of his crew in October, 1917. He erected secret wireless stations at various points, to communicate to Berlin via Mexico, whither thousands of his army reservists had fled on false passports at the outbreak of war. He smuggled information of military importance in and out of the country in secret inks, on neutral vessels, and even wrote them (on one occasion) in cipher upon the shoulder of a prima donna. He burned warehouses and shell plants. He sawed the keel of a transport nearly through. He placed a culture of ptomaine germs in the milk supply of the cadets' school at Fort Leavenworth. He invented a chemical preparation which would cause painful injury to the kidneys of every man who drank water in a certain army cantonment. He received Irish rebellionists and negotiated with them for further revolution. He made his way into our munitions plants and secured data which he forwarded to Berlin; he worked in our aeroplane plants and deliberately weakened certain vital parts of the tenuous construction so that our aviators died in training; he kept track of our transports, and of the movements of our forces, and passed them on to the Wilhelmstrasse. He sold heroin to our soldiers and sailors. He supplied men for the motor boat Alexander Agassiz which put to sea from a Pacific port to raid commerce. In short, he continued to carry out, with multiplied opportunity, the same tactics he had employed since August, 1914.
The German spy in America continues to attack our armies in the rear. He is here in force. A word to him may mean that within twenty-four hours Kiel will know of another transport embarking with certain forces for France. He is here to take the lives of Americans just as certainly as his kinsman is firing across a parapet in Lorraine for the same purpose. Whatever provision will save those lives must be made swiftly. The Departments, already overtaxed with the magnitude of their task, ask simply that they be given the weapons to make their splendid battle on the American front successful.
Whatever aid and comfort the enemy may find in this recitation of his disgraceful achievements and graceless failures, he may have and welcome. He has imposed upon the hospitality of the United States, has dragged his clumsy boots over the length and breadth of their estate, has run amuck with torch and explosive, and has earned a great deal of loathing contempt, hardly amounting to hatred. But no fear—and that is what he sought. The spectacle of what the disloyalists of America have done, and the easily conjurable picture of what they would do if Germany should win, are graphic enough for loyal America. The United States must proceed with incisive vigor to cut out this poisonous German sore. And the United States will remember the scar. It is so written.
[APPENDIX]
In 1915 Fritz von Pilis came to America. He had been a member of the colonization bureau of the German Government maintained to Prussianize Poland, and later an emigration agent of the North German Lloyd.