The second step was the preparation of a complaint charging as a violation of law the issuance of Federal Reserve notes by national banks on the ground that the New York banks had lent money to the Allies which was being used in payment for war supplies, and that some of those banks had rediscounted notes with the Federal Reserve Bank. Here again was displayed a remarkably detailed knowledge of the business of the Federal Reserve Banks. This charge also fell flat.
A third move was against Dudley Field Malone, Collector of the Port of New York. Resolutions were adopted accusing him of exceeding his authority in having granted clearance papers to the steamship Lusitania when that vessel was ladened with munitions, and authorizing an action to be started against him. No suit, however, was begun. In this connection, it may be mentioned that one member of the peace committee was attorney for a woman of Chicago, who, months afterwards, started suit for $40,000 against Collector Malone and Captain Turner, of the Lusitania, on the ground that the ship illegally carried explosives.
CONSPIRACY GROWS BOLDER
These public acts mentioned above, however, are stated by the Federal Government to have been merely a cloak, covering a more extensive conspiracy financed by von Rintelen. By a series of strikes in munition factories, humming with the Allies’ war orders; on railroads carrying the articles to the seaboard, and on steamships, von Rintelen, it is alleged, sought to cut off commerce among the United States and the Allied countries. Von Rintelen and several others are accused in the Federal indictment of doing six different acts in a conspiracy in restraint of foreign commerce. They are charged with conspiring to use “solicitation, persuasion and exhortation” to influence the workers to go on strike or to quit work, to bribe officers of labour unions to get the men to strike, and “by divers other means and methods not specifically determined upon by the defendants, but to be decided as the occasion arose.”
Von Rintelen was busy now jumping from town to town, sending orders under one name, then another, and paying out money. There took place in June and July, 1915, many strikes which, the national labour leaders of the respective trades said, were absolutely unauthorized by the national bodies. The German agent was delighted to read in the newspapers of strikes at the Standard Oil plant in Bayonne, N. J.; of strikes at the Remington Arms Company in Bridgeport, Conn., and in the General Electric Plant in Schenectady, N. Y. His agents would approach him gleefully with the newspapers containing these accounts, and immediately would receive another bundle of bills with the exhortation, “That is fine. Go out and start some more.”
Another projected strike in connection with which Germans were mentioned in correspondence, but in which von Rintelen is not named, is presented here because it fits in the general scheme of the German plotting. That is the conspiracy on part of moneyed representatives of Germany in May and June, 1915, to start a strike simultaneously among the 23,000 ‘longshoremen on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Such a walkout would absolutely have paralysed American shipping, completely stopped the movement of explosives to the Allies at a most critical moment. A leader of the big ‘Longshoremen’s Union told Chief William J. Flynn, of the United States Secret Service, that $1,035,000, or $45 for every man, was offered to keep the men out on strike for four weeks. After the sinking of the Lusitania, the man who approached the ‘longshoremen wrote under the name of “Mike Foley,” asking if an “S.” (strike) was to be called, that because of the “L. (Lusitania) affair,” his people were not going to do anything at present, and because the “Big Man” (who preceded von Rintelen) was going away. It will be recalled that after the sinking of the Lusitania, Dernburg was dismissed from the country because of his comments concerning the attitude of Germany towards submarine warfare.
CRIMINALS SET TO WORK
While von Rintelen was reaching out in so many directions in his frantic endeavour to build a barrier between the United States and the Entente Powers, he did not hesitate to resort to criminals. Keeping his quick eyes on the progress of the peace propaganda, he had schemes which, while distinctly separated from that organization, were designed to work in harmony with the developments in the strike propaganda. Von Rintelen planned by aid of reservists and crooks to take other measures in munition factories to stop, delay, injure the production of materials destined for the Allies’ battle fronts.
He sent trained German reservists to get employment in factories with orders to collect information and do what they could to cause trouble. Resorting again to the well-developed system of German secret agents in New York, under new aliases, he got in touch with organized bands of criminals in New York, and, the authorities say, hired them to start depredations on the ships being loaded with supplies for the Allies in New York harbour. To von Rintelen or some other person associated with him is attributed the origin of a plot for widespread attacks by thieves on cargoes being lightered from railroad piers to merchantmen. These thefts of sugar, automobile tyres and magnetos have amounted to millions of dollars. For instance, one of the sugar thieves stealing bags of sugar from a lighter said to a comrade:
“Take some more bags. The ship won’t ever reach the other side, anyway, and nobody will know.”