Common Cause: A Novel of the War in America

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

CHAPTER VIII

DUMBA had gone. Von Bernstorff was preparing for departure. The atmosphere which they had created under the cloak of diplomatic privilege was malodorous with the taint of plottings, corruption, and chicanery. Grain elevators were developing extraordinary tendencies toward spontaneous combustion. Munitions plants were dissolving into fiery fragments, in numbers beyond the reckoning of insurance-risk experts. Strikes were materializing in the most unexpected places and for the most unexplained reasons. An informal morning call upon a peaceful and businessless “advertising agency” office in lower New York had laid bare to the heads of Government the extent of Germany’s official treachery, and inklings of it were beginning to leak out to the public. Strident politicians were filling the atmosphere with irresponsible clamor. The American representatives of Deutschtum were frantically explaining, denying, palliating, sulking, or plotting. No corner of the horizon but bristled with imminent lightnings. The earth underfoot trembled with the rumble of coming events. So the old year of 1916 which saw civilization fighting with its back to the wall, the great bubble of Russian might and Russian nationalism already dissipating, France staggering though still resolute, England facing terror and herself the more terrible in that grim confrontation, the lesser nations opponent to Germany crushed to a mere welter of blood, the Hun savagely certain of his triumph, and on this side of the ocean, the United States being slowly, steadily, unwittingly, powerfully drawn and bound by the gossamer threads of a nation’s psychology to the great purposes before it—so 1916 passed into 1917.

With it passed United States Senator Eugene Harter, of the State of Centralia. Time was when Senator Harter had been a useful figure in the Senate, rather by the possession of a vote than for any other and more forceful reason. But even his vote had been lost of late, for the exigencies of war-complications had terrified him and a nervous and overfed stomach had opportunely collapsed. The Senator fled to the tropics for surcease from troublous national questions and in search of health, and there encountered a mosquito in search of dinner. The mosquito being infected with one of the regional fevers, his victim passed, six weeks later, to that country where politics have been unknown since Lucifer’s insurgents met their historical downfall. Thus was left as heritage to the Senator’s already sufficiently bemuddled State a legacy of further complications, in that his successor must be elected in the early fall. Here was benign Fate moving to meet the welcoming smile of Martin Embree, well ahead of schedule. As soon as official decency permitted, he announced his candidacy for the senatorship. With his German following nothing, he believed, could defeat him. The path of glory extended, broad and unobstructed, before his eager feet to the Capitol at Washington; and thence—who could tell? His campaign prospered from the first.

Imagination could picture nothing less like a lion in Martin Embree’s path of progress than the old man who, on a harsh March night of 1917, sat in a scholar’s book-lined study, painfully writing. A bust of Goethe looked benignly down upon him. There were pictures on the walls of Schiller, of Lessing, of Beethoven, of Wagner, and the table was strewn with German publications. By every bond of the old man’s lonely life, he should have been at the Deutscher Club, for good news of the great war had come through private channels, and the brüdern were meeting that evening to celebrate, in good German drink, and hearty German song, and sturdy German sentiment, the promised triumph. Though an American since early boyhood, Professor George Brender had grown old in these associations. He was a lover of sound Rhenish wine and of the noble literature of the mighty German poets, and of that tenderest and loveliest and simplest of all music, the Lieder of the Fatherland, and above all, of the close comradeship of the German-American clan. Tonight he was giving them all up. He had been forced to the sternest decision of his life. Quite simply he wished that he might have died before his seventieth year had set a sword in his hand wherewith he must now sever himself from past loyalties and fellowships. It amounted to that. For, torn to small fragments in his waste-basket, was a letter upon which he had pondered for a week; a letter from another German-American, a man wise and informed and clear of vision and of spirit, and that letter summoned him, in the name of a lifelong friendship, now to declare himself. From the first reading, he had known how the decision must fall. The Germany of world-domination, of the “will to victory,” of the torn and dishonored “scrap of paper,” of terrorism and the slaughter of the helpless, and violation of humanity’s laws—that was not his Germany. To it he owed no real allegiance. As between it and his adoptive country he could no longer hesitate. He was an American. And as the first step toward justifying himself to his own soul, George Brender, Doctor of many degrees from Universities German and American, head of the German Department of Old Central, feared of its undergraduates for his caustic tongue, loved of its graduates for his leal and generous heart, had resigned from the Deutscher Club of Fenches-ter, with all that the action implies.

The gravest events of the cumulative international crisis did not more deeply stir Fenchester than the resignation of Professor Brender. Of such import to us human toads are the giant ripples upon the tiny puddles wherein we mightily splash! Rumors of the most violent and inspiring nature were passing from mouth to mouth before his letter was formally announced but verification of his intent had been wanting. Neither local paper had touched it, therefore. So the story grew and took on strange embellishments. Professor Brender had torn down the German flag from over the Deutscher Club door and resigned rather than be expelled. Professor Brender had called upon the Deutscher Club to rise and sing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and had resigned in fury when they refused. Professor Brender had denounced the Club as traitors and been thrown out bodily by President Bausch. Professor Brender was going to sue the Deutscher Club. The Deutscher Club was going to sue Professor Brender. Gossip, untrammeled by the responsible restraints of print, was having a gala day over the affair. Yet all that the old German scholar had done was to resign, on the ground that his sympathies must henceforth be American and not German.

Now he sat in his study, sorrowful and lonely, seeking to stem the tide of rumor by a plain statement to the press. He wrote in German, for thus his deeper feelings best expressed themselves, then translated into simple and gracious English. This is the letter of Professor George Brender, as offered to and refused (for reasons of policy) by The Record, but published conspicuously by The Guardian:

I have grown old and gray in the service of the German tongue and German letters in America. One of the most vivid recollections of my childhood is the positive declaration of the German elders that I was not a German but an Amerikaner. On the other hand, the Americans were just as emphatic in their declaration that I was a German. Then the “hyphen” came to the rescue and I blossomed out into a German-American with a dicken Bind-estrich (thick hyphen). Later I heard that the Kaiser had given it as his opinion that there were only Germans and Americans. The true Americans of my own country endorsed this point of view. So I concluded that I would have to make a place in the sun for myself.

And now, with the snow gathering on my hair, I am an American only: nothing more (if there be such) and surely nothing less.

In my American heart there is and always will be a shrine dedicated to that which came into my life from the soul of my father and mother. But they have long ago gone into the land from which no traveler returns and they have left a son who can love but one flag, although he has often nailed the Star-Spangled Banner to a staff of good solid German oak.

I am now an old man, whose work is almost done. I cherish but one more great hope—that on the stars and stripes of my country’s flag there shall ultimately be written the gospel which will redeem the world—the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.