THE WORST ENEMIES OF CERTAIN LOYAL AMERICANS
March 10, 1918
The army and navy of the United States in the training camps, on the high seas, and at the battle front, are at this moment proving themselves the most potent agencies of Americanism that our country contains. All good Americans should feel a peculiar pride in the fine and gallant loyalty with which the great majority of the Americans of German descent have come forward to do their part to win this war against the brutal and merciless tyranny of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns. As regards able-bodied men, this service must be rendered in the army, for in war-time no other form of activity can be accepted as a substitute for the fighting work of the fighting man.
I continually meet officers from the front. A captain recently out of the trenches called on me the other day. His father and mother were born in Germany. He himself, after going through a small American college, had spent three years at Heidelberg. He mentioned that one of his lieutenants was born in Norway, and that another was of Irish parentage, and then continued by saying that already his brief experience of the war had given him a horror of the Germany of to-day, had convinced him that our only safety lay in the complete Americanization of all our people and therefore in the insistence that English should be the only language of this country and the only language taught in any primary school, and that he regarded such organizations as the German-American Alliance as guilty of moral treason to America as the worst and most dangerous foes of good Americans of German blood, and as richly deserving to be promptly suppressed and punished.
An officer from our destroyer squadron across the seas informed me that our destroyers had accounted for nearly a score of submarines; that about a quarter of their crews were, as indicated by their names, of German descent, but straight-out Americans and nothing else; that his own best gun-pointer was named Fritz Heinz; and that their keenest indignation was reserved for the German officials in Germany and the German-American Alliance in America whose actions tended to make a wall between them and their fellow Americans and who inflicted the most cruel wrong possible upon them by exciting among other Americans an indiscriminate distrust and anger toward all men of German origin.
These men were absolutely right. We speak in the name of all good Americans and on behalf of Fritz and Adolph and Gustav exactly as on behalf of Bill and Harry and Edward, when we demand the prompt suppression of the German-American Alliance and of all similar organizations. The German blood is exactly as good as any other blood, but exactly as, under the corroding influence of slavery, masses of Americans of the best blood once became the enemies of the Union and of humanity, so under the debasing and brutalizing influence of the kultur of the last fifty years, Germany has become the cruel and treacherous enemy of the United States and of all the other liberty-loving nations of mankind.
GIRD UP OUR LOINS
March 16, 1918
The Bible warns us to gird up our loins if we wish to win a race. Most certainly we cannot expect to do well in the present struggle unless we bend every energy to the task and exercise all our forethought in instant preparation.
Russia’s betrayal of the Allied cause under the foolish and iniquitous lead of the Bolsheviki has been a betrayal of the United States and of the cause of liberty and democracy and justice throughout the world. Above all, it has been a betrayal of Russia herself, and it has, of course, absolved us of every obligation to her. Our duty is to stand by England and France and Belgium and Serbia, who have stood by us. Russia has ruined herself in Germany’s interest, and has immensely increased the peril for the rest of us. This simply means that we ought to re-double our effort. We should be building the cargo ships in three eight-hour shift days and should treat work on them as being equivalent to work in the army. We should speed to the utmost the work on the cannon and flying machines so that our army may cease having to rely on the French for artillery and airplanes. The army should copy the wisdom of the navy in regard to the Lewis auto rifle and should use this weapon to the utmost limit now, even although it prove wise later to supersede it with the Browning weapon.