A Threatened Despotism of Spirit
By Gertrude Atherton
The subjoined article, appearing as a letter to The New York Times, was provoked by the appearance on hundreds of billboards in New York of flaring appeals to American women that they use their influence to prevent the further exportation of arms and munitions to the enemies of Germany.
New York, July 5, 1915.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
As I do not belong to any of the suffrage or other woman's organizations in New York, may I say in your columns that for the honor of my sex, if for no other reason, I hope the Mayor will consent to the obliteration of those disingenuous posters addressing "American citizens," and so cunningly worded and signed as to produce an impression of representing the women of the United States? If the people that are spending their thousands so freely had come out frankly and stated that they were pro-German, and that the success of their propaganda would mean defeat for the Allies, short of ammunition, and victory for a nation that has nine-tenths of all the ammunition in Europe, then at least we should have the sheep separated from the goats; we could put it down to masculine influence over the weaker female vessel, which at least was trying to be honest, and let it go at that.
But I hold that such a poster, flaring from every billboard, is a defamation of patriotic American women, and a distinct blow to the cause of suffrage. It will not only antagonize men, who alone have the power to grant the franchise in those States still obdurate, but disgust thousands of women not yet won over to the cause, and far too intelligent not to know the precise meaning behind those lying and hypocritical words. For if that poster were really representative of American women it would mean that American women were traitors to their country, just as all pro-German American men, whatever their descent, are traitors, whether they realize it or not. What was the cause of the roar of indignation that went up all over the United States on Aug. 1? Anti-Germanism? Not a bit of it. If Russia had made the declaration of war the roar would have been as immediate and as loud. It was the spontaneous protest of the spirit of democracy against an arrogant autocracy that dared to plunge Europe into war and the world into panic, without the consent of the people; the manifest of a mediaeval power by an ambitious and unscrupulous group over millions of industrious, peace-loving men who had nothing to gain and all to lose.
It has been pointed out over and over again how diametrically opposed are the German and American ideals; therefore, it seems incredible that every American who champions the cause of a powerful and sublimely egotistic nation does not realize that what he hopes to see is not only the victory of the German arms in Europe, but the eventual destruction of democracy, the annihilation of the spirit of America as epitomized in the Declaration of Independence. I have not the least apprehension of immediate war with Germany, any more than of physical defeat at her hands did she, with the rest of Europe prostrate, make a raid on our shores; but it seems hardly open to question that with Europe Prussianized, we, the one heterogeneous race, and always ready to absorb and imbibe from the parent countries, should lose, in the course of half a century, our tremendous individual hustle, and gratefully permit a benevolent (and cast iron) despotism (not unnecessarily of our own make) to do our thinking, perhaps to select our jobs and apportion our daily tasks.
For that is what it almost amounts to now in Germany, and it is for this reason, no less than to escape military service, that so many millions of Germans have immigrated to this country. Unlike the vast majority of the bourgeois and lower classes, a kindly but stupid people, they were born with an alertness of mind and an energy of character which gave them the impetus to transfer themselves to a land where life might be harder but where soul and body could attain to a complete independence. Their present attitude is, however unconsciously, hypocritical, but it is not altogether as traitorous as that of the American born, who has not the excuse of that peculiar form of sentimentality which has fermented in Germans at home and abroad during this period of their Fatherland's peril. It is this curious and wholly German brand of sentimentality which is the cohering force in the various and extraordinarily clever devices by which modern Germany has been solidified. It is a sentimentality capable of rising to real exaltation that no other nation is capable of, and that alone should make the American pro-German pause and meditate upon a future United States where native individualism was less and less reluctantly heading for the iron jaws of the Prussianized American machine; and, furthermore, upon the weird spectacle of the real gladiatorial contest—German sentimentality wrestling in a death grapple with American downright unpicturesque common sense.