Robert’s eyes suddenly blazed. It was as though something had flared in his brain. And it angered him. It carried him back to his solitary attempt at debating.
“You say you are sincere in carrying out the mission of the Trick Track Tribe,” he cried. “Don’t interrupt me! Yet you sit there like a lawyer trying to frame up a case against an opponent, or a kid debater. Anything to win. If you have anything against the Jews or the Catholics, I want to see it. I don’t care a pig’s ear for any arguments about what the Jews or the Catholics might do or might have done. I can make up that sort of stuff myself. The Jews have a plot to assassinate the President. The Catholics are planning a world-wide revolution.”
Freeman was equally angry.
“Stop! We don’t make such wild assertions.”
“You do,” cried Hamilton. “I’ve simply reversed the charges. Here’s your statement that ‘the man who shot President Garfield was a Roman Catholic. The man who shot President Lincoln was a Roman Catholic.’ And in another article you say, or somebody says, that the Jews are planning to spread Bolshevism throughout the world. When you say that Roman Catholics killed two presidents, you mean to insinuate that there is something about Catholicism itself that makes it hostile to American government, that makes it possible that another Roman Catholic will later kill another president. If the relation were merely accidental you wouldn’t mention it. It wouldn’t be logical. You might as well say that the man who shot McKinley ate onions.”
His voice fell and he leaned forward in his chair confidentially. “This is the thing that brought it home to me,” he continued. “You were basing an accusation against the Jews as a people because Stinnes, the Kaiser’s backer, was supposedly a Jew. Now that it turns out that he’s a Lutheran, you don’t propose an attack upon Lutherans for causing the war, do you? Before, you didn’t honestly know that Stinnes had the slightest connection with the cause of the war. But because you thought he was a Jew, you would have tricked me into assuming it, so as to make a point.”
“You’re right,” Freeman agreed finally. “The Tribe can’t afford to use unfair arguments. It stands for justice first of all. It stands for pure Americanism. But, first, in order to have it, we must have pure Americans. You can’t have it with Catholics, Jews, Negroes and aliens. They don’t belong. They have alien beliefs, customs, traditions. We can fight them fairly.
“I cannot help being what I am, racially. I am not a Jew, nor a Catholic, nor a Negro, nor a foreigner. I am an Anglo-Saxon white man, so ordained by God and so constituted and trained that I cannot conscientiously take either my politics or my religion from some secluded ass on the other side of the world.
“Now, if somebody else happens to be a Jew, I can’t help it any more than he can. Or if he happens to be black I can’t help that either. If he were born under a foreign flag, I couldn’t help it—but there is one thing I can do. I can object to his un-American propaganda being preached in my home or practised in the solemn assembly of real Americans!”
His voice was eloquent with emotion.