1683-1920 / The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them - Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools - Rewriting the History of the United States - The Espionage Act and How It Worked - "Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers - 1,000,000 Victims of Starvation - Our Debt to France and to Germany - The War Vote in Congress - Truth About the Belgian Atrocities - Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed - The Alien Property Custodianship - Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes - Racial Strains in American Life - Germantown Settlement of 1683 and a Thousand Other Topics

Propaganda in the United States.

Propaganda in the United States.—It has been charged that though a large number of American newspapers were controlled in England through Lord Northcliffe, a joint commission of English, French and Belgian propagandists was deemed necessary early in the war to create public sentiment in the United States in favor of intervention on the side of the European Allies through the process of “retaining” a number of prominent speakers as attorneys and employing a staff of well-known writers, novelists and poets to arouse us from our state of neutrality. A similar policy was followed in other countries, and in the course of an interview with Vicente Blasco Ibanez, the Spanish novelist, author of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (in which the Germans are pictured in most repellent color), the New York “Times” of October18, 1919, printed the following significant paragraph:

Ibanez said the actual writing of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was done in four months in time spared from his official work of writing a weekly chronicle of the war and directing the Allied propaganda as an agent of the French Government.

This frank statement will tend to cause “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” which was hailed as “the greatest novel of the war” by the literary critics on the newspapers, and many persons ignorant of the design concealed within the pages of the novel, to appear in a somewhat different light from that inspired by a belief in the untainted integrity of the author.

The English propaganda bureau for the United States, located in New York, was in charge of Louis Tracy, an English novelist. In an interview with Tracy, published in the New York “Evening Sun” of November10, 1919, the author exposes frankly the methods pursued by himself and staff in fostering the British cause by attacks on the German and Irish element in the United States and in furthering libels of the enemy through the medium of the American press. Incidentally he is quoted as follows:

The great part of my work, of course, was the press. We began that during the first winter of the war, and it covered every phase of magazine and newspaper publication.... We had at our disposal the services of writers and scholars who made it possible for us to find out, at any particular moment or crisis, special information for articles about any event, place or person.... The growth of the work of the British Bureau of Information may be estimated by the fact that the working force grew from a mere nine at the time of Mr. Balfour’s installation of the office to fifty-four at the end of thewar.

For the entire two years of our participation in the war, and for a period long antedating that event, the American people were under the hypnosis of a propaganda conducted with serpent tongues and poisoned pens by alien agents, spitting and hissing venom in the interest of England and France. Mr.Tracy tells us that other means employed were “war posters which went all over the country and which are still going.”

The British Bureau of Information was the headquarters of “writers, journalists and authors, dramatists and poets, who turned over to us special articles or descriptions or pieces of art, to be relayed to the periodicals.” And he adds: “There was also, perhaps most in the public eye, the almost endless chain of English men and women who came over during the war to speak under the auspices of the British Government upon different aspects of the war. These did not include the speakers and writers who came over here upon their own initiative and for pecuniary benefit. We were not responsible for them. But we did look after and made arrangements for all the speakers who were sent over by the Government. And they were legion!”

These, in the estimation of Tracy, were as much a part of the militant forces as the actual fighters, for he says: “No war in the history of mankind has been fought with so many aids from the army of intelligence, with so many pens and typewriters and cartooning pencils conscripted in the same army with the line man, the tank and the birdman.”

Need we be surprised that the last bulwark of resistance to this insidious propaganda was swept away? How the British Bureau of Information must have laughed in its sleeve and rejoiced when the fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters of the 17,000 American boys of German descent who bled in France were treated as criminal aliens in their own country under the spell of the British propaganda?

The French propaganda bureau was busy in a similar manner. “The Dial” of February8, 1919, has this tosay:

By 1916 the simple installation in the rear of the Quai d’Orsay Ministry had evolved into the famous Maison de la Presse, which occupied, with its many bureaus, a large six-story building on the Rue Francois Premier. This was one of the busiest hives of wartime Paris. There the promising novelist, the art critic, the publicist, or the well-recommended “belle chanteuse,” as well as the more vulgar film operator and press agent, found directions and material support for patriotic activities in the “propagande.” From the Maison de la Presse were dispatched to every neutral and entente nation select “missions.” The chief focus of all this Allied propaganda was the United States, especially Washington and New York, though itinerant propagandists in every variety have covered every section of the country. By this time the English propaganda, also, was in full blast, under the blunt leadership of Lord Northcliffe, with a Minister at home—in the person of Lord Beaverbrook—all to itself. In those days Fifth Avenue became a multi-colored parade of Allied propaganda. One could scarcely dine without meeting a fair propagandist or distinguished Frenchman or titled Englishman (titles in war being chiefly for American consumption!), or enter a theatre without suffering some secret or overt stimulation from the propaganda,etc.

Chief of the French propagandists was Andre Cheradame, who, when President Wilson at one time during the peace confab threatened to bolt the conference, rose to the boldness of proposing to start a conspiracy against him in his own country. According to the Paris “Le Populaire,” early in1919:

Cheradame, who was received and treated in a very friendly way by Woodrow Wilson, moved that “highly paid propagandists be sent at once to the United States to get in touch with President Wilson’s opponents, in particular with those who are members of the Senate, as the Constitution of the United States gives that body power to veto any treaty signed by the President.”

To this extent had the success of anti-German propaganda in our country encouraged the agents of the French government! In the New York “Evening Post” of March3, 1919, David Lawrence, the regular correspondent of that paper, then sojourning in Paris, speaks of “propaganda bureaus, known to the public of America, however, as ‘bureaus of education’ or ‘committees on public information,’ are conducted by most of the Allied governments in different parts of the world.” He points out that in Paris the method largely followed was that of bestowing social attention and decorations “on American civilians to make them support all sorts of causes.”

The Vienna correspondent of the “Germania,” Berlin, writing the latter part of June, 1919, refers to “the utterances of a French general staff officer, who asserts that every intelligent person in France knows that Germany did not desire the war. Germany could not have wished anything better for herself than the preservation of peace, but France was obliged to make propaganda for her own cause, and it had served the purpose of gaining the accession of the Americans.”

While English and French propaganda was thus conducted openly in the American press, a Committee of the United States Senate headed by Overman, was filling the newspapers with alarming accounts of German propaganda—conducted before the United States declared war on the Imperial German Government, the net result being a report of glittering generalities accusing everybody indiscriminately and convicting noone.

To what extent our own novelists, musical critics, film producers and “belles chanteuse” were tainted, it is not intended to discuss in this place. That some of our writers were hard put to find cause for describing the German people as Huns, a menace to civilization and a blot on humanity, is evidenced by a remarkable letter written to the New York “Times” by Gertrude Atherton, one of the most outspoken enemies of Germany, in the issue of July6, 1915 (p.8, cols.7 and8). Not to print it were an unpardonable omission, as it constitutes an indictment of German civilization which none should miss reading. She writes:

During the seven years that I lived in Munich, I learned to like Germany better than any State in Europe. I liked and admired the German people; I never suffered from an act of rudeness, and I was never cheated of a penny. I was not even taxed until a year before I left, because I made no money out of the country and turned in a considerable amount in the course of a year. When my maid went to the Rathaus to pay my taxes (moderate enough), the official apologized, saying that he had disliked to send me a bill, but the increasing cost of the army compelled the country to raise money in every way possible. This was in 1908. The only disagreeable German I met was my landlord, and as we always dodged each other in the house or turned an abrupt corner to avoid encounter on the street, we steered clear of friction. And he was the only landlord Ihad.

I left Munich with the greatest regret, and up to the moment of the declaration of war I continued to like Germany better than any country in the world except myown.

The reason I left was significant. I spent, as a rule, seven or eight months in Munich, then a similar period in the United States, unless I traveled. I always returned to my apartment with such joy that when I arrived at night I did not go to bed lest I forget in sleep how overjoyed I was to get back to that stately and picturesque city, so prodigal with every form of artistic and aesthetic gratification.

But that was the trouble. For as long a time after my return as it took to write the book I had in mind I worked with the stored American energy I had within me; then for months in spite of good resolutions, and some self-anathema I did nothing. What was theuse?

The beautiful German city, so full of artistic delight, was made to live in, not to work in. The entire absence of poverty in that city of half a million inhabitants alone gave it an air of illusions, gave one the sense of being the guest of a hospitable monarch who only asked to provide a banquet for all that could appreciate. I look back upon Munich as the romance of my life, the only place on this globe that came near to satisfying every want of my nature.

And that is the reason why, in a sort of panic, I abruptly pulled up stakes and left for good and all. It is not in the true American idea to be content; it means running to seed, a weakening of the will and the vital force. If I remained too long in that lovely land—so admirably governed that I could not have lost myself, or my cat, had I possessed one—I should in no long course yield utterly to a certain resentfully admitted tendency to dream and drift and live for pure beauty; finally desert my country with the comfortable reflection: Why all this bustle, this desire to excel, to keep in the front rank, to find pleasure in individual work, when so many artistic achievements are ready-made for all to enjoy without effort? For—here is the point—an American, the American of to-day—accustomed to high speed, constant energy, nervous tenseness, the uncertainty, and the fight, cannot cultivate the leisurely German method, the almost scientific and unpersonal spirit that informs every profession and branch of art. It is our own way or none for us Americans.

Therefore, loving Germany as I did, and with only the most enchanting memories of her, if I had not immediately permitted the American spirit to assert itself last August and taken a hostile and definite stand against the German idea (which includes, by the way, the permanent subjection of women), I should have been a traitor, for I know out of the menace I felt to my own future, as bound up with an assured development under insidious influences, what the future of my country, which stands for the only true progress in the world today, and a far higher ideal of mortal happiness than the most benevolent paternalism can bestow, had in store for it, with Germany victorious, and America (always profoundly moved by success, owing to her very practicality) disturbed, but compelled to admire.

The Germans living here, destitute as their race seems to be of psychology, when it comes to judging other races, must know all this; so I say that they are traitors if they have taken the oath of allegiance to the United States. If they have not, and dream of returning one day to the fatherland, then I have nothing to say, for there is no better motto for any man than: “My country, right or wrong.”

The process of reasoning here plainly is: Germany is such a well-governed, well-behaved, well-groomed, honest, beautiful, seductive country that if I do not side with her enemies I shall fall completely under her spell, and therefore, having left such a model country, every German who comes to the United States to live must be a traitor to America. Ingenious reasoning!

Clyx.com