Chapter XI: Section 5: of a resolution adopted nine months later, at a meeting of (1)

the Palatine Committee, May 21, 1775, expresses the declaration in even more specific form, as follows:

That as we abhor a state of slavery, we do Join and unite
together under all the ties of religion, honor, justice
and love for our countrymen never to become slaves, and to
defend our freedom with our lives and fortunes.

Of the 71 names attached to the declaration, 48 were distinctly German, and six Dutch or Low German. Some of the names appear in their anglicised form in the minutes, due to clerical errors and gross indifference of their bearers; but their identification is based on the careful researches of Friedrich Kapp, the historian of the German element in New York, and others. Fuchs was changed into Fox, Teichert into Tygart and Klock into Clock. The change was also due to an inherent desire to hide the German origin of the names which assume such important historical value. That the writing of Loucks for Lux was an error is proved by the discovery that a descendant of the same family, one Adam Lux, played quite an important part in the Baden revolution of 1849, while descendants of the Petrie family are living today in Wurtemberg, Germany. The list of 54 German signers (inclusive of the Hollanders or Low Germans) is as follows:

Adam Lux, Johann Frey, Major; Andreas Finck, Jr., Major; Andreas Reiber, Peter Wagner, Lieutenant-Colonel; Johann Jacob Karl Klock, Colonel; George Ecker, Nikolaus Herckheimer, Major-General; Wilhelm Sieber, Major; Johann Pickert, Ensign; Edward Wall, Wilhelm Petrie, Surgeon; Jacob Weber, Markus Petrie, Lieutenant; Johann Petrie, George Wentz, Lieutenant; Johann Frank, Philipp Fuchs, Friedrich Fuchs, Christoph Fuchs, Adjutant; August Hess, Michel Illig, Captain; Friedrich Ahrendorf, George Herckheimer, Captain; Werner Teichert, Lorenz Zimmermann, Peter Bellinger, Lieutenant-Colonel; Johann Demuth, Adjutant; Wilhelm Fuchs, Christian Nellis, Heinrich Nellis, Heinrich Harter, Hanjost Schumacher, Major; Isaak Paris, (Elsaesser) Heinrich Heintz, Friedrich Fischer, Colonel; Johann Klock, Lieutenant; Jacob James Klock, Major; Volker Vedder, Lieutenant-Colonel; Fried. Hellmer, Captain; Rudolph Schuhmacher, Hanjost Herckheimer, Colonel; Johann Eisenlord, Captain; Friedrich Bellinger, Adam Bellinger, Second Lieutenant; Johann Keyser, First Lieutenant; Johann Bliven, Major; Wilhelm Fuchs, Lieutenant.

Samuel Ten Broeck, Major; Antoon van Fechten, Adjutant; Harmanus van Slyck, Major; Abraham van Horn, Quartermaster; Willem Schuyler, Gose van Alstijn.

=Franz Daniel Pastorius and German, Dutch and English Colonization.=--What the Mayflower is to the Puritans, the Concord is to the descendants of the Germans who were among the pioneer settlers of America. It was this vessel that bore to American shores the first compact German band of immigrants, under the leadership of Franz Daniel Pastorius.

While the first Dutch settlement, that of Manhattan Island, or New York, was founded in 1614, and that of Plymouth by the Puritans in 1620, that of Germantown, Pennsylvania, occurred in 1683, although long prior to that date Germans in large numbers were settled in the New World, and there is evidence that there were Germans among the Jamestown pioneers and those of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

But German immigration is reckoned to have begun with the arrival of thirteen families from Crefeld under Pastorius. They embarked July 24, 1683, on the Concord, and arrived October 6, 1683, in Philadelphia.

Pastorius was born September 26, 1651, at Sommernhausen Franconia, studied law and lived in Frankfort-on-the-Main. By the so-called Germantown patent he acquired 5,350 acres near Philadelphia from William Penn and founded Germantown. Acting for a company of Germans and Hollanders, 22,377 additional acres were acquired under the Manatauney Patent. Germantown was laid out October 24, 1685. (See “Germantown Settlement.”)

The principal occupation of the settlers was textile industry, farming and the establishment of vineyards. Pastorius was elected mayor in 1688 and the next year the town was incorporated. In 1688 Pastorius and others issued a judicial protest against slavery. He became a member of the Philadelphia school-board, twice was elected to the Assembly and also acted as magistrate.

Three famous families issued from this settlement. The Rittenhausens, who established the first flour and the first paper mill in America and from whom was descended the great astronomer, Rittenhouse; the Gottfrieds, from whom descended Godfrey, the inventor of the quadrant, and the Sauers, of whom Christopher Sauer attained fame as a printer.

There is some analogy between the Puritans and the Crefeld colony in that they were strongly religious bodies, and of the plain people, though the Germans, unlike the Pilgrims, were not forced to leave their native country by intolerable conditions of oppression and bigotry. Another notable incident is the fact that the Pilgrims brought over the political ideas of Holland rather than of England, as they had lived in Holland for twelve years, exiled for conscience’s sake, earning their bread in a foreign land by the labor of their hands.

King James had declared of the Puritans: “I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land.” Their long residence in Holland influenced their future politically, if not in the direction of tolerance, since those who joined them soon practised in America the oppression on their fellows which they had left England to escape.

Dr. William Elliot Griffis agrees with Lowell “that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.” Dr. Griffis says that the Dutch settlers of that period, a period when England, even down to 1752, was in her calendar, like Russia today, eleven days behind the rest of the world, “brought with them something else than what Washington Irving credits them with. They had schools and schoolmasters, ministers and churches, the best kind of land laws, with the registration of deeds and mortgages, toleration, the habit of treating the Indian as a man, the written ballot, the village community of free men, and an inextinguishable love of liberty were theirs. =They originated on American soil many things, usually credited to the Puritans of New England, but which the English rule abolished.= They, however who remained, assisted by Huguenot, Scotchman and German, though in a conquered province, fought the battle of constitutional liberty against the royal governors of New York night and day, and inch by inch, until, in the noble State constitution of 1778, the victory of 1648 was re-echoed.”

New York he contends, “is less the fruit of English than of Teutonic civilization.” It was the institutions of Holland, not only directly, but through the medium of the Puritans, that influenced the shaping of those policies which are known as American. “They say we are an English nation,” writes Dr. Griffis in a paper read before the Congregational Club of Boston in 1891, “and they attempt to derive our institutions from England, notwithstanding that our institutions which are most truly American were never in England. The story of Holland’s direct influence on the English-speaking world is an omitted chapter.”

While the Puritans were persecuting those who did not share their narrow views of heaven, setting up blue laws and the stocks, manufacturing iron manacles for the slave trade, and enriching themselves at the expense of the Indians, the Pastorius settlement was spreading the light of intelligence and impressing its stamp upon the American character in a different manner. “Here was raised the first ecclesiastical protest against slavery,” writes Dr. Griffis, “and here the first book condemning it was written. Here, also, was printed the first Bible in a European tongue (German), the first treaties on the philosophy of education, the largest and most sumptuous piece of colonial printing; and here was the first literary center and woman’s college established in America. Pennsylvania led off in establishing the freedom of the press (John Peter Zenger), in reform of criminal law, in reform of prisons, in awarding to accused persons the right of counsel for defense. In not a few features now deemed peculiarly American, besides that of honoring the Lord’s day, the State founded by William Penn is the land of first things, and the shining example. Well, who was William Penn?” continues the writer. “He was the son of a Dutch mother, Margaret Jasper, of Rotterdam. Dutch was his native tongue, as well as English.”

With the greater part of these civic virtues we find the Crefeld settlement closely identified as well as the Dutch--and therefore Germanic, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon--influence, for Pastorius himself was the author of the first protest against slavery on American soil. To this historic pioneer a monument was to be erected in 1917 at Germantown. The statue by Albert Jaegers, sculptor of Steuben in Lafayette Park, Washington, was ready for unveiling in that year but boarded up, as the war between Germany and the United States had been proclaimed in the meantime. For many months a systematic agitation was conducted by certain pseudo-patriotic societies to prevent the unveiling of the monument, on the ground that it was designed to serve pro-German propaganda; the proposition was made to destroy it and fill its place with cannons captured from the Germans by troops, including men from Germantown. Among those so agitating were the Germantown Federation, Junior Order United American Mechanics, the Order of Independent Americans, the Stonemen’s Fellowship, the Patriotic Order Sons of America, the Sons of Veterans, the Loyal Orange Lodge No. 39, the Fraternal Patriotic Americans, and others. Petitions and resolutions of protest were addressed to Representative J. Hampton Moore, to whose efforts was due the appropriation of $25,000 for the monument, to Senator Penrose and to the Secretary of War, under whose jurisdiction are all monuments built at the expense of the people. The leader of the campaign was one Raymond O. Bliss. This was not in the heat of the war excitement, but in November, 1919, a year after the armistice had been signed.

Comment is hardly necessary. It almost seems that it is deliberately desired to deny recognition to any American historical character not of English origin, for in Pastorius is embodied one of the strongest spirits that reacted upon the education, refinement and spiritual life of the American people; the protest against human slavery--slavery for which the Puritans were forging the shackles--adopted by the conference of German Quakers, April 18, 1688, is in the handwriting of Pastorius. A better understanding of him and his little band was entertained by John Greenleaf Whittier, when he wrote his “lines on reading the message of Governor Ritner of Pennsylvania, in 1836:”

And that bold-hearted yeomanry, honest and true,
Who, haters of fraud, give to labor its due;
Whose fathers of old sang in concert with thine,
On the banks of Swatara, the songs of the Rhine,--
The German-born pilgrims, who first dared to brave
The scorn of the proud in the cause of the slave:--* * *
They cater to tyrants? They rivet the chain,
Which their fathers smote off, on the negro again?

The American author, E. Bettle, in “Notices of Negro Slavery in America,” says of the above body of men and their action: “To this body of humble, unpretending and almost unnoticed philanthropists belongs the honor of having been the first association who ever remonstrated against negro slavery.”

Though disapproving their habits of drinking and hearty feasting at weddings and funerals, Dr. Rush, in his “Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical,” page 220, says: “If they possess less refinement than their Southern neighbors, who cultivate their land with slaves, they possess also more republican virtue.” They introduced glass-blowing and iron manufacture as early as colonial conditions would allow, and the establishment of the first iron foundry in America was the work of Baron Stiegel. They confuted Franklin’s fear of their growing influence in determining the policy of the province by responding as ardently to the call of patriotism in 1775-76 as Massachusetts.

The German newspaper in Philadelphia, the “Staatsbote,” published by Henry Miller--later the official printer of Congress--was one of the papers that fanned the flames of rebellion. It was read as far as the Valley of Virginia. The edition of March 19, 1776, contains an appeal to the Germans beginning: “Remember that your forefathers immigrated to America to escape bondage and to enjoy liberty.” (Virginia Magazine, vol. x, pp. 45 ff.)

History is strangely silent about any similar intellectual and cultural currents emanating from the English settlements of the early period, though latterly giving birth to a group of historians and poets who wove the garb of romance around every green New England hillside and embalmed every local event in poetic legend. While in Germantown the printing press was turning out Bibles and works of science and learning, and the people were laying the foundation of paper mills and type foundries, a harsh spirit of intolerance, superstition and religious asceticism was the rule in the Bay Colony.

American colonial history reveals the fact that Englishmen, while boastful of the liberty of conscience which they claim as a divine heritage, differed from the Dutch and other Teutonic settlers in America as foremost in seeking to impose religious restrictions upon others and in offending against the doctrines of personal and religious liberty. There was very little of real democracy in the Bay Colony, but much aristocracy, according to Dr. William Elliot Griffis; for only church members had a right to vote. These Puritans could not tolerate the men of other ways of thinking, like the Quakers and the Baptists who came among them, whom they beat, branded and hanged. Both in Holland and America, this authority continues, the Pilgrim Fathers were better treated by the Dutch than by the Puritans. “Toleration is a virtue which Americans have not learned from England or from the Puritans of New England. For the origins of the religious liberty which we enjoy we must look to the Anabaptists, William the Silent and the Dutch republic.” But the Colony did not a little trade in slaves, and one of its industries was the making of manacles for the supply of the African man-stealers and traders in human flesh.

The influence on American life which flowed from the settlements of the Puritans and from Pennsylvania under the charter held by William Penn, was as distinct as night and day. From the ultimate confluence of these two divergent currents of civilization American life and institutions received a certain character of harmony which concretely, may be called Americanism. Had the Puritan current remained uninfluenced by that which flowed from Pennsylvania and New York, our country would have had the distinct stamp of bigoted middle-class England, leavened to some extent by the gentry spirit of slave-holding Virginia, and we should justly have been called an English, or even Anglo-Saxon people.

But as numerous writers from other than New England regions, have shown, those institutions which we have commonly been taught to be English institutions, did not exist in England, but were brought to America from Holland and the continent, or developed here. The written ballot came from Emden in Germany; freedom of conscience was the common possession of the Teuton peoples, and not of Englishmen. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony numbered 3,000 settlers, there were but 350 freemen among them, as the condition of freemanship was made, not a property or educational test, but a religious qualification. It was not till 1641 that a code of laws was adopted. Prior to this, they had been governed by the common law of England and the precepts of the Bible.

Much has been written of religious and political oppression at home which drove many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and New York; but the New England settlement owed its founding and growth entirely to religious persecutions at home. If James I chastised the Dissenters with whips, his son Charles chastised them with scorpions. It was William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, above all men, who visited bitter persecutions upon the Puritans in the reign of Charles, and it was Laud who caused the building of the English commonwealth in the New World. The great migration set in with the ascendancy of Laud. More than 1,000 came in 1630, and as the policy of the king and Laud became more intolerable, the tide increased in volume. The people came, not singly, nor as families merely, but frequently as congregations, led by their pastors. On March 18, 1919, the British Consul presented the City of Boston with a casket made from the rails of the docks in the Old Guild Hall at Boston, England, wherein 1,620 of the Puritan refugees were tried for non-conformist proceedings.

The religious differences which the Puritans fought out--and have never fought to a conclusion--in the New World, the Germans and Hollanders had decided in the Thirty Years War. Politically and religiously, the Puritans were uncompromisingly intolerant to all. They expelled Roger Williams for denying the right of the magistrate to punish for violation of the first table of the Decalogue; for denying the right of compelling one to take an oath, denouncing the union of church and state and pronouncing the King’s patent void on the ground that the Indians were the true owners of the soil. In 1656 they persecuted the Quakers; in 1692 they hanged witches. Harvard College was founded in 1636 by the Puritan clergy. Nowhere in the world was paternalism carried to such extremes as in New England. The State was founded on the Hebrew Old Testament and religion was its life. The entire political, social and industrial policy was built on religion, and Puritanism was painfully stern and somber.

Had this civilization been gradually extended, uninfluenced by the institutions which were brought over from the continent by the Hollanders, German Palatines and Delaware Swedes, we should have to form a radically different conception of the American of today. The influence of the Puritans continues to make itself still felt in manifestations of bigotry and intolerance in the form of prohibition, blue laws, race antagonism, etc. Out of its midst have arisen many great and free minds, like beautiful orchids out of a swamp, but rarely great minds uninfluenced by education flowing from or gained on the continent of Europe, while the rank and file at heart remains what it always was, an imponderable mass, excluding light, dealing with external forms and interpreting the passions of life and the spiritual institutions of soul and mind by the fixed standards of an obsolete philosophy, and continues to be harsh, intolerant, hostile and fanatical.

In 1631, Roger Williams arrived at Nantasket. He was a radical who claimed that no one should be bound to maintain worship against his own consent, and that the land belonged to the Indians and they ought to be paid for it. The Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered Williams to leave, and when he and five friends took up lands in Rhode Island, the Plymouth men notified him that the land he had chosen was under their control and intimated that he must move on. The next person to come into contact with colonial intolerance was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, “a pure woman of much intellectual power,” but for whose preaching and teaching there was no room in Massachusetts. The General Court, after deciding that Mrs. Hutchinson was “like Roger Williams or worse,” banished her. With William Codington and others she bought Rhode Island from the Indians and began the colonies of Portsmouth and Newport. In 1638 Rev. John Wheelwright was expelled from Massachusetts for sympathy with Mrs. Hutchinson.

The Maryland English were more liberal, but their laws did not protect Jews or those who rejected the divinity of Christ. When the Commonwealth was established in England, its Commissioners in Maryland acted in a most intolerant manner, allowing no Catholics to have a seat in the legislature. They repealed the statute of toleration and prohibited Catholic worship. In the Carolinas all Christians lived harmoniously together until Lord Granville attempted to remove the religious privileges of the Colonists, by excluding all who were not members of the Anglican Church from the Colonial legislature.

Massachusetts, in 1656, passed a law pronouncing the death sentence on any Quaker who, having once been banished, should return to the Colony. Under this law four were actually hanged. In 1692 hundreds of people accused of witchcraft were thrown into prison; nineteen were hanged; one, an old man, was pressed to death, and two died in jail before the popular madness had run its course.

A valuable contribution to the history of religious intolerance in our country, the result of English civilization, is contained in “American State Papers Bearing on Sunday Legislation,” revised and enlarged edition compiled and annotated by William Addison Blakely of the Chicago Bar and lecturer at the University of Chicago; foreword by Thomas M. Cooley. Published by “Religious Liberty,” Washington, D. C. Here we get the text of the first Sunday law on American soil, passed in Virginia in 1610:

Every man or woman shall repair in the morning to the
divine service and sermon preached upon the Sabbath Day,
and in the afternoon to divine service and catechising,
upon pain for the first fault to lose their provision and
allowance for the whole week following (provisions were
held in common at that day); for the second to lose the
said allowance =and also to be whipt=; for the third =to
suffer death=. Whipping meant that the offender shall by
order of such justice or justices, receive on the bare back
ten lashes well laid on.

In Massachusetts the law provided various penalties, according to the gravity of the offense. Ten shillings or be whipped for profaning the Lord’s day; death for presumptuous Sunday desecration; fines for traveling on the Lord’s day; boring tongue with red-hot iron, sitting upon the gallows with a rope around the offender’s neck, etc., at the discretion of the Court of Assizes and General Goal Delivery. (“Acts and Laws of the Province of Mass. Bay 1692-1719,” p. 110.) It was pretty much the same in Connecticut, where the laws explicitly prohibited “walking for pleasure,” while Maryland provided “death without benefit of clergy for blasphemy.” Practically every English colony had similar laws and ordinances. We read in Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia” (1788, p. 167):

The first settlers were immigrants from England, of the
English Church, just at a point of time when it was
flushed with a complete victory over the religion of other
persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the power of
making, administering and executing the laws, they showed
equal intolerance in this country with their Presbyterian
brethren who had emigrated to the Northern government....
Several acts of the Virginia Assembly, of 1659, 1662 and
1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have their
children baptized, and prohibited the unlawful assembling
of Quakers, had made it penal for any master of a vessel
to bring a Quaker into the State, had ordered those
already there, and such as should come hereafter, to be
imprisoned until they should abjure the country--provided
a milder penalty for the first and second return, but
=death= for their third. If no capital executions took
place here, as did in New England, it was not owing to the
moderation of the Church, or spirit of the Legislature,
as may be inferred from the law itself; but to historical
circumstances which have not been handed down to us.

William H. Taft, when President, said: “We speak with great satisfaction of the fact that our ancestors came to this country to establish freedom of religion. Well, if you are to be exact, they came to establish freedom of their own religion, and not the freedom of anybody else’s religion. The truth is that in those days such a thing as freedom of religion was not understood.”

Just what American freedom was at the time that English influence was at high tide, unleavened by the liberal and tolerant ideas brought over from the European continent, may be inferred from the following extract from the “Columbian Sentinel” of December, 1789, quoted in “American State Papers:”

The tithingman also watched to see that “no young people
walked abroad on the even of the Sabbath,” that is, on the
Saturday night (after sundown). He also marked and reported
all those who “lye at home” and others who “prophanely
behaved,” “lingered without dores at meeting times on the
Lord’s Daie,” all “the sons of Belial strutting about,
setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the day.”
These last two offenders were first admonished by the
tithingman, then “sett in stocks,” and then cited before
the Court. They were also confined in the cage on the
meeting house green, with the Lord’s Day sleepers. The
tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode too fast
in pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who
“walked or rode unnecessarily on the Sabbath.” Great and
small alike were under his control.

Even General Washington while President was interfered with on one occasion by “the tithingman.”

=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 October 18, 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 November 10, 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 the
war.

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 bird man.”

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 February 8, 1919, has this to say:

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 in 1919:

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 March 3, 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 no one.

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 July 6, 1915 (p. 8, cols. 7 and 8). 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 I had.

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 my own.

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 the use?

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!

=Pitcher, Molly.=--Not only was Barbara Fritchie of German descent, as shown elsewhere, but so also was the famous “Molly Pitcher” of Revolutionary fame, whose story is known to every American patriot as the woman who brought water to the fighting men in the battle line in a large pitcher, to which she owed her name in history. Her maiden name was Marie Ludwig, and she was born of good Palatine stock October 13, 1754, in New Jersey. Her husband was John Hays, a gunner, who was wounded at the battle of Monmouth. There being no man available, Molly took his place and served the cannon so efficiently, loading and firing with such dexterity, that after the battle Washington appointed her to the rank of sergeant with a sergeant’s pay.

=Press Attacks in Congress.=--Representative Calloway quoted in the Congressional Record of February 9, 1917:

Mr. Chairman, under unanimous consent, I insert in the Record at this point a statement showing the newspaper combination, which explains their activity in this matter, just discussed by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Moore):

“In March, 1915, the J. P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.

“These 12 men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished to each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.

“This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States army and navy and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes.

“This policy also includes the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March, 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary, to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the army and navy under the false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is that it is ‘patriotism.’ They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people.”

=Pathfinders.=--In reply to the question, “Who are the twelve greatest Americans of German descent?” the following were named by a small committee who conferred upon the matter:

Franz Daniel Pastorius, founder of Germantown and author of the first protest against slavery on American soil.

Conrad Weiser, “the first who combined the activity of a pioneer with the outlook of a statesman.”--Benson J. Lossing.

Governor Jacob Leisler, acting governor of New York, the first martyr to the cause of American independence.

Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg, founder of the Lutheran Church in America and father of General Muhlenberg and of the first Speaker of the House of Representatives.

John Peter Zenger, founder of the freedom of the press in America.

David Rittenhouse, America’s first great scientist.

General Frederick von Steuben, the drillmaster of the American Revolutionary army, who received the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

John Jacob Astor, the pioneer and pathfinder in American industrial enterprise.

Carl Schurz, Union general, diplomat, United States Senator and Cabinet officer; founder of the Civil Service.

Francis Lieber, politician, encyclopedist, college professor, who first codified the laws of war for the United States government.

Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the typesetting machine.

Charles P. Steinmetz, one of the world’s greatest electricians.

=Poison Gas.=--That the Germans were not the first to use poison gas in warfare, that the practice originated with the English, and that the French used gases in the world war before the Germans, was well known to thousands in a position to inform others, but no denial of this falsehood has ever been made. The first recorded use of poison gas in modern times was in connection with the bombardment of Colenso by the English during the Boer War. The fact is testified to by General von der Golz in a book describing the English military operations against the Boers, which he witnessed as German military attache, and is verified in a number of accounts of the war against the South African republics. The guns used against Colenso to discharge the gas and kill the defenders by asphyxiation were brought from the British dreadnought, “Terrible.” It was a typical English invention. At first there was no thought of using gas in land warfare. It was designed to be discharged by a shell which should penetrate the armor-plate of an enemy vessel. A poisoned gas-shell exploding inside of another vessel was expected to kill everybody under deck. When it was found impossible to effect the surrender of Colenso, the guns were used there for the first time in field operations, as stated. These facts are further corroborated by Mr. George A. Schreiner, Associated Press correspondent during the recent war, author of “The Iron Ration,” and a participant in the defense of Colenso, who to this day is feeling the effect of the gas.

The charge that the Germans were the first to use gas bombs and the attempt to represent their employment of such bombs as acts of barbarism was ridiculed by Gustav Hervé, the editor of the Paris “La Guerre Sociale,” in these words: “There is a bit of hypocrisy in this show of indignation against the use of asphyxiating gas. Have we forgotten the incredible stories that were told about the effects of turpinite when in August the Germans were marching toward Paris and the craziest stories were in general circulation? People in fits of ecstacy told others about the murderous effect of the asphyxiating bombs of the celebrated inventor. ‘Why, my dear sir, 70,000 Germans were simply stricken down; whole regiments were destroyed by asphyxiation.’ I remember very distinctly. No one protested. As long as we believed in the marvel of Turpin’s asphyxiating powder, Turpin was hailed as a hero. Then why this absurd cry, this hypocritical attempt to condemn the Germans for inventing a powder, that in comparison with the turpinite we called to our aid in the hour of our greatest distress, appears to be as gentle as the holy St. John. Instead of blaming the Germans for utilizing asphyxiating gases, we might better blame ourselves for permitting the enemy to outdo us in inventive genius.”

General Amos A. Fries, head of the Chemical Service of the American Expeditionary Forces, quoted in the February, 1919, issue of “Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering,” described the use of poison gas as “the most humane method of fighting.” Only 30 per cent. of American casualties and 5 per cent. of the deaths were due to gas. He held that the situation was similar to that when gunpowder was first utilized, a practice “universally frowned upon as unfair and unsportsmanlike, yet it endured.” In a similar vein General Sibert testified before a Senate Committee in June, 1919.

=Penn, William.=--Founder of Pennsylvania, under whose jurisdiction the first Pennsylvania German settlements were effected. His mother was a Dutch woman, Margaret Jasper, of Rotterdam. Dutch was Penn’s native tongue, as well as English. He was a scholar versed in Dutch law, history and religion. He preached in Dutch and won thousands of converts and settlers, inviting them to his Christian Commonwealth. (Dr. William Elliot Griffis.) Oswald Seidensticker (“Bilder aus der Deutsch-Pennsylvanischen Geschichte,” Steiger, New York, p. 82) writes:

“For more than a century Germantown remained true to its
name, a German town. William Penn in 1683 preached there,
in Tunes Kunder’s house in the German language, and General
Washington in 1793 attended German service in the Reformed
Church.”

=Pilgrim Society.=--A powerful organization in New York City, nominally for the promotion of the sentiment of brotherhood among Englishmen and Americans, but in reality to promote a secret movement to unite the United States with “the Mother Country,” England, as advocated by Andrew Carnegie, the late Whitelaw Reid, and, as provided for in the secret will of Cecil Rhodes. Among its prominent members are the British Ambassador, J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont, partner of Morgan; John Revelstoke Rathom, British-born editor of the Providence “Journal;” Adolph Ochs, owner of the New York “Times;” Ogden Mills Reid, President New York “Tribune,” and brother-in-law of the first Equerry to the King of England; James M. Beck and numerous other Wall Street corporation lawyers, and the underwriters of the Anglo-French war loan of $500,000,000 and Russian ruble loan.

=Quitman, Johan Anton.=--One of the most prominent and daring soldiers of the Mexican War; son of Friedrich Anton Quitman, a Lutheran minister at Rhinebeck-on-Hudson. Born 1798, took part in the war for the independence of Texas from Mexico, and in 1846 was made brigadier general. Fought with the greatest distinction at Monterey; first at the head of his command to reach the marketplace of the hotly-contested city and raised the American flag on the church steeple. Was in command of the land batteries in 1847, and in conjunction with the American fleet bombarded Vera Cruz into surrender. Distinguished himself at Cerro Gordo, was brevetted Major General and voted a sword by Congress. On September 13, at the head of his troops, stormed Chapultepec, the old fortress of Montezuma, which was considered impregnable by the Mexicans, and on the following day opened the attack on Mexico City, which he entered September 15. Gen. Scott, as a mark of appreciation, appointed Quitman governor of the city, in which capacity he served until peace was restored. He was later elected governor of Mississippi and elected to Congress by large majorities from 1855 to 1858, the year of his death. General Quitman had an eventful career, beginning as a teacher of German at Mount Airy College, Pennsylvania. He studied law and began to practice at Chillicothe, Ohio. Proceeding to Natchez, Miss., he became Chancellor of the Supreme Court, member of the Senate, in the State Legislature, then its president, participating in the Texas War for Independence, visited Germany and France, and on his return was appointed to the Federal bench. His father was born in Cleve, Rhenish Prussia, and was a brilliant scholar, high in the councils of the Lutheran church.

=Representation in Congress, 1779-1912.=--Table compiled of the membership of Congress from 1779 to and including the 62nd Congress:

Total number of members of Senate and House
from the 1st to the 62nd Congress 7,500

Total number of members of Senate and House of
foreign birth, 1st to 62nd Congress 302

Distributed as follows:
Ireland 114
England 47
Germany 42
Scotland 37
Canada 23
France 8
Austria 5
West Indies 4
Norway 4
Sweden 3
Wales 4
Holland 2
Switzerland 2
Bermuda Islands 2
Denmark 1
Brazil 1
Azore Islands 1
Madeira Islands 1
Spanish Florida 1
------
302

=Rhodes’ Secret Will and Scholarships, Carnegie Peace Fund and Other Pan-Anglican Influences.=--It is a well-established principle of strategy as practiced by diplomatists to arouse public attention to a supposed danger in order to divert it from a real one. Long antedating our association with England, secret plans were laid by far-seeing Englishmen, and sedulously fostered by their friends in the United States, to reclaim “the lost colonies” as a part of the United Kingdom. While the so-called German propaganda at best was directed toward keeping the United States out of the war, a subtle and deceptive propaganda was being conducted to enmesh us in European entanglements to such extent that retreat from a closer political union with England should become impossible.

In order to arrive at a clear understanding of the sources from which such influences are proceeding, it is necessary to call the reader’s attention to the secret will of Cecil Rhodes. This will is printed on pp. 68 and 69, Vol. I, Chapter VI, of “The Life of the Rt. Hon. Cecil Rhodes,” by Sir Lewis Mitchell, and reads as follows:

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of
a secret society, the true aim of which and object whereof
shall be the extension of British rule throughout the
world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the
United Kingdom and of colonization of British subjects of
all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by
energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation
by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa,
the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands
of Cyprus and Canadia; the whole of South America and the
Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great
Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, =the ultimate
recovery of the United States of America as an integral
part of the British Empire=; the inauguration of a system
of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament,
=which may tend to weld together the disjointed members
of the Empire=, and finally =the foundation of so great a
power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote
the best interests of humanity=.

Fourteen years later, in a letter to William T. Stead, dated August 19 and September 3, 1891, Rhodes wrote as follows:

What an awful thought it is that if we had not lost
America, =or if even now we could arrange with the present
members of the United States Assembly and our own House
of Commons=, the peace of the world is secured for all
eternity. =We could hold your federal parliament five years
at Washington and five years at London.= (“The Pan-Angles,”
by Sinclair Kennedy; published by Longmans, Green and Co.,
London and New York.)

Mr. Kennedy writes further on this subject as follows:

Not alone the federation of the Britannic nations, but
the federation of the whole Pan-Angle people is the end
to be sought. Behind Rhodes’ “greater union in Imperial
matters” lay his vision of =a common government over
all English-speaking people=. If we are to preserve
our civilization and its benefits to an individual
civilization, we must avoid friction among ourselves and
take a united stand before the world. =Only a common
government will insure this.=

These words have a remarkable resemblance to a declaration made by the late American Ambassador to Great Britain, the Hon. Whitelaw Reid, in a speech delivered in London, July 17, 1902, when, speaking of Anglo-American relations, he employed these significant words: