Читать книгу America's War for Humanity - Thomas Herbert Russell - Страница 8

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German Propaganda in the United States and Mexico—Sinking of the Lusitania—Unrestricted Submarine Warfare.

WHY WE WENT TO WAR

During two years preceding our entrance upon war, Germany had been carrying on open warfare against us, within our own borders. For more than thirty years Germany's policy of preparatory penetration had been in course. As we know now, every country, all round the globe, but especially the United States in North America and Brazil and Venezuela in South America, had been filled with Germans, ostensibly settlers, business men and followers of the higher professions, but for the greater part agents of Germany, in continuous contact with Potsdam and under Potsdam direction. It was the business of these imported Germans to foster the German idea, exalt Germany's leadership in military power and in science and the arts, impress their language, their literature, music and customs upon our people, and to do all those things which might work for the day when Germany, having faked a partnership with Almighty God, should reach out for world dominion.

The processes were pressed with that strange blend of industry, stupidity, mendacity and cunning which characterize the Prussian and all his acts. Under our noses a German solidarity was attempted here, and in part achieved. Organizations having Prussian ends in view were numerous, large, popular and unsuspected. Threading them through and through was a spy system unbelievably thorough and amazingly adroit. Potsdam had us marked as a nation of easy going money getters, to be bled white, crammed with her muddy kultur and taught the goose-step, at her imperial leisure, after France and England had fallen to her guns.

But her blend of qualities, no matter how strong in itself, was nullified by just one lack: the total inability of the Prussian mind to understand the mind of the world exterior to Germany. In the day of test it failed.

Because of that inability, and knowing full well how readily the German mind could be terrorized, the outbreak of war in Europe brought an outbreak of blind German violence in the United States. We were to be impressed by the German power to strike. Our soil was chosen as a garden of domestic sedition, and of foreign conspiracy against powers with which we were at peace. To keep us busy with troubles of our own, German propaganda and German money in Mexico raised on our southern border a threatening spectre of war. We were to have been rushed into conflict with Mexico and kept employed there while being terrorized by wholesale arson and sabotage at home, so that by no chance could any friendly European power look to us for help. The scheme came near to succeeding, for our people were aroused by Mexican aggression, and the flaunting insults of Mexican authority, prompted by German agents. The policy of our Government saved us from falling into a trap that might have held us fast while Germany overran the whole of Europe and made ready to come a-plundering here at her own time and convenience.

If the truth had been known by the people then as clearly as it was known at Washington, nothing could have held us back: We would not have bothered with Mexico at all. We would have joined the free nations of Europe, and nobody may guess what would have happened. Certainly we could not have assembled the men and the resources we actually and swiftly did assemble later, when the real hour sounded. We would have cut a sorry figure and gone into the mess confusedly. Washington knew. The President knew so well that through 1915 and 1916 he and others in high places never ceased crying a warning to "prepare." The President himself toured the country and told the people everywhere that with a world on fire we could not hope to escape unsinged.

He said openly as much as he dared. Under the surface the Government did much more. The rapid movement of events once we were declared a combatant would have been impossible otherwise. That rapidity of effective action surprised the world only because it had all been planned before a word was said.

In the years of our neutrality our course as a nation was surely shaping itself for war, without an outward sign or act. Ruthless destruction of property and of life became too open, too frequent, too outrageous, for the patience of even a long-suffering, tolerant people such as we. The first impulse of genuine resentment was given when the Lusitania went down with its neutral passengers, a defenseless ship on a peaceful errand, drowning more than a hundred Americans of both sexes and all ages without the slightest notice, or the faintest chance of escape.

Any nation other than ours would have gone to war in a moment over such a blow in the face. We did not. Farther, we endured a sudden and flagrant increase of German propaganda in high quarters and low, and of German insolence openly and defiantly parading itself. The catalogue of provocations grew daily, and daily bred anger, but our temper held until in February of 1917, when Germany proclaimed unrestricted piracy by submarines, and under the thin pretext of starving out the British Isles, American and other ships were destroyed with all on board, wholesale.

Even then our hand was withheld until Germany advised us that we might send just one ship a week to Europe, one ship and no more, provided that solitary ship were painted in a manner prescribed in the permission, and then held strictly to a course laid down by the German admiralty. Germany, a third rate naval power, had arbitrarily forbidden us the freedom of the seas.

Then our patience broke. For this and all the other causes Germany had given us, and for our own safety and the rescue of a world that without us would have perished, the United States went to war.

WORK OR FIGHT

Back of every American soldier about fifty men and women were needed in order that he be supplied with everything his physical, moral and military well being might require. They were put there. The result was a sweeping change, an immense expansion of energy in the United States itself. The draft took care of the army. No time or trouble had to be given to filling the ranks and keeping them full. The enormous sums of money necessary to finance our allies as well as ourselves were promptly oversubscribed in a series of loans, the first and least of which ran into three billion dollars, the fourth into six billions, a sum larger than any single loan ever floated by any other nation. Idleness was abolished. The order to "work or fight" was strictly enforced upon all the people, rich and poor alike, for any attempt to except any one or any class would have been blown away in a gale of laughter. In a space incredibly brief the United States became a nation of actual workers, in which every individual did his or her share, submitting meanwhile, with good grace and no murmuring, to being rationed. Interstate utilities were taken over and operated by the government, including the railway, telegraph and telephone lines; and government fixed prices on the necessaries of life. Everything was subordinated to the one and only purpose of winning the war. All that we were and all that we had was thoroughly mobilized behind the fighting arms, the army and the navy.

RATIONING THE NATIONS

Almost immediately after the first military and naval preparations had been set in operation the United States Government, taking no chance as against the future, began to regulate the lives and living of Americans at home. A policy of conservation, so well devised that it went into effect without the slightest disturbance of daily living and daily routine, was at once adopted.

England, France and Belgium had to be fed. Belgium had to be clothed and housed as well as fed. Out of our abundance had to come the means to those ends, as well as to equip and maintain vast armies of our own, from bases three thousand miles away in Europe and twice as far in Asia. The whole nation was mobilized for war.

Britain and France had come through more than three years of close-lipped but bone-cracking effort, in which every aspect of domestic life was changed, the final ounce of strength exerted, privations unheard of endured in grim silence. America saved them, and not alone by force of arms against the common enemy.

WHAT THE YANKEE DUDE'LL DO BY TOM H. DEVEREAUX. Uncle Samuel blew the bugle call, For his boys to fall in line, And they came, yes, by the million, On the march at double time, With muskets on their shoulders They answered to the call To defend our nation's honor, And for Liberty of all. They buckled on their knapsacks, And they loaded up their guns, To the tune of Yankee Doodle, They whipped those Turks and Huns; For their hearts were with the colors Of the red, the white and blue, And they've shown those fiendish Prussians What the Yankee Dude'll Do. REFRAIN Singing rally round Old Glory, boys, And fight for freedom true, Rally to the Stars and Stripes As your fathers did for you. Oh! we sailed across the ocean deep, With the red, the white and blue, And we've shown that devilish Kaiser What the Yankee Dude'll Do. From our north land, and our east land, To our far-off Golden Gate, From our south way down in Dixie And the old Palmetto State, Bravest sons of all the nation came To fight our country's foe, Who would follow our Old Glory, Where her stars and stripes might go; To the battle cry of Freedom, All our men would surely come, And fight for world-wide Victory At the call of fife and drum. We have proved to all creation That our boys are real true blue, And we've shown those fiendish Prussians, What the Yankee Dude'll Do.