Chapter VI (4)

But important though all production is, the production of food, the production which we owe to the farmer, is the most important of all. This country needs more food. Its allies need more food. Only the farmer can give the food. It is nonsense to expect him to produce it unless he can make his livelihood by so doing. The farmer is thoroughly patriotic; he stands ready now as he has stood ready in every crisis of the Nation, pledged to do his full duty, and a little more than his duty. But he makes his livelihood by producing what is essential to the livelihood of the rest of us. He cannot produce unless he makes his livelihood. Not a step should be taken that interferes with his welfare, save after such wise and cautious inquiry as to make us certain that the step is necessary.

We should do whatever is necessary to help the farmer produce the maximum of food at this time. Moreover, every step we take should be conditioned upon securing the farmer’s permanent well-being. The city man is often utterly ignorant of the work and of the needs of the man who lives in the open country. The working-man and the business man who growl about one another are a little apt to join in growling about the farmer. The city Socialist is more utterly ignorant of the farmer than any other human being. Last fall the Socialist campaign in New York had for one of its battle cries the announcement that they intended to make the farmer give them five-cent milk. Apparently the detail that the farmer had to feed the cows and take care of them struck them as unworthy of notice.

The farmer must have labor. But there must be no importation of Chinese or any other cheap labor, whether permanent or temporary. The emergency need of farm labor for planting and harvesting can be met at this time just as the need for the national army was met. The farmer must have first-class prices for his products. No price-fixing at his expense must be gone into without the clearest necessity being shown, and above all there must be no repetition of the folly that marked the dealing with the fuel situation last summer. The farmer must have what capital he needs at a rate of interest not excessive, in order to plant and reap his crop this year. The aid can be given to groups of farmers who underwrite one another, so to speak, and, of course, if he can be given it by private means, so much the better. If that is impossible, then the Government should act. We should profit by the admirable California example to see that the help is given only to the man who is a real farmer and can really make use of it, but that it is extended in such a way as to be of genuine and material benefit.

This is the immediate need, and let us treat meeting this need as the opening wedge of a policy designed to prevent the growth of tenant farms at the expense of the farm owner who tills his own soil, and designed also to put a premium upon the permanent prosperity of the small farmer as compared with the big landowner.

THE PEOPLE’S WAR

FEBRUARY 26, 1918

It is not agreeable to keep insisting on the need of doing better than we have done. It is not agreeable to keep pointing out our shortcomings, but to do so is the only way of remedying them and of securing better action in the future.

The people, some of them well-meaning, some of them anything but well-meaning, who denounce criticism and who object to telling the minimum of truth necessary to correct our faults, are the efficient allies of Germany and the foes of the United States. Actual events have shown that fatuous complacency on the part of our officials has resulted in inefficiency and delay which would have meant overwhelming disaster to this Nation if we had not been protected by the fleets and armies of England and France.

For the first eleven months of this war the inefficiency at vital points in our Government, notably in the matter of shipping and in the management of the War Department, was worse than anything Russia herself has ever seen. Nearly thirteen months have now passed since Germany went to war with us and we broke relations with Germany and afterwards timidly and helplessly drifted stern foremost into what we styled a “formal” state of war. The Russo-Japanese War likewise began before there was any formal declaration of war. It only lasted sixteen months. We have been accustomed to hold out Russia’s action during that sixteen months as a miracle of inefficiency, but she showed herself far less inefficient than we have shown ourselves during the thirteen months that have just passed, and, of course, there was nothing in her conduct quite as bad as our criminal folly in utterly failing in any shape or way to prepare during the two and a half previous years. There is just one difference between the two cases. Russia did not have England and France to protect her from the effects of her folly. That we have been at liberty to indulge in our folly with impunity is due only to the fact that England and France have protected us with the blood of their bravest, while we have refused to prepare and then delayed and blundered and fatuously boasted after the war came on. Every pro-German, of course, heartily applauds these blunders and delays and bitterly objects to their being pointed out, but every American with a particle of patriotism in him, every American proud of his country, should learn the bitter lesson and should resolve that never again will we permit our great Nation to be put in such an ignoble position.

Our worst failure, of course, has been our failure to grapple with the shipping problem. But there have been many such failures. One was the failure to equip Pershing’s army. I do not believe a more gallant little army than Pershing’s was ever sent abroad, but without abundant artillery, machine guns, and airplanes a modern army is as helpless as if its men were armed only with stone-headed axes. Pershing’s army has only the field artillery, machine guns, and airplanes that the French have given it, and this, although since our troops landed last June, a longer time has elapsed than covered the whole Franco-Prussian War. As regards the field artillery, the fault is due to the blind refusal of the Government to prepare in advance to build the guns. As regards the machine guns and auto rifles, the fault is due to our Government’s refusal during the last thirteen months to utilize the Lewis gun.

Steps have been taken to remedy some of the worst of these evils in the War Department. They have been taken only and purely because of public criticism of them and because of the fearless exposure of inefficiency of Senator Chamberlain and his colleagues of the Senate investigating committee. Until this committee began its labor, the War Department had striven to conceal and had refused to remedy its inefficiency, blundering, and delay. There has been some improvement, and this improvement is due solely to the Senate committee.

This is the people’s war. It is not the President’s war any more than it is Congress’s war. It is America’s war. We are in honor bound in conducting it to stand by every official who does well and against every official who fails to do well. Any other attitude is a servile attitude. Congress on the whole has done well. Until Congress finally asserted itself the executive branch of the Government did very badly. If Congress follows the lead outlined in the Chamberlain Bill, it will continue to do well; if it follows the lead outlined in Senator Overman’s Bill, it will condone the inefficiency of the past and put a premium upon inefficiency in the future. Congress must not shirk its duty to the people. Let the machinery of the Government be modernized and above all let this machinery be manned by men of distinguished and demonstrated ability who will make the governmental conduct efficient instead of grossly inefficient, as it was during the first year of the war.

Let us quit being content with feeble mediocrity. Let us demand really first-class efficiency in both preparation and performance. That is the only way to do what we must do and see this war through to a triumphant conclusion.

THE FRUITS OF FIFTY-FIFTY LOYALTY

MARCH 2, 1918

A captain in the regular army of the United States has just been justly sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for trying to combine loyalty to this country with loyalty to Germany. He was born here of German parents. In Germany, for such an offense, he would have been instantly shot or hung. And in Germany organizations and newspapers responsible for causing such action would be instantly suppressed and their organizers and editors heavily punished.

The unfortunate army officer in question is paying the penalty for heeding such organizations as the German-American Alliance. Mr. Gustavus Ohlinger has put before Congress facts concerning the past actions and activities of this organization which warrant and require its instant suppression. Its leaders have sometimes been men who practiced a fifty-fifty loyalty between this country and Germany and sometimes men all of whose loyalty was for Germany and all whose enmity was for the nationality, ideals, and language of the American people. It is an outrage that such an organization should be permitted longer to exist. Congress should act against it at once and the Department of Justice should abandon its slack attitude toward German spies and should so act as to convince our enemies that Uncle Sam is not a timid and soft-headed fool, and that hereafter German spies, dynamiters, and murderers who ply their trade here will do so at the risk of their necks.

Teaching German in the public schools should be prohibited. German language newspapers should have a time limit act, after which it should not be lawful to publish them save in English. A few of their newspapers have a most honorable past and are doing excellent work in the present. A number of English language newspapers have preached moral treason to the American people, often covering it by zeal in denouncing all honest and truthful men who point out the delays and inefficiencies in government, actions which make those responsible for them enemies of the American people and aids to Germany; but moral treason in English is at least open, whereas in a foreign language it is hidden. Moral treason is not necessarily legal treason, but it may be as dangerous, and from senators to school teachers, all public servants who deal in it should promptly be removed from office.

The organizations, newspapers, and public servants who thus betray the honor of America in the interest of Germany wrong all their fellow citizens. But above all they cruelly wrong those loyal Americans, the great majority of our citizens who are in whole or in part of German blood. The loyal majority should lend their utmost energies to securing the condign and summary punishment of the disloyal minority of Americans of German blood who are a disgrace and a menace to this country. Gustavus Ohlinger is an admirable example of the Americans in whole or in part of German blood who is an American and nothing else. All good Americans, and especially all good Americans of German blood, should actively and heartily back him. There is no room in this country for fifty-fifty Americanism.

QUIT TALKING PEACE

MARCH 5, 1918

The experience of Trotzky, Lenine, and the other Bolshevist leaders in their peace negotiations with Germany ought to be illuminating to our own people. Germany encouraged them to enter peace negotiations, spoke fairly to them, got them committed to the abandonment of their allies, used them to demoralize Russia and make it impossible for her to organize effective resistance, and then threw them over, instantly invaded their land, and now holds a part of Russia.

Let our people take warning and insist that all peace talk cease forthwith. Germany is the enemy of humanity generally and in a special sense is the enemy of the United States. She has introduced into warfare horrors which not another civilized nation would have dreamed of using. Her conduct toward Belgium stands out on the high peak of infamy. She has murdered innocent women and children wholesale on the high seas and hundreds of Americans have thus been slain. She has organized murder, rape, robbery, and devastation on a gigantic scale in every conquered territory. Our own sons and brothers are at this moment facing death by the awful torture of the poison gas because Germany has invented methods of warfare more cruel than those of the Dark Ages. Peace on equal terms with such a foe would mean black shame in the present and the certainty of renewed and wholesale war in the future.

To talk peace means to puzzle the ignorant and to weaken the will of even the stout-hearted. It is hailed with evil joy by all the men in this country who have opposed war and have wished us to submit tamely to German brutality. When there comes from Washington an announcement about peace terms which the pacifists and pro-Germans are able to interpret as favorable to their views, the Hearst papers gleefully champion it as undoing the effect of previous declarations that we are in this war to the end, and Mr. Hillquit, the New York mayoralty candidate of the Germanized Socialists and the pacifists, expresses his hearty approval and says that the President has now taken his (Mr. Hillquit’s) position.

Let us quit talking peace with a foe who, if we entered into peace negotiations, would, according to his ability, trick us as he has already tricked the Bolsheviki of Russia. Let us not put ourselves on the moral and intellectual level of Trotzky and Lenine. Every peace utterance pleases the Germans, renders our allies uneasy, strengthens the pacifists, the pro-Germans, and the various seditious elements in our own country, and bewilders, disheartens, and weakens our honest citizens.

The time when words about peace were useful passed a very long time ago. Let us now merely announce that we are in this war to fight until Germany is beaten to her knees. Then let us bend our entire energy to building ships and more ships at the greatest possible speed and putting a couple of million men on the firing line at the earliest possible moment. That is the effective way to bring a just and lasting peace.

THE WORST ENEMIES OF CERTAIN LOYAL AMERICANS

MARCH 10, 1918

The army and navy of the United States in the training camps, on the high seas, and at the battle front, are at this moment proving themselves the most potent agencies of Americanism that our country contains. All good Americans should feel a peculiar pride in the fine and gallant loyalty with which the great majority of the Americans of German descent have come forward to do their part to win this war against the brutal and merciless tyranny of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns. As regards able-bodied men, this service must be rendered in the army, for in war-time no other form of activity can be accepted as a substitute for the fighting work of the fighting man.

I continually meet officers from the front. A captain recently out of the trenches called on me the other day. His father and mother were born in Germany. He himself, after going through a small American college, had spent three years at Heidelberg. He mentioned that one of his lieutenants was born in Norway, and that another was of Irish parentage, and then continued by saying that already his brief experience of the war had given him a horror of the Germany of to-day, had convinced him that our only safety lay in the complete Americanization of all our people and therefore in the insistence that English should be the only language of this country and the only language taught in any primary school, and that he regarded such organizations as the German-American Alliance as guilty of moral treason to America as the worst and most dangerous foes of good Americans of German blood, and as richly deserving to be promptly suppressed and punished.

An officer from our destroyer squadron across the seas informed me that our destroyers had accounted for nearly a score of submarines; that about a quarter of their crews were, as indicated by their names, of German descent, but straight-out Americans and nothing else; that his own best gun-pointer was named Fritz Heinz; and that their keenest indignation was reserved for the German officials in Germany and the German-American Alliance in America whose actions tended to make a wall between them and their fellow Americans and who inflicted the most cruel wrong possible upon them by exciting among other Americans an indiscriminate distrust and anger toward all men of German origin.

These men were absolutely right. We speak in the name of all good Americans and on behalf of Fritz and Adolph and Gustav exactly as on behalf of Bill and Harry and Edward, when we demand the prompt suppression of the German-American Alliance and of all similar organizations. The German blood is exactly as good as any other blood, but exactly as, under the corroding influence of slavery, masses of Americans of the best blood once became the enemies of the Union and of humanity, so under the debasing and brutalizing influence of the _kultur_ of the last fifty years, Germany has become the cruel and treacherous enemy of the United States and of all the other liberty-loving nations of mankind.

GIRD UP OUR LOINS

MARCH 16, 1918

The Bible warns us to gird up our loins if we wish to win a race. Most certainly we cannot expect to do well in the present struggle unless we bend every energy to the task and exercise all our forethought in instant preparation.

Russia’s betrayal of the Allied cause under the foolish and iniquitous lead of the Bolsheviki has been a betrayal of the United States and of the cause of liberty and democracy and justice throughout the world. Above all, it has been a betrayal of Russia herself, and it has, of course, absolved us of every obligation to her. Our duty is to stand by England and France and Belgium and Serbia, who have stood by us. Russia has ruined herself in Germany’s interest, and has immensely increased the peril for the rest of us. This simply means that we ought to re-double our effort. We should be building the cargo ships in three eight-hour shift days and should treat work on them as being equivalent to work in the army. We should speed to the utmost the work on the cannon and flying machines so that our army may cease having to rely on the French for artillery and airplanes. The army should copy the wisdom of the navy in regard to the Lewis auto rifle and should use this weapon to the utmost limit now, even although it prove wise later to supersede it with the Browning weapon.

We ought at once to introduce obligatory universal military training for our young men between nineteen and twenty-one. They would not be sent to war until they were twenty-one. This would be the most effective step in preparing to get ready an army of five million men. Such an army would be relatively no larger than the four hundred thousand men which gallant Canada, to her eternal honor, has already raised. Let us begin now to prepare ourselves for a three years’ war.

If we had prepared as we ought to have done during the two and a half years before we at last reluctantly faced our duty and went to war, we would have put a couple of million of fighting men into Europe last June. Russia would never have broken, and in all probability the war would have ended at once with almost no fighting. There is no use in crying over the enormous quantities of milk we have already spilled, unless it becomes necessary in order to prevent us from continuing to spill it in the present and future. Failure to prepare as above outlined may cause us as much trouble in the future as our past failure to prepare has already caused us. General Pershing’s gallant little army has already made the entire United States its debtor. But it is not as yet as important a military factor as the army of Belgium or of Portugal or of Serbia. Let us back it up and equip it and reënforce it to the utmost of our strength. Let us quit talking peace and bend all our energies to winning the war, and thereby winning the only kind of peace that will be safe, honorable, and lasting.

BOLSHEVIKI AT HOME AND ABROAD

MARCH 19, 1918

The answer of the Bolsheviki to the President’s message was an example of mean and studied impertinence. There was no gratitude, no apology for their betrayal of America and of the cause of liberty, and no expression of hostility to their German masters, but there was a gratuitous and insulting expression for a class war in America against what the Bolsheviki with ignorant folly speak of as capitalism. A couple of days afterward the Bolshevist authorities definitely concluded with Germany their peace of ignominy and treachery.

There is now no possible reason for our Government to draw the sharp distinction they have drawn between the Bolsheviki abroad and the Bolsheviki at home. The Government is prosecuting Victor Berger and has suppressed the paper of Max Eastman. But Berger and Eastman are essentially the same as Lenine and Trotzky. All four have played Germany’s game; all four have been the enemies of the cause of the United States and of liberty. The utter ruin which the Bolsheviki have brought on Russia offers an illuminating example of the destruction which would befall the United States if it ever submitted to the leadership of men like Messrs. Hillquit, Townley, Haywood, and Berger.

We have had many evil capitalists in the United States, but on the whole the worst capitalists could not do the permanent damage to the farmers and working-men in America which these foreign and native Bolsheviki would do if they had the power. Our people should keep steadily in mind that the Russian Bolsheviki have not attacked the big Russian capitalists who were in alliance with the autocracy of the Romanoffs and they have been the tools, paid or unpaid, of the German militarists and capitalists. They have spent their energies in attacking the revolutionists who overthrew the Romanoffs and in persecuting the peasants who have become small farmers and the working-men who are skilled mechanics and the small shopkeepers. They hate and envy those thrifty and self-respecting workers who in this country make up the great majority of our people and who are our most typical and characteristic Americans.

The Bolsheviki have concluded a peace with Germany which includes handing back to the Turks, or, in other words, plunging back into brutal savagery, a district in Asia in which there are multitudes of Armenians and other Christians. Our Government has been derelict in its duty to the Armenians, to the Christians of Syria and to the Jews of Palestine, by its failure to declare war on Turkey. It is a grave error to coddle the Bolsheviki and support them in any way against our allies unless we are also willing fearlessly to condemn their betrayal of us and of the Allied cause, and unless we are ready to war to the end against both Germany and Turkey in order to rescue from tyranny and to give independence to the unfortunate people whom the Bolsheviki have abandoned to a cruel fate.

THE FRUITS OF OUR DELAY

MARCH 26, 1918

The shameful betrayal of the Allies’ cause by the Russian Bolshevists and the delay and incompetence of the American Government have given the Germans a free hand for their drive against the British army. England is at this moment fighting our battles just as much as she is fighting her own, yet, although three years have passed since the Lusitania was sunk and a year since Congress declared that we had “formally” entered the war, America is still merely an onlooker.

We owe this ignoble position to the folly and the procrastination of our Government and its inveterate tendency to substitute rhetoric for action. We have a gallant little army across the ocean, but it is smaller than the Belgian army. We are not holding a greater extent of the battle front than the army of little Portugal. We have at the front no airplanes or field artillery and very few machine guns except those we have gotten from the French. Even the clothes of our troops are mainly obtained from the English. Yet we are the richest nation and one of the most populous nations on the earth.

Our Government is responsible for our dreadful shortcomings, but the responsibility is shared by all the foolish creatures who have willfully blinded themselves to these shortcomings and have clamored against the faithful public servants, like Senator Chamberlain, who laid bare the shortcomings for the purpose of remedying them. The truly patriotic men in this crisis have been the men who have fearlessly told the truth in order to speed up the war. The other men who have decried the truth-telling as “crying over spilt milk” have been profoundly unpatriotic. It was the failure to point out how much milk had been spilt which was primarily responsible for the failure to stop further spilling of milk.

In the face of the terrible battle which our English allies are now waging, and in view of the fact that for three years and a half we have owed our safety to the British fleet and to the French spirit typified by Premier Clemenceau, let the American people now demand that the Government recognize the need of instant and efficient action. Let our Government quit flirting with the Bolshevists at home and abroad. Let it declare war on Turkey at once. Let it acknowledge its dreadful failures and delays and henceforth act with all possible speed. Let it manfully endeavor to make our weight felt in the war this year. Let it stop boasting about the future and begin to act in the present.

Let the Government use common sense. It has talked magnificently about having twenty thousand airplanes ready in June, but it has not one American war plane at the front to-day. Let it quit boasting and act. Let it push the shipping programme by night and day. Let it give France and England the men they so sorely need.

Our Government has delayed until the Allies have been brought to the brink of destruction. Let it act at once lest the chance for action pass completely by.

HOW THE HUN EARNS HIS TITLE

MARCH 31, 1918

THE CURSE OF THE SYSTEM

BY D. THOMAS CURTIN