The nation at war

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Preface

The Council of National Defense is not responsible for this book, let me say in acknowledging the invaluable assistance derived from the use of its files and from suggestions furnished by its members. "The Nation at War" is the record of a personal experience, and should be accepted as such.

The book is not a history of State Councils, and far less does it pretend to be an account of all American war work. The treatment of the States is indeed deliberately uneven, certainly not from partiality or prejudice, but simply because, within the limits of a single handy volume, I have tried to give the casual reader some general idea of what the State Councils are doing as a whole. This I have thought could be more effectively done by ^'picking out the high lights" here and there rather than by covering my canvas with a flat uniformity of detail. Quite frankly, too, I have occasionally dwelt with emphasis on the less known parts of the country, and on parts that are misunderstood.

It has been the most interesting year of my life, and I hope I can impart to the reader some notion of the thrilling story of the States as this has unrolled

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itself before my own fortunate eyes in more than a hundred thousand miles of national travel.

James A. B. Scherer.

Washington^ D. C, August 12, ipi8.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I ''the confession of a de-hyphenated

AMERICAN" 13

CHAPTER I ''the confession of a de-hyphenated american^^

GERMANY — a name to conjure with ! Ever since I can remember, its traditions, historical, educational,^*/ and religious, have been reverentially instilled into my mind. My paternal ancestors came to North Carolina from the Palatinate about a century and a half ago, and from that day to this have furnished an unbroken line of Evangelical Lutheran ministers. Some of them fought in our Revolutionary War, and not as Hessians for that Hanoverian King, George HI., but as Americans under the leadership of Washington — following the illustrious example of the Rev. J. P. G. Muhlenberg, who, at the close of a patriotic sermon in the old Lutheran church at Woodstock, Virginia, in 1775, dramatically flung aside his Lutheran gown, so exposing the uniform of a Continental soldier, and then led his fellow-Lutherans into the war for American independence.^ My family were "de-hyphe-

* To a relation who complained that he had abandoned the Church for the State, Muhlenberg said: "I am a clergyman, nated" more than a century ago. I have never been a "German-American;" I am an American of German descent.

But it is almost impossible to exaggerate the intensity of the pro-German educational influences to which I and many others like me have been subjected. Above all, we were taught to admire the German Reformation, and everything that came of it, including the State Church of modern Germany. Whenever, as sometimes seemed to some of us, the fruits of the German Reformation in this country did not wholly justify the all-inclusive claims set up by dogmatic teachers for the ancient tree, we were told that for Teutonic institutions to be properly appreciated they must be observed growing on their own native soil; that the modern Vaterland, in other words, was a liv-

it is true, but I am a member of society as well as the poorest layman, and my liberty is as dear to me as to any man." Muhlenberg at once marched with his army to the relief' of Charleston, S. C, and his "German regiment," the 8th Virginia, gained a reputation for discipline and bravery. Made a brigadier-general in 1777, he became major-general before Washington's victorious army disbanded. He had been in 1774 chairman of the Committee of Safety of his county, a member of the House of Burgesses, and in 1776 was delegate to the State Convention. On returning from war to civil pursuits (in Pennsylvania) he was at once elected member of the Pennsylvania Council, was in 1785 chosen Vice-President of that State, with Benjamin Franklin as President, and served as presidential elector in 1797. Elected to the 1st, 2d, and 3d Congresses, he was in 1801 chosen to the U. S. Senate (as a Democrat), but resigned before Congress met, having been appointed by President Jefferson Supervisor of the Revenue from the District of Pennsylvania.

THE DE-HYPHENATED AMERICAN 16

ing witness to the spiritual power and pre-eminent ethical superiority of German Protestantism.

This we accepted on faith. Any one curious to see the personal reaction liable to be produced by this kind of education may find it in my first book, "Four Princes, or, The Growth of a Kingdom" (1903), written on the basis of other books and of reverently received hearsay, and culminating in a treatment of German Protestantism as a shining example of "the full corn in the ear."

In 1907 I made my first visit to Germany. The */ result was a violent disillusionment. I went intent upon further studies of German Protestantism, and I came back resolved never again to open my mouth in glorification of the pre-eminent spiritual and ethical power of modem Germany. In my opinion, it is wholly unfair to measure the world-wide movement set up by the Lutheran Reformation, as I had been told by dogmatic partisans to do, by contemporary Germany — clutched in the grip of a Prussianism which, so far as my own eyes can see, gives not a fig for Luther's faith or for vital Christianity of any kind. Subsequent visits only confirmed the impression of the first one. Efficiency I found to an impressive and depressing degree; it did not take long to find out that Kultur is a very different product from culture. Prussianism I came up against, as against a solid brass wall, everywhere; but Lutheranism, as a spiritual power, had to be looked for. The Prussian Church has been dominated by the State; too often it has been the mere tool of state-craft.

Far from being the obvious fountain-head of dominant Teutonic conduct, as I had been taught to believe, German Lutheranism seems confined, as a vital religious power, to fruitful obscurity. I am aware that some of my best friends profess a different experience; I can only recount my own. In fact, the Germany I had been taught to believe in seems, in a word, to have undergone a complete metamorphosis ; the Germany of Luther and Goethe and Beethoven, big and warm and tender and free, has been shaped by the iron hand of the HohenzoUerns into a marvellous but soulless machine, tended by a comfortable people going blind. That is the dominant impression Germany produced on me, utterly to my surprise, in the year 1907; and the pride I take in my German ancestors, who came to this country a hundred and fifty years ago, is scarcely diminished by the fact that they came from old Germany rather than new.

It is not easy, however, to throw off wholly the shell of a shattered tradition, and it is almost impossible to escape from the deep reverences and sympathies ingrained by prolonged education in one undeviating direction. I was in Europe in the summer of 19 1 4. Returning just before the War broke out, fresh from the liberalising influences of European contact, which every traveller knows how to appreciate, and startled by the apparent rashness of the outbreak, I shut myself in my study for a fortnight and tried, for the sake of old blood and old ties, but above all for the sake of fair play and justice, to get the mod-

THE DE-HYPHENATED AMERICAN IT

ern German point of view regarding this War. Not only did I read the White Paper when it appeared, but also, again, the history of modern Germany, the life of Bismarck, the speeches of the present Emperor, and the works — in part at least — of Bernhardi and Treitschke.

As for the German White Paper, no one, however sympathetic, could read it carefully without wondering over the cool suppression of fundamental parts of Serbia's amazingly acquiescent reply to the severe ultimatum of Austria, which reply is really the hinge in which turns the whole heavy responsibility for this War. The further I read into German books, seeking the German point of view, the more was I led by these writings themselves away from all possibility of sympathy to a conviction which has gradually become most profound, that the German Government, with its highly efficient Kultur, has, in deliberately willing this wholly unnecessary War, with its much boasted "frightfulness,** reverted to a barbarism infinitely more revolting than that of the pre-Christian epoch. With a cynicism that strikes the heart cold, this Prussic Germania tears the sacred law of contract, on which all civilisation is founded, into scraps of paper, massacres Belgium, stealthily murders American women and children on the high seas, and outrages the decencies of international hospitality by converting embassies into nests of intrigue and dishonour. This is only the ABC of the Hohenzollem alphabet of crime!

I had been a pacifist of the Norman Angell School. Because I believe in evolution, I still believe the time will come when an international tribunal will supersede national wars, just as wars among nations have superseded successively those of religions, of tribes, and of families. But since the spring of 19 16, I have postponed my pacifism indefinitely, and devoted such strength as I have to the cause of civilisation against Germany.

Chapter II

ALTHOUGH convinced of Germany's guilt in the summer of 19 14, I did not speak out until the spring of 1916, when, incensed by a German- American newspaper, I wrote and published the substance of the preceding chapter.^ Because of my German name, this hyphenated New York newspaper had had the effrontery to rebuke me for permitting a speech on American preparedness to be made by James R. Garfield at the College of which I am President away out in Pasadena, California I

Those were strange days. It is difficult now to realise the extent to which we were bullied and muzzled by the hyphenated press propaganda, which at length so over-reached itself that the German Emperor himself issued a public warning to "his people" here in America to be more discreet and less noisy. For my part, I was ''boiled in oil'* in the German-American press, and ''drawn and quartered" — that is what they actually said should be done to this "renegade"

' In the New York Times, April 20, 1916. Reprinted (in large part) by the Literary Digest. Widely circulated as a tract by the American Rights Committee, New York City, and other similar agencies.

who had "turned his back on his people even as certain base scoundrels, in American pioneer days, forsook their white kinsmen to consort with bloodthirsty savages!'*

On the other hand, I received from many Americans of German ancestry letters commending my stand, most of them, however, adding that considerations of a business or social character must prevent the publication of names. Some of these letters I published (without naming the writers) in the New York Times of May ii, 1916.^ Here is one, from a beloved teacher of my youth, an honoured professor in a Lutheran college, a man of pure German descent, and of intimate acquaintance with Germany:

"My own conviction," he wrote — "one that grows stronger every day — is that the military oligarchy of Germany has been actuated by a purely bandit spirit, and that the future peace of the world depends on the crushing of this dominant power in that country. Furthermore, I am growing very tired of German plotting and agitation in this country. The German press is treasonable; and were the editors to suffer the fate that would meet them in Germany I should not shed a tear."

The very day I wrote my "confession," and quite by coincidence, there came a communication from one of the most prominent Lutheran laymen in America in which he complained that certain Lutheran periodicals were "so strongly pro-German, and so strongly inclined to be anti-American, that we have come to the

'See also the Literary Digest, May 27, 1916, pp. 1537-1538.

pass at which non-Lutheran readers of such journals put Lutherans down as antagonistic to their own Government." One of my chief reasons in writing my own brief ''confession" was the desire to efface as much as I could of the treasonable stigma that had been affixed on Americans having German names by the noisy effrontery of a few bigots, and long tolerated by a silent forbearance that at length ceased to be virtuous. It was an interesting coincidence, at least, that every attack on my position that came to my notice contained also an attack either on the national Administration for its failure to surrender wholly to Prussia, or on American institutions as a whole ; while the essence of my own offense was expressed in the copious use of such epithets as "renegade" and "traitor," the c in my name outweighing, in the minds of these hyphenates, a hundred and fifty years of unbroken American lineage !

Among the commendations of my "confession" was the following letter from a prominent Lutheran clergyman:

"I can not forbear taking time, in Holy Week though it be, for thanking you for your very fine letter in this morning's New York Times. I have myself been deterred from attempting just such a statement solely because I did not wish to give offense to my friends and parishioners. It is a wholly admirable statement and tells the story for many of us who have been in grave danger of confusing religion with modern Germanism. One sees now where our extreme apologetics brought us and how near we have come to being wrecked on the rocks of Teutonism rather than borne along on the great deep currents of an Evangelical faith which is not confined anywhere, least of all by the wretchedly narrow limits of one very constricted people. ... I feel very keenly a certain humiliation at having been submissive to the roaring bulldozing of the pro-German defenders of our Church, who have so long held the whip over us and made us believe in their little type of self-conscious religion. So easily may we be fettered when we forget what is *the eternal price of liberty,' national or religious.''

The Lutheran Church has now officially purged itself from the Prussian blot with which it was stigmatised by a few of its followers. The great *'General Council," at its meeting in Philadelphia (on October 24, 1917) unanimously adopted the following clear declaration, to be emulated by other general bodies :

We, the Members of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, in convention assembled in this notable year of the Quadri-Centennial of the Reformation, representing over 800,000 communicant members, conscious of our sacred duty before Almighty God in these trying times, and deeply moved by the great and serious task which they have imposed upon our Government; and mindful of the heroic deeds and noble sacrifices of our forefathers at every crisis in the history of our beloved country, do hereby present the following preamble and resolutions:

Whereas, We are mindful of the good order and happiness flowing from attachment to the principles upon which our Government is founded, and sincerely hold and believe that it is the bounden duty of those in authority to provide for the enactment and enforcement of laws to the end that the rights, pre-

AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR %S

rogatives and obligations of American citizenship may be secured, maintained and met ;

Whereas, The doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, expressed in the principles of the Augsburg Confession, to which the ministry and members of the Church are solemnly obligated, commands loyalty to the Government of the United States:

Therefore, be it resolved: — i. That we remember before God and record before man, our deep gratitude that the United States have rightly maintained liberty of conscience, freedom of worship and a separation of Church and State, which are precious heritages of the Reformation and under which our Church has enjoyed unbroken prosperity.

2. That we pray Almighty God to grant us, the American people, together with our Allies, a complete and decisive victory over our enemies, in order that our ancient liberties may be preserved and deepened; and that justice, righteousness and that freedom, which is our sacred heritage, may be enjoyed by the nations of the earth.

3. That we express to the President of the United States our Christian sympathy and loyal devotion, and beseech our Heavenly Father to sustain and strengthen him with all needed grace, and that we most earnestly pledge to him our support in the exercise of his constitutional authority as the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, in his high and earnest purpose "to make the world safe for democracy.'^

4. That we express our earnest co-operation in all constructive efforts to bring this great war to a just issue, and that we encourage all our people to give their enthusiastic support to the efforts of our Government for the conservation and control of food supplies, to all Liberty Loans, to the work of the Red

M THE NATION AT WAR

Cross and to all agencies which promote the welfare of our soldiers and sailors.

5. That we record with just pride the fact that so many of our young men have gone forth from our congregations at their country's call ; that we pray that they, and all the young men of our Army and Navy, be found courageous and chivalrous, strong and heroic, pure, temperate, manly and just; that we beseech God to defend them in all danger and save them from temptation; that we urge all men cheerfully to respond to the call to arms and utterly condemn those who in any way falter or obstruct the carrying out of the laws of our land ; holding, as we do, that upon the declaration of a state of war every loyal man and woman becomes a trustee of his time and talents, life and fortunes for our country.

6. That we unite in prayer to Almighty God to give us as a nation a due sense of His overruling providence, so that we may enjoy that security which can only be obtained by a unity of purpose and effort which will command and receive the respect of the whole world ; securing in the end victory to our arms, and the blessing of a speedy, honourable and lasting peace.

7. That a copy of these resolutions be transmitted to His Excellency, the President of the United States, and to all Lutheran chaplains at their posts of service.

Of almost equal importance, and certainly of equal interest, are the following resolutions, prepared by Dr. Theodore E. Schmauk, and adopted by the Pennsylvania ''Ministerium" of the Lutheran Church, May 21, 1918:

Whereas, there appears to be an impression widely prevalent that the Lutheran Church in America is a foreign Church, and that the members of this Ministerium are newcomers in the State of Pennsylvania, we hereby lay down the following declaration of fact and principle:

1. That the Lutheran Church is a world Church, and not the offshoot of any State Church in Germany. It was found in England, France and Italy four centuries ago. It is found in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Russia, Australia, Canada, the United States, no less than in Germany. In no case has the Lutheran Church in the United States any connection with any Church in Germany, least of all with that of which the Kaiser is the head. The Kaiser himself is not a Lutheran, but he and his father and grandfather are of Reformed stock, and the Prussian Union, which they founded, is composed of Reformed and Lutheran elements. Up to 1907 this Prussian Imperial Church had no organic association even with the International Lutheran Conference, with which the General Council of the Lutheran Church in North America has had affiliation, so far as great meetings for representing a world Lutheranism was concerned. But since 1907, in which year the Imperial Prussian Church acquired some control of the International Conference, the General Council of the Lutheran Church in America, to which this Ministerium belongs, has been in an attitude of protest against the International Conference, and has stood for a re-organisation of this World Conference of Lutherans on American principles.

2. The Ministerium of Pennsylvania is not an exotic Church in America. Fifty years before William Penn its very earliest membership was invited to settle in Pennsylvania. The Ministerium was organised and in full operation a quarter of a century before the American Revolution. Its leaders and its membership were all patriots in the colonial era, and they have participated in a marked and effective degree in all the wars of our nation from the French and Indian and the Revolutionary War down. The original members of this venerable Ministerium took an illustrious part in the founding of our American nation, and at its birth many of them sealed their loyalty with their life-blood on the battlefields of the Revolution. To-day this Ministerium stands squarely with its President in his actions and utterances. It not only supports the Government of the United States in the present war, but it stands for and believes itself to be an exponent of those free principles of government to secure which, throughout the world, the present world war is being fought. This Ministerium believes that the principles for which Martin Luther stood out against the Church and the Imperial State in his day, in behalf of the conscience and liberties of the people, are the principles for which the United States is contending at this moment; and it here and now pledges itself anew, even to its last drop of blood, in its attempt to make sure that a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, shall not perish from the earth; and that in religion every individual shall have the right to worship God in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience; and we believe that our words and acts will ever testify to our Synodical loyalty to American ideals and American institutions.

My belief, as expressed in May, 19 16, has been fulfilled : ''that in the event of war between this country and Germany, fully ninety per cent of American citizens with German names would be loyal to their citizenship, but that the remaining tithe, who do most of the talking and writing, would constitute a very grave menace."

The "ninety per cent" of us were long restrained from utterance — not by any vestige of sympathy with Prussia, indeed, but by the solemn injunction of our President.

President Wilson's first acts on taking office in 1913 had won from me a very high regard. Besides the respect due to his office, I felt for him — on account of his attitude on the Panama Tolls question preeminently, but also because of such Acts as the revision of the tariff and the reform of our banking and currency system — a personal regard so profound that in spite of my own deep convictions concerning the War, I did my best to obey his neutrality proclamation of August 19, 1914, when he said:

*T venture, my fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides. The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another."^

Obedience to this last injunction was impossible; I could not be neutral in thought. But from August, 1914, until April, 1916 — in spite of the Lusitania crime of May, 191 5 — I obeyed the President's other

* President Wilson's State Papers and Addresses: New York, 1918; p. 219.

requests scrupulously. Then I gave way. The verbal safety-valve of my ''confession," however, was as nothing compared with the satisfaction I got in attending the Monterey Training Camp — our California Plattsburg — in the summer of 191 6. But there is no use trying to express it: the emotions that thousands of Americans suffered, until we finally entered the War in April, 191 7, can never be set down on paper. When my only boy — not yet twenty years old — decided for himself in March, 19 17, that he must leave for the battle front, and left, I remember that my first act was to answer a long-unanswered letter from my best friend in England, the aged Sir William Mather, and to begin it by telling him that now at last I could once more look an English gentleman in the face without blushing. When the news had reached us in California on the morning of February 3, 191 7, that the President had announced the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany, I remember weeping with a sense of relief from deep shame. And I shall never forget that April night in San Francisco when the great War Message came over the wires! Then again did we glory in our President : the most patient man in human history, not excepting the patriarch Job; and now we looked to see the traditional anger of the patient man when fully roused, and our hearts burned within us as Americans!

Now at last one could speak out, his country sanctioning. At Throop College we "speeded up" commencement by a month, so as to turn the campus into a training camp. In that bright May of renewed national splendour I spoke to our boys of "Our Problem." And because this book is nothing unless a "human document" — the story of an American life in relation to the Great War — I will set down some of the things I then said to them. I have another reason, too, for reprinting some of those words. This book is called, "The Nation at War." The Hearst papers used to be fond of saying (until the Sedition Act of May 1 6, 19 18, muzzled them)^ that this is not America's war, but Europe's war. I tried to show my boys in 191 7 that this is America's war, just as truly as the Revolution itself was. Perhaps such a chapter is necessary to a book on America at War.

It is impossible to write such a book at the present time without getting more or less into politics. Perhaps I may be permitted to say once for all that I have always been an Independent in politics. I owe allegiance to no party, but judge it by its platform, and especially by the personality of its chosen leader. But personal partisanship is in my judgment quite as mischievous as party partisanship. On this point Lincoln gave us good advice when he said : "Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong. In both cases you are right. To desert such groimd is to be less than a man, less than an American,"

*See Appendix A, final article.

Chapter III

FORTUNATELY, it is now ancient history— I said to my college boys at their commencement in 1 91 7, — but America has been involved in intellectual strife during the last few months. Controversies breed epithets ; and so we have heard one hostile camp denouncing the other as militarist, while they, in turn, have been branded as pacifists. Speaking more broadly and less offensively it would he fair to say that one of these groups has emphasised in these perilous times the need of efficiency, while the other has clung to its faith in idealism. It takes no prophet to discern that the great problem for the future of America is involved in the question whether these conflicting forces can be reconciled, and national efhciency be combined with democratic ideals.

That Americans are capable of high efficiency is known to all men. We demonstrate it in our capacity for business and industrial organisation. I shall never forget the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the "Boston Tech." To take part in it I did not go to Boston, I simply rode down to Los Angeles. Allowance having been made for the difference in time, the Tech alumni in Los Angeles sat down at exactly the same moment as the alumni in Boston, and banqueted. A little rubber disk lay beside each plate, while in front of the toastmaster stood a telephone transmitter. At the close of the banquet we placed the tiny receivers to our ears, and heard the Boston speeches and the toasts, and the "rah, rah, rah!" of the Boston alumni. Nor was that all.

A score or so of cities were linked by wire with Boston just as we were; and we could hear New Orleans singing "Dixie," while New York sang "Yankee Doodle" and Washington thrilled all our hearts with the strains of "The Star Spangled Banner." San Francisco and Los Angeles and the two Portlands; Chicago and St. Louis; the Gulf of Mexico and Puget Sound; — the hearts and voices of a thousand men all over this broad continent were linked by magic spokes to the Boston "hub" through the genius of American efficiency.

We learned, moreover, that when the morning' hour of three should strike, all this vast network of wires would be placed in the hands of the Government, and then deep would call unto deep, most literally, across a thousand leagues of mountain and valley and desert. For the ships in the Atlantic then shout through the air to the great wireless stations on shore ; the American telephone system catches their cry, and flashes it here to the Pacific; whence once more the sound waves roll off through the air to our vessels out in the ocean, and the two seas are blended into one at the touch of American skill.