Emerson Hough

“ The debt of the world must be paid by America. We can pay it only by making a new and better democracy in America. We can pay it only by renewed individual sacrifices and a renewed individual courage.
We must remake America. We must purify the source of America’s population and keep it pure. We must rebuild our whole theory of citizenship in America. We must care more for the safety of America’s homes and the safety of the American ideal. We must insist that there shall be an American loyalty, brooking no amendment or qualification. ”

“ There was, therefore, in the spring of 1917 in America, the greatest menace to our country we ever had known. Organized criminals were in a thousand ways attacking our institutions, jeopardizing the safety, the very continuity of our country. No loyal American was safe. We did not know who were the disloyal Americans. We faced an army of masked men. They outnumbered us. We had no machinery of defense adequate to fight them, because we foolishly had thought that all these whom we had welcomed and fed were honest in their protestations—and their oaths—when they came to us. ”

“ Shall a continuance in America of the old German ways in America serve to outlaw her awful and eternally unpaid debt?
Why does such feeling as this exist in the minds of the most chivalrous of foes against whom Germany ever fought? Why should America and France and Britain feel an implacable hatred against a helpless enemy? In other wars the sign of submission has arrested the wrath of warriors. But not in this war. The world looks on beaten Germany to-day with cold scorn and with no feeling of relenting. ”

“ It is for every man of foreign blood to know his own heart—we cannot know his heart for him. He alone knows whether he is German or American. He knows which he wants to be. We know that he cannot be both. That is the one test—the impossibility of a man being both a good German and a good American. Let him choose. Let him read his own heart. And let him remember that he is not the victor but the vanquished in this war.
One great American—I fancy even his enemies will allow him that title now—wrote as his final message to America the real answer to this war as it applies to us in America. ”

“ The Army man is the worst foe of the censorship which has held back the truth from America for so long. Perhaps the Army man will be able to settle accounts with that politician whose stock in trade is the holding back from the American people of the knowledge of themselves. It is time to raise the real banner of America. It will take courage to march under those colors. But if we cannot march side by side and shoulder to shoulder, then we have lost this war, we have lost the Monroe Doctrine, we have lost the League of Nations. ”

“ The government of this country had had thrown on it all at once a burden a thousand times as great as that of times of peace. We had to raise men and money, munitions, food, fuel for ourselves and all the world. We were not prepared. We had to learn all at once the one and hardest thing—one which America never yet had learned—economy. We had to do all the active and positive material things necessary to put an Army in the field across seas—build ships, fabricate ordnance, arm large bodies of men, train them, feed them, get their fighting morale on edge. ”

“ The only reconstruction policy—political, commercial or industrial—by which America really can gain, is one which is going to say: “This country is America. It has but one flag.” It is time we laid aside our old vote-catching methods, our old business timidities, and quit ourselves like men. Indeed, it is impossible to get in touch with the mass of the A. P. L. testimony and not to feel bitter and more bitter toward the traitors who have been left immune under our flag—not to feel sure and more sure that we have handled them too gently and to our own later sorrow. ”

“ The Price of Peace—The First Days After the Armistice—Ferocious Treachery of Germany in this Country—The Test of the Citizen—The New America.
To the merely morbid mind, the white faces of the starved, the moans of the maimed, the black habiliments of those who mourn, may be thought parts of a drama whose terrible appeal has found no counterpart in the human emotions. For the average man, soon to settle back to the grim struggle of making his living, perhaps even these scenes will fade, the world turning from them because the world can endure no more. ”

“ But America, resting on her old traditions, paid no attention. We heard with sympathy for a time the classic two-faced German-American’s wail, “Germany is my mother, America my wife! How can I fight my mother?” The truth is that all too many German-Americans never cared for America at all in any tender or reverent way. Resting under their Kaiser’s Delbrueck injunction never to forget the fatherland, they never were anything but German. They used America; they never loved her. ”

“ No volume can describe New York’s part in the war, for that man does not live who knows or ever will know all that went on in New York in war time. New York herself never will know how she was endangered and how she was protected.
Until war broke out, New York was much like London. Grown indifferent to her vast foreign element, she was disposed to let these people meet and march, preach and pray and then go home again, red flag and all. No great world city can have a homogeneous population, nor can any such population be governed as a whole. ”

“ We Americans thought ourselves above fickleness and lightness always, boasted always of our common sense and steady practical point of view. We called France hysterical. Was it so? No. Once again popular counsel is wrong. It is we Americans who are the most hysterical people in the world. We make a purpose and forget it. We erect a hero and forget him. We believe, boast, acclaim, hurrah—and forget. We are easily excited—it is we who most easily grow “high headed,” as the French say. It is we, of all nations, who most quickly forget. ”

“ Our morale was continuously assailed. Through our colleges, our schools, our churches, Germany always intended to undermine America and to break down her patriotism. On the list of men of intellect whom Germany had bought, there are, besides a long list of college professors, fifty other names, including judges, editors, priests, men of large affairs. The German satyrs of diplomacy juggled huge figures carelessly in a cold-blooded commerce which dwelt in hearts and souls and honor. That was done merely in the hope to divide and conquer the United States, all in good time. ”

“ She does not believe herself defeated even now. The undying occult spirit of the old Teutonic Knights still lives to-day in America. Now, you will begin to hear attempts to make us dislike England, attempts to incite Ireland to revolt against England, attempts to make us dislike France, stories that England and France owe us much for everything they gave us in the way of equipment, aeroplanes, munitions; stories that we will never get back any of the moneys we loaned to the Allies; stories of how simple and innocent the German people are, how anxious they are to be friendly to America. ”

“ Again we shall hear the stirring in the leaves, and see arise once more the fanged front which has so long menaced the world. The time to scotch that snake is now, to-day; and this is no time, when our maimed men are coming home, when our young boys are growing up, to be faithless to those men who—their eyes still on us as they fling to us the torch of civilization—lie not yet content nor quiet in Flanders Fields. ”

“ It is a great and splendid country. These hundreds of thousands of pages which have been read—and every report sent in has been read—make the greatest reflex of America it ever has been the privilege of any man to know. Talk no more of a merely material America—it is not true. The real America at least is a noble, a splendid, a patriotic country, eager to do its share, determined to take its place.
The bewildering amount of material from all over the United States made condensation and classification alike difficult. ”

“ Give us a generation of selected immigration; deport the un-Americans who divide their loyalty; revoke the naturalization of every man interned in this war and of every other disloyal man,—every adherent to the law of violence and destruction,—and then, and then only, the result may be an American population and a real America.
The best possible news for America would be that of the deportation of more than 300,000 false and foresworn citizens who have acted as German spies in America during this war. ”

“ Our dead stand at the table with all those other gallant dead, to demand their hearing through all time. We must be done with foresworn citizenship in America. We could forgive a soldier; but we cannot forgive a naturalized German who foreswore himself when he took the oath of allegiance to our country. That treachery is one thing which must go—that is one thing which shall never be forgotten or forgiven in America. ”

“ Women naturally did not like the thought of casting their sons into that brutal hell. And then arose the female-men, the pacifists, forgetting their sex, forgetting their country, forgetting the large and lasting game of humanity’s good, which cannot count present cost, but must plan for the long game of the centuries.
With the pacifists suddenly and silently rose the hidden army of German espionage and German sympathy in our own country, quick to see that here was their chance! Millions of German gold now came pouring across to finance this break in America’s forces. ”

“ But Germany could not come and get her arms and munitions had she wished to do so. Great Britain had something to say about that. Wherefore Germany hated us, secretly and openly—hated us for doing what she once had done but could no longer do.
The enforcement of blockade made Germany hate us. Germany’s psychology has always been double-faced—one face for herself and one for the rest of the world. The Austrian double-headed eagle belongs of right also on the German coat of arms. “What I do not wish to have done to me is Wrong; what I wish to do to others is Right!” ”

“ The trouble with most of us Americans was that we did not know our America. For America, this war is not over. It is just beginning. The more we set aside preconceived notions or biased and unctuous conclusions based on suppositions and not facts for premises, and the more we learn the actual facts regarding this country’s problems to-day, the more we shall be obliged to that sobering and wholly distasteful thought that America is at the threshold of her real war. That man does not live who can with any color of authority predict the end of that irrepressible conflict. ”

“ It is time now that from the great mass of the American people there shall appear silently, standing shoulder to shoulder and side to side as they have in their old organization, a new American Protective League. Our old League determined that our homes and our property should be saved. Let the new League determine that our country and our principles shall be saved. All the eyes of the world turn to America to-day. The remainder of the world is distracted. In Berlin, radicals coming up from the dregs are doing their best to get control of a ruined country. ”

“ There are no braver or more skilled fighting men in the world than in these Southern hills. There are none more loyal. They did their part and were ready to do it wherever called. They helped win the war for America as well as those from richer states. Now that the war is over, let America forget Europe’s sordid sycophants, the grinning reservists of the “unbeaten” German Army, and turn attention to these, her own children—no cuckoo product without an ancestry to claim, who have no love for this country beyond their love for this country’s easy money. ”

“ Would to God that the chameleon record, that fatally accurate census map, could show us the American hue spreading decade after decade, and not these other colors of the map of America, showing the extension of the foreign-born! It is time now, old as we are, that we should seek a far more normal balance of the increase of our foreign-born. ”

“ I went into the elevator of a building in my city, a copy of a newspaper in my hand with the black headline of the Lusitania across the page. The German operator of the elevator saw it as I turned it toward him silently. “Vell, they vere varned!” he said, and grinned.
That incident shows Germany in America, then and now, covert, sinister, sneering, confident, exultant. You could not find an answer you would dare speak to such a man. There is no deed that you could do. I pulled together, and only said, “It will cost Germany the war.” ”

“ It is by no means too much to say that much of the Kaiser’s disappointment over his German-American revolt was due not so much to any loyalty to the American flag—for of all of our racial representatives, the Germans are the most clannishly and tenaciously loyal to their own former flag—as it was to fear of the silent and stern hand searching out in the dark and taking first one and then another German or pro-German away from the scenes that erstwhile had known him. It was fear that held our enemy population down—fear and nothing else. ”

“ What is going to be the future condition of the United States in these days following the war? One thing is sure, the thinking men of the country are uneasy. There is reason to feel concern, in a city like Cleveland, over bolshevism and labor troubles. There do not lack those who predict for all America the wave of disregard for property and life which quite often ensues at the close of a great war—and this war was the greatest upheaval of human institutions and human values the world has ever seen. ”

“ As the home of easy living and good cooking, as the place of kindly climate and gentle manners, all flavored with a wholesome carelessness as to life and its problems, New Orleans was, to use a very trite expression, in a class quite by herself. She never has had a rival, and more is the pity that the old New Orleans has succumbed to the modern tendency towards utilization and change which has marked all America. ”