Frederick Franklin Schrader

“ Roosevelt wrote:
It is certainly desirable that we should remain entirely neutral, and nothing but urgent need would warrant breaking our neutrality and taking sides one way or other.
Still later Col. Roosevelt wrote:
I am not passing judgment on Germany’s action.... I admire and respect the German people. I am proud of the German blood in my veins. When a nation feels that the issue of a contest in which, from whatever reason, it finds itself engaged will be national life or death, it is inevitable that it should act so as to save itself from death and to perpetuate its life.... ”

“ The point is that future wars will not be decided by the usual engines of war, but by the starvation of the civil population; this invests the nation having the largest fleet with a terrible weapon of annihilation; it makes England the arbiter of nations—it compels us to compact our own terrible power of destruction, for in making food the sine qua non of victory, fate has given us a factor of far-reaching importance. ”

“ We believe that every soldier who does his duty will be happy here, and that every such one who dies in battle, will be happy hereafter. We believe that General Washington is the only fit man in the world to head the American army. We believe that Nathaniel Green was born a general. We believe that the evacuation of Ticonderoga was one of those strokes which stamp the man who dares to strike them, with everlasting fame. We believe that Baron Steuben has made us soldiers, and that he is capable of forming the whole world into a solid column, and displaying it from the center. ”

“ I have German, French and English blood in my veins. On the whole, I think that I admire Germany more than any other nation, and most certainly it is the nation from which I think the United States has most to learn. On the whole, I think that of all the elements that have come here during the past century, the Germans have on the average represented the highest type. I do not say this publicly, for I do not think it well to make comparisons which may cause ill will among the various strains that go to make up our population.... ”

“ Estimating, for the sake of argument, a white immigrant at the same price, the 19,500,000 immigrants for the stated period would represent a value of $21,450,000,000; but as a white man performed three times as much work as a slave, besides having a larger claim on life and a much higher intelligence, a white immigrant represented four times the value of a slave. What value, for instance, was an Ericson to the Union army in the summer of 1862, or a Lieber, a Schurz, a Mergenthaler or a Carnegie? But 22 percent of the total immigration was made up of children under 15 years of age. ”

“ Germany, the low countries, Switzerland for the most part, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and our own islands, are all in language, in blood and institutions, German most decidedly. But all South America is peopled with Spaniards and Portuguese; all North America and Australia with Englishmen. I say nothing of the prospects and influence of the German race in Africa and in India; it is enough to say that half of Europe and all of America and Australia are German, more or less completely, in race, in language, in institutions or in all. ”

“ It is not enough to disprove the absurd statement that the English people had no responsibility for the stamp act and the oppressions that were practiced against the American colonies, and that all these evils were the work of George III; it is vital for the American people to recognize the danger of the ultimate aim of the Anglo-American publishers who are supplying the public schools with histories in which the English are exalted and the Germans represented as our immemorial enemies, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. ”

“ The Allies never crossed the German lines, save in East Prussia, nor the Austrian-Hungarian border save in Galicia, and here the Cossack reign, short as it was, proved the shrewd wisdom of English and French foresight; 700,000 homes were wantonly destroyed in Galicia alone. Its lawlessness beggars description; but humanity was not staggered because the mind of the world had been drugged by fatal infusions of falsehood about Belgian babies and women maimed and brutalized by “German barbarians.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the peace conference, when it was Germany’s turn to be heard, it was decided that the interests of all concerned were best served by precluding any discussion, and the German delegates, with revolution and starvation in their back, and with arms wrested from their hands by a promise, were left no alternative but to affix their signatures to the most violent peace treaty ever consummated. ”

“ With a newspaper clamor for war unequaled in the history of the United States, with the bitter denunciation of Senators who voted against the armed ship bill in March still ringing in their ears, and with the widespread propaganda carried to the doors of Congress by those anxious for war, every legislator felt the gravity of his step in refusing to sanction the necessary authority which would plunge the country into the European conflagration. ”

“ In all my travels in the theater of war I have seen no atrocities committed by either side. I have seen men led away to execution, but only after thorough and ready justice of a drumhead court martial had been administered. Germany is full of stories of German Red Cross nurses with their breasts slashed by Belgians. ”

“ So many laboriously achieved understandings, agreements and principles of international law were swept overboard that the world must begin its efforts all over, if humanity is to regain the rights which it had slowly wrested from reluctant power during four or five centuries.
The outstanding fact is the recognition of the right of a belligerent power to compel another to surrender by the starvation of its civil population. ”

“ It is a mistake; one of the greatest of modern historians writing the history of the English people has said that England is not the fatherland of the English-speaking people, but Germany. I go into that and say, ‘The real fatherland of the people of this country is Germany, and our friend who has fallen came to us direct from our fatherland, and, not, like the rest of us, around by the way of England.’ Then I give a little sketch of German character, and what Carlyle and Montesquieu said, that the British constitution came out of the woods of Germany. ”

“ The boundary established in 1871 was the true national and racial boundary, which had been destroyed by Louis XIV when Germany, after the Thirty Years War, was too weak to defend it, but which remained the boundary in the hearts of those on both sides until the French Revolution, when executions, deportations and process of ruthless extermination finally broke the spirit of resistance in the population and made it succumb in order to save itself from extinction. ”

“ 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 motion was never pressed to a division; for during its progress there came at one moment the news that General Grant had taken Vicksburg, on the Mississippi, and that General Meade had defeated General Lee, at Gettysburg, and put an end to all thought of a Southern invasion.... There was no more said in this country about the recognition of the Southern Confederation, and the Emperor of the French was thenceforth free to follow out his plans as far as he could, and alone.
It was during these dismal hours of trembling hope that Germany proved herself the friend of the Union. ”

“ All this was glorified in the name of “democracy,” in the name of “liberty,” in the name of “freedom.” A shadow fell upon the intellectual life of the nation. For the time being it was blotted out. All thinking had ceased, except for a courageous few, and they were mobbed or sent to the penitentiaries. Yet the editors, politicians, preachers, capitalists, bankers, exploiters, profiteers, patrioteers, “labor leaders,” all, looked upon their work and called it good. Missions went abroad to tell the European yokels of our “ideals.” ”

“ If the sinister plot, with its ramifications in our churches and universities, our publishing houses and newspapers, is to be checked, it will be necessary to act so as to make it unprofitable for these interests to pursue their plans in quiet, and to seek by every means available to arouse something of the good old spirit of 1776 that prevailed throughout America until the advent of the late John Hay as the first American ambassador to forget the traditions of his country and its experiences at the hands of England. ”

“ We aspire to the same position. We both aspire to the government of the seas. We are both manufacturing people, and in every port, as well as at every court, we are rivals to each other.”
March 26, 1863, Mr. Laird of Birkenhead: “The institutions of the United States are of no value whatever, and have reduced the very name of liberty to an utter absurdity.” ”

“ The frontier history of our country abounds in such examples down to the period of the Civil War, when the Germans of New Ulm, Minnesota, again, practically for the last time as settlers, were exposed to Indian massacres in their march to extend our far-flung battle line of civilization into the regions of the primeval wilderness. This border history is dominated by the names of the German, Dutch and English race. No Frenchmen, Russians, Italians or any of the races of southwestern Europe have any share in the reduction of the forests and prairies to the spirit of American sovereignty. ”

“ In the first place, I am either a citizen of the United States in every sense of the word, and in every duty and right, or I am not. So long as there is not set up, let me say, immigrant citizens, or whatever designation may be deemed proper, which class a person can join, fully cognizant of what he or she is doing, the citizen admitted on the basis of full citizenship, the reservation of the presidency duly considered, would show his utter unfitness for his national status did he relinquish, in the least degree, his rights and guarantees, as constitutionally fixed and legally defined. ”

“ In the novel Dru wages a successful civil war and sets himself up as the administrator of the country, establishing a dictatorship, remodels our system of government, conquers and incorporates Mexico, remodels our relations with Canada, establishes a close bond with England, wipes out all memories of the Civil War by having Grant and Lee clasp hands on the same pediment, elects his own president and assigns to each of the powers its allotted space in the universe, after which he disappears like the good fairy of the books. ”

“ To be known as having sympathized with the Central Powers, no matter what one’s action was after we entered the war, was to insure one’s footsteps and movements to be dogged by spies. No home was sacred, and the least indiscreet utterance was ground for a report, arrest and indictment under the so-called Espionage Act, which the New York “American” of February 24, 1917, described as “simply the infamous Alien and Sedition laws under another name,” passed in 1789, during the presidency of John Adams, which consigned the party that passed it to eternal oblivion. ”

“ The hour has come when the people are asking, ‘Shall it be revolution or self-determination?’ Before that question is decided we appeal to the good sense of the world, which must know that until the Alsace-Lorraine question is solved beyond the limits of our country, two great nations will never know peace. ”

“ Throughout the war for independence General Washington depended on him to recruit the army in Virginia, which he never failed to do under the most trying circumstances; men seemed to spring up like mushrooms when he needed them to replenish his oft depleted ranks.
Lord Dunmore was ravishing the country; Colonel Muhlenberg followed closely on his heels. Dunmore built Great Bridge and took up quarters in Norfolk; finding himself closely hemmed in, he burned the town, then one of the finest cities in the South, for which act he was severely criticized by the British. ”