Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 236, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1918 — LIES OF THE HUN IN EVERY CORNER [ARTICLE]

LIES OF THE HUN IN EVERY CORNER

Imperial Germany Spares No Community in U. S. PLANTING SEEDS OF KULTUR Dastardly Assault Is Under the Direction of a General Staff and Has Been Prepared With the Utmost Care. By HARVEY O’HIGGINb, Associate Chairman, Committee on Public Information, Washington, D. C. (This is the first of three articles by Mr. O'Higgins dealing with the propaganda of the enemy in our country.) Mr. Citizen, you are now on the firing line. Imperial Germany is not merely attacking on the western front. She is attacking in every community in the United States. Her assault is under the direction of the German general staff. It has been prepared as carefully as the strategy and tactics of a military drive. As in Russia and in Italy, so here also a campaign of German propaganda —a gas attack of poisonous lies and rumors and false imports—has been launched successfully and is now under way. The collapse of Russia was not a victory for German arms. It was a triumph of German propaganda. America is now the strongest enemy that Germany has. A weakening of our public morale is as necessary to German success as the weakening of Russia was. And the attempt to weaken us has already developed two main lines of movement. The first aims to destroy our unity of action with our allies by setting lis against the French, the British and the Japanese. The Second proposes to destroy our domestic unity by encouraging -among us every sort of class dissension, religious difference, racial prejudice and political quarrel. Slandering the French. The officials of the Red Cross report that many loyal mothers are refusing to let their daughters volunteer as nurses in France because of rumors of immoral conditions in the hospitals there. A detailed story has been circulated to the effect that 200 Red Cross nurses have recently been returned on a transport from abroad and secretly removed to maternity hospitals here as patients. There is not a word of truth in the story. It has been investigated by a federal grand jury in New York city and found to be false. German sympathizers caught circulating it have been interned. The nurses in service In our hospitals in France have the same discipline and protection that they have here-—and need it as little. The story has been invented to hamper the work, of the Red Cross and to prejudice us dgainst our French allies. A similar alm is evident in the reports of drunkenness immorality among our forces at the front. These charges, most circumstantially made, were even taken up by the national leaders of our prohibition societies and purity leagues, and an appeal was sent out to the readers of the religious press asking them to protest to President Wilson. The number of these protests showed the success of the slander. As a matter of fact, no liquor ration Is served to our troops either here or abroad. No army canteen sells alcoholic liquors. By General Pershing’s orders, our soldiers in Francis are forbidden “either to buy or to accept as gifts from the. inhabitants,” any “alcoholic beverages other than light wine or beer.” As there is little beer sold in France, General Pershing reports: “Men who drink are thus limited to the light native wine used by all French people. Even this is discouraged among our troops in every possible way. I hope to secure the cooperation of the French government to prevent the sale of all liquors and wines to our troops. Personally, I favor prohibition in the army, but it is impracticable and inadvisable to issuej orders that cannot be enforced without the co-operation of the French government.” Slandering Our Soldiers. The charge of drunkenness among our expeditionary forces is a proGerman lie designed to alarm the mothers and fathers of the boys who have gone to France. The stories of immorality consequent upon drunkenness are equally baseless. When the recruits for the National army were first assembled in our cantonments, the medical examiners sent as many as 400 out of every 1,000 men to the hospitals to be treated for venereal diseases. The hospital admission rate fdt venereal diseases in those camps has since been as low as 64.4 per 1,000, and the rate for the men in our expeditionary forces in France has been as low as 44.2 per 1,000. That is to say, the statistics of the surgeon general’s office show that our soldiers in France have been almost ten times as free from the effects of immorality as - the same sort of men were when they were first drafted These slanders upon the nurses and -upon the troops are typical of the work of the German general staff. It has been their policy in their campaigns of propaganda to circulate in an enemy country the falsehoods that most appeal to that country’s prejudices. America, in Its Ignorance of all France, outside of the tourist haunts

of Paris, is easily imposed upon with stories of French vice. The German propagandist knows that. He is planning to take advantage of it for his own purposes. He is making a drive upon the sentiments and emotions of American women just as he at ,first attacked the susceptibilities of the Italian wopien behind the lines in preparing the way for the Italian defeat. How well he is succeeding in America is shown by a passage In that appeal for a protest to President Wilson which was printed in the religious press. It pointed out: “Throughout this country a feeling of bitterness dangerous in the extreme is arising and gazing With menacing eyes toward France. The mothers who have reared sons strong and clean, and who have, given them with glad, aching hearts—women who have loved France and glorified her —are now muttering that our boys are wanted for the profits of their debauchery and not to take their deaths in strength and cleanliness.” Such mothers are the victims of a German falsehood. So is the writer who thus described them and protested against the “debauchery” of their soldier sons. The reports of immoral conditions in France and the campaigns of protest against those conditions are equally the work of German agents, assisted by the prejudiced credulity of their American victims. Mr. Citizen, the committee on public information wishes to warn you against these snares. There will be more of them. In Italy anonymous letters were sent to the soldiers from their homes accusing their wives of infidelity. Our nfllltary censorship prevents such tactics among our men, but similar impostures will doubtless be attempted. Already forged letters pretending to be from soldiers in France have been found in the lobbies of New York theaters, as if accidentally dropped there by the recipients. The letters are always in the angular handwriting of persons accustomed to using German script. So far they have contained little but alarming falsehoods about the alleged slaughter of American regiments. Slandering the British. In order to set us against our British allies, several sorts of “whispering propaganda” are being used. There is the story that American soldiers are reeling around the streets of London, drunk. It-has been disproved. There is the charge that while we are stinting ourselves to save grain the English are using it to make whisky—although we are saving and shipping chiefly wheat, which is little used in distilling, and the figures from England show that the English liquor traffic has been decreased by the war almost as much as ours. And there is the report that millions of British soldiers are held in England while the allies are “doing their fighting for them” —a falsehood that is sufficiently discounted by the fact that the British empire has 7,500,000 men in the field and a half million in her fleet; that of the British troops in France 70 per cent are English, 8 per cent Scotch, 6 per cent Irish, and 16 per cent Canadians, Australians, etc.; and that the casualties among these troops have been 76 per cent English, 10 per cent Scotch, 6 per cent Irish, and 8 per cent Canadian, Australian, etc. The German mischief-makers who first supplied arms for the revolt in Ulster against home rule, and subsequently shipped arms for the revolt of the home rulers —these same promoters of disunity are now furnishing the Irish in America with any story, any argument, any slander that can arouse anti-English prejudice among us. On the Pacific coast, in the same way, they are rattling the dry bones of the yellow peril. The average organ of publicity that was pro-German before our declaration of war, no matter how pro-American it now pretends to be, almost invariably uses the antiBritish and the anti-Japanese appeals. And just as the Zimmerman note tried to unite Mexico find Japan against us, so the enemy of our unity alternates denunciations of the yellow peril with appeals for a declaration of war against Mexico. Should Be on Guard.

The German sympathizer who tells you the story of how a discharged Japanese servant boasted that the Japanese would soon “own America,” invariably couples it with a lying account of how all Washington Is saying that “the next war will be with Great Britain about the Panama canal.” Ou the Italian front, before the successful German drive, counterfeits of Milan newspapers were circulated, containing accounts of how bread riots had been suppressed in north Italian towns by British soldiers imported for that purpose, after Italian had refused to fire upon their own people. All over Italy the argument was used that the nation was merely “pulling England’s chestnuts out of the fire.” The same argument is now doing duty here, in spite of the fact that the United States only Went to war in self-defense after we had endured every form of German outrage and injustice and exhausted every means of peaceful appeal. . Many of the agents of this sort of propaganda in America, both publishers .and “whisperers,” are protected by their American citizenship and by the traditional freedom of speech which our laws permit. The government has no power to reach them. They are often the innocent victims of guiltier minds. It Is only possible to warn the public of the Infection which they spread, and to mark them as “carriers” of that German propaganda bacillus which completely enervated the strength of Russia and so nearly broke down the Italian power of self-defense. .