The Illusion of Victory (11 page)

A star German-American writer soon emerged: George Sylvester Viereck. He had come to the United States as a boy, graduated from New York’s City College, and won a reputation as an experimental poet and a progressive political journalist. With backing from the German Information Service, he began editing an English-language weekly,
Fatherland,
which swiftly achieved a circulation of 100,000. But Viereck blundered badly when he defended the sinking of the
Lusitania
as proof that “Germany was not bluffing in this war” and maintained that burning Louvain’s famous library taught a valuable lesson to other countries that were thinking of ordering their civilians to participate in the war. Naive Germanic self-righteousness skewed even Viereck’s seemingly sophisticated judgment.
⁴³

Also active was a national group, the German-American Alliance. Until the war began, they had confined themselves to fighting prohibition, the growing political movement to ban alcoholic drinks from the United States. They now organized mass meetings in Washington to demand an embargo on the sale of munitions to England and France. They also indulged in outbursts of authoritarianism when their local numbers gave them power. They called for firing schoolteachers who espoused the Anglo-French cause in their classrooms and the banning of pro-Entente books in public libraries. These activities raised the hackles of the National Security League and other Americans, whom Wellington House had turned into Germanophobes. They began claiming that the alliance was a “vast engine of the German government.”
⁴⁴

Germany also had some spokesmen in the academic world. Shortly after the war started, the
New York Times
gave Hugo Munsterberg, professor of history and psychology at Harvard University, a respectful hearing when he blamed Russia for igniting the explosion. Another Harvard professor, Edmund von Mach, launched a weekly column,“The German Viewpoint,” for the Boston
Evening Transcript
. After the
Lusitania
went down, the editors decided their readers were no longer interested in the German viewpoint and fired him. Munsterberg was similarly isolated. He stopped coming to Harvard faculty meetings because former friends refused to sit near him.
⁴⁵

The Germans tried to counter Belgian atrocity stories with tales of monstrous deeds by Russians on the Eastern Front. Berlin’s lack of imagination was almost pathetic. The best they could muster was a familiar recital of women with amputated breasts, impaled children, and virgins ravished by gloating Cossacks. These obvious retreads impressed no one.
⁴⁶

The German Information Service sponsored or originated more than 1,500 books, pamphlets and articles. But they seldom disguised the source of this propaganda; with that same naive self-righteousness, they usually did not even try. They never came close to matching the covert way Wellington House distributed British propaganda through American friends and pliable reporters. Nor did the Germans ever find an advocate with Viscount Bryce’s instant credibility. The GIS’s first spokesman, Bernhard Dernburg, was a clever man and a skillful writer. But he was soon labeled the Kaiser’s mouthpiece by the pro-British New York press. When he tried to defend the sinking of the
Lusitania
, the American response was so ferocious, Ambassador von Bernstorff sent him back to Germany.
⁴⁷

Ironically, numerous American politicians, including Woodrow Wilson, worked themselves into a state of considerable outrage at the Germans for trying to “tamper” with American public opinion. No one ever said a word against Wellington House, for a very simple reason: Its existence was unknown to all but the top people in the British government.

The Germans had seemingly formidable allies in the second largest ethnic group in America, the Irish-Americans. Four million strong, with powerful political machines that controlled major cities such as Chicago and New York, the Irish had a grievance against Great Britain, which some of them were not shy about expressing: the long history of oppression in their homeland. The famine of 1847, which killed 1.5 million Irish, while the British feasted on beef and barley exported from Ireland, was still a vivid memory. In 1911, the slums of Dublin had a higher death rate than Calcutta.
⁴⁸

In the
Gaelic American
and the
Irish World,
the two largest newspapers read by Irish-Americans, Great Britain was abused with a pugnacity and pertinacity that the Bernstorff team must have found heartwarming at first. The papers praised Irish-Americans who stormed movie theaters showing British propaganda films and shut them down. They published in large black type a protest against the U.S. government’s pro-British tilt by the United Irish-American Societies, whom they pointedly described as “the largest aggregation of citizens in Greater New York”—a warning to vulnerable politicians. Not far behind these two papers was the American Truth Society, headed by Jeremiah O’Leary, which tried to expose British lies as fast as Wellington House churned them out. Among O’Leary’s favorite quotations was an editorial in the
London Chronicle
:“The debt that England owes the newspaper world of America cannot be overestimated. . . . We have no better Allies in America than the editors of the great papers.” O’Leary also began publishing a monthly magazine whose title spoke for itself:
Bull
.
⁴⁹

These Irish-Americans pointed out that the British empire controlled some 13 million square miles of the earth’s surface, with a subject population of 444 million. In this vast expanse, the only people with the right to vote were a minority of Britons in their home islands, and in the dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. The Irish occasionally noted that if you threw in the Russian empire, the two governments controlled half the earth’s surface, each a colossus built “on the ruins of small nations.” London’s claim to be fighting for democracy was a sick joke. The top 21/2 percent of Britain’s population controlled 98 percent of the country’s wealth. England, wrote John Devoy, the editor of the
Gaelic American,
was “the incarnation of greed. Her arrogance and insolence are only equaled by her conscienceless cupidity.”
⁵⁰

With this viewpoint, it was hardly surprising that Devoy and his fellow supporters of Irish independence rooted for a German victory. They argued that Ireland, Poland, Finland, Egypt and India would become free democracies. They scoffed at the atrocity stories flooding New York newspapers, and urged a political union of Irish-Americans and German-Americans that would be “more than a match for the pro-British intriguers who have been using press, pulpit and platform to promote England’s interests.”
⁵¹

For a while, these inflamed Irish spokespersons were supported by the semiofficial newspapers of the Roman Catholic Church, which was strongly sympathetic to the Catholic rulers of Austria-Hungary, the Hapsburgs. The church was also extremely cool to embattled France, where anticlericalism was part of the political creed of French liberals and had prompted the government to expel numerous religious orders from the country in 1904.
⁵²

The alliance that the Irish-Americans and the German-Americans tried to concoct to meet the British propaganda onslaught soon revealed serious weaknesses. The circulation of the
Gaelic American,
the
Irish World,
and
Bull
barely exceeded 200,000 a week. The
New York Times
alone reached 300,000 readers each day, and the total circulation of the other New York papers, most of them even more pro-British, came to ten times that figure. Only William Randolph Hearst’s chain of newspapers (circulation 4 million) scoffed at British claims and called for genuine neutrality. The old adage, it takes one to know one, seemed to apply here. Hearst readily saw Lord Northcliffe’s yellow-journalist hand in Wellington House and ordered his newspapers to resist London’s line.

The great mass of Irish-Americans were not passionately concerned with Irish independence—or into hating the British in the violent style of Devoy, O’Leary and company. They were as repelled by the German atrocity stories as most other Americans and were equally dismayed by the sinking of the
Lusitania
and the execution of Edith Cavell. As one woman put it some years later, there was too much “Deutschland go-bragh” in the onslaught of the Irish independence men for most Irish-Americans to swallow.

Confusing matters even further were ferocious assaults on the independence men by fellow Irish-Americans, such as the distinguished lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn. His contacts with British writers had turned him into a critic of his own people. Quinn said he would like to see Paul von Hindenburg (Germany’s top general) as governor general of Ireland for six months. Not only would he get rid of the likes of Devoy and O’Leary, but he would “teach the [home] Irish industry, order, efficiency, economy [and] cleanliness.” One can almost hear the ghost of that earlier British propagandist, Samuel Johnson, repeating his famous remark:“The Irish are a fair people—they never speak well of one other.”
⁵³

Perhaps most important, the vast majority of the Irish-Americans were Democrats, and in early 1916, Woodrow Wilson made a series of speeches condemning “hyphenates.” He accused them of “pouring poison into the veins of our national life.”The speeches had a chilling effect on support for Germany among the Irish-Americans who did not regularly read the independence-for-Ireland press. Wilson was reviving memories of their persecution in the previous century by nativist organizations such as the Know Nothing Party and the American Protestant Association, which questioned their loyalty to the United States. When Devoy and his friends tried to respond to the president by calling an Irish Race Convention in 1916 to create a semblance of Celtic unity, numerous leading Irish-Americans such as Senator James O’Gorman of New York declined to attend.
⁵⁴

Then came a dramatic turnaround. On Easter Sunday, 1916, Irish rebels seized key buildings in Dublin and proclaimed a republic. The British quickly crushed the rebellion. With a stupidity that more than matched the German execution of Cavell, the London government sentenced most of the leaders to death—and the Wilson administration, with equally incredible stupidity, made no protest against the barbarity.

The executions caused a huge uproar in the Irish-American community and gave new influence to the independence men. Easter martyrs also solidified the Irish link to Germany, which lost no time issuing a statement that it recognized Ireland’s right to independence.“The Irish are with us,” gloated the secretary of the German American Alliance.”
⁵⁵

The independence men’s antagonism to Wilson was intensified by the
Gaelic American
’s claim that the U.S. government had betrayed the Easter rebellion after Secret Service agents raided the office of the German consul in New York and discovered correspondence between Devoy and Roger Casement about a shipload of arms and ammunition that Casement had obtained from Germany. The Wilson administration had supposedly turned the letters over to the British, who captured Casement and forced the panicked German captain to scuttle his ship. Casement was executed for his role in the rebellion, and his reputation smeared by the publication of diaries purporting that he was a homosexual. Throughout the rest of 1916, the
Gaelic American
repeatedly accused Wilson of being the evil genius behind this tragedy.

Again revealing the minority status of the independence men, the accusation had little impact on the Irish-American vote for Wilson in the 1916 election. No mean debater, Wilson used the violent hostility of the Devoy O’Leary circle to bolster his call for ethnic support for his frequent declarations of neutrality. When Jeremiah O’Leary sent Wilson a snide telegram predicting his defeat, the president replied:“I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them.” Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s Irish-American secretary, later claimed this telegram galvanized the president’s reelection campaign.
⁵⁶

It was, as the saying goes, a famous victory. But the time was not far off when Wilson would pay dearly for alienating these outspoken Irish Americans.

Throughout the argument over submarine warfare, the Germans said they only wanted a fair hearing—something the British made sure they never got. The London government had a very different agenda in mind—one that extended beyond public opinion. From the opening of the war, British newspapers portrayed the submarine as an outlaw weapon, used by the Germans to kill unarmed sailors on merchant ships. Woodrow Wilson and most other Americans accepted this idea. Much of Wilson’s dialogue with the German government before the declaration of war was about his insistence that the submarine should act as a surface raider, and give sailors time to abandon ship before their vessel was sunk. The British praised the president for this stance.

In their war at sea, however, the British went to great lengths to make these “cruiser rules” extremely dangerous if not impossible for the U-boats. The admiralty under First Lord Winston Churchill warned ship captains that they would be prosecuted if they tamely surrendered their ships. The admiralty ordered crews to ram or fire on U-boats whenever possible. Churchill also ordered that the survivors of sunken U-boats be treated as felons rather than prisoners of war, meaning they could be shot if this was the “most convenient” way of dealing with them.
⁵⁷

British ships were ordered to sail with no names or registry numbers. When they were in the barred zone around the British Isles, they were told to fly a neutral flag, preferably American. On the voyage before it was sunk, the
Lusitania
had used this tactic as it approached the Irish coast. Although the Wilson administration objected to this misuse of Old Glory, the president was ignored as usual and did nothing as usual.
⁵⁸