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Page 69
"There are no more socialists!" he cried. "No more proletariat! We're all
Americans! We'll all fight for the Union and the old flag! _You too!_"
He turned to William Jennings Bryan, who rose slowly and with
outstretched hands faced his adversaries.
"I, too, have made mistakes and I am sorry. I, too, feel the grandeur of
those noble words spoken by that great patriot who has sent us his last
message. I, too, will stand by the flag in this time of peril and will
spare neither my life nor my fortune so long as the invader's foot rests
on the soil of free America."
"Americans!" shouted Roosevelt, the sweat streaming from his face.
"Look!" He caught Bryan by one arm and Russell by the other. "See how we
stand together. All the rest is forgotten. Americans! Brothers! On your
feet everybody! Yell it out to the whole land, to the whole world,
America is awake! Thank God, America is awake!"
CHAPTER XXII
ON CHRISTMAS EVE BOSTON THEILLS THE NATION WITH AN ACT OF MAGNIFICENT
HEROISM
Now all over America came a marvellous spiritual awakening. The sacrifice
of the President's noble life, and his wife's thrilling effort to shield
her husband, was not in vain. Once more the world knew the resistless
power of a martyr's death. Women and men alike were stirred to warlike
zeal and a joy in national sacrifice and service. The enlistment officers
were swamped with a crush of young and old, eager to join the colours;
and within three days following the President's assassination a million
soldiers were added to the army of defence and a million more were turned
away. It was no longer a question how to raise a great American army, but
how to train and equip it, and how to provide it with officers.
Most admirable was the behaviour of the great body of German-Americans;
in fact it was a German-American branch of the American Defence Society,
financed in America, that started the beautiful custom, which became
universal, of wearing patriotic buttons bearing the sacred words: _"The
Union! The Flag!"_
"It was one thing," wrote Bernard Ridder in the Chicago _Staats-Zeitung_,
"for German-Americans to side with Germany in the great European war
(1914-1919) when only our sympathies were involved. It is quite a
different thing for us now in a war that involves our homes and our
property, all that we have in the world. When Germany attacks America,
she attacks German-Americans, she attacks us in our material interests,
in our fondest associations; and we will resist her just as in 1776 the
American colonists, who were really English, resisted England, the mother
country, when she attacked them in the same way."
I was impressed by the truth of this statement during a visit that I
made to Milwaukee, where I found greatly improved conditions. In fact,
German-Americans themselves were bringing to light the activities of
German spies and vigorously opposing German propaganda.
In Allentown, Pennsylvania, which has a large German population, I heard
of a German-American mother named Roth, who was so zealous in her loyalty
to the United States that she rose at five o'clock on the day following
the President's assassination and enlisted her three sons before they
were out of bed.
In Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities women
volunteered by thousands as postmen, street-car conductors, elevator
operators and for service in factories and business houses, so as to
release the men for military service. Chicago newspapers printed pictures
of Mrs. Harold F. McCormick, Mrs. J. Ogden Armour, Mrs. J. Clarence
Webster and other prominent society women in blue caps and improvised
uniforms, ringing up fares on the Wabash Avenue cars for the sake of the
example they would set to others.
In San Francisco, Denver, Portland, Oregon, Omaha, and Salt Lake City a
hundred thousand women, at gatherings of women's clubs and organisations,
formally joined the Women's National War Economy League and pledged
themselves as follows:
"We, the undersigned American women, in this time of national need and
peril, do hereby promise:
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