Part 10

“I have no wish to dissemble,” Frederick wrote in answer to the suggestion of an English alliance; “whatever pains may be taken, I will never lend myself to an alliance with England. I am not like so many German princes, to be gained for money.” Of the Landgrave of Hesse, he said: “Do not attribute his education to me. Were he a graduate of my school he would never have sold his subjects to the English as they drive cattle to the shambles. He a preceptor of sovereigns? The sordid passion for gain is the only motive of his vile procedure.”

Foerster, in “Friederich der Grosse” (1871, viii) quotes the great King as follows: “This subject leads me to speak of princes who conduct a dishonorable traffic in the blood of their people. Their troops belong to the highest bidder. It is a sort of auction at which those paying the highest subsidies lead the soldiers of these unworthy rulers to the shambles. Such princes ought to blush at their baseness in selling the lives of people whom, as fathers of their countries, they ought to protect. These little tyrants should hear the opinion of mankind, which is one of contempt for the misuse of their power.”

=The “Fourteen Points.”=--On January 8, 1917, less than sixty days before we found ourselves in a state of war with Germany, President Wilson presented to Congress the following fourteen specific considerations as necessary to world peace:

1. Open covenants of peace without private international understandings.

2. Absolute freedom of the seas in peace or war, except as they may be closed by international action.

3. Removal of all economic barriers and establishment of equality of trade conditions among nations consenting to peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

4. Guarantees for the reduction of national armaments at the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

5. Impartial adjustment of all colonial claims based upon the principle that the peoples concerned shall have equal weight with the interest of the government.

6. Evacuation of all Russian territory and opportunity for Russia’s political development.

7. Evacuation of Belgium without any attempt to limit her sovereignty.

8. All French territory to be freed and restored, and France must have righted the wrong done in the taking of Alsace-Lorraine.

9. Readjustment of Italy’s frontiers along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

10. Freest opportunity for the autonomous development of the peoples of Austria-Hungary.

11. Evacuation of Rumania, Servia and Montenegro, with access to the sea for Servia, and international guarantees of economic and political independence and territorial integrity of the Balkan States.

12. Secure sovereignty for Turkey’s portion of the Ottoman Empire, but with other nationalities under Turkey’s rule assured security of life and opportunity for autonomous development, with the Dardanelles permanently opened to all nations.

13. Establishment of an independent Polish State, including territories inhabited by indisputably Polish population, with free access to the sea and political and economic independence and territorial integrity guaranteed by international covenant.

14. General association of nations under specific covenants for mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to large and small states alike.

This was the programme laid down for the attainment of peace and was accepted by both sides, the Allied powers as well as Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The total disregard of the Fourteen Points in the peace treaty proved a grievous disappointment to the majority of the thinking people of America. In the final analysis of the work of the Paris peace conference it was found that we had achieved not a single point of our programme, except as to the last provision, from which evolved the so-called League of Nations, subsequently defeated in the Senate.

Instead of “open covenants openly arrived at,” the treaty was made in secret conference; we did not gain the freedom of the seas, but helped Great Britain to strengthen her command of the seas by eliminating her greatest rival; we witnessed no removal of economic barriers--not even among the Allies, as the President himself recommended an American tariff on dyes; disarmament was decreed for Germany and Austria only; self-determination of small nations became a dead letter at once as to Ireland, German Austria, the German Tyrol, Danzig, Egypt, India, the Boers, Korea, Persia, and numerous others, especially where the question involved the self-determination of Germans; Hungary’s borders were at once invaded by Rumania, Serbia and Czecho-Slovakia; Russia was not permitted to determine her own fate, as Kolchak was formally recognized and supported by the powers; Belgium remains a vassal of England and France; in addition to righting the wrong of 1871 by the recession of Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar Valley was taken away from Germany and a plebiscite was ordered in Schleswig, Silesia, and German-Poland under the guns of the Entente; Italy’s borders were not readjusted along national lines, for the Brenner Pass, the Voralsberg, parts of Dalmatia and a lease on Fiume provided; the autonomous development of Austria-Hungary was interpreted to mean that the German-speaking part of Austria was forbidden to unite with Germany; the independence of the Balkan States was made subject to the invisible government of the Big Four; autonomy for Turkish vassal states and the internationalization of the Dardanelles was construed to mean that these States should become mandatories of the Allies and the strait to be under Allied control; Polish freedom celebrated its advent with Jewish pogroms, while the League of Nations became a league of victors, in which Japan was bribed to enter by the cession to her of the Shantung peninsula.

“Germany has accepted President Wilson’s fourteen points,” said Dr. Mathias Erzberger, “but so have the Allies.”

That President Wilson fully recognized his responsibility and that of his European associates under the Fourteen Points is shown by his own statement. On December 2, 1918, he said in addressing Congress:

“=The Allied Governments have accepted the bases of peace which I outlined to the Congress on the 8th of January last, as the Central Empires also have=, and very reasonably desire my personal counsel in their interpretation and application, and it is highly desirable that I should give it =in order that the sincere desire of our government to contribute without selfish aims of any kind to settlements that will be of common benefit to all the nations concerned may be fully manifest=.”

In an interview printed in the Paris “Temps” of March 25, 1919, Count Bernstorff, former Ambassador to the United States, said:

“The armistice of November 11 was signed when all the Powers interested had accepted the program of peace proposed by President Wilson. Germany is determined to keep to this agreement, which history will regard, in a way, as the conclusion of a preliminary peace. She herself is ready to submit to the conditions arising from it, and she expects all the interested Powers to do the same.”

The President’s reversal was diplomatically covered under various specious pretexts by the staff of English journalists at the peace conference. Sir J. Foster Frazer put it this way: “Mr. Wilson has broadened in vision since he came to Paris. He has abandoned his purely national point of view.”

The same writer discoursed entertainingly of the methods pursued in the conference. “Except at intervals,” he wrote, “the conferences are not in public, that is when a certain number of journalists are permitted to be present. The great things are debated in private, and at these private conversations in M. Pichon’s room at the French Foreign Office, the full representation of the five powers is not in attendance.... The full conferences of the seventy delegates will have but little option but to acquiesce with the conclusion of the ten.... It is a perfectly open secret that the three men who are ‘running the show’ are M. Clemenceau, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George.”

The noble writer frankly admits that the conferences revolved around the secret treaties among the Allies instead of the Fourteen Points. He reports:

“We already know there were three secret treaties made during the war and to all of which Great Britain was a party; (1) conceding to Italy the Dalmatian coast in return for her help, (2) the concession of the former German islands in the North Pacific to Japan, (3) the promise of Damascus to the King of Hedjaz.”

Again he says: “Japan is in possession of the Marshall and Caroline groups of islands in the Pacific, and has a document signed by both France and Britain that she shall retain them.”

So much for “open covenants openly arrived at,” though they do not cover all the secret pacts which determined the conditions of peace.

Only once Mr. Wilson rose to the importance of his mission, when he declared that Fiume must go to the Jugo-Slav Republic. His announcement was soon followed by an invasion of Fiume under d’Annunzio, the Italian poet-patriot, with the apparent secret connivance of our associates in the war.

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. The commission, headed by Brockdorf-Rantzau and Scheidemann, resigned rather than sign, and a new delegation was named, which signed the treaty without being given an opportunity to discuss it. In the streets the German delegates were stoned.

Thus was realized the golden promise held out in the speech Mr. Wilson made on the very day that Congress met to declare war:

“=We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship.= It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering the war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old unhappy days when people were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interests of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.”

When Germany, in 1871, had France prostrate at her feet, the French people were represented at the peace conference by their statesmen, just as France was represented at the Peace of Vienna after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Mr. Wilson had said peace must not be determined as it was in the Congress of Vienna. Sir Foster Frazer furnishes the answer. In 1871 the terms of peace were arranged by Bismarck on one side and a full delegation of French statesmen on the other. Bismarck relented so far as to release back to France the great fortress of Belfort, claiming only the recession of Alsace-Lorraine and a war indemnity of five billion francs. So far from seeking to crush France, everything possible on the German side was done to enable her to recover from the war, and no sooner had Paris surrendered, than trainloads of foodstuffs were rushed into the city by the Germans to feed the starving population.

The European allies had first starved Germany, with a loss of 1,000,000 souls by famine, then severed portions of her territory whose possession antedated the American Revolution, on the ground of Mr. Wilson’s point in behalf of the self-determination of small nations, and on top of all left the country in helpless vassalage to her enemies, under a war indemnity that staggers humanity. Erzberger cried out in despair:

“I appeal to the conscience of America by reminding her of the American famine conditions in the years 1862-65. At that time it was Germany who sprang to America’s aid, and steadied her, sending her not only money, but clothes, shoes and machinery as well, thus making it possible for the United States to recuperate economically.

“Today, after half a century, the situation is reversed. Germany needs American wheat, fats, meats, gasoline, cotton and copper.

“Germany’s credit is low. If America today stood by Germany as Germany stood by America fifty years ago, she could furnish us foodstuffs and raw materials against German credits and thus help us to work ourselves out of debt--and, besides, make money in doing so.

“The German people cannot live on the promises they are getting.”

=Fritchie, Barbara.=--Immortalized by Whittier in a patriotic poem bearing her name, in which her defense of the Union flag during the Civil War is celebrated, came of an old German family which settled in Pennsylvania in colonial times, and her own life spanned the two great crises in the history of her country, the founding of the republic and the struggle for the preservation of the Union. She was born in Lancaster, Pa., December 3, 1766. Her maiden name was Hauser.

=First Germans in Virginia.=--Jamestown, Va., the cradle of Anglo-Saxon America, is the place where the Germans are met with for the first time. The earliest incidents on record are cases of imported contract laborers. Those sent to Virginia in 1608 were skilled workmen, glass-blowers. Capt. John Smith (“John Smith, the Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, the Summer Isles,” London, 1624, p. 94), characterizing his men, gives the following account of them: “labourers ... that neuer did know what a dayes work was: except the Dutch-men (Germans) and Poles, and some dozen others.” In 1620 four millwrights from Hamburg were sent to the same settlement to erect saw mills. (“The Records of the Virginia Company,” ed. S. M. Kingsbury, Washington, 1906, I, pp. 368, 372, 428.) In England timber was still sawed by hand. (Edward Eggleston, “The Beginners of a Nation,” New York, 1896, p. 82.) The Germans who settled in the Cavalier colony in large numbers about the middle of the seventeenth century seem to have been attracted chiefly by the profitable tobacco business. The most highly educated citizen of Northampton county in 1657 was probably Dr. George Nicholas Hacke, a native of Cologne. (Philip Alexander Brue, “Social Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” Richmond, Va., 1907, p. 260.) Thomas Harmanson, founder of one of the most prominent Eastern Shore families, a native of Brandenburg, was naturalized October 24, 1634, by an act of the Assembly. (William and Mary College Quarterly, ed. L. G. Tyler. Williamsburg. Va., I, 1892, p. 192.) Johann Sigismund Cluverius, owner of a considerable estate in York County, was ostensibly also of German birth. (From “The First Germans in North America and the German Element of New Netherlands,” by Carl Lohr, G. E. Stechert & Co., New York, 1912.)

=First German Newspapers.=--The oldest German newspaper in the U. S., the weekly “Republikaner,” at Allentown, Pa., ceased publication December 21, 1915, after an existence of 150 years. Another old paper in the German language, the “Reading Adler” ceased in 1913, after continuous publication since November 29, 1796.

=German Americans in Art, Science and Literature.=--An analysis of a comparatively recent edition of “Who’s Who in America” shows a list of 385 German-born persons in the United States who have achieved fame in art, science and literature, against a total of 424 English-born persons so distinguished, a remarkable bit of evidence, considering that the former were initially handicapped by the necessity of having to learn a new language in their struggle for recognition. Nor does this list include a number of Germans credited to Austro-Hungary by reason of their birth.

Dating back to the early decades of 1600 down to the present day, the German element has produced a formidable literature, ranging from travel descriptions to political works, like Schurz’s “Life of Henry Clay,” von Holst’s important work on American constitutional government, George von Bosse’s comprehensive volume on the German element, A. B. Faust’s “The German Element in the United States,” Seidensticker’s and Kapp’s books on the early settlements of Pennsylvania and New York, and further including scientific books by eminent authorities, original explorations, discussions of the fauna and zoology of certain regions, novels and contributions to the poetry of America in both languages.

One of the most active minds in political circles was Carl Nordhoff, who came to the United States with his father in 1835 at the age of five, and in his later years represented the New York “Herald” as its Washington correspondent through numerous sessions of Congress. At the age of nineteen he enlisted in the United States Navy, visited many parts of the world during his term of three years’ service, and after publishing some books about the sea, he worked for many years for Harper Brothers in a literary capacity and for ten years was employed in the editorial department of the New York “Evening Post.” In the interval he published several books, notably his popular “Politics for Young Americans” and then acted as Washington correspondent of the New York “Herald.” His chief literary work was published in 1876 as the result of a six months tour of the South, “The Cotton States,” in which he exposed the Republican misrule in the South.

While Steinmetz, Mergenthaler and Berliner rank high among American inventors, Herman George Scheffauer, George Sylvester Viereck and Herman Hagedorn are among the foremost poets of the present day, to cite those writing in the English language, without taking account of a generation of German-writing poets of the distinguished lineage of Conrad Kretz and Konrad Nies. Theodore Dreiser is one of the best-known novelists. Bret Harte had a strong German strain in his blood; Bayard Taylor had a German mother; the second name in Oliver Wendell Holmes indicates German relationship; Joaquin Miller was of German extraction; Owen Wister owns to German antecedance, while one of America’s greatest actors, Edwin Forrest, was the son of a German mother, and Mary Anderson is likewise credited with this racial admixture; Maude Powell, the famous violinist, had a German mother to whom she attributed her genius for music.

The greatest American historical painter is still Emanuel Leutze, whose “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Westward the Star of Empire” are among the most cherished art possessions of the American people. Save Remington, none has pictured the stirring life of the frontier as Charles Schreyvogel, notably in his painting, “My Bunky,” while a host of others, like Albert Bierstadt, Carl Marr, Carl Wimar, Toby Rosenthal, Henry Mosler, Henry Twachtman, F. Dielman, Robert Blum and Gari Melchers, have permanently taken their place in the gallery of famous artists. A. Nahl was selected to perpetuate in historic paintings the frontier days of California, and his works may be seen in the capitol at Sacramento and in the Crocker Art Gallery of that city.

Hiram Powers’ name is one of the most familiar in the art history of America, but few are aware that the sculptor’s instructor was Friedrich Eckstein, who went to Cincinnati in 1825 and opened an academy where Powers obtained the training that enabled him to create his masterwork, “The Greek Slave.” In fact, one of the most enduring influences exercised by the German element has at all times been as teachers and instructors.

American musical history would have had an entirely different aspect had it not been for the pioneer work of Theodore Thomas in carrying the cult of classic music into the remotest corners of the land under all kinds of physical discouragements, and had it not been for the numerous brilliant conductors who passed various periods in America to give it the best products of their genius, but particular credit is due to the host of individual Germans who scattered throughout the country and became part of town and village life as tireless instructors in music and art. Their influence was similar to that of the countless thousands of skilled chemists and mechanics who contributed so vastly to the development of our industries.

The number of distinguished architects, sculptors and engineers is legion, though a few can be named here, famous architects like Johannes Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz, the architects of the Congressional Library in Washington, and other public buildings; Alfred Ch. H. C. Vioch, Ernest Helffenstein, G. L. Heins, Otto Eidlitz and Carl Link. Famous sculptors: Karl Bitter, Joseph Sibbel, Charles Niehaus, Albert Weinmann, Albert Jaegers, F. W. Ruckstuhl, Otto Schweitzer and Prof. Bruno Schmitz, the designer of the Indianapolis monument.

The great engineers and bridge builders of America are Johann August Roebling and Gustav Lindenthal. The former built the first suspension bridge over Niagara Falls, the Brooklyn bridge and Ohio River suspension bridge, and was the first manufacturer of bridge cables; Lindenthal constructed the new railway bridge across Hellgate from Manhattan to Long Island, said to be the most perfect piece of bridge construction in the United States.

Famous among novelists, whose works were translated into all languages, was Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postel) who wrote equally well in both languages, writing in English “Tokeah, or The White Rose,” and several other works. Friedrich Gerstaecker and Otto Ruppius lived many years in the United States and wrote novels of American life which were translated into English, French and Spanish. A female writer of considerable repute was the wife of Professor Robinson, known by her pen-name of “Talvj.” She was born in Halle, Germany, and was a friend of Washington Irving, and, after publishing “Ossian not Genuine,” a story of Captain John Smith and a work on the colonization of New England, wrote in English “Heloise, or The Unrevealed Secret,” “The Exiles” and “Woodhill.”

Such names are selected at random out of hundreds, like that of Julius Reinhold Friedlander, of Berlin, who founded the first institute for the blind in Philadelphia in 1834, subsequently taken over by the State. He is called the father of the institutions for the blind in America. Dr. Konstantin Hering was the father of homeopathy in America. Friedrich List was one of the pioneers in the advocacy of a protective tariff, writing in 1827 “Outlines of a New System of Political Economy,” which attracted wide attention. Philip Schaff soon after his arrival in 1844, attained fame in miscellaneous and religious literature, writing in English “The Principles of Protestantism,” “America, Its Political, Social and Religious Character,” “Lectures on the Civil War in America,” etc. Demetrius Augustin Gallitizin, better known as Father Schmidt, founded the Catholic mission Loretto in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, in 1798, and his life is commemorated by a statue. Johann N. Neumann wrote “The Ferns of the Alleghanies” and the “Rhododendrons of the Pennsylvania and Virginia Mountains”--and so an almost endless array of German names troop in review before our minds to show the influence of this element on our literature and our institutions. From no European source have we received a stronger accession of intellectual currents than from Germany, and whether the field be literature, art, science or music, among their foremost figures are men with German names. They never belonged to the coolie class; they were never identified with the various movements for the suppression of rights, they have had fewer of their race figure in the crime records and more in the ranks of those who stood for liberty, education and progress than any others. Their literature would fill a library, and as Professor Scott Nearing has shown, the American people are a conquering race because they are composed of the descendants of conquerors, the English and Germans.