Speech or Document 22

NO QUESTION OF DIVIDED LOYALTY CAN BE TOLERATED

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF WITTENBERG COLLEGE AT SPRINGFIELD, OHIO, ON MAY 25, 1918

AT this time no good American should sleep easily, if during the day he has not done everything in his power to put this country back of the armed men who in France are fighting for our own national honor and interest, and for the future of the free peoples of civilized mankind.  The peril is faced by and the honor is rightly due to those at the front.  But the rest of us, the men and women who can not get to the front, must at least back up our men in every possible way; and the way to back them up is every day, every week, every month, to do the thing that is next.  At this moment the thing that is next is the Red Cross drive.  Last month it was the Liberty loan.  And all the time the biggest thing that is next is to back up the men who wear our uniform by insisting that we at home tolerate absolutely no division on the great question of Americanism.

It is primarily on this question of Americanism that I come to speak today.  I accepted the invitation to come here, from the president of Wittenberg college, who informed me he wished me because Wittenberg college, founded by Lutherans of German blood, was American and nothing else, and that he wanted me to preach the straightest and stiffest doctrine of Americanism, exactly such doctrines as I have been preaching all my life, and most of all during the past four years.  To emphasize the quality of true Americanism, President Heckert, the president of this Lutheran college, has asked my old and deeply valued friend, Monseigneur Vattman to come, so that it is a Lutheran preacher and a Catholic ecclesiastic who give the invocation and the benediction at this meeting.  Both alike are of German blood, and both of them are as straight and good Americans as are to be found in the whole United States, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.  Americans in body and in spirit, standing like all other good Americans, for America and the allies of America, and against the Prussianized Germany of today and all her allies and vassal states.

Such an invitation from such a source appealed to me peculiarly, and I was glad to accept it.

The first essential here in the United States is that we shall be one nation and that the American nation.  We are a new nation, by blood akin to but different from every one of the nations of Europe.  We have our own glorious past, we are a nation with a future such as no other nation in the world has before it, if only we the men and women of today, do our full duty and bring up our sons and daughters to do their full duty, as Americans, and as nothing else.

In such a nation there can be no fifty-fifty allegiance.  There is not such thing as being loyal to the United States, and also loyal to any other power.  It is just as impossible as for a man to be loyal to his wife and also equally loyal to some other woman.  If any man dilutes his loyalty to America by any degree of loyalty to any other country whatsoever, he ought instantly to be sent out of this country and back to the country where he belongs.  And of course the case is even worse if he sacrifices his loyalty for America to his hatred for some other country.  The German-American alliance put the interests of Germany above the interests of the United States, it showed itself the embittered foe of America and tried to run our politics with reference not to our own honor and interests but to the needs of the Germany of the Hohenzollems.  The Sinn Feiners have put the honor and interest of America second to their hatred to England.  The German-American alliance is dissolved, but Congress ought by law to make the dissolution permanent, and to render forever impossible its revival or the creation of any similar anti-American and semi-traitorous organization.  In just the same way every Sinn Feiner who directly or indirectly seeks to discredit America's allies in this war and thereby to give aid and comfort to Germany, should be interned as an enemy alien or sent out of the country.  The same thing is true of the Russian Bolshevists who seek to plunge this country into the chaotic ruin into which Russia has been plunged.  All these men are the allies of Germany, and the enemies of the United States.  Their most potent allies are the native American demagogues whether politicians or newspaper editors, who pander to the foreign vote that is hostile to America, and the native American pacifists who have been the mean allies of German militarism, and the I.  W.  W.  people, and the Germanized societies.  All these are enemies to the United States and should be treated as such.

This question of Americanism has two sides to it.  The first side is that which I have above out" lined.  Applying what I have said in concrete form, it means that at this time the American of German blood should himself take the lead in proceeding against every man in this country who directly or indirectly favors Germany, or is luke-warm in our war against Germany.  In the Revolution the American of English blood took the lead against the British king and his backers.  In this war it should be the Americans of German blood who take the lead against the Germany of the Hohenzollerns, the Germany that has become a menace to liberty and to justice and to mercy and to honor throughout the world.  America has special and intolerable grievances of her own against Germany, for no nation is worth being called a nation if it permits such wrong as Germany did this country to go unpunished.  But in addition America is fighting the battle of all well-behaved nations.  It is fighting for the right of free peoples to exist.  No nation can be of full effect in such a war as this unless it stands loyally by its allies; and any man who now seeks to embroil us with our allies is a traitor to the cause of America.

Nor can any nation make such a fight effectively if it is not itself united.  We can permit no division here.  Our ideals and our principles of national unity and honor and greatness must be the same in whatever part of the country we dwell and from whatever stock we come.  Therefore, we must have but one flag — the American flag, and but one language — the English language.  In our primary schools nothing but the English language should be taught or studied, and the law should require that after a reasonable period every newspaper in this country to be published in English.  As for our higher institutions of learning, all foreign languages should be taught in them insofar as it is considered necessary, but the language of the high school or college itself should always be the English language, and only the English language — just as it is in Wittenberg college today, just as it is in Rutgers college, which my own Dutch Reformed ancestors helped to found.  And what is true of the newspaper and the college is true of the church.  Let the Lutheran church profit by what befell my own church, the Dutch Reformed church, in New York.  That church clung to Dutch as a language and dwindled until its leaders saw that it was doomed unless it adopted English as its tongue.  If the Lutheran church tries to remain a German church, using the German language, either it will dwindle or else it will be an alien body in the American commonwealth.  We Americans must speak in the school, in the church and in the home and must read in our newspapers one language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington's farewell address and of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech.

This is one side of Americanism.  But there is another side just as important.  If a man behaves as an American it is an infamy to hold his creed or his national origin against him, or to fail in any way to give him the square deal as an American.  If the man is a straight American it is our business to stand by him.  I don't care a rap whether he is Catholic, Protestant or Jew — I don't care a rap whether his ancestors or he himself came from England or Ireland or Germany, France or Italy, the Scandinavian or the Slavonic countries.  We have a right to insist that he be an American and nothing else.  If he lives up to that requirement he has a right to insist that we treat him exactly on a level with every other American.

At this moment the great majority of the Americans who are in whole or in part of German blood are as heartily loyal to America and, therefore, as resolutely hostile to Germany, as all other good Americans.  These men are fit to hold every office, civil or military, from the highest to the lowest, in this country.  The best text books on Americanism and on the duty of Americans within this country and in regard to Germany, that have been written by Americans during this war, have been written by Americans who themselves are partly of German blood.  Witness Owen Wistar's “Pentecost of Calamity," James Beck’s” Documents In the Case," and Gustavus Ohlinger's “Their True Faith and Allegiance."

As a matter of fact, all our children's children will intermarry and in a very few generations all our people will derive their blood from various European nationalities.  Let me give you my own case.  About two and a half centuries ago some German peasants who had been driven out of the palatinate by the armies of Louis XIV came to America, and founded Germantown, near Philadelphia.  Two of these were ancestors of mine.  At about the same time a French Protestant came here because the Catholics in France persecuted the Protestants, and an Irish Catholic came here, because the Protestants in Ireland persecuted the Catholics; and some Dutch traders settled at the mouth of the Hudson, and some Scotch farmers and some Welsh and English Quakers settled in Pennsylvania.  All these people lived here and their children lived here after them.  They devoted themselves to this land and ceased to think of any other.  Their children's children intermarried with one another — and if they had not intermarried I would not have been here.  Therefore, in my case, if you tried to express me in terms of the hyphen, you would have to use seven hyphens; and sooner or later the children of all of you will pass through a similar experience, for they are all going to intermarry, and even before they do thus intermarry they will all be turned out in the same American type.  It is the type of Washington and Lincoln and Andrew Jackson.  It is also the type of Muhlenberg and Herkimer and Custer, of Sheridan and Sullivan and Farragut, of Carroll and Schuyler and Paul Revere.  I have named some of the great names in our history.  They were borne by men whose fathers had come from many different lands.  Who cares? They were all Americans and nothing but Americans.  There wasn't a hyphen in the lot.

Here where I speak in the shadow of Wittenberg college there can be no truer American ideal to uphold than that of Muhlenberg.  He was the pastor of a Lutheran church when the Revolution opened.  He got up to preach his last sermon in the uniform of the Continental army, and told his congregation that now war had come it was his duty to fight as an American patriot in the ranks of American soldiers under Washington.  His brother was the first speaker of the national Congress.  They were Americans and nothing but Americans; they knew but one flag, the American flag, and their speech was the speech of their American fellows.

A Red Cross friend, Maj.  Simons, of St.  Louis, told me a little anecdote the other day that illustrates just what I mean.  He had just come back from France, where he had been to the hospital to see my son Archie.  In the next cot but one to Archie lay a young fellow who was a little worse hurt even than Archie was, for a bullet had gone right through the point of his heart.  He had to lie absolutely motionless for eight days, until the muscle knitted, and his life was saved.  He had shown conspicuous gallantry and ability.  My friend, the Red Cross man, got into conversation with him, and after taking certain messages to be delivered to his family (and to one young lady who was not of his family) my friend asked him what his name was.  Whereupon the young officer, who was really little more than a boy, grinned and said, “Say, now don't faint when you hear my name.  It is Von Holtzendorf.  Wouldn't the Huns feel good if they knew they had ' got' a man with a name like that? "

The boy in the cot between my son and this young officer had an English name.  But those three boys were Americans and nothing else.  They were straight United States! They had given their blood for this country — for one country, for one flag; and they talked to one another in one language — the language of the soldiers of Washington and of the soldiers of Grant and Lee.