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"1683-1920": The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germa — John Shaqi

History

"1683-1920": The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germa

Schrader, Frederick Franklin

Germans -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- Miscellanea

The methods to be followed in the pursuit of the plan to induce
us to repudiate our ancestors and their action are diverse and
always devious. It begins with an agitation for “an orderly Fourth
of July,” in order to wipe out the memories of 1776, and it finds
expression in insidious attempts to discredit our national poets,
notably Longfellow, for recording the rape of the Acadians in his
“Evangeline,” and for writing “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

This foreign propaganda is supported by men like Putnam and even
American writers like Owen Wister. For the Fourth of July issue of
the London “Times” in 1919, Wister wrote an article in which he said:

    A movement to correct the school books (in America) has
    been started and will go on. It will be thwarted in every
    way possible by certain of your enemies. They will busily
    remind us that you burnt our Capitol; that you let loose
    the Alabama on us during the Civil War; they will never
    mention the good turns you have done us. They would spoil,
    if they could, the better understanding that so many of us
    are striving for.

At the meeting of the House of Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, at Detroit, October 11, 1919, a resolution was offered
to exclude from the church hymnal “The Star Spangled Banner” and
“America.” In some of the public schools in New York copy books are
furnished the children with a picture of General Haig and embellished
with the British flag, and for some time pictures of a flag combining
the American Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack in one design were
publicly exhibited for sale all over New York City.

We read in the Prefatory Note to the revised edition of “English
History for Americans,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Edward
Channing (1904): “In the preparation of this revised edition, the
authors have been guided by the thought that the study of English
history in our schools generally precedes that of the United States.”

There is obviously as strong a Tory sentiment in the United States
as there was in 1776, 1779, 1808 and 1812, and the words of Thomas
Jefferson, in his letter to Governor Langdon, of New Hampshire, are
as true today as they were then:

    =The Toryism with which we struggled in ‘77 differed but in
    name from the Federalism of ‘99, with which we struggled
    also; and the Anglicism of 1808 against which we are now
    struggling is but the same thing still in another form.
    It is a longing for a King, and an English King rather
    than any other. This is the true source of our sorrows and
    wailings.=

Again we hear the prophetic voice of Abraham Lincoln as it is borne
to us like an echo of his speech at Springfield, Ill., June 26, 1857:

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