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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—GermaSchrader, Frederick Franklin

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

If the sinister plot, with its ramifications in our churches and
universities, our publishing houses and newspapers, is to be checked,
it will be necessary to act so as to make it unprofitable for these
interests to pursue their plans in quiet, and to seek by every means
available to arouse something of the good old spirit of 1776 that
prevailed throughout America until the advent of the late John Hay as
the first American ambassador to forget the traditions of his country
and its experiences at the hands of England.

How painful, how humiliating to every American, it should be to have
the history of our national life for 144 years declared a forgery and
to see it rewritten at the dictates of the champions of a foreign
power who repudiate the stand of their forefathers. (See “Propaganda
in the United States.”)


=Astor, John Jacob.=--“The inborn spirit of John Jacob Astor made
America what it is,” is the judgment passed upon this famous German
American by Arthur Butler Hurlbut. Popular conception of John Jacob
Astor’s personality and work is based upon a collossal underestimate
of his tremendous service in the cause of the commercial and economic
development of the United States. More interest attaches to those
things which appear adventurous in Astor’s life than to the genius
which inspired all his undertakings in pursuing unsuspected aims and
converting into accomplishments objects that seemed impossible of
accomplishment. Many picture him as a sort of Leatherstocking with an
eye to business, a hunter and trapper, boldly invading the wilderness
and making friends of the Indians, and who finally amassed an immense
fortune from the fur trade.

Truth is, only two millions represented the share of his fur trade
in the total of twenty or thirty million dollars which constituted
his fortune at the time of his death. The mythical John Jacob Astor
was a creation of those who came after him; the real one appeared
quite different to his contemporaries. His bier was surrounded by
the leading statesmen, financiers and scholars of the first half of
the nineteenth century, for they knew what today is either little
known or forgotten, that his methods were those of a true pioneer and
pathfinder.

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

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