The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective LeagueHough, Emerson
History
The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective League
Hough, Emerson
American Protective League; Propaganda, German; World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- United States
There are two distinct points of view as to the slacker raids, so
called, and criticisms as well as praise have come to the A. P. L.
for its part in them all over the country. Naturally, no miracle was
wrought in human nature. The families of the men who were hid or
shielded were no more loyal after their men were taken than they had
been before. The conscientious objector experienced no stiffening of
fiber in his flabby soul. But even these would have felt otherwise
towards the slacker drives had they known all the truth. Ask the men
themselves who were inducted into the army what they think about it
now. Nine-tenths of them will say that they are ashamed that they had
to be asked twice to go into the army. The other one-tenth is the
better for having gone, whether or not they will confess so much. As
a saving influence, a mere reclamation enterprise, the slacker raids
were a vast agency for the public good. They were not man-hunters, but
man-savers, these men who conducted the raids.
Just one instance of this truth must serve for all the many communities
who engaged in this work and who caught, in all, perhaps, a half
million men for examination, and held a tenth of all they caught. It is
only a little anecdote, but it makes the best answer possible to all
the critics of the Selective Service Act.
A gentleman came into the National Headquarters with certain papers in
the way of reports, and announced that he was the Chief of the Akron,
Ohio, Division. He offered the usual apologies—by this time more or
less familiar at the book desk—that he had been able to do so little
when he had wanted to do so much in the work of the A. P. L. “But there
is one thing that I wish you would put in this book,” he said, “to show
people what this League has done in the remaking of men. I don’t care
whether you say another thing for Akron, but I want to tell this story
of a man we saved.
“A young woman came to my office and complained of her husband. ‘I am
almost desperate about Joe,’ she said to me. ‘He drinks and drinks, and
hangs around the saloons. He hasn’t given me a cent in eight months,
and I don’t know what to do. I—I love him. I don’t want him to go. But
do you think the army would do him any good. He doesn’t do anything for
me and our baby.’
“‘The army will see,’ I said to her. So I went and found her husband—in
a saloon, drunk, shabby, dead to all pride and all ambition, about as
poor-looking material for a soldier as you ever saw. ‘That’s Joe,’ said
his wife, when I brought them together in my office.
“Well, I sent Joe to jail to think things over. When he was in his
cell, his wife took him in a tray full of good things to eat, some hot
coffee, and all that sort of thing. I went with her. ‘You see,’ I said
to him, ‘how much your wife is doing now for your support—more than you
have done for her in a year. What do you think about it now?’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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