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
Los Angeles had considerable to do with the stoppage of propaganda
by means of motion pictures, that city being the capital of filmdom.
Newspaper reports of the cases of the film “Patria” and of “The Spirit
of 1776” are familiar to the reading public. A. P. L. was always on
hand for film censorship purposes.
A case which attracted considerable attention was known as the von H——
case. The subject was a native of Germany, fifty-three years of age,
a resident in the United States for thirty-two years. He never had
become a citizen, although once employed in the California post office.
Von H—— was a movie actor who did spy parts. He fraternized with the
soldiers and sailors _in propria persona_, and liked to ask them to
his room for conversations over the war. At length he was arrested.
His rooms turned out a mass of evidence, including four hundred snap
shots and some forty letters of the vilest nature. He had intended to
send this material over to Germany to show the lack of morale of the
American soldiers and sailors. He had an oil painting of the Kaiser, a
picture of von Hindenburg and one of the German flag. He was sentenced
to five years, but it is not thought that he will live out his
sentence. Perhaps we can struggle along without him.
There is no character in whom the public more naturally reposes
confidence than in the tried and true negro Pullman porter, but this is
the story of one such porter accused of draft evasion. He was confined
in jail but was offered release if he would go into the Army. He told
the operative that he would go all right, but that his check for forty
dollars was not on hand and that he needed about five dollars to “float
himself.” The operative loaned him the five dollars and the Pullman
porter is still floating. Neither Army nor anyone else has heard of him
since.
Most of the more groundless suspicions and imaginings of Americans
regarding German spies arose among the women of the country. Their
apprehensions at times would lead them to report almost anything. One
small demure little woman once applied to the headquarters of the A.
P. L. in Los Angeles and said that she knew parties—German spies—who
received money from Germany and who had no resources other than the
funds of the German Government. The chief asked her upon what she based
her information. The little lady looked carefully around the room,
under the table and out of the window, and then came close up to the
chief before she gave him the real basis of her charge. She said that
the parties referred to were the possessors of a cuckoo clock which
she was sure was made in Germany; hence they must be pro-Germans, and
therefore spies!
The German ministers, it seems, infest the Pacific slope as well as
the northwestern part of the United States. Herewith the case of Emile
K——, minister of a German Methodist church. An operative went into his
church and took his seat in the last pew. He reports:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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