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
Major Humes took Dr. Edmund von Mach over the jumps in his
cross-examination before the Overman Committee. Von Mach came in
for a gruelling by Senator Nelson and others of the Committee when
he attempted to speak in justification of German practices in war.
He did his best to carry water on both shoulders, but had a very
unhappy quarter of an hour. He was followed and preceded on the
stand by certain literary gentlemen, college professors and others,
who undertook to explain to the Committee utterances they had made
in print or elsewhere which were charged to show disloyalty to the
interests of the United States. It is impossible to give in any sort
of detail the vast extension of the testimony before this Committee,
or to mention the many widely extended forms of the German activities
that ran in this country during the war. Perhaps we may summarize the
German attitude, as well as in any other way, by citing the opinion
of that delectable gentleman, the Count von Bernstorff, ambassador of
the Imperial German Government at Washington, in his communication to
the Foreign Office in Berlin, in explanation of his activities in the
United States:
It is particularly difficult in a hostile country to find
suitable persons for help of this sort, and to this fact, as well
as the Lusitania case, we may attribute the shipwreck of the
German propaganda initiated by Herr Dernburg. Now that opinion
is somewhat improved in our favor, and that we are no longer
ostracized, we can take the work up again. As I have said before,
our success depends entirely upon finding the suitable people. We
can then leave to them whether they will start a daily, weekly, or
a monthly, and the sort of support to be given. In my opinion, we
should always observe the principle that either a representative
of ours should buy the paper, or that the proprietor should be
secured by us by continuous support. The latter course has been
followed by the English in respect of the New York ——, and our
enemies have spent here large sums in this manner. All the same,
I do not think that they pay regular subsidies. At least, I never
heard of such. This form of payment is moreover inadvisable,
because one can never get free of the recipients. They all wish
to become permanent pensioners of the Empire, and if they fail in
that, they try to blackmail us.
I, therefore, request your Excellency to sanction the payment in
question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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