RISING HEAT AND HATE IN U.S.A.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 57, 26 July 1940, Page 55

RISING HEAT AND HATE IN U.S.A.

"Flagrant Disregard Of Our Sensibilities’"’

(By

ARTHUR

ROBB

in the "Editor and Publisher" )

beginning to appear in those columns which American daily newspapers devote to the "Editor's Mail Box," Hysterical letters are being hurled at newspapers which print comments on events in Europe, or against letters from other readers. Most of the screaming correspondents loudly protest their Americanism, and most of those that we have seen have been in protest against editorial condemnation of the German government's ruthless disregard of its small neighbours’ rights. It may be coincidence that most of the letters (again-those that we have seen) have been signed with names indicating Germanic origin. It may also be coincidence that editorial suggestions of increased American aid to the Allies provoke these letter-writers, who unanimously deny approving Hitler's doings. Whatever may lie behind these apparent coincidences, we don’t like the omen. It is too reminiscent of 1915 and 1916. Then, as now, we had in this country a gradually rising tide of resentment against Germany, and then, as now, we had the same _ screaming, sneering, strident remonstrance from (1) people who favoured the Germans, (2) people who hated the British, (3) people who honestly believed that Europe’s war was none of our business and resented what they considered propaganda in the press to drag the United States into it. Propaganda of 1914-18 After reading a number of volumes on the propaganda in the 1914-1918 war, we are not convinced that the press was either a willing or a stupid victim S HRILLNESS, heat, and hate are

of Allied propaganda. There is no. question that the Allies worked their propaganda machine from the very beginning. Nor is there any question that the British controlled the flow of news from the start and kept from American readers plenty of information that might have influenced our final decision, We knew nothing of the secret treaties which later proved so potent at Versailles, We didn’t find out until much later that Britain and France were near the end of their string when we declared war on Gerfany. And we were not allowed to learn that mutiny had crippled the French army as an effective force for many months in 1917, On the other hand, the British did play the plight of Belgium to a fare-ye-well. They made the most of the Germans’ execution of Nurse Edith Cavell--a story which the Germans could never explain to a sentimental nation, no matter how well they. justified it as a military measure. The atrocity stories had a following for a time, The Providence Journal’s sensational spy series, supplied by the British, fanned American heat against Germany. Despite that record, we are not convinced that the American press, prior to April, 1917, was consciously or un-, consciously luring the American people into a war for which they had no sympathy, Memory and reading pull us the other way. :

Germany Best Allied Propagandist. The press printed what news it could get. The bulk of it came from British sources. France was also a heavy contributor. Germany was low ‘in volume of representation, but we can’t forget that Carl Ackerman and Karl von Wiegand, to mention only two American correspondents, distinguished themselves for their reports from Berlin, The factor that put the United States into the war in 1917 was not Allied propaganda. It was not Page’s unambassadorial conduct at London. And it was not President Wilson’s love for England or craving for glory. It was, we think, Germany’s flagrant disregard of our sensibilities. We didn’t have to think of the Germans as the "Boche" or the "Hun" or the " blond, beast" to get mad at him for sinking ships on which we, as free people, thought we had the right to travel.

No Coaching Needed We didn’t need any coaching from our visiting torchbearers to resent the patronising and insolent tone of the German replies to Mr. Wilson’s scholarly statements of American rights, We raised plenty of steam on our own fires when it developed (admittedly, with British Relp) that Germany was plotting against us in Mexico. Mr. Wilson, as some have held, may have sealed America’s fate long before April, 1917, when he solemnly told the German government that the United States would hold it to "strict accountability" for further violations of American rights; when he wrote those words, he appeared to have..the approval of his countrymen. And those

words were not written or suggested by any Allied propagandist. It is abundantly clear from post-war records that Germany knew American intervention was certain when unrestricted submarine warfare was proclaimed. Germany decided to gamble on ending the war before American help could be effective. It was a desperate gamble, but it came within a hair of winning; so close, that if Germany had played her submarine game with more finesse in the Spring of 1917 and delayed America’s entry from April to June or July, the German army might have been in Paris by July of 1918, The Allies didn’t bustle us into the war on April 6, 1917; the Germans did. The smartest propagandist the Allies ever sent here would have been helpless without the repeated provocations that the Germans supplied,

Germany Again Irks Americans That’s an old story, but it is being repeated to-day. Britain and France don’t need any: propagandists in America to arouse hatred of Hitler’s Germany, The ordinary newspaper reader doesn’t think of Norway, Denmark, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Czechoslovakia as lost customers for American goods, He doesn’t realise as he reads his paper that we won’t be able to ship them our corn, wheat, automobiles, or whatever, for a long time, and that the loss of those ‘markets may hit him in the paycheck before many months have passed. He thinks of them as groups of human beings like himself, people who want to be let alone, raising their crops, keeping their stores, running their lathes or their book-keeping machines. He knows that none of them as a nation could have attacked Germany, He knows that Germany over-ran them for their food, their gold, their machines, their railways, their shipping, or for their strategic nearness to major enemies. And our ordinary newspaper reader, an honest chap who believes in fair play, has no use for the blitzkreig. His instincts are all against it, as they are against the thug who shoots a cop from the ambush of a dark doorway.