The Guardian’s den was brightly lighted on this December evening of 1917. It was brightly lighted on most evenings. Yet Doc Summerfield, aforetime of a pessimistic view regarding the effect of night-labor upon Jeremy Robson, was obliged to admit that he showed a steady improvement in spite of apparent overwork. Perhaps this was because he had provided himself with a highly valued assistant. The assistant was seated opposite the chief, reading proof on an editorial, when the door opened, and in stalked Andrew Galpin, traveling-bag in hand.
“Hello, Bosses!” he said.
“Hello, Andy,” said his chief; and “Welcome back, Andy,” said the assistant getting up to perch upon the arm of the chief editorial chair, thus leaving a seat for the general manager, who took it with a nod.
“I saw Cassius Kimball,” he stated. “He’s just back from Washington.”
“Any news?” asked Jeremy.
“We’ve located Emil Bausch. But not for publication.”
“Where is he?”
“Behind two rows of barbed wire, one of ’em charged with electricity, in a pleasant Southern camp. He’s a member of the Millionaires’ Club, there. They caught him on that chemical deal. Supposed to be wholesale drugs; really high explosives.”
“Any other of our extinguished local lights heard from?”
“Muller, the saloon-keeper, is down there, too. But not in the Millionaires’ Club. He’s gardening. One dollar per diem. Martin Dolge is in Mexico.”
“What about Gunst and Klink and the church outfit?”
“They’ve promised to be good. Three of their religious weeklies are scheduled to quit. Gordon Fliess has dropped his financial support of the German-American dailies. We’re going to go stale for lack of opposition if this keeps on,” prophesied Andy sadly.
“Cassius didn’t run across Mart Embree down there, did he?” queried Jeremy.
“Ay-ah. He did. Says ‘Smiling Mart’ was running around like a little, worried dog, wagging his tail anxiously and trying to make his peace.”
“Peace is still Governor Embree’s specialty, then?” put in the assistant, from her perch.
“Why, I guess it always will be, so long as there’s a German vote in Centralia,” returned the general manager. “But what does ‘Smiling Mart’ amount to, now? We’ve got the whole bunch licked to a frazzle, and licked for keeps.”
“Do you think so. So easily?”
Andy Galpin looked intently at Mrs. Jeremy Robson. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said meekly. “You think it isn’t over?”
The little, tawny head was shaken emphatically.
“I think that we shall have it all to fight again,” she said, in her unchanged, precise, and subtly caressing manner of speech.
“When?” The chief and the general manager challenged her with one voice.
“When Germany’s peace offer is made. Then you will see Governor Embree and all that is left of Germany here making their fight for a peace which will be worse than war. That is why I will not listen to Jem’s giving up the paper.”
“What do you think of that, Andy?” asked Jem.
The general manager smiled his slow, homely, friendly smile at Marcia Robson. “I think what I’ve thought since the first minute I set eyes on her,” he said: “that she’s a wise guy. Boss, we haven’t won this war over here until we’ve won this war over there, and don’t you forget it! By the way, there’s quite a little talk in Washington, Kimball tells me, about the new Senator-elect from Centralia.”
“I blush, modestly and prettily,” retorted Jem. “Or—Marcia, you do it for me. I’d rather stay here and run the old Guardian.”
“I’d rather have you,” returned Andy, with rueful emphasis.
“We shall be back for the fight that is coming,” promised Marcia.
Galpin’s eyes wandered slowly about the room and returned upon Marcia. “It gives me the shivers,” he said, “to think how near we were to losing out on the whole fight when Buddy Higman went and got you. I’d like to have heard Buddy’s argument.”
“It was effective,” laughed Marcia. “Buddy was honestly convinced that without The Guardian to guide it, the Nation would go to immediate destruction.”
“Buddy’s little plan turned out well for him,” observed Jem. “Marcia is sending him to Old Central in the fall. Sort of a fairy godmother, aren’t you?” he added, looking up at his wife. “Pull the paper through with one hand, save us all, and make a man of Buddy with the other.”
“Do not give me too much credit,” said Marcia, more gravely. “It was Andy who really held you here when you wished to go into the army.”
“Oh, well, I had my stake in the paper, too,” disclaimed the general manager, picking up his valise and hat. “Good-night, Bosses,” he added. “Don’t overwork and spoil your beauty, you two.”
“Marcia,” said Jem, after their aide had gone. “That night when you came back—don’t go away while I’m talking seriously, please!—would you really have married me, right away, then and there?”
“Certainly, I would. I meant to. You were very cruel. You spoiled my plans.”
He regarded her with suspicion. Was there a note of raillery in the sweet, even voice?
“What plans?”
“Why, to marry you then.”
“And then what?”
“To put my money into the paper and keep you from selling it, of course.’
“But if I wouldn’t have taken it? And I wouldn’t, you know.”
“That would not have made the slightest difference,” she said calmly. “You could not have sold the paper, in any case, if you had married me when—when I proposed to you.”
“Couldn’t I! I’d have had to, if matters had gone on as they were going.”
“No. For you could not have sold the paper without the plant, and the plant being real estate, could not be transferred without the wife’s consent.”
“So it couldn’t! You wretched little plotter! Who put you up to that?”
“I consulted a lawyer,” she replied demurely. “On a hypothetical case.”
“I’m jealous,” declared Jem. “You were trying to marry me for my property and not for my winning self. Was that the only reason?”
Her face changed adorably as she bent over him. “What do you think?” she said.
“But I wanted to have—what is it Andy called it?—a stake in the paper, too,” she continued, after a moment. “You have never let me. Do you think that is fair?”
“It’s the only fair way. We’re not out of the woods yet, with The Guardian. Newspaper property is going to be mighty uncertain before this war is over, and I don’t want you involved in it. The Guardian has taken you in, little wife, but it won’t take your money.”
“Not even if you should need it? To save the paper?”
“Not even then.”
“Jem, I—I want a—a stake in the paper.”
“Why, Marcia! What is it, dearest? You’re not crying, are you?”
“No, I think not. If I am, it is for happiness, Jem. I—I have a—a special stake now in the paper. I want to keep The Guardian to hand it down to—to—”
“Marcia!” He turned in the circle of her arms, but for once the frank eyes were hidden from him.
“—to our son,” said the soft voice with a little catch in it. “I am sure it will be a son, Jem. If we name him Jeremy Andrew Robson”—the voice was muffled now against Jem’s cheek—“he will be almost The Guardian’s child—next to being ours, Jem.”
Jem drew a long, deep breath of happiness. “There’ll always be a good fight for a hundred per cent American paper like The Guardian to get into. That’s the real best of the business, I guess.” He bent over the little, proud, bowed head. “I hope he’ll be as good an American as his mother,” he said.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. Germans constituted the largest immigrant group in the United States. In 1914, nearly one in five Americans—twenty million people—were of German descent.
More than eight million had been born in Germany or had a parent who was. At the beginning of the war, the majority of Wisconsin’s population was of German origin.
These German-Americans were generally hardworking, well educated, and proud of their heritage. They tended to be pillars of their community, as the group assembled in the Fenchester Auditorium suggests.
“The fury that broke upon the German-Americans in 1915,” historian John Higham observes, “represented the most spectacular reversal of judgment in the history of American nativism. . . . In 1908 a group of professional people, in rating the traits of various immigrant nationalities, ranked the Germans above the English and in some respects judged them superior to the native whites.” Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1978), 196. German immigrants, wrote sociologist Edward Ross in 1914, had “proved, on the whole, easy to Americanize.” Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New (New York: Century, 1914), 51.
2. This patriotic German song originated out of conflicts with France in the nineteenth century. It was written by Max Schneckenburger as a call to defend the left bank of the Rhine River against French annexation. Germans often sang it during the Great War.
3. The word Deutschtum here refers to the sense of Germanness—its language, culture, and the like—held by ethnic Germans residing in foreign countries.
4. The Germans were extensively organized in local and national societies. According to Robert E. Park’s monumental study, the German-American Address Book carried entries for 6,586 organizations. These included social and athletic clubs, veterans groups, philanthropic bodies, singing societies, and other cultural clubs. Robert E. Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper, 1922), 128.
The National German-American Alliance claimed two million members and argued strenuously against the United States going into war. At a January 1915 meeting in Washington, its leaders exhorted members to “bring their adopted country, misled and misrepresented by its newspapers, back to authentic Americanism.” Local German-American organizations were urged to recruit speakers to “counteract the influence of the English press.”
5. Originally Adams named the character Borst, but Ferris Greenslet at Houghton Mifflin asked him to change it because one of their authors, Sara Cone Bryant, was married to a German-American by that name. Adams replied, “Sure, I’ll change Borst, though with reluctance, as I knew a prize S.O.B. of that name and I wanted to follow him to hell (whither he went last year) with a record of his character. However, that’s another sweet dream gone wrong. How would Bausch do for the name, or Balsch? I’m giving you an alternative, as God knows how many other German friends you are cherishing to your official bosom.” Greenslet to Adams, September 3, 1918, and Adams to Greenslet, September 7, 1918, Houghton Mifflin Papers (hereafter HMP), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Chapter 2
1. In journalistic parlance at the time, a pippin was a scoop.
Chapter 4
1. Adams introduced Socialists into the story to round out the picture of anti-war sentiments. When the American government declared war, many members of the Socialist party balked. Pro-war Socialists bolted from the party. Many volunteered with the CPI. Eugene Debs, a Socialist, ran for president in 1912 and was jailed for speaking out against the war in June 1918.
2. This is a reference to the novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling. The hero joins a Tibetan lama who seeks to liberate himself from “the Wheel of Things.” The book was popular at the time. It was originally serialized in McClure’s in 1900 and 1901.
Chapter 5
1. Journalism instruction was new to universities. The University of Wisconsin, which established a department of journalism in 1910, was one of the first to offer courses.
Chapter 7
1. Fenchester bears a strong similarity to Madison, Wisconsin. It is the state capital, has an analog to the University of Wisconsin (Kent College), and borders on four attractive lakes, of which Lake Mendota is the largest.
Chapter 8
1. To many, journalism seemed an unsavory occupation thanks to the sensation-mongering of yellow journals such as those owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
Chapter 10
1. Two of the chief targets of muckrakers were utilities and railroads, both of which are portrayed in this novel as taking unfair advantage of citizens.
2. Robert La Follette was short, not tall like Embree. But Adams may have imparted La Follette’s confidence and oratorical skills to his Embree.
Chapter 11
1. German language instruction emerged as a contentious issue once the war broke out, as it was viewed as an engine for promoting German culture. In the summer of 1917, the Wisconsin State Journal called for the University of Wisconsin to be “Americanized” and questioned the large number of German language instructors. Enrollment in German language classes declined sharply that fall. Elsewhere others sought to legislate against the use of foreign languages. Iowa’s governor issued a proclamation requiring that only English be used in schools, church services, on the telephone, and in public spaces. Louisiana went further, passing a law that forbid the use of German in any school. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wanted to outlaw German language newspapers. Meanwhile books written in German were burned. The New York State Board of Education banned textbooks that contained anything favorable about the German Kaiser. “We are quite sure that the German language now is a hated language, and long will remain so,” said the American Defense League.
Chapter 12
1. Department stores then, as now, were among the most important advertisers in daily newspapers.
Chapter 14
1. The children of German settlers in rural Wisconsin were instructed in German in the 1800s. This practice died out by the early twentieth century and ended with the clamp down on German culture during the war.
2. The war years brought an acceleration of efforts to Americanize immigrant groups. One slogan was “100 percent Americanism.”
Chapter 16
1. The Germans were ardent, albeit extraordinarily clumsy, propagandists in the United States.
Propaganda efforts were conducted through the German language press, which the Germans subsidized. In 1916 the Germans bought the New York Evening Mail through a third party, and also purchased the International Monthly and a Jewish newspaper, and maintained an Irish news service. (Irish-Americans were a prime target due to their antipathy of the British.) Behind the scenes they financially sponsored two national movements, the American Embargo Conference and the Organization of American Women for Strict Neutrality.
The impact of German propaganda is disputed. The popular press, much like Robson’s Guardian, and Congress, in hearings opened toward the end of the war, portrayed German propaganda as well-funded and crafty; revisionist historians claimed German expertise and funding were overstated. What is clear is that Germany shrewdly targeted audiences, including legislators with large German constituencies. In the early months of the war, German propagandists raised public consciousness that war guilt was shared by both sides, and they fed the Anglophobia and distaste for Russian despotism that resided in sectors of the American population.
The Germans were greatly handicapped, however, by the sway the United Kingdom held over the world’s communications systems. In the first hours of the war, the British cut Germany’s five most important Atlantic cables. This hampered the Germans’ ability to send news to the United States. As the war dragged on, the Germans improved their wireless communication, facilitating the transmission of news, which made its way into both German language newspapers and mainstream American ones.
The British, however, continued to enjoy a great advantage. They had had a much easier time getting their message into the American press. They were aided greatly by the insensitive statements made by German officials in the United States. At the same time, they worked quietly to expose much of the German propaganda machinery. The impression in the end was that only the Germans we
re engaged in such activity.
Chapter 17
1. The reference here is to liberal revolutions that swept across Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. German revolutionaries argued for a pan-German government—instead of the fractured German Confederation—one that would be more democratic and respectful of human rights. When conservative aristocratic elements prevailed, the liberal revolutionaries fled the country. Many of the so-called “Forty-Eighters,” who included liberal Czechs and Hungarians who failed in their countries as well, fled to the United States, particularly to Wisconsin. The liberal German Forty-Eighters readily sided with the Union Army in the Civil War, enlisting in such large numbers they constituted almost ten percent of the total force. Forty-Eighter Carl Schurz, a general in the Civil War, was the first German-American elected to the U.S. Senate.
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