Helping Uncle Sam to Get Up
Speed
“THE military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, then agents diligently spread sedition among us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance....
“They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions ... and seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.
“But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always in every accent.... The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a people’s war, a war for freedom and justice and self-government among all the nations of the world.”
From President Wilson’s Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917.