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Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials

Chapter 39: THE GERMANIZED SOCIALISTS AND PEACE
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About This Book

The collected editorials present a series of forceful wartime commentaries urging vigorous national mobilization and uncompromising pursuit of victory. They call for honest information, increased military preparedness including universal training, efficient production and conservation of resources, vigorous support for liberty loans and relief organizations, and firm action against pro-enemy sentiment or obstruction. Alongside practical policy prescriptions, the pieces criticize political timidity, wrongheaded compromise, and inadequate leadership, while exhorting citizens to civic responsibility and sacrifice. Occasional reflections on individual episodes and public figures illustrate broader themes of duty, patriotism, and the relationship between democratic governance and effective wartime administration.

THE GERMANIZED SOCIALISTS AND PEACE

November 26, 1917

The American Socialist party at the present time is a thoroughly Germanized annex of the Prussianized militaristic and capitalistic autocracy of the Hohenzollerns. Honest social reformers have left it. No patriotic American ought longer to stay in it. It is purely an aid to the capitalist and militarist Hohenzollern party of Germany. It is a bitter enemy of the United States and a traitor to the cause of liberty throughout the world. Its leaders are the supporters of an alien autocracy and are seeking to secure a peace which would immensely benefit this Prussian autocracy. They stand beside the Bolsheviki, whose antics have made Russia at this moment a by-word, both of derision and hope to every believer in despotism and every opponent of liberty throughout the world.

Any man who feels that there is the slightest exaggeration in the above statements would do well to read the articles in which the New York Tribune has recently set forth the connection of Mr. William Bayard Hale with the pro-German propaganda in this country, with the Hearst papers and with the Socialist campaign in New York on behalf of Mr. Hillquit and a peace satisfactory to Germany. These articles should be published in permanent form and circulated as a tract among all decent Americans who still believe that the Germanized Socialist party in America to-day is anything except the foe of America, the foe of democratic liberty throughout the world, and the tool and ally of the autocrats, the capitalists, and the brutal and unscrupulous military chiefs of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns.

Exactly as the reactionary is in the end the worst foe of order; exactly as the conscienceless and greedy man of wealth is in the end the worst foe of property and of honest and duty-performing holders of property, so the Anarchist and the wild Socialist, whose doctrines when applied necessarily lead to Anarchy and the I.W.W., and the crack-brained professional pacifists inevitably themselves are the worst enemies of freedom, of true democracy, and of righteousness. It is natural that in this terrible and melancholy world crisis these men should have struck hands with the sordid tools of German intrigue in this country. The masters of Germany find all these men, whatever their nominal differences, united in the evil bond of a common subserviency to German purposes. The German rulers, who at home trample on the Socialists and dragoon the labor organizations and bully the leader of democratic thought, cynically profit by aiding in other countries the men who in the name of social reform seek to overthrow orderly liberty and thereby show themselves the sinister allies of tyranny and despotism.