John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

“I see that the thing to do is to close at once with the assassin and not let him put his hands out,” Spring Rice wrote Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, deprecating any assistance he’d been able to give; “Morgan was really a trump and so was she.”

Morgan, bleeding from a wound in the thigh and an abdominal wound that might have been fatal, walked stolidly to the telephone, called his office in New York and told them to send out the best physician they could find. Then he lay down on the bed.

It turned out that one bullet had merely creased the skin of his belly while the other had gone through a fleshy part of the thigh. He was on his feet in a few days.

The assailant on being taken to the Mineola jail gave his name as Frank Holt. He was identified as a Ph.D. who taught German at Cornell. He claimed he had not intended to kill Mr. Morgan but merely to hold his family as hostages until Morgan gave orders to suspend the shipment of munitions to Great Britain. On further questioning he boasted of having planted the bomb in the Capitol the day before. He refused all food, tried to slash his wrists and seemed in a state of complete nervous collapse. He was obviously a man of education and at times was quite coherent. Always he came back to his determination to stop the shipment of munitions.

Widening investigation turned up an extraordinary tale. The man was a German. His real name was Erich Muenther. An instructor in Germanic languages at Harvard, he had vanished a few years before from Cambridge with the dead body of his first wife, on being questioned by the police over her death from arsenic poisoning. Professor Hugo Muensterberg, the famous psychologist and stout defender of the German cause, admitted that he’d known Muenther and threw a hedge of scientific terminology about the proposition that Muenther had been mad all along.

The same day the newspapers printed the story of Holt’s past, they reported his suicide. In some unaccountable way he had been allowed to escape from his cell and was said to have killed himself plunging head first from the upper tier of cells above to the concrete floor below. The jailer’s first story was that he’d blown his head off by chewing on a percussion cap. Spring Rice claimed Muenther was murdered by an accomplice.

This news had hardly hit the headlines before a message came from Holt’s present wife in Texas warning the police that Holt had written her that he’d planted time bombs on a number of eastbound liners. Searches were carried out on several ships in vain, but sure enough, a few days later, there was a violent explosion on the Minnehaha of the Atlantic Transport Line bound for England with a cargo of munitions.

While these events were holding the front pages, a tale even more fantastic was being unfolded by Secretary Lansing and his assistants for the private ear of Woodrow Wilson, still happily vacationing at Cornish in a house full of adoring relatives with Mrs. Galt as house guest.

In early July Lansing received a letter from a young lady of his acquaintance who was spending the summer at a fashionable hotel at Kennebunkport, Maine, saying that she had information of vital importance which she didn’t dare put in writing. Lansing sent up his assistant Chandler Anderson who hurried back to Washington with her story.

An aristocratic young German who spoke perfect English and seemed thoroughly at home in the highest circles in England and America had lost his head so completely in his enthusiasm for the young lady’s charms that he had confessed to her that he was the secret German agent who had given the order for the sinking of the Lusitania.

The Department of Justice checked on the story and discovered that the gentleman was Franz Rintelen von Kliest, an intelligence officer on the staff of the German Admiralty, sent to America on a Swiss passport with many millions of dollars at his disposal to try to get the Welland Canal destroyed; to hire underworld characters to blow up munitions ships and piers; to stir up strikes against the loading of arms for the Allies and to finance a counterrevolution in Mexico by the ousted Huerta, who was lurking on the United States side of the Mexican border, against the Carranza government.

The story was corroborated again when British Intelligence lured Rintelen aboard a Europebound liner by a message in the supersecret German Admiralty code which the British had broken. They arrested him when they searched the ship off Dover.

A couple of weeks before Rintelen stepped into the British trap, Dr. Heinrich Albert, commercial attaché of the German Embassy, a privy counsellor and a gentleman of great prestige in Germany, was indiscreet enough to forget his briefcase on an elevated train in New York.

Secretary McAdoo’s treasury agents had been interested in Dr. Albert for some time. Besides being commercial attaché he had an office on lower Broadway with vast bank accounts, where no visible business was transacted. Dr. Albert’s briefcase came into McAdoo’s hands through a series of happy accidents.

Two secretservice agents were dogging the footsteps of George Sylvester Viereck, editor of The Fatherland who was suspected, it turned out, rightly, of being in the pay of the German Government. Following him one Saturday afternoon from the offices of the Hamburg-Amerika Line to the Rector Street station of the Sixth Avenue El, they noticed that he was being very deferential to a large germaniclooking gentleman carrying a heavily stuffed briefcase who accompanied him.

One of the agents followed Mr. Viereck when he left the train at Twentythird Street, the other, Frank Burke by name, stayed aboard to watch the stout gentleman, whom he’d now decided must be the portentous Dr. Albert.

Dr. Albert, who was reading a paper, almost missed his stop at Fiftieth Street and jumping up shouted to the guard to hold the train. In his excitement he left his briefcase on the seat.

Frank Burke just had time to snatch it up and make away with it before Dr. Albert came storming back into the car. After a chase Burke managed to elude the stout German and get the briefcase into the hands of William J. Flynn, the head of the Secret Service. “A glance at the contents of the bag,” he noted in his report, “though much of it was in German, satisfied me that I’d done a good Saturday’s work.”

The documents in Dr. Albert’s briefcase dealt with the subsidizing of newspapers and motion pictures and lecture tours, with the bribing of labor leaders to foment strikes in munitions plants and to agitate for an arms embargo. (“I am morally convinced,” McAdoo noted when he described the incident in his memoirs, “that the British were doing the same thing, but we had no documentary proof.”) With Teutonic thoroughness every detail was set down of the measures being taken to get control of the Wright Airplane Company, to rig the cotton market, to corner chlorine and to purchase munitions to keep them away from the Allies.

Flynn immediately jumped on the Bar Harbor express to take the mass of material up to Secretary McAdoo who was at North Haven, Maine, with his family. McAdoo drove over to Cornish to show the President the documents.

Wilson told him to get Lansing’s and Colonel House’s advice as to whether they should be published. The three of them, House, Lansing and McAdoo, decided to give copies to Frank Cobb who, promising to release no inkling of their origin, started publishing them in the World as a great scoop on August 15. It was generally believed that British Intelligence furnished the documents.

House as usual gave his opinion to the President in writing: “It may … even lead us to war, but I think the publication should go ahead. It will strengthen your hands enormously and will weaken such agitators as Mr. Bryan …”