This past Independence Day weekend, as they have
done since the turn of the millennium, Americans heard warnings about terror
plots on their own soil. A century ago, the nation dealt with similar threats—and,
as in 2001, they were stunned to find one plot came to fruition, in both
America’s political capital and its financial and media center.
In 2015, these foreign plots involve terror unleased
in the name of Islam by fringe groups unaffiliated with a specific country; in
1915, they took inspiration from—or were specifically directed by—a tangible
government: Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. But the reactions they produced—dread on
the part of ordinary Americans, all-stops-out manhunts initiated by law enforcement
and military officials—remained, to a large degree, similar.
Shortly before midnight on July 2, 1915, an enormous
explosion rocked the U.S. Capitol. In short order, it was traced to a bomb left
in the Senate Reception Room. While no fatalities occurred (in those sleepier,
pre-air-conditioning days, the nation’s lawmakers were not in session), the
Reception Room was destroyed.
While Washington law enforcement sifted through the
debris searching for clues the following morning, banker J. P. Morgan, Jr. was shot twice at the door of his Long Island
estate. The assailant, armed with two pistols and few sticks of dynamite, was
immediately subdued by Morgan’s servants, then arrested.
Something curious—even more than what had just
transpired in the two cities already—then took place. The gunman, having
identified himself to police as an instructor at Cornell University named Frank Holt (see accompanying photo), claimed that he wanted to
force Morgan to use his influence to prevent American munition manufacturers
from arming the Allies against German in the conflict then raging in Europe.
On the night after the Senate explosion, a number of
readers of the Washington Evening Star
newspaper were startled by this headline: “Letter Received by the Star Thought
to Have Bearing on the Explosion.” In particular, Chief Detective Robert
Boardman in the capital focused on this line in the Star letter, signed by “R. Pearce”: “Europe needs enough
non-contraband material to give us prosperity.... We would, of course, not sell
to the Germans either, if they could buy here.”
It sounded strikingly similar to the statement made
by Holt to the police: “If Germany should be able to buy munitions here, we
would positively refuse to sell them to her... Do we not get enough prosperity
out of non-contraband shipments[?]” Intrigued, Boardman cabled detectives in
New York to press Holt about this, as well as a corollary question as to his
whereabouts the night of the Capitol explosion.
At first, Holt denied any connection to the Senate
Reception Room explosion, claiming he had been in a New York City hotel that
night. But subsequently, under what New York Police Department bomb-squad head
Captain Thomas Tunney admitted were “third-degree methods,” he confessed: He
had reached DC on the afternoon of the 2nd, assembled the bomb in a
hotel, had set it on a timer, walked in the Capitol without any guard asking
where he was going, left the bomb in the reception room, waited outside the
building till he heard the explosion, and was out of the city on a New
York-bound train shortly after midnight.
Having made one confession, Holt was ready to divulge
somewhat more. He was linked, he said, to Abteilung IIIB, a German secret intelligence network already active in the U.S. Holt
warned about missing sticks of dynamite, and took special pleasure in
predicting an operation that would occur the nest day.
Holt did not live to see this action, having
committed suicide in his cell on July 7. But his death did little to ease
Americans’ concerns, especially since the SS
Minnehaha did catch fire in the Atlantic that day.
At the same time they tried to prevent the disaster
he predicted, the authorities tried to make sense of who Holt actually was. Besides
“R. Pearce,” Holt had also used the aliases “Charles Hendricks” and “Mr. Patton.”
Yet another identity, however, appears to have been his real one: Erich Muenter,
a Harvard professor of German language studies who fled Boston in 1906 after
the poisoning death of his wife.
Mexico became Muenter’s hideaway for several years,
until he crossed the border back into Texas. Now, under a new identity, with a
new wife, he worked his way back into the groves of academe. Amazingly, he
found employment again in the more insular world of the Ivy League, with nobody
the wiser that this German professor at Cornell was the same man who had fled
Cambridge less than a decade ago.
Muenter's activities came at a time of anguished transition for German-Americans. According to historian Maddalena Marinari, before
the outbreak of WWI, they had been held up as
the “model minority”
that had assimilated seamlessly into American society. But the outbreak of the
conflict in Europe left them dangerously vulnerable to charges of disloyalty—and
the security policies of their ancestral homeland didn’t help.
Howard Blum, in Dark Invasion (2015), has called
this latter German network of sabotage and spying "the first terrorist
cell in America." That term “terrorist” is loaded with all kinds of
after-the-fact problems (e.g., terrorist cells usually claim credit when a bomb goes off,
whereas the German network invariably slinked away into the shadows).
But these German activities were meant to disrupt American policies. The German General Staff’s
plans hinged on knocking the British and French out of the war, which meant
degrading the links between those two powers and America—which, for all the
professions of neutrality by President Woodrow Wilson, remained inextricably
tied, by colonial heritage and trade, to England.
Two months before the Senate Room explosion,
Germany’s sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania
had ratcheted up tensions between the United States and Germany. As I explained in a prior post, though the circumstances around the sinking were
murkier than American war hawks would admit, relations between the two
countries continued to deteriorate, as Germany continued its policy of
unrestricted submarine warfare.
These tensions were intensified by the spy network.
In the two years preceding America’s declaration of war, the following
incidents—which, we now know, were initiated by the spies—unnerved the public:
* American horses shipped off to Europe to assist in
the Allied war effort were infected with anthrax cultures on American soil;
* Irish dockworkers were sometimes persuaded to
plant small cigar bombs that caused fires on ships;
* Spies leveled the country’s largest munitions
factory, the “Black Tom” plant in New Jersey, on July 30, leading to the deaths
of more than 50 people.
In an article for the Brookings Institute four years ago, Peter Skerry compared the
situation of Islam in the United States today to a century ago, where a different
religion was eyed suspiciously—Roman Catholicism, another “assertive,
triumphalist, immigrant faith.” But he immediately—and correctly, I think—finds
a better comparison, to German-Americans of that time.
German-born sailors in the U.S., for instance, notes
Blum in an interview with NPR, represented a potential large potential source of internal unrest:
“There were bars all along the [New York] waterfront
that were just filled with Germans, and these were people who had nothing,
really, but time on their hands. They were bored, they were concerned because
many of their relatives were involved in fighting in Europe, and here they
were, cut off from it. They missed the homeland, they missed the war, and it
was creating a situation where here was, in effect, a ‘fifth column’ in
America. At one point the German ambassador threatened that ... they would rise
up against the United States if the United States entered the war.”
All of this represented rather free-floating
discontent until Capt. Franz von Rintelen was recruited in Germany to head “the Manhattan Front.” Operating
out of the New York Yacht club, this aristocratic naval officer within weeks
managed to employ the services of sailors and officers from roughly 80 German
ships in New York harbor. Even after British intelligence detained him and
prevented his return to the U.S., the network he established continued without
him. (Holt/Muenter, for instance, appears to have been a precursor of the “lone
wolf” assassin/terrorist with whom Americans would become far more familiar in
the Sixties, notably Lee Harvey Oswald.)
That network drew from a large demographic cohort. While
the 9/11 plotters created chaos in their wake, American Islamophobes have
largely exaggerated their continuing capacity for mischief: The best estimate
is that Moslems comprise only about 1% of the U.S. population today. In contrast, those of German descent
comprised approximately 1 out of every 10 Americans a century ago.
Most German-Americans of a century ago and
Moslem-Americans today have adapted well to their new country. But many remain
profoundly ambivalent about military conflict aimed at their ancestral
homelands, and their denunciation of the drift toward war in both eras further
served to isolate them.
As calls mounted to intervene in order to stop
Germany and its allies from committing what were seen as “atrocities,”
German-Americans went against the grain, advocating for neutrality. That
position became increasingly untenable as Germany’s ham-handed methods of
dealing with America—including offering Mexico assistance in recovering lands
lost in the Mexican-American War (the infamous “Zimmerman Telegram”)—alienated U.S. policy-makers, the media and the public.
Their positions were also
often voiced freely, including in one New York City daily newspaper that sold 75,000
copies each day just in the German language.
Contrary to what many Americans today believe,
suspicion about those regarded as inimical to American life did not start with
the War on Terror, nor even with the Cold War. The actions of Holt and other
Germans in the U.S. made the great mass of German emigrants loyal to their new
country fall under suspicion, to an often ridiculous extent. Sauerkraut was
rechristened “freedom cabbage”; hamburger, “Salisbury steak”; and frankfurter,
“hot dog.” With the outbreak of war, approximately 6,000 German and Austrian
nationals were arrested as potential threats to national security, and there
was a push to outlaw the teaching of German.
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