The Loyalty Test at the Breakfast Table
A Kennewick editor argues that questioning official reports of German war atrocities is tantamount to treason.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
We have in this community, as has every community, the man who does not believe the long list of crimes that have been laid to the door of 'Germany in Arms.' It is not surprising that the man of German birth is loath to believe that men of his own blood have been guilty of such atrocities. In fact, it is difficult for a man of any birth to believe them. They are so terrible, so barbarous, so foreign to civilized times as to be almost unbelievable. But there is such a preponderance of incriminating evidence to show that 'Germany in Arms' has torn from the book of man’s progress those pages which we knew as civilization, that continued disbelief borders dangerously near to disloyalty to America’s cause in this war. The committee on public information recently published a 94-page booklet entitled, 'German War Practices.' The publication deals with the German war machine’s treatment of civilians and is for free distribution. And yet every day we meet the man who says: 'I do not believe it.' In other words he believes that Secretary Lansing, Secretary Baker, Secretary Daniels, Ambassador Gerard, Minister Whitlock, Herbert Hoover, President Wilson and the whole United States government are liars, that the truth, like God, is of German origin. There may be a difference between such belief and disloyalty, but we don't know where the one ends and the other begins.
“There may be a difference between such belief and disloyalty, but we don't know where the one ends and the other begins.”
This editorial captures the intense, suffocating social pressure of the First World War in rural Washington, where public opinion was policed at the local level. It mirrors modern anxieties about 'fake news' and the weaponization of patriotism, showing how communities have long wrestled with the boundaries between dissent and dangerous disloyalty.
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