A Lithuanian lecturer was described as about to deliver a seditious harangue in the village of Cicero, near Chicago. The Southwest Division sent out several motor cars with picked men ready for trouble. They found a hall crowded with foreigners who were listening to a much bewhiskered man, clad in shabby tweeds, who was demonstrating at a blackboard on a platform, and was speaking in some unknown tongue. At last one of the operatives who had been taken along as an interpreter began to laugh and said, "Let's go home, fellows; we've got the old bird wrong. He ain't talking anarchy; he's giving a lecture on sex control!"
An unusual amount of shrewdness should be credited to some of these operatives. It was a mere guess, for instance, on the part of such a man that the figure "8"—the final figure on a foreign birth certificate—had been changed to a "5." If this were true, it meant that the suspect would come within the draft age, although otherwise his story was perfectly straight. Suspicion is not evidence, so the Department of Justice was about to release this man. The latter had remarked to someone that his father lived in Indiana. The operative went to the phone and pretended to call up the father in this town personally, with the intention of inducing the suspect to eavesdrop on the phone conversation in the next room. After a while the operative turned to the suspect, his hand over the receiver, and said: "Well, we've got the information we wanted. What have you got to say?" Completely fooled, the suspect confessed! He was inducted into the army.
A certain colored draft dodger was discovered to belong to a staff of colored waiters in a certain hotel. The head waiter, very pompous and very shiny, refused to allow a search. The A. P. L. declared that if the suspect was not forthcoming he would arrest every waiter in the place and carry them off in the wagon. This brought out the suspect. He's in the Army now.
A certain Mrs. L called the Red Cross a bunch of grafters and crooks, said Ambassador Gerard was a traitor and a liar, said the President was the greatest traitor since Jefferson Davis and made other interesting remarks. She
