States Army, but the recruiting office, inquiring into the reason for the Chicago telegram, found that the man had served a term in the penitentiary. He was not, therefore, classified even as a slacker and he did not get into the Army, which will not receive anyone who has served a prison sentence.
Los Angeles had considerable to do with the stoppage of propaganda by means of motion pictures, that city being the capital of filmdom. Newspaper reports of the cases of the film "Patria" and of "The Spirit of 1776" are familiar to the reading public. A. P. L. was always on hand for film censorship purposes.
A case which attracted considerable attention was known as the von H case. The subject was a native of Germany, fifty-three years of age, a resident in the United States for thirty-two years. He never had become a citizen, although once employed in the California post office. Von H was a movie actor who did spy parts. He fraternized with the soldiers and sailors in propria persona, and liked to ask them to his room for conversations over the war. At length he was arrested. His rooms turned out a mass of evidence, including four hundred snap shots and some forty letters of the vilest nature. He had intended to send this material over to Germany to show the lack of morale of the American soldiers and sailors. He had an oil painting of the Kaiser, a picture of von Hindenburg and one of the German flag. He was sentenced to five years, but it is not thought that he will live out his sentence. Perhaps we can struggle along without him.
There is no character in whom the public more naturally reposes confidence than in the tried and true negro Pullman porter, but this is the story of one such porter accused of draft evasion. He was confined in jail but was offered release if he would go into the Army. He told the operative that he would go all right, but that his check for forty dollars was not on hand and that he needed about five dollars to "float himself." The operative loaned him the five dollars and the Pullman porter is still floating. Neither Army nor anyone else has heard of him since.
Most of the more groundless suspicions and imaginings of Americans regarding German spies arose among the women
