CHAPTER VI
GERMAN PROPAGANDA
How the Poison was Spread—The Press—The Pulpit—The Word-of-Mouth Rumor—Various Canards Directed Against American Morale—Stories and Instances of the Hun's Subtlety.
Germany made two mistakes—one in beginning the war,
the other in losing it. The world has reckoned with her far
otherwise than as she hoped. Now she learns what it is to
feel defeat. Shrewd as the shrewdest, more patient than the
most patient, not lacking courage while victory was with her—yet
always showing that peculiar German clumsiness of
intellect—Germany fought with trained skill on both sides
the sea. The world knows the story of the battles in France.
Let us now study the battles fought in silence in America.
In actual practice the various secret methods which the Germans employed in America could not always be defined one from the other. A certain confusion and over-lapping existed between the spy systems and those of propaganda and sabotage. Often one man might practice all three. The purpose of this chapter is to take the humblest form of German secret work in America, that practiced by the least skilled and most numerous branch of her spies—the sort of thing which usually is classified as propaganda.
Let no one undervalue the work of propaganda. No army is better than its morale, and no army's morale is better than that of the people which send it to the front. The entire purpose of enemy propaganda is to lessen the morale either of an army or a people; and that precisely was Germany's purpose with us.
Anything is good propaganda which makes a people nervous, uneasy or discontented. Many of the stories which Germany spread in America seemed clumsy at first, they were so easily detected. Yet they did their work, even though
