Battleangel

America likes to put on a good show and be put on record as being fair and correct. Rather than debate the actual events, Americans like to think they got it right in the end and that is all that matters. The “history will judge us” doctrine which has been brought up again recently. Or like when the New York Times famously corrected itself in 1969 over an editorial on Robert Goddard from 1920, having claimed that rockets would not function in a vacuum. That’s the part of the story they’d always like us to hear. No one wants to hear of the suffering, the casualties, both of body and mind. And the same is true for this rather empty gesture from the state of Montana where victims of bellicose sedition sentences during WWI. The anti-German hysteria is almost incomprehensible to the modern reader but fits hand in glove with the way America is to this day and the way the costly national unity is maintained.

Liquor salesman Ben Kahn spent 34 months in prison. “This is a rich man’s war, and we have no business in it,” he told a hotel owner. “The poor man has no show in this war. The soldiers are fighting the battles of the rich.”

Laws at the time even made it illegal to speak German. Schweitzer, whose ethnic German immigrant parents had recently arrived in Montana, said his grandmother was not allowed to speak the only language she knew while out in public.