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The editor of the Providence Journal, whose extraordinary work in unearthing and exposing the long series of German plots in the United States has been one of the foremost achievements of American patriotism in recent years and has made him an international figure

"The Providence Journal Will Say This Morning"

An Appreciation of John R. Rathom, the Man Who Exposed the
German Plots in This Country, and An Announcement
of Mr. Rathom's Own Story, Which Will Be
Published in the World's Work

BY

FRENCH STROTHER

OHN R. RATHOM, Editor of the Providence Journal, is the man who discovered and exposed the German plots in this country. He is the man who forced the recall of the precious Von Papen and the notorious Boy-Ed. He is the man who unearthed Dr. Heinrich Albert and his $40,000,000 corruption fund and sent him back to Germany. He is the man who discovered and revealed the plot to restore Huerta to a German-made dictatorship in Mexico. He is the man who proved that the Lusitania warning was sent out by the German Embassy on orders direct from Berlin. He is the man who exposed William Jennings Bryan's "peace at any price" interview with Dumba. He is the man who sent ConsulGeneral Bopp, at San Francisco, to prison for two years for conspiracy. He is the man who warned the Government that the Canadian Parliament Building at Ottawa was to be fired, three weeks before it was burned by German agents. In brief he is the man who (without official authority) was for three years the eyes of the nation, guarding it against the treachery of the German Government. He has been a patriot of the highest order in the face, first, of early unbelief and ridicule on the part of our own government; and then of slander and abuse on the part of the whole pro-German element in this country.

"The Providence Journal will say this morning:" that phrase, familiar to every newspaper reader in the United States, has been the preface to the exposure of nearly every German plot that has been told to the American public since the World War began. Merely to list all these exposures, giving only the barest outlines of names, dates, and places involved, would require ten or twelve pages of type like this in the WORLD'S WORK. To reprint all the thousands of original cablegrams, letters, checks, photographs and codes on which they are based would fill a five-foot shelf of books.

This mass of data, accumulated in three years of ceaseless search, is stored in triplicate in vaults in Providence, New York, and Washington. Copies of

every item of it have been supplied, as discovered, to the State Department in Washington or to some other branch of the Government. It is literally the foundation stone upon which has been erected the whole structure of our present enormous secret service, and it is the cause of the awakening of the American people to the hideous menace of German's cold-blooded assaults upon our very existence as an independent nation.

How has it happened that a provincial newspaper (it is called "the Rhode Island Bible" in its own territory) has been the means of disclosing facts that usually are procured only by the secret agents of governments and kept guarded like precious jewels in the most sacred archives of their State departments? It has happened because:

1. John R. Rathom, editor of the Journal, sensed from the first hour of the war that we were a World Power with world-wide interests; that we were one of the objects of Germany's mad ambition to destroy democracy the world over; and that the cataclysm in Europe was, no less for us in America than for Great Britain and France, the crucial test of all history.

2. Because Mr. Rathom, encouraged and financed by the owners of his conservative old New England paper, and working with the loyal aid of a dozen newspaper reporters, has beaten the German secret service at their own game a hundred times since the war began.

3. Because he had the foresight to have taken down in writing and kept on file every wireless despatch sent by the great Sayville and Tuckerton Stations since the day war was declared in August, 1914, and the ingenuity to decipher masses of these despatches in code, including thousands of damning messages from Von Bernstorff, Von Papen, Boy-Ed, Dumba, Von Nuber, and scores of nameless others, to the German and Austrian governments.

4. Because, in his efforts to serve his country, he succeeded in getting his own reporters into confidential positions in the twelve most important Teutonic headquarters in the United States, and received from them almost daily reports and original documents covering every phase of German plots and German propaganda. These men he placed in: The German Embassy in Washington; The German Consulate-General in New York;

The Austrian Consulate-General in New York;

The German Consulate in Boston; The Austrian Consulate in Cleveland; The German Consulate in New Orleans; The German Consulate-General in Chicago; The Austrian Consulate-General in Chicago; The German Consulate-General in San Francisco;

The Austrian Consulate-General in Philadelphia;

The German Consulate in Denver;
The German Consulate in St. Louis.

That, in barest outline, is the story. Mr. Rathom himself is going to tell the details of it in a series of articles in the WORLD'S WORK, beginning next month. These articles will be a challenge to the most sober reflection of the American people, because they will reveal the profound need of a new birth of patriotism and of a new organization of the national life to meet a condition of world affairs and our relations to them which few, even of the most informed Americans, have even yet realized are absolutely vital. This nation not merely has been, but still is, in deadly peril from dangers from without and from within, and Mr. Rathom's purpose is, by a showing of the facts, to call the American people back to a militant national consciousness.

The purpose of this present article is to give some idea of the man who did these things. But it may be well to suggest the character and scope of his forthcoming articles by an attempt to tell briefly three of his experiences in combating German plots:

When the war began, in 1914, most Americans regarded themselves as interested, but aloof, spectators of the most colossal drama ever staged- in the world's history. That it might concern them in their own dearest honor and possessions did not for one moment enter their minds. But Mr. Rathom knew otherwise. He had traveled pretty much the whole world-Europe, Africa, China, Australia, and the United States. He knew, of old, Germany's ambitions; particularly its designs upon the Monroe Doctrine, and its subtle and carefully organized propaganda to consolidate the Germans in the United States for the working out of the American end of its dream of world dominion. Hence, the day war was declared, he began to probe the German activities in America, knowing well that soon they would be in full play to

cause us much damage. In his search for German plots he placed men in the Teutonic offices listed above. Even now he cannot publish how this was done, though he can, and will, tell the men's names that did this dangerous work. Of these, one secured employment as a secretary to Von Bernstorff in the Embassy in Washington.

HOW DR. ALBERT WAS DISCOVERED

. Enters now Dr. Heinrich Albert, fresh from Germany, with a letter of credit for $4,000,000 in his pocket and the assurance of his Government that he may have forty millions altogether to buy public opinion here, to purchase the votes of Congressmen, to procure the murder of American citizens working in munition plants, and to do other "friendly" acts toward our neutral Government and its unsuspecting people. Dr. Albert landed in New York and registered at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He wrote at once to Ambassador Bernstorff, announcing his arrival and asking for instructions. The Ambassador happened to be taking an outing in the Adirondacks when Dr. Albert's letter reached the Embassy. The letter was delivered on Saturday afternoon-and the mail clerks at the Embassy were habitually granted a vacation from Saturday noon to nine o'clock Monday morning. The Embassy secretaries, however, often stayed at their desks on Saturday afternoon; and so it happened that Mr. Rathom's man there got the letter, along with others, and, without apparently disturbing the envelope, read the contents. Without a moment's hesitation he took the next train to New York and telegraphed Mr. Rathom. He was met in New York by another reporter from the Providence Journal. Next morning this other reporter, in Sunday top hat and frock coat, appeared at the Ritz-Carlton and asked for Dr. Albert. He was shown up to the doctor's suite and there presented to Dr. Albert his own letter to Von Bernstorff, and said the Ambassador had sent him to discuss the situation with him. But first he must be assured that he was really addressing Dr. Albert, and not some possible untrustworthy underling. Dr. Albert produced credentials of his identity, and even called in members of his suite to prove that he was himself-forgetting, in the heat of his earnestness, to demand a similar guaranty from his caller. That would hardly have seemed necessary even if he had

reflected, for there was his own letter, brought to him from Washington.

Having satisfied his visitor, Dr. Albert went at length into his mission-the precise purposes of it, the money he had in hand and in prospect-all the details. His caller congratulated him, bade him good-day, and left; and immediately restored the letter to his brother reporter, who took the afternoon train back to Washington, resealed the letter, and replaced it in the Embassy mail that night.

On Monday, one of the mail clerks at the Embassy opened the letter and laid it, as a matter of routine, on the Ambassador's desk. Bernstorff appeared on Tuesday, and as soon as he read it he telephoned Dr. Albert to come to Washington.

The two men met the following morning at the Embassy and embraced in the presence of the Journal reporter. And the first words Dr. Albert spoke were to praise his Excellency upon his choice of "so discreet and admirable an agent" as he had sent to him in New York. Then there was a scene. Bernstorff denied sending any messenger, and Albert reaffirmed it. The mail clerk was called in, and declared he had slit the envelope with his own hand. Albert repeated that he had had that very letter, physically, back in his hand, from the messenger, on Sunday. Results: Two badly perturbed agents of the Kaiser, and the ultimate exposure of Dr. Albert in the Providence Journal.

HOW VON PAPEN WAS CAUGHT

Another episode among Mr. Rathom's many adventures into the intricacies of German intrigue is known in the Journal office as "The Case of the Two Hearts." He had caught the trail of Von Papen when this happened. Von Papen, in the course of his duties here, had accumulated a large mass of letters, receipts, reports of plots to blow up munition plants and American ships, and other documents that would be as useful to the United States and England as to Berlin (We were still neutral and the Kaiser still addressed the President in "friendly" messages). As they often did, the Germans used the Austrian diplomatic channels to get this treacherous correspondence to Berlin. Hence Von Papen was packing his documents in a box in the office of the Austrian Consulate-General in New York for shipment on the Oscar II. The stenographer in the office had been on

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Four Vapend

A GERMAN EFFORT TO "GET" MR. RATHOM Von Papen's account of his expenditures in a nation-wide investigation of Mr. Rathom's career in an effort to find some vulnerable point of attack upon his personal character

the job only a few months. Before that she had never done anything more exciting than to take dictation in the office of the Journal, though, of course, that was not mentioned when she applied for the place. She knew what was going into the box and had reported it, and she had instructions to mark the case so that it could be identified later. The day it was nailed up for shipment she ate her luncheon seated on the top of it. When she was in the midst of her meal, Von Papen came in. He asked if he might share her sandwiches. She consented. They sat on the box together. He grew sentimental. She did not discourage his poetical mood. At its height she took a red crayon pencil from her hair and in a dreamy way drew, on the packing box, the outline of two hearts

entwined. The susceptible Von Papen, in the spirit of the moment, seized the pencil and with his own hand drew an arrow piercing them. And so it was that when the British secret service agents inspected the cargo of the Oscar II, when it touched Falmouth, they took particular pains to look for the box marked with two red hearts and an arrow -and found it. And ultimately the Providence Journal published such full and intimate details of the sentimental Von Papen's career in America that he was invited to leave the country.

THE WELLAND CANAL PLOT

Episode number three, and the last to be told here-Mr. Rathom, in his articles, will tell others more important-illustrates not only one of the many methods used to gather evidence, but also the cheering fact that some German-Americans are just Americans, and of the most loyal kind at that. Mr. Rathom discovered that the offices of a great German steamship company in New York were in reality a branch of the German government and a hotbed of German intrigue, and he determined to get access to their records. One of his reporters was little more than a boy, the son of German parents. They were good Americans, though, and the boy himself was an ardent patriot. Under instructions he went back from Providence to his birthplace at Lima, Ohio, and there he wrote a letter to the general manager of the steamship line in New York. He had a brother, so he wrote, who was a telegraph operator in Providence and acquainted with one of the telegraph operators on the Providence Journal. Through this channel he learned that the Providence Journal planned to install one of its men in the office of this German steamship company in the guise of a janitor so that he might, in the course of his duties, become familiar with the location of their secret files and take from them such of their contents as were of interest to the Journal. About a month later a man did apply to the officers of the company in New York for a job as janitor. The Prussian officials were ready for him. They had detailed the chief of their secret service to apply the third degree. This he did, and under the machine gun fire of his questions the applicant stammered, hesitated, trembled, and finally confessed. For two days thereafter the officers of the steamship

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