WAR & PEACE: Citizen Viereck

WAR & PEACE

George Sylvester Viereck, 57, is a U.S. citizen who has made a career of spreading German propaganda. That is a perfectly legal way for a U.S. citizen to make money, if he tells the Government what he is doing and who is paying him. Because Citizen Viereck has apparently been less than frank with the Government, he was in trouble last week.

Born in Munich, Viereck arrived in the U.S. at the age of eleven, went to college, became a naturalized citizen, leaped into letters. His first small fame bloomed with publication of a book of poetry, grew a little brighter because of a story that his father was the bastard son of William I of Prussia, which would make him Kaiser Wilhelm’s cousin.

More notoriety than fame accrued to George Viereck during World War I. After the sinking of the Lusitania by a U-boat, Viereck wrote: “The facts in the case absolutely justify the action of the Germans. Legally and morally there is no basis for any protest on the part of the U.S.”

His pro-German expressions aroused so much wrath among his Mt. Vernon, N.Y. neighbors that he asked police to protect his home. He was expelled from the New York Athletic Club, expelled from the Poetry Society of America. “But no executive committee,” cried he, “can take away from me my pass to Parnassus.”

Since Hitler’s rise, Viereck has taken up his trumpet again, has tooted lustily for Naziism. Several times the Government had turned a piercing eye on him. It hauled him in a year ago for a searching examination, and Viereck, who had properly registered as an agent of a foreign power, apparently told everything there was to tell.

But there were still a few things he kept to himself. According to a Federal grand jury charge, he had failed to relate, for instance, that he had supplied Congressmen with material for speeches so that he might get his propaganda into the Congressional Record and sent around the country under Congressional frank. He had failed to tell that he had provided material for a book published under the authorship of Illinois Congressman Stephen A. Day, or that he had aided and financed the “non-interventionist” Islands-for-War-Debts-Committee. For these and other oversights, last week Viereck was indicted on five counts, released on $15,000 bail. He pleaded not guilty.

Said he, with curled, pale lip: “My indictment is only an incident in the perfidious plot to smother and smear all opposition to the arbitrary forces cunningly at work to destroy the America we know and love.”