He turned to William Jennings Bryan, who rose slowly and with outstretched hands faced his adversaries.
“I, too, have made mistakes and I am sorry. I, too, feel the grandeur of those noble words spoken by that great patriot who has sent us his last message. I, too, will stand by the flag in this time of peril and will spare neither my life nor my fortune so long as the invader’s foot rests on the soil of free America.”
“Americans!” shouted Roosevelt, the sweat streaming from his face. “Look!” He caught Bryan by one arm and Russell by the other. “See how we stand together. All the rest is forgotten. Americans! Brothers! On your feet everybody! Yell it out to the whole land, to the whole world, America is awake! Thank God, America is awake!”
ON CHRISTMAS EVE BOSTON THEILLS THE NATION WITH AN ACT OF MAGNIFICENT HEROISM
Now all over America came a marvellous spiritual awakening. The sacrifice of the President’s noble life, and his wife’s thrilling effort to shield her husband, was not in vain. Once more the world knew the resistless power of a martyr’s death. Women and men alike were stirred to warlike zeal and a joy in national sacrifice and service. The enlistment officers were swamped with a crush of young and old, eager to join the colours; and within three days following the President’s assassination a million soldiers were added to the army of defence and a million more were turned away. It was no longer a question how to raise a great American army, but how to train and equip it, and how to provide it with officers.
Most admirable was the behaviour of the great body of German-Americans; in fact it was a German-American branch of the American Defence Society, financed in America, that started the beautiful custom, which became universal, of wearing patriotic buttons bearing the sacred words: _“The Union! The Flag!”_
“It was one thing,” wrote Bernard Ridder in the Chicago _Staats-Zeitung_, “for German-Americans to side with Germany in the great European war (1914-1919) when only our sympathies were involved. It is quite a different thing for us now in a war that involves our homes and our property, all that we have in the world. When Germany attacks America, she attacks German-Americans, she attacks us in our material interests, in our fondest associations; and we will resist her just as in 1776 the American colonists, who were really English, resisted England, the mother country, when she attacked them in the same way.”