Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • April 20, 2011 get Texas back. The Mexicans were also asked to approach the Japanese and suggest that Japan might want to join with Germany if the United States declared war. The United States had already trampled all over Mexico with an army of occupation the Mexicans had shrugged off. Japan was an ally of Great Britain, and had defeated German troops in China and taken the German holdings for Japan. The Japanese had also taken German’s Pacific colonies. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm had invented “The Yellow Peril” as a political ploy that the Japanese – who had admired Germany in Otto von Bismarck’s time – found intensely aggravating. Japan was not about to lift a sword or a finger for Germany. Japan’s alliance with Britain remained intact, and Mexico was no serious threat to Texas. This pretext, however, enabled the banks that supported Britain to the tune of $25 billion to get America into a war a year after Wilson won an election under the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Expanding the pretext, the Creel Commission and the film industry concentrated on making all things German look evil and portraying the allies as entirely heroic. A handful of genuine German outrages involving shooting of snipers and harmless suspects alike in Belgium in 1914 were inflated into horrific tales of mass public rape of Belgian women and the hand-lopping of Belgian children – neither of which was ever substantiated. Rubella, a childhood disease, was said to have been deliberately invented in a Berlin laboratory and became known as “German measles.” The Germans were also said to have invented influenza. Some of the ultra-patriotic fervor was amusing – dachshunds were renamed “liberty pups” and sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.” Schools dropped their German language programs. Concert orchestras dropped the works of Beethoven and Wagner. A German-American named Robert Prager was lynched because he smiled when he flunked his pre-induction physical. Prager was 45 and blind in one eye, a very unlikely soldier in a war he said he supported, but his former buddies lynched him anyway. Wilson must have known the Germans outnumbered all other foreign volunteers for Lincoln’s Union Army, and that they all supported the abolition of slavery. This hasn’t been mentioned much since. Wilson’s request and the war that followed was payback time for Prussia, the one European country that took no part in the African slave trade. Wilson, his film biography tells us, wrecked his health trying to get fusty conservatives to support the League of Nations. This is substantially true, but Wilson’s idealism as expressed on paper had some dreadful consequences. Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” expressed the concept of self-determination for all peoples. The Fourteen Points were cited by the Germans as the basis for their request for an armistice. The fact that fresh American troops, at great cost of their own lives, tipped the balance in favor of the weary allies and against the weary Germans cannot be overlooked. The victorious allies reacted to the Fourteen Points by carving huge chunks out of German territory without the assent of the Germans who lived there. The damage wasn’t limited to Europe. Long before I was a guest in Woodrow Wilson’s house, there was another guest: Syngman Rhee, a Korean who became the hero of Korean independence working from the United States while most Koreans took their chances opposing the Japanese in Korea and China. Wilson once flattered Rhee by telling him that Rhee was destined to be the liberator of Korea. In 1919, Rhee took Wilson up on it. The Japanese had annexed Korea in 1910 with the secret approval of the United States, but most Americans didn’t know about the Taft-Katsura Agreement, and no Koreans did. Kojong, the last king of Korea, died early in 1919, and the Japanese granted permission for a huge national demonstration of mourning. Rhee – citing the Fourteen Points – told those Koreans who had never been to America that if the Koreans demonstrated peacefully and demanded total independence under the Fourteen Points, Wilson would come to their rescue and free Korea from the Japanese. On March 1, as many as a million Koreans began to march toward Seoul shouting “Manzei!” – a cheer roughly equivalent to “Banzai” in Japanese. Yuasa Katsuei, a Japanese author, describes the event as a sort of Romeo and Juliet story. Kannani, the Korean Juliet, tells Ryuji, the Japanese Romeo: “Maybe if we shout Manzei loud enough President Wilson will come and help us in an airplane.” Instead, some Koreans start to throw rocks, some Japanese and Korean policemen start to swing swords, and the terrified teenagers watch from the frigid hilltop as Korean rioters flee into a church and the Japanese set the church on fire. Everyone inside the church is trapped and burned. This atrocity at Suwon, where 23 people died, virtually doomed peaceful relations between the Japanese and the Koreans. Despite pleas from American missionaries and a handful of academics, the United States refused to intervene to foster Korean independence. Eventually the Japanese toned down the abuses on their own and went back to fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia as an ally of Britain and the United States. That didn’t work, either. The simple lesson is this: Whether it’s based on opportunism or idealism, American meddling with nations outside our hemisphere isn’t appreciated, and mistreatment of groups within America isn’t appreciated either. Fortunately, I didn’t think about this during the wedding reception. I once had dinner in Woodrow Wilson’s house. The event was my daughter’s wedding, and Prospect House, on the campus of Princeton University, was the scene of the reception. The house – except for the paintings marking Wilson’s career after he served as president of Princeton – looked exactly as it did in the 1944 movie “Wilson” with Alexander Knox. There was, alas, another movie. That movie was called “Birth of a Nation,” and it was a landmark twice: once as marking the emergence of cinema as a serious art form, and once as being perhaps the most racist movie ever made on this side of the Atlantic. Wilson, as a historian, had perpetuated the Southern myth that the Reconstruction movement that offered freed slaves education and voting rights was a terrible injustice to the defeated Southerners who had just lost the Civil War. “Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers was finally ended, and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class, established,” Wilson wrote in “A History of the American People.” He didn’t stress the fact that before Reconstruction a lot of white Southerners didn’t know how to read. Thomas Dixon Jr. went Wilson one better. He wrote a book called “The Clansman,” which was made into a theatrical play and later became the basis for “The Birth of a Nation.” When the movie was shown in 1915, Wilson asked for a special screening at the White House. That was the first time a movie was shown there. Wilson marveled at what he saw, as he saw it. “It is like writing history with lightning,” Wilson said. “My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Wilson’s terrible “truth,” as portrayed in the film, is that the Abolitionists who wanted to end slavery were opportunists or dupes and that the slaves they wanted to free were ignorant buffoons. In the film, many former slaves were played by white actors in makeup. Abraham Lincoln is played as a noble soul whose merciful plans for the defeated South are terminated by John Wilkes Booth, a crazy actor surrounded by a handful of degenerate cutthroats. The real Booth was a Confederate agent who received money and took his orders from the Confederate government. The other Yankees are fools or worse, but the blacks are so menacing to white womanhood that at the end, a couple of former Union soldiers join the former Confederates in firing on black federal troops intent on rape. At the end, the misguided whites espouse Southern-style racism and the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue. Remember: Wilson loved this movie. That explains some other things. During Wilson’s administration, 10 Southern states adopted laws that prohibited racial intermarriage, which directly violated the U.S. Constitution. After seeing “The Birth of a Nation,” no one cared. About 95 years ago, the United States reacted to another racial threat. The zonked-out foreign minister of Germany, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a telegram to his diplomats in Mexico which offered the Mexicans a deal. If the United States declared war on Germany, and if Mexico joined the war on Germany’s side, the Germans would support Mexico at peace negotiations and they just might have a chance to Three strikes and you’re out Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: It is with sincere gratitude that I recognize the tireless efforts of Fresh Air Fund volunteers in Northern New Jersey as the country celebrates National Volunteer Week. Their commitment to helping New York City children is exemplary for all community members and truly embodies the spirit of the 2011 National Volunteer Week theme, “Celebrating People in Action.” Fresh Air volunteers work in several capacities throughout the year in 13 northeastern states and Canada to help make the fund’s programs possible. Caring Fresh Air host families open their homes and share the everyday joys of summertime with their Fresh Air guests. Our local volunteer leaders – many of whom are also hosts – serve on our local committees, plan summer activities, publicize the program, and interview prospective host families. Additionally, individuals and businesses give generously of their time and resources to make the Friendly Town host family program throughout this area a great success each and every summer. The Fresh Air Fund, an independent, not-for-profit agency, has provided free summer experiences to more than 1.7 million New York City children since 1877. For more information on how you can help to continue this wonderful tradition of volunteering, please call The Fresh Air Fund at (800) 367-0003 or visit www.freshair.org. Jenny Morgenthau, Executive Director Fresh Air Fund Dear Editor: As we contemplate this letter to honor our volunteers Fresh Air Fund thrives on volunteers during National Volunteer Week (April 11 through 18) we see that the weather report is for temperatures ranging from the 30 to 80 degrees. These unpredictable conditions sum up what Mother Nature has given us this past year. The record snowfall this winter forced us to cancel meal deliveries on six occasions, a decision we arrived at with a heavy heart because it meant our clients would not get a hot (and/or cold) meal that day, but they would also not have the benefit of seeing our dedicated and cheerful volunteers, who are often are only people they may have contact with. The CMI Board of Directors was concerned about the number of unprecedented cancellations this winter and decided to impede Mother Nature by providing Blizzard Bags (non-perishable groceries) to all our clients to use on “snow days,” because our clients’ nutrition is a primary concern. Regardless of ice, snow, wind, or floods, our dedicated volunteers still braved the elements to deliver meals -- and for this we cannot thank them enough. Their care and compassion never ceases to amaze us. This year, we celebrate our 40th anniversary and we cannot begin to thank our volunteers enough for a “job well done.” Our organization would not be able to continue the very special service of home meal delivery to our communities: Allendale, Glen Rock, Ho-Ho-Kus, Midland Park, Ridgewood, and Waldwick. “Thank you” seems an inadequate gesture, but please know you are truly appreciated, not only by CMI but by “your” clients and their families. Stacey Gilmartin, Executive Director Margaret Hughes, Associate Director Community Meals Inc. Honoring volunteers