early as July 1914, Richard Flournoy, assistant to the solicitor at the State Department, considered that “the introduction of a quite novel provision, according to which Germans residing in foreign countries may keep their German nationality, under certain conditions, after obtaining naturalization as citizens of such countries” seemed “to carry the principle of dual nationality further than it [had] ever been carried before.”25 And when war broke out, the reactions grew stronger still. In June 1915, in an article titled, “When Is an American Not an American?” former president Theodore Roosevelt called the German law into question.26
On August 25, 1916, Attorney General Gregory was requested by George A. Dew, editor and publisher of The Messenger in Toledo, Washington, to act against naturalized Germans’ “disloyal and traitorous in sentiment.”27 He replied that “utterances, such as you describe, are clearly evidence that when they were made, the person guilty thereof was bearing allegiance to Germany, his motherland. The open question would be whether he had returned to German allegiance, since his naturalization, or whether the expression was of mental reservation which he had always entertained. If the former, it would not constitute a ground for cancelling his naturalization certificate. If the latter, it would.” And Gregory concluded that the court would determinate the answer and decide whether or not to cancel the certificate of naturalization.28
Many Americans had entered into what Christopher Cappozola calls “vigilant citizenship,” which heightened demands for volunteer neighborhood policing and closer cooperation with the state during wartime.29 German Americans had become the enemy for many, along with anything that carried a trace of German origins.30 Gregory commented later that
during the early period of our participation in the war much complaint was current[ly] growing out of disloyal utterances on the part of naturalized Americans of German and Austrian origin. Many of these utterances, while entirely disloyal, did not fall within the scope of the criminal statutes. The department reached the conclusion, however, that in certain individual cases these utterances were of a character that demonstrated that the naturalized citizen had never in good faith renounced his allegiance to the country of his origin. A number of civil actions were therefore instituted. . . . The successful outcome of these early litigations and the accompanying wide publicity had a marked effect upon naturalized citizens of disloyal tendency throughout the country and greatly lessened the volume of these utterances.31
Denunciations flourished, but they did not necessarily provoke denaturalization. One illustrative case was that of August Weiler, born in Germany in 1846 and naturalized in Illinois in 1888. Thirty years later, on May 21, 1918, Weiler was arrested in St. Louis, following notification of the authorities by Harry Rosecarr, a customer at Yawitz Tailoring Company, Weiler’s place of employment. Rosecarr had gone to the tailor shop to solicit contributions to the Red Cross. Weiler responded to this request by saying, “I am born in Germany and you cannot tear the German out of my heart. . . . My cradle was there and it is my country. . . . The Kaiser has done nothing to me and I can’t see why the U.S. went into that war, we ought to stay out of it.”32
After his arrest, the seventy-one-year-old Weiler was locked up by local police pending his transfer to national authorities. Two days later, on May 23, the Office of the Chief Examiner of the Naturalization Service in St. Louis recommended to Campbell that he endorse a denaturalization procedure against Weiler.33
A subsequent August 8, 1918, letter to the commissioner revealed that Weiler had also been indicted for “violation of the Espionage Act.” However, the local U.S. attorney was “very much in doubt as to the value of the evidence against said Weiler. He recommended the cancellation suit only in the event of conviction in the criminal case.” On September 7, the commissioner endorsed this strategy and denaturalization proceedings were never initiated.34
Another case concerned Victor Schneider, who was born in Austria in 1871, arrived in the United States in 1893, and filed his declaration of intention in 1899, a few days before his naturalization. According to the information gathered by the local Bureau of Investigation, at the beginning of 1918, it appeared to the chief examiner in Chicago that Schneider was pro-German and was still in allegiance to the emperor of Austria as he “has declined to work on war materials.” On March 11, 1918, the chief examiner referred the matter to the U.S. attorney in order to institute denaturalization proceedings. During the following months the U.S. attorney certified to the Naturalization Service that he wanted to use Schneider as a test case and that he had only delayed it on account of other work. He promised the case was a priority, but that was not exactly the truth. Still, three years later, on February 2, 1921, he again promised the naturalization office that the case would be tried at the earliest date. Finally, on January 13, 1922, he wrote the chief naturalization examiner in Chicago that the disloyal statements had been made in December 1917, too much time had passed, there was a risk of not finding the witnesses, and finally that it would be impossible for the government to succeed in court, and the case was therefore dropped.35
But when suits occurred, courts accepted the order to denaturalize U.S. citizens based on evidence of present disloyalty as a retroactive indication of disloyalty at the time of naturalization. This assumption necessitated inquiries, and the courts’ decisions were consistent during the period from 1916 to 1923, with the exception of one case, Woerndle.
The District Court of Washington set the tone on May 10, 1918, by denaturalizing Carl August Darmer.36 On October 17, 1917, Darmer, a German-born citizen naturalized in 1888, had refused to buy a Liberty Bond. He told the sellers that “if he bought any Liberty Bonds it would be the same as kicking his own mother.” He added “he would rather throw all his property into the bay than buy one $50 Liberty Bond.” The court reasoned that since “attachments generally are weakened by length of time and absence from the cherished object, the contention that it is more likely that it was stronger then than now cannot be said, in the absence of explanation, to be altogether unreasonable.”
Three days after the Darmer decision, on May 13, 1918, in the District Court of New Jersey, the Wursterbarth case37 echoed the sentiment that loyalty and allegiance to the United States should increase with the defendant’s stay there, and that the subject’s alien allegiance should correspondingly decrease. A native of Germany, naturalized in 1882, Frederick W. Wursterbarth refused repeatedly to give money to or become a member of the American Red Cross, or to subscribe to the Young Men’s Christian Association fund. At these occasions, he made statements that he would do nothing to defeat his country of origin, and that he did not wish the United States to win the war. The question for Judge Thomas G. Haight, Sr. was “whether it may be legitimately inferred as a fact, from his present state of mind, that he was of the same mind at the time he took the oath of allegiance and renunciation.” And the judge provided an answer that would become a point of reference for the attorney general:
As the years succeeding his naturalization passed, coupled with the fact that he continued to dwell within our midst, associate with our citizens, receive the benefits . . .it is natural to presume that his affection and feeling of loyalty and allegiance to this country would increase, and that any ties which bound him to the country from which he came would correspondingly decrease. If therefore, under such circumstances, after 35 years, he now recognizes an allegiance to the sovereignty of his origin, superior to his allegiance to this country, it seems to me that it is not only permissible to infer from that fact, but that the conclusion is irresistible, that at the time he took the oath of renunciation, he did so with a mental reservation as to the country of his birth, and retained toward that country an allegiance which the laws of this country required him to renounce before he could become one of its citizens. Indeed, for the reasons just stated, his allegiance to the former must at that time has been stronger than it is at present.38
Immediately, Gregory sent a circular, with the court decision, to all U.S. attorneys, emphasizing “the doctrine enunciated by the court in the Wursterbarth case”: “This decision is
