Last week, before the President returned from fishing, spring—and something else more ominous than spring—were waiting for him at the White House.
Spring came with all the familiar sights and sounds of peaceful generations. The ten acres of White House lawn turned green overnight; gaspowered, rubber-tired lawn mowers began to whir over the sward's long roll, barbering the Kentucky bluegrass to the regulation two inches. A man painted the tennis-court backstop; other men with shears trimmed the California privet hedges in pyramid style.
Tiny green feathers delicately blurred the heavy black-purple branches of the Japanese fernleaf beech trees near the Executive Office. Tight green buds popped all over what Calvin Coolidge used to call "the south lot." One forsythia shrub, near the office, already sprayed yellow.
But the something else that came to the White House had none of the happy sights or sounds of peacetime. There were newspapers that told of the look in the eyes of women who last week boarded the Magallanes, a Spanish ship bound from New York for Bilbao. Some were in tears, some stolid. They were Germans—142 women, 14 children, 35 men—sailing to the Fatherland in what appeared to be a general evacuation. One woman wrote, desperately: "Hitler has ordered our husbands who are members of the Bund to come back to Germany at once. We had to sell our insurance and take all our money to the consul, who gives us only a piece of paper. God help us, we leave our soul and life in America to go, we know not where, only to leave here before Hitler strikes at New York." Blankly, sadly the women went up the gangplank. Fortnight before, another ship, the Marques de Comillas, had taken 180 Germans. Hitler's people were fleeing before the shadow of events to come.
Nor were Hitler's people the only refugees. Although the fact was not advertised, Washington knew that U. S. reporters were leaving or preparing to leave Berlin, and reporters do not scare easily.
Some insiders even believed that active hostilities between the U. S. and Germany were growing imminent. The sign with which the new week opened was the most suggestive of all.
In Port Newark, N. J., an Italian seaman with no love for Il Duce tipped off a customs official that Italian ships in U. S. ports were being systematically sabotaged by their crews. In a few hours word reached the President. Back came an order from the Potomac: seize all German and Italian ships to prevent their being further damaged; put all Danish ships in protective custody. In Washington, tall, mild, Acting Treasury Secretary Herbert Earle Gaston put his finger on Section I of Title II of the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, authorizing seizure of foreign vessels "to prevent damage or injury to any harbor or waters of the U. S."