Wednesday, April 4, 1917
As the war debate heats up in the U.S. Senate, recruitment efforts are underway today for a Saratoga Springs depot company.
The upper house is expected to vote on the war resolution sometime tomorrow after a lengthy, lopsided and sometimes bitter debate pitting a bipartisan antiwar minority against overwhelming public opinion. George W. Norris (R-NE) calls the imminent war “a war of dollars” and argues that declaring war on Germany would be “putting the dollar sign on the American flag.” James A. Reed (D-MO) answers that Norris’s speech “took on a treasonous character.”
The main anti-war Senator is Robert W. LaFollette (R-WI), who used a parliamentary maneuver to postpone the debate to today. He speaks for more than three hours this afternoon, warning that “The poor who are called to rot in the trenches have now no organized mouthpiece, they have no press, but some time they will be heard.”
Rejecting President Woodrow Wilson’s claim that Germany has waged war on mankind, LaFollette asks why, if that’s the case, no other neutral nation is declaring war over Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against shipping bound for its enemies, France and Great Britan.
“Some may have a clearer view than we,” LaFollette says, “This suspicion of a desire for war profits does not attach to them.”
John Sharp Wiliams (DMS) answers LaFollette, calling his speech “pro-German, pro-Goth, pro-vandal and … anti-President, anti-Congress and anti-American.
“I am getting tired of this talk that this is a Wall Street war,” Williams says, “That’s a lie. Wall Street did not sink the Lusitania, the Arabic, the Sussex and these other ships. I’m tired of lies like that and I think it is the duty of the American Congress and people to brand them as lies.”
A decisive vote for war is expected later tonight. In the meantime the House foreign relations committee approves the Senate war resolution, with one dissenting vote from each party.
In Saratoga Springs, Captain Ranulf Compton of the National Guard Reserve announces the opening of a recruiting drive for a 150 man depot company.
The depot company will defend the Saratoga Springs armory in the absence of Company L of the Second New York Infantry regiment. Mobilized into federal service, Company L. has been deployed to Schenectady County for police protective duty, guarding bridges and railroads against possible attack following a declaration of war.
Local men seeking “immediate active service” will no longer be enlisted in Saratoga Springs. Instead, they must go to Troy for medical examinations before they’re enlisted into “any particular copany they may wish to join.”