Thursday, Sept. 20, 1917
Saratoga Springs police chief James King warns today that “the police would assume no responsibility” if local gardeners opened fire on produce thieves.
The chief’s warning follows several recent reports of crops being stolen from gardens planted as part of the national effort to increase the wartime food supply. King tells The Saratogian that “he knew of several cases where amateurs had declared they would protect their crops at the point of a shot gun.”
Saratoga Springs YMCA secretary John H. Iron endorses the shotgun approach. He’s been a leader in the movement to encourage boys to grow war gardens, some of which have been robbed in the recent crime wave.
“I have the evidence sufficient to convict one person and I intend to lay it before the police magistrate and secure a warrant if the thefts do not cease,” Irons says.
“I wish every gardener would get a shot gun and fire a charge into the legs of any person whom he finds stealing. This would break up the practice pretty quickly.”
‘It is for America’
War correspondent J. M. de Beaufort describes the moment a group of Belgian soldiers learned that the U.S. had declared war on Germany to an audience at the Casino tonight. De Beaufort is one of four speakers touring the state on a patriotic rally tour.
“Early in the evening, but later than the usual hour at which orders were usually delivered to the officers, a courier rushed into the dugout and handed a piece of paper to the colonel in command,” de Beaufort recalls, “He read it carefully, re-read it, and then turned to the officers who were waiting impatiently to learn its contents.
“’Gentlemen!’ he exclaimed, ‘America is our ally!’”
“Those words were music to my ears,” de Beaufort adds. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he joined the Belgian army when the war broke out in the summer of 1914, and has traveled extensively across enemy lines as a correspondent since then.
De Beaufort says that reactions to the U.S. declaration of war last April were similarly ecstatic in France and Great Britain. “It was as if a small boy who was being badly beaten by other boys glanced up and saw his big brother coming around the corner toward him.”
French patriotism is a model for the U.S., the correspondent says. Every personal sacrifice there is justified with the saying, “It is for France.”
“You men in this audience tonight when you go home tonight, stand before a mirror and ask yourselves, ‘For God’s sake, what am I doing for America?’”