The commercial. (Union City, Tenn.) 190?-193?, 1918-08-23
DISLOYAL PASTOR TOLD
TO GROW AMERICAN SOUL
Judge Passes Three Year Sentence on
E.. German Minister.

Duluth, Mimi, August 1o.-ReV.
j. Fontana, pastor of the German
Evangelical Church of New Salem,
N. D., was convicted at Bismarck of
uttering seditious language for the
purpose of interfering with the mill
tary activities of the United States.
In sentencing him to three years in
the Federal Penitentiary, Judge
Charles F. Amidon made utterances
| of such wide application and sound
statemanship that they are repro
duced here in full:
You received your final papers as
a citizen in 1898. By the oath which
you then took you renounced and
adjured all allegiance to Germany,
and to the emperor of Germany, and
swore that you would bear true faith
and allegiance to the United States.
| What did that mean? That you
would set about earnestly growing an
American soul, and put away your
| German soul. That is what your
oath of allegiance meant.
Have you done that? 1 do not
| think you have. You have cherished
everything German, and stifled ev-
erything American. You have
preached German, prayed German,
read German, sung German. Every
thought of your mind and every emo
tion of your heart thru all these
years has been German. Your body
has been in America, but your life
has been in Germany. If you were
set down in Prussia to-day you would
be in harmony with your environ
ment. 1t would fit you just as a
flower fits the leaf and stem of the
plant on which it grows.
You have influenced others who
have been under your ministry to do
the same thing. You said you would
cease to cherish your German soul,
and that you would begin to build up
inside of you an American soul That
meant that you would begin the
study of American life and history;
that you would open your mind and
heart to all of it's Influences; that
you would try to understand it's
ideals and purposes, and love them;
that you would try to build up in
side of yourself group of feelings
for the United States, the same as
you felt towards the fatherland when
you left Germany.
There have been a good many Cor
mans before me in the last month.
They have lived in this country, like
yourself, ten, twenty, thirty, forty
years, and they had to-givc their
evidence thru an interpreter. 1t has
been an impressive part of the trial
AS l looked at them and tried, as
best l could, to understand them,
there was written all over every one
of them, Made in Germany" Amer
lean life had not dimmcd that mark
in the least. 1t stood there as bright
and fresh as the inscription upon a
new coin.
l do not blame you and these men
alone. 1 blame myself l blame my
country. We urged you to come; we
welcomed you; we gave you oppor-
tunity; we gave you land; we con-
ferred upon you the diadom of Amer
lean citizenship-and then we left
you. We paid no attention to what
you have been doing
And now the world wer has
thrown a searchlight upon our ma
tional life, and what have we dis
covered? We find all over these
United States, in groups, little Ger
manies, little Italics, little Austrias,
little Norways, little Russias. These
foreign people have thrown a circle
about themselves, and instead of
keeping tho oath they took that they
would try to grow American souls
inside of them, they have studiously
3triven to exclude everything Ameri-
can and to cherish everything for
aign.
A clever gentleman wrote a ro-
nance called America, the Melting
Pot" 1t appealed to our vanity, and
thru all these years we have been
seeing romance instead of fact. That
S the awful truth. The figure of my
country stands beside you to-day. 1t
says to me, "Do not blame this man
llonc. am partly to blame. Punish
lin for this offensc, but let him
know that 1 see things in a new
light; that a new era has como here.
Punish him to teach him and the like
If him, and all those who have been
nisled by him and his life, that a
hange has come; that there must be
n Interpretation anew of the oath
# allegiance. 1t has been in the past
but a formula of words.
from this time on it must be trans