Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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Other causes that came as hard back-kicks from the Great War are another example in the swing of the pendulum from low to high. Try to see clearly here. There is no use doing anything else. It is a lesson for all time. A great deal of the Middle West was settled by the thriftiest, hardest-working type of German settlers in the immigration movement from 1848 to 1870. In fact, during the Civil War, St. Louis was known as a “Dutch town.” They did not love their native land less because they came to America, but they loved the freedom of America more. I, who am of British and American ancestry, acknowledge that the aspersions cast on these people during the War were unjust. When War Bonds came to be sold, their thrift enabled them to be eager and ready cash buyers. War prices had bulged their bank accounts and the proof of their fealty to Uncle Sam was that they bought War Bonds eagerly. But War prices had also sent up new factories for hides, beef, hogs, flour, sugar; and when bonds had to be floated to expand these factories, further proof of the German-American’s loyalty was demanded—may I say forced?—to buy the bonds of these factories. One of these in the beef-packing industry went into bankruptcy, another went so close to the bankrupt dead-line that its stock fell to seven and six from a hundred and reduced one of the biggest packing fortunes in America to such a residuum that the public gasped.