Industrial Sabotage Quotes
This was a great victory for the Victor Berger wing of the party. They purged the violence advocates and communists from the party. Despite this, a few right wingers call any socialist a communist and a revolutionary.
The smaller German towns had not been targets for allied bombing and German censorship kept most Germans from realizing that the factories in the larger cities were being attacked. But the “rules of war” which the Germans had abandoned early in the war by bombing civilian targets in England and other European cities, required that only military targets be attacked. If a nation placed its factories or military bases in the midst of civilian populations, then the rules of war no longer protected the civilians. So the allies were within their rights by bombing the smaller towns where they targeted factories. However, this quotation is used by some critics to show that FDR’s motive was not the destruction of factories per se, but the breaking of German civilian morale. They argue that the allies were following the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
In the War of 1812, in retaliation of English facilities being attacked by Americans in Canada, the British raided Washington DC and burned the White House. They had also set up a battery of cannon in front of the Patent Office building—one of the most impressive in Washington—and were about to destroy it. The Superintendent came out with this speech. The British officer ordered the cannon removed and the Patent Office with its models was saved.
