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Correspondence from H. Christopher Watts[1] to the Foreign Office
[EXTRACT]
[3 November 1917]
Mr. Harris is that Frank Harris, who was for a time editor of the London Saturday Review. His present position is that of a renegade Englishman. I cannot account for his exit from London, though doubtless there are reasons for that. But for some time he did hard work in New York and was associated with one or two journalistic ventures. Then he became, last year, the editor of Pearson's Magazine, a monthly published in New York. His editorship began with the publication of a series of articles purporting to give certain scurrilous and unsavoury scandals in the life of the late King Edward VII, and ever since the magazine has kept up this sort of tone. Harris is not a Catholic, but he is not above using the Catholics as a lever to unload some of his spite.
George Sylvester Viereck is a German. It is said, with how much truth I do not know, that he is related on the wrong side to the Imperial German family. At any rate, he was a close associate with Dr. Albert and other persons in carrying out the plans of the German propaganda. At the same time when the war broke out he brought out a weekly journal called The Fatherland. It was an English-language paper issued entirely on behalf of Germany. As far as it went is was thorough, and backed up Germany on every point, and it made a special plea of identifying Germany with the cause of Catholicism. Since America has come into the was the name of the paper has been changed to that of Viereck's Weekly, but the Americanism of its editor is just dust thrown into the eyes of the American Government. Actually the paper is still keeping alive by subtle means the German propaganda. I do not think that Viereck is a Catholic; in fact I know from some of his associates that he is a lewd rascal. But he took a very cunning line: for example, he wrote a poem that was quoted largely in the Catholic papers, in which one verse begins:
The Teuton thundering through the land Shall set God's prisoned shepherd free.
This came out at a time when there was some talk of Germany making the restoration of the Pope's temporal power one of its war objects, and it caught hold on the imagination of the Catholic public. The idea has been exploited considerably since then.
Now Viereck has another paper, a monthly called The International. It is a more or less radical journal, and prints articles by English pacifists. Also it has taken an anti-British standpoint, though not after the vulgar manner of the Gaelic-American. In fact, it has always appeared to have for its aim the fuddling of American opinion on the truth about the war. Among the contributors to The International have been Frank Harris and a man named Aleister Crowley.
Now this Crowley is another renegade Englishman. He achieved an unsavoury notoriety in England chiefly on account of his connection with those Eleusinian mysteries stunts at Caxton Hall in Westminster. I think there was a scandal about it some few years back. Anyway, Crowley left this country for the country's good a few years back, and appeared in New York where he posed as a mystic and a Rosicrucian and a good many other things. He found it somewhat difficult to make a living, and took to hack work, when he could get it. Then Viereck got hold of him, and now he is doing work on behalf of the German propaganda.
Crowley was very anxious to get into touch with a man I was working with the New York Times, a well-known Catholic poet and man of letters. But this man happened to be friendly with one of Crowley's former associates, a man named Everett Harre, the author of a highly sensational and salacious novel. Harre quarrelled with Crowley on account of his being a low villain and a bad egg generally, and warned my friend against him, so he refused to have anything to do with Crowley.
Some time last year Crowley sent a woman, with whom he was living, round to the [New York] Times, asking him if he would recommend a priest who he [Crowley] might consult with some idea of his becoming a Catholic. My friend refused to have anything to do with the matter, and when Crowley called him up on the phone he asked to be excused from giving the name of any priest, and he left the matter at that.
Now I do not know for a fact that Crowley has become a Catholic. But I do know with some certainty that he is still working with Viereck, and that Frank Harris is also associated with whatever is going on. I think that the open German propaganda has been abandoned, and that it is carried on subtly under the guise of the future welfare of Catholicism. . . .
1—H. Christopher Watts was an English journalist who had worked in New York and had supplied the British government with much American intelligence.
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