"On the Firing Line with the Germans" Film Annotations (2017)

pursue the film project on his own as long as he fulfilled his usual still photography for the NEA. He
proposed the film project to a group of Chicago businessmen who saw the business opportunity of
showing the war to Americans first hand and formed the War Film Syndicate. Durborough was not a
cinematographer, so he needed one and the Syndicate selected Irving Guy Ries. Durborough wanted to
hire Nicholas MacDonald, a fellow photographer he had worked with at the Chicago Examiner, but the
Syndicate felt MacDonald did not have enough experience, while Ries was a proven movie cameraman,
having worked for the Industrial Film Company for a year and a half, who also spoke fluent German.
Germany approved Durborough’s trip, and others like it, for several reasons. While Germany may have
been doing reasonably well militarily in 1915, it was losing the propaganda war in the United States. It
felt, not without reason, that French and British propaganda dominated the media, especially on the
Anglophile East Coast, and the cosmopolitan West Coast as well. The only cable to get news from
Germany to the United States was via London and from early in the war the British censored all news
out of Germany. So America tended to hear only the Entente side of the story. The Germans were
highly motivated to share their side of the war with the American public.
The investors in Chicago had many reasons to invest in the trip as well. In the American mid-west a vein
of anti-war sentiment ran deep, partially because of the pacifism of the Progressive movement leaders,
such as Senators Robert La Follette and George Norris, as well as the Progressive aversion for the
autocratic government of the Czar. In addition, there were many German and Irish immigrants in the
cities of the mid-west, especially Chicago. In some cases, German-Americans were pro-German even to
the point of going to serve in the German Army. Most were not interested in fighting for Germany, but
were against America entering the war on the side of Britain, Russia and France. The Irish were strongly
anti-British and the Irish Mayor of Chicago, Big Bill Thompson, wanted to “punch King George in the
snoot”. At first he even refused to greet French Prime Minister Viviani and General Joffre when they
visited Chicago in 1917. Many of the Scandinavians in the central and upper mid-west were also
lukewarm about involvement in a European war.
So it was natural that Chicago became a center of pro-German sentiment. The Chicago Tribune was pro-
German and the Chicago Daily News, if not pro-German, was careful in presenting the German side in
every argument. Oswald F. Schuette, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News who appears in
Durborough's film, was a passionate Germanophile. James O’Donnell Bennett, correspondent for the
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