One of the most vicious of the anti-Roosevelt propaganda mediums was established by Nazi agents in a carefully hidden printing plant.
[Illustration: Anti-Semitic anti-Roosevelt handbill issued by the American White Guard in California.]
No one who got off on the sixth floor at 325 W. Ohio St., Chicago, and entered the John Baumgarth's Specialty Company, would have suspected anything out of the ordinary about the place. It looked just like hundreds of other business firms where pale girls and anemic-looking men made calendars.
People came up on the ancient elevator, attended to their affairs at the desks in front of the door, and left. Very few of them ever went behind the enormous piles of cardboard and paper which almost obstructed the passage to the right of the desks. But if you turned into this passage and then turned to the left, you came upon a wooden partition. Unless you were watching for it you would think it a wall.
There was no indication of what was behind the partition. There was only a shiny Yale lock in a door carefully hidden from the eyes of casual visitors. If you knew nothing about it and tried to open the door, you would find it locked. If you knocked or banged on it, there would be no answering sign from the other side, and the young man operating the cutting machine alongside the partition would merely stare at you blankly.
But if you knocked three times quickly, paused for a split second and then knocked once more, the door would be opened immediately. Without the proper signal all the knocking in the world would not help, for this was the entrance to the carefully guarded publication rooms of the _American Gentile_ and the headquarters for Nazi anti-democratic activities in the Middle West. But even more guarded than the location of the printing plant were the goings and comings of the paper's editor, Captain Victor DeKayville and his financial backer, Charles O'Brien.
This brings me to two of the leading Nazi agents in the United States, one of whom originally started the newspaper. Certainly none of the American suckers who gave them money to spread pro-Nazi propaganda knew that both were masquerading under false names and that one of them is an ex-convict.