Politics & Power Quote by Shane Leslie

The line carries the clipped, wary precision of a diplomat watching alliances wobble in real time. Leslie is pointing to a uniquely American vulnerability in World War I: a nation that wants to act like a unified moral actor while hosting large immigrant populations whose old-world loyalties and resentments don’t neatly dissolve at Ellis Island. “A very considerable body” is bureaucratic language doing strategic work. It turns people into a political mass, something measurable, potentially mobilizable, and therefore threatening.

The subtext is less about Germans as an ethnicity than about legitimacy. If German-Americans “propose to fight that Government,” the “that” matters: it’s not framed as abstract dissent but as active resistance to the state’s war policy. Leslie is tracking how propaganda, fundraising, and political agitation could complicate U.S. entry into the war or weaken its resolve after entry. This is the era when suspicion of “hyphenated Americans” was becoming a mainstream posture, laying groundwork for surveillance, loyalty tests, and the logic of the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

Then he pivots to “Bourke,” whose speech “worked out the President’s meaning with care.” That phrase is both compliment and tell. Bourke isn’t merely welcoming a Belgian mission; he’s translating Wilsonian rhetoric into a usable public mandate: Belgium as martyr, Germany as violator, America as reluctant enforcer. Leslie is noting how war is sold: not by raw exhortation, but by careful interpretation of presidential ambiguity into moral clarity. In a single breath, he sketches the two fronts of wartime politics - the battle abroad and the argument at home.