Plain Words from America: A Letter to a German Professor (1917)

Written in the spring of 1917, as America enters the Great War, this remarkable epistolary work captures a moment of profound transatlantic tension through one scholar's patient attempt at understanding. Douglas Wilson Johnson, an American academic, replies to a German professor who had appealed for fair consideration of his nation's position. Rather than polemic, Johnson offers something rarer: a careful accounting of how educated Americans formed their views of Germany, drawing not from journalism alone but from personal exchanges, diplomatic archives, and firsthand observation of German militarism's ascent. He distinguishes sharply between reverence for German philosophy, music, and science, and utter condemnation of the autocratic government that mobilized that culture for conquest. The result is a nuanced, often moving defense of American opinion that refuses to conflate the German people with their rulers, while leaving open the door for reform and democratic renewal. It stands as a historical artifact of extraordinary value: not propaganda, but the reasoned voice of an intellectual trying to bridge an ocean of fury.