"The Darkest Hour"

Endless testimony, intricate detail, points of law, and points of fact, characterized the progress of the Government's suit to recover 4,800 German chemical patents, seized and sold to the Chemical Foundation of Wilmington. Over two weeks have been spent by the Government in striving to prove that the transaction was " fraudulent "; because the price was "altogether inadequate" ($250,000), because President Wilson was " not properly informed" in sanctioning the sale, and because Francis P. Garvan, then Alien Property Custodian, sold patents to the Foundation of which he became President.

The defense opened its case by calling to the stand A. Mitchell Palmer, former Alien Property Custodian whom Mr. Garvan succeeded, Mr. Palmer, Attorney General in 1919 and prominent candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination , in 1920, made a frontal attack on the claims which the Government set up in the dye case. It was during his term as Alien Property Custodian that the plans for the sale of the German patents were first made, although the sales were mainly completed by Mr. Garvan. Part of Mr. Palmer's testimony was his disclosure of the circumstances under which President Wilson and he had decided that the German patents should be sold: " It was the darkest hour of the War. . . . It was about the time that General Haig had said that Great Britain was fighting with its back to the wall. . . . the Secretary of War (Mr. Baker), on returning from the front told a party of 20 men at the house of Hugh Wallace . . . that it was the general opinion that Paris was about to fall and that the Channel ports would be taken. Although that was serious, he said, he thought it was not fatal, but to the rest of us men of the Administration gathered there it sounded fatal. . . .

" I asked the President to let me go down to Congress and ask Congress to hit the Germans where it would hurt, to strike a blow from which they knew they could never recover, and let them know right now, as an act of war that we proposed to Americanize this property."