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No one, to my knowledge, has ever noted a resemblance between Berkeley and Ferndale — at least not until recently, when I did.

Here’s how it came about.

I arrived at the U. C. Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964, a freshly minted freshman from a small high school situated in the mountains of Southern California. I was unprepared for the transition.

As someone once said, “U. C. Berkeley, but more than that, you hear it,” and hear it I did, every day on my way to and from class as I passed the tables and talkers arrayed before the campus’s south entrance. There were long-haired Maoists, trying to sell you on Chinese Communism; there were crew-cut Christians, promoting Presbyterianism and other faiths; there were others whose eloquence was beyond me, and whose arcane causes I never understood. But the one I remember best was a full-uniformed member of the American Nazi Party, who always drew a crowd and then sweated under his cap as he fanned the flames of hostility. One day, after I’d left campus, he was chased down Bancroft Avenue by a part of his audience he’d angered too much.

And then the U. C. administration cracked down on the sidewalk speakers, and the Free Speech Movement was born. Now I made my way not past the proselytizers of pedestrians, but past phalanxes of police and crowds of protesting demonstrators. I saw college cops drag Mario Savio off the stage of the campus’s Greek theater when he tried to make an announcement over the microphone. I realized that while some speech may be free, for other speech you pay a price.

So what does any of this have to do with Ferndale, you might ask? The answer to that question takes us back ninety-two years, to another time when freedom of speech was an important issue, although in this case it had more to do with freedom of song.

Die Wacht am Eel

The song came from a ranch house in the Sage Road section of the lower Eel River’s so-called “Island”:

Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall … (A call roars like a thunderbolt)

… and continued on for several stanzas, followed by a stirring refrain, the conclusion of which gave the song its name:

Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein! (Solid Stands, and staunch, the Watch, the Watch at the Rhine!)

It was an old and popular German patriotic song, sung thousands of upon thousands of times with fervor and feeling, but on this occasion it was sung at the wrong place and the wrong time. It was 1917, not long after America’s entry into World War I, and the location was within earshot of one of the singer’s daughters, Clara Ammer, who thereby heard it.

Heard it and reported it.

What might otherwise have been merely a nostalgic foray into the Volkslieder of the Fatherland became, under the recently passed Espionage Act, a federal offense. Within a few months one of the singers — carpenter, rancher, and naturalized citizen Chris Ammer — was convicted of violating the Act, his singing (which must have been astoundingly stirring) and pro-German statements apparently having the effect of promoting the “success of … [the] enemies” of the United States, which was prohibited by the new law.

Ammer’s alleged antics had come to the attention of authorities in early November of the previous year, when Clara Ammer called the sheriff’s office, “seeking protection for herself and her mother,” after they had fled their home following an argument with Chris Ammer over “his defense of the Kaiser.” Two weeks later, Chris was arrested on two charges of disturbing the peace, such disturbance consisting of using “disloyal language” and having “cursed the Flag, the President, and the country.” Rumors from Ferndale indicated that if Ammer persisted in “his treachery toward the country,” he would be “in danger of rough handling, or worse, at the hands of his neighbors.” Perhaps prompted by the Ammer incident, Ferndalians staged a “grand union patriotic meeting” at the end of the month, during which a “chorus of fifty voices” sang not only the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but also “Proud Flag of the Free” and “Flag of Freedom.”

In January 1918 Ammer pleaded guilty, was fined $200, and was given a ninety-day suspended jail sentence. This resolved his legal difficulties in Humboldt County, but he was about to swim in a bigger pond. In early March a federal grand jury in Sacramento indicted Ammer for violation of the Espionage Act. The Enterprise carried the news on its front page, while just above the masthead the paper ran the exhortation: “Buy War Savings Stamps and Help Swat the Kaiser.” The tone of the Ammer article made it clear that the Enterprise hoped that Chris would be swatted too. While Ammer awaited trail in federal court, he faced additional legal action when his wife Mary sued him for divorce, citing “cruelty” as the basis for ending their thirty-seven-year marriage.

Ammer’s trial was held in the federal court at Eureka in July. Four persons testified against him. The main witness was his daughter, Clara, who repeated the claims she’d made to the county sheriff’s office, adding that her father had also rejoiced “over the defection of Russia,” had sung German songs, including “The Watch on the Rhine,” at a neighbor’s house, and “had driven her from her home because she was active in patriotic work.” Another witness “told of hearing what she believed to be German songs,” while Elizabeth Fulmore “testified about Ammer’s refusal to contribute to the Red Cross.” Found guilty of committing these offenses, Ammer was sentenced to five years in the McNeil Island Penitentiary in the state of Washington.

Ammer had plenty of company. In all, over fifteen hundred Americans were prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act and its subsequent amplification, the Sedition Act, and more than one thousand were convicted. The IWW — Industrial Workers of the World — saw more than one hundred of their leaders brought to trial under the acts; all of them were found guilty, including the well-known Big Bill Haywood, and the “Wobblies” were toppled into torpidity by what amounted to a patriotic purge. Anarchist Emma Goldman also went to prison, as did Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. Part of Debs’ crime had been denouncing the Espionage Act as undemocratic. When the top Democrat of them all. President Woodrow Wilson, was asked by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer to pardon Debs, Wilson replied “Never!” It was left to Wilson’s successor. Warren G. Harding, to provide the pardon. Meanwhile, Debs polled over 900,000 votes in the 1920 presidential election while still in prison.

Ammer did not suffer the wrath of Wilson as Debs did. In March 1919, the Associated Press reported:

Unduly harsh sentences imposed on a number of persons convicted during the war emergency of violating the espionage act will be corrected from time to time through executive clemency by President Wilson …

To that end, Wilson had just commuted fifty-two sentences and granted a complete pardon in another case. One of the first commutees, as another article reported, was Chris Ammer, whose sentence was reduced from five years to two. He wound up serving only about ten months at McNeil Island. Ammer retained his American citizenship, but it was in Germany that he died in 1937, while there having no doubt heard “Die Wacht am Rhine” to his heart’s content.

The Ammer House still stands today, a 107-year-old, three-story Victorian, complete with a pair of requisite palm trees — the first “butterfat palace,” or “moo mansion,” that you encounter as you approach Ferndale. If you turn right on Sage Road and drive past it you’ll find no monument to Chris’s unsanctioned singing, but you are nonetheless passing one of the battlefields of First Amendment rights, just as Bancroft Avenue in Berkeley — so far from the cows and creameries of Ferndale — was in the 1960s.

“Silence is subversive” — Eric Hoffer