[On Port Hume Beacon management stationery, small sheet, Vantine's private letterhead. Typed by Vantine's personal secretary (not the newsroom). Single page. Filed in Vantine's office safe, "Management correspondence 1917" file.]

PORT HUME BEACON L. Vantine, Publisher

MEMORANDUM — PRIVATE.

TO: Mr. B. Dreyfoos, Managing Editor. FROM: L. Vantine. DATE: 3 June, 1917.

SUBJECT: K. Dannemeyer.

Benjamin —

I have reflected further upon our conversation of Friday last. You will proceed with the separation of Mr. Dannemeyer from the Beacon's employ in accordance with the following:

  1. The effective date shall be Friday the 8th of June, 1917.

  2. The public cause shall be his German-American sympathies, which in the present climate of our nation's engagement in the war, and in the concerns of our subscribers and our advertisers, render his continued presence on our masthead inconsistent with the Beacon's civic posture. This cause may be stated to Mr. Dannemeyer at the termination interview and, if necessary, to third parties who inquire.

  3. The actual cause — which we have discussed and which you and I need not belabor between ourselves — is his continuing inquiries into the 1912 matter, which we have four times asked him to put aside, and which he has four times put aside for ninety days at a stretch before resuming. Mr. Dannemeyer's persistence on this point is not, in my judgment, incompatible with his employment in newspaper work in general, but it is incompatible with his employment at the Beacon in particular, for reasons which he himself may by now have inferred. The point is not to be stated aloud in any conversation with him.

  4. No severance is to be paid. The pro-German cause furnishes, under the staff agreement of 1911, grounds for separation without severance. This was the particular convenience of selecting that cause.

  5. He is to be permitted to retain his personal papers from his desk. Do not inspect them. I do not wish a scene. Whatever he wishes to take, he may take.

  6. Miss Pellman is not to be informed of the actual cause. She and Mr. Dannemeyer are friends. Her own continuance at the paper is, as we both have observed, complicated by her loyalty to him. Let her believe what she reads on the bulletin-board notice — nothing more.

  7. I will not speak with Mr. Dannemeyer personally. The termination is yours to deliver.

I regret the necessity. Mr. Dannemeyer is a capable reporter in many respects and has served this paper well in many other matters. The 1912 matter is the one on which he cannot be reasoned with, and the Beacon is not a newspaper that can carry, within its staff, a reporter who disagrees with its publisher on what the paper may and may not report.

You will do the necessary.

L. V.

[pencil annotation, Dreyfoos's hand, dated 9 June 1917:]

"Done yesterday afternoon. K. took it well. He did not ask the real reason. Perhaps he knew. He collected his things in twenty minutes and walked out without speaking. He did not shake my hand. I did not offer. I returned to the newsroom. S. Pellman asked me at the end of the day whether I had 'any notion why Klaus.' I said the bulletin-board notice was the reason. She looked at me. She did not say anything further. She has not spoken to me in private conversation since. — B.D."