William Saier was tarred and feathered on the first tee of a Lansing golf course because he committed what The State Journal called “an unprintable crime against the Star Spangled Banner.”

It was Nov. 2, 1917, more than three years after a Serbian nationalist’s bullet sparked the First World War and seven months since the United States had joined it. In Belgium, a months-long horror of death and mud known as the Third Battle of Ypres was breaking in favor of the British and their allies. In Lansing, patriotic and anti-German feelings ran high.

Saier, a butcher, was grabbed from the corner of Capital Avenue and Kalamazoo Street. At the golf course, surrounded by men in white sheets, “he apologized with all the emotion of his terrified heart for the insult to the flag and for cursing the government which had given him freedom and protection all the years of his life,” the Journal wrote.

They covered him with hot tar and feathers until he “looked like a goose.”

An echo of Saier’s story appears in the pages of “Foreign Born,” a novel written by Lansing-born author John Herrmann in the mid-1920s but never published until this year.

The German butcher coated in tar was a minor character, though. Herrmann’s true concerns were the hypocrisies of patriotism, the violence that sometimes maintained it and the anti-German sentiment that swept his hometown during the war.

As the son of a German immigrant family, Herrmann hadn’t failed to notice.

“What is sort of brilliant about the book, at least in an intellectual way, is it really critiques patriotism,” said Sara Kosiba, an independent scholar who rediscovered the manuscript of “Foreign Born” in an archive at the University of Texas at Austin while working on a biography of Herrmann.

“I find that, especially in today’s climate, a really sort of fascinating thing to look at.”

Herrmann had spent part of the early 1920s in Paris, where he struck up a friendship Ernest Hemingway and a romance with the socialist writer Josephine Herbst and wrote a novel, “What Happens,” that would later be banned for obscenity.

Returning to Lansing, where his father ran a successful tailoring business, his momentum slowed.

He began work on “Foreign Born” after attending a 1924 concert by the Liederkranz Society, a German singing society and social club that had seen its membership plummet during the war years only to bounce back after the armistice.

The book's central character is Ernst Weiman, a German-American businessman intent on ingratiating himself with "the best families in town." He succeeds, only to see his business and social relationships fracture over his support for Germany in the war.

The book's vigilance committees, which used the threat of public humiliation to encourage the sale of war bonds, and American Protective League, a vigilante group that worked with law enforcement to root out German sympathizers, weren't fictions. Lansing had both.

Indeed, there was suspicion that it was members of the American Protective League who had dragged Saier out to the golf course, according to testimony in one of the two unsuccessful libel suits Saier filed against The State Journal for its account of his tarring and feathering.

And, when Saier sought to restore his reputation, he appealed to the local vigilance committee to say that the flag desecration had never happened. They declined.

The book "touches on things that actually happened in Lansing," said Bill Castanier, president of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, which hosted a program on the book in May. "They’re thinly veiled, if even veiled."

Herrmann began sending the manuscript for "Foreign Born" to publishing houses in 1925. One of the kinder reader responses that Kosiba found in the archives said the book was "ahead of its time - certainly above and beyond current popular taste," but even that reviewer said it would need "literary quality of a higher order" to merit publication.

“The readers reports don’t say specifically, ‘We don’t want to publish this because it’s too close to World War I,' but I think that’s ultimately one of the undertones," Kosiba said. "It’s post war. Everyone wants to move on. I don’t think a lot of people wanted to take ownership of the way the German-American community was treated.”

But a century after the war's end, it had become interesting in other ways, which is why Kosiba sought to have it published.

"It’s the only novel I’m aware of that dedicates an entire novel to looking at that German-American backlash..." she said, "that speaks to the fear within the German community and to the hypocrisy, in many ways, of how they were treated."

Contact Matthew Miller at mrmiller@lsj.com or at (517) 377-1046.

John T. Herrmann

Born: Nov. 9, 1900 in Lansing.

Died: April 9, 1959, Guadalajara, Mexico

Novels: "What Happens" (1926), "Summer is Ended" (1932), "The Salesman" (1939), "Foreign Born" (2018)