Prior to America's entry into the Great War, Germany spent the modern equivalent of one billion dollars to infiltrate American media and undermine the supply chain of the Allied forces. If not for the ceaseless activity of John Revelstoke Rathom, editor of the scrappy Providence Journal, America may have stayed neutral. And yet John Rathom was not even his real name, and his biography was outrageous fiction. Here Mark Arsenault tracks down the story of this enigmatic figure, a patriot who was eventually brought low by up-and-coming political star Franklin Delano Roosevelt.