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American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best History & Biography (2022)From award-winning, New York Times bestselling historian Adam Hochschild, a fast-paced, revelatory new account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath, when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.
The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.
This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known, among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover; others less familiar, such as the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards O’Hare and the outspoken Leo Wendell, a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comrades—but who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.
A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that feel ominously familiar today.
The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.
This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known, among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover; others less familiar, such as the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards O’Hare and the outspoken Leo Wendell, a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comrades—but who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.
A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that feel ominously familiar today.
422 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 2022
About the author
Adam Hochschild
30 books1,061 followersHochschild was born in New York City. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would later write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the leftwing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones.
Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986), in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. His later books include The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990; new edition, 2007), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994; new edition, 2003), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (1997), which collects his personal essays and reportage, and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998; new edition, 2006), a history of the conquest and colonization of the Congo by Belgium's King Léopold II. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, published in 2005, is about the antislavery movement in the British Empire.
Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Hochschild's books have been translated into twelve languages.
A frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference and similar venues, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Hoc...
Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986), in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. His later books include The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990; new edition, 2007), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994; new edition, 2003), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (1997), which collects his personal essays and reportage, and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998; new edition, 2006), a history of the conquest and colonization of the Congo by Belgium's King Léopold II. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, published in 2005, is about the antislavery movement in the British Empire.
Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Hochschild's books have been translated into twelve languages.
A frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference and similar venues, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Hoc...
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October 12, 2022
Adam Hochschild's American Midnight revisits the painful period of 1917 through 1921, when the United States entered World War I then, having helped to win it, plunged into a maelstrom of political violence and state repression. Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost) turns his narrative gifts to Woodrow Wilson's quixotic effort to "make the world safe for democracy" while working to crush it at home. Dissent was criminalized by the Espionage and Sedition Acts, with the government arresting socialists, labor leaders and other radicals under the guise of protecting America from German espionage. Vigilantes targeted German-Americans, some of whom were beaten, tarred-and-feathered or lynched; the American Protective League, a semi-official citizens' detective agency, rounded up draft-dodging "slackers" and conscientious objectors; the Bureau of Investigation, under the ambitious detective William J. Flynn, consolidated its power. War's end in November 1918 merely presaged a flowering of peacetime unrest: a flu pandemic, labor strikes, race riots, a wave of anarchist bombings and reprisals by super-patriots like the American Legion. It culminated in the Palmer Raids, where Wilson's Attorney General unleashed the Federal government on thousands of victims - some radicals, many simply immigrants in the wrong place, who were arrested, beaten and many of them deported. The hysteria eventually burned itself out, but not without leaving deep scars on the American psyche.
These topics have often been discussed individually, like in Kenneth Ackerman's Young J. Edgar (which depicts the Red Scare through the eyes of an ambitious young Bureau official), David Kennedy's Over Here or Cameron McWhirter's Red Summer. Hochschild ties these events into a cohesive narrative while adding unfamiliar contours. Familiar progressives Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman and Robert La Follette brush shoulders with less-known figures like socialist Kate Richards O'Hare, the first American prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and IWW leader Frank Little, lynched by a patriotic mob; reactionaries Ole Hanson, Seattle's Red-baiting Mayor, and former Rough Rider Leonard Wood use the chaos to craft political careers. Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois bemoan race riots in East St. Louis and Chicago while encouraging the "New Negro" to assert their democratic rights in the face of prejudice and violence. Strikers are demonized as Bolsheviks, while a wave of wartime xenophobia leads to violence against immigrants and ultimately strict restrictions on their arrival. Hochschild unsparingly portrays Wilson as a pious hypocrite, with subordinates Flynn, A. Mitchell Palmer, George Creel (head of wartime propaganda) and postmaster Albert Burleson tightening the screws of repression. America emerged from this period fundamentally changed, its extant fault lines emphasized and a pattern for government repression in the name of "democracy" and anti-communism firmly established. A thoughtful, highly-readable narrative of a tumultuous time.
These topics have often been discussed individually, like in Kenneth Ackerman's Young J. Edgar (which depicts the Red Scare through the eyes of an ambitious young Bureau official), David Kennedy's Over Here or Cameron McWhirter's Red Summer. Hochschild ties these events into a cohesive narrative while adding unfamiliar contours. Familiar progressives Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman and Robert La Follette brush shoulders with less-known figures like socialist Kate Richards O'Hare, the first American prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and IWW leader Frank Little, lynched by a patriotic mob; reactionaries Ole Hanson, Seattle's Red-baiting Mayor, and former Rough Rider Leonard Wood use the chaos to craft political careers. Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois bemoan race riots in East St. Louis and Chicago while encouraging the "New Negro" to assert their democratic rights in the face of prejudice and violence. Strikers are demonized as Bolsheviks, while a wave of wartime xenophobia leads to violence against immigrants and ultimately strict restrictions on their arrival. Hochschild unsparingly portrays Wilson as a pious hypocrite, with subordinates Flynn, A. Mitchell Palmer, George Creel (head of wartime propaganda) and postmaster Albert Burleson tightening the screws of repression. America emerged from this period fundamentally changed, its extant fault lines emphasized and a pattern for government repression in the name of "democracy" and anti-communism firmly established. A thoughtful, highly-readable narrative of a tumultuous time.
June 19, 2023
Hochschild paints a vivid picture of the repression and vigilantism that took over America in the four years following the country’s entry into WWI. President Wilson and the Congress targeted anti-war advocates, passing new laws including the Espionage Act that were used to crack down on minorities, immigrants, socialists, and labor union members. Warrantless searches, raids, and arrests, along with censorship and deportations were used to deny these groups their civil rights and free speech. The Justice Department authorized vigilante groups that violently harassed and intimidated suspect groups. Thousands of people were jailed on little or no evidence. Targeted people and groups were indiscriminately labeled as subversive and threats to society and falsely accused of plotting violence. Socialists, labor unionists, and immigrants were rounded up and sent to jail in group trials on hearsay and innuendo. Conscientious objectors were sent to prison along with draft dodgers. Their treatment in prison was brutal as it was for others targeted. A frequently used punishment was to tie a prisoner’s hands to a high bar in his cell so he had to stand on his tiptoes for up to eight hours a day. Confessions were extracted with tortures that had been used by veterans who had served in the Philippines. All of this took place in Woodrow Wilson’s second term. Hochschild portrays a hypocritical Wilson who talks in lofty tones espousing personal freedom, while enabling authoritarian racist forces to undermine democracy. His book is an important reminder of what America can become if those forces come to power again. My notes follow.
Soon after America declared war on Germany in 1917, the Wilson administration imposed draconian domestic security measures. Wilson supported the Espionage Act which doled out prison sentences of up to twenty years for opposing the war including just making “false” statements about the war. In addition, the Espionage Act allowed newspapers and other mail to be declared unmailable, imposing censorship on a primary means of communication at a time when printed matter was the prime method of communication. Wilson had pushed for even more extensive provisions for censorship in the act. His Postmaster General Albert Burleson began declaring unmailable newspapers and other mail that he found offensive. Another new law held up foreign language publications by requiring a translation to be submitted to the Post Office for approval, a process soon backlogged.
In 1917 the Department of Justice authorized an official auxiliary called the American Protective League (APL). Wilson raised no objections, although later making some critical comments, he took no action. This civilian vigilante organization was even given the privilege of sending its mail for free. The Bureau of Investigation, forerunner to the FBI, gave the APL letters to show its field directors authorizing them to help the APL. APL members received badges that looked like a policeman’s showing their rank, some saying Secret Service. Ostensibly formed to counter German spies, the APL quickly turned its attention to other targets. Big business found the APL useful to infiltrate and attack organized labor, particularly the International Workers of the World (IWW) aka the Wobblies. The Wobblies and other unions had large numbers of immigrants making them a target for nativists who proliferated in the APL. Big businesses had traditionally used state militias and the US military to break strikes, so turning to the more than willing APL was natural. Local police deputized the APL to make arrests. The APL established offices throughout the country with many thousands of members. APL investigations included wiretapping, bugging and break ins. For example, in Seattle in six months the APL investigations secured over a thousand arrests. These included 449 cases of “Seditious Utterances,” 677 of “Disloyal Citizens,” and 36 of “Aliens and Citizens living in Luxury without Visible Means of Support”.
Blacks suffered numerous episodes of violence in 1917. Perhaps the worst was the East St. Louis Massacre in July. Over 100 Blacks were killed and 6,000 driven from their homes and out of the state. Companies hiring Blacks at lower wages displacing whites led to the violence which quickly escalated out of control with a white mob burning down hundreds of Black homes and businesses. Black leaders organized the first civil rights March in New York to protest. Wilson ignored their entreaties, although he made time to meet with Confederate War Veterans. The Ku Klux Klan had reemerged in 1915 and active racism was condoned.
Hochschild contends that the rise of women in the workforce threatened male egos. He believes this contributed to violence and repression of The Socialist Party and the left leaning IWW. A cultural war was underway as a conservative public lashed out against organizations with a progressive message. This attitude was fed by well-organized disinformation campaigns launched by the Wilson administration and supported by big business discrediting these groups as a direct threat to America. Two prominent women were targeted. The activist Emma Goldman was arrested for advising men not to register for the draft and sent to prison for two years. The outspoken red haired Kate Richards O’Hare a Socialist Party member known as “Red Kate” was also indicted under the Espionage Act. In one of her many speeches the mother of four said American women “had become brood sows to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer.” The judge sentenced her to five years for interfering with the draft noting “the only way to win a war [is] to have soldiers.”
In September 1917 Wilson personally authorized raids on all 48 IWW offices. US Marshalls, the Secret Service, IRS Agents, Immigration Bureau agents, local police and their “Red Squads,” along with the APL arrested IWW members and confiscated five tons of documents, records, and cash. The haul was enough to disable the IWW and threaten its existence. Over 300 IWW leaders were arrested in mass indictments under the Espionage Act for impeding the draft, fomenting insubordination in the military, blocking the flow of war materials, obstructing the rights of employers. 166 of the Wobblies were tried together in Chicago in 1918 facing identical charges. It was the largest civilian criminal trial ever in the US. They were charged solely for what they said or wrote. Wilson wrote in support of the trial. The 97 men who made it to the end of the trial were convicted on the same four counts each. In total 807 years of prison time and $2 million in fines were assessed. Most were given a one-year sentence while some got up to twenty years. 400 more would be arrested over the next two years as the IWW was dismantled by the government.
As 1918 rolled around, Wilson presented his fourteen points to Congress, but as Hochschild notes none of them included the right to dissent. Wilson’s postmaster was busy quelling that. Burleson banned completely over 70 periodicals and virtually all the socialist ones. Many more publications had individual issues that he objected to and were not mailed. If he deemed several issues unmailable Burleson considered them not published and revoked the periodical’s second-class mailing status resulting in a huge increase in their mailing costs. Reasons publications were considered unmailable ranged from criticism of Wilson’s allies, proposing raising taxes on the wealthy, promoting Irish independence, to complaining about Blacks being lynched. Local postmasters followed Burleson’s lead. In the South, Black publications were often removed from the mail.
In 1918 the Sedition Act was passed to toughen up the Espionage Act. It made it illegal to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” It legalized not delivering the mail. Many states and localities following suit enacted similar laws. IWW members found their personal mail was no longer being delivered, nor was normal mail for targeted publications. Over 1,000 people were convicted for criticizing the war or the government in 1917/18. The APL began “slacker raids” looking for draft dodgers. In Chicago alone 10,000 APL members stopped and interrogated 150,000 men yielding 1,400 draft evaders who were sent to the army. The APL conducted similar raids in many other cities. Later that year in New York thousands of men who couldn’t show draft cards were detained and housed in two armories. 20,000 APL members had spread out across the city stopping and questioning over 300,000 young men and arresting those without draft cards. Estimates of up to 50,000 arrests were made. Some draft officials protested noting that registration had not been completed. New York passed a law authorizing firing teachers who made “treasonable or seditious statements.” NYC held hearings where students testified about “seditious” statements made by their teachers.
After decimating the IWW, Wilson focused on suppressing the antiwar Socialist Party. Its leader Eugene Debs had won 6% of the presidential vote. In 1917 municipal elections the Socialists got over 20% of the vote in America’s 14 largest cities. They had a US Congressman and 23 mayors. Over a thousand had won state and local elections. Debs was arrested under the Espionage Act for opposing the war after giving a speech and sentenced to ten years in prison by a judge who was a former law partner of Wilson. Debs commented, “Much has been made of a statement that I declared that men were fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder…Men are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder…”
In 1918 the war ended, but Postmaster General Burleson didn’t let up on his censorship continuing to remove liberal leaning publications from the mail and denying them much cheaper second-class mail rates. Wilson wrote Burleson that he could stop censorship after the war ended. But Wilson was at the Paris Peace Conference for months completely focused on his Fourteen Points and League of Nations. And as his closest advisor, Colonel House wrote in his diary “The President does not know what is going on in any of the departments.” Burleson paid no attention to Wilson’s message. Trials of Wobblies, Socialists, and activists like Kate Richards O’Hare for speaking out against the war proceeded even after the war was over. O’Hare got five years in prison.
In 1919 numerous strikes and the Bolshevik revolution led to more suppression of dissent. Immigrants were targeted by government officials as the Red Scare dominated their thinking. Just as in the McCarthy era, lists of communists were presented in Congress. Wilson ignored the country’s turmoil spending six months in Paris where he suffered a bout of the Spanish flu followed by strokes that greatly diminished his health. Anarchists bombed Attorney General Mitchell A. Palmer’s home. He could have easily been killed. Palmer established the new Radical Division, the goal of which would be to identify subversives expected to be immigrants and deport them. J Edgar Hoover was chosen to lead the new division.
The summer of 1919 saw “race riots” primarily instigated by whites inflamed by rabble rousing politicians. 380,000 Black veterans of WWI had come home and Blacks were migrating from the South, all looking for jobs and places to live. Soon whites were attacking Blacks, but unlike before, Blacks in the summer of 1919 fought back. In Chicago, 6,000 state militia were deployed to stop rioting in what was called the “Red Summer.” Hundreds were killed or wounded. Similar riots took place in dozens of other cities. In the fall a major strike took place at the behemoth US Steel where workers worked 12-hour days seven days a week for poverty wages. The Boston Police strike and other significant strikes broke out across the country. Wilson did nothing about the strikes or riots. Instead, he took a cross country train trip to give speeches promoting the League of Nations. He suffered a devastating stroke before completing the trip leaving him a semblance of his former self. Going forward his wife and aides would run the country.
Between November 1919 and January 1920 Attorney General Palmer and his bulldog J Edgar Hoover executed their plan to deport immigrants. They conducted the “Palmer Raids” in dozens of cities arresting typically without warrants thousands of primarily Italian and Jewish immigrants for supposedly being subversive communists. About 10,000 had been detained, interrogated, and often beaten. Activists and many people who had no idea why they were arrested were jailed. But the plan ran into a hitch. Acting Secretary of Labor Louis Post in charge of immigration didn’t agree. He rescinded 3,000 of the arrests. Most were arrested for being members of “subversive” organizations. But that was typically based on the organizations’ member lists which were inflated with people who had never joined. Due to Post’s intervention, in the end out of 2,300 recommended for deportation only 500 were deported. The Republican House promptly began investigating Post. One deportee was 50-year-old Emma Goldman who came to America at 16 from Russia. She had been an American citizen because she had been married to one, but her ex later lost his citizenship so hers was rescinded too. Historian Alan Brinkley noted the Palmer Raids were “arguably the greatest single violation of civil rights in American History.” Hochschild assumes he excluded slavery. Shortly after the raids Palmer announced he was running for the presidency, clearly a primary reason for the raids.
In 1920 Palmer, J Edgar Hoover, and cohorts predicted massive Communist protests and riots on May Day, making extensive preparations and alarming the public. Nothing happened. The deflation of the Red Scare began and numerous stories of horrific abuses by the authorities tumbled out changing public opinion. Republican Warren Harding became president in 1921 and although he is much maligned today, he did much to undue the draconian repression of the preceding four years. His Postmaster stopped censoring the mail. Harding began releasing political prisoners including Eugene Debs on Christmas day. The last would be released in 1924 by President Calvin Coolidge. Still, racist immigration laws would be passed and the resurgent Klan would march through New York in 1927 including one member of note, Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father.
Soon after America declared war on Germany in 1917, the Wilson administration imposed draconian domestic security measures. Wilson supported the Espionage Act which doled out prison sentences of up to twenty years for opposing the war including just making “false” statements about the war. In addition, the Espionage Act allowed newspapers and other mail to be declared unmailable, imposing censorship on a primary means of communication at a time when printed matter was the prime method of communication. Wilson had pushed for even more extensive provisions for censorship in the act. His Postmaster General Albert Burleson began declaring unmailable newspapers and other mail that he found offensive. Another new law held up foreign language publications by requiring a translation to be submitted to the Post Office for approval, a process soon backlogged.
In 1917 the Department of Justice authorized an official auxiliary called the American Protective League (APL). Wilson raised no objections, although later making some critical comments, he took no action. This civilian vigilante organization was even given the privilege of sending its mail for free. The Bureau of Investigation, forerunner to the FBI, gave the APL letters to show its field directors authorizing them to help the APL. APL members received badges that looked like a policeman’s showing their rank, some saying Secret Service. Ostensibly formed to counter German spies, the APL quickly turned its attention to other targets. Big business found the APL useful to infiltrate and attack organized labor, particularly the International Workers of the World (IWW) aka the Wobblies. The Wobblies and other unions had large numbers of immigrants making them a target for nativists who proliferated in the APL. Big businesses had traditionally used state militias and the US military to break strikes, so turning to the more than willing APL was natural. Local police deputized the APL to make arrests. The APL established offices throughout the country with many thousands of members. APL investigations included wiretapping, bugging and break ins. For example, in Seattle in six months the APL investigations secured over a thousand arrests. These included 449 cases of “Seditious Utterances,” 677 of “Disloyal Citizens,” and 36 of “Aliens and Citizens living in Luxury without Visible Means of Support”.
Blacks suffered numerous episodes of violence in 1917. Perhaps the worst was the East St. Louis Massacre in July. Over 100 Blacks were killed and 6,000 driven from their homes and out of the state. Companies hiring Blacks at lower wages displacing whites led to the violence which quickly escalated out of control with a white mob burning down hundreds of Black homes and businesses. Black leaders organized the first civil rights March in New York to protest. Wilson ignored their entreaties, although he made time to meet with Confederate War Veterans. The Ku Klux Klan had reemerged in 1915 and active racism was condoned.
Hochschild contends that the rise of women in the workforce threatened male egos. He believes this contributed to violence and repression of The Socialist Party and the left leaning IWW. A cultural war was underway as a conservative public lashed out against organizations with a progressive message. This attitude was fed by well-organized disinformation campaigns launched by the Wilson administration and supported by big business discrediting these groups as a direct threat to America. Two prominent women were targeted. The activist Emma Goldman was arrested for advising men not to register for the draft and sent to prison for two years. The outspoken red haired Kate Richards O’Hare a Socialist Party member known as “Red Kate” was also indicted under the Espionage Act. In one of her many speeches the mother of four said American women “had become brood sows to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer.” The judge sentenced her to five years for interfering with the draft noting “the only way to win a war [is] to have soldiers.”
In September 1917 Wilson personally authorized raids on all 48 IWW offices. US Marshalls, the Secret Service, IRS Agents, Immigration Bureau agents, local police and their “Red Squads,” along with the APL arrested IWW members and confiscated five tons of documents, records, and cash. The haul was enough to disable the IWW and threaten its existence. Over 300 IWW leaders were arrested in mass indictments under the Espionage Act for impeding the draft, fomenting insubordination in the military, blocking the flow of war materials, obstructing the rights of employers. 166 of the Wobblies were tried together in Chicago in 1918 facing identical charges. It was the largest civilian criminal trial ever in the US. They were charged solely for what they said or wrote. Wilson wrote in support of the trial. The 97 men who made it to the end of the trial were convicted on the same four counts each. In total 807 years of prison time and $2 million in fines were assessed. Most were given a one-year sentence while some got up to twenty years. 400 more would be arrested over the next two years as the IWW was dismantled by the government.
As 1918 rolled around, Wilson presented his fourteen points to Congress, but as Hochschild notes none of them included the right to dissent. Wilson’s postmaster was busy quelling that. Burleson banned completely over 70 periodicals and virtually all the socialist ones. Many more publications had individual issues that he objected to and were not mailed. If he deemed several issues unmailable Burleson considered them not published and revoked the periodical’s second-class mailing status resulting in a huge increase in their mailing costs. Reasons publications were considered unmailable ranged from criticism of Wilson’s allies, proposing raising taxes on the wealthy, promoting Irish independence, to complaining about Blacks being lynched. Local postmasters followed Burleson’s lead. In the South, Black publications were often removed from the mail.
In 1918 the Sedition Act was passed to toughen up the Espionage Act. It made it illegal to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” It legalized not delivering the mail. Many states and localities following suit enacted similar laws. IWW members found their personal mail was no longer being delivered, nor was normal mail for targeted publications. Over 1,000 people were convicted for criticizing the war or the government in 1917/18. The APL began “slacker raids” looking for draft dodgers. In Chicago alone 10,000 APL members stopped and interrogated 150,000 men yielding 1,400 draft evaders who were sent to the army. The APL conducted similar raids in many other cities. Later that year in New York thousands of men who couldn’t show draft cards were detained and housed in two armories. 20,000 APL members had spread out across the city stopping and questioning over 300,000 young men and arresting those without draft cards. Estimates of up to 50,000 arrests were made. Some draft officials protested noting that registration had not been completed. New York passed a law authorizing firing teachers who made “treasonable or seditious statements.” NYC held hearings where students testified about “seditious” statements made by their teachers.
After decimating the IWW, Wilson focused on suppressing the antiwar Socialist Party. Its leader Eugene Debs had won 6% of the presidential vote. In 1917 municipal elections the Socialists got over 20% of the vote in America’s 14 largest cities. They had a US Congressman and 23 mayors. Over a thousand had won state and local elections. Debs was arrested under the Espionage Act for opposing the war after giving a speech and sentenced to ten years in prison by a judge who was a former law partner of Wilson. Debs commented, “Much has been made of a statement that I declared that men were fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder…Men are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder…”
In 1918 the war ended, but Postmaster General Burleson didn’t let up on his censorship continuing to remove liberal leaning publications from the mail and denying them much cheaper second-class mail rates. Wilson wrote Burleson that he could stop censorship after the war ended. But Wilson was at the Paris Peace Conference for months completely focused on his Fourteen Points and League of Nations. And as his closest advisor, Colonel House wrote in his diary “The President does not know what is going on in any of the departments.” Burleson paid no attention to Wilson’s message. Trials of Wobblies, Socialists, and activists like Kate Richards O’Hare for speaking out against the war proceeded even after the war was over. O’Hare got five years in prison.
In 1919 numerous strikes and the Bolshevik revolution led to more suppression of dissent. Immigrants were targeted by government officials as the Red Scare dominated their thinking. Just as in the McCarthy era, lists of communists were presented in Congress. Wilson ignored the country’s turmoil spending six months in Paris where he suffered a bout of the Spanish flu followed by strokes that greatly diminished his health. Anarchists bombed Attorney General Mitchell A. Palmer’s home. He could have easily been killed. Palmer established the new Radical Division, the goal of which would be to identify subversives expected to be immigrants and deport them. J Edgar Hoover was chosen to lead the new division.
The summer of 1919 saw “race riots” primarily instigated by whites inflamed by rabble rousing politicians. 380,000 Black veterans of WWI had come home and Blacks were migrating from the South, all looking for jobs and places to live. Soon whites were attacking Blacks, but unlike before, Blacks in the summer of 1919 fought back. In Chicago, 6,000 state militia were deployed to stop rioting in what was called the “Red Summer.” Hundreds were killed or wounded. Similar riots took place in dozens of other cities. In the fall a major strike took place at the behemoth US Steel where workers worked 12-hour days seven days a week for poverty wages. The Boston Police strike and other significant strikes broke out across the country. Wilson did nothing about the strikes or riots. Instead, he took a cross country train trip to give speeches promoting the League of Nations. He suffered a devastating stroke before completing the trip leaving him a semblance of his former self. Going forward his wife and aides would run the country.
Between November 1919 and January 1920 Attorney General Palmer and his bulldog J Edgar Hoover executed their plan to deport immigrants. They conducted the “Palmer Raids” in dozens of cities arresting typically without warrants thousands of primarily Italian and Jewish immigrants for supposedly being subversive communists. About 10,000 had been detained, interrogated, and often beaten. Activists and many people who had no idea why they were arrested were jailed. But the plan ran into a hitch. Acting Secretary of Labor Louis Post in charge of immigration didn’t agree. He rescinded 3,000 of the arrests. Most were arrested for being members of “subversive” organizations. But that was typically based on the organizations’ member lists which were inflated with people who had never joined. Due to Post’s intervention, in the end out of 2,300 recommended for deportation only 500 were deported. The Republican House promptly began investigating Post. One deportee was 50-year-old Emma Goldman who came to America at 16 from Russia. She had been an American citizen because she had been married to one, but her ex later lost his citizenship so hers was rescinded too. Historian Alan Brinkley noted the Palmer Raids were “arguably the greatest single violation of civil rights in American History.” Hochschild assumes he excluded slavery. Shortly after the raids Palmer announced he was running for the presidency, clearly a primary reason for the raids.
In 1920 Palmer, J Edgar Hoover, and cohorts predicted massive Communist protests and riots on May Day, making extensive preparations and alarming the public. Nothing happened. The deflation of the Red Scare began and numerous stories of horrific abuses by the authorities tumbled out changing public opinion. Republican Warren Harding became president in 1921 and although he is much maligned today, he did much to undue the draconian repression of the preceding four years. His Postmaster stopped censoring the mail. Harding began releasing political prisoners including Eugene Debs on Christmas day. The last would be released in 1924 by President Calvin Coolidge. Still, racist immigration laws would be passed and the resurgent Klan would march through New York in 1927 including one member of note, Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father.
December 15, 2023
”The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.”
~David Brion Davis, American historian
American Midnight chronicles how conservative forces in the United States manipulated the patriotic frenzy caused by America’s entry into the Great War to crush all dissent. Censorship was strictly enforced through control of the mails. Hundreds of Americans were imprisoned for nothing more than what they said or wrote. The government sponsored a massive vigilante group, The American Protective League, which harassed, tormented, and occasionally killed citizens with impunity. Conscientious Objectors were subjected to military justice, and were routinely tortured. Particularly targeted were radical labor groups like the IWW (Wobblies), Anarchist (then personified by Emma Goldman), and Socialist. Not coincidentally, these groups were largely made up of newer immigrants — Jews, Eastern and Southern Europeans — and the campaigns against the groups became a xenophobic war against immigrants.
While these dark events were concentrated in a short, three year window, they had devastating, long term effects. The IWW, the nation’s most progressive union, was crushed, never to recover. Anarchism as a social movement in America was so obliterated that most today have no concept of what it was, and define it by the hostile caricature created by the propaganda of its enemies. Socialism, which had been a strong, minority party in the Progressive Era, with Socialist mayors of major cities, Socialist state and federal representatives, and even Socialist presidential candidates capturing a significant portion of the vote — Socialism was broken, never to recover its influence. Perhaps most significantly, the Johnson-Reed Act slammed the door on immigration, replacing the Statue of Liberty’s torch of freedom with a stop sign for four decades, making xenophobia systematic.
American Midnight should be read as a warning. These events, while happening a little over one hundred years ago, are not remote and dead history. Rather, they are a particularly virulent representation of a dark side of America that often emerges in time of national stress. From the McCarthy Red hunting of the ‘50s, to the Patriot Act, water boarding torture, and Black Sites after 9/11, to recent MAGA demonization of immigrants, these impulses are never far below the surface, and re-emerge repeatedly.
~David Brion Davis, American historian
American Midnight chronicles how conservative forces in the United States manipulated the patriotic frenzy caused by America’s entry into the Great War to crush all dissent. Censorship was strictly enforced through control of the mails. Hundreds of Americans were imprisoned for nothing more than what they said or wrote. The government sponsored a massive vigilante group, The American Protective League, which harassed, tormented, and occasionally killed citizens with impunity. Conscientious Objectors were subjected to military justice, and were routinely tortured. Particularly targeted were radical labor groups like the IWW (Wobblies), Anarchist (then personified by Emma Goldman), and Socialist. Not coincidentally, these groups were largely made up of newer immigrants — Jews, Eastern and Southern Europeans — and the campaigns against the groups became a xenophobic war against immigrants.
While these dark events were concentrated in a short, three year window, they had devastating, long term effects. The IWW, the nation’s most progressive union, was crushed, never to recover. Anarchism as a social movement in America was so obliterated that most today have no concept of what it was, and define it by the hostile caricature created by the propaganda of its enemies. Socialism, which had been a strong, minority party in the Progressive Era, with Socialist mayors of major cities, Socialist state and federal representatives, and even Socialist presidential candidates capturing a significant portion of the vote — Socialism was broken, never to recover its influence. Perhaps most significantly, the Johnson-Reed Act slammed the door on immigration, replacing the Statue of Liberty’s torch of freedom with a stop sign for four decades, making xenophobia systematic.
American Midnight should be read as a warning. These events, while happening a little over one hundred years ago, are not remote and dead history. Rather, they are a particularly virulent representation of a dark side of America that often emerges in time of national stress. From the McCarthy Red hunting of the ‘50s, to the Patriot Act, water boarding torture, and Black Sites after 9/11, to recent MAGA demonization of immigrants, these impulses are never far below the surface, and re-emerge repeatedly.
October 18, 2022
Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight is a compelling read about an overlooked chapter in American history, that is, how US involvement in World War I became an excuse for a government-led war against democracy at home. As the author notes in the Introduction, most high school history texts detail the United States’ enthusiastic embrace of the European war after a period of neutrality, the US role in Allied Powers’ victory, the subsequent ticker tape parades, and the arrival of the Jazz Age. However, little or no mention is made of how two wartime acts passed by Congress—the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918—were used to suppress wartime dissent, imprison union organizers, shut down leftist newspapers, justify attacks on African American communities, dismantle the American Socialist party, and persecute immigrants. These topics have remained largely confined to academic histories of the era. With this well-researched and easy-to-read popular history, Hochschild seeks both to rectify this oversight and to provide a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy. To this end, the author highlights parallels between past and present, that is, how rage against immigrants and refugees, racism, and the American predilection for blaming our economic, social, and political woes on sinister conspiracies continue to garner large numbers of adherents within the populace.
It is as a cautionary tale that this book touches a nerve. With a very light touch, the author points to continuities between now and then. For example, he notes in the Conclusion: “Just as veterans of the Philippine War appeared in the violence that surged after 1917, so veterans of later Asian counter-guerrilla wars, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, have helped fill the ranks of new camouflaged-clad armed militia groups." Although the author makes no mention of the January 6th insurrection or the storming of Michigan’s capitol by militia groups, including the Boogaloo Boys and the Michigan Liberty militia, these events, at least for this reader, immediately came to mind. A more direct parallel is drawn when the author highlights how many former members of the American Protective League—a nationwide volunteer citizens’ organization that in league with the US government conducted unlawful searches and even tarred and feathered members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union for protesting the war—became leading members of the postwar Ku Klux Klan. In the framework of this discussion, the author notes that when 1000 hooded Klansmen marched through the streets of New York City on Memorial Day 1927, one of the Klansmen arrested was Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. The racist, xenophobic, and conspiratorial views of the father found expression in the son’s presidential campaign and presidency. Any report that spoke critically of his presidency was labeled “fake news” and blame for the country’s political and economic woes was placed on immigrants.
However, let us be clear; this cautionary tale is not a partisan one. The author emphasizes that both major political parties have been guilty of making “dog-whistle appeals” aimed at the populace’s darker side. Both parties also have had a hand in creating the environment in which conspiracy-driven, anti-democratic solutions thrive. Each has promoted policies that widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots, so that tens of millions of Americans’ economic circumstances have deteriorated—making conditions ripe for looking for scapegoats to blame. Moreover, members of both parties have been guilty of prioritizing political expediency over promoting civil rights and Constitutional safeguards.
This eye-opening popular history may be hard for many to read, as it debunks the national myth of American freedom. However, this is no nihilistic narrative of the country’s past sins. Instead, the author hopes that by examining “the toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law [that] have long flowed through American life,” we can “better defend against them in the future.”
I would like to thank NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.
It is as a cautionary tale that this book touches a nerve. With a very light touch, the author points to continuities between now and then. For example, he notes in the Conclusion: “Just as veterans of the Philippine War appeared in the violence that surged after 1917, so veterans of later Asian counter-guerrilla wars, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, have helped fill the ranks of new camouflaged-clad armed militia groups." Although the author makes no mention of the January 6th insurrection or the storming of Michigan’s capitol by militia groups, including the Boogaloo Boys and the Michigan Liberty militia, these events, at least for this reader, immediately came to mind. A more direct parallel is drawn when the author highlights how many former members of the American Protective League—a nationwide volunteer citizens’ organization that in league with the US government conducted unlawful searches and even tarred and feathered members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union for protesting the war—became leading members of the postwar Ku Klux Klan. In the framework of this discussion, the author notes that when 1000 hooded Klansmen marched through the streets of New York City on Memorial Day 1927, one of the Klansmen arrested was Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. The racist, xenophobic, and conspiratorial views of the father found expression in the son’s presidential campaign and presidency. Any report that spoke critically of his presidency was labeled “fake news” and blame for the country’s political and economic woes was placed on immigrants.
However, let us be clear; this cautionary tale is not a partisan one. The author emphasizes that both major political parties have been guilty of making “dog-whistle appeals” aimed at the populace’s darker side. Both parties also have had a hand in creating the environment in which conspiracy-driven, anti-democratic solutions thrive. Each has promoted policies that widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots, so that tens of millions of Americans’ economic circumstances have deteriorated—making conditions ripe for looking for scapegoats to blame. Moreover, members of both parties have been guilty of prioritizing political expediency over promoting civil rights and Constitutional safeguards.
This eye-opening popular history may be hard for many to read, as it debunks the national myth of American freedom. However, this is no nihilistic narrative of the country’s past sins. Instead, the author hopes that by examining “the toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law [that] have long flowed through American life,” we can “better defend against them in the future.”
I would like to thank NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.
September 27, 2022
It's hard to review a book which has so many positive attributes but has one major and fatal flaw. The review becomes even harder when the author is Adam Hochschild who wrote one of the best books I have ever read, King Leopold's Ghost.
The positives of American Midnight are considerable. Hochschild has chosen a very interesting time in American history and has put the focus on an often ignored part of World War I, the home-front. Specifically, he focuses on the unions and war opponents. As you would expect from an exceptional author, the history is sound, the prose is easy to read, and extremely interesting people are highlighted. There is a lot to like about this book and its story.
However, I could not get passed the fatal flaw of this book which is Hochschild's clear bias when wading through this history. This is not a hidden bias as Hoschschild makes it clear in the prologue what he is going to present and why he is doing so. I have no problem with his theses and often, I was very much in agreement with his observations.
However, the bias can get to the point where it is significantly distracting even when you agree with the author (and I agreed with a good amount of Hochschild's point of view). An example is when Hochschild mentions a military member (who he is clearly not a fan of) complimenting the Confederate flag. While this is certainly something we would analyze today if a public figure made such pronouncements, mentioning this specific event in 1917 is clearly a manipulative tactic. It would not have been strange to hear or see something like that in 1917, but today it is a hot button item. The history is sound as I have no doubt Hochschild is reporting the truth. However, the choice to include this is clearly meant to inflame today's reader with something not inflammatory in its own time. To make this choice even more jarring, this particular passage is followed soon after by a positive presentation of someone who was implicated in an attempted murder.
There are other missteps which get in the way. Another example is when Hochschild states that "No other country, for instance, had anything comparable to Pennsylvania's Coal and Iron Police..." This is a very interesting statement that made me wonder how this comparison is being done. Are we including countries which never allowed unions to happen in the first place? How did it compare to other union breaking forces? There is no footnote for what is a declarative statement. It is only one example, but it happened enough in the book to take me out of the flow.
Ultimately, it becomes a question of how distracting you find things like the examples I have mentioned above. History is told from a point of view and there is no way around that. However, these episodes proved too blatant and repeated for me to enjoy the rest of the book which is quite good. If you can glide past such episodes better than me, then you will enjoy it immensely. Other reviews here on Goodreads (mostly respectful, some not) disagree with my conclusion and I wouldn't say there are necessarily wrong. There is a lot of great stuff in this book, but for me, these distractions kept it from being as good as Hochschild's own King Leopold's Ghost, for instance.
(This book was provided to me as an advance copy by Netgalley and Mariner Books. The full review will be posted to HistoryNerdsUnited.com on 9/27/2022.)
The positives of American Midnight are considerable. Hochschild has chosen a very interesting time in American history and has put the focus on an often ignored part of World War I, the home-front. Specifically, he focuses on the unions and war opponents. As you would expect from an exceptional author, the history is sound, the prose is easy to read, and extremely interesting people are highlighted. There is a lot to like about this book and its story.
However, I could not get passed the fatal flaw of this book which is Hochschild's clear bias when wading through this history. This is not a hidden bias as Hoschschild makes it clear in the prologue what he is going to present and why he is doing so. I have no problem with his theses and often, I was very much in agreement with his observations.
However, the bias can get to the point where it is significantly distracting even when you agree with the author (and I agreed with a good amount of Hochschild's point of view). An example is when Hochschild mentions a military member (who he is clearly not a fan of) complimenting the Confederate flag. While this is certainly something we would analyze today if a public figure made such pronouncements, mentioning this specific event in 1917 is clearly a manipulative tactic. It would not have been strange to hear or see something like that in 1917, but today it is a hot button item. The history is sound as I have no doubt Hochschild is reporting the truth. However, the choice to include this is clearly meant to inflame today's reader with something not inflammatory in its own time. To make this choice even more jarring, this particular passage is followed soon after by a positive presentation of someone who was implicated in an attempted murder.
There are other missteps which get in the way. Another example is when Hochschild states that "No other country, for instance, had anything comparable to Pennsylvania's Coal and Iron Police..." This is a very interesting statement that made me wonder how this comparison is being done. Are we including countries which never allowed unions to happen in the first place? How did it compare to other union breaking forces? There is no footnote for what is a declarative statement. It is only one example, but it happened enough in the book to take me out of the flow.
Ultimately, it becomes a question of how distracting you find things like the examples I have mentioned above. History is told from a point of view and there is no way around that. However, these episodes proved too blatant and repeated for me to enjoy the rest of the book which is quite good. If you can glide past such episodes better than me, then you will enjoy it immensely. Other reviews here on Goodreads (mostly respectful, some not) disagree with my conclusion and I wouldn't say there are necessarily wrong. There is a lot of great stuff in this book, but for me, these distractions kept it from being as good as Hochschild's own King Leopold's Ghost, for instance.
(This book was provided to me as an advance copy by Netgalley and Mariner Books. The full review will be posted to HistoryNerdsUnited.com on 9/27/2022.)
June 19, 2023
4.5 rounded up.
Like many people, I'm sure, I find myself anxiously contemplating what our country might look like if the Conservative Right as it currently exists gains control of the government: certain subjects and forms of expression banned, reproductive and marriage rights dramatically curtailed, school curricula policed, voting rights curtailed, workers' rights curtailed, preference given to one particular religion over others, political corruption... It would be a nightmare (for people like me, anyway).
And then I read "American Midnight" and discovered that we've been in precisely that dark place before, and not so terribly long ago. Sadly, as a nation we seem to have forgotten. Unsurprising, since none of the American history classes we took ever talked about it.
Beginning with America's entry into World War and continuing for the next several years, the United States was for many of its citizens a violent dystopia. The situation for laborers -- low pay, dangerous working conditions, no protections, forced to buy from company stores -- was intolerable, and attempts to organize workers were ruthlessly put down. Police, private security firms working for the companies, and vigilante groups beat, shot, and killed thousands of demonstrators. In the aftermath, the perpetrators of these riots were exonerated, the victims sent to prison. One example: members of the Industrial Workers of the World (a major labor union, known as Wobblies) were arrested while meeting in their headquarters and charged, because no other grounds could be found, for vagrancy. A local newspaper, defending the arrests, said it was warranted because most of the men were "uncouth in appearance." When the arrested men finally had their day in court the police could not name any laws they had violated, not did any of the defendants have criminal records. At the conclusion of the trial, however, “Judge T. D. Evans found them all guilty and fined them $100 apiece (the equivalent of some $ 2,000 a hundred years later). This was a sum no Wobbly could afford and one that guaranteed that they would remain in jail. By way of explaining his verdict, the judge cryptically declared, 'These are no ordinary times.'” As the condemned men were taken from the courtroom, bailiffs seized six other men in the audience -- five of whom had testified as defense witnesses -- and locked them up as well.
Outside the workplace, the situation was no better. Even before the US entered the war, freedom of expression was... "curtailed" is an entirely inadequate words. The notion of "freedom of speech" that we currently take for granted did not exist. Any expressions of dissent or criticism of the government -- in print, in public, even in private conversation -- were deemed violations of federal laws. Men and women convicted of these crimes (most people so charged were convicted) were sentenced to years in prison. In one case, men were accused of “conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act and the Selective Service Act” even though neither law had been passed when the alleged conspiracy happened. President Woodrow Wilson supported the indictments, saying his attorney general that such actions — which is to say, private conversations — were still “worthy of being suppressed.” The courts -- including the U.S. Supreme Court -- almost universally ruled in favor of suppressing speech. (Interestingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the decision in a key case defending the prohibition "subversive" speech. A few years later Holmes was to write the dissent in a similar case, having changed his mind about what freedom of speech meant.) Offices were set up within the government to spy on all manner of "suspicious" groups, whatever that might mean, going so far as to plant agents who would deliberately stir up trouble. J. Edgar Hoover first made his name overseeing such operations.
Postmasters could on a whim declare some publications subversive and refuse to allow them to be shipped. It probably goes without saying that these "dangerous" publications were disproportionately put out by groups supporting labor, the rights of Black Americans, an opposition to the war. Police enforcement of laws was augmented by officially sanctioned vigilante groups -- aka, militias -- like the so-called American Protective League. Young men who resisted the military draft were targeted: “The American Protective League needed targets. Draft-dodging “slackers” provided one. Nothing aroused the rage of middle-aged APL members more than young men who might be failing to fight. In addition, the government offered a $50 bonus to anybody who caught such a man. Worth more than $1,000 today, such a reward was tempting because you could seize a suspected “slacker” without a warrant. APL members leapt at the chance.” Thousands of people were regularly arrested without warrants and judges almost always upheld all such abuses. “In Montana,"Hochschild tells us, "a 1918 sedition bill provided a prison sentence of up to 20 years and a $ 20,000 fine for any 'disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous, slurring or abusive' words directed against, among other things, the American form of government, the Constitution, or the flag.” Vague language to be sure, but crafted with a particular political outcome in mind. Before Montana's governor left office in 1921, for example, he commuted the sentences of 7 rapists and 13 murderers -- but not a single person convicted under the state's sedition law. In Indiana, a man was tried for killing a man who muttered “to hell with the United States. The jury took two minutes to find him not guilty.
Only the most compliant citizens were safe. War fever raged through the population. In addition to whatever penalties the law might threaten, the population at large determined that any acts that might be deemed less than enthusiastically supportive of the war should be punished: people were persecuted by their neighbors if they didn’t buy war bonds — or didn’t buy enough war bonds — and women were ostracized if they chose not to knit sweaters and socks for soldiers. In some towns and cities schools were prohibited from teaching the German language, people with German-sounding names had them legally changed, German-sounding foods (hamburgers and frankfurters, for example) are given new names, and in at least one American town, speaking German in public was made illegal.
The groups that suffered the most were labor activists, pacifists (one such person was Eugene V. Debbs, a Socialist, who was sentenced to several years in an Atlanta prison, during which time he ran for president — from his cell — and garnered almost one million votes.), immigrants (one U.S. senator, advocating for sharp reductions in immigration by people who were not of north European stock, complained that “during the one month of October, 1920, it is estimated that of the 74,665 immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, more than 75 per cent were of the Semitic race.”), and most sorrowfully, Black Americans. As membership in the KKK soared in America, the number of lynchings, murders, and attacks grew in number. There are passages in the book that are difficult to read -- heartbreaking and shocking, indictments of what outrages we are capable of.
Clearly, the very same fissures driving American politics and culture today were there in the period Hochschild writes about. Indeed, events of the past few years here -- the election of Donald Trump, replacement theory, etc. -- are named in the final chapter, a stark reminder that many fear to be on the horizon in the near future was made real the America of roughly 100 years ago. In that sense — and clearly, this was the author’s point in writing the book — “American Midnight” is a warning of what is possible in America.
A postscript: Believe it or not, there are lighter moments in the book. My favorite concerns Warren G. Harding, who was quite the character and who presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in our history. Hochschild writes: “People… mocked Harding for his language, which H. L. Mencken dubbed Gamalielese. “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” A rival politician once called Harding’s verbiage “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude.””
Like many people, I'm sure, I find myself anxiously contemplating what our country might look like if the Conservative Right as it currently exists gains control of the government: certain subjects and forms of expression banned, reproductive and marriage rights dramatically curtailed, school curricula policed, voting rights curtailed, workers' rights curtailed, preference given to one particular religion over others, political corruption... It would be a nightmare (for people like me, anyway).
And then I read "American Midnight" and discovered that we've been in precisely that dark place before, and not so terribly long ago. Sadly, as a nation we seem to have forgotten. Unsurprising, since none of the American history classes we took ever talked about it.
Beginning with America's entry into World War and continuing for the next several years, the United States was for many of its citizens a violent dystopia. The situation for laborers -- low pay, dangerous working conditions, no protections, forced to buy from company stores -- was intolerable, and attempts to organize workers were ruthlessly put down. Police, private security firms working for the companies, and vigilante groups beat, shot, and killed thousands of demonstrators. In the aftermath, the perpetrators of these riots were exonerated, the victims sent to prison. One example: members of the Industrial Workers of the World (a major labor union, known as Wobblies) were arrested while meeting in their headquarters and charged, because no other grounds could be found, for vagrancy. A local newspaper, defending the arrests, said it was warranted because most of the men were "uncouth in appearance." When the arrested men finally had their day in court the police could not name any laws they had violated, not did any of the defendants have criminal records. At the conclusion of the trial, however, “Judge T. D. Evans found them all guilty and fined them $100 apiece (the equivalent of some $ 2,000 a hundred years later). This was a sum no Wobbly could afford and one that guaranteed that they would remain in jail. By way of explaining his verdict, the judge cryptically declared, 'These are no ordinary times.'” As the condemned men were taken from the courtroom, bailiffs seized six other men in the audience -- five of whom had testified as defense witnesses -- and locked them up as well.
Outside the workplace, the situation was no better. Even before the US entered the war, freedom of expression was... "curtailed" is an entirely inadequate words. The notion of "freedom of speech" that we currently take for granted did not exist. Any expressions of dissent or criticism of the government -- in print, in public, even in private conversation -- were deemed violations of federal laws. Men and women convicted of these crimes (most people so charged were convicted) were sentenced to years in prison. In one case, men were accused of “conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act and the Selective Service Act” even though neither law had been passed when the alleged conspiracy happened. President Woodrow Wilson supported the indictments, saying his attorney general that such actions — which is to say, private conversations — were still “worthy of being suppressed.” The courts -- including the U.S. Supreme Court -- almost universally ruled in favor of suppressing speech. (Interestingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the decision in a key case defending the prohibition "subversive" speech. A few years later Holmes was to write the dissent in a similar case, having changed his mind about what freedom of speech meant.) Offices were set up within the government to spy on all manner of "suspicious" groups, whatever that might mean, going so far as to plant agents who would deliberately stir up trouble. J. Edgar Hoover first made his name overseeing such operations.
Postmasters could on a whim declare some publications subversive and refuse to allow them to be shipped. It probably goes without saying that these "dangerous" publications were disproportionately put out by groups supporting labor, the rights of Black Americans, an opposition to the war. Police enforcement of laws was augmented by officially sanctioned vigilante groups -- aka, militias -- like the so-called American Protective League. Young men who resisted the military draft were targeted: “The American Protective League needed targets. Draft-dodging “slackers” provided one. Nothing aroused the rage of middle-aged APL members more than young men who might be failing to fight. In addition, the government offered a $50 bonus to anybody who caught such a man. Worth more than $1,000 today, such a reward was tempting because you could seize a suspected “slacker” without a warrant. APL members leapt at the chance.” Thousands of people were regularly arrested without warrants and judges almost always upheld all such abuses. “In Montana,"Hochschild tells us, "a 1918 sedition bill provided a prison sentence of up to 20 years and a $ 20,000 fine for any 'disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous, slurring or abusive' words directed against, among other things, the American form of government, the Constitution, or the flag.” Vague language to be sure, but crafted with a particular political outcome in mind. Before Montana's governor left office in 1921, for example, he commuted the sentences of 7 rapists and 13 murderers -- but not a single person convicted under the state's sedition law. In Indiana, a man was tried for killing a man who muttered “to hell with the United States. The jury took two minutes to find him not guilty.
Only the most compliant citizens were safe. War fever raged through the population. In addition to whatever penalties the law might threaten, the population at large determined that any acts that might be deemed less than enthusiastically supportive of the war should be punished: people were persecuted by their neighbors if they didn’t buy war bonds — or didn’t buy enough war bonds — and women were ostracized if they chose not to knit sweaters and socks for soldiers. In some towns and cities schools were prohibited from teaching the German language, people with German-sounding names had them legally changed, German-sounding foods (hamburgers and frankfurters, for example) are given new names, and in at least one American town, speaking German in public was made illegal.
The groups that suffered the most were labor activists, pacifists (one such person was Eugene V. Debbs, a Socialist, who was sentenced to several years in an Atlanta prison, during which time he ran for president — from his cell — and garnered almost one million votes.), immigrants (one U.S. senator, advocating for sharp reductions in immigration by people who were not of north European stock, complained that “during the one month of October, 1920, it is estimated that of the 74,665 immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, more than 75 per cent were of the Semitic race.”), and most sorrowfully, Black Americans. As membership in the KKK soared in America, the number of lynchings, murders, and attacks grew in number. There are passages in the book that are difficult to read -- heartbreaking and shocking, indictments of what outrages we are capable of.
Clearly, the very same fissures driving American politics and culture today were there in the period Hochschild writes about. Indeed, events of the past few years here -- the election of Donald Trump, replacement theory, etc. -- are named in the final chapter, a stark reminder that many fear to be on the horizon in the near future was made real the America of roughly 100 years ago. In that sense — and clearly, this was the author’s point in writing the book — “American Midnight” is a warning of what is possible in America.
A postscript: Believe it or not, there are lighter moments in the book. My favorite concerns Warren G. Harding, who was quite the character and who presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in our history. Hochschild writes: “People… mocked Harding for his language, which H. L. Mencken dubbed Gamalielese. “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” A rival politician once called Harding’s verbiage “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude.””
December 15, 2022
Every book of Hochschild's that I have read has impressed me. Not alone is his research impeccable but the topics he chooses indicate that his interests are diverse and reflect a humanitarian heart. This book is no exception. He tells the whole story of the country during and following the First World War. Before the war, there was a great amount of turbulence in the country. The Gilded Age had produced vast inequality and the working classes had begun to demand more: better working conditions and hours, and fair wages. Strikes were prevalent throughout the country. Groups like the Wobblies, the various socialist organizations, and even anarchists clambered for change. Added to this, there were huge numbers of immigrants who came seeking a better life but those already here resisted them. Racism, as always, was highly visible. The Progressive Era brought about many changes but very little for African Americans. Plessey v Ferguson was met with approval by most segments of society, including Progressives.
Along comes Woodrow Wilson, a man of principle who is elected president. Those who voted for him hoped for an advocate in the White House but in many very important ways, that was not to be. Aside from the racism which is quite widely known about, he also presided over the Red Scare, although his rhetoric rarely reflected the approval he felt for the men who ran around the country, violating the constitution without a second thought, attempting to purge the country of the elements that the White Anglo Saxon Protestants considered below them. White supremacy was the order of the day and it came from the President on down. Hochschild pulls no punches, assigning blame for the nativism and hatred that was unleashed during this time. Along with Wilson and many of the Democrats, he faults Theodore Roosevelt and the Republicans. Just about the only politician left unscathed was Robert La Follete, the progressive Republican Senator from Wisconsin and Eugene Debbs, the socialist leader.
The author details the unrest throughout the country and the people caught up in it. From Butte, Montana, to Seattle Washington, to Pennsylvania and Ohio, and many, many more.
I had read a fair amount about this time period and considered myself quite well versed in it but this book brings to light many people and events that I was unaware of. I recommend this book highly. This is history, real, honest, history.
Along comes Woodrow Wilson, a man of principle who is elected president. Those who voted for him hoped for an advocate in the White House but in many very important ways, that was not to be. Aside from the racism which is quite widely known about, he also presided over the Red Scare, although his rhetoric rarely reflected the approval he felt for the men who ran around the country, violating the constitution without a second thought, attempting to purge the country of the elements that the White Anglo Saxon Protestants considered below them. White supremacy was the order of the day and it came from the President on down. Hochschild pulls no punches, assigning blame for the nativism and hatred that was unleashed during this time. Along with Wilson and many of the Democrats, he faults Theodore Roosevelt and the Republicans. Just about the only politician left unscathed was Robert La Follete, the progressive Republican Senator from Wisconsin and Eugene Debbs, the socialist leader.
The author details the unrest throughout the country and the people caught up in it. From Butte, Montana, to Seattle Washington, to Pennsylvania and Ohio, and many, many more.
I had read a fair amount about this time period and considered myself quite well versed in it but this book brings to light many people and events that I was unaware of. I recommend this book highly. This is history, real, honest, history.
October 31, 2022
Reading AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, 1917-1921 was a very sobering experience for me. It showed how the U.S., from the moment it declared war on Germany in April 1917, allowed itself to be swept up in a hysteria that would brook no dissent or criticism, however slight, of the war and of the nation's leaders.
Prior to reading this book, I had known of the widespread anti-German sentiment that led to the banning of the teaching of the German language in many school systems, the prohibition of the playing of classical music of German composers in orchestras across the country, and the renaming of frankfurters as "hot dogs" and sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage." But I did not realize the full extent of the changes the U.S. went through from being a neutral nation prior to April 6, 1917 to a country at war that became suffused with a hyper-patriotic fervor which gave the government license to brutalize and dehumanize conscientious objectors, made it permissible for people to beat or kill union leaders and organizers, tar and feather union members, and ignore people's constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.
Then, once the war was won in November 1918, the U.S. government continued to promote and encourage a repressive environment that, using the fear of the threat of Bolshevism (in the wake of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War), led to massive crackdowns on labor unions, the Socialist Party (which, before the war, had been gaining much national appeal; indeed many Socialists had been elected prewar to various state offices and Congress), and a spate of arrests of people deemed as "threats to the peace and security of the nation." (The country itself in 1919 endured race riots, a number of bombings thought to be caused by anarchists or Bolshevik agitators, and scores of labor strikes; for with the end of the war, came inflation, and a major economic downturn.) Many of those arrested who were found not to be American citizens were hastily deported through the frenzied efforts of the Bureau of Investigation and the Attorney General (A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker) and his young assistant heading the Justice Department's Radical Division whose name was J. Edgar Hoover.
What I also found galling was President Woodrow Wilson's general indifference to the domestic scene during most of those years. Frankly, I can't think of someone given his position who was such a gross and shameless hypocrite. Wilson presented himself to the world as an apostle for democracy, while remaining unconcerned with the plight of African Americans who, whether serving in the military during WWI or in support of the country at home, were treated with suspicion, scorned, despised, and if deemed by the white power structure in the South guilty of 'socially unacceptable behaviors' more likely to be lynched.
Furthermore, Wilson's efforts to get the U.S. to ratify the Versailles Treaty and become a part of the League of Nations (his brainchild) were for naught. For his pains, Wilson suffered a paralytic stroke in September 1919 while on a cross-country speaking engagement to convince the public to support him. He spent the remaining 18 months of his presidency closeted in the White House, where his wife and some of his aides largely acted in his stead.
Truly this was a shameful period in the nation's history. One that, given the precarious state the U.S. democratic system is now in, should be re-examined so that we become firmly resolved to avoid making the same grievous errors again.
Prior to reading this book, I had known of the widespread anti-German sentiment that led to the banning of the teaching of the German language in many school systems, the prohibition of the playing of classical music of German composers in orchestras across the country, and the renaming of frankfurters as "hot dogs" and sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage." But I did not realize the full extent of the changes the U.S. went through from being a neutral nation prior to April 6, 1917 to a country at war that became suffused with a hyper-patriotic fervor which gave the government license to brutalize and dehumanize conscientious objectors, made it permissible for people to beat or kill union leaders and organizers, tar and feather union members, and ignore people's constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.
Then, once the war was won in November 1918, the U.S. government continued to promote and encourage a repressive environment that, using the fear of the threat of Bolshevism (in the wake of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War), led to massive crackdowns on labor unions, the Socialist Party (which, before the war, had been gaining much national appeal; indeed many Socialists had been elected prewar to various state offices and Congress), and a spate of arrests of people deemed as "threats to the peace and security of the nation." (The country itself in 1919 endured race riots, a number of bombings thought to be caused by anarchists or Bolshevik agitators, and scores of labor strikes; for with the end of the war, came inflation, and a major economic downturn.) Many of those arrested who were found not to be American citizens were hastily deported through the frenzied efforts of the Bureau of Investigation and the Attorney General (A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker) and his young assistant heading the Justice Department's Radical Division whose name was J. Edgar Hoover.
What I also found galling was President Woodrow Wilson's general indifference to the domestic scene during most of those years. Frankly, I can't think of someone given his position who was such a gross and shameless hypocrite. Wilson presented himself to the world as an apostle for democracy, while remaining unconcerned with the plight of African Americans who, whether serving in the military during WWI or in support of the country at home, were treated with suspicion, scorned, despised, and if deemed by the white power structure in the South guilty of 'socially unacceptable behaviors' more likely to be lynched.
Furthermore, Wilson's efforts to get the U.S. to ratify the Versailles Treaty and become a part of the League of Nations (his brainchild) were for naught. For his pains, Wilson suffered a paralytic stroke in September 1919 while on a cross-country speaking engagement to convince the public to support him. He spent the remaining 18 months of his presidency closeted in the White House, where his wife and some of his aides largely acted in his stead.
Truly this was a shameful period in the nation's history. One that, given the precarious state the U.S. democratic system is now in, should be re-examined so that we become firmly resolved to avoid making the same grievous errors again.
April 18, 2023
Scary familiar! Toxic masculinity, immigration, white supremacy, racism, union busting, censorship, wars, control women, surveillance, authoritarian tendencies, abuse of power, repeat every 50 years...
4+ Stars
Listened to Audible. Jonathan Todd Ross was excellent!
4+ Stars
Listened to Audible. Jonathan Todd Ross was excellent!
April 7, 2024
Audible sale (#35 of 40) 15 hours 6 min. Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross (A)
4.5 stars
With so many great reviews about this book, I will just add my 2 cents about it. If I had to lose one night of sleep, I had an engrossing book to keep me company.
For my first penny of thought, I will never forget the chapter on race relations, especially concerning the treatment of black soldiers upon returning to America after serving heroically in France in WW One. Race riots targeted blacks by whites throughout the country. Gruesome acts of violence were committed. It was sickening to read, and it will haunt me as long as my memory holds.
For my second penny, I determined to mention a name lost to history, but it is now given due honor in this book. What can one man do, and how much impact can he have against those senior in rank within his own party and cabinet members? While thousands faced mass deportation from America, leaving behind homes and families, LEWIS F. POST the acting (third in line) Secretary of Labor exhibited rare courage against Attorney General A.Mitchell Palmer and the young but still imposing J.Edgar Hoover to stop those deportations. Thank you, Mr. POST for recognizing evil and taking a stand!
This book would have been a 5 star book until the final chapter when the author, instead of recording history, decided to add his own personal evaluations, which conflict with my own values.
4.5 stars
With so many great reviews about this book, I will just add my 2 cents about it. If I had to lose one night of sleep, I had an engrossing book to keep me company.
For my first penny of thought, I will never forget the chapter on race relations, especially concerning the treatment of black soldiers upon returning to America after serving heroically in France in WW One. Race riots targeted blacks by whites throughout the country. Gruesome acts of violence were committed. It was sickening to read, and it will haunt me as long as my memory holds.
For my second penny, I determined to mention a name lost to history, but it is now given due honor in this book. What can one man do, and how much impact can he have against those senior in rank within his own party and cabinet members? While thousands faced mass deportation from America, leaving behind homes and families, LEWIS F. POST the acting (third in line) Secretary of Labor exhibited rare courage against Attorney General A.Mitchell Palmer and the young but still imposing J.Edgar Hoover to stop those deportations. Thank you, Mr. POST for recognizing evil and taking a stand!
This book would have been a 5 star book until the final chapter when the author, instead of recording history, decided to add his own personal evaluations, which conflict with my own values.
January 12, 2023
American Midnight examines certain dark elements of life in the United States that arguably reached their nadir during the First World War and the several years that followed it. In the subtitle of the book, Hochschild calls these developments “democracy’s forgotten crisis.”
This period saw an upswing in hatred of and violence against Blacks, immigrants—especially Jews and others of so-called “inferior races” (i.e., those who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants), labor unions and organizers, draft dodgers and conscientious objectors, socialists, and other “radicals.” A climate of fear took hold in the country, fed in part by reports of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, as well as economic concerns and persistent prejudices against the “other.”
Once Congress heeded President Woodrow Wilson’s call to join the war, everyone was expected to rally around the flag. Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to enlist public support. The CPI was, essentially, a propaganda agency. As one of its leaders wrote, “‘Truth and Falsehood are arbitrary terms. . . . There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other. . . . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.’”
The propaganda was accompanied by a crackdown on dissent. This repression found an especially zealous advocate in Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, who used his office to censor publications he deemed radical or ban their distribution outright. Citizen vigilante groups also got into the act. One group, the American Protective League, received the imprimatur of the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI). APL members fought the “enemy” on the home front by conducting “slacker raids” and arresting men who couldn’t produce their draft cards.
Meanwhile, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. These laws ramped up the legal justification for government agents to round up thousands of suspected radicals, many of whom were jailed or deported. Overt acts were not required. It was enough to express an anti-war sentiment or belong, even unwittingly, to a suspect organization. For example, in 1918, Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 10 years in jail. His crime? Stating that ordinary people did not have a voice in declaring war. Other prominent dissidents who were caught in the government’s net included labor leader William “Big Bill” Haywood, anarchist Emma Goldman, and socialist Kate Richards O’Hare.
States and local jurisdictions followed suit. Educators were a particular target. The State of New York passed laws providing that teachers could lose their jobs for “treasonable or seditious statements.” The New York City Board of Education required “all teachers to sign loyalty oaths and held hearings at which students testified about what their teachers said in class.”
The end of the war did not mean the end of the government’s campaign against dissent. A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General for the last two years of Wilson’s term, led a program of “Palmer Raids” against suspected “reds.” (No doubt he felt justified after nearly being killed by a bomb that exploded at his home in June 1919.) Palmer lost some momentum after a massive nationwide revolutionary uprising that he predicted would occur on May Day 1920 failed to materialize.
Where was Woodrow Wilson himself in all of this? There is no doubt that he had no sympathy for anyone who disagreed with the war, or afterward, with his plan for peace, anchored by the League of Nations. Hochschild suggests that Wilson was a contradictory figure: “the inspirational idealist abroad, determined to end war forever … and the nativist autocrat at home.” Wilson’s legacy has been tarnished in recent years, and this book does nothing to change that.
American Midnight is an excellent book. Hochschild is a skillful historian, teacher, and writer. He wants readers to understand how fragile our democracy is—an especially important point to keep our focus on as we navigate the post-Trump era. “The toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law have long flowed through American life,” writes Hochschild in his prologue. “Never was this raw underside of our nation’s life more revealingly on display than from 1917 to 1921.” But it is never far from the surface.
This period saw an upswing in hatred of and violence against Blacks, immigrants—especially Jews and others of so-called “inferior races” (i.e., those who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants), labor unions and organizers, draft dodgers and conscientious objectors, socialists, and other “radicals.” A climate of fear took hold in the country, fed in part by reports of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, as well as economic concerns and persistent prejudices against the “other.”
Once Congress heeded President Woodrow Wilson’s call to join the war, everyone was expected to rally around the flag. Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to enlist public support. The CPI was, essentially, a propaganda agency. As one of its leaders wrote, “‘Truth and Falsehood are arbitrary terms. . . . There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other. . . . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.’”
The propaganda was accompanied by a crackdown on dissent. This repression found an especially zealous advocate in Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, who used his office to censor publications he deemed radical or ban their distribution outright. Citizen vigilante groups also got into the act. One group, the American Protective League, received the imprimatur of the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI). APL members fought the “enemy” on the home front by conducting “slacker raids” and arresting men who couldn’t produce their draft cards.
Meanwhile, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. These laws ramped up the legal justification for government agents to round up thousands of suspected radicals, many of whom were jailed or deported. Overt acts were not required. It was enough to express an anti-war sentiment or belong, even unwittingly, to a suspect organization. For example, in 1918, Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 10 years in jail. His crime? Stating that ordinary people did not have a voice in declaring war. Other prominent dissidents who were caught in the government’s net included labor leader William “Big Bill” Haywood, anarchist Emma Goldman, and socialist Kate Richards O’Hare.
States and local jurisdictions followed suit. Educators were a particular target. The State of New York passed laws providing that teachers could lose their jobs for “treasonable or seditious statements.” The New York City Board of Education required “all teachers to sign loyalty oaths and held hearings at which students testified about what their teachers said in class.”
The end of the war did not mean the end of the government’s campaign against dissent. A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General for the last two years of Wilson’s term, led a program of “Palmer Raids” against suspected “reds.” (No doubt he felt justified after nearly being killed by a bomb that exploded at his home in June 1919.) Palmer lost some momentum after a massive nationwide revolutionary uprising that he predicted would occur on May Day 1920 failed to materialize.
Where was Woodrow Wilson himself in all of this? There is no doubt that he had no sympathy for anyone who disagreed with the war, or afterward, with his plan for peace, anchored by the League of Nations. Hochschild suggests that Wilson was a contradictory figure: “the inspirational idealist abroad, determined to end war forever … and the nativist autocrat at home.” Wilson’s legacy has been tarnished in recent years, and this book does nothing to change that.
American Midnight is an excellent book. Hochschild is a skillful historian, teacher, and writer. He wants readers to understand how fragile our democracy is—an especially important point to keep our focus on as we navigate the post-Trump era. “The toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law have long flowed through American life,” writes Hochschild in his prologue. “Never was this raw underside of our nation’s life more revealingly on display than from 1917 to 1921.” But it is never far from the surface.
March 27, 2023
When I read the book cover I thought this book would be more about the black experience during and after WWI.
It wasn't.
It was about the different formal, semi-formal, and informal efforts to squelch free thought and speech during and after WWI.
* The American Protection League --- scary stuff. Basically the KKK with the guise of helping the Justice Department protect the Country from draft dodgers. They would arrest you and send you to jail if you didn't have your draft papers on you. Thousands were arrested and sent off to fight.
* Wilson's Post Master General, Albert Burleson, has been described as the worst Post Master General ever. The author points out this is not accurate, he did accomplish several good things, but that he was probably the worst person to ever hold the office. He used his power along with the Espionage Act to quelch contradictory points of view and punish those who dared to write anything semi-controversial.
* Eugene Debs ---In the first half of the book, the coverage of Debs was fairly superficial and high level. The second half was much more thorough and complete. Hochschild did a good job talking about him and other political prisoners of the era. There were hundreds arrested by the federal government and thousands by state and local governments. The efforts to get them released was
* I thought this would be more about the black experience during the period (the reference to black churches in the first sentence of the description). While blacks are discussed, they are only one among many groups.
* Labor Unions and Socialist groups are attacked vigorously by the different organizations.
* People are spied upon---even in the privacy of their own homes---and if they say something in the privacy of their houses, they are arrested and convicted.
* Several characters that I had never heard of are featured.
* Women's rights is brought up and the efforts to suppress them---especially Margaret Sanger.
It wasn't.
It was about the different formal, semi-formal, and informal efforts to squelch free thought and speech during and after WWI.
* The American Protection League --- scary stuff. Basically the KKK with the guise of helping the Justice Department protect the Country from draft dodgers. They would arrest you and send you to jail if you didn't have your draft papers on you. Thousands were arrested and sent off to fight.
* Wilson's Post Master General, Albert Burleson, has been described as the worst Post Master General ever. The author points out this is not accurate, he did accomplish several good things, but that he was probably the worst person to ever hold the office. He used his power along with the Espionage Act to quelch contradictory points of view and punish those who dared to write anything semi-controversial.
* Eugene Debs ---In the first half of the book, the coverage of Debs was fairly superficial and high level. The second half was much more thorough and complete. Hochschild did a good job talking about him and other political prisoners of the era. There were hundreds arrested by the federal government and thousands by state and local governments. The efforts to get them released was
* I thought this would be more about the black experience during the period (the reference to black churches in the first sentence of the description). While blacks are discussed, they are only one among many groups.
* Labor Unions and Socialist groups are attacked vigorously by the different organizations.
* People are spied upon---even in the privacy of their own homes---and if they say something in the privacy of their houses, they are arrested and convicted.
* Several characters that I had never heard of are featured.
* Women's rights is brought up and the efforts to suppress them---especially Margaret Sanger.
December 14, 2023
I find myself not knowing what to say or even how to say it if I did know. Five stars means it was a WOW! book for me but what the author details in this book is just too hard to believe even though all of it is true. I have read about this period of our history before so it wasn't exactly new material for me. What Hochschild has done, however, is cast a much wider net that descends to much greater depth than anything I have read before. Basically, what this book does is demonstrate what happens when we don't teach and learn from our history. What we, as a nation, are experiencing today with a non-functioning government populated by idiots and a factionalized society motivated by irrational fears and conspiracy theories is a result of not knowing about the events depicted in this book. Those among us that do not want the children of this country to read about unpleasant or upsetting events of our history will definitely not like what is contained in this book.
So what is the book about? It covers a period from just before the entry of the U.S. into WWI during the Wilson administration until Wilson leaves office at the end of his second term. The man who "Kept Us Out of War" does an about face on that issue and goes all in on the side of the Allies and justifies this action based on Germans sinking civilian ships with Americans aboard. The fact that these ships were carrying significant amounts of war materials for the Allies is never revealed to the American public. In fact the British did a wonderful job of leading Wilson and the American public around by the nose regarding what was happening in Europe at that time. It is to be wondered how the American public would have reacted if they really knew what was going on in Europe and behind closed doors among the Allied leadership. Since the British cut the transatlantic cables from Germany to the U.S. at the start of the war the German side of the story was never known in the U.S.
Since getting involved in Europe's war was not very popular with the American public Wilson needed to sell this and started a PR campaign that exalted nationalism at its worst. Unfortunately, there were those in this country at that time that were able to take advantage of this campaign for other reasons. Racism, jingoism, nationalism, and anti-labor forces all found something they liked and could benefit from under the guise of backing the war effort and protecting our shores from foreign invasion and influence. Anti-immigration interests mounted attacks on "hyphenated Americans" painting them as not American or not American enough and justifying wholesale deportations for membership in socialist organizations or worse, the IWW the wobblies. Virtually all Eastern and Southern European immigrants, Blacks and Central Americans, and anybody speaking a foreign language and especially German was suspect and subject to warrantless arrest and detention by law enforcement as well as civilian volunteers aiding law enforcement and the DOJ.
The war effort was also used by business leaders to quash attempts at unionization by arresting union leaders for a variety of anti-war activities. Of course what helped the anti-union efforts was the passage of federal legislation which made it a criminal offense to speak against the war, the president, or the army or in anyway that was viewed as harmful to the war effort. That legislation is still on the books today though it has been amended in significant form so the abuse it was put to during WWI isn't repeated. While the war was going on we had civilian volunteers acting under the color of law conducting large scale groundless raids looking for draft dodgers and foreign agents and detaining people for days or weeks without basic human necessities not to mention without access to counsel. But then the war ended and with it so it would seem the need for these assaults on basic civil rights. But the abuses continued.
About this time Wilson suffered a stroke and disappeared from public view. He lost control of Congress and most importantly the Senate. About the only thing that Wilson cared about during this time was passing the WWI peace treaty which included Wilson's much loved League of Nations. With Wilson pretty much a non-entity in national government things continued as they had been during the war. Now, however, we had ambitious office seekers attempting to mount the nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-labor bandwagon in view of the 1920 presidential election. At this time a young man named John Edgar Hoover enters our national history to begin a career that will be with us for decades to come. Hoover does his best to assist the Democratic front runner to continue his nationalistic and anti-union agenda and the abuses continued. What saved the country isn't entirely clear but it seems that the people just got tired of the hate and voted to change leadership. Harding was elected over the Democrat who shortly thereafter was succeeded by Coolidge who was no gift to labor but had no interests in the extremes of the Wilson administration. Does this history tell us that our only hope of being saved from our present situation is for us, the American voters, to vote to remove those that obstruct our government and divide our nation? I guess you should just read the book and make that decision for yourself. Enjoy.
So what is the book about? It covers a period from just before the entry of the U.S. into WWI during the Wilson administration until Wilson leaves office at the end of his second term. The man who "Kept Us Out of War" does an about face on that issue and goes all in on the side of the Allies and justifies this action based on Germans sinking civilian ships with Americans aboard. The fact that these ships were carrying significant amounts of war materials for the Allies is never revealed to the American public. In fact the British did a wonderful job of leading Wilson and the American public around by the nose regarding what was happening in Europe at that time. It is to be wondered how the American public would have reacted if they really knew what was going on in Europe and behind closed doors among the Allied leadership. Since the British cut the transatlantic cables from Germany to the U.S. at the start of the war the German side of the story was never known in the U.S.
Since getting involved in Europe's war was not very popular with the American public Wilson needed to sell this and started a PR campaign that exalted nationalism at its worst. Unfortunately, there were those in this country at that time that were able to take advantage of this campaign for other reasons. Racism, jingoism, nationalism, and anti-labor forces all found something they liked and could benefit from under the guise of backing the war effort and protecting our shores from foreign invasion and influence. Anti-immigration interests mounted attacks on "hyphenated Americans" painting them as not American or not American enough and justifying wholesale deportations for membership in socialist organizations or worse, the IWW the wobblies. Virtually all Eastern and Southern European immigrants, Blacks and Central Americans, and anybody speaking a foreign language and especially German was suspect and subject to warrantless arrest and detention by law enforcement as well as civilian volunteers aiding law enforcement and the DOJ.
The war effort was also used by business leaders to quash attempts at unionization by arresting union leaders for a variety of anti-war activities. Of course what helped the anti-union efforts was the passage of federal legislation which made it a criminal offense to speak against the war, the president, or the army or in anyway that was viewed as harmful to the war effort. That legislation is still on the books today though it has been amended in significant form so the abuse it was put to during WWI isn't repeated. While the war was going on we had civilian volunteers acting under the color of law conducting large scale groundless raids looking for draft dodgers and foreign agents and detaining people for days or weeks without basic human necessities not to mention without access to counsel. But then the war ended and with it so it would seem the need for these assaults on basic civil rights. But the abuses continued.
About this time Wilson suffered a stroke and disappeared from public view. He lost control of Congress and most importantly the Senate. About the only thing that Wilson cared about during this time was passing the WWI peace treaty which included Wilson's much loved League of Nations. With Wilson pretty much a non-entity in national government things continued as they had been during the war. Now, however, we had ambitious office seekers attempting to mount the nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-labor bandwagon in view of the 1920 presidential election. At this time a young man named John Edgar Hoover enters our national history to begin a career that will be with us for decades to come. Hoover does his best to assist the Democratic front runner to continue his nationalistic and anti-union agenda and the abuses continued. What saved the country isn't entirely clear but it seems that the people just got tired of the hate and voted to change leadership. Harding was elected over the Democrat who shortly thereafter was succeeded by Coolidge who was no gift to labor but had no interests in the extremes of the Wilson administration. Does this history tell us that our only hope of being saved from our present situation is for us, the American voters, to vote to remove those that obstruct our government and divide our nation? I guess you should just read the book and make that decision for yourself. Enjoy.
January 20, 2023
A well-researched and engaging work.
The story moves along at a pretty fluid pace, and Hochschild provides great portraits of the colorful people involved, and brings to life an era where lawlessness was rampant and the presidency charged with executing the law was complicit in many abuses and, at its most charitable, willing to overlook them. The partnership between Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover is presented clearly as well. He also does a good job describing the forces that led to so much hysteria, such as the Great War and public resistance to US involvement, the Russian revolution, labor movements, anti-immigrant sentiment, vigilantes, and the eugenics movement.
Hochshild does try to link some of the story’s themes to modern-day events, and some readers may find this a bit forced. Wilson can be a confounding president to study, but Hochschild’s portrait of him doesn’t have much nuance. Others might wish for more coverage of the movement for women’s suffrage. Still, the narrative is well-organized, the writing is clear and the story is coherent and very readable.
An insightful and well-written work.
The story moves along at a pretty fluid pace, and Hochschild provides great portraits of the colorful people involved, and brings to life an era where lawlessness was rampant and the presidency charged with executing the law was complicit in many abuses and, at its most charitable, willing to overlook them. The partnership between Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover is presented clearly as well. He also does a good job describing the forces that led to so much hysteria, such as the Great War and public resistance to US involvement, the Russian revolution, labor movements, anti-immigrant sentiment, vigilantes, and the eugenics movement.
Hochshild does try to link some of the story’s themes to modern-day events, and some readers may find this a bit forced. Wilson can be a confounding president to study, but Hochschild’s portrait of him doesn’t have much nuance. Others might wish for more coverage of the movement for women’s suffrage. Still, the narrative is well-organized, the writing is clear and the story is coherent and very readable.
An insightful and well-written work.
November 16, 2022
“These were no ordinary times. Yet they are largely left out of the typical American history book. There’s always a chapter on the First World War… Turn the page, and the next chapter begins with the Roaring Twenties… This book is about what’s missing between those two chapters. It is a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of black Americans, and far more...It is a story of how a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home.”
Narrative history covering the tumultuous years 1917 to 1921 in American history, which was rife with civil rights abuses, including censorship, surveillance, unjustified imprisonment, torture, and lynchings. The entrance of the US into World War I was used as justification to track down and deport “undesirables” and repress dissension. To tell the story, the author focuses notables such as Woodrow Wilson, Colonel Edward House, J. Edgar Hoover, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Kate Richards O’Hare, A. Mitchell Palmer, Leo Wendell, and others.
It is a disturbing account, and Hochschild does not spare the horrifying details. People were persecuted for their pacifism, alliance with labor unions, or basically any behavior deemed “unpatriotic.” The root causes of these abuses were nationalism, racism, fear of Communism, and xenophobia. These may sound familiar. It is a reminder to safeguard civil liberties and to learn from past mistakes.
Narrative history covering the tumultuous years 1917 to 1921 in American history, which was rife with civil rights abuses, including censorship, surveillance, unjustified imprisonment, torture, and lynchings. The entrance of the US into World War I was used as justification to track down and deport “undesirables” and repress dissension. To tell the story, the author focuses notables such as Woodrow Wilson, Colonel Edward House, J. Edgar Hoover, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Kate Richards O’Hare, A. Mitchell Palmer, Leo Wendell, and others.
It is a disturbing account, and Hochschild does not spare the horrifying details. People were persecuted for their pacifism, alliance with labor unions, or basically any behavior deemed “unpatriotic.” The root causes of these abuses were nationalism, racism, fear of Communism, and xenophobia. These may sound familiar. It is a reminder to safeguard civil liberties and to learn from past mistakes.
April 4, 2023
After defeating the world’s strongest military, the founders of the United States faced the task of forming a country that would honor and implement the principles upon which they had declared their independence. The Declaration of Independence was a promise to all men and women that they would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This shared inheritance remains a beacon for all people for all time.
Even as we celebrate these freedoms, there is no escaping the fact that not every facet of our nations’ history has been worth celebrating. There is no serious argument about the despicable nature of some parts of American history. Slavery, Indian genocide, Jim Crow laws, World War II’s internment of Japanese Americans, and the exclusion of women from experiencing the full rights of men are indisputably part of our nations’ history. America was “built on land bloodily wrested from its native inhabitants.” The forced march of Choctaw, Creek and Cherokee tribes from their homes in the South became known as “The Trail of Tears.” Thousands died along the way. After the Civil War, blacks were attacked for exercising their newfound right to vote. Women did not receive the right to vote until 1920. Native Americans did not get U.S. citizenship until 1924.
Erasing history has always been a part of how Americans have dealt with the atrocities of the past. In 1921, white citizens set fire to homes, businesses and churches in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in an area known as Black Wall Steet. Historians estimate that as many as 300 people were killed and 10,000 blacks left homeless. In 2020, a piece on “60 Minutes” revealed that this significant event is still not taught in Oklahoma’s schools. While some want to maintain a Norman Rockwell view of America, our nation has begun a long-overdue and very welcome awakening into its own history.
As author Adam Hochschild observes in his prologue, history textbooks typically include a chapter about the First World War, with the following chapter recalling the Roaring Twenties. His recent book, American Midnight, is about the darkest period of America’s twentieth century that occurred between 1917 and 1921 during Woodrow Wilson’s second term. Sadly, knowledge of this ugly and shameful period has largely disappeared from our national memory, though it seems painfully relevant to America in the 2020s.
― “This book is about what’s missing between these two chapters. It is a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans, and far more that is not marked by commemorative plaques, museum exhibits, or Ken Burns documentaries. It is the story of how a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became an excuse for a war against democracy at home.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
Woodrow Wilson came into office with the goal to keep America out of World War I. However, in 1917 America was forced to become involved after continued German submarine attacks. In justifying his decision to take the country to war in Europe, Wilson appealed to the highest ideals of freedom, self-determination, and peace. But almost overnight, his quest to establish democracy abroad unleashed a wave of intolerance and violence at home. Wilson pushed for new laws that criminalized core First Amendment speech. Wilson signed the Espionage Act shortly after the U.S. entered the war in 1917. Later, the Sedition Act of 1918 imposed harsh penalties for a wide range of dissenting speech. These two laws, directed at socialists, pacifists, and other anti-war activists, allowed restrictions on freedom of speech that were draconian by today’s standards. What followed in the U.S. is shocking to say the least.
― “Fear that dissenters might resist the draft, or otherwise thwart the war effort, provided the excuse for a relentless erosion of civil liberties that Americans had long taken for granted.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Once America joined the war effort, Wilson had no apparent misgivings about imprisoning dissident Americans. One prominent individual who was jailed was the labor champion and Socialist Party candidate who had run against him for president in 1912, Eugene V. Debs. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a speech in Canton Ohio that the Wilson administration interpreted as discouraging participation in the war. Many conscientious objectors were not just jailed, they were treated brutally.
― “And no one was reporting from the prison at Camp Funston, Kansas, where conscientious objectors to military service were shackled to their cell bars on tiptoe for eight hours a day.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Wilson allowed his postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, to vigorously enforce the Espionage Act. Burleson ordered local postmasters to report any illegal or suspicious material that they found. He banned any antiwar material from being delivered by the Post Office. He denied mailing privileges to 74 left-wing and pacifist magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, forcing several widely read publications out of business. In one particularly egregious act, he banned a publication called the Gaelic American because it favored Irish independence from America’s ally Britain.
The anti-union response was particularly fierce. The primary target was the Industrial Workers of the World, a union that tried to organize workers ignored by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Consisting largely of women, Blacks and unskilled workers, the unionists were known as “Wobblies.” They were perceived as a grave threat to the country after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917.
― “Other forces also fed the violence, and most of them are still with us; a long-simmering nativism and hatred of immigrants; and, finally, a nostalgia among white southerners—and many northerners—for the days when Blacks ‘knew their place.’”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, stirred up fears of a possibly revolutionary uprising of socialists and trade unionists. When Palmer decided he needed a new “Radical Division” in the Justice Department, he chose the young J. Edgar Hoover to lead it. The two men devised a plan to round up and imprison thousands of new American immigrants, left-wing activists, conscientious objectors, Blacks and union members. Many of the recent immigrants were deported without due process of law. Ordinary citizens were harassed for even the most minor infractions.
― “A Minnesota pastor was tarred and feathered because people overheard him praying in German with a dying woman.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Joining the federal government and law enforcement agencies in this assault on civil liberties was the American Protective League, an organization of private citizens numbering about 250,000. The APL conducted numerous raids and engaged in surveillance activities aimed at anyone who failed to register for the draft, German immigrants, pacifists, and Jews. Law enforcement would stand aside as APL members formed lynch mobs, burned Black churches, and executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Woodrow Wilson presided over this whole toxic brew. Because a majority of states passed copycat laws in the wake of the Espionage Act, no one has ever counted the total number of people jailed under such laws. The anti-immigrant mentality of this dark period was precisely what stopped the U.S. from sheltering those trying to escape from Nazi occupied Europe.
― “It never seems to have occurred to Wilson that the censorship, political imprisonments, and harsh crackdown on antiwar dissidents he had presided over for nearly two years had not nurtured a climate of enthusiasm for a peace-oriented, international idea like the league.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
― “But the paranoia ignited by the First World War empowered government intelligence agencies, both military and civilian, to do their own spying and infiltrating.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Adam Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost) provides a fascinating account of one of the darkest and most shameful periods in our nation’s history. The book is exceptionally well written and well organized.
― “Why were so many Americans in 1917, especially men, so passionate about going on the attack—not just against the Germans but also against imagined domestic enemies? Their fervor partly came from yet another front at home: a long-growing tension over the changing positions of men and women.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Even as we celebrate these freedoms, there is no escaping the fact that not every facet of our nations’ history has been worth celebrating. There is no serious argument about the despicable nature of some parts of American history. Slavery, Indian genocide, Jim Crow laws, World War II’s internment of Japanese Americans, and the exclusion of women from experiencing the full rights of men are indisputably part of our nations’ history. America was “built on land bloodily wrested from its native inhabitants.” The forced march of Choctaw, Creek and Cherokee tribes from their homes in the South became known as “The Trail of Tears.” Thousands died along the way. After the Civil War, blacks were attacked for exercising their newfound right to vote. Women did not receive the right to vote until 1920. Native Americans did not get U.S. citizenship until 1924.
Erasing history has always been a part of how Americans have dealt with the atrocities of the past. In 1921, white citizens set fire to homes, businesses and churches in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in an area known as Black Wall Steet. Historians estimate that as many as 300 people were killed and 10,000 blacks left homeless. In 2020, a piece on “60 Minutes” revealed that this significant event is still not taught in Oklahoma’s schools. While some want to maintain a Norman Rockwell view of America, our nation has begun a long-overdue and very welcome awakening into its own history.
As author Adam Hochschild observes in his prologue, history textbooks typically include a chapter about the First World War, with the following chapter recalling the Roaring Twenties. His recent book, American Midnight, is about the darkest period of America’s twentieth century that occurred between 1917 and 1921 during Woodrow Wilson’s second term. Sadly, knowledge of this ugly and shameful period has largely disappeared from our national memory, though it seems painfully relevant to America in the 2020s.
― “This book is about what’s missing between these two chapters. It is a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans, and far more that is not marked by commemorative plaques, museum exhibits, or Ken Burns documentaries. It is the story of how a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became an excuse for a war against democracy at home.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
Woodrow Wilson came into office with the goal to keep America out of World War I. However, in 1917 America was forced to become involved after continued German submarine attacks. In justifying his decision to take the country to war in Europe, Wilson appealed to the highest ideals of freedom, self-determination, and peace. But almost overnight, his quest to establish democracy abroad unleashed a wave of intolerance and violence at home. Wilson pushed for new laws that criminalized core First Amendment speech. Wilson signed the Espionage Act shortly after the U.S. entered the war in 1917. Later, the Sedition Act of 1918 imposed harsh penalties for a wide range of dissenting speech. These two laws, directed at socialists, pacifists, and other anti-war activists, allowed restrictions on freedom of speech that were draconian by today’s standards. What followed in the U.S. is shocking to say the least.
― “Fear that dissenters might resist the draft, or otherwise thwart the war effort, provided the excuse for a relentless erosion of civil liberties that Americans had long taken for granted.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Once America joined the war effort, Wilson had no apparent misgivings about imprisoning dissident Americans. One prominent individual who was jailed was the labor champion and Socialist Party candidate who had run against him for president in 1912, Eugene V. Debs. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a speech in Canton Ohio that the Wilson administration interpreted as discouraging participation in the war. Many conscientious objectors were not just jailed, they were treated brutally.
― “And no one was reporting from the prison at Camp Funston, Kansas, where conscientious objectors to military service were shackled to their cell bars on tiptoe for eight hours a day.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Wilson allowed his postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, to vigorously enforce the Espionage Act. Burleson ordered local postmasters to report any illegal or suspicious material that they found. He banned any antiwar material from being delivered by the Post Office. He denied mailing privileges to 74 left-wing and pacifist magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, forcing several widely read publications out of business. In one particularly egregious act, he banned a publication called the Gaelic American because it favored Irish independence from America’s ally Britain.
The anti-union response was particularly fierce. The primary target was the Industrial Workers of the World, a union that tried to organize workers ignored by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Consisting largely of women, Blacks and unskilled workers, the unionists were known as “Wobblies.” They were perceived as a grave threat to the country after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917.
― “Other forces also fed the violence, and most of them are still with us; a long-simmering nativism and hatred of immigrants; and, finally, a nostalgia among white southerners—and many northerners—for the days when Blacks ‘knew their place.’”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, stirred up fears of a possibly revolutionary uprising of socialists and trade unionists. When Palmer decided he needed a new “Radical Division” in the Justice Department, he chose the young J. Edgar Hoover to lead it. The two men devised a plan to round up and imprison thousands of new American immigrants, left-wing activists, conscientious objectors, Blacks and union members. Many of the recent immigrants were deported without due process of law. Ordinary citizens were harassed for even the most minor infractions.
― “A Minnesota pastor was tarred and feathered because people overheard him praying in German with a dying woman.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Joining the federal government and law enforcement agencies in this assault on civil liberties was the American Protective League, an organization of private citizens numbering about 250,000. The APL conducted numerous raids and engaged in surveillance activities aimed at anyone who failed to register for the draft, German immigrants, pacifists, and Jews. Law enforcement would stand aside as APL members formed lynch mobs, burned Black churches, and executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Woodrow Wilson presided over this whole toxic brew. Because a majority of states passed copycat laws in the wake of the Espionage Act, no one has ever counted the total number of people jailed under such laws. The anti-immigrant mentality of this dark period was precisely what stopped the U.S. from sheltering those trying to escape from Nazi occupied Europe.
― “It never seems to have occurred to Wilson that the censorship, political imprisonments, and harsh crackdown on antiwar dissidents he had presided over for nearly two years had not nurtured a climate of enthusiasm for a peace-oriented, international idea like the league.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
― “But the paranoia ignited by the First World War empowered government intelligence agencies, both military and civilian, to do their own spying and infiltrating.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Adam Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost) provides a fascinating account of one of the darkest and most shameful periods in our nation’s history. The book is exceptionally well written and well organized.
― “Why were so many Americans in 1917, especially men, so passionate about going on the attack—not just against the Germans but also against imagined domestic enemies? Their fervor partly came from yet another front at home: a long-growing tension over the changing positions of men and women.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
January 10, 2024
I have to echo the sentiments of another reviewer, Brendan Dowd, who basically indicated that injecting one’s own personal political ideology and comparing historical episodes to recent topical subject matter is never a good thing.
While I learned some fascinating details about one of the darkest chapters in America’s history (the period from 1917-1921) where Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Poles, Socialists, Unionists, Bolsheviks, German-Americans and more were made pariahs in a burgeoning “mass formation hypnosis” type fervor that was sweeping the nation (resulting in the ratification of the “Espionage Act” and the “Sedition Act”), interjecting personally held polemical insights by the author is abjectly egregious and is just plain disingenuous to the reader.
When I’m reading about the Woodrow Wilson administration and how he and his cabinet handled dissension in the populace, I don’t want to read ONE WORD about George Soros or Donald Trump—to say nothing of “Climate Change”. It’s completely uncalled for and taints and otherwise fascinating subject. That more reviewers have not harped on this is just plain baffling to me.
While I learned some fascinating details about one of the darkest chapters in America’s history (the period from 1917-1921) where Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Poles, Socialists, Unionists, Bolsheviks, German-Americans and more were made pariahs in a burgeoning “mass formation hypnosis” type fervor that was sweeping the nation (resulting in the ratification of the “Espionage Act” and the “Sedition Act”), interjecting personally held polemical insights by the author is abjectly egregious and is just plain disingenuous to the reader.
When I’m reading about the Woodrow Wilson administration and how he and his cabinet handled dissension in the populace, I don’t want to read ONE WORD about George Soros or Donald Trump—to say nothing of “Climate Change”. It’s completely uncalled for and taints and otherwise fascinating subject. That more reviewers have not harped on this is just plain baffling to me.
August 17, 2022
This is an excellent, well-researched and documented survey of the ways Woodrow Wilson and his appointees used political power to silence, kill, and injure American citizens and residents who opposed American intervention in the First World War. Wilson and his allies used brutal tactics to suppress First Amendment rights across the country, engaging in strike-breaking, infiltrating unions, wire-tapping civilian lines, and more. I think everyone needs to read this, especially as efforts to suppress free speech continue.
December 1, 2023
If you think things are bad now, go back to 1920.
This historical book on a sliver of American history, 1917 through about 1923, is absolutely vital to read and understand America itself. Just this small window into American history will teach why American culture and politics is so insane and how incredibly authoritarian and downright fascist America has been. This tale involves largely Woodrow Wilson but a cast of many famous figures like J. Edgar Hoover, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldan, Kate Richards O-Hare and, Mitchel Palmer and many more.
While Woodrow Wilson is thought of as a progressive President because of helping labor laws, women’s suffrage, income tax, League of Nations and puting Brandies into the Supreme Court. But, Wilson also ushered in an age of extreme draconian measures that resulted in an enormous war propaganda machine along with harsh limits on free speech. Wilson oversaw the era of the Espionage and Sedition act which were basically created to throw war dissenters in jail. And thrown in jail they were. During this time in America, if you said anything that was derogatory about the draft or America’s decision to enter WWI, you were literally imprisoned. Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years for his 1918 Canton speech. Let me repeat: he went to prison for 10 years for giving a speech. Here’s the words that got him thrown in prison:
The working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
Look, I know things are nuts in 2023 America, but no one is going to prison for saying something that by today’s standards is quaint. 100 years ago, you were jailed or lynched simply for being who you are or having slightly non-mainstream opinions. This was an era where anti-bolshevik and red scare panic literally drove federal policy across the board and provided the seeds for how the federal government would behave for the next 100 years. A huge realization I had reading this book is that the American federal government agencies and policies were quite literally borne from anti-leftist and anti-immigration fear mongering. Conservatives today who decry federal government intervention seem to lack the understanding that the federal government is extremely conservative to begin with.
This book goes into such detailed history during this time. The author covers Wilson’s rationale for entering the war which was because German U-boats sank “innocent” American ships. What the American propaganda press didn’t mention is that the American vessels had munitions for the alleys and so were inviting attack. The US victimized itself to engage in war profiteering and to “spread democracy”. SOUNDS FAMILIAR. Not much has changed in 100 years of American war mongering. During this time the National Guard was routinely used to battle labor strikes where many workers died. Workers during this time enjoyed few federal protections. People were terrorized by the employers into using their wages to buy government war bonds.
There were scores of white riots, literal lyncing and terrorism against black people everywhere especially Chicago and St. Louis. Members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) or “Wobblies” were seen as enemies of the state. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General, issued many raids against anarchists and socialists and imprisoned many people simply for expressing free speech. Teachers were fired for speaking out against the war and their students were encouraged to rat on them. The American Protective League (APL) was essentially a paramilitary group across 600 cities that did lots of the dirty work fighting anarchists and “German spies” for the federal government. The PostMaster General flagrantly stopped any publications that had any leftist leanings or anti-war sympathies at all.
What is described in this book is an era of deep government surveillance, censorship and harsh violations of the constitution and civil and labor rights. This is America. The legacy is entrenched to this day. Yes, civil liberty rights are way better but it’s taken 100 years for the meager results since then and the exact same crap is going on right now. People talk about the deep state and this book is describing the real deep state: the out in the open harsh restrictions of civil and labor rights. The exact same forces are still at play right now in 2023. It is astonishing how some things do not change.
Anyway, this was an amazing read. I highly recommend it.
This historical book on a sliver of American history, 1917 through about 1923, is absolutely vital to read and understand America itself. Just this small window into American history will teach why American culture and politics is so insane and how incredibly authoritarian and downright fascist America has been. This tale involves largely Woodrow Wilson but a cast of many famous figures like J. Edgar Hoover, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldan, Kate Richards O-Hare and, Mitchel Palmer and many more.
While Woodrow Wilson is thought of as a progressive President because of helping labor laws, women’s suffrage, income tax, League of Nations and puting Brandies into the Supreme Court. But, Wilson also ushered in an age of extreme draconian measures that resulted in an enormous war propaganda machine along with harsh limits on free speech. Wilson oversaw the era of the Espionage and Sedition act which were basically created to throw war dissenters in jail. And thrown in jail they were. During this time in America, if you said anything that was derogatory about the draft or America’s decision to enter WWI, you were literally imprisoned. Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years for his 1918 Canton speech. Let me repeat: he went to prison for 10 years for giving a speech. Here’s the words that got him thrown in prison:
The working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
Look, I know things are nuts in 2023 America, but no one is going to prison for saying something that by today’s standards is quaint. 100 years ago, you were jailed or lynched simply for being who you are or having slightly non-mainstream opinions. This was an era where anti-bolshevik and red scare panic literally drove federal policy across the board and provided the seeds for how the federal government would behave for the next 100 years. A huge realization I had reading this book is that the American federal government agencies and policies were quite literally borne from anti-leftist and anti-immigration fear mongering. Conservatives today who decry federal government intervention seem to lack the understanding that the federal government is extremely conservative to begin with.
This book goes into such detailed history during this time. The author covers Wilson’s rationale for entering the war which was because German U-boats sank “innocent” American ships. What the American propaganda press didn’t mention is that the American vessels had munitions for the alleys and so were inviting attack. The US victimized itself to engage in war profiteering and to “spread democracy”. SOUNDS FAMILIAR. Not much has changed in 100 years of American war mongering. During this time the National Guard was routinely used to battle labor strikes where many workers died. Workers during this time enjoyed few federal protections. People were terrorized by the employers into using their wages to buy government war bonds.
There were scores of white riots, literal lyncing and terrorism against black people everywhere especially Chicago and St. Louis. Members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) or “Wobblies” were seen as enemies of the state. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General, issued many raids against anarchists and socialists and imprisoned many people simply for expressing free speech. Teachers were fired for speaking out against the war and their students were encouraged to rat on them. The American Protective League (APL) was essentially a paramilitary group across 600 cities that did lots of the dirty work fighting anarchists and “German spies” for the federal government. The PostMaster General flagrantly stopped any publications that had any leftist leanings or anti-war sympathies at all.
What is described in this book is an era of deep government surveillance, censorship and harsh violations of the constitution and civil and labor rights. This is America. The legacy is entrenched to this day. Yes, civil liberty rights are way better but it’s taken 100 years for the meager results since then and the exact same crap is going on right now. People talk about the deep state and this book is describing the real deep state: the out in the open harsh restrictions of civil and labor rights. The exact same forces are still at play right now in 2023. It is astonishing how some things do not change.
Anyway, this was an amazing read. I highly recommend it.
August 19, 2022
American Midnight by Adam Hochschild presents both an unsettling period in our history as well as a cautionary tale for our current times.
Suppression of free speech, violence toward anyone not agreeing with the faux-patriots of the day, championing big business over workers to the point of violence, increased racism and antisemitism. These sound like I am talking about current events but I'm highlighting the US during the period covered in the book, 1917-1921. While the history is fascinating, how it speaks to today is important, if listened to.
Hochschild makes clear he is biased, biased against unjustified violence and suppression, hatred of people for nothing more than their race or religion. In other words, anyone who complains about bias as a negative of the book must find those aspects unobjectionable. Even a fake historian complained about a small part (a couple of sentences) on the grounds that it would have been just fine in those days. First, that is just wrong. There were many people, especially former US military men who still bristled so soon after the Civil War at the sight of the Confederate flag used as anything other than a memorial for fallen soldiers of the war. Add that this was shortly after the big "lost cause" push that promoted a false understanding of the war and of the confederate south and the mention of a comment about a Confederate flag is indeed a justifiable one. Especially since the "compliment" was that it was an "honorable flag." The quote, in context, is about that General acting like he was campaigning for office and playing up very specific constituencies. So anyone who makes such a dog-whistle filled complaint about the book is simply showing their own disgraceful colors. Ignore the poor little thing, he is compensating for, um, shortcomings.
This extremely well-researched book reads almost like an epic novel. The facts are weaved into a narrative, with the historical characters demonstrating who and what they are through their very actions (or inactions) and words. Some history nonfiction can easily be read either as a whole or in chunks as the urge strikes. This one compels the reader to keep turning pages so is like a novel in that respect as well.
Highly recommended for (actual) history buffs as well as those who want to fill in the many gaps of the typical history taught in schools. Also for those who want to look to the past to help understand and react to the present. Not as highly recommended for the small-brained who think what happened then and what is happening now is fine and anyone pointing out the unethical and immoral ways are overly biased.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Suppression of free speech, violence toward anyone not agreeing with the faux-patriots of the day, championing big business over workers to the point of violence, increased racism and antisemitism. These sound like I am talking about current events but I'm highlighting the US during the period covered in the book, 1917-1921. While the history is fascinating, how it speaks to today is important, if listened to.
Hochschild makes clear he is biased, biased against unjustified violence and suppression, hatred of people for nothing more than their race or religion. In other words, anyone who complains about bias as a negative of the book must find those aspects unobjectionable. Even a fake historian complained about a small part (a couple of sentences) on the grounds that it would have been just fine in those days. First, that is just wrong. There were many people, especially former US military men who still bristled so soon after the Civil War at the sight of the Confederate flag used as anything other than a memorial for fallen soldiers of the war. Add that this was shortly after the big "lost cause" push that promoted a false understanding of the war and of the confederate south and the mention of a comment about a Confederate flag is indeed a justifiable one. Especially since the "compliment" was that it was an "honorable flag." The quote, in context, is about that General acting like he was campaigning for office and playing up very specific constituencies. So anyone who makes such a dog-whistle filled complaint about the book is simply showing their own disgraceful colors. Ignore the poor little thing, he is compensating for, um, shortcomings.
This extremely well-researched book reads almost like an epic novel. The facts are weaved into a narrative, with the historical characters demonstrating who and what they are through their very actions (or inactions) and words. Some history nonfiction can easily be read either as a whole or in chunks as the urge strikes. This one compels the reader to keep turning pages so is like a novel in that respect as well.
Highly recommended for (actual) history buffs as well as those who want to fill in the many gaps of the typical history taught in schools. Also for those who want to look to the past to help understand and react to the present. Not as highly recommended for the small-brained who think what happened then and what is happening now is fine and anyone pointing out the unethical and immoral ways are overly biased.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Read
May 22, 2024O Columbia, who are you? I’ve lived my life learning ever more uncomfortable pieces about your character and your past. And now I believe the land of the free and the brave should equally be considered the land of the oppressor and the intolerant. How do we process this duality of good and evil among our selves?
As with King Leopold’s Ghost, Mr. Hochschild succeeds at evoking intense emotion for inexcusable wrongs rendered through time – focusing here on a dozen or so notably bad actors who used our entry in the First World War to organize and conduct systems of repression targeted against innocent Americans that lasted well into the 1920s. His journalistic style, along with a notable political bias, caught my attention to a greater degree with this work, which diminished the strength of his message. He seemed to focus heavily on the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization I had previously considered a footnote to history, another minor criticism. That acknowledged, whatever admiration I formerly held for President Woodrow Wilson, once an estimable academic who was surely destined to nourish national prosperity and international goodwill, has been replaced with antipathy, both for his actions at home and abroad. Erasing a myth requires effort.
This era was ripe for the emergence of demagoguery and scare tactics – to keep virtuous white Protestants safe from the scheming, dark forces that lurked in the shadows plotting to overthrow our government, pillage our property, and rape our women and children if left unchecked. Except who does history suggest had real reason for worry? Why that would be the innocent residents of Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Panama, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines, Hispaniola, Cambodia, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Somalia, Laos, and Micronesia – and that’s only the short, short list of destructive American direct interventions. Then, too, the tribes of Africa, raided for enslavement across the Atlantic, their offspring, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas all had excellent cause to worry. For the latter, Paul Revere’s legendary warning, “The British are coming!” takes on a different meaning, issued a couple centuries too late. The fact is that our fears have been grossly misplaced, for we have given others plenty to fear while this country has been free from hostile invasion for more than two hundred years. Further, the one actual coup attempt, that of 6 January 2020, came not from a subversive communist or socialist plot, but from the invitation of the unpunished President of the United States of America – Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and Kate Richards O’Hare knew a far less forgiving course of justice.
Some may gaze upon our revered garden and wonder for the broad patches of decay and desert, the result of poisons wantonly spread so widely through the decades. “How did this happen?” we may then ask. Because we allowed it to happen, and before our very eyes, that’s how.
I’m left to consider the origin of my anger – likely a result of the scant admittance we allow for our sordid history, where the worst behaviors seem easily forgotten. Am I overreacting? I don’t think so. Since every nation has a dark past, America’s is of particular concern because it’s my home. I’d like for that place to be deserving of lasting honor and respect. I'd like for us to acknowledge our errors and work to do better. Is all that too much to ask?
As with King Leopold’s Ghost, Mr. Hochschild succeeds at evoking intense emotion for inexcusable wrongs rendered through time – focusing here on a dozen or so notably bad actors who used our entry in the First World War to organize and conduct systems of repression targeted against innocent Americans that lasted well into the 1920s. His journalistic style, along with a notable political bias, caught my attention to a greater degree with this work, which diminished the strength of his message. He seemed to focus heavily on the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization I had previously considered a footnote to history, another minor criticism. That acknowledged, whatever admiration I formerly held for President Woodrow Wilson, once an estimable academic who was surely destined to nourish national prosperity and international goodwill, has been replaced with antipathy, both for his actions at home and abroad. Erasing a myth requires effort.
This era was ripe for the emergence of demagoguery and scare tactics – to keep virtuous white Protestants safe from the scheming, dark forces that lurked in the shadows plotting to overthrow our government, pillage our property, and rape our women and children if left unchecked. Except who does history suggest had real reason for worry? Why that would be the innocent residents of Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Panama, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines, Hispaniola, Cambodia, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Somalia, Laos, and Micronesia – and that’s only the short, short list of destructive American direct interventions. Then, too, the tribes of Africa, raided for enslavement across the Atlantic, their offspring, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas all had excellent cause to worry. For the latter, Paul Revere’s legendary warning, “The British are coming!” takes on a different meaning, issued a couple centuries too late. The fact is that our fears have been grossly misplaced, for we have given others plenty to fear while this country has been free from hostile invasion for more than two hundred years. Further, the one actual coup attempt, that of 6 January 2020, came not from a subversive communist or socialist plot, but from the invitation of the unpunished President of the United States of America – Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and Kate Richards O’Hare knew a far less forgiving course of justice.
Some may gaze upon our revered garden and wonder for the broad patches of decay and desert, the result of poisons wantonly spread so widely through the decades. “How did this happen?” we may then ask. Because we allowed it to happen, and before our very eyes, that’s how.
I’m left to consider the origin of my anger – likely a result of the scant admittance we allow for our sordid history, where the worst behaviors seem easily forgotten. Am I overreacting? I don’t think so. Since every nation has a dark past, America’s is of particular concern because it’s my home. I’d like for that place to be deserving of lasting honor and respect. I'd like for us to acknowledge our errors and work to do better. Is all that too much to ask?
April 30, 2023
This is a non-fic historical account about the United States during the years 1917-1921, which saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for March-April 2023 at Non Fiction Book Club group.
The book details how the Wilson administration pioneered the police raids, surveillance operations, internment camps, strikebreaking, and backed vigilantism, which aimed at anarchists, socialist and anti-conscription activists, as well as people of German and Russian [as the empire, not a nation] descent. There is a strong quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Supreme Court justice during this period:
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe . . . that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. . . We should be eternally vigilant against the attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
This quote largely describes my feelings about the book, the facts it supplies and its attitudes toward participants. For what is depicted is rightfully called “Midnight”, the darkest hour. People are beaten threatened and killed not only for their beliefs but because a band of thugs decided to play policemen. The book stresses how the Wilson administration drew on America’s experience in the Philippines, Mexico, and other far-flung parts of the world, to deploy an unbridled force against dissent at home, leading to political repression and the suspension of civil liberties. For example, using drowning torture comes from the Philippines - the “water cure” used by the US army on supposed guerrillas.
The book is biased, but most works are, it is just that we, readers, more often spot bias if it doesn’t coincide with ours. Say, it stresses people of German descent were threatened and beaten for speaking German after the US entered the war in 1917. While I fully agree that people shouldn’t be punished for what their native tongue is, I can tell you a few recent stories from Ukraine where people are traumatized by e.g. a salesperson speaking to them in Russian, even after they asked such a person to switch to Ukrainian – there are no beatings but what I want to stress that the war causes a lot of trauma and this book omits even its possibility. Or a lot is said about the Wobblies, i.e. members of the Industrial Workers of the World, but nothing about the fact that the IWW wasn’t a traditional trade union, e.g. it actively backed strikes by non-members – they were more political activists w/o a party. Or while often illegal and currently seemed too harsh reactions against communists, socialists and anarchists are depicted as purely negative [and they often were] one should get into shoes of a person of 1919 – there are multiple reports about Bolshevik terror and atrocities, communists got to power in Germany (Spartakists) and Hungary (Kun Béla) and the world is about to turn upside down – we now know it hasn’t but this 20/20 backsight shouldn’t make us feel morally superior to people actually living and experiencing this.
As a side note, the book barely touches on some themes regarding WW1 outside the US, but where it does, there are also biases. E.g. its description of the peace of Brest-Litovsk and events on the territories of the former Russian empire are under Soviet/Russian narrative, i.e. no nations trying to throw away Russian yoke but a civil war, etc. It also follows (very briefly) that the US entry to WW1 was caused by business/rich interests, a socialist narrative, which I can argue against with multiple facts…
Overall, a lot of interesting facts, even if sometimes I disagree with their interpretation. Terror is never a solution, and its color doesn’t matter.
The book details how the Wilson administration pioneered the police raids, surveillance operations, internment camps, strikebreaking, and backed vigilantism, which aimed at anarchists, socialist and anti-conscription activists, as well as people of German and Russian [as the empire, not a nation] descent. There is a strong quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Supreme Court justice during this period:
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe . . . that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. . . We should be eternally vigilant against the attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
This quote largely describes my feelings about the book, the facts it supplies and its attitudes toward participants. For what is depicted is rightfully called “Midnight”, the darkest hour. People are beaten threatened and killed not only for their beliefs but because a band of thugs decided to play policemen. The book stresses how the Wilson administration drew on America’s experience in the Philippines, Mexico, and other far-flung parts of the world, to deploy an unbridled force against dissent at home, leading to political repression and the suspension of civil liberties. For example, using drowning torture comes from the Philippines - the “water cure” used by the US army on supposed guerrillas.
The book is biased, but most works are, it is just that we, readers, more often spot bias if it doesn’t coincide with ours. Say, it stresses people of German descent were threatened and beaten for speaking German after the US entered the war in 1917. While I fully agree that people shouldn’t be punished for what their native tongue is, I can tell you a few recent stories from Ukraine where people are traumatized by e.g. a salesperson speaking to them in Russian, even after they asked such a person to switch to Ukrainian – there are no beatings but what I want to stress that the war causes a lot of trauma and this book omits even its possibility. Or a lot is said about the Wobblies, i.e. members of the Industrial Workers of the World, but nothing about the fact that the IWW wasn’t a traditional trade union, e.g. it actively backed strikes by non-members – they were more political activists w/o a party. Or while often illegal and currently seemed too harsh reactions against communists, socialists and anarchists are depicted as purely negative [and they often were] one should get into shoes of a person of 1919 – there are multiple reports about Bolshevik terror and atrocities, communists got to power in Germany (Spartakists) and Hungary (Kun Béla) and the world is about to turn upside down – we now know it hasn’t but this 20/20 backsight shouldn’t make us feel morally superior to people actually living and experiencing this.
As a side note, the book barely touches on some themes regarding WW1 outside the US, but where it does, there are also biases. E.g. its description of the peace of Brest-Litovsk and events on the territories of the former Russian empire are under Soviet/Russian narrative, i.e. no nations trying to throw away Russian yoke but a civil war, etc. It also follows (very briefly) that the US entry to WW1 was caused by business/rich interests, a socialist narrative, which I can argue against with multiple facts…
Overall, a lot of interesting facts, even if sometimes I disagree with their interpretation. Terror is never a solution, and its color doesn’t matter.
October 16, 2022
There are some gems in this book for take away but also some statements I think I need to drill down on as I think there is a misinterpretation of events. Also, tying it all together with a culmination in the Trump administration is suspect. No fan of Trump, but is that really the key to marketing a history book? I would have preferred an in-depth look at the historical context without tying it to current events to make it relevant in the author's eyes.
December 26, 2022
As an American historian I was aware of this unsavory aspect of our history, but I suspect that for many – probably most – citizens of the United States today the events Hochschild describes will come as a shocking surprise. He does us a service by detailing just how easily calm, clear-thinking, and easy-going men and women can be frightened into becoming angry, scared, and vengeful people.
Hochschild also demonstrates the fragility of democracy – the many ways in which the intricate webs that bind us into a democratic republic can be stretched and sundered – and the incredible courage and witness that some among us nonetheless mange to provide.
Just as the Great War – what we call World War I – was the war that did not have to happen (but, instead, was stumbled into through a combination of blindness and stupidity), so also was it a war in which the United States had no real cause to enter.
While the war itself is not Hochschild’s focus – the vast bulk of the book is concerned with domestic developments during and immediately after it – it of course runs as a constant background context for all that unfolds in its pages.
Hochschild makes it quite clear that although the United States proclaimed itself a “neutral,” it really was not. In fact, it was the steady supply of American manufacturing and agricultural supplies to embattled Britain that allowed the British to continue to fight. Moreover, when the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine attacks on merchant vessels as well in 1917, the United States not only failed to recognize the logic of the German position – they were, after all, attempting to restrict this flow of aid to Great Britain – but also ignored and refused to criticize the British blockade of Germany which was driving millions of Germans toward starvation.
Although the US had warned Germany of the consequences of resuming submarine warfare against “civilian” transports, especially those flying the American flag, our government also turned a blind eye to the fact that many of these same ships, while transporting passengers, also carried munitions and weaponry intended for Great Britain.
Nonetheless, with war fever growing in this country and Germany’s desperate resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson succumbed to these mounting pressures and asked the Congress to declare war.
At this point, I need to add that Woodrow Wilson had been one of my heroes when I was young. I was moved by his soaring rhetoric and believed that if only a peace treaty along the lines of his 14 Points had been adopted – instead of the horrific and unjust one that actually came about – and if the United States had joined the League of Nations, then the horrors of the 1930s may well have not occurred.
While I still believe that about the peace treaty and the League, I now know much more about how flawed a man Woodrow Wilson really was. Not only was he a racist – he endorsed efforts to deny Black people government positions, reimposed segregated workplaces, and sympathized with the “Lost Cause” narrative being spun by Southern historians about the “Noble South” despoiled by the North in the Civil War – but he seemed often blinded by his own ego and little believed in, nor worked to achieve, compromise positions.
And so it was that while he attended the long-drawn-out peace negotiations, almost everything he had proposed in his 14 Points was sacrificed in order to achieve the goal nearest to his heart – the creation of the League of Nations.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, all sorts of ghastly things were happening:
Massive pushbacks against immigration fueled by popular concerns about the dangers of furriners and resentment against “their taking our jobs,” allowed members of Congress, the administration, and Executive Branch – especially the ironically named “Justice” Department and the new bureau that became the FBI – to launch wave after wave of immigrant suppression on the grounds that they represented a distant threat to this country (it was an unfortunate truth that many of the most prominent feared and hated labor organizers and members of the Socialist Party were immigrants);
A wave of strikes by all sorts of workers, including miners, railroad and steel laborers, etc. led to violent reactions against work-stoppages by hired thugs supported by government law-enforcement agencies. Unions were all tarred with the same accusations of being radical, anti-American, and for harming the average citizen through their actions.
A resurgence of racial violence against Black people, ranging from relatively isolated instances of harassment and discrimination to savage beatings, lynchings, and mob violence that were last seen in the years immediately following the Civil War. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan reached record levels of membership in the 1920s.
Censorship of publications, refusing the privileges of mail to publications, and imprisoning writers, editors, and publishers, all in the name of suppressing disloyalty.
And, as a consequence, growing self-censorship on the part of writers and public figures.
This is a book that all who wish to be educated American citizens ought to read – and ponder.
Just like the mistaken phrase It can’t happen here, so also is it untrue that This will never happen here again! If you are tempted to think such things, well, then you haven’t looked around much lately, have you?
A sober book, although approachably written and compellingly argued.
January 13, 2024
Yet one more in a long line of history books I've read these past few years that reinforces just how much I don't know about history. Even though I already knew a bit about this time period and the events mentioned in this book, there was still so much that was brand new to me. Books like this make it glaringly obvious how little we learn from our history.
November 18, 2022
I appreciated how this book highlighted a period that is often skipped over, that of America's involvement in and the immediate aftermath of World War I, and what was happening in American life during that era. The cast of characters (or rather, historic figures) is large and ranges from people like President Woodrow Wilson, activist Emma Goldman, young J. Edgar Hoover, and socialist Eugene Debs. If this history has a flaw, it's that the author seems to be emphasizing how relevant the themes of this period are to today's culture and politics, rather than just allowing this to be apparent to the reader. Overall, however, I did find this history to be insightful and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in American history.
February 27, 2023
I really tried. There are many instances of real intellectual and amply cited historical rigor, and then the author slides into time travel and conflation to current events. While I somewhat agree with his political leanings, I can’t in all good conscience recommend this as narrative non-fiction. This is political opinion, plain and simple.
November 19, 2022
I did not actually finish this one. I had about 2 hours left. It was dry and one sidedly biased toward modern politics. Personally, I just want the facts and beliefs of the past, not any embellishments by the author. Disappointing.
April 12, 2024
I picked this book up on a whim and found it remarkable. I doubt high school and entry-level college courses are going deep on World War I and the social labor movements of the 19teens. Or at least, they weren't when I was in high school and college. But this is nearly essential reading - suppression of labor and anti-union politics, war-hawking, fear of immigrants and socialism, a crackdown on free press - it all echoes in today.
March 9, 2023
If you were of the opinion that Woodrow Wilson was a terrible president, then this will confirm your bias. While Hochschild points out some of the good things he did, like wanting to pass child labor laws, the dark stuff is still....dark. However, the author's attempt to bring this period of American history to popular consciousness, while remarkable in content was unremarkable in execution.
It is a straightforward account that mostly focuses on the horrific usage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts-still with us in amended form-and race riots (one of the worst ones occurred in my state, unfortunately). Thousands of people were jailed in terrible conditions for their opinions. The Republican and Democratic parties were not hardline as they are now so there was a range of individuals targeted: Republicans, Democrats, and especially Socialists. I have severe disagreements with all of these parties (I even have severe disagreements with my own party, lol), but it is so important to uphold the First Amendment for exactly the reason this book shows. Aside from this, newspapers were shut down, lynchings occurred frequently...the narrative bleeds together into a swarm of wretchedness. It is impossible to read this without thinking of numerous occasions today from both the left and the right to suppress free speech.
While he doesn't spend a great deal of time on this, he does veer into relating this period to events of today. It is most interesting that Hochschild hails from the left wing of the American political spectrum and his prescription is more government because overreach is exactly the problem the entire book portrays. He says, "A more equitable distribution of wealth; so that there will not be tens of millions of people economically losing ground and looking for scapegoats to blame." I am open to this argument in general, but he doesn’t make it. I desire as much as anyone for there to be less economic inequality, I am just greatly suspicious that the government is the avenue through which to accomplish it.
He ends by encouraging tolerance of opinions that differ and, considering the need to become more aware of the history of our country (one of the prescriptions I agree with), the book is a valuable read...just a mixed bag. He doesn't make a strong economic case and the writing is mediocre. Hochschild just does not achieve anything close to great prose, though the material alone is enough to keep one riveted.
All things considered? It is worth reading.
Personal: I can only listen to music while reading if it is easily comprehensible. I decided to read this to the accompaniment of 1920s jazz (of which I am an enthusiast; no knowledge as I have of classical) and the juxtaposition of reading this material with it in the background was fascinating. It is mostly upbeat, and just seemed to clash with the entire narrative of what was happening to black people. It made me want to research this music more.
It is a straightforward account that mostly focuses on the horrific usage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts-still with us in amended form-and race riots (one of the worst ones occurred in my state, unfortunately). Thousands of people were jailed in terrible conditions for their opinions. The Republican and Democratic parties were not hardline as they are now so there was a range of individuals targeted: Republicans, Democrats, and especially Socialists. I have severe disagreements with all of these parties (I even have severe disagreements with my own party, lol), but it is so important to uphold the First Amendment for exactly the reason this book shows. Aside from this, newspapers were shut down, lynchings occurred frequently...the narrative bleeds together into a swarm of wretchedness. It is impossible to read this without thinking of numerous occasions today from both the left and the right to suppress free speech.
While he doesn't spend a great deal of time on this, he does veer into relating this period to events of today. It is most interesting that Hochschild hails from the left wing of the American political spectrum and his prescription is more government because overreach is exactly the problem the entire book portrays. He says, "A more equitable distribution of wealth; so that there will not be tens of millions of people economically losing ground and looking for scapegoats to blame." I am open to this argument in general, but he doesn’t make it. I desire as much as anyone for there to be less economic inequality, I am just greatly suspicious that the government is the avenue through which to accomplish it.
He ends by encouraging tolerance of opinions that differ and, considering the need to become more aware of the history of our country (one of the prescriptions I agree with), the book is a valuable read...just a mixed bag. He doesn't make a strong economic case and the writing is mediocre. Hochschild just does not achieve anything close to great prose, though the material alone is enough to keep one riveted.
All things considered? It is worth reading.
Personal: I can only listen to music while reading if it is easily comprehensible. I decided to read this to the accompaniment of 1920s jazz (of which I am an enthusiast; no knowledge as I have of classical) and the juxtaposition of reading this material with it in the background was fascinating. It is mostly upbeat, and just seemed to clash with the entire narrative of what was happening to black people. It made me want to research this music more.
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