Editorial Content for American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
In AMERICAN MIDNIGHT, distinguished author Adam Hochschild has recreated a period in American history (1917-1921) when mob violence seemed to dictate national policy, and resistance to war or support of minorities could result in imprisonment or death for American citizens willing to speak out.
With Europe in turmoil, America was on edge, led by the strangely diffident President Woodrow Wilson. Jim Crow laws had become the unspoken rule in the South, where the end of slavery had provoked fear and loathing among many white people, with lynching a tacitly accepted practice (at the rate of a hundred or more per year) and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan a simple (to some, welcome) result. In the northern states, unrest came from the wish of workers for better conditions. The Industrial Workers of the World (aka the Wobblies) were threatening and sometimes carrying out strikes.
"Hochschild deftly weaves the skeins of the many distressing historical facts he has mined, creating a portrait of the US that may awaken many to the need for reexamination of basic values."
Hochschild’s dark tale begins with the arrest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of 11 men lounging in the IWW headquarters. These individuals, who had committed no crime (the formal charge was vagrancy), were sentenced to five years in prison when they proved unable to pay their fines, and six Wobblies in the courtroom were arrested immediately after the trial. Resisting America’s involvement in the war would occasion even more arrests, with figures like anarchist Emma Goldman, socialist Kate Richards O’Hare and union proponent Eugene V. Debs imprisoned for exercising their right to free speech.
Immigration became a hotbed issue, with government policymakers systematically barring European Jews and other undesirables from making the transition to freedom, sometimes imprisoning them at Ellis Island for indeterminate periods before deporting them.
The era’s harsh and ever-increasing rules and regulations would incite a young, zealous J. Edgar Hoover to rise in the ranks and hold sway in the FBI for nearly half a century. Wilson, whom Hochschild describes as “the most enigmatic of American presidents,” participated with European allies in drafting the Treaty of Versailles, which would so stringently punish Germany for its actions that another world war was arguably the eventual consequence.
Hochschild deftly weaves the skeins of the many distressing historical facts he has mined, creating a portrait of the US that may awaken many to the need for reexamination of basic values. He holds that “almost all the tensions that roiled the country” during the period described in his diligently researched work “still linger today.” In order to prevent the sort of overt and subtle chaos and catastrophe depicted from arising again, he advises that we educate ourselves, speak out and carefully maintain basic respect for “civil rights and constitutional safeguards.” And, one might wonder, if that period of our American story was its midnight, whence comes the dawn?
Teaser
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced --- in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons --- a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own.
Promo
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced --- in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons --- a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own.
About the Book
From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threated by war, pandemic and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration and the rights of labor.
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced --- in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.
This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons --- a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover and to an outspoken leftwing agitator --- who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now.
In AMERICAN MIDNIGHT, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country --- and showing how their struggles still guide us today.
Audiobook available, read by Jonathan Todd Ross
