American Midnight

Historian Adam Hochschild examines the years between 1917 and 1921, when the United States' entry into World War I triggered an unprecedented assault on civil liberties. Drawing on archival records and surveillance files, Hochschild traces how a war fought to "make the world safe for democracy" (32) became the pretext for mass imprisonments, vigilante violence, press censorship, racial terror, and government propaganda, and how the era's repressive currents have recurred throughout American life.

The book opens in November 1917 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where detectives raided the local headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a militant labor union whose members were known as Wobblies. Eleven men were arrested on trumped-up vagrancy charges and convicted; bailiffs then seized six more in the courtroom. All 17 prisoners were intercepted by masked vigilantes called the Knights of Liberty, who stripped, whipped, tarred, and feathered them before sending them barefoot into the freezing darkness.

Hochschild turns to President Woodrow Wilson, whose April 2, 1917, address to Congress requesting a declaration of war against Germany marked the beginning of this era. Wilson was a figure of deep contradictions: the last president of the Progressive Era, yet also a southerner whose father preached that the Bible sanctified slavery. Wilson framed the conflict in moral terms, but Hochschild exposes the economic forces driving the decision: American industry had been booming from Allied munitions purchases, and entering the war was the only way to extend further credits and avert a financial panic.

Congress voted for war on April 6. The war generated staggering corporate profits: Du Pont quadrupled its assets, and US Steel's annual income increased more than tenfold. The government moved swiftly to crush dissent. The Espionage Act of June 1917 imposed penalties of up to 20 years for interference with the war effort, and the Sedition Act of 1918 made it criminal to utter disloyal or abusive language about the government. Postmaster General Albert Burleson gained the power to declare any publication "unmailable" and targeted the socialist press with particular zeal, eventually silencing virtually all of it. The American Protective League (APL), a vigilante auxiliary of the Justice Department with over 250,000 members, assisted in enforcement. The Committee on Public Information (CPI) deployed 75,000 volunteer speakers to deliver pro-war talks nationwide. Major Ralph Van Deman created a Military Intelligence branch that spied on American civilians on an unprecedented scale.

Hochschild follows several individuals whose stories illuminate the era. The anarchist activist Emma Goldman was sentenced to two years for opposing the draft. Socialist leader Eugene Debs delivered an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918 and was sentenced to ten years under the Espionage Act. Kate Richards O'Hare, the Socialist Party's most popular woman speaker, was convicted for an antiwar speech and sentenced to five years. Goldman and O'Hare became close friends in the Missouri state penitentiary.

The war provided business with an excuse to crush organized labor. In Bisbee, Arizona, a vigilante posse rounded up 1,186 striking copper miners at gunpoint and deported them by cattle car into the New Mexico desert. In Butte, Montana, IWW organizer Frank Little was dragged from his boardinghouse by masked men and hanged from a railroad bridge. The government raided all 48 IWW offices nationwide, and the resulting Chicago trial became the largest civilian criminal trial in American history: The jury found all 97 defendants guilty, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis distributed 807 years of prison time.

Racial violence formed another front. In East St. Louis, Illinois, in July 1917, white mobs killed close to 100 Black residents and burned 245 buildings. The army segregated Black draftees into labor battalions and forced the retirement of its highest-ranking Black officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Young. Van Deman's Military Intelligence surveilled Black newspapers and pressured them to moderate their coverage of lynching. Some 450 conscientious objectors who refused all military duties were imprisoned and subjected to brutal treatment including shackling and near-drowning.

The Armistice of November 11, 1918, ended the fighting but not the repression. Wilson traveled to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference but proved an ineffective negotiator against Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, and France's premier, Georges Clemenceau, ultimately accepting harsh terms including severe reparations. The postwar United States erupted: Inflation drove prices up over 40 percent, four million workers went on strike during 1919, and the "Red Summer" brought the worst racial violence in decades. More than 70 Black Americans were lynched, including 17 military veterans. In Chicago, a week of fighting left 38 dead and over 537 injured.

Anarchist bombings in June 1919 became the pretext for expanded repression. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, once considered the cabinet's most progressive member, transformed into a fierce anti-radical crusader and appointed the 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to head the Justice Department's new Radical Division. Hoover orchestrated raids in over a dozen cities on November 7, 1919. On December 21, Goldman and 248 others were deported to Soviet Russia aboard the troopship Buford, with Hoover personally supervising. A larger wave of raids across 30 cities followed on January 2, 1920; several estimates place the total arrested at about 10,000.

Meanwhile, Wilson collapsed. After a 10,000-mile tour to promote the League of Nations, he suffered a massive stroke on October 2, 1919, that left his left side paralyzed. His wife Edith, physician Dr. Cary Grayson, and secretary Joseph Tumulty concealed the president's condition for months, with Edith deciding which documents and visitors reached him.

An unexpected figure then blocked Palmer and Hoover's plans. When the labor secretary went on leave in March 1920, Louis F. Post, the 70-year-old assistant secretary, became acting secretary and took charge of deportation cases. Post invalidated nearly 3,000 arrests, finding that many detainees had been seized without warrants or enrolled in Communist parties without their knowledge. Palmer and Hoover pushed for Post's impeachment, but Post testified before the House Rules Committee for ten hours, revealing that the raids produced only "Three pistols, two of them .22 caliber" (324). The committee abandoned proceedings. Palmer's prediction of a May Day 1920 Communist uprising proved spectacularly wrong, fatally damaging his presidential campaign.

Both Palmer and General Leonard Wood, a career army officer who had deployed troops to crush labor strikes, failed to win their parties' nominations after staking their campaigns on anti-radical crusading. Republicans chose Senator Warren Harding of Ohio, who won in a historic landslide. Debs, running from prison as the Socialist candidate, won over 900,000 votes. Harding released Debs on Christmas Day 1921. O'Hare and her husband Frank organized a "Children's Crusade" of prisoners' families that paraded to Washington, generating press coverage that helped free the remaining political prisoners; the last 36 were released in June 1924.

Hochschild traces the era's lasting consequences. Hoover became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 and held the position for nearly 50 years, using the surveillance infrastructure against targets ranging from Communists to Martin Luther King Jr. Congressman Albert Johnson and his ally, anti-immigrant crusader John B. Trevor, succeeded in passing the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which slashed immigration from southern and eastern Europe by nearly 95 percent and barred Asians entirely. Adolf Hitler praised the law in Mein Kampf, and it later barred untold numbers of Holocaust refugees from the United States. The Socialist Party never recovered, and the IWW shriveled. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 destroyed 35 blocks of Black businesses and homes, and the Ku Klux Klan reached four million members by 1924. Hochschild concludes that the era's toxic currents, including racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for civil liberties, have recurred throughout American history and remain present, requiring constant vigilance.