Just before midnight in late December 1917, the governor of California, William D. Stephens, and his wife were startled awake by a blast in the executive mansion. An explosion powerful enough to carve a hole five-feet deep had blown out the whole rear of the mansion. No one was injured, but the governor suffered what would later be called “a nervous shock.” Speaking early that morning to the New York Times, the governor—recently returned from a Southern California trip where he’d given speeches about the patriotic duties of Americans during the war—speculated it was “probably…done with a view to terrorism, the chief weapon of the alien enemy.” The paper of record took him at his word, running its story with the subhead “Police Believe Attempt to Kill California Executive Was Made by Pro-Germans.”
Although it was reported that two men had fled the scene of the bombing, neither suspect, nor evidence of pro-German feeling, was ever found. This wasn’t a problem because ready culprits whose persecution often stood for the enemy within lurked everywhere—be they German, Communist, Jewish, or just plain other—and that makes up a central strand of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, Adam Hochschild’s panoramic history of war hysteria and its aftershock. The boogeyman, in Hochschild’s sights, is the Wobblies, otherwise known as the Industrial Workers of the World, then one of the world’s largest unions and one dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and fiercely opposed to war.
Within a month of the blast, several dozen Wobblies were picked up and thrown in jail to be put on trial. A newly passed law—the Espionage Act, enacted to prevent sabotage and military interference but in effect used to shut down any criticism of the war and weaponized against labor and immigrants—would make them easier to try. Four of those picked up would die in prison of the influenza pandemic, which would ultimately claim nearly 675,000 lives in the United States. The remaining Wobblies eventually stood trial in January 1919, and 46 were convicted in less than an hour. All but a few were sent off to a maximum security prison in Leavenworth, Kansas—even though the war by that point was officially over.
Hochschild’s book, which traces how a war abroad led to another at home, is a masterpiece of storytelling. It is unusual among World War I domestic histories for the way it connects the violence of previous U.S. wars to what a country did to its own citizens and residents in the name of starting a new war. American Midnight is also a bracing read at a time when people are being jailed for simply exercising their right to free speech, often against the actions of unpopular wars abroad. So many lessons this book imparts relate to our present moment, especially because it tells a story about how under the guise of war, in an era of rising inflation, nativist forces become ever easier to unleash and ever harder to control. Men engorged by power find others seeking it.
The truth of the matter is that before 1917, when American Midnight begins, most Americans did not support the war. It was viewed as a European problem, one that became a U.S. one when Germany began to torpedo ships carrying Americans (and weapons in their hulls that were being shipped to allies). Hochschild’s book reveals that in response to this rising fever, a group of men at the heart of the government pounced on the opportunity to go to war and to conduct some handy side errands against their favorite enemies with the powers and unity that war brings.
It should be said that the attitudes these men carried were not abnormal. Anti-German sentiment, which led to hilarious things, like calling the hamburger the liberty sandwich, and less amusing things, like the arrest of three Kentucky men for speaking in the privacy of their own business, were easily stoked. “This is a nation,” Theodore Roosevelt thundered, “not a polyglot boarding house,” in the buildup to war. The United States had just completed a half century of violent repression, both at home in Reconstruction and during the Indian Wars and in conflicts abroad, such as the Philippine War.
Many of the actors at the heart of American Midnight were veterans of such campaigns. Albert Burleson, the nation’s postmaster general and censor in chief, who interrupted thousands of letters, parcels, and publications, was the son of a Confederate soldier. One of his first acts as postmaster general in 1913 had been to segregate the workforce. Not surprisingly, he also stepped on Black periodicals and anything in a foreign language—each publisher was required to provide a translation of its paper to the government for approval before mailing. He was aided in such efforts by opportunists and bigots, like Albert Johnson, the congressman from Washington State who would become the chief supporter of the Immigration Act of 1924.
However, driving these events was Ralph Van Deman, an army veteran who is often credited as the father of military intelligence. He was a man so earnest about his work that he continued it after retirement, spying on and harassing leftist Americans until his death.
American Midnight chronicles how these men and others unleashed a crackdown on American lives as broad as it was deep. At the center of this cosmos of malignant actors is an unlikely dark star—president Woodrow Wilson. A former college professor and president of Princeton University, often called the schoolmaster, Wilson evolved in the throes of power, and this development forms the melody to Hochschild’s portrait of nativist forces stoked by the full backing of the U.S. government.
The strength of this story comes from Hochschild’s demonstration that Wilson’s evolution might have been less a true transformation and more him acting in public as the person he always had been in private. The son of a Presbyterian minister and raised in Virginia, he was known to tell “darky” stories to fellow Southern members of his cabinet, Hochschild reminds. The author doesn’t specify which members of that cabinet, but surely one of them was Attorney General Thomas Gregory. In September 1917, Wilson sent Gregory a copy of the People’s Counselor, “an obscure Chicago antiwar newspaper that had provoked his ire,” saying, “I would very much like you seriously to consider whether publications like the enclosed do not form a sufficient basis for a trial for treason…. One conviction would probably scotch a great many snakes.” Gregory made sure that the publisher of the paper was arrested and indicted.
Wilson, Gregory, Van Deman, and Burleson were able to do such things not merely because of their positions, but because the government had given them incredibly powerful tools: the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which swing in tandem across this book like brutal levers to pry activists or foreign-born citizens from their homes and send them to jail. American Midnight does not overemphasize the passage of these bills, because they were not, in terms of numbers, heavily contested, and those who fought against them, such as Wisconsin Senator Bob La Follette or former socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs, were made to pay for their resistance. Debs was ultimately sentenced to up to 10 years for hinting in a speech that American men should hope for things other than going to battle.
These tools, Hochschild makes clear, did not emerge out of nowhere. In fact, the Sedition Act contained language startlingly similar to a law that had been passed in the Philippines during the American war there. “As the US Army was crushing the resistance in that archipelago,” he writes, “the new American colonial government imposed a harsh sedition act.” This law made “every person who shall utter seditious words or speeches, [or] write, publish, or circulate scurrilous libels against the Government of the United States” a criminal. Ten and a half years later, the Sedition Act in the United States criminalized the provision of “disloyal advice” about buying war bonds. It also criminalized the utterance, printing, writing, or publication of “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”
What these two things had in common was that Van Deman had started the surveillance unit of that campaign in the Philippines.
Emboldened by these tools, operated by men like Van Deman, Gregory, and others, the U.S. government became an instrument of incredible cruelty, Hochschild’s work reveals. Van Deman and Gregory interacted with a Bureau of Investigation that spied openly on leftists, radicals, and anyone who suggested that war was not a good thing. Once Wilson had committed the nation to conflict, the United States needed to prepare its soldiers; the government had a short amount of time to ready its small army for battle and to swell its ranks through conscription. Propaganda abounded—the “Uncle Sam wants you” picture, Hochschild reminds, comes from this era—and yet for all the war fever, the draft lacked support. While in popular memory the Vietnam War was the conflict with the greatest number of draft dodgers, a higher percentage of American men successfully resisted the draft during World War I.
This infuriated the men who had served before. Van Deman and Gregory and Wilson above them began to treat the nation as a frontier that needed to be controlled. They rounded up vast numbers of people, brutalizing many and punishing conscientious objectors in various prisons—again, Kansas figures largely here—using torture methods perfected in campaigns of which they were veterans. In one memorable scene, conscientious objectors and Black conscripts are made to watch three Black soldiers accused of raping a white woman hanged before them at their Kansas barracks.
Despite the cost to life and reputation, war continued to be resisted with great bravery by labor unions and activists and often women. Hochschild, who cofounded the socialist magazine Mother Jones, named after the crusading labor organizer and campaigner for children’s rights, tells their stories vividly. They include well-known figures such as Emma Goldman, the philosopher, anarchist, and early advocate for reproductive freedom, but also less haloed figures like Marie Equi, who was a medical doctor, an advocate for the eight-hour workday, and a fiery opponent to anyone seeking to tell an American what to do. Equi was sentenced to prison in California during this period. These women’s paths intersect and overlap here in Hochschild’s pages. Kate O’Hara, a redheaded socialist and firebrand speaker and once the socialist party’s candidate for U.S. senate in Missouri, wound up meeting Goldman in prison in Kansas, where she was serving a five-year term.
Throughout Hochschild’s career as a historian, one in which he has dealt with everything from the aftermath of the Boer War in South Africa to chronicling the tales of survivors of the Soviet gulag to exploring King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo, he has observed that brutality and acts of repression are often born from embittered masculinities. Focusing on the United States and the buildup to a war now called the Great War, American Midnight shines a light on the phenomenal cruelties that grew out of white men’s anxieties. It is not an accident that the Great Migration of Black Americans—northward and into the armed forces, where many were shot at from behind as well as from the front—led to some of the most vicious white riots in the nation’s history. With a consumer price index rising 40 percent between 1917 and 1920, as Hochschild points out, and jobs scarce once World War I ended, many men coming home—or already there—were looking for scapegoats.
Hochschild notes that 1919 was a high-water mark for lynchings in the United States, which had always been a dangerous country for Black Americans. That year, over 70 people would be killed in this way, several of them in their uniforms. Returning home, Black veterans found that it was often more risky to their security to let whites know they had fought abroad. Often, American Midnight reminds, there is no loyalty test great enough to overcome nativism or bigotry. These were feelings the United States would come to know well when the war crested and ended, and yet a whole new scare would take off across the country—the hunt for Bolshevik sympathizers.
In this guise, the country would simmer at a boil for a very long time, beginning in 1919 with a committee led by North Carolina Democrat Lee Overman. Charged with searching for German propaganda and Bolshevik leanings, the committee would determine a course that would lead to a continued clubbing of labor unions in the name of a Red Scare that would go on for decades. Once again, you might even say it led back to California, where, in 1935, 17 union organizers were put on trial for “criminal syndicalism.” They had led the then-largest farmworker strike in the country—18,000 cotton pickers—and won. Their trial would go on to be one of the longest in state history. Many of them would go to prison. American Midnight reveals that we remain in their moment.•
AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S FORGOTTEN CRISIS, BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD
