People often assume that because I write about gloomy subjects—slavery, war, colonialism, political repression—my life as a writer must be a gloomy one. It’s not. I look forward to getting to work in the morning and often wish there were more hours in my workday. I love my trade.
I mostly write history, and it’s hard to find many times and places in which people were not enslaving or exploiting or making war on one another or letting ethnic or religious prejudice take a brutal toll. Certainly there have been times and places in which that’s not been so, but most of us don’t race to read about them. How many books are there on your bedside table about welfare policy in modern Scandinavia?
No matter how dark the times I write about, one thing that keeps me going is the joy of finding people who resisted the darkness. The period from 1917 through 1921 described in American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis was indeed dark. I’ve long been interested in that epoch; my parents lived through it, and my father talked about the paranoia in the air then.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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During those years, the federal government shut down some 75 newspapers and magazines, chartered a nationwide vigilante force with 250,000 members, and imprisoned hundreds of Americans solely for things they wrote or said. This was the Trumpiest period of American history before Trump. In fact, the government did many things that Trump has said he would love to do now but that he hasn’t—yet, at least—been able to.
However, time and again, in the three years I worked on this book, I stumbled onto people who resisted the madness of their era and whose words and actions inspire me still.
A century ago, as today, many politicians promised massive deportations. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920 and thundered about how ships would soon be sailing out of New York Harbor packed with noxious, unwanted immigrants. In what became known as the Palmer Raids, his Justice Department arrested some 10,000 people. Like ICE agents today, Palmer’s men publicly roughed up those they seized and paraded them through city streets in shackles.
But before Palmer could coast to the Democratic presidential nomination, a brilliant bureaucrat foiled his plans. The Labor Department’s Immigration Bureau had to approve any deportations, and the acting secretary of labor, 70-year-old Louis F. Post, was a former journalist deeply committed to civil liberties. He believed that no one should be expelled from the United States simply because of their political opinions—or someone’s presidential ambitions. He was also a skilled lawyer who found that many Palmer Raid arrests had been made without warrants or with warrants based on faulty information. Post’s important work got thousands of people released from jail, and, in the end, Palmer succeeded in deporting fewer than 600 of the people he had arrested.
Another example is Emma Goldman, the fiery anarchist and feminist, deported in 1919 after being sent to prison for two years for organizing against the draft. “Gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriotism,” she said at her trial. “But may there not be different kinds of patriotism.… Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.”
Is there a better definition of true patriotism? I’m far from the first person to discover either Goldman or Post, but it was a pleasure to help make them slightly better known. For me, the greatest joy in researching dark times is being able to find bright lights like these.•
AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S FORGOTTEN CRISIS, BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD
