Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905. If his aphorism has long since come to be regarded as a bromide, it might also stand as an epigraph for Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Published in 2022, during the interregnum between the first and second phases of the Trump regime, the book looks at, roughly, Woodrow Wilson’s second presidential term, beginning with the United States’ 1917 entry into World War I and the passage that same year of the Espionage Act. As Hochs-child explains, this act—which remains on the books—“defined opposition to the war of almost any sort as criminal. The penalties were draconian.” In 1918, Eugene V. Debs, five-time Socialist candidate for president, was charged with sedition under the act; his final campaign for the White House was conducted from a prison cell.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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None of this was exactly unexpected; despite his first-term reputation as a progressive, Wilson had condemned “citizens of the United States…born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws…who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” More shocking was the severity with which it was carried out. In tandem with 1918’s Sedition Act, the Espionage Act set the stage for the first Red Scare, leading to the so-called Palmer Raids (after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who oversaw them) in late 1919 and early 1920.
Given the parallels—restriction of First Amendment rights, criminalizing of dissent and protest, violent raids on immigrants—it’s tempting to read American Midnight as a gloss on our current crises. But Hochschild has more than commentary in mind. Although he’s clear about where he stands, the book is no polemic. Rather, it is sober and considered, a mix of complex narratives.
“Virtually no one inside the federal government spoke up for civil liberties,” Hochschild writes. “One rare exception, however, was the author of a letter that landed on President Wilson’s desk in February 1918. It came from Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post.” Post’s letter advised the president to issue “a blanket pardon” to “all those convicted of opposing the draft,” and given the fact that such a message might have been considered actionable, it represents an act of conscience.
Largely unknown heroes such as Post play their own part in the story Hochschild seeks to tell.
Equally important is what we might call American Midnight’s necessary subtext: that history is long. What happens next is neither inevitable nor predetermined.•
AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S FORGOTTEN CRISIS, BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD
