Night had fallen in the rugged oil-boom city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the squad of detectives appeared on a downtown street. They gathered outside a building whose ground-floor meeting hall had yellow curtains at the windows. Then they burst inside.
It was November 5, 1917, and the room they raided was the local headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was the country’s most militant labor union and was organizing the region’s oil workers; for reasons obscure, its members were known to all as Wobblies. The detectives examined the premises suspiciously, looking into corners with flashlights, but found nothing more incriminating than 11 Wobblies reading or playing cards. They arrested the men, ordered them into a paddy wagon, and, for want of other offenses, charged them all with vagrancy. The worst that the Tulsa Daily World, the voice of the state’s oil industry, could come up with the next day, looking for something damning to say about them, was, “Most of them were uncouth in appearance.”
When the Wobblies were brought to court two days later, the police could not name any laws the men had violated, and none had a criminal record. Their attorney argued that they could not possibly be vagrants, or “loafers,” as the prosecution charged, because they were employed. One had not lost a workday in ten months; another was the father of ten children and owned a mortgage-free home. However, when their trial ended late at night on November 9, Judge T. D. Evans found them all guilty and fined them $100 apiece (the equivalent of some $2,000 a hundred years later). This was a sum no Wobbly could afford and one that guaranteed that they would remain in jail.
By way of explaining his verdict, the judge cryptically declared, “These are no ordinary times.”
Immediately after he sentenced the 11, bailiffs seized six other men in the courtroom, five of them Wobblies who had been defense witnesses, and locked them up as well. Shortly afterward, police ordered the entire group into three cars, supposedly to take them to the county jail. At a railroad crossing, however, the cars were suddenly surrounded by a large mob of men wearing long black robes and black masks and carrying rifles and revolvers. It was below freezing. “You could see the frost on the railroad ties,” remembered one Wobbly. By now he and his comrades knew that in store for them was something worse than jail.
Judge Evans was right: these were no ordinary times. Yet they are largely left out of the typical high school American history book. There’s always a chapter on the First World War, which tells us that the United States remained neutral in that conflict until German submarines began sinking American ships. Then, of course, we sent General Pershing and his millions of khaki-clad doughboys to Europe in their distinctive, broad-brimmed, forest-ranger hats. They fought valiantly at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, helped win the war, and returned home to joyful ticker-tape parades. Turn the page and the next chapter begins with the Roaring Twenties: flappers, the Charleston, Prohibition, speakeasys, and Al Capone.
This book is about what’s missing between those two chapters. It is a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans, and far more that is not marked by commemorative plaques, museum exhibits, or Ken Burns documentaries. It is a story of how a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home.
The toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law have long flowed through American life. People of my generation have seen them erupt in McCarthyism, in the rocks and insults hurled at Black children entering previously all-white schools, and in the demagoguery of politicians like Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and Donald Trump. By the time you read this, they may well have boiled up again in additional ways. My hope is that by examining closely an overlooked period in which they engulfed the country, we can understand them more deeply and better defend against them in the future. “The struggle of man against power,” wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”•
Excerpted from American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Copyright © 2022 by Adam Hochschild. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S FORGOTTEN CRISIS, BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD
