The Stories You Know Are Wrong

History may be drafted by the victors, but, luckily for us, it is revised and made newly relevant by the Adam Hochschilds of the world. As whatever moral standing the United States may once have claimed crumbles at home and abroad, it is hard to imagine a more critical moment to revisit than World War I and its aftermath, as Hochschild does in American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. After all, the First World War launched the United States from self-centered isolationism to interventionist altruism on April 2, 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson boldly declared that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Right?

Reality, of course, is a little less rosy. Highlighting Wilson’s staunch segregationism, open xenophobia, and embrace of authoritarian tactics to shut down political opposition, Hochschild neatly dismantles the AP U.S. History version of Wilson as the idealistic progressive who yearned for global peace but failed to persuade his own countrymen to join the League of Nations. The Wilson revealed in American Midnight is a man of disturbing contradictions: the “inspirational idealist abroad” and the “nativist autocrat at home.” He both explicitly directed and tacitly permitted his administration to silence antiwar voices by virtually any means, constitutional or otherwise. (And all this from a man who rode to reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”)

His administration painted labor activists and recent immigrants as dangerous alien elements, targeted Black and socialist newspapers for censorship, systematically imprisoned citizens and deported legal residents for their speech, and sanctioned paramilitary groups like the American Protective League to harass, assault, and arrest their fellow civilians. In victory, Wilson held a mean grudge, as demonstrated by his refusal to free socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs from federal prison in 1920: “Even though the war was long over,” Hochschild writes, “Wilson could not forgive those who opposed what he saw as a noble crusade.” While promoting his beloved League of Nations in soaring terms, Wilson still couldn’t resist referring to the alleged treachery of hyphenated Americans (the era’s derogatory term for recent, non-British immigrants). Wilson may not have been calling Mexicans “rapists” while floating down a golden escalator, but what separates the man from Trump on that front appears to be more style than substance.

Throughout American Midnight, Hochschild confronts misconceptions about the United States in the early 20th century that still carry weight today: Were Americans really a “peaceful people,” as Wilson claimed in his 1917 declaration of war? Not exactly. The decades leading up to World War I saw ruthless American military actions both within the United States (the massacre at Wounded Knee) and beyond (the Spanish-American War and the Philippine War). The imperial project, whether executed against the Lakota in South Dakota or nationalists in the Philippines, can never be siloed from the democratic one: Its brutal tactics will inevitably be used against its own citizens. And, indeed, in that period, military veterans such as General Leonard Wood and Major Ralph Van Deman harnessed the same forms of espionage and torture they’d honed in the Philippines to target socialists, immigrants, and conscientious objectors at home.

American Midnight takes particular interest in lesser-known figures who pushed against the prevailing grain. While we spend time with a disgruntled, warmongering Theodore Roosevelt and a power-hungry, twentysomething J. Edgar Hoover, Hochschild also follows the outspoken anarchist Emma Goldman, who was imprisoned and deported for her antiwar rhetoric, and the pugnacious Senator Robert La Follette from Wisconsin, who called out Wilson’s hypocrisy in real time. It was La Follette who “asked pointedly, if this was a war for democracy, why was it that ‘the President has not suggested that we make our support of Great Britain conditional to her granting home rule to Ireland, or Egypt, or India?’” The actions of journalist turned government bureaucrat Louis F. Post similarly pop up time and again as moral correctives to a supposedly progressive administration gone terribly awry. Eventually, Post finds himself as acting secretary of labor, where he manages to stop the deportation of thousands of immigrants targeted by Hoover and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

It may be unfair to expect our forebears to meet contemporary moral standards, but it is equally unwise to assume that everyone was simply too naïve or racist or ignorant to recognize injustice when they saw it. In 1917, following a horrific massacre of Black residents in East St. Louis, part of a larger wave of racial violence, over 8,000 Black protesters, including W.E.B. Du Bois, marched down Fifth Avenue with signs demanding, “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” Many at the time did, in fact, recognize the government’s hypocrisy at work—they simply weren’t the ones in power.

Throughout his books, Hochschild returns again and again to such overshadowed players. In To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, a forerunner to American Midnight that covers Britain during World War I, he focuses on a small set of interconnected characters, often members of the same family, who found themselves on opposing sides of the war over whether to fight the war at all. Hochschild quickly dispatches another persistent myth about the First World War—that no one from the innocent before-times could have possibly anticipated the horrors the war would unleash. Indeed, many ordinary citizens saw what their leaders could not: “From the beginning, tens of thousands of people on both sides recognized the war for the catastrophe it was” and spoke out against it at great personal cost.

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 turns from the conscientious objectors of World War I to those swept up in the inverse phenomenon: people who went to fight a foreign civil war despite their own government’s desperate attempts to stop them. Here, Hochschild relies heavily on the memoirs and letters of regular people drawn to the fight against fascism. While George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway appear, they never steal the show from the likes of Lois Orr, “a fiery young Kentucky woman on her honeymoon,” through whose eyes we witness the rise and fall of a flickering proletariat utopia in Barcelona before most Americans even arrived in Spain.

Demythologizing history and refocusing on everyday people are part and parcel of the same project. Wilson didn’t die a hero; he died diminished in body and spirit, with the presidency in the hands of the opposition. It was, as Hochschild points out in American Midnight, thanks to the concentrated 40-year effort by Wilson’s widow, Edith, that her husband’s standing was elevated: “In a memoir, a multivolume biography she authorized and partly financed, and even a carefully supervised Hollywood film—a lavish whitewash in Technicolor that won five Oscars—she assiduously crafted her husband’s image as a president to rank with Washington and Lincoln.” Our misconceptions about the past are not born at random; they are deliberately fashioned by those with power. There is no better antidote than returning our attention to how ordinary people grappled with extraordinary times, especially when living through such times ourselves.•

Join us on July 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Hochschild will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Michael Meyer to discuss American Midnight. Register for the Zoom conversation here.

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