Journalist and historian Adam Hochschild began the hour by reading an excerpt from the opening of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis about a 1917 roundup of the Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and their arrest. When the men were brought to court, the police couldn’t name any laws they’d violated, but the judge found them guilty anyway, declaring, “These are no ordinary times.” Hochschild explained that his book is about a period of American life, 1918 to 1921, that “certainly was no ordinary times, in the way that all the checks and balances of democracy got ignored and forgotten during that period.”
Host John Freeman asked Hochschild what the excuse for the crackdown was and how the buildup to and fever around World War I made it possible for these things to happen. Hochschild responded that we were always told that when World War I broke out in Europe, the nations of the Old World were fighting one another and that meanwhile, this country was peaceful. But in fact, he explained, there were tremendous tensions between Black and white Americans, and there was huge discrimination on every front against Black people during that period. Additionally, the author said, “there was tremendous tension between nativists and immigrants, something that feels familiar today.”
Freeman said that one of the things the book makes clear is that the people at the heart of actions taken under the Espionage Act and the Alien Sedition Act had a background in the military that led back to American colonial wars, either at home, as with the Indian Wars, or abroad, such as in the Philippines, where a strikingly similar sedition act had been passed. He asked, “Can you talk about that sort of cycle of violence within American history and what you found of it in researching this book?”
Hochschild replied that the United States has a violent past, including in its expansion from the East Coast to the West Coast, which was based on pushing out people who were there before us, in the course of the Indian Wars. During World War I, many people high up in the U.S. military had taken part in those extermination expeditions against Indians, and many more were veterans of the Philippine War. He said, “So you have veterans of this war who then come back to the United States and find a place in the war against dissidents at home.” One such veteran discussed in American Midnight, Hochschild pointed out, was Ralph Van Deman, who had been in charge of the Bureau of Insurgent Records in the Philippines, keeping tabs on suspected Filipino nationalists and guerrillas, and then decided to build up a military intelligence operation of roughly 1,000 people, amassing tons of information about Americans on the same file card system he’d developed in the Philippines. Hochschild noted, “One of the fun things about writing about a period like this, 100 years later, is that those records are now all available, and we can look at them. So that was part of the building blocks of this book.”
Michael Meyer, a former student of Hochschild’s, as well as a professor and an accomplished author himself, joined the conversation. Among other things, he asked whether Hochschild was a big reader as a kid. Hochschild responded that he was and that for a long time, he wanted to be the great American novelist but fell back on doing journalism and then “came to feel, Wow you can really have a lot of fun writing nonfiction, and you can use a lot of the same techniques that novelists do. And what makes good nonfiction—you and I have often talked about this—is the same things…that hold your attention in a novel: suspense, lively characters, conflict between those characters.”
Meyer asked how Hochschild knows when it’s time to write a book. Hochschild replied that it’s sometimes a particular episode or scene that hooks him, but there have been other periods that he’s crept up on more gradually. He was interested in the First World War period that he researched for American Midnight because his parents had both lived through it. His mother had remembered how thrilled she was as a teenage girl to see cadets trained at Princeton University, where her father was a professor and a friend of Woodrow Wilson’s. His father was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany who remembered how terrified his family was to speak German on the street “because you could get beaten up for speaking the enemy’s tongue.” The book he wrote before American Midnight was Rebel Cinderella, the story of a remarkable woman who lived through this period and who was sentenced under the Espionage Act, though she didn’t serve her sentence. He thought, “Well, there’s room for a broader book about this period.”
An audience member asked if there is something in the American character that seems to lead citizens to be afraid of other residents. Hochschild noted that he has had occasion to spend a lot of time in other countries and sometimes write about them, and said, “We have no monopoly whatever on hate, or wanting to put our political enemies in prison, or on whipping up fury against somebody who doesn’t belong to the right ethnic or religious group. You find these things all over the world.”•
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AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S FORGOTTEN CRISIS, BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD
