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AMERICAN MIDNIGHT

The great war, a violent peace, and democracy's forgotten crisis.

by Adam Hochschild ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2022

A riveting, resonant account of the fragility of freedom in one of many shameful periods in U.S. history.

A history of the early-20th-century assault on civil rights and those the federal government deemed un-American.

For Hochschild—the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among many other honors—one of America’s darkest periods was between 1917 and 1921. “Never was [the] raw underside of our national life more revealingly on display.” Those years, he writes, were rife with “the toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law [that] have long flowed through American life”—and clearly still do today. From the country’s entry into World War I until Warren Harding became president, the federal government and law enforcement agencies joined with the civilian-staffed American Protective League and union-busting industrialists to censor newspapers and magazines; fabricate communist conspiracies; surveil and imprison conscientious objectors and labor leaders (particularly the Wobblies); harass socialists, German immigrants, pacifists, and Jews; deport foreigners without due process; and stand aside as police and vigilantes killed labor activists and destroyed Black communities and formed lynch mobs. Among numerous others, those who benefitted most politically were J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Woodrow Wilson presided over the entire toxic political and social landscape. Ultimately, writes the author, “a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home.” Labor leaders, socialists, and anti-war activists such as Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, along with government officials such as Sen. Robert La Follette and Secretary of Labor Louis Post, resisted but with little success. Although these threats to civil liberties were subsequently deflected, “almost all of the tensions that roiled the country during and after the First World War still linger today.” The book is exceptionally well written, impeccably organized, and filled with colorful, fully developed historical characters.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-358-45546-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History ). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | UNITED STATES | POLITICS | HISTORY

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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

by Howard Zinn

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America Has Had It Worse

In his new book, Adam Hochschild remembers a time when a crusade for democracy abroad released a demonic spirit of intolerance and violence at home.

Y ou could be forgiven for thinking that we live in uniquely horrible times. Four 21st-century horsemen haunt us—a baking planet, the next pandemic, technological singularity , and nuclear war. In the immediate present, Russia has declared war on the West, liberal democracy is weakening around the world, and the United States, at once stagnant and berserk, is suffering possibly irreversible decline, while Americans stare at the return to power of a would-be dictator. In rich countries the terrors are mostly anticipatory, and they coexist with unprecedented comforts. Waiting for the end of the world while ordering dinner on Seamless is its own kind of slow-motion Armageddon.

One value of reading history at a moment like this is to be reminded of the many ways that the past was actually worse—that progress is possible. Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis is a narrative history of the repression that accompanied the United States’ entry into World War I. The similarities to our own time are obvious enough that Hochschild doesn’t have to belabor them: nativism, racial backlash, deterioration of the rule of law, left-right clashes over who counts as an American. President Woodrow Wilson justified his decision to take the country to war in Europe on the highest ideals of freedom, self-determination, and peace. “We have no selfish ends to serve,” he told Congress in his war declaration on April 2, 1917. “We desire no conquest, no dominion.” But almost overnight, the American crusade for democracy abroad released a demonic spirit of intolerance and violence at home.

A president known for his progressive achievements—champion of child-labor laws, antitrust regulation, the eight-hour day, and, belatedly, women’s suffrage—became a wartime dictator. Every major war increases presidential power and threatens civil liberties, but in Wilson’s case there was a strange continuity. He was the kind of political liberal (and man of God) whose sense of the right and wrong was so fervent that it demanded compliance. The Espionage Act criminalized any speech considered to be anti-war, and the Wilson administration used the law against militant workers, Socialists, pacifists, Black people, and immigrants. War opponents lost their basic rights; if they were lucky to escape being (quite literally) tarred and feathered by mobs, many ended up serving long jail terms. The Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was given a 10-year sentence for saying, in a speech in Canton, Ohio, “They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.” To the very end, Wilson refused to pardon the revered and ill old man. The main organizations of American radicalism, the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, were essentially broken.

Read: The world really is getting better

After the armistice in Europe, illiberalism at home grew even worse, as if the violent spirit of war needed new feeding grounds. Black soldiers returned with raised expectations that they could more fully participate in American democracy and prosperity. They were met instead with a wave of race riots and Klan lynchings. The success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia inspired the national paranoia known as the Red Scare: Mass labor actions were put down by police violence, and in the summer of 1919, anarchist bombings led to the arrest and summary deportation of thousands of foreigners and other suspects in what were called Palmer Raids, after Wilson’s attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, the ambitious politician who ordered them.

By the time the panic subsided, a series of strokes had left Wilson paralyzed in the White House. His cherished League of Nations—meant to herald a new era of international cooperation and peace—was dead on arrival in the Senate. The war to end all wars had made the world safe for demagogues, bankers, and Warren G. Harding. What had it all been for? No one could say, but Americans, especially the disillusioned young, were ready for a party. Numerous historians have analyzed this period, but the best account I know is fictional—John Dos Passos’s 1919 , the second novel of his great U.S.A. trilogy, which ends in a prose poem of unsurpassed bitterness about the burial of the unknown soldier:

       And the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki        they took to Chalons-sur-Marne                            and laid it out neat in a pine coffin          and took it home to God’s Country on a battleship                                   and buried it in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheater in the Arlington National Cemetery        and draped the Old Glory over it        and the bugler played taps        and Mr. Harding prayed to God …        Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.

A merican Midnight lacks the fresh revelatory power of King Leopold’s Ghost , Hochschild’s best-known book, about the Belgian exploitation of the Congo. But his talent for characterization and storytelling serves him here in portraits of little-known figures: heroes like Kate Richards O’Hare, a Socialist firebrand from Kansas, and Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, a rare dissenter in the Wilson administration; villains like Leo Wendell, who went undercover in the ranks of labor, and Albert Sidney Burleson, Wilson’s postmaster general, who censored the press with “virtually unprecedented power.”

Hochschild’s books are concerned with social justice, and he doesn’t paint in moral shades of gray. Wilson was the most complex and enigmatic of presidents—idealistic and harsh, cold and passionate, liberal and bigoted, arrogant and self-doubting. Here he comes across as merely authoritarian. A famous anecdote has Wilson foreseeing the coming nightmare, telling an associate on the eve of his message to Congress: “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life … If there is any alternative, for God’s sake, let’s take it.” Plenty of other evidence suggests that Wilson hesitated before the terrible harm that he knew he was about to inflict on American democracy, his life’s passion. But Hochschild is dismissive of the story. Wilson’s agony doesn’t fit with the autocratic president who stubbornly refused to free Debs.

Wilson, thus flattened, drains the story of its tragic irony and some of its more interesting implications. The repression Hochschild describes so vividly was not just a betrayal of liberal values but, in some ways, the consequence of them. Wilson justified everything, be it the graduated income tax or conscription, in the name of humanity and at a moral altitude where the jailing of trade unionists was barely visible. “Participation in the war put an end to the Progressive movement,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote. “And yet the wartime frenzy of idealism and self-sacrifice marked the apotheosis as well as the liquidation of the Progressive spirit … the war was justified before the American public—perhaps had to be justified—in the Progressive rhetoric and on Progressive terms.”

The war killed the very idealism that sent the doughboys over there to defend freedom and peace. The liberal thinkers who pushed for Wilson’s domestic reforms cheered the president’s war message; they realized their terrible mistake only after the victory parades were over. There’s a recurring tendency of American liberalism, for better and for worse, to internationalize its own causes with lofty language and universal values. World War II closed out the New Deal, but also enlarged it as Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Vietnam was the project of Cold War liberals who saw the battle against communism in Southeast Asia as almost continuous with the struggle for civil rights at home, but the war ended up destroying the Great Society. “That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved,” Lyndon Johnson once complained.

A nativist panic runs like a continuous underground stream beneath the calmer, more open stretches of American history, always on the verge of bubbling up. The Red Scare, McCarthyism, and MAGA all seem fed by the same source: the recurring fear among “real Americans” that their homeland is threatened by foreigners, traitors, and alien ideologies. “To keep these dark forces from overwhelming American society once again will require a lot from us,” Hochschild concludes in American Midnight . “Knowledge of our history, for one thing, so we can better see the danger signals and the first drumbeats of demagoguery.”

Read: How advertisers used World War I to sell, sell, sell

But it’s also worth realizing what’s changed over time. Certain abuses are unlikely if not impossible today, not because of new laws or better officials but because public opinion wouldn’t tolerate them. The Espionage Act is still on the books, but it’s impossible to imagine a president banning hundreds of newspapers and magazines on grounds of national security. A judge wouldn’t sentence labor activists to long prison terms for speaking out against government policy. Vigilantes and police killed far more Black people in the two days of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre than in all the violence against civil-rights workers during the 1950s and ’60s. Deportations of immigrants still occur with a minimum of due process, but police no longer round up thousands of people in the middle of one night on no basis other than political affiliation or ethnicity to be expelled from the country after rigged hearings. As often as Jim Crow is invoked today—in relation to mass incarceration, voter suppression, or something else—there’s no systematic effort by the entire apparatus of the state to deprive a group of Americans of their most basic rights. The use of the law toward nefarious ends during and after the Great War has never been equaled since. This is progress worth acknowledging without illusions about our own peril.

The authoritarianism that threatens us is of a different kind. Today the political repression is less harsh, but the political rot is more extensive. A major party is engaged in a concerted effort to deny the democratic will of the people. Its officials routinely undermine the public’s faith in the legitimacy of elections. Its followers are awash in a sea of lies that makes them incapable of grasping ordinary reality. Its leader flaunts his autocratic proclivities without even paying lip service to the principles of self-government in which Wilson expressed absolute conviction.

Perhaps we can’t judge yet whether the Big Lie is worse than the Red Scare—whether Donald Trump, who couldn’t jail his opponents, is more dangerous than Woodrow Wilson, who didn’t provoke an insurrection. The crisis of 1917–21 died away rather suddenly, as if a fever had broken. Our affliction feels more like sepsis, with no obvious cure.

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How World War I Crushed the American Left

Adam hochschild’s new book documents a period of thriving radical groups and their devastating suppression..

There are few episodes in national history as blithely misunderstood as America’s participation in World War I. In the history-textbook summary, the country remained above the fray until German submarine attacks forced President Wilson to renege on his 1916 election promise to keep the country out of the war. Despite their belated RSVP, the well-fed, well-bred American soldiers arrived in Europe as liberators, marched cheerfully into the protracted slaughter, and quickly put paid to the Hun. Back they came to more cheering crowds, and then it was the Roaring Twenties.

Adam Hochschild’s new book, American Midnight , explores “what’s missing between those two chapters”—an enraging, gruesome, and depressingly timely story about the fragility of American democracy, as both institution and concept. The most prominent figure in this story is Woodrow Wilson, who enjoyed a benign-to-heroic reputation for most of the twentieth century. In bringing the United States into the war, Wilson created a sunny myth of the nation as uniquely virtuous: peace-loving, despite its violent origins, and selfless, despite the hand-over-fist profits that the war was already bringing to American factories. It was such a powerfully appealing line of thinking that “seldom would any later president depart from such rhetoric.” Most famously, Wilson urged his audience that “the world must be safe for democracy”—without anyone stopping to question whether its noble defenders had any idea what the word meant.

When America entered the war as the savior of this vague principle, the country’s industrial might far outweighed its military capabilities. Its army was smaller than Portugal’s, under a high command characterized by one historian as “old, drunk, and stagnant.” The advance guard, led by General Pershing, was greeted with rapture, but it would be almost a year before U.S. troops were on the Western Front in numbers sufficient to make a difference. In the absence of action, there was symbolism: The four sons of Theodore Roosevelt enlisted at once, to the delight of the newspapers and their vocally pro-war father (who was devastated, though not deterred, when the youngest was killed). There was propaganda, courtesy of the new Committee on Public Information; a compliant Hollywood; and the “four-minute men” who traveled the country delivering short, pithy speeches in support of the war anywhere a crowd gathered.

And, as the book lays out in stark and relentless detail, there was repression. “War means autocracy,” Wilson told his navy secretary, in one of his less inspiring, but more sincere, moments. Civil liberties, as we have come to understand them, could not survive in this frenzied atmosphere, and any right to protest, question, or even simply ignore the distant conflict disappeared. Thousands of Americans all over the country were thrown in jail for speaking out against the war or belonging to groups deemed subversive or un-American: labor unions, foreign cultural organizations, and pacifist groups. Many were tortured, several killed, and hundreds of immigrants were deported. The sweeping Espionage Act of June 1917 empowered Postmaster General Albert Burleson, a plantation-bred Southerner, to censor and restrict any publication he deemed anti-war, while librarians pulled books from shelves and pastors who did not fly the American flag were attacked.

The anti-German, pro-war fervor was only part of the story, however. Hochschild makes clear that the Espionage Act was equally conceived as a “club to smash left-wing forces.” A vast network of spies and private detectives went to work infiltrating workplaces, union halls, and leftist gatherings in the hope of hearing disloyal talk and sowing disagreement. Strikes, work stoppages, and picket-line demonstrations were suddenly seen as evidence of enemy infiltration and suppressed even more violently than before. Prominent leaders and speakers on the left were surveilled, harassed, and frequently imprisoned. Most shockingly, Wilson’s presidential rival, the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, was arrested and jailed.

According to Hochschild, it was partly belief and partly self-interest—the desire to maintain his party’s tenuous hold on power—that spurred Wilson’s determination to “crush the Socialists.” His narrative helps explain why the left has had such difficulty regaining its political ground in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even when economic crises lay bare (again and again) the failures of capitalism. Anti-Red sentiment, from the 1910s on, was a toxic brew of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and fear, in which rational arguments about the fair distribution of resources were comprehensively drowned.

In the decade before the war, the U.S. was home to a thriving network of radical groups and leaders. Russian-born Emma Goldman, anarchist and birth control advocate, was a wildly popular speaker (in English, Yiddish, or German, as needed) and the publisher of her own magazine. Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party, was determined to hold Wilson to his promise of support. The NAACP, founded in 1909, shone a spotlight on lynching and advocated for African American civil rights. Activism against “preparedness” and war had been on the rise in left-wing circles since 1914 , led especially by women like the writer and left-wing activist Crystal Eastman , head of the New York Woman’s Peace Party and executive director of the American Union Against Militarism, out of which the ACLU was later formed.

These were the groups that came under attack during the war. Emma Goldman, who drew thousands to rallies for her No-Conscription League, was arrested the very day that the Espionage Act went into effect, almost as though it had been designed for her.

No political group, however, experienced the sustained assault that eventually broke apart the radical Industrial Workers of the World, formed in 1905. The IWW’s dream of “one big union” threatened bosses who relied on division among their vast, multiethnic workforces to maintain authority. The organization’s legendary orators addressed crowds in simple English, with a force of conviction that needed no translation, and helped workers across the country—from “sawmill hands in Minnesota” to “fruit pickers in California, silk weavers in New Jersey, [and] teamsters in Iowa”—to organize strikes and walkouts. To a degree vastly out of proportion to its actual success in organizing workers, the IWW was the target of vitriol and violence from business leaders and political authorities, which escalated with the trumped-up fear of German infiltration. “The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the IWW’s,” one Oklahoma newspaper editorial frothed in November 1917. That night, 18 Wobblies (as IWW members were nicknamed) were sprung from jail in Tulsa, taken to an isolated area by a group of robed and masked men, then stripped, whipped, tarred and feathered, and forced to flee barefoot while their kidnappers fired rifles over their heads.

This chilling scene of vigilante violence, which opens Hochschild’s book, was not an isolated incident. The perpetrators that night called themselves the Knights of Liberty, but they were a small part of a massive civilian effort to enforce the draft and punish dissent. A Chicago advertising executive cooked up the idea for a nationwide group, which called itself the American Protective League and offered the “thrill” of combat to men too old to join up. Over the faint objections of law enforcement, and the even fainter qualms of President Wilson, nearly a quarter of a million men joined this group, an official auxiliary to the Department of Justice. Flashing their official-looking badges, they arrested, detained, and roughed up thousands of people suspected of being “slackers” (draft-dodgers), spies, or socialists.

The violence meted out to “slackers” and Wobblies by the APL and a network of similar vigilante groups was often brutal but rarely amounted to murder. Black individuals and communities in this period suffered significantly worse. The American Protective League was not officially an all-white organization, but the record shows only one aspiring Black member, whose application was quietly denied. The patriotic Northern businessmen who joined the APL might have distanced themselves from Southern lynch mobs, but their role as self-appointed “protectors” of American society was rooted in the same racist and xenophobic impulses.

The war years saw a surge in racist violence and lynching around the country, sometimes explicitly fueled by white fears over Black men enlisting and fighting in the military, but elsewhere tied to existing economic and social tensions. In East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, hundreds of African Americans were killed, and homes and businesses burned, in a rampage of violence that came to be known as a “race riot,” although Hochschild quotes a local Jewish leader labeling it, more accurately, as a “pogrom.” Yet even after the NAACP organized a huge demonstration in Manhattan, and a delegation of prominent Black leaders went to Washington to attempt to meet with Wilson, the president said and did nothing about the incident. After the war, when Black soldiers returned triumphantly from the front, they were met with a national campaign of racist violence, dubbed the “red summer” of 1919. Again the president, preoccupied with postwar political negotiations, “said only a single, reluctant, vague sentence about the bloodshed.” Despite having assembled a truly enormous network of surveillance and detection forces over the past two years, nominally to prevent violence against American civilians, the government made no effort to catch and punish the perpetrators.

The scale and the cost of these years of oppression is hard to calculate. The arrest figures, which likely climb into the tens of thousands, have never been fully counted and cannot, in any case, properly measure the invisible impact of this climate of fear: We can only guess at the true extent of the harassment, lost jobs, self-censorship, fractured relationships, and psychological damage. Yet it was the continuation and escalation of this repression after the end of the fighting that is most shocking. The Sedition Act, passed in the spring of 1918, expanded the Espionage Act to encompass still more acts of vague disloyalty and threat.

The crushing of socialism—and a new bugbear, communism—was total. The treatment of Eugene Debs was a stark illustration of the crackdown. Debs had won 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912, as the Socialists were making gains at the local and state level, threatening both Republicans and Democrats. By 1917, Hochschild notes, there were 23 Socialist mayors in office across the country, leading cities including Toledo, Pasadena, and Milwaukee. Debs opposed the war steadfastly, but he was so widely respected that the government feared directly attacking him. Instead, a disinformation campaign was launched—by whom, historians are still unsure—which implied that he had changed his position. To counter the accusations, the frail 62-year-old leader addressed his party’s state convention in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918. Careful not to advocate resisting the draft, he nevertheless roused his crowd by declaring that “in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.” Two weeks later he was arrested. When he ran for president again in 1920, it was from jail.

During these years, democratically elected socialist members of the New York State Assembly were expelled, and the House of Representatives refused to seat Wisconsin Congressman Victor Berger when he was reelected in 1918. The initial justification for silencing leftist voices, that they were sowing opposition to the war and the draft, had disappeared. In its place had arrived a generalized threat of revolution, fanned and fueled by every stray remark about ways that American society could be fairer to workers. Although most Americans today are far more familiar with the Cold War–era Red Scare, it did not come out of nowhere. The blueprint for that later crackdown was established during World War I, by many of the same actors, such as J. Edgar Hoover, who would revive it after World War II.

Those fears built to fever pitch in the lead-up to May Day 1920, the traditional European labor holiday, during which the Justice Department drew up plans for, more or less, an all-out civil war. Cities bristled with weaponry and eager vigilantes desperate for some kind of action, or the smallest sign of unrest. With his eye for the absurd, Hochschild records one incident in Boston when panicked reports of a red flag during a parade turned out to be the waving of a Harvard banner.

The story of uprising and repression that American Midnight tells is overwhelmingly a story of men: of industrial workers, politicians, secret agents, soldiers, vigilantes, protesters, and prisoners. Hochschild’s goal, it seems, is to emphasize how far the anti-Red crusade was an expression of what we might now call toxic masculinity, the urge to assert racial and gender dominance by those who felt their authority and virility fading. In his telling, the appeal of the American Protective League, for instance, was its promise of “martial glory” for men who were too old to serve in the Army.

But why did that dream have such a powerful hold on these men, even to the point of turning their own countrymen into enemies? Hochschild cites the significant change in gender roles and the labor market in the 50 years leading up to World War I—particularly the marked rise in women’s workforce participation, and the concurrent rise in the (still very low) divorce rate. Modern, self-supporting, marriage-eschewing women were “as much of a threat to the traditional order as immigrants, socialists, and Blacks.” The appeal of war, with its rigid reinforcing of the gender binary, is therefore obvious.

It’s also somewhat reductive. Women had, after all, been openly agitating for their rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. Why did their demands seem so threatening in this moment? One explanation is that in the decade prior to World War I, suffragists became far more vocal and visible, taking to the streets and—especially in New York—explicitly linking their cause to the fights for labor rights, racial justice, and world peace. Suddenly, women were demanding not just the vote but a wholesale reorganization of society, under the banner of a new idea, “feminism,” which was firmly linked to socialism in this era. Accordingly, Hochschild observes, “many of the antiwar dissidents who provoked the most male rage were women.” Emma Goldman—who embodied the worst fears of many men about leftists and feminists—was eventually deported to her native Russia in 1919, under the watchful eye of a rising young functionary in the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Hochschild also threads through the book the experiences of Kate Richards O’Hare, a flame-haired Socialist party speaker and activist who was quickly indicted under the Espionage Act and befriended Goldman in prison. But Hochschild gives other important women short shrift. He mentions Crystal Eastman, for instance, only as the sister of Max and his co-editor on the left-wing magazine The Liberator, without noting her role as a major figure in the peace movement. Nor, in a mention of the ACLU further down the same page, does Hochschild identify her as one of the founders of that organization. His previous book was a biography of the extremely famous Socialist turned Communist Rose Pastor Stokes, a friend of Eastman’s, so it is possible he doesn’t want to revisit her story in a different account of the same historical period, but without a fuller picture of the role of women in these years, the argument about the fundamental misogyny of the moment feels less convincing.

Most strikingly, Hochschild does not discuss the way the government treated suffrage leader Alice Paul and members of the National Woman’s Party between 1917 and 1920, an important illustration of how a crackdown on public protest could quickly morph into a wholesale violation of Americans’ constitutional rights. Starting on January 10, 1917, Paul and her allies mounted a months-long vigil at the White House gates, silently and obstinately repudiating Wilson’s claims to be a safeguard of democracy. If women couldn’t vote, how could the U.S. claim to be a democracy itself? Their protests escalated after police started arresting and jailing the women for blocking the sidewalk. According to one NWP member who wrote a detailed account of their campaign, Paul and her allies lobbied to be treated as political prisoners—only for the authorities to refuse, on the grounds that there was no such thing in America.

Despite the fervent hype of the Justice Department and a complicit press, May Day 1920 was far from a bloodbath: “Nothing happened,” Hochschild writes. In fact, he argues, the nonevent of that day marked a tide turning. As the economy crashed from its wartime high, public anger was directed more and more at war profiteers than at low-level Wobblies and workers scrabbling for a few extra dollars in their paychecks.

This shift away from anti-Red panic was helped along, he notes, by the bravery of a few mostly forgotten figures. The Ellis Island supervisor Frederic C. Howe resigned his position rather than see the immigration center turned into a holding cell for deportees. Judge George W. Anderson exposed the Justice Department’s egregious undercover plotting to ensnare noncitizens in anti-Communist raids. During the trial that ended with his freeing 18 accused prisoners, he remarked, “In these times of hysteria, I wonder no witches have been hung.” Most of all, however, Hochschild celebrates the bravery of the acting deputy secretary of labor, former left-wing journalist Louis F. Post, who took over from his boss in March 1920 and immediately halted the mass deportation project so dear to Hoover and his boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Post demanded further investigation or immediate release for thousands of detainees, and in one pivotal case, he shared the story of a clearly blameless immigrant with his friends in the press, inciting public ire at the Department’s overreach.

One of Woodrow Wilson’s last lucid acts in government was to deny a request for the release of the ailing Eugene Debs, who was finally freed in 1921 by Wilson’s successor, the affably corrupt Warren G. Harding. Hochschild’s account of Debs’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment make Debs’s moral authority clear, and it shines all the more vividly in a story that’s otherwise rife with cowardice, hypocrisy, and casual violence. “Men talk about holy wars,” Debs told a hushed crowd at his 1918 trial. “There are none.”

The historian David Brion Davis has written that “the years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.” Reading this story after four years of Trump—a man whose father enthusiastically paraded with the KKK—it’s impossible not to wonder if the hysterical, xenophobic tenor of those years will match or exceed the war years when the historical reckoning is in. Such parallels are often hazy, but this book poses an uncomfortably relevant question—of whether America is capable of safeguarding its own democracy, let alone anyone else’s.

Joanna Scutts is the author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It .

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Book Review: ‘American Midnight’ by Adam Hochschild

by Brian Lokker | November 20, 2023 | Books & Literature , American History

Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. P ublished by Mariner Books, 2022 .

American Midnight  examines certain dark elements of life in the United States that arguably reached their nadir during the First World War and the several years that followed it. In the subtitle of the book, Hochschild calls these developments “democracy’s forgotten crisis.”

This period saw an upswing in hatred of and violence against Blacks, immigrants—especially Jews and others of so-called “inferior races” ( i.e.,  those who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants), labor unions and organizers, draft dodgers and conscientious objectors, socialists, and other “radicals.” A climate of fear took hold in the country, fed in part by reports of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, as well as economic concerns and persistent prejudices against the “other.”

Once Congress heeded President Woodrow Wilson’s call to join the war, everyone was expected to rally around the flag. Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to enlist public support. The CPI was, essentially, a propaganda agency. As one of its leaders wrote,

“‘Truth and Falsehood are arbitrary terms. . . . There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other. . . . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.’”

The propaganda was accompanied by a crackdown on dissent. This repression found an especially zealous advocate in Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, who used his office to censor publications he deemed radical or ban their distribution outright. Citizen vigilante groups also got into the act. One group, the American Protective League , received the imprimatur of President Wilson and the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI). APL members fought the “enemy” on the home front by conducting “slacker raids” and arresting men who couldn’t produce their draft cards.

Albert S. Burleson, United States Postmaster General, 1913–1921. (National Photo Company Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. These laws ramped up the legal justification for government agents to round up thousands of suspected radicals, many of whom were jailed or deported. Overt acts were not required. It was enough to express an anti-war sentiment or belong, even unwittingly, to a suspect organization.

For example, in 1918, Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 10 years in jail. His crime? Stating that ordinary people did not have a voice in declaring war. Other prominent dissidents who were caught in the government’s net included labor leader William “Big Bill” Haywood, anarchist Emma Goldman, and socialist Kate Richards O’Hare.

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States and local jurisdictions followed suit. Educators were a particular target. The State of New York passed laws providing that teachers could lose their jobs for “treasonable or seditious statements.” The New York City Board of Education required “all teachers to sign loyalty oaths and held hearings at which students testified about what their teachers said in class.”

The end of the war did not mean the end of the government’s campaign against dissent. A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General for the last two years of Wilson’s term, led a program of “Palmer Raids” against suspected “reds.” (No doubt he felt justified after nearly being killed by a bomb that exploded at his home in June 1919.) Palmer lost some momentum after a massive nationwide revolutionary uprising that he predicted would occur on May Day 1920 failed to materialize.

Where was Woodrow Wilson himself in all of this? There is no doubt that he had no sympathy for anyone who disagreed with the war, or afterward, with his plan for peace, anchored by the League of Nations. Hochschild suggests that Wilson was a contradictory figure: “the inspirational idealist abroad, determined to end war forever … and the nativist autocrat at home.” Wilson’s legacy has been tarnished in recent years, and this book does nothing to change that.

Copyright © Brian Lokker 2023. This is a slightly revised version of the review that I published on Goodreads.com on March 20, 2023 .

About The Author

Brian Lokker

Brian writes about a range of subjects including history, movies, books, sports, travel, and coffee. A former lawyer, adjunct university instructor, and web designer, he is committed to the preservation of the Oxford comma, except where prohibited by law.

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Book summary and reviews of American Midnight by Adam Hochschild

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American Midnight

The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

by Adam Hochschild

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From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor.

The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens' arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover's star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now. In American Midnight , award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today.

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"A history of the early-20th-century assault on civil rights and those the federal government deemed un-American...The book is exceptionally well written, impeccably organized, and filled with colorful, fully developed historical characters. A riveting, resonant account of the fragility of freedom in one of many shameful periods in U.S. history." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "During the United States' current tumultuous times, it is important to remember and revisit the forgotten injustices of the previous century. Hochschild succinctly does so here." - Library Journal (starred review)

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Adam hochschild.

Adam Hochschild is the author of ten books. King Leopold's Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars . His Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN USA Literary Award. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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Sorry, there was a problem., american midnight: the great war, a violent peace, and democracy’s forgotten crisis audible audiobook – unabridged.

From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threated by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor

"A riveting, resonant account of the fragility of freedom.”— Kirkus, STARRED review

The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.

This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now.

In American Midnight , award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

• Listening Length 15 hours and 6 minutes
• Author Adam Hochschild
• Narrator Jonathan Todd Ross
• Audible release date October 4, 2022
• Language English
• Publisher HarperAudio
• ASIN B09TX2XFGZ
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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Customers find the tone great and the book shines a light on a dark period of US history. They also describe the reading experience as terrific, skillful, and captivating. Readers praise the content as beautifully written and deeply researched. They appreciate the excellent background on tainted part of US History.

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Customers find the book a terrific, masterfully written, and easy read that lays out the genesis of American threats to the world. They also say the author does a very good job capturing the time period and relationship in an honest, skillful, and captivating way.

"...Adam Hochschild has written a marvellous book ...." Read more

"...However, I found it enjoyable reading and instructive in filling in a gap in my knowledge of modern US history...." Read more

"...I need more information on plenty of topics. It was a wonderful and well researched starting point.********..." Read more

"...them all together and demonstrates their relationship in an honest, skillful , and captivating way...." Read more

Customers find the book's content beautifully written, deeply researched, and interesting. They also say the lessons are stark and indelible, and the book introduces readers to little-known American defenders of democracy.

"...WW1 and the first couple of years with peace, this is an instructive insight into a fascinating period of US history...." Read more

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"...As far as that angle goes, this book is exceedingly important to teach (or at least remind) Americans that we've frequently lost our way on civil..." Read more

Customers find the tone of the book great, illuminating, and beautifully written. They also say it shines a needed light on a dark period of US history.

"...Adam Hochschild sheds light on a fascinating period . Highly recommended." Read more

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"This is a well-researched and readable history of the dark period in the US between 1917 and 1921, in which horrible lynchings and the blatant..." Read more

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Customers find the background excellent, and appreciate the section of black and white photos.

"...The section of black and white photos was excellent , and, despite the author's politics, I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to compare..." Read more

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Customers find the book insightful, saying it does an outstanding job of showing one of America's most controversial and important historical moments. They also say the parallels are easy to see from then to present day.

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Book Review: American Midnight

The 1917-21 period encompassing US entry into an international “Great War” and capped by the domestic Red Scare surrounding the conflict’s end – bringing heightened repression of political dissidents -- has had a pernicious effect right up to today on progressive and socialist activism, Adam Hochschild concludes in his focused account of the era in American Midnight (Mariner Books/HarperCollins, 2022).

Subtitled “The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,” Hochschild’s study lays out month by month and year by year the Wilson administration’s multipronged attack on left, labor, civil and human rights and free speech access, scapegoating “anti-Americanism” in many political, ethnic and cultural versions of The Other. By Hochschild’s persuasive account, effects of that half-decade’s intense repression continue to undermine any robust US democracy. Fueled by public officials, the era’s divisions left the political landscape barren and sterilized into two-party dominance until the persistent economic inequality of the 1920s led to the depression of the ‘30s and impetus for the New Deal’s improved landscape for dissident organizations. Patterns for future repression were refined, and continue to evolve today.

State fears, bureaucratic weapons

This five-year episode is tucked, sometimes overlooked, in the long calendar of US repression and resistance that begins with the end of the Civil War and establishment of nominal (male) equality with the end of legal enslavement. It coincides with the US entry into the Great War already under way in Europe and a rapid, unnerving rise of public paranoia about what “American” should mean. In the historical background was the steady drumbeat of social and economic inequality through the Gilded Age and the response of workers with sometimes-violent struggle throughout the 1870s, ‘80s and ‘90s. In harness with overall inequality was the elaboration of the Jim Crow system from South to North.

The Wilson administration federalized and empowered – in the name of national security and with the infamous Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) – regional supremacists’ individual and collective prejudices and fears about an “Other.” The Espionage Act banned speaking against US participation in the Great War; the Sedition Act (an amendment to the Espionage Act) criminalized speaking against the US, or its symbols. The “threat” that brought passage of the two acts was homogenized from ingredients such as Black flight from the sharecropper quasi-slavery in the South, immigrants overrepresented in industries like coal and steel, and left formations like the Socialist Party.

Hochschild’s American Midnight gives this five-year outbreak of fear and savagery the compact, focused and granular account it deserves to reinforce the era’s part in what is the real American exceptionalism – the recurring episodes of public paranoia and reaction, in this instance skillfully fanned by a fascinating and repellent cast of high and low characters whose racist, sexist and nativist sentiments left a permanent and scarring imprint.

Foreign wars, domestic fronts

But why enter the war, so far away?

Hochschild notes that persistent German advances had by 1917 raised the specter of US allies’ actually losing to Germany. So Wilson and corporate types also grew aware that if France and England lost, their massive debts to US banks would not get paid. Hence, Wilson’s campaign slogan “he kept us out of war” was quickly sidetracked in favor of Wilson’s (prayerful, as always) request to Congress for a declaration of war.

The forces of resistance were, as usual, scattered. The Socialist Party, despite Eugene Debs’ popularity, diminished itself, splitting off two communist parties after the 1917 Bolshevik victory in Russia. That event, in itself, also frightened the powerful money men of Wilson’s government. The Bolsheviks’ peace treaty with Germany freed up whole divisions of their Eastern troops to join the fight in France and Belgium, which put a possible German victory on the table.

The Civil War was just fifty years ended, strong in memories, and many of the powerful actors in the Red Scare were sons of veterans. More recently, the US’s actions following the end of the Spanish-American War included the savage repression of Philippine indigenous resistance by a succession of military governments in the decade before Wilson took office. Fresh from brutal repression overseas, the US military was primed to support an imagined “Americanism” at home.

So, with official help, the “enemies of Americanism” were easily grouped and isolated: Wobblies, socialists, women leading independent lives, union organizers (mostly industrial), Blacks (especially in the North), Catholics, immigrants and anyone with an accent, especially one that could be imagined as German. In echoes of today, a large but shrinking white, male, nominally Christian power structure was ripe to be frightened about change.

Egged on by officials like A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general who provided the label for the Palmer Raids of 1920 (and had his eye on a presidential campaign) and his youthful investigative chief J. Edgar Hoover, US citizens were encouraged and empowered to mobilize their fear and hatred for what they perceived as “different” from their majority-white, Protestant selves into often violent action.

Hochschild keeps his focus on the Red Scare associated with US entry into the Great War and its aftermath, and seldom projects that period’s features into the future. The term “McCarthyism” is absent. But for the reader there is no mistaking the symmetries when an officially sanctioned “atmosphere of free-floating paranoia” enabled tribal-majoritarian groups to form and act out/act on their own prejudices, resulting in the rapid erosion of norms of political and social behavior.

Agents of Paranoia

By sticking methodically to the five-year period of war fever, burning xenophobia capped by the Red Scare, and attempted mass deportation and “cleansing” of a white-supremacist populace, Hochschild rewards the reader with a close understanding of the important lesson: how easily a complacent but increasingly uneasy majority can be turned against not only an imagined foreign threat but their neighbors and community.

The book introduces us, for instance, to the widespread chapters of the American Protective League and its evolution from promoting war bonds (to both enrich and protect the banks) to actively carrying out vigilante attacks on unions, political organizations and “suspicious” individuals. It provides vivid lessons about how official permission for this behavior can push many beyond the norms and constraints of everyday life they might otherwise observe.

American Midnight includes career through-lines involving many players besides Wilson, who is characterized as idealistic to the point of overlooking the actions of his own administration (though he had a direct hand in re-segregating the civil service, reversing what had been a positive development). On the official side, Postmaster General Albert Burleson as a personal project barred radical periodicals from the mailstream, ignored Wilson’s hints to lighten up, and continued after Wilson left office. Free thought, in the pre-electronic era, flowed through the mails, and Burleson’s refusal to allow socialist publications to flow through the postal service was automatic, going so far as to intercept press between SP offices.

Political censorship of periodical mail, sanctioned by the courts, didn’t end till Warren Harding’s new postal chief, Will Hays, took over in 1921. For far-flung, dispersed US radicals it was the equivalent of closing schools during the Pandemic.

During the Red Scare years, Washington state Congressman Albert Johnson was a constant Congressional agitator on immigrants, even those already legally in the US, as a degraded and dangerous sector of the public. Hochschild, in a rare comparison across eras, calls Johnson “a voice not unlike those who flocked to the Tea Party a century later: the voice of a white, rural or small-town America profoundly unsettled by change, and change that seemed embodied in people who looked or sounded different.”

Through the Red Scare half-decade, Johnson was a major player in whipping up existing public prejudices like his own into anti-immigrant violence. He ushered in the severe restriction of immigration (except from Norther Europe) through the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which was referenced in a diary that would become Mein Kampf. (Even during the next World War, the act famously excluded refugees from the Holocaust.) He urged mass deportation of union organizers, socialists and (alleged) anarchists and other perceived enemies of Americanism. He was one of many officials giving the wider public permission to turn its fears and dislikes into active violence.

Also prominent on the “Americanism” front was another presidential aspirant, Gen. Leonard Wood, who had been a particularly brutal military governor of the southern Philippines, oppressing a mostly Islamic population and the Moro rebels. On his return, pinned down with US training commands while his fellow generals were leading US troops in Europe, Wood kept a high profile by declaring martial law and occupying cities like Omaha or Gary, Ind. or West Virginia coal country, where strikes had turned violent.

As Hochschild shows, the Philippine military expedition provided many behind-the-scenes actors as well, like antisocialist Ralph Van Deman and antisemite John B. Trevor, both military intelligence officers who, back in the US, were detailed to keep an eye on US activities and gained favor through their individual enthusiasms. As Hochschild says, “the violence of the Philippine War came back to haunt the United States.”

Also making Zelig-like appearances in this frequently entertaining book is Leo Wendell (AKA “Walsh”), who made a career of infiltrating left-labor formations in Pittsburgh and elsewhere and arranging to be arrested by the Bureau of Investigation (his employers) often enough to keep his radical cred with fellow workers.

Imperialist Forces meet Common Resistance

The Palmer Raids took place in November of 1919, in a national-crisis atmosphere of cascading postwar strikes, as union leaders pushed for gains and for penalties for war profiteers. Huge numbers of “suspicious” people and organizations were netted, a mass of potential deportees.

Almost humorously, a massively publicized prediction of revolutionary violence pegged to May Day 1920 left Palmer and Hoover high and dry when “nothing happened.” Major newspapers, which till then had published Palmer and Hoover’s every paranoid effusion, felt “taken for a ride” and were early defectors from the Red Scare bandwagon.

As with Trump’s short reign, democratic values held on in unexpected parts of officialdom.

Louis Post, an undersecretary of Labor with a foot in Henry George’s near-socialist camp, found himself in charge of the department as his superiors were absent and suddenly became the official to make the call on thousands of pending deportation cases. Careful and well-documented analysis found about 80 percent of them defective due to bad or no warrants, and he tossed them out, bringing screams from Rep. Johnson and his anti-immigrant allies in Congress. Post was investigated by a House committee in preparation for his impeachment. But he defended himself before the committee with such wit and skill that (after the popped balloon of the May Day 1920 non-insurrection) Congress abandoned its quest. Post had a wide network of support in and out of government, strong PR savvy and knew well where to pull the strings, but Hochschild suggests his skill at covering his tracks is one reason his important role is less widely known.

The trope of labor organizing as foreign and disloyal was already well engrained and easily turned majoritarian unease into violence. The above-mentioned American Protective League, the KKK for the new era of war fever, was created by a PR specialist in cahoots with Army Intelligence and gave men beyond draft age an organization and identity (with badges) that “deputized” them as enforcers of Americanism and would loosen their behavioral norms.

Many nervous majoritarian cultures before and since have extruded the same white-collar mob behavior enabled by officialdom. We are seeing this today —political violence in the US is, Reuters reports , reaching new highs.

Secrets, spin doctors, soldiers and socialists

In parallel, as frequently happens, is the contradiction of information control and its opposite, unconstrained rumor.

Wilson created the Committee for Public Information less than two weeks after he asked Congress for a declaration of war November 2, and veteran newsman George Creel was tapped to lead it. With Creel’s CPI, the US took the world stage on a wave of chauvinism and propaganda. The level of falsehood from officials, echoed in a compliant Hollywood’s implausible plots about conspiracy, brought a diminished public respect for truth per se, an eerie forecast of the Trump era – one newsman noted wonderingly “the force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.” Meanwhile racist mob violence repeatedly flared up around the country fueled, in many instances, by rumor.

To counter the top-down promotion of the US as saviors of democracy, resistance came from well-known political figures like Eugene Debs and other Socialist Party members as well as more passively from the proposed cannon fodder themselves. Though not radical, many draft-age men proved reluctant to fight on foreign shores. Hochschild tots up 338,000 men who registered for the draft but failed to show for induction – “in those pre-electronic days, of course, it was easy to drop from sight.” Those who did not, but registered as conscientious objectors, could anticipate miserable treatment at the hands of military authorities. Gen. Wood, who was put to running a midwestern basic training camp instead of the swashbuckling leadership of troops in Europe he felt was his due, also had charge of all the COs at his camp and abused them openly.

Those who didn’t show up for induction couldn’t drop from sight as easily as they would like because the ever-vigilant American Protective League conducted huge sweeps in public gatherings and grabbed those who couldn’t show a draft card.

Touring the country trying to speak out against the war, other socialist leaders along with Debs risked jail for violating the Espionage Act ban on discouraging the war effort. Some, like Debs, were convicted and sentenced to prison. Like many socialists in the US and especially Europe, the celebrated Kate Richards O’Hare found the fact of workers fighting workers “a shattering blow.” After sharing prison life with Emma Goldman (they were fast comrades) she was released and toured the country arguing Debs should be released, but Warren Harding waited until Christmas Day 1921 to do so. Goldman, finally found deportable, was expelled from the country she had come to love despite its politics.

The Socialist Party received special attention from others, including the rabid war hawk Theodore Roosevelt, because their activism was largely channeled into electoral work, which he found particularly dangerous. Five years of sustained repression dealt a “shattering blow” to the fortunes of the party. As Hochschild observes in his final chapter, “the party that had once elected 33 state legislators, 79 mayors and well over 1,000 city council members and other municipal officials [and drawn almost a million votes for a presidential candidate who was in prison] had shrunk to less than 10,000 members nationwide.”

As the war ended Wilson, who by John Maynard Keynes’s account had arrived in Paris with lofty speeches but “no plan at all” for concrete peace, failed to talk Lloyd George and Clemenceau out of demanding savage reparations by Germany. John Maynard Keynes, a British peace delegate, forecast the disaster that took place. Worse still, since no fighting took place in Germany and German propaganda and censorship were so massively imposed, “tens of millions of Germans did not believe their country had actually lost the war” – another disastrous deviation from reality that would lead to Hitler’s rise.

Republican candidate Harding campaigned on “normalcy” in the 1920 election. The public’s urge to be done with the Red Scare era partially illustrated by his 26-point margin of victory, which remains the widest in a presidential race since before the Civil War. His postmaster general, Will Hays, ended Burleson’s freewheeling censorship.  Harding, after his death, had an off-the-record comment released by a reporter: “Let’s not kid ourselves. Debs was right. We should never have gone to war.”

It seems likely that without US intervention in WWI the political landscape of Europe would have been significantly different as the 1920s began. But the war not only cost millions of lives (multiplied by the flu epidemic that wartime travel and travail doubtless spread) but, as Hochschild impressively demonstrates, badly damaged democratic possibilities in the US and gave the powerful a test bench for future forms of repression. Woodrow Wilson, “the inspirational idealist abroad,” failed as a peacemaker even as he proved “the nativist autocrat at home.” The Sedition Act was stripped from the Espionage Act soon after the war ended, but the Espionage Act remains, a threat to truthtellers today.

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American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

Adam hochschild. mariner, $29.99 (432p) isbn 978-0-358-45546-2.

Reviewed on: 08/30/2022

Genre: Nonfiction

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Featured Nonfiction Reviews

American Midnight by Adam Hochschild

Brendan’s alternate tagline for american midnight:.

All was not fine on the home front.

Quick synopsis:

A look at the American home front around the time of World War I.

Fun Fact Non-History People Will Like:

On June 5, 1917, all eligible men were required to register for the draft. Although there were concerns on how many would do so, nearly 10 million did so.

Fun Fact for History Nerds:

So much food was needed for the war effort that meatpacking companies saw their profits soar over 400%.

My Take on American Midnight:

It’s hard to review a book which has so many positive attributes but has one major and fatal flaw. The review becomes even harder when the author is Adam Hochschild who wrote one of the best books I have ever read, King Leopold’s Ghost.

The positives of American Midnight are considerable. Hochschild has chosen a very interesting time in American history and has put the focus on an often-ignored part of World War I, the home front. Specifically, he focuses on the unions and war opponents. As you would expect from an exceptional author, the history is sound, the prose is easy to read, and extremely interesting people are highlighted. There is a lot to like about this book and its story.

However, I could not get passed the fatal flaw of this book which is Hochschild’s clear bias when wading through this history. This is not a hidden bias as Hoschschild makes it clear in the prologue what he is going to present and why he is doing so. I have no problem with his theses and often, I was very much in agreement with his observations.

However, the bias can get to the point where it is significantly distracting even when you agree with the author (and I agreed with a good amount of Hochschild’s point of view). An example is when Hochschild mentions a military member (who he is clearly not a fan of) complimenting the Confederate flag. While this is certainly something we would analyze today if a public figure made such pronouncements, mentioning this specific event in 1917 is clearly a manipulative tactic. It would not have been strange to hear or see something like that in 1917, but today it is a hot button item. The history is sound as I have no doubt Hochschild is reporting the truth. However, the choice to include this is clearly meant to inflame today’s reader with something not inflammatory in its own time. To make this choice even more jarring, this particular passage is followed soon after by a positive presentation of someone who was implicated in an attempted murder.

Ultimately, it becomes a question of how distracting you find things like the examples I have mentioned above. History is told from a point of view and there is no way around that. However, these episodes proved too blatant and repeated for me to enjoy the rest of the book which is quite good. If you can glide past such episodes better than I can, then you will enjoy it immensely.

(This book was provided to me as an advance copy by Netgalley and Mariner Books.)

There is a lot to like, but it may lean too hard one way for some readers. Buy it here!

If You Liked This Try:

• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost

Brendan Dowd

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Book Review: ‘Kent State’ a chilling examination of 1970 campus shooting and its ramifications

This book cover image released by Norton shows “Kent State: An American Tragedy” by Brian VanDeMark. (Norton via AP)

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More than a half century has passed since Ohio National Guard members opened fire on college students during a war protest at Kent State University , killing four students and injuring nine others.

The description of the nation, then split over the Vietnam War, leading up to the 1970 tragedy echo today’s politics and divisions in many ways. In “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” historian Brian VanDeMark recounts a country that had split into two warring camps that would not and could not understand each other.

“It was a tense, suspicious, and combustible atmosphere that required only a spark to ignite a tragedy,” VanDeMark writes.

VanDeMark succeeds at helping readers understand that atmosphere, creating a chilling narrative of the spark and ensuing tragedy at Kent State. Within less than 13 seconds, 30 guardsmen fired 67 shots at protesters in an event where “the Vietnam War came home and the Sixties came to an end,” he writes.

With a straightforward writing style, VanDeMark provides both a micro and macro look at the events leading up to the massacre — examining the growing dissent against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and how it rippled across Kent State’s campus.

VanDeMark relies on a host of new material, including interviews with some of the guardsmen, to reconstruct the protests on campus and the shooting. He also recounts the investigations and legal fights that ensued following the shooting.

“Kent State” portrays a campus that grappled for years with its legacy, with no official memorial to the slain students erected on campus until two decades later, in 1990. A new visitors center devoted to the shooting that opened in 2012 suggested an emerging consensus about the tragedy, writes VanDeMark, whose work may contribute to that consensus as well.

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Browsing Is a Pleasure in This History of the Bookstore

“People feel differently about their bookstore than they do about their grocery store or electronics store,” writes Evan Friss, in praise of a retail ritual battered by the internet.

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THE BOOKSHOP: A History of the American Bookstore, by Evan Friss

We all know of food deserts : landscapes where there’s no access to fresh produce, just a Taco Bell or two. Less fretted over are the book barrens .

It is now possible to visit many places in our great democracy and not come anywhere close to a bookstore. (Public libraries are hanging in there — for now — though younger people overwhelmingly experience them through smartphones .)

Of course, along with bulk orders of Folgers and Cottonelle, one can order many exciting titles to be delivered cheaply — overnight even! — from this amazing online entity named for a river in South America. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. …

Grossly inadequate, asserts Evan Friss, a historian and husband to a former clerk at Manhattan’s Three Lives, in “The Bookshop,” a spirited defense of this important, odd and odds-defying American retail category. (He previously has written about bicycles, another common good that needs more support.)

A book about bookstores risks being a gag, like Kramer’s coffee-table book about coffee tables . It seems assured placement up front with the tote bags, mugs and other impulse merch that shops stock in order to pad their often dismal profit margins.

And yet there have been many engrossing memoirs by booksellers, most recently by Paul Yamazaki of the fabled City Lights in San Francisco, and another from the antiquarian Marius Kociejowski . Nor should one overlook the epistolary classic 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff.

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American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

• By Adam Hochschild
• Mariner Books
• Reviewed by David O. Stewart
• November 1, 2022

Can our country’s dark past teach us anything about its dark present?

The title American Midnight : The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis promises to instruct us that the cruel distempers of our times have happened before and that, if we pay attention, we will learn important lessons. And author Adam Hochschild has written wonderful books about other midnights in human history, including King Leopold’s Ghost (European exploitation of the Congo) and Bury the Chains (fighting the transatlantic slave trade). So, yes, attention should be paid.

In American Midnight, the darkness extends from 1917 to 1921. In Hochschild’s telling, the United States plunges into the madness of World War I, emerges more violent and hate-filled, and then recovers its bearings.

Culprits are exposed and castigated, with President Woodrow Wilson at the top of the list. Close behind is a toxic partnership between an attorney general who would be president (A. Mitchell Palmer) and an amoral, media-savvy policeman (young J. Edgar Hoover). Vigilantism runs amok as mobs and the government target union activists, immigrants, dissenters against the war effort, socialists, and African Americans.

Hochschild has a sharp eye for personalities and moments. His renderings of radical firebrand Emma Goldman and socialist leader Kate Richards O’Hare are compelling and three-dimensional. The description of an evening when prison officials barred O’Hare’s teenaged son from playing his trumpet for his jailed mother is perfect. And the portrait of Wilson as fundamentally feckless and bored by public administration — even before his debilitating stroke in autumn 1919 — is disturbing and persuasive.

As a narrative of troubled times, American Midnight shines. Its ambition to instruct us, however, may be an ambition too great.

It is no matter of national pride that other eras have featured comparable darkness. Coordinated violence against labor organizers, the newly arrived, war resisters, minorities, and leftists has recurred far too often. Comparable episodes include the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s; repression against war dissenters on both sides of the Civil War and during the Vietnam era; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; and intermittent “Red Scares” and union “massacres” and “wars” between the 1870s and the 1940s. Lamentably, public and private violence against African Americans and Native Americans has been nearly constant.

In American Midnight , the evil fevers afflicting the nation subside during the 1920 presidential election. Both Democrats and Republicans turn away from frontrunners promising more social anger and repression, choosing instead lightly known candidates of milder disposition: James Cox and Warren Harding. The affable Harding’s victory brings a few thieves into the White House but no crusaders against leftists or Black people. Why did the fevers break?

Hochschild stresses two episodes in 1920 when Attorney General Palmer’s brutal methods were criticized — by an obscure acting secretary of labor (Louis Post) and by a blue-ribbon panel of legal poohbahs (in today’s parlance, “elites”). Were those enough to transform the public mind and bring peace to the valley? Maybe, but there had been plenty of similar criticism before, which Hochschild describes. Perhaps Americans just grew weary of being angry.

Beyond the era covered by American Midnight is the disappointment that the 1920s proved to be no festival of brotherhood. The Ku Klux Klan flourished in many states, even electing a Klansman governor of Oklahoma. Lynchings continued at a steady pace. Federal courts and bureaucrats hammered labor when it dared to organize and strike. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, detailed by Hochschild, shut down much immigration for the next two generations.

So, what’s the lesson for today? How do we accelerate the end of such midnights, or even prevent them from happening? The takeaway may be that every period has its midnight, replete with angry populist movements and craven political leaders, and the people of that era must resolve to banish that darkness — or at least to wait it out.

David O. Stewart has written two historical novels set during the period of American Midnight ( The Paris Deception and The Babe Ruth Deception ) and five works of history.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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I spent 9 hours in Qatar Airways' newest airport lounge. It had perks, but the quiet rooms felt like a dentist's office.

• I had a 9-hour overnight layover in Doha, Qatar with access to the Qatar Airways' Garden lounge.
• I booked six hours in its quiet rooms to try to rest, but the chair was uncomfortable.
• Next time, I would sleep on the plane and enjoy the other great lounge amenities instead.

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Our business-class ticket came with access to the Al Mourjan Garden lounge, a business travel lounge at Hamad International Airport that opened in 2023.

I was excited to check out the massive space and all of its amenities, including a quiet room where I wanted to take a nap .

Our flight landed just before midnight and the airport was packed with travelers.

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I wouldn't say anything else in the room could be described as cozy except for that thick, soft blanket.

The chair and environment made me feel like I was in a dentist's office. At least the lights could be turned off here, and no one was pulling teeth.

I ended up in a single room but had the opportunity to view the double. It was essentially the same, except the space was larger, and there were two chairs instead of one.

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The quiet rooms didn't feel super secure because the sliding doors to get in didn't appear to have locks, but nappers also have the option to store their luggage at a separate secure counter if they're worried.

I struggled to get comfortable but I eventually fell asleep.

Because the chair was immovable and designed with a curve, sleeping on my side didn't feel possible.

As a side sleeper , I eventually ended up moving to the floor to get more comfortable. I folded the blanket up several times to lie on it and used my backpack as a pillow.

I could hear some noises outside my room, but to be fair, the room is billed as "quiet," not "silent."

My room was next to a staff door I heard opening several times an hour, and the airport intercom recordings were faint but consistent. I didn't hear any conversations, phone alerts, or other more annoying sounds.

Earplugs were also provided to alleviate the noise.

Later, I enjoyed other amenities of the lounge, including breakfast

After about four hours of somewhat unsatisfactory snoozing, I freshened up and rejoined the main area of the lounge.

As the sun began to rise, the light streamed through the massive lounge windows and illuminated the space.

I sat at one of the few open tables in the restaurant section of the lounge and had avocado toast with poached eggs and mimosas for breakfast.

The service in the lounge was excellent, and I loved all of the natural light.

The quiet rooms weren't the best, but they were better than gate seating — or even the main area of the lounge.

The quiet room is a fine place to relax for six hours during a layover in Doha, but I'd tell other visitors not to expect the most comfortable sleep of their lives.

The quiet room's chair wasn't nearly as comfortable as the lie-flat seats in Qatar Airways' epic business class, where the seat is adjustable and the crew can provide a mattress pad and pillow.

If they were, I would've had a much better rest. Next time, I'd sleep more on the plane and take extra time to enjoy the lounge's other wonderful amenities.

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August 15, 2024

Current Issue

Misjudging Labor

August 10, 2024

Paul DeMaria/NY Daily News/Getty Image

Transport Workers Union President Mike Quill tearing up a temporary strike-barring injunction issued by state supreme court Justice George Tilzer, New York City, 1966

On June 13 the Supreme Court  once again  sided with a multibillion-dollar corporation over its workers. The case of  Starbucks Corp.  v . McKinney  concerns seven employees, now known as the Memphis Seven, whom Starbucks fired in February 2022 as they tried to unionize their store in Tennessee. (Because federal law prohibits employers from retaliating against organizing, the company naturally claims they were let go for violating workplace policies.) The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency tasked with guaranteeing workers’ rights to join unions and negotiate contracts, was quick to intervene. Directed by the Biden-appointed General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, NLRB staff filed for a preliminary injunction to force Starbucks to reinstate the fired activists while the case was fully litigated. 

Such requests are rare. The NLRB only makes them when companies glaringly violate labor law and the agency is confident that courts will decide the case in the workers’ favor. In August 2022 a lower-court judge agreed and granted the injunction.

That six-month wait for a modicum of justice was blazing speed by the standards of United States labor law. It was too fast for the Supreme Court, which, in an 8-1 decision, reversed the injunction. The justices ruled that when courts consider the NLRB’s injunction requests, rather than using a legal standard specific to labor disputes that gives the board relative deference, they must use a more restrictive standard known as “the traditional four-factor test,” as articulated in the 2008 case  Winter  v . Natural Resources Defense Council , Inc . Among the factors considered are the “balance of equities” (meaning that the ruling is fair to both sides) and that an injunction serves the “public interest.” Both factors are a matter of opinion. Put simply, the Court is placing its own views over the expertise of the NLRB’s professional staff, in the name of a “traditional” test that’s as old as a teenager. 

The NLRB still needs to decide the case, which might take a year or more. A majority of its members—the Democrats—will likely agree that Starbucks violated the plain language of the law forbidding “discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” When the agency returns to court for an enforcement order, the judges should rule in its favor once more, though Starbucks can appeal that decision as well. 

All this delay favors employers. Union representation cases are usually won or lost in the years it takes to finish adjudicating a wrongful termination charge—the fired Starbucks workers included five of the six members of the organizing committee. Many cases are settled for cash payouts and a mutual agreement to call the matter a “resignation.” Sometimes unions trade settlements to get a company to withdraw its own charges or bargain in good faith. Starbucks is apparently negotiating under just such a  brokered framework  with the union, Workers United.

In one sense the consequences of  Starbucks  v . McKinney  are relatively minor. Many Republican-leaning circuit courts were already using the four-factor test. In her partial dissent, Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed that it was the appropriate rubric but argued that it should be applied in a way that recognizes the NLRB’s authority, and that courts shouldn’t fully relitigate such cases: an “injunction request simply does not present the district court with an opportunity to wade into the midst of an ongoing labor dispute (over which it otherwise has no say) and offer its own take about how the merits should be decided.” 

But in another, deeper sense, the  Starbucks  decision is a dispiriting sign that the courts will only allow labor rights to be revised downwards. The National Labor Relations Act, which Congress passed in 1935 to protect workers’ right to form unions and bargain collectively, may no longer be adequate to that task in a court system that has been historically pro-corporate but is especially conservative today in the aftermath of the Trump administration (though even two of the liberals, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined the  Starbucks majority). In another blow to unions, on June 28 the Court, in a more nakedly partisan 6-2 vote,  eviscerated  the forty-year-old  Chevron  deference, rejecting the subject-matter expertise and statutory interpretation not just of the NLRB but of all federal regulatory agencies. How might union supporters hoping to curb inequality wrest control back from the legal system?

Judicial hostility to labor is hardly a new phenomenon. As Jackson noted in her partial dissent, “To put it bluntly, courts exercising their equitable discretion amidst labor disputes today do so against the backdrop of an ignominious history of abuse.” In his classic study,  Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement , the historian William E. Forbath showed how, in the nineteenth century, “judge made law”—that is, legislating from the bench—forced unions to adopt an essentially conservative political strategy. 1 In an era-defining decision in the case  Lochner  v . New York (1905), the Court overturned a New York law limiting working hours in bakeries, arguing that the legislation interfered with the freedom to contract under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

As a result, in its early decades the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—the country’s largest labor organization—focused narrowly on contractual negotiations and largely gave up on state intervention as a solution to working people’s problems, except to try to prevent courts from intervening in labor disputes. When Roosevelt’s 1933  National Industrial Recovery Act  tentatively endorsed collective bargaining and the right to organize, the Supreme Court overturned it using the  Lochner  doctrine. New York senator Robert Wagner then responded with the 1935 NLRA. That law stripped the courts of nearly all jurisdiction on cases pertaining to labor relations—essentially telling judges to keep their opinions on the subject to themselves—and created the NLRB, a parallel system of civil tribunals, which hears cases of alleged violations of workers’ rights to organize unions and go on strike. If the NLRB finds that an employer broke the law and cannot get them to comply or settle, it then and only then turns to the courts for enforcement (including injunctions). The NLRA was intended to supersede common law.

Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/Library of America

A fifteen-year-old boy employed as messenger at Mackay Telegraph Company, Waco, Texas, 1913; photography by Lewis Hine

Set beside the original mandate of the NLRB, the Court’s decision in  Starbucks  v . McKinney  couldn’t be more wrong. But the federal agency’s authority has eroded over time. In  Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law , the legal scholar James B. Atleson narrated how, after the passage of the NLRA, the class biases of patrician judges led them to push back against pro-worker laws. “The belief in the inherent rights of property and the need for capital mobility, for instance, underlie certain rules,” Atleson writes, “and some decisions turn on the received superior need for continued production or the fear of employee irresponsibility.” 2 More recently, in his book  The Supreme Court on Unions  (2016), Julius B. Getman described how, if anything, the highest court’s historical antagonism to labor has only gotten worse in the last four decades. “What has remained constant over the years has been judicial arrogance,” he writes: “the willingness of the Court to establish factual premises for its decisions with little basis in reality.” 3

Take the right to strike, which is both specifically enumerated under the NLRA and clearly identified as one of its policy goals: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed so as either to interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike.” But this was undone just three years later in  NLRB  v . Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co. , a 1938 case concerning the firing of striking workers at a regional telecom firm. Justice Owen Roberts upheld strikes as protected activity, but he also made a careless aside in his decision, musing that an employer would be allowed to permanently replace his striking workers if it was necessary “to protect and continue his business.” 

In the following decades, employers pressed the outer edges of  Mackay : Can we offer replacement workers  super-seniority  protection from layoffs while strikers are not similarly protected? (No.) How about  give them vacation pay  that strike participants are denied? (Also no.) By the 1980s, however, their efforts turned Justice Roberts’s offhand comment into  stare decisis , a disastrous precedent   that held that replacing strikers and only offering them their jobs back when scabs retire is “proper under  Mackay. ”

Judges also watered down the “balance of equities” protections, which were once robust enough to protect even the worst employees from retaliatory firings for union activism. Consider Walter Weigand, the subject of the landmark 1943 case  Edward G. Budd Mfg. Co.  v.  NLRB . “If ever a workman deserved summary discharge it was he,” concluded a bemused circuit court judge. “He was under the influence of liquor while on duty. He came to work when he chose and he left the plant and his shift as he pleased.” If I’m not misinterpreting the court’s demure transcript, Weigand also ran a prostitution operation in the employer’s back alley (on company time) and testified that he had no idea what his actual job entailed. But he was only fired after switching from the boss’ company union to the more militant CIO, and for that reason the NLRB and the courts ordered him back on the job as the law intended.

But since 1980, the NLRB has applied what’s called the “ Wright Line ” standard for judging “mixed motive” terminations of union activists. It requires that a union prove that a worker was fired while engaged in protected union activity, that the employer knew the worker was a union activist, and that the employer held animus against the union. These demands in turn require more time-consuming litigation, even when an employer’s actions—like Starbucks  firing  people for talking to reporters about their union activism—wouldn’t pass a common-sense smell test. It’s not surprising, then, that the Wright Line standard has become a go-to union-busting weapon for employers. These days union supporters are  fired  in the course of nearly one in three certification votes brought before the NLRB. 

An implicit assumption of the 1935 NLRA was that employers would remain neutral about organizing campaigns, and recognize a union if a clear majority of workers wanted one. But soon the Supreme Court had granted employers a First Amendment right to campaign against unionization and force employees to attend mandatory captive audience presentations. In the 1950s the NLRB fought for unions’ right to respond to these presentations, or at least mandate some access to the workplace, but since 1956 the Supreme Court has consistently supported employer’s property interests over unions’ access and speech.

Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Senator Bernie Sanders shaking hands with fired Starbucks worker leader Jaysin Saxton, U.S. Capital, Washington, DC, 2023.

What do employers say in captive audience meetings? In 1969  Chief Justice Earl Warren  allowed them to threaten that a successful union drive would lead to workplace closures or other negative effects, as long as these threats were presented as predictions “carefully phrased on the basis of objective fact to convey an employer’s belief.” In a 2009  report , the labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that between 1999 and 2003, employers threatened plant closure in 57 percent of NLRB elections, and in 15 percent of the cases they actually followed through. 

In all, it took the courts roughly thirty years to take workers out of a legal environment where union organizing was a fully enforceable right—with meaningful job protections and enforcement against threats, reprisals and the refusal to negotiate—to one where certification elections are conducted under manifestly crooked rules.

While corporations aggressively worked the courts, the AFL-CIO and its think-tanks pressed for legislative reform whenever the Democrats briefly controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. But the Democrats only pursued narrow, technical fixes: a push to ban permanent replacements under Clinton; simple proof of majority, or “card check,” certification under Obama. Even these were vigorously resisted by the business lobby and eventually killed by filibusters. Biden’s is the first Democratic administration to meaningfully use the rules in place, and the NLRB’s rule-making authority, to encourage the practice of collective bargaining. 

“Of all of the members of Biden’s administration,” the  Nation  has gushed , it’s Abruzzo “who has brought about the most significant changes for American workers.” Under Abruzzo the NLRB has sped up the timeline for conducting union representation elections. It has also expanded the instances in which employers must accept card check certification, has tried to limit the ability of employers to conduct mandatory captive audience meetings, and stretched for  “make whole” financial penalties against employers who violate their workers’ rights. Even its decision to request an injunction in the Starbucks case was part of Abruzzo’s systemwide attempt to modernize operations. (The NLRB has not yet, I’ll note in case Abruzzo is reading,  restored the right to strike by revisiting the  Mackay  standard and forcing employers to prove that they would go out of business if not allowed to hire permanent replacements.)

And yet any of these actions can be overturned if the Supreme Court finds they violate a precedent or employers’ First or Fourteenth Amendment rights. All of them, ultimately, cry out for new lawmaking. Restoring the promise of US labor law requires amending the NLRA to  override  unfair court precedent and reassert the NLRB’s supremacy over judges on routine enforcement of labor violations. 

It is axiomatic on the left that lawmakers do not pass such prolabor legislation until a strike wave forces them to. Yet the historical record suggests otherwise. The “right” to organize was shoehorned into the  National Industrial Recovery Act —the objectively pro-business “First New Deal” legislation that the Supreme Court overturned—to gain the AFL’s support for a controversial bill. It wasn’t won through workplace action, and lacking enforcement powers, it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. But by offering just enough to raise workers’ expectations—and more to dash their hopes—it inadvertently birthed the very militancy needed to enshrine more meaningful reform.

This argument about the effect of the NIRA is still controversial. The labor activist and scholar Eric Blanc  recently cut through  decades of mythmaking and crunched the numbers. He found a 129 percent increase in union membership and a 260 percent increase in workers going on strike in the months that followed the act’s enactment. In my forthcoming book,  We Always Had a Union: New York’s Hotel Workers Unions, 1912-1953 , I show that the National Recovery Administration’s wage and hours code, in addition to failing to compel union recognition and reinstate fired union activists, directly caused a citywide hotel strike that the agency was attempting to mediate in January 1934. Though the unions didn’t “win” that strike, shaken hotel bosses negotiated a neutrality agreement so that the industry wouldn’t be hit with another work stoppage during the 1939 World’s Fair. The agreement resulted in the  New York Hotel Trades Council , the union that remains a powerhouse in the city and state.

One lesson from this history is that unions need to be quicker to take advantage of favorable organizing environments. Today there is both a noticeable uptick of worker-led organizing (as evidenced by independent union wins at Amazon and Trader Joe’s , and wildcat job actions during the pandemic) and a pro-worker NLRB. And yet most unions are building up their savings accounts instead of spending down on new campaigns. Unions have collectively reduced their staff and organizers by an estimated 19 percent between 2010 and 2020, which translates to 23,440 fewer people that could potentially be put in the field. With the benefit of new leadership, the Teamsters and UAW are notable exceptions, joining a small handful of organizing champions like SEIU and UNITE HERE in investing significant resources on campaigns aimed at growing the labor movement, at huge employers like Volkswagen , Marriott  hotels, and FedEx .

The other lesson is that opportunities for legal reform come rarely, briefly, and usually by surprise. There is no shortage of reform proposals like the PRO Act and the Clean Slate program. But too little attention is paid to counteracting judicial bias. If the Roberts Court’s judicial power grab, already a constitutional crisis, is to be met with more political brinkmanship like court-packing and Congressional overrides of politically motivated decisions, then why not center that fight on issues where judges’ historic tendency to favor corporations over workers cast them as perfect villains? Union supporters should be demanding that judges stop imposing their values and assumptions on accredited bodies like the NLRB. As the Transport Workers Union president Michael J. Quill once said of the man who sentenced him to jail for the 1966 New York City transit strike, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes .”

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Shaun Richman teaches history at SUNY Empire and is author of Tell The Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century .

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Book Review: 'Kent State' a chilling examination of 1970 campus shooting and its ramifications

Historian Brian VanDeMark writes about the fatal 1970 shooting of four students by National Guard members at a war protest in “Kent State: An American Tragedy.”

More than a half century has passed since Ohio National Guard members opened fire on college students during a war protest at Kent State University , killing four students and injuring nine others.

The description of the nation, then split over the Vietnam War, leading up to the 1970 tragedy echo today's politics and divisions in many ways. In “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” historian Brian VanDeMark recounts a country that had split into two warring camps that would not and could not understand each other.

“It was a tense, suspicious, and combustible atmosphere that required only a spark to ignite a tragedy,” VanDeMark writes.

VanDeMark succeeds at helping readers understand that atmosphere, creating a chilling narrative of the spark and ensuing tragedy at Kent State. Within less than 13 seconds, 30 guardsmen fired 67 shots at protesters in an event where “the Vietnam War came home and the Sixties came to an end,” he writes.

With a straightforward writing style, VanDeMark provides both a micro and macro look at the events leading up to the massacre — examining the growing dissent against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and how it rippled across Kent State's campus.

VanDeMark relies on a host of new material, including interviews with some of the guardsmen, to reconstruct the protests on campus and the shooting. He also recounts the investigations and legal fights that ensued following the shooting.

“Kent State” portrays a campus that grappled for years with its legacy, with no official memorial to the slain students erected on campus until two decades later, in 1990. A new visitors center devoted to the shooting that opened in 2012 suggested an emerging consensus about the tragedy, writes VanDeMark, whose work may contribute to that consensus as well.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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