(2022-10-03) When America Was Awash In Patriotic Frenzy And Political Repression

When America Was Awash in Patriotic Frenzy and Political Repression. Adam Hochschild’s new book, “American Midnight,” offers a vivid account of the country during the years 1917-21, when extremism reached levels rarely rivaled in our history.

The United States during that time saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression rarely rivaled in its history. President Woodrow Wilson’s terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.

In 1917, as Hochschild recounts, the U.S. Army was smaller than Portugal’s. An 18th-century legal corset — the U.S. Constitution — constrained the executive branch, requiring two-thirds of the Senate to ratify foreign treaties

When Wilson became president in 1913, he was hailed as a progressive visionary. He wanted to transform moth-eaten American institutions into a sleek administrative state.

He wanted to make America the decisive player in world politics, and for its influence to match its economic might.

Aided by the news of German war atrocities, the Wilson administration whipped up anti-German hysteria.

the Wobblies, whose American membership never numbered more than 100,000, were a thinly organized movement fighting against business groups, which financed vast armories, many of which still squat at the center of American cities. These, in turn, were backed by a fledgling surveillance state that did not hesitate to outsource its violence to officially sanctioned vigilante groups

If the proto-human-rights missionaries such as Roger Casement and Edmund Morel were the heroes of “King Leopold’s Ghost,” Hochschild has a more colorful cast to work with in “American Midnight.” There is Emma Goldman, the Russian-born revolutionary; Marie Equi, the medical doctor and fighter for women’s and workers’ rights; and the fiery orator Kate Richard O’Hare — all of whom the Wilson administration wasted no time imprisoning on charges authorized by the 1917 Espionage Act. W.E.B. Du Bois captures the deep dismay American Blacks felt about a party that had begun to attract more of their votes, but which all but acquiesced in the licensing of lynching by Dixie senators. Hovering throughout Hochschild’s account is Debs himself, the keeper of the tablets of American socialism

Powerful thinkers about the political moment, such as Randolph Bourne, are absent from “American Midnight,” while John Dos Passos features more as a backup bard than a literary chronicler with historical insight.

The Catholic Church inoculated large segments of immigrant workers from radicalization, while canny capitalists like Henry Ford devised ways to divide workers into a caste system with different gradations of privilege. For all of the success of the strike waves of 1919, almost none of them left any permanent new trade union organization in place, nor did socialists make much headway in electoral politics.

In the closing portions of this tale, Hochschild shows that, by contrast, a generation of American liberals learned what not to do from Wilson

Felix Frankfurter, who, as a young judge advocate general, gallantly tried to counteract some of Wilson’s domestic terror, and Frankfurter’s friend Walter Lippmann, who worked on Wilson’s foreign policy team, were determined to cast off the administration’s excesses. Both envisioned a state that would protect civil rights instead of violating them, and oversee a more efficient and fair economy.