Adam Hochschild on The Crushing of American Socialism

 

It is impossible to recall the Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the Capitol without feeling how close we came. If Vice President Mike Pence had capitulated to Donald Trump; if the election had been forced into the House of Representatives; if that unsavory mob had flooded the building’s interior before security personnel could hustle legislators away. . . . So many if’s. After watching the searing congressional hearings about that day, many have declared last year’s assault the gravest threat to our constitutional order since the Civil War. But was it?
 
American democracy suffered a deep, sudden crisis just over a hundred years ago. It saw thousands of people jailed for their political opinions, freedom of the press drastically slashed, and an unprecedented government attack on labor. These are several shameful years that, astonishingly, we’ve almost completely forgotten.
 
Two events kicked off that dark period in American life. The first was the declaration of war on Germany in April 1917. This provided an excuse for brutal repression. Big business and labor, for instance, had been battling bloodily for years, but now any workers daring to strike could be accused of impeding the war effort. In the summer of that year in Bisbee, Ariz., more than 2,000 striking copper miners and their families were roused from their beds at dawn by a heavily armed sheriff’s posse. A total of 1,186 men who refused to return to work were herded into railway freight cars at gunpoint, hauled 180 miles through the desert, and placed in an Army stockade.
 
Then came the Russian Revolution in November 1917. The resulting Red Scare provided a further pretext for cracking down on dissent of all kinds. This took several forms.
 
First, between 1917 and 1921, roughly a thousand Americans went to prison for a year or more — and a far larger number for shorter periods — solely for what they wrote or said. Some were famous, among them longtime Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who had once won 6 percent of the popular vote for president. He wound up in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for speaking against American participation in the war. Others were completely unknown, among them, for example, three middle-aged men who were sent to another federal prison for private conversations with one another in a Kentucky cobbler’s shop. They had been secretly eavesdropped on by a microphone planted by a local vigilante group, and a court found their talk disloyal to the United States.
 
Second, the federal government censored the press on a massive scale. The First World War was the excuse, but censorship continued full steam for more than two years after the fighting ended. Hundreds of specific issues of newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail, and some 75 publications forced to close. The most famous of the latter was The Masses, a New York literary monthly that was in style and content a precursor to The New Yorker. It had published a stellar array of writers ranging from John Reed to Walter Lippmann to Sherwood Anderson to Edna St. Vincent Millay.

 
Third, the government used the mood of hysteria to crush groups it didn’t like. Debs was far from the only Socialist leader sent to jail, and many of the party’s chapters suddenly found that the post office no longer delivered their mail. Hundreds of members of the country’s most militant labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World, known to all as the Wobblies, were swept up in nationwide arrests. In a single trial in Chicago, a federal judge sentenced more than 90 Wobblies to a total of 807 years of prison time.
 
The repression climaxed with the notorious Palmer Raids. One pretext for the raids was a string of bombings of sites around the Northeast, including the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington, D.C. Today the bombings are believed to have been the work of a tiny group of Italian American anarchists, who were never successfully prosecuted. But that didn’t prevent the ambitious Palmer, who had his eye on the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination, from casting a far wider net, rounding up leftists and immigrants of all kinds, some of whom had never been politically active at all. Supervised by the youthful J. Edgar Hoover, agents of Palmer’s Justice Department, accompanied by local police and civilian vigilantes, seized approximately 10,000 people and jailed several thousand of them, often roughing them up for the benefit of newsreel cameras — you can see footage on YouTube. Historian Alan Brinkley called the Palmer Raids “arguably the greatest single violation of civil liberties in American history.”
 
We did recover from all this, but slowly. It would be nice to say that we recovered because the politicians of the era saw the excesses they had committed and repented. But the change came for other reasons. One was that Palmer, believing his own propaganda about the left-wing menace, rashly warned that a nationwide Communist uprising would erupt on May 1, 1920. National Guard troops were put on alert, cities mobilized off-duty police, business moguls hired extra security men. The day dawned and nothing whatsoever happened. This deflated Palmer’s presidential campaign and the Red Scare generally.
 
But the other reason the repression eased was that it had crippled progressive forces in the way that its architects intended. The Industrial Workers of the World never recovered from the jailing of hundreds of its leaders. Anti-labor legislation caused even the determinedly moderate American Federation of Labor to lose a million members. Not until the mid-1930s would union organizing recover momentum. Most of the shuttered newspapers and magazines, many of them supporters of the Socialist Party, never saw print again. And the party itself, which had once elected more than a thousand officials to state and local offices around the country, would never again be a significant force in American life.
 
What lesson should we take from this sorry piece of our history? Exactly the same one as offered by Jan. 6, 2021 — and by the ominous threats Trump and his followers are making right now.
 
We can have a Constitution full of safeguards like the First Amendment and the separation of powers. But safeguards only work if we enforce them — vigilantly. Last year, they were almost shattered by a president falsely claiming an election was stolen. Between 1917 and 1921 they were shattered because of frenzy over war and the imagined threat of revolution. There will be different dangers ahead, and they will come in ways we can’t anticipate. The crisis of a century ago began not under a spiteful showman urging on his camouflage-clad followers but under the most scholarly and dignified of American leaders, Woodrow Wilson, a former university president. We need to be on the alert for these threats and to remember that the Constitution is not a fixed backstop that will always stand securely but something vulnerable that can be undermined in the blink of an eye.
 
The assault on the Constitution that was too quickly forgotten. By Adam Hochschild. The Boston Globe, October 25, 2022
 

What year is it really? On the calendar it says 2022, but time feels broken: Past, present and future all seem to be colliding. This disorientation often feels alien and monstrous — but could also be productive and radically recuperative.
 
America and many other parts of the world are under siege by illiberal forces that are seeking to end democracy under the banner of right-wing populism and other authoritarian visions. Such forces are old and new at the same time.
 
In the United States and many other parts of the world, right-wing street thugs and paramilitaries have staged marches and engaged in acts of violence against their "enemies" — which include Black and brown people, immigrants of all races, LGBTQ people, liberals and "socialists," Jewish people, Muslims and other targeted groups — as part of a reactionary revolutionary project to enforce "tradition" and "conservative" values and return their societies to a mythic past of "greatness" and "unity".
 
It is clear that Donald Trump still aspires to be an authoritarian strongman and fascist, looking to some of the worst such leaders in history as his role models. To that point, Trump's coup attempt on Jan. 6 had echoes of Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall putsch and the Reichstag fire, both of which preceded the Nazi seizure of power.
 
In other parts of the world, right-wing populists and neofascists like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and, most recently, Giorgia Meloni in Italy have risen to power.
 
Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by rhetoric about the rejection of liberal democracy along with "political correctness," "diversity" and "multiculturalism," often describing such values as "cosmopolitan" and by implication feminine and weak. Putin, Orbán and other authoritarian leaders are idolized as role models by many American "conservatives."
 
The QAnon conspiracy cult also continues to gain influence within the Republican Party and "conservative" movement. It is hardly a new phenomenon: It draws on centuries-old antisemitic beliefs such as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and the "blood libel" that Jewish people murdered Christian babies, which can trace their origins at least to the European Middle Ages.
 
In the United States and other Western societies, wealth and income inequality have reached extreme levels not seen since the Gilded Age, where a very small number of people control the majority of the world's resources.
 
In these examples and others, we see the unvanquished ghosts and demons of the 19th and 20th centuries (and even earlier) reanimated for the 21st century and amplified by social media across an interconnected global society. Today's Western-style democracies and societies appear to lack the civic immune systems required to effectively resist these forces — and are running out of time to develop them.
 
History offers many lessons in dealing with such crises, and historian and journalist Adam Hochschild is among our most valuable instructors. His books include such bestselling and award-winning titles as "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves," "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa" and "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918."
 
Hochschild returns to early 20th-century history in his newest book, "American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis." His essays and other writing have appeared in such publications as the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Yorker, Mother Jones and the New York Review of Books.
 
In this conversation, Hochschild locates Trumpism and the rise of American neofascism and other reactionary revolutionary forces within a much longer continuity of American history and unresolved struggles over democracy, freedom, truth, reason, progress, equality of opportunity, and civil and human rights. He describes Donald Trump as an almost unique figure in American history, which is why he is so popular among his followers — and so dangerous to the country's democratic institutions and culture.
 
American society, Hochschild says, would be more democratic, more humane and more prosperous for most people if progressive movements had not been crushed during the latter part of World War I  and its immediate aftermath. Toward the end of this conversation, Hochschild reflects upon the importance and meaning of "social democracy" and says that tradition can still help American society weather its multiple overlapping and potentially existential crises.
 
Given the world's democracy crisis and so many other troubles, how are you making sense of it all? How are you feeling?
 
AH : It's been up and down these last few years. The fact that we came within such a hair's breadth of getting Trump for the second time scared the hell out of me. Government inaction in the months after that was deeply depressing. I did feel somewhat heartened that the Manchin-Schumer deal unleashed a lot of money that will help the country.
 
Having a president who recognizes that global warming exists and is actually trying to do something about it just reminds me of how lucky we are compared to a couple of years ago. But we also saw George Floyd murdered for all the world to see, and that was a reminder of just how far we have to go as a country. These tough years for many people here in the United States and the world have also seen an explosion of wealth inequality. These years have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from bottom to top in modern American history.
 
How are you using your intellectual tools as a historian to get leverage on these events, to make the larger picture more coherent and more intelligible?
 
AH : I love writing about history, and I have to say that it was a great comfort to me to have the privilege of writing this book during the pandemic. So many people were unable to work. Their jobs were shut down and they did not have the privilege of working from home. If I'm writing a book and telling people about a time in history that they may not know about, I feel like I am being somehow useful. The pleasure of doing that just keeps me going.
 
In times of trouble and tumult we often hear the phrase that "history is being made" or that these are "historic events." What does that actually mean? I feel like that language should be unpacked and interrogated.
 
AH : History is always happening, even at times when it feels stuck. There are tensions building and nasty things are afoot. In "American Midnight," I write about how these tensions were building here in the U.S. in that period from the end of World War I through the early 1920s. Nativists were against immigrants. Whites were against Black people. Business was against labor. Then there are these moments where things seem to be happening more rapidly and something dramatic happens that crystallizes the public mood. The murder of George Floyd was one such recent moment.
 
When I am writing, I am living emotionally in the time period I'm writing about. I find satisfaction in that. I also find satisfaction in feeling the echoes of that earlier time period in the present. None of the conflicts that divided the United States 100 years ago have gone away: They're just here in different forms.
 
What year is it really? The Age of Trump is utterly disorienting. We know the calendar year, of course, but the feeling and experience of the past and present colliding can make it feel difficult to locate ourselves relative to history.
 
AH : I believe it depends on where you are and who you are in this society and world. If you're a young Black man walking down the street on a dark night in Chicago, and a car full of cops comes by, it may feel like it's 1870. If you're a journalist who is able to express themselves through their freedom of speech and rights, then it really is 2022. Wanting and needing the freedom to say what you want, to think critically and be investigative and probe deeply, it really is 2022 — you are not being repressed or censored in the way journalists were during the earlier decades of the 20th century. If you're a labor activist who is trying to sign people up for a new union at Amazon or Trader Joe's, maybe it feels like 1930, where we hadn't yet gotten to the surge in the labor movement that happened under the New Deal.
 
One way I have oriented myself during this democracy crisis is to lean into my study of history. It is frustrating and disheartening to see the professional politics watchers and pundits, who are supposed to know the fundamentals about America's history, repeat narratives that do not pass the most basic critical inquiry. Many of them treat the Age of Trump and neofascism as a surprise or shock, when the facts of American history are clear: This not something foreign to the country's political and social history. I wonder if that ignorance is just a performance or if the professional smart people really do not know these things.
 
AH :  I think one of the problems is that the writing we do tends to get read by people who agree with us already and who don't need convincing. The problem is how to reach the ones who do need convincing or whose minds could be broadened. That's why I put a lot of emphasis on trying to write history in a way that makes use of narrative techniques and catches readers up in the story of it. I really try to tell history through the lives of individual people, rather than just sitting back and looking at broad historical trends. When people reach out to me after reading one of my books, they tell me that those human stories really pulled them in.
 
How do we locate the Age of Trump within the larger story or American history? What chapter is this?
 
AH : It's a middle chapter, because we're not at the end yet. We've made some progress and I think that we took some steps back. There are areas of life in this country where we've not had much progress and other areas where we have seen much progress. One of those areas I have focused on is the distribution of wealth. As a society we have been backsliding on that terribly since around 1970. We've reached the point where the two or three richest people in this country — Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — have as much wealth as the bottom half of the population combined, which is more than 150 million people. Such a situation is unparalleled in the country's history.
 
I think we've advanced in some other areas. My wife and I were civil rights workers for a brief time in the South in 1964. At that time, Black people in the South couldn't vote. Of course Black Americans have the right to vote now, but of course there are strenuous efforts being made to take their right to vote away through voter suppression, voter nullification and such things. In terms of the labor movement, the country has slipped backward too. Not too long ago, 30 percent or so of working Americans were in unions; now it is much lower. But history is always a matter of moving forward and backward, and then trying to figure out what we can do to move forward again.
 
What are some of the continuities between the period you were writing about and today?
 
AH : Some of the continuities that I identified in the book that we see in different forms today involve that old tension in American life between nativists and immigrants. In this context, "nativist" means the people whose ancestors got here one or two generations ago being resentful of those who are now arriving. A hundred or so years ago, that meant tensions around European immigrants and questions of whiteness. As you know, Jews, Poles, Italians and other white "ethnics" had not yet become white in the eyes of the white people who were already here in America. The tensions of the color line, where whites are resentful of Black people's advances and progress is still very much with us in this country. The tension between business and labor is still with us too.
 
And of course, questions of women's rights and equality are unresolved in this country, with the most obvious example being how this right-wing Supreme Court just struck a huge blow against women's reproductive rights and freedoms. The right-wing militia groups and what they represent are also nothing new in American history either.
 
How do you locate Donald Trump in this American story? Here I mean not just the man — that is a superficial error that too many political observers are making. My concern is about what Donald Trump represents and symbolizes.
 
AH :  I wish that I had a perfect comparison for Donald Trump to somebody in the country's past. In many ways, we have not had a figure exactly like him before. One strand of Trump can be traced to the European fascists and leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini. Trump, like them, knows that if you can target a whole group of people as a villain or some type of enemy, you can gain power. Another strand of Trump connects to the country's long history of snake oil salesmen, flimflam artists and con men who are trying to sell you a magical cure for your troubles. Trump also connects to conspiracy theories. He is also a P.T. Barnum-esque figure, a showman who travels around entertaining his public.
 
Trump basically has endorsed QAnon, which is fundamentally just the antisemitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" updated for today. Trump also has connections to the Ku Klux Klan and blatant appeals to whiteness that we saw after the Civil War and through to the 1920s, the Red Summer and beyond.
 
The full title of your new book is "American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis." Who has forgotten this history? 
 
AH :  I'm always interested in forgotten history because I think every country in the world likes to have a glowing, shiny, upbeat version of its past and things it wants to forget. For example, look at the outpouring of grief and loss because of Queen Elizabeth II's passing. She is being almost canonized as some type of perfect person when in reality the British Empire, which she symbolized, has its origins in imperialism, chattel slavery and other crimes against humanity. America is no exception to that yearning for a simple shiny version of its past.
 
There are so many parts of America's history that many people would like to overlook by instead focusing on hagiographic or mythical stories about the founders. We do so at our peril. Many of the dark forces that I write about, from 1917 to 1921, that very repressive time in our country's history, are still with us today. Moreover, those dark forces could be triggered and inflamed even further, depending on political developments or some great crisis here or abroad.
 
How do you make sense of these right-wing attacks on history and the creation of Orwellian thought-crime laws across red-state America?
 
AH :  We've seen it before. We've also seen periods of time in this country where those types of thought crimes and suppression were not even necessary because history was so sanitized and written by the powerful. There weren't books like "The 1619 Project" to challenge those narratives. The right wing didn't have to start banning books because there were relatively few bannable books, in their eyes. The fact that the right wing in America is so outraged and wants to ban books today is really a testimony that there are a lot more books out there today which are challenging power and the dominant narrative. That is an improvement and a good thing, compared to decades before.
 
I don't want to summon this outcome into being, but the truth-telling you are advancing in "American Midnight" may get it banned in some parts of this country.
 
AH : Many of the books that have been banned in recent years have been targeted because they talk openly and honestly about race. Books that discuss women's rights, human sexuality, the LGBTQ movement and history have also been targeted by the right wing. I don't know if my book will earn the right-wing's ire. But then again, I do discuss America's long history of racial violence, which basically means white violence. The so-called race riots of 1919, the Red Summer, really should be called "white riots" because that's exactly what they were.
 
Can you highlight some of the profiles of resistance to these forces of evil that you feature in "American Midnight"?
 
AH : It is always more interesting to try to tell history from the bottom up, as well as from the top. In "American Midnight," I was drawn to the resistors during what was a very unequal and oppressive time in the country's history. In the book I spend a lot of time on Emma Goldman and Kate Richards O'Hare. I also would make a deep bow to Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois, who were brave and tough in how they chronicled the racial injustice in this period. Another of my heroes in the book is Louis F. Post. He has not received much attention. He was a government bureaucrat who saved thousands of people from being deported. There are those bottom-up stories, stories of those who fought against the repression, if you go looking for them,

 
Eugene Debs is certainly another hero from this period. He was somebody who spoke out strongly against World War I and in favor of racial and social justice of all kinds. Debs spent three years in jail for his beliefs and received almost a million votes for president while he was in jail. Those are the kinds of stories that I love to look for and then weave into a larger tapestry of history.
 
A fundamental and critical question: What is history? And why does history matter?
 
AH : History formed who we are, and unless we understand how we came to be, we're not going to be able to make a turn for the better. Unless we understand how we got to where we are right now, we're not going to be able to understand the dangers we face, the possibilities we face and find heroes and heroines to inspire us. Those are some of the reasons we need to study history.
 
What are some things we can do to fight back against the right and its thought-crime campaign? Fascism and other authoritarian systems gain power and sustain themselves by attacking critical thinking in order to disorient the public.
 
AH : You have to push back against the thought-crime impulse. People need to organize, join school boards, support libraries. It is so important right now to support the teachers and librarians who want books to be available to the public, because they know the importance and power of critical thinking. It's tough in these small rural communities where there aren't a lot of people who feel that way. The more we can do to support the people who are fighting these battles, the better. Supporting the independent news media is also a critical part of this struggle for truth and history and democracy.
 
The struggle for social democracy is a key theme in your new book. Many Americans may not be familiar with that concept, or at least with what it means. How would you explain it to them?
 
AH : Different people use that word in different ways. To me, social democracy means that a full-scale democracy involves much more than just being able to vote. It's not just a matter of having the rights that are there in the Bill of Rights. Real democracy means having a far larger measure of social and economic equality. This means that medical care is a right, for example. Access to a truly meaningful social safety net is part of social democracy too. Access to higher education, if you qualify, should also be a right. I can't help but wonder whether we wouldn't have some of those things, or more of those things, here in the United States if the left had not been so ruthlessly crushed in this 1917 to 1921 period that I write about.
 
Given the democracy crisis and ascendant neofascism and other overlapping challenges, what time of day is it right now in the American story? Is it midnight?
 
AH : I don't think we're at midnight yet. But let's put it this way: If we go one direction we're heading for midnight and if we go another direction, then we're heading for noon.
 
How do you want people to feel after they have read "American Midnight"?
 
AH : I want them to feel inspired by some of the heroic figures they met. I want them to feel surprised and a little bit angry that they didn't learn about this in that American history class in high school. I want them to go out and vote and organize.

Adam Hochschild on history and the orange man: "We haven't had a figure exactly like him before". Author and historian says we haven't quite hit "American Midnight" — but the crucial turning point is upon us. By Chauncey Devega. Salon, October 24, 2022

Adam Hochschild — American Midnight
 
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. 
 
Politics and Prose, October 19, 2022

 

Adam Hochschild returns to The Commonwealth Club with his revelatory new account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath, when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.
 
The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.
 
This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of some well-known characters, like the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover, and of other less-familiar characters, like the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards O’Hare and the outspoken Leo Wendell, a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comrades—but who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.
 
A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that all feel ominously familiar today.
 
Adam Hochschild in Conversation with George Hammond
 
Commonwealth Club of California, October 13, 2022

Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that, when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also of crushing alternatives. Whatever Trump did, that act has a sorry track record in both its own time and ours when it has been used, including by his administration, to silence the leakers of government information. And because my latest book, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and America’s Forgotten Crisis, is about the crushing of alternatives a century ago in this country, in the midst of all this, I couldn’t help thinking about a part of our history that The Donald would undoubtedly have been the first to crush, if he had the chance.
 
But let me start with a personal event closer to the present. While visiting Denmark recently, I developed an infection in my hand and wanted to see a doctor. The hotel in the provincial city where I was staying directed me to a local hospital. I was quickly shown into a consulting room, where a nurse questioned me and told me to wait. Only a few minutes passed before a physician entered the room, examined me, and said in excellent English, yes, indeed, I did need an antibiotic. He promptly swiveled in his chair, opened a cabinet behind him, took out a bottle of pills, handed it to me, and told me to take two a day for 10 days. When I thanked him and asked where I should go to pay for the consultation and the medicine, he responded simply, “We have no facilities for that.”
 
No facilities for that.
 
It’s a phrase that comes back to me every time I’m reminded how, in the world’s richest nation, we still don’t have full national health insurance. And that’s far from the only thing we’re missing. In a multitude of ways, we’re known for having a far weaker social safety net than many other wealthy countries and behind that lies a history in which the Espionage Act played a crucial role.
 
A Danish friend who visited with me recently was appalled to find hundreds of homeless people living in tent encampments in Berkeley and Oakland, California. And mind you, this is a progressive, prosperous state. The poor are even more likely to fall through the cracks (or chasms) in many other states.
 
Visitors from abroad are similarly astonished to discover that American families regularly pay astronomical college tuitions out of their own pockets. And it’s not only well-off European countries that do better in providing for their citizenry. The average Costa Rican, with one-sixth the annual per capita income of his or her North American counterpart, will live two years longer, thanks largely to that country’s comprehensive national health care system.
 
Why hasn’t our country done better, compared to so many others? There are certainly many reasons, not least among them the relentless, decades-long propaganda barrage from the American right, painting every proposed strengthening of public health and welfare — from unemployment insurance to Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare — as an ominous step down the road to socialism.
 
This is nonsense, of course, since the classic definition of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, an agenda item not on any imaginable American political horizon. In another sense, though, the charge is historically accurate because, both here and abroad, significant advances in health and welfare have often been spearheaded by socialist parties.
 
The globe’s first national healthcare system, in Imperial Germany, was, for example, muscled through the Reichstag by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 precisely to outflank the German socialists, who had long been advocating similar measures. Nor was it surprising that Britain’s National Health Service was installed by the Labour Party when it took power after the Second World War.
 
And in the United States, early in the last century, some of President Theodore Roosevelt’s modest moves to regulate business and break up trusts were, in fact, designed to steal a march on this country’s socialists, whom he feared, as he wrote to a friend, were “far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in times past.”

 
Back then — however surprising it may seem today — the American Socialist Party was indeed part of our political reality and, in 1904, it had come out in favor of compulsory national health insurance. A dozen years after that, New York Socialist Congressman Meyer London introduced a bill strikingly similar to the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act of more than a century later. In 1911, another socialist congressman, Victor Berger of Wisconsin, proposed a national old-age pension, a goal that wouldn’t be realized for another quarter of a century with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935.
 
Socialism was never as strong a movement in the United States as in so many other countries. Still, once it was at least a force to be reckoned with. Socialists became mayors of cities as disparate as Milwaukee, Pasadena, Schenectady, and Toledo. Party members held more than 175 state and local offices in Oklahoma alone. People commonly point to 1912 as the party’s high-water mark. That year, its candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, won 6% of the popular vote, even running ahead of the Republican candidate in several states.
 
Still, the true peak of American socialism’s popularity came a few years later. The charismatic Debs decided not to run again in 1916, mistakenly accepting President Woodrow Wilson’s implied promise to keep the United States out of the First World War — something most Socialists cared about passionately. In April 1917, Wilson infuriated them by bringing the country into what had been, until then, primarily a European conflict, while cracking down fiercely on dissidents who opposed his decision. That fall, however, the Socialists made impressive gains in municipal elections, winning more than 20% of the vote in 14 of the country’s larger cities — more than 30% in several of them — and 10 seats in the New York State Assembly.
 
During that campaign, Wilson was particularly dismayed by the party’s popularity in New York City, where Socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit was running for mayor. The president asked his conservative Texan attorney general, Thomas Gregory, what could be done about Hillquit’s “outrageous utterances” against the war. Gregory responded that he feared prosecuting Hillquit “would enable him to pose as a martyr and would be likely to increase his voting strength. I am having my representatives in New York City watch the situation rather carefully, and if a point is reached where he can be proceeded against it will give me a great deal of pleasure.” Hillquit lost, but did get 22% of the vote.
 
Jubilant Socialists knew that if they did equally well in the 1918 midterm elections, their national vote total could for the first time rise into the millions. For Wilson, whose Democrats controlled the House of Representatives by the narrowest of margins, the possibility of Socialists gaining the balance of power there was horrifying. And so, already at war in Europe, his administration in effect declared war on the Socialists at home as well, using as its primary tool Wilson’s sweeping criminalization of dissent, the new 1917 Espionage Act. The toll would be devastating.
 
The Government’s Axe Falls
 
Already the party’s most popular woman, the fiery Kansas-born orator Kate Richards O’Hare — known as Red Kate for her politics and her mass of red hair — had been sentenced to five years under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the war. Still free on appeal, O’Hare, who knew the hardships of farm life firsthand and had run for both the House and the Senate, continued to draw audiences in the thousands when she spoke in the prairie states. Before long, however, her appeal was denied and she was sent to the Jefferson City, Missouri, penitentiary, where she found herself in the adjoining cell to anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman. The two would become lifelong friends.
 
In 1918, the government went after Debs. The pretext was a speech he had given from a park bandstand in Canton, Ohio, following a state convention of his beleaguered party. “They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command,” he told the crowd. “But in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.”
 
That was more than enough. Two weeks later, he was indicted and swiftly brought before a federal judge who just happened to be the former law firm partner of President Wilson’s secretary of war. At that trial, Debs spoke words that would long be quoted:
 
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of the earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
 
Spectators gasped as the judge pronounced sentence on the four-time presidential candidate: a fine of $10,000 and 10 years in prison. In the 1920 election, he would still be in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta when he received more than 900,000 votes for president.

 
The government didn’t merely prosecute luminaries like O’Hare and Debs however. It also went after rank-and-file party members, not to mention the former Socialist candidates for governor in Minnesota, New Jersey, and South Dakota, as well as state Socialist Party secretaries from at least four states and a former Socialist candidate for Congress from Oklahoma. Almost all of them would be sentenced under the Espionage Act for opposing the war or the draft.
 
Not faintly content with this, the Wilson administration would attack the Socialists on many other fronts as well. There were then more than 100 socialist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies and the Espionage Act gave Wilson’s postmaster general, segregationist Albert Burleson of Texas, the power to deem such publications “unmailable.” Before long, Burleson would bar from the mail virtually the entire socialist press, which, in the prewar years, had a combined circulation of two million. A few dailies, which did not need the Post Office to reach their readers, survived, but for most of them such a banning was a death blow.
 
The government crippled the socialist movement in many less formal ways as well. For instance, Burleson’s post office simply stopped delivering letters to and from the party’s Chicago headquarters and some of its state and local offices. The staff of a socialist paper in Milwaukee typically noticed that they were failing to receive business correspondence. Even their mail subscriptions to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune were no longer arriving. Soon advertising income began to dry up. In the midst of this, Oscar Ameringer, a writer for the paper, called on a longtime supporter, a baker who had suddenly stopped buying ads. According to Ameringer, the man “slumped down in a chair, covered his eyes and, with tears streaming through his fingers, sobbed, ‘My God, I can’t help it…They told me if I didn’t take my advertising out they would refuse me… flour, sugar and coal.’”
 
Also taking their cues from the administration in that wartime assault were local politicians and vigilantes who attacked socialist speakers or denied them meeting halls. After progressives and labor union members staged an antiwar march on the Boston Common, for example, vigilantes raided the nearby Socialist Party office, smashed its doors and windows, and threw furniture, papers, and the suitcase of a traveling activist out the shattered windows onto a bonfire.
 
In January 1918, the mayor of Mitchell, South Dakota, ordered the party’s state convention broken up and all delegates expelled from town. One party leader was seized “on the streets by five unknown men and hustled into an automobile in which he was driven five miles from town,” a local newspaper reported. “There he was set out upon the prairie and… told to proceed afoot to his home in Parkston [an 18-mile walk] and warned not to return.”
 
The Big “What if?” Question
 
The Socialists were far from alone in suffering the wave of repression that swept the country in Wilson’s second term. Other targets included the labor movement, the country’s two small rival Communist parties, and thousands of radicals who had never become American citizens and were targeted for deportation. But among all the victims, no organization was more influential than the Socialist Party. And it never recovered.
 
When Debs took to the road again after finally being released from prison in 1921, he was often, at the last minute, denied venues he had booked. In Cleveland, the City Club canceled its invitation; in Los Angeles, the only place he could speak was at the city zoo. Still, he had an easier time than the socialist writer Upton Sinclair who, when he began giving a speech in San Pedro, California, in 1923, was arrested while reading the First Amendment aloud.
 
By the time Debs died in 1926, the party that had once elected 33 state legislators, 79 mayors, and well over 1,000 city council members and other municipal officials had closed most of its offices and was left with less than 10,000 members nationwide. Kate Richards O’Hare wrote to her friend Emma Goldman, who had been deported from the United States in 1919, that she felt herself a “sort of political orphan now with no place to lay my head.”
 
Despite their minority status, the Socialists had been a significant force in American politics before patriotic war hysteria brought on an era of repression. Until then, Republican and Democratic legislators had voted for early-twentieth-century reform measures like child labor laws and the income tax in part to stave off demands from the Socialist Party for bigger changes.
 
If that party had remained intact instead of being so ruthlessly crushed, what more might they have voted for? This remains one of the biggest “what ifs” in American history. If the Socialist Party hadn’t been so hobbled, might it at least have pushed the mainstream ones into creating the sort of stronger social safety net and national health insurance systems that people today take for granted in countries like Canada or Denmark? Without the Espionage Act, might Donald Trump have been left to rot at Mar-a-Lago in a world in which so much might have been different?
 
The last time you tried to pay a medical bill, might you, in fact, have been told, “We have no facilities for that”?

The Crushing of American Socialism.  by Adam Hochschild. Countercurrents, October 7,  2022.  

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.
 
How World War I Crushed the American Left. By Joanna Scutts. The New Republic, October 18, 2022. 

At a time when professional doom-mongering about democracy has become one of the more inflationary sectors of the American economy, it is tonic to be reminded by Adam Hochschild’s masterly new book, “American Midnight,” that there are other contenders than the period beginning in 2016 for the distinction of Darkest Years of the Republic. By some measures — and certainly in many quarters of the American left — the years 1917-21 have a special place in infamy. 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.

 
As Hochschild vividly details, the Wilson administration and its allies pioneered the police raids, surveillance operations, internment camps, strikebreaking and legal chicanery that would become part of the repertoire of the American state for decades to come. It may be recalled how, when Donald Trump was a presidential candidate in 2016, his followers ignited a media storm when they threatened to lock up his challenger. But only Wilson went the distance: He jailed his charismatic Socialist opponent, the 63-year-old Eugene Debs, for opposing America’s descent into the carnage of the First World War, with the liberal press in lock step. “He is where he belongs,” Hochschild quotes The New York Times declaring of the imprisoned Debs. “He should stay there.”
 
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. Despite prompt invasions of Mexico and Haiti during Wilson’s first term, the country was hardly prepared for a major war. 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. The state’s financial coffers were heavily reliant on excise and customs revenues. Despite the booming American economy and a thriving modern culture that would soon sweep the globe, Wilson found that he had taken control of the equivalent of a creaking galleon in an age of submarine warfare. 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. Wilson produced a great deal of cant about making the world “safe for democracy,” though by “democracy” he had in mind something like an international clinic for political delinquents with America as supervisor. Internal enemies ultimately proved more reliable than high ideals in sustaining the country’s war fever. German-speaking Americans and other immigrant groups made for obvious targets. “I want to say — I cannot say it too often,” Wilson declared in 1919, “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic.” But the grander enemy was American socialists, who publicly opposed entering a war in which they would kill fellow workingmen at the behest of their ruling classes.
 
Standard histories of the first “Red Scare” tend to tell it as a largely domestic story. Hochschild insists on filling out the international dimension. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 features in “American Midnight” like a flare against the dark sky that captures the imagination of the left wing of the American labor movement. “Lenin and Trotsky were the men of the hour,” Debs declared, as members of the Industrial Workers of the World — known as the Wobblies — organized actions across the country. In 1919, one in five American workers walked off their jobs. In Seattle, in what later became known as the “Soviet of Washington,” a motley group of labor unions succeeded in conducting the first general strike in U.S. history — the only time American workers have taken over a city.
 
Yet neither the Wobblies nor any of the other American socialist outfits were a pincer party, unlike the Bolsheviks in Russia, who were led by a determined group of brilliant strategists and had a crumbling empire in their sights. Instead, 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. “Force, force to the utmost, force without limit,” Wilson said on Flag Day in 1918, the year his administration began overseeing the banning of small radical magazines like The Masses, and the hounding of any publication not on board with the war.

 
Hochschild also stresses how the Wilson administration drew on America’s experience in the Philippines, importing torture and counterinsurgency techniques back to the mainland. In “American Midnight,” the years 1917-21 figure unmistakably as a two-front war. While Wilson dispatched the Philippine War veteran Gen. John Pershing to fight Germany in Europe, he permitted the more ruthless Gen. Leonard Wood — who had, among other achievements, overseen a large massacre of Moro and Tausug people in his days as governor of Moro Province — to put down revolts across the American Midwest.
 
Hochschild’s best-known book, “King Leopold’s Ghost,” initiated a generation of Americans into the horrors of European colonialism and became required reading in the human-rights-saturated 1990s. Something of a specialist in the annals of atrocity, Hochschild spares no detail in “American Midnight.” In 1914, the Colorado National Guard, which had fought in the Philippine War, killed 11 children while defending a Rockefeller coal mine from strikers. For German-speaking Americans, these were years of persecution and fear. There were public burnings of German songbooks, and German-language instruction was widely banned in schools. In a foretaste of the transformation of French fries into “freedom fries” during the Iraq war, frankfurters became “hot dogs,” while sauerkraut less successfully transitioned into “liberty cabbage.”
 
Paranoia reached an absurdist pitch. “You can’t even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage,” the editor of The Masses, Max Eastman, told an audience in 1917. “They give you 90 days for quoting the Declaration of Independence, six months for quoting the Bible, and pretty soon somebody’s going to get a life sentence for quoting Woodrow Wilson in the wrong connection.” When a young Eugene O’Neill went to work one sunny day on the beach in Cape Cod, a vigilant citizen interpreted the flashing glares reflecting off the metal of his typewriter as — what else? — covert signals to German submarines. “He was arrested at gunpoint,” Hochschild writes.
 
As in “King Leopold’s Ghost,” Hochschild in “American Midnight” stages a morality tale. There is an extensive cast of villains, from Leo Wendell, the intrepid federal agent who managed to pass himself off as one of the most radical Wobblies for years, to A. Mitchell Palmer, who with the help of a young J. Edgar Hoover conducted “raids” on radicals; Nicholas Murray Butler, the war-giddy president of Columbia University; and Ole Hanson, the reactionary mayor of Seattle, whom Hochschild nominates as America’s first “professional anti-Communist.” As a Nebraskan who takes some pride in my local knowledge, I thought I was the only one who knew about the mafia boss Tom Dennison, who toppled the progressive mayor of Omaha by orchestrating a series of attacks on women by white thugs in blackface, but Hochschild includes every twist and turn of the episode.
 
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, who tried to unite the various factions of the nation’s labor movement, but whose temperament and long term in prison made him more of a symbol than a strategist.

 
Hochschild’s sharp portraits and vignettes make for poignant reading, but at times skirt fuller historical understanding. We hear about newspapers and magazines being shut down, but little about what was being argued in them. 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. Hochschild attributes much of the failure of American socialists to expand their ranks to the racism and xenophobia that bedeviled the white working class. But there were also significant problems of organization in the American labor movement, which struggled to unite unskilled immigrant workers with workers in established unions. Trotsky had expected America to make as great a contribution to world socialism as it had to capitalism; he was appalled by the lack of party discipline, later damning Debs with faint praise, as a “romantic and a preacher, and not at all a politician or a leader.” 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 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. As his international crusade sputtered into catastrophe, with Wilson signing off on the Versailles Treaty, which laid the kindling for World War II, younger members of his staff were already preparing to become different kinds of liberals. 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. In the early 1930s, even as they drifted apart, Lippmann and Frankfurter would help impart a crucial lesson to the Roosevelt administration: If it wanted to snuff out American socialism, it was better to absorb some of its ideals than to banish them.
 
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis | By Adam Hochschild. Mariner Books.’

 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. By Thomas Meany. The New York Times, October 3, 2022

Harper Collins Publishers

On a winter night a hundred years ago, Ellis Island, the twenty-seven-acre patch of land in New York Harbor that had been the gateway to America for millions of hopeful immigrants, was playing the opposite role. It had been turned into a prison for several hundred men, and a few women, most of whom had arrived in handcuffs and shackles. They were about to be shipped across the Atlantic, in the country’s first mass deportation of political dissidents in the twentieth century.
 
Before dawn on December 21, 1919, the prisoners were roused from their bunks to be packed onto a barge and transported to a waiting vessel, the Buford, which was berthed in Brooklyn. The Buford was an elderly, decrepit troopship, known by sailors as a heavy “roller” in rough seas. One of the two hundred and forty-nine people who were deported that day, Ivan Novikov, described the scene in the island prison: “It was noisy and the room was full of smoke. Everybody knew already that we are going to be sent out. . . . Many with tears in their eyes were writing telegrams and letters.” Many “were in the literal sense of the word without clothes or shoes,” he went on. “There was no laughter.” Then, as now, deportations severed families: “One left a mother, the other a wife and son, one a sweetheart.”
 
At 4 a.m., with the temperature in the twenties, shouting guards ordered the captives outside, where a gangplank led to the barge and an attached tugboat. “Deep snow lay on the ground; the air was cut by a biting wind,” wrote that day’s most famous victim of what she called “deportation mania,” the Russian-born anarchist and feminist firebrand Emma Goldman. “A row of armed civilians and soldiers stood along the road. . . . One by one the deportees marched, flanked on each side by the uniformed men, curses and threats accompanying the thud of their feet on the frozen ground.”
 
The mass expulsion was so important to the U.S. government that, despite the hour, a delegation from Washington joined the deportees on the trip across the harbor to the Buford. The group included several members of Congress, most notably Representative Albert Johnson, of Washington State, who was the chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization as well as an outspoken anti-Semite, a Ku Klux Klan favorite, and an ardent opponent of immigration. Shepherding the party was a dark-haired, twenty-four-year-old Justice Department official who was quietly respectful toward the dignitaries he was with but who would, before long, wield far more power than any of them: J. Edgar Hoover.
 
Hoover had met Goldman some weeks earlier, in the courtroom where he made the case for her deportation. Now one of the great American radicals of her day and the man who would become the country’s premier hunter of such dissidents encountered each other one last time, in the galley of the tugboat. She was fifty, more than twice his age, but they were of similar stature, and would have stood nearly eye to eye, with Goldman looking at Hoover through her pince-nez. One admirer described her as having “a stocky figure like a peasant woman, a face of fierce strength like a female pugilist.” Hoover had won this particular match, but, according to a congressman who witnessed the exchange, she got in one last jab.
 
“Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked, as they steamed toward Brooklyn in the darkness.
 
“Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied, two hours away from being ejected from the country where she had lived for thirty-four years and found the voice that had won her admirers around the world. “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”
 
That morning’s mass deportation had been preceded by a crescendo of anti-immigrant rhetoric that will sound distinctly familiar today. “The surest way to preserve the public against those disciples of destruction,” Thomas Edward Campbell, the governor of Arizona, told a conference of newspaper editors on February 22, 1919, “is to send them back forthwith to lands from which they came.” And if native-born Americans were acting un-American, why not deport them, too? Senator Kenneth McKellar, of Tennessee, suggested that they “be deported permanently to the Island of Guam.”
 
And why not go one step further and strip objectionable people of U.S. citizenship, to make them more deportable? In 1919, alarmed by the growing presence of “peoples of Asiatic races,” the Anti-Alien League called for a constitutional amendment “to restrict citizenship by birth within the United States to the children of parents who are of a race which is eligible for citizenship”—i.e., whites. Senator Wesley Jones, of Washington State, promised to introduce such a measure—a proposal not unlike today’s calls to end birthright citizenship. That May, a cheering convention of the American Legion demanded the deportation not only of immigrants who evaded military service during the First World War but of any men who evaded service.
 
What made high-ranking government officials so passionate about deportations that they would get up in the middle of the night to ride through freezing wind across New York Harbor? One factor was the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in November, 1917, which political and corporate leaders feared might incite militant labor unionists in the U.S., who had already shaken the country with a stormy, decade-long wave of strikes. Lenin had written a “Letter to American Workingmen” declaring “the inevitability of the international revolution.” Postwar economic turmoil promised to make the country more vulnerable than ever to radical doctrines.
 
For these officials, the most worrisome left-wing group was the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. The I.W.W. had more flash than breadth—the number of members probably never exceeded a hundred thousand—but the Wobblies caught the public imagination with their colorful posters, stirring songs, and flair for drama.
 
The Justice Department began a nationwide crackdown in September, 1917, raiding all four dozen I.W.W. offices and the homes of many activists. In sealed boxcars, Wobblies from around the country were brought to Chicago’s Cook County Jail. When they received news of the Bolshevik takeover in St. Petersburg, they celebrated by singing and banging tin cups on their cell bars. A hundred and one leading Wobblies were charged with violating a long list of federal laws as part of a mass trial—still the largest in American history—that ran through the spring and summer of 1918. The jury took a mere fifty-five minutes to render its verdict, finding all the defendants guilty on all counts. They were sentenced to an average of eight years in prison. Tons of I.W.W. records, which the Justice Department had seized in the raids, were later burned.
 
Fear of bolshevism blended with a long-standing hostility toward certain classes of immigrants. By 1890, those coming ashore at Ellis Island were no longer from places like Britain and Germany; the great bulk were now from Italy, Eastern Europe, or the Russian Empire, and they were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish. There were a lot of them, too: by 1900, the majority of men in Manhattan over the age of twenty-one were foreign-born.
 
Many Americans shared the resentment voiced in a book published in 1902: “Throughout the [nineteenth] century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country . . . but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” The writer of these words was a young Princeton professor, who, a decade later, would become the President of the United States: Woodrow Wilson.
 
His feelings were echoed widely among the American establishment. The Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge was a prominent political enemy of the President’s, but he completely shared Wilson’s attitude on this score. In a speech to the Senate about the need to restrict “undesirable immigrants” who came from the “races” he found “most alien,” he invoked Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem “Unguarded Gates,” which compared such people to the “thronging Goth and Vandal [who] trampled Rome.” For Lodge and others anxious to restrict immigration, Eastern European Jews were definitely among the undesirables. The historian Henry Adams, a friend of Lodge’s, declared that “the Jew makes me creep” and wrote of a “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish.” The novelist Henry James was disgusted by the people he saw “swarming” on New York’s heavily Jewish Lower East Side, who reminded him of “small, strange animals . . . snakes or worms.”
 
These immigrant swarms, politicians claimed, were not just unseemly; with their affinity for radical movements, they were a threat to national security. Many leftists, like Goldman, were Jewish, and the most violent anarchists were largely Italian-American. In June, 1919, one of them managed to blow himself up as he was planting a bomb at the Washington, D.C., home of Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, and among the items he left at the scene was an Italian-English dictionary. The Socialist Party had a high proportion of foreign-born members, and the pro-Socialist press included newspapers like New York’s Robotnik Polski and Chicago’s Parola Proletaria.
 

The tenor of the deportation frenzy was heightened by the upcoming 1920 Presidential election. Several of those hoping to succeed Wilson saw great potential in promising to deport troublemakers. A leading Republican contender was Major General Leonard Wood, a dashing hero of the Indian Wars and a former Rough Rider, who captured headlines in 1919 for leading military forces against strikes and race riots in the Midwest, and who at one point put Gary, Indiana, under martial law. “Deport these so-called Americans who preach treason,” he told an audience in Kansas City.
 
Another Republican candidate, the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, said in a speech, “Today, we hear the hiss of a snake in the grass, and the hiss is directed at the things Americans hold most dear.” He called for deporting “Reds” to the Philippines. The Republican senator Miles Poindexter, of Washington State, also eying the Presidential nomination, called on the government “to deport every alien Bolshevist and to punish rather than protect those who practice their savage creed in this country.” Poindexter suggested that Attorney General Palmer was pursuing the deportation of these savages with insufficient vigor: “The government had positively refused in many cases to allow them to go.”
 
But Palmer, a Democrat, had his own hopes for the Presidency. An imposing-looking man with a shock of gray hair who wore three-piece suits crossed by a watch chain, he was not about to let anyone outflank him in enthusiasm for deportations. And, unlike the out-of-power Republicans, he had the authority to back up his words. Raised as a Quaker, Palmer had declined the position of Secretary of War, when Wilson had offered it, in 1913, but, when he accepted an appointment as Attorney General, in 1919, his faith did not prevent him from waging a kind of domestic war the likes of which the United States has seldom seen.
 
The bombing of Palmer’s house, which was clearly intended to kill him, his wife, and their ten-year-old daughter, understandably left him terrified. Eight other bombs went off the same night, mostly at the homes of prominent politicians or judges. Some five weeks earlier, a mail bomb had exploded in the home of a former U.S. senator from Georgia, blowing off the hands of his maid, and thirty-five additional mail bombs addressed to Cabinet members, judges, and business moguls were intercepted before they could go off.
 
Immediately after the spate of bombings, Palmer founded the Radical Division of the Justice Department to track subversive activities of all kinds, and he put J. Edgar Hoover in charge. This post, as Kenneth D. Ackerman shows in his biography “Young J. Edgar,” was a key step on this precocious man’s path to power. Hoover, during an earlier job at the Library of Congress, had come to love the great information-management technology of the day: file cards. Within two and a half years in his new job, he would amass a database of four hundred and fifty thousand cards on people and organizations, carefully linking them to documents in the Radical Division’s files.
 
To those in power, signs of a simmering revolution were everywhere. Two rival Communist parties each promised to reproduce on American soil the Bolshevik takeover. In 1919, amid the largest strike wave in U.S. history, one in five workers walked off the job—everyone from telephone operators to stage actors. An unprecedented general strike briefly brought Seattle to a halt. In September of that year, most Boston police officers went on strike. If even those sworn to defend law and order were in rebellion, what could come next? Senator Henry Myers, of Montana, warned that if America did not hold firm it would “see a Soviet government set up within two years.”
 
At the same time, agents provocateurs played a significant role in the turbulence. Many came from the ranks of private detectives; the three biggest such firms had a hundred and thirty-five thousand employees. In July, 1919, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia wrote to Palmer to tell him that many of the most extreme agitators were undercover operatives “actively stirring up trouble” because “they know on which side their bread is buttered.” Justice Department officials in Los Angeles concluded that private detectives, in order to create more business, had planted bombs in nearby oil fields. But none of this deterred Palmer, who was now on an anti-dissident crusade, with mass deportations as his main goal. Ninety per cent of Communist and anarchist agitation, he maintained, “is traceable to aliens.”
 
Millions of immigrants, even if they had arrived decades earlier, had never bothered to become American citizens. The bureaucracy of doing so could seem intimidating, especially for those who didn’t speak English well, and naturalization hadn’t seemed important at a time when the country professed to welcome newcomers. Now, however, lacking citizenship became an enormous liability. Emma Goldman, a prime target, was under close surveillance—her mail was opened, her phone calls were tapped, and her secretary, unbeknownst to her, was a government informer. Goldman believed that she had become a citizen thirty-two years earlier, by marrying a naturalized immigrant, Jacob Kershner. But Hoover contended that the rabbi who performed the ceremony was not properly ordained; moreover, two decades after their divorce, Kershner’s citizenship had been revoked, because he had falsified something on his original application. It was deemed that Goldman had thus lost her status as a U.S. citizen as well, and could be duly shipped off on the Buford.
 
The crackdown at the time of Goldman’s deportation came to be known as the Palmer Raids, although they were planned and closely supervised by the much younger Hoover. The first big raid rounded up members of the Union of Russian Workers, an avowedly anarchist organization that also offered classes and social activities. Offices of the union in more than a dozen cities were raided during the night of November 7, 1919—pointedly, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik coup—and 1,182 people were arrested and interrogated. A far larger number were roughed up, briefly detained, and then let go. Hoover’s agents were helped by local police. A raid of offices near New York’s Union Square, where members of the anarchist group had been attending night-school classes in mathematics and auto repair, left the building looking “as if a bomb had exploded in each room,” the New York World reported. “Desks were broken open, doors smashed, furniture overturned and broken, books and literature scattered, the glass doors of a cabinet broken, typewriters had apparently been thrown on the floor and stamped on,” and there were “bloodstains over floor, papers, literature &c.” The Times, although it backed the arrests, acknowledged that “a number of those in the building were badly beaten by the police during the raid, their heads wrapped in bandages.” The raids, which were recorded by newsreel-makers for greater impact, produced the outcome that Hoover and Palmer wanted: foreign-born radicals began filling immigration prisons like the one on Ellis Island. President Wilson, incapacitated by a stroke at the time, never publicly addressed the raids, but just before falling ill he had spoken of the “disciples of Lenin in our own midst,” from whom “poison has got in the veins of this free people.”
 
The Palmer Raids reached their climax on January 2, 1920, with night sweeps in more than thirty cities and towns. Their professed targets were the two Communist parties, whose combined membership was no more than forty thousand but was ninety per cent immigrant. Many of those arrested had only a tangential connection, if any, to the Communists, including, in Nashua, New Hampshire, a hundred and forty-one Socialists. In nearby Manchester, it was everyone dancing at the Tolstoi Club; in Chicago, all the patrons at the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant; in Lynn, Massachusetts, thirty-nine bakers, a third of them American citizens, in the middle of a meeting to discuss forming a coöperative; in New Jersey, a group of Polish-Americans soliciting money for a funeral; in Philadelphia, the members of the Lithuanian Socialist Chorus, mid-rehearsal. There are no complete records of how many people were seized, but a careful study by the Danish scholar Regin Schmidt estimates the total arrested in the Palmer Raids at ten thousand.
 

More than five hundred of those arrested were jammed into quarters at Ellis Island, which ran out of cots and bedding. Several inmates died of pneumonia. In Detroit, some eight hundred men and women were held for up to six days in a narrow, windowless corridor of a federal building, with a bare stone floor to sleep on and one toilet and one drinking fountain. They were without food for twenty hours, and then could eat only what their families and friends brought them. In Boston, a hundred and forty prisoners in chains and leg irons were marched through the city’s streets, then locked up in an unheated prison on an island in the harbor. One despairing prisoner committed suicide by jumping from a window.
 
A. Mitchell Palmer, with one eye on justifying these mass arrests and the other on his Presidential campaign, issued a series of press releases. One was headed “warns nation of red peril—U.S. Department of Justice Urges Americans to Guard Against Bolshevism Menace.” The department’s press office distributed photographs of prisoners, taken after they had been jailed for days without the chance to shave or wash, captioned “Men Like These Would Rule You.” And Palmer published a magazine article warning that Communism “was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws.” (In fact, a survey by a church organization found that a large majority of the arrested men—eighty per cent of whom had lived in the United States for at least six years—were married.)
 
The arrests continued, and Palmer promised that deportations by the thousands would follow. New Yorkers would soon find, he told an audience in the city, a “second, third, and fourth” ship like the Buford, “sailing down their beautiful harbor in the near future.” Hoover personally led a raid in New Jersey in February, 1920, and Palmer began predicting that a nationwide Communist uprising would erupt on May Day of that year.
 
Palmer and Hoover had assumed that they could deport most of those seized in the raids. A high proportion were non-citizens, and a law passed in 1918, during the martial fervor of the First World War and the anti-Bolshevik hysteria, said that any alien who advocated anarchism or violent revolution, or who belonged to an organization that did so, could be expelled. There was, however, one considerable roadblock: although it was Palmer’s Justice Department that had the power to arrest people, deportations were under the authority of the Immigration Bureau, which was part of the Labor Department.
 
Then something happened that neither Hoover nor Palmer anticipated. Two and a half months after the Buford had sailed, and just as the two men were hoping to deport many more shiploads of newly arrested “undesirables,” the Secretary of Labor went on leave, to tend to an illness in the family; his replacement resigned; and a seventy-year-old man named Louis F. Post became the acting Secretary of Labor.
 
Post was no typical bureaucrat. His wire-rimmed glasses, Vandyke beard, and thick head of dark hair combined to give him a striking resemblance to the man then commanding Soviet Russia’s Red Army, Leon Trotsky. As far as Palmer and Hoover were concerned, he was just as dangerous.
 
He was born on a New Jersey farm in 1849 and, though too young to serve in the Civil War, was imbued with abolitionist zeal. As a boy, he talked to the free black handyman who worked for his grandfather and noticed that the man had to eat at a separate table. As a young man, Post spent two years working in the South during Reconstruction and saw how white Southerners foiled all possibility of advancement for the former slaves who hoped for equal rights at last. He served as a court reporter in a series of South Carolina trials in which Ku Klux Klansmen were convicted of murder—only to see President Ulysses S. Grant pardon most of the Klansmen several months later. He returned North, where he became a prosecutor and then a private attorney in New York City. The work left him uninspired, but he acquired a keen sense of the law that he was able to put to extraordinary use decades later.
 
Journalism, first on the side but eventually full time, became Post’s calling. While running the opinion pages of a lively pro-labor daily, the New York Truth, he supported the campaign that established Labor Day. Along the way, he became a convert to Henry George’s single-tax movement, which advocated a land tax meant to discourage speculators from getting rich by acquiring land and leaving it idle, impoverishing those who could have put it to good use. A friend of George’s, Post in effect became the leader of the single-tax movement after George’s death, in 1897, and toured North America lecturing on the subject. As the editorial writer for the Cleveland Recorder, Post crusaded against industrial monopolies and in favor of workers’ rights. By the turn of the century, he and his wife had started a Chicago-based magazine, The Public, which denounced American colonization of the Philippines, the power of big business, and racial discrimination while supporting women’s rights and unrestricted immigration. Post had been impressed by the promises of reform that helped Woodrow Wilson first get elected President, and, in 1913, when offered a position in the brand-new Department of Labor, he happily accepted.
 
Post knew, and had published, many of the leading reformers and radicals of the day. Indeed, Emma Goldman had been a dinner guest in his home, and he had managed, in 1917, to prevent her from being deported, although he was powerless to do so two years later, when the laws had been tightened. Being in government did not tame him: as the Assistant Secretary of Labor, he had boldly written to President Wilson suggesting a blanket pardon for jailed draft resisters. As for anarchists, Post knew that some practiced violence, like the man who had bombed Palmer’s home, but he argued that anarchist ranks also included “apostles of peace,” like the followers of Tolstoy, who were “supremely harmless.” It was “perverted,” he wrote, to lump them all together as people to be deported.
 
Now, in charge of the Department of Labor, Post proved a shrewd investigator and decisive reformer. When he discovered that many of the raids had been made without warrants, or with warrants based on faulty information, he invalidated nearly three thousand of the arrests. He found that prisoners had been questioned without being informed that their answers could be used as evidence against them and without being given access to lawyers. In response, he ruled that any alien subjected to the deportation process was entitled to full constitutional safeguards. Post learned that many people taken in the raids hadn’t known that one of the Communist parties listed them as members; these factions had seceded from the Socialist Party and were intent on claiming as large a membership as possible. He ordered the release of many of those still held in immigration prisons like the one on Ellis Island; he slashed the amount of bail for others. Palmer and Hoover were furious.
 
Public opinion, however, slowly turned in Post’s favor. Quoting an unnamed commentator, Representative George Huddleston, of Alabama, said that some of the supposedly dangerous “Reds” targeted for expulsion probably didn’t know the difference between bolshevism and rheumatism. A federal judge in Boston ordered a group of immigrants to be released from custody, declaring that “a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers, and the vicious classes.” Despite the estimated ten thousand arrests made amid the Palmer Raids and the 6,396 deportation cases that Hoover’s Radical Division prepared during this period, Palmer succeeded in deporting fewer than six hundred radical immigrants.
 
The Attorney General condemned Post’s “habitually tender solicitude for social revolution and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists.” Privately, Palmer suggested that Post was “a Bolshevik himself.” Palmer and Hoover sought to discredit Post and get him impeached by Congress. A three-hundred-and-fifty-page file on Post attempted to tarnish him with evidence about everything from contacts with I.W.W. members to his advocacy of divorce reform. The House Rules Committee, supplied with this file, called Post in for ten hours of testimony. But he acquitted himself brilliantly, and the committee could find no grounds for impeachment.
 
Palmer’s Justice Department continued to issue dire warnings, almost daily, of the nationwide Communist uprising predicted for May Day, 1920. As the date approached, New York City’s police force was put on twenty-four-hour duty; Boston stationed trucks with machine guns at strategic locations. In Chicago, three hundred and sixty local radicals were arrested and put in preventive detention.
 
May Day came and went. Nothing happened. Yet the silence turned out to be an event in itself. It deflated the national hysteria about arresting and deporting “Reds,” and helped kill Palmer’s campaign for the Presidency. Nor did any of the three Republicans who had thundered about deportation become his party’s choice. The eventual candidate and victor was Warren Harding, a Republican who declared that “too much has been said about bolshevism in America,” and campaigned for a “return to normalcy.” The Republican Party platform that year rebuked the “vigorous malpractice of the Departments of Justice and Labor.”

 
Owing in part to Post’s courage, normalcy did not include mass deportations on the scale that people like Hoover and Palmer had hoped for. But a larger battle was lost, since pressure for deportations has always been linked to another cause: keeping people out in the first place. In 1924, Congress passed a law that, for the next four decades, slammed the door on all but a tiny trickle of immigrants. It barred Asians from entering the United States and assigned country-by-country quotas, set to reflect the American population as it had been in 1890—when the proportion of Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Jews was small. The law bore the name of its principal author, Representative Albert Johnson, one of the men who, along with Hoover, had seen off the Buford and its cargo of deportees from New York Harbor. It was the Johnson-Reed Act that, years later, would prevent untold numbers of people trying to flee the Holocaust from finding shelter in the United States.
 
Post did not live to see that shame; he died at the age of seventy-eight, in 1928. But he died proud. He had entered the Wilson Administration expecting to fight for workers’ rights, but ended up fighting a very different battle. When faced with a challenge he had never anticipated, he rose to it magnificently, saving thousands of people from being expelled from the country. Moreover, his example emboldened others to speak out. It was only after Post had spent several months publicly stopping deportations that a group of a dozen distinguished attorneys, law professors, and law-school deans, including the future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, issued a report denouncing the Justice Department’s many violations of the Constitution in carrying out the Palmer Raids. The report was accompanied by sixty pages of material, from sworn statements of witnesses to photographs of bruised and beaten prisoners.
 
The report had a big impact on members of Congress and the press. Few were aware that two of the people who had helped prepare it were close allies of Post, and that Post almost certainly supplied much of the information in it. Post was both a man of high principle and a master of bureaucratic maneuvering—a rare combination. “He struggled without ceasing to preserve our liberties and to enlarge them,” the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote after Post’s death. “He resisted the clamor of stupid intolerance. He exposed its shameful, ruthless lawlessness.” ♦
 
 
When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals.  A hundred years ago, the Palmer Raids imperilled thousands of immigrants. Then a wily official got in the way.
By Adam Hochschild. The New Yorker.  November 4, 2019

Webpage on Adam Hochschild  Berkeley Journalism