American Midnight – The Great War, A Violent Peace, And Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

 

By Adam Hochschild

HarperCollins - 2022

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

In the United States most people feel that we have a right to “freedom of speech.” We feel we have a right to openly criticize politicians and believe this right is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution. 

Well, reading Adam Hochschild’s book American Midnight – The Great War, A Violent Peace, And Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis gives us a completely different view of how this right has been routinely compromised. We can begin to see a glimmer of what was happening in this country during the First World War with the murder of Frank Little who was an organizer for the labor organization the Industrial Workers of the World.

1917 was the year the United States joined the allied powers in the First World War and declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, 2,500 immigrant miners in Butte, Montana protested the war and demanded independence for their homelands from Britain and Russia. Britain and Russia were two of the allied powers that the United States was joining in the war. President Woodrow Wilson argued that this was a “war for democracy.”

Three days after this demonstration, there was an explosion in the mine that took the lives of 163 miners. In the twentieth century there were close to 100,000 mining deaths caused by accidents and corporate neglect. Frank Little came to Butte to organize the miners and demand better working conditions. Little was also opposed to the war and argued that “We have no interest in the war.” 

Copper company officials demanded that Attorney General Burton K. Wheeler use the Espionage Act to silence Little. However, Wheeler argued that Little had the right to freedom of speech. 

Then, two weeks after his arrival in Butte, a gang of armed men kidnapped Little, tied him to the back of a Cadillac, dragged him over a road, and lynched him. The murderers were never prosecuted. Thousands of Butte miners joined his funeral procession. Then, eleven days after his death federal troops occupied the town. They would remain in Butte for three years. While the government did nothing to prosecute the murderers, Vice President Thomas Marshall coined a pun on the victim’s name. “A Little hanging goes a long way.” 

Before the First World War, the government routinely compromised the rights of people who lived in this country. These attacks were centered on labor, immigrants, Black people, and women. However, when President Wilson joined the allied powers in the First World War, those attacks accelerated. Adam Hochschild’s book makes it clear that the United States wasn’t only at war in Europe, but carried out an intensive war against the majority of people who lived in the United States. 

While President Wilson claimed that the war was for “democracy,” he also had this to say. “War means autocracy…We shall be dependent upon the steel, oil and financial magnates. They will run the country.”

Hochschild didn’t mention the name Alice Paul in his book, but he could have. Paul marched in front of the White House with other suffragettes demanding that women have the right to vote. They ridiculed Wilson arguing that if women didn’t have the right to vote, there could be no democracy. 

The government declared that these statements by Alice Paul were a violation of the law, and the demonstrators were arrested. While in prison, the suffragettes went on a hunger strike arguing that they were political prisoners and not criminals. Prison guards then inserted a tube into Paul’s throat and force-fed her. 

Prison guards also force-fed pacifists who went on hunger strikes. For the prisoners who refused to do prison labor, they were handcuffed to their cells during the hours other prisoners were working. 

Hochschild never mentioned why the government was legally allowed to torture prisoners. When we read the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, we get a clue as to why torture was, and continues to be allowed in the dungeons of this country. The Thirteenth Amendment states that slavery is abolished in this country except when someone is “duly convicted” of a crime. So, when people live in prison, the government believes that they have lost all rights and can be brutalized.              

The socialist Kate Richards O’Hare, and the anarchist Emma Goldman gave speeches all over the country. Thousands attended those events. Although O’Hare and Goldman had differing politics, they were both adamantly opposed to the war. Because of their opposition to the war, both O’Hare and Goldman served time in prison. They lived in adjoining cells and became friends. 

Because Emma Goldman was born in Russia, the government ordered her deportation after she was released from prison. This was because of the work of the future director of the FBI, Jay Edgar Hoover and the Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

The Palmer Raids

The labor organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World became a special target of the government, as well as self-appointed vigilantes. Adam Hochschild began his book with a with the arrest of eleven members of the I.W.W. (known as Wobblies) while they were reading or playing cards in their headquarters. This was in 1917 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The detectives found no incriminating evidence and charged the Wobblies with vagrancy. 

The Wobblies were working to organize the oil workers in the area. Although they hadn’t broken any laws, Judge T.D. Evans found them all guilty and fined them $100 which would be worth $1,000 today. Since the Wobblies didn’t have the money for the fine, they all severed time in prison. They were the lucky ones.

Then, bailiffs arrested six Wobblies who sat in the courtroom. They were transported to a country jail, but never made it there. They were met by a mob who forced them to strip to their waists in the cold evening air. They were then tied to a tree, whipped, tarred and feathered. They were then let loose in the cold and forced to run for their lives. One of the six had been set free because he was an agent. 

In 1918 the largest civilian trial in the history of this country took place of more than 100 members of the IWW. They were charged with violation of the Espionage and Selective Service Acts. None of those charges included theft, sabotage, or violence. 

One of the defendants at this trial was William D. “Big Bill” Haywood. Haywood worked at many jobs in the violent atmosphere he was born into. He spent 16 years as an underground miner. At this trial Haywood spoke about the real charges he and his comrades were accused of.

He hoped that one day there would be, “no rich and no poor; no millionaires, and no paupers no palaces and no hovels…and where no man will have to work 13 hours in a smelter.” If working for that dream “is a conspiracy, then we are conspiring.” All the IWW defendants in this case were found to be guilty. 

Immigrant workers who were in some way critical of the United States government also became targets. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer organized to deport least 10,000 immigrants. 

A vigilante group called itself the American Protective League or APL. At the time of the U.S. entry into the First World War, there were millions of men who saw no reason to murder people from other countries and refused to enlist in the draft. APL members busied themselves by raiding events where many gathered. They would then grab anyone who didn’t have a draft card. The reward for turning someone in was $50. Today this would be equivalent to $1,000.

The war against the Black community

During these same years racist mobs went to war against several Black communities in this country. We might consider that after the defeat of the reconstruction governments in 1877, the federal government allowed the racist forces of the Ku Klux Klan to strip African Americans of citizenship rights in this country. 

However, Black people managed to set up several neighborhoods that were self-sufficient. Then, during these years racist mobs attacked many of those communities. These mobs attacked the African American Communities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, East St. Louis, Missouri, and in Rosewood, Florida. These mobs murdered hundreds of Black people and destroyed entire communities.

8,000 Black men and women marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue protesting the massacre in East St. Louis. They demanded, “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?”

The Bureau of Investigation (Predecessor to the FBI) sent agents to East St. Louis. They looked into whether German influence had caused the mass murder. When they found that this was not the case, the investigation was dropped. The Los Angeles Times made the seemingly insane argument that the reason for this mass murder was “Bolshevik propaganda.” 

In fact, President Wilson made no secret of his overtly racist attitudes. This is what he had to say about slavery. “Slavery itself was not so dark a thing as it was painted…The domestic slaves, at any rate, and almost all who were under the master’s eye were happy and well cared for.” 

The Postmaster General in those days was Albert Sidney Burleson. Burleson had a long list of periodicals that he prevented from passing through the mail. One of those periodicals was the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine. He also prevented the Masses magazine that was a predecessor to today’s New Yorker Magazine. 

William H. Lamar was the chief legal counsel for the Post Office. Lamar explained what his criterion was for censoring the mail. “You know I am not working in the dark on this censorship thing. I know exactly what I’m after. I’m after three things and only three things—pro-Germanism, pacifism, and high-browism.” 

The politics of Adam Hochschild and Leon Trotsky

Before I read Adam Hochschild’s book American Midnight, I read Leon Trotsky’s first volume of his book The History of the Russian Revolution. Reading these two books gave me an insightful contrast of what was happening in the United States and Russia during these same years. These two books also showed me how the political orientation of these two authors were different. 

Trotsky was one of the central leaders of the Russian Revolution and was intimately aware of the issues surrounding that profound event. At the time of the Revolution, millions of Russian soldiers lost their lives because of the First World War. The Russian people also experienced a famine where food was difficult to come by.

However, Trotsky argued that there were other reasons that provoked the Revolution. This had to do with the horrendous repression of the Czarist regime the people endured for decades. That overall atmosphere caused workers to risk their lives and attack armed Cossacks in the hope that they had the potential to create profound change. 

In other words, the Russian Revolution was inevitable. That inevitability had to do with the fact that masses of Russian people were determined to end the horrendous rule they had been forced to endure. However, while the Revolution was inevitable, the outcome of that revolution was not inevitable. This begins to explain why the Bolsheviks, who were a minority political party, were able to win the masses of the Russian people to their program. When the Revolution erupted again in October of 1917, and the Soviets took power, there was very little opposition.

Adam Hochschild had this to say about the Russian Revolution. “Russia’s people were weary, its factories hit by strikes, and its army was slowly drained away in mass desertions.”

Well, people don’t make revolutions because they are weary. This is what Thomas Jefferson had to say about Revolution in his Declaration of Independence, that was the founding document of this country.

“Prudence, indeed will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Here we see the profound contradiction of Thomas Jefferson who was both the author of the Declaration of Independence as well as a slave owner. By the year 1852 Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery had this to say on the day after the forth of July.

"For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy America reins without a rival." The profound contradiction of slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

I believe that these quotations are also relevant in explaining the causes for the Russian Revolution. The Russian people weren’t “weary,” but felt a “duty to throw off” the regimes of the Czar and the Provisional Government. The people of the new Soviet Union would then successfully defend themselves against an invasion of 14 nations that attempted to overthrow the new revolutionary government. They could not have dome that if the people were weary.

The problem was that after the First World War, the Revolution, and then the Civil War, there was a weariness of the people in the Soviet Union. They wanted some kind of stability, and those were the conditions that led to the betrayal of the Revolution by the forces that supported Joseph Stalin.   

So, what is the essence of the political difference between Hochschild and Trotsky? Hochschild believes that there are democratic norms in this country that were compromised during the years of 1917-1921. He concludes his book with the statement that we need to have “respect for civil rights and constitutional safeguards, to save ourselves from slipping back into darkness again.”

Today about 42 million people do not have enough food to eat in the United States. Four people have over $100 billion. While President Wilson might have deported 10,000 people from this country, Presidents Obama and Trump deported millions of immigrants. Thousands of those deported immigrants have children who were born in this country. When they were deported, the government effectively prevented them from ever seeing their children again.

The prison population has mushroomed to the point where the United States has more people living in dungeons than any other nation in the world. Clearly, I could go on and on listing the horrors working people face in this country and the world.

Therefore, I believe that Leon Trotsky’s perspective on the Russian Revolution continues to be relevant. The ruling powers of this country are just as clueless about the reality working people face as the ruling powers were clueless as to the reality of the Russian working class in 1917.

Events will erupt, just as they did in 1917, where masses of people will mobilize to demand profound change. When this happens, the working class of the world will have a real opportunity to create, for the first time, a genuine democracy. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, they will also create “new guards for their future security.”