UC Berkeley journalism instructor and historian Adam Hochschild is the author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis. He says he wrote the book during the first Trump administration because he was struck by similarities between President Woodrow Wilson’s agenda and some of President Donald Trump’s aspirations.
KAZU’s Amy Mayer recently spoke with Hochschild about what was happening in the United States from 1917-1921 and why it feels even more relevant today than 10 years ago.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Adam Hochschild: During those four years, roughly a thousand Americans spent a year or more in prison—and a much larger number, shorter periods of time—solely for things that they wrote or said. During that period there was a government sanctioned vigilante group called the American Protective League, which went around rounding up and roughing up young men it suspected might be resisting the draft. And, finally, there was press censorship on a huge scale.
The postmaster general was given the power under the Espionage Act, which was the law that enabled all this, to declare any newspaper or magazine “un-mailable”—it could not be mailed through the US Post Office. He essentially used that power to shut down 75 newspapers and magazines and to ban from the mail specific issues of several hundred others.
Amy Mayer: What kinds of things were people doing to resist?
AH: They did so to some extent at the ballot box. In the fall of 1917, the Socialist Party was the principal voice against the United States joining the First World War. Suppressing anti-war feeling was a major impetus behind all of this repression. And
the Socialist Party earned 20% or more of the vote in 14 of the country's largest cities.
AM: I did want to ask you, specifically, from within the administration...you talk about Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, who really struck me as a sort of insider hero in some ways.
AH: Yes, he was one of my favorite characters in American Midnight. Post was a former progressive journalist and a longtime activist for social justice, who was the third ranking person in the Department of Labor. Through a fluke, he became the acting secretary of labor. Something that was happening right at that time was that Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, was aiming at becoming president in November 1920. He saw the promise of mass deportations as his pathway to the White House. So in late 1919, early 1920, he ordered Justice Department agents out around the country, principally in the big cities of the Northeast. They arrested some 10,000 people whom they thought were candidates for deportation. That meant people who were active leftists or radicals in one way or another, but who had never bothered to get naturalized as American citizens. Palmer rounded up all these folks in what became known as the Palmer raids, but there was a wrinkle. The Justice Department—his agents—had the power to arrest these people and to jail them. But deportations had to be approved by the Immigration Bureau, which fell under the Department of Labor.
I think there is a more widespread respect among people in general, in this country, and in our court system, for the First Amendment.
And Louis F. Post, this quite good guy who was acting secretary of labor, did not believe anybody should be deported from the United States because of his or her political opinions. So he saved, we don't know the precise numbers, but it was many thousands of people from being deported.
AM: After that deep dive from a hundred years ago, how do you view the current political landscape in this country?
AH: Well, I think the current political landscape is pretty grim. Because we have a president who would like to do all of these things. In some ways, we have a stronger resistance. One difference is that today we have state governors like (Gavin) Newsom in California and (JB) Pritzker in Illinois, who are speaking out very vocally against the repression that's happening on the national level. Another difference is that I think there is a more widespread respect among people, in general in this country and in our court system, for the First Amendment.
