Synopsis

Between 1917 and 1921, the United States endured one of the most severe crackdowns on civil liberties in its history—and then largely forgot about it. American Midnight is Adam Hochschild's account of those four years: a period of mob violence, mass imprisonment, government-sponsored vigilantism, and the systematic targeting of immigrants, Black Americans, labor organizers, and anyone who dared to oppose the war. Hochschild tells the story through a richly interwoven cast of characters. Some are famous—the inscrutable Woodrow Wilson, who presided over it all, and a young J. Edgar Hoover, then an ambitious bureaucrat laying the groundwork for a surveillance apparatus that would define his career. Others are less familiar: Kate Richards O'Hare, a fiery antiwar activist imprisoned for a speech, and Leo Wendell, a labor radical trusted completely by his comrades—who was in fact Hoover's most valuable undercover informant. More than 1,000 Americans were jailed solely for what they said or wrote. Some 250,000 citizens joined a vigilante organization formally sponsored by the Department of Justice. Hochschild brings narrative history's full force to bear on a chapter that has been minimized and misremembered—and whose echoes, as he makes clear, have never fully faded.