![]() ![]() The Bureau of Investigation and the American Protective League suppressed dissent. Among other things, they assigned George Creel-one of history’s great propagandists, although Hochschild barely mentions him-to pump up jingoism. ![]() Woodrow Wilson had run for reelection on a campaign to keep the country “out of war.” When, months later, he reversed course and declared hostilities, the administration was worried that the response might not be wholehearted. ![]() This hysteria was fueled by several forces. General Leonard Wood, who expected to become president in 1920, bellowed his plan to “deport these so-called Americans who preach treason openly.” An Iowa senator promoted “a one-language nation.” Even in New York-a place Hochschild describes as “the most multilingual city on earth”-an alderman sought to ban any “meetings held in alien tongues.” WITH A NOD to January 6, 2021, Adam Hochschild’s new interwar history, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, tells the tale of “the extreme repression of 1917 to 1921,” a time when the United States subverted its democracy and gave in to hysteria.ĭriven by war fever, Americans turned on anyone and anything they cast as traitors and dangers: immigrants in general and Jews in particular, labor in general and Wobblies and Socialists in particular, and, of course, African Americans. ![]()
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