Adam Hochschild - American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracys Forgotten Crisis

For

Troy Duster, Russ Ellis, and Thelton Henderson

N IGHT HAD FALLEN in the rugged oil-boom city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the squad of detectives appeared on a downtown street. They gathered outside a building whose ground-floor meeting hall had yellow curtains at the windows. Then they burst inside.

It was November 5, 1917, and the room they raided was the local headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was the countrys most militant labor union and was organizing the regions oil workers; for reasons obscure, its members were known to all as Wobblies. The detectives examined the premises suspiciously, looking into corners with flashlights, but found nothing more incriminating than 11 Wobblies reading or playing cards. They arrested the men, ordered them into a paddy wagon, and, for want of other offenses, charged them all with vagrancy. The worst that the Tulsa Daily World, the voice of the states oil industry, could come up with the next day, looking for something damning to say about them, was, Most of them were uncouth in appearance.

When the Wobblies were brought to court two days later, the police could not name any laws the men had violated, and none had a criminal record. Their attorney argued that they could not possibly be vagrants, or loafers, as the prosecution charged, because they were employed. One had not lost a workday in ten months; another was the father of ten children and owned a mortgage-free home. However, when their trial ended late at night on November 9, Judge T. D. Evans found them all guilty and fined them $100 apiece (the equivalent of some $2,000 a hundred years later). This was a sum no Wobbly could afford and one that guaranteed that they would remain in jail.

By way of explaining his verdict, the judge cryptically declared, These are no ordinary times.

Immediately after he sentenced the 11, bailiffs seized six other men in the courtroom, five of them Wobblies who had been defense witnesses, and locked them up as well. Shortly afterward, police ordered the entire group into three cars, supposedly to take them to the county jail. At a railroad crossing, however, the cars were suddenly surrounded by a large mob of men wearing long black robes and black masks and carrying rifles and revolvers. It was below freezing. You could see the frost on the railroad ties, remembered one Wobbly. By now he and his comrades knew that in store for them was something worse than jail.

JUDGE EVANS WAS right: these were no ordinary times. Yet they are largely left out of the typical high school American history book. Theres always a chapter on the First World War, which tells us that the United States remained neutral in that conflict until German submarines began sinking American ships. Then, of course, we sent General Pershing and his millions of khaki-clad doughboys to Europe in their distinctive, broad-brimmed, forest-ranger hats. They fought valiantly at Chteau-Thierry and Belleau Wood, helped win the war, and returned home to joyful ticker-tape parades. Turn the page and the next chapter begins with the Roaring Twenties: flappers, the Charleston, Prohibition, speakeasys, and Al Capone.

This book is about whats missing between those two chapters. It is a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans, and far more that is not marked by commemorative plaques, museum exhibits, or Ken Burns documentaries. It is a story of how a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home.

The toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law have long flowed through American life. People of my generation have seen them erupt in McCarthyism, in the rocks and insults hurled at Black children entering previously all-white schools, and in the demagoguery of politicians like Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and Donald Trump. By the time you read this, they may well have boiled up again in additional ways. My hope is that by examining closely an overlooked period in which they engulfed the country, we can understand them more deeply and better defend against them in the future. The struggle of man against power, wrote Milan Kundera, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Never was this raw underside of our nations life more revealingly on display than from 1917 to 1921. For instance, twenty-first-century Americans are all too familiar with rage against immigrants and talk of fortifying the southern border, but this is nothing new: major candidates for both the Republican and Democratic Party presidential nominations in 1920 campaigned on promises of mass deportations. And some people, including the vice president of the United States, suggested going further: Why limit deportation merely to immigrants? Why not permanently expel troublemakers of every sort? Also during this period, army machine-gun nests appeared in downtown Omaha and tanks on the streets of Cleveland, and armed troops patrolled many other American cities, from Butte, Montana, to Gary, Indiana. The military crafted a secret 57-page contingency plan to put the entire country under martial law.

During those four years more than 450 people were imprisoned for a year or more by the federal government, and an estimated greater number by state governments, merely for what they wrote or said. For the same reason, or simply for belonging to fully legal organizations, thousands of Americans like those Tulsa Wobblies were jailed for shorter periods, anywhere from a few days to a few months.

Right-wing TV networks did not exist in 1917, but in that year was born a presidential tool even more powerful, a lavishly financed government propaganda agency that operated in every medium of the day: films, books, posters, newspaper articles, and a corps of 75,000 speakers who gave more than seven million talks everywhere from movie houses to revival tents. In addition, the federal government also attacked the press, both during and well after the First World War. It banned hundreds of issues of American newspapers and magazines from the mail (a fatal blow in an age before electronic media), permanently barring some 75 periodicals entirely.

These years also saw the birth of a nationwide group of vigilantes that, in size and power, dwarfed the militia groups in bulletproof vests that would flourish a century later. With more than a quarter-million members, that earlier organization became an official auxiliary of the Department of Justice. Men in its ranks would sport badges and military-style titles, cracking heads, roughing up protestors, and carrying out mass arrests. Tens of thousands of Americans would join smaller local groups as well; the masked vigilantes under those black hoods in Tulsa that night in November 1917 belonged to one called the Knights of Liberty.

WHEN THE POLICE cars stopped at the railroad crossing, none of the policemen had a chance to reach for his gun, claimed the Tulsa Daily World, as they were surrounded by armed men. The Worlds managing editor, who clearly had been tipped off beforehand, was on the scene to observe, even bringing his wife with him. The newspaper had virtually called for something to happen, publishing an editorial that very afternoon saying, The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the I. W. W.s. Kill em, just as you would kill any other kind of a snake.... It is no time to waste money on trials and continuances and things like that. All that is necessary is the evidence and a firing squad.

Americas entry into the First World War earlier that year had provided business with a God-given excuse to stop workers from organizing. Any man or any set of men, as the