My Amazon Review of Adam Hochschild's "American Midnight: The Great War..............."

Red Scare 1917-21

I thoroughly enjoyed Adam Hochschild’s book on the Spanish Civil War (See:Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Adam Hochschild's "Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939"  ) and was very hopeful that his book on the crushing of civil liberties during and immediately after World War I would be as good. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. To be sure Hochschild does a very good job in covering the era, but I believe he over does it. It is one civil liberties violation after another with the evil Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his Bureau of Investigation aide J. Edgar Hoover ferreting out socialists, Wobblies, communists, labor union organizers ad Black Americans coming home from the war. The author leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that he is man of the Left.

It is too much and ignores the real scare that was facing Americans, the very deadly influenza pandemic. Simply put, his book lacks context and he leave out the fact that part of the fear of Bolshevism was based o the fact that Lenin and Trotsky took Russia out of the war to the very real detriment of the American soldiers arriving in France. Further he doesn’t go into detail about the breakup of socialist party into a socialist and a communist faction.

Nevertheless, I learned much from the book. Hochschild shows the full extent of press censorship accomplish by Postmaster General Albert Burleson. In those days magazines were distributed by mail and the postal authorities had the ability to suspend mailing privileges of any publication it deemed contrary to the Espionage Act.

I also learned of  Leo Wendell an accomplished government spy and provocateur entrenched deep in the labor movement. One of the leading red hunters of the day was the very anti-immigrant Senator Albert Johnson of the state of Washington. In 1924 he would go on to write the Johnson-Reed drastically restricting immigration.

Woodrow Wilson does nothing to stop the attacks on civil liberties and, in fact, he refuses to pardon of commute the sentence of Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs. It would take the election of Republican Warren Harding to commute Debs’ sentence many others. It was Harding who put an end the Red Scare.

One of the heroes in the book is Department of Labor official, Louis Post. He personally stopped a huge number of deportations and embarrassed Palmer before a congressional committee thereby hurting his presidential prospects.

In sum Hochschild has given us a sese of this sordid time in American history. However, it would have helped if spent more time on the lives of every day American were trying to live normal lives.

For the full Amazon URL see: Red Scare 1917-21 (amazon.com)