American Midnight
Ratings5
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings5
Average rating4.2
National Bestseller • New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2022 • a New Yorker and Kirkus Best Book of 2022 From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now. In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today.
Reviews with the most likes.
A great subject but written for people with maybe a high school level knowledge of the period.
Maybe also good reading for the America First crowd.
Some tighter copyediting might have been helpful. Four times it is mentioned that Emma Goldman was an accomplice to the assassination attempt on Henry Frick: a mention of why he was a loathed target would be helpful perhaps.
4.5 stars rounded up. This is a fascinating account about a period of American history of which I was largely ignorant. I do think, however, that the author may have allowed his reasonable outrage about the repression in America to cloud his judgment about Wilson's prosecution of the war in Europe. Still, thank goodness for Mr. Post and the clear-minded thinkers who got the country back on a somewhat fairer track.
