Adam Hochschild: American Midnight

With Donald Trump actually have loved being president back in nineteen seventeen, and that’s the argument from the author of a new book called American midnight, the Great War, a violent peace, and democracy’s forgotten crisis of the Boston Globe rights in its book review that those years around nineteen seventeen were a brutal chapter of American history almost always omitted from high school textbooks and the standard history offerings at the Nations University, the author of American midnight. Adam Hochschild joins me on the podcast. Good morning, Adam. How are you?

Good to be with you, Charles.

Adam is a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s school of journalism and the author of eleven books. So Okay. So we’re talking about a book written about the Wilson administration more than a hundred years ago.

Tell

me why you wrote it. What were you thinking at the time you began writing it back in twenty seventeen? A hundred years to the date from what you’re describing.

That’s right. It was exactly a hundred years earlier. That period has always fascinated me. In part because my parents who had me when they were quite far along in years lived through it and often used to talk about it. And I’ve always thought of the first world war as the time when our whole world sort of took a turn for the worse.

Simon Chalmette talks about the first world war as the original sin of the twentieth century. And one of the ways that’s reflected in the United States was a terrific crackdown on domestic descent of all kinds. And when I plunged into this period, it was just at the time that Donald Trump became president. And so many of the things that he was talking about, you know, criminalizing the news media and you know, building walls along the border and keeping immigrants out of the United States and so forth, were to me echoed so much things that happened during this period a hundred years ago. And the more the time went on, the more I realized that Trump would have loved being president back then because not only could he have trumpeted about a lot of the things that he did talk about, like, you know, cutting down on immigration of all kinds, but he could have done things he would have liked to do, like shutting down dissident media like throwing his political opponents in jail.

You know, when he was campaigning in twenty sixteen, his followers chatted, lock her up, lock her up about Hillary Clinton. Well, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, went one better and actually did lock up a sizable number of his political opponents.

What I find really interesting about this book is I I have a I have a I have a thing for, you know, histories of underappreciated period of American life. And you’ve read in this book never was the raw underside of our nation’s life more revealingly on display than from nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty one. It’s the story of how a war that was supposedly fought to make the World Save for Democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home And as you just mentioned, a lot of this took place under the presidency, almost all of it took place for the presidency of Woodrow will who’s normally identified as this progressive icon. And yet and yet as you described, you know, oversaw the censorship of speech, jailing of political opponents, deporting immigrants, fail to protect black citizens. And, you know, this is one of those you know, moments we look back on, you know, the the the quirks of history because when I was growing up, you know, Woodrow Wilson was this progressive giant.

Right? It was only later. I think I think it was Jonah Goldberg’s book was the first time that, you know, I ever heard him describe as somebody who was who was a white racist, who who aired birth of a nation in the White House, who was engaged and, you know, who was the, you know, presided over over the red scare. So, I mean, there’s a real irony in history there that this period that echoes Donald Trump was actually you know, what we thought of at the time as a and for many years afterwards as a progressive era.

That’s true. And I think the lesson of it is that you don’t have to be a loud mouth showman to preside over a period of great repression. In personal style, nobody could be more different than from Donald Trump than Woodrow Wilson. He was as Gentile, as dignified, as professorial, a person as you can imagine. He was a Democrat.

He was indeed elected as a progressive and, you know, in in his first term in office from nineteen thirteen to nineteen in ‘seventeen, there were some mild progressive measures, a little more regulation of business, progressive income tax, child labor law, a few things like that. But then he really did preside over this extremely harsh repression. Two things kicked that off. The first was when the United States entered the first world war in April of nineteen seventeen. That set off an absolute frenzy of mindless super patriotism of all sorts and provided the excuse for all kinds of crackdowns.

The espionage act was passed immediately after that happened. Ironically, the same law an amended version of which is still in effect, which could get Donald Trump in trouble today over those classified documents at Mar a Lago. Then the second thing that intensified this midnight period that I write about was the Russian Revolution November of nineteen teen when the Bolsheviks, the most extreme faction, the Russian revolutionaries, seized power in that country, and many people in the American establishment were terrified that the Russian revolution was gonna spread to the United States, so that added more impetus to the crackdown. So

one of the things that that I think is is interesting looking back at this period is the the period before the war, the run up to the war, appear to be an era of good feeling. You know, the avant garde flourishing in literature art and music. As you write, people were convinced the world was changing in a good way. So it felt as if the culture was headed in a different direction. And the war and the Russian revolution either broke this or did it reveal something that was always under the surface?

I guess that’s the question we keep coming back to in the Trump era. How much is Trump, you know, is is Trump centric? And how much of it is Trump as a is a symptom of an underlying condition? So how much of this was there? Because you’re you’re talking about anti immigrant rhetoric, tax on the media, white backlash, conspiracy theories, suppression of Civil Liberty.

Was was all of that sort of paper thin and we were just revealed how vulnerable it all was back then?

Well, you know, I think both Trump himself and these events a hundred years earlier that I just mentioned the entry into the first world war and the Russian revolution. They were both like setting on fire or increasing the flames under something that was already smoldering. Because the myth was that the United States was a peaceful country that was drawn reluctantly into this terrible war that was going on in Europe. But the United States even though that period, as you said, before the first World War was one of great optimism that things were getting better, was not a peaceful country. There were a lot of very severe conflict going on.

Business versus labor. Dozens of people were killed in labor violence each year. In nineteen thirteen, nineteen fourteen alone, more than seventy people were killed in a by the National Guard in a Colorado minor strike. That was one smoldering conflict that entering the war turned up the flames under. Another was that between Nativeists and immigrants, which has long been there in the United States, where people whose ancestors came a couple of generations ago have always been uneasy about people who are coming from new and different parts the world in their own time.

Today, of course, it’s people who are upset about immigrants coming in mainly from Latin America. A hundred years ago, there was almost no immigration from Latin America. But the majority of the white population of the US were people who’d come whose ancestors had come from Northwestern Europe. Great Britain, British Isles, Germany, Holland, Denmark and so forth. They were upset with the newer waves of immigrants who were coming primarily from southern and eastern Europe.

That is Italians, Poles, and Jews who, in the eyes of these older stock Americans, were, so to speak, not yet white. And so there was a tremendous move to restrict this immigration. The leading presidential candidates up to the very last minute in nineteen twenty on both sides, Republican and Democrat campaigned on promises of mass deportations.

And they continued into the nineteen twenties with the passage of very, very restrictive racially based immigration laws.

That’s right. In nineteen twenty four, that basic we slammed the door on immigration for the next forty one years. That’s what kept out refugees from the Holocaust.

And then

the third conflict that was going on was the long one between black and white Americans. Many people, especially in the south, never really wanted to admit that the South had lost the civil war. Most black Americans, you know, in nineteen seventeen, were working in horrible low paid jobs as sharecroppers picking cotton and stuff like that. They were starting to flee this out in the green migration. The war and the boom in industrial production that it unleashed speeded that up, but a lot of white northerners in the northern big cities didn’t want them coming in.

And we saw in nineteen nineteen the worst racial violence in American history since the South had rolled back reconstruction in the eighteen seventies. So

both the war and the Russian revolution speeded up and intensified these conflict that were already there. So I wanna keep going back and forth between the these echoes of

what happened from nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty one and and the current situation. There are a lot of concerns about attacks on civil liberties, the possibility of in fascism, the breakdown of the various guardrails. But as you right, what we had after World War one was the greatest repression of of liberties in the country since the end of slavery. So Donald Trump may have, you know, chanted lock her up about Hillary Clinton, but much Pro Wilson actually did lock up the socialist candidate for president from nineteen twelve, Eugene Debbs for posing the entry into the war. So, I mean, back then, in fact, you could be jailed for things you said or you wrote.

A rather remarkable period in American culture. And I guess the question is, for people who say, well, that can’t happen here because we have the first amendment, it did happen. And so what was the

climate of speech and first amendment protections back during this Wilson era? Well, during these four years that I’m focusing on, early nineteen seventeen when the US entered the war to

early nineteen twenty one when a Wilson administration left office. The best estimate is that roughly a thousand Americans spent a year or more in jail and a much larger number shorter periods of time solely for things that they rode or said. Just an astounding figure. More than four hundred of those four hundred and fifty of those people were in federal prisons, a slightly larger number. It’s estimated we’re in state prisons because states around the country passed copycat laws similar to the espionage act, some of which were actually drafted by the Department of Justice.

And it’s an astounding degree of repression. I think actually that if I can be optimistic for a second, I think we do have a greater appreciation of civil liberties today. Than existed a hundred years ago. And, you know, Civil liberties is something that’s beyond political partisanship. For example, a very influential organization came out of this period, the American Civil Liberties Union, which began its life under a slightly different name as an advocate for imprisoned draft resistors.

In nineteen seventeen. So I think there is more of a sense of the importance of the bill of rights today than there was a hundred years ago, but we still face an awful lot of dangers. And I don’t need to tell you because the the bulwark has been writing about those things in a very articulate way. We

can come back to this because I I I certainly hope you’re right about the the optimism. My takeaway, however, from your work was a reminder of how fragile these things are and and perhaps how thin the adherence to liberal values are because this was an ugly period in American history and that we we went through it. And so let but let let’s come back to that in in a moment. Know, you talked about some of the other things that happened, the the nineteen twenty one Tulsa Massacre. And I’ve talked about this numerous times now on the podcast.

And I continued to be slightly embarrassed, no not slightly, considerably embarrassed about the fact that I was really unaware of this. Until relatively recently. And I guess the question is, how could so much of this have been erased from our history? You know, reading about the palm of raids, these raids on radicals, you know, the the jailing of of, you know, prominent political figures And as you point out, we memory hold a lot of that. So it raises questions about the American memory and the American sense of

self. That that a lot of our history that leaves out things like that does feel very very whitewashed. That’s true. I think every country has a strong impulse to

play

up the good, noble sounding parts of its history and to downplay the bad parts. I’ve written about this as applies to other countries. You know, one of my books, Kingsley Post, was about Belgium colonization of the Congo, which was a very nasty business, which led to a decrease in that population’s territory of some ten million people. And this thing was almost completely left out of Belgian history books. Same thing in Great Britain when they talked about the heritage of slavery in the British empire.

Something else I’ve written about. And the United States is no different on that score. The period that I wrote about an American midnight I think usually gets left out of the standard high school history textbook. When high-tech American history in high school, in any case, there was one chapter on the First World War. The Doe Boys went off to Europe and those Broad brim forest ranger hats They fought the war bravely, helped to win.

They came back. Mhmm. Chapter ends, you turn the page, and then it’s the roaring twenties, the Prohibition, speakeases, babrooth and so on. So we we do tend to sanitize our history. And you know, we see it, for example, in how slavery is dealt with in history textbooks.

Today, you know, there’s a great deal about it, but it wasn’t always the case. When I went to high school in the nineteen fifties, we learned there was slavery in the United States but it was important only as a cause of the American Civil War. We never read a slave narrative. When my kids went to high school in the nineteen eighties, there were slave narratives that they read. They they learned much more about it.

Why? I think it was the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties. If, for example, before nineteen seventy, you have visited that wonderful collection of reconstructed eighteenth century buildings Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, there was nothing there that indicated that half the population of the original Williamsburg were slaves. After nineteen seventy, that started to change and the whole exhibits are very different today. So what we see in our history usually doesn’t change until somebody comes along

at really pushes us and says, look at this, acknowledge this. And that’s true across the board in all countries. And this is not revisionist history. This is filling in the

gaps you know, for example, and I do think that, obviously, these narratives are crucial to where a nation sees itself in the way it confronts its problems. So for example, you were mentioning slavery. I was thinking about the way that I was taught about the civil war. And I think still the dominant narrative is, you know, Abraham Lincoln, fought the civil war, freed the slaves, And yes, there were problems after that, but that problem was solved in eighteen sixty five. Whereas, the history of reconstruction I remember the high school textbooks that I have, you know, reconstruction was about the carpet baggers.

And fortunately, that came to an end. Reconstruction that led to Jim Crow was not one of the great eras of American history. And so it was an open sword that was never resolved. And when we have debates about race, if the assumption is that, you know, that closed the book on that, we solved their you’re going to have a very different reaction. And then you remember, I’m sorry, we have had a, you know, a century and a half of not resolving what happened back then.

And and

I feel the same way about the history that you’re describing, the the nativism, the conspiracy theories, the the the

contempt for civil liberties, the, you know, willingness to throttle the media, those are still out there. They very much are, and there’s so many continuities to today. I mean, when

you look at the number of conspiracy theories that are in circulation today where everybody from George Soros to Washington DC, Pizza Parlor, gets blamed for all kinds of evil happenings in the world. This same stuff was going on a hundred years ago. The villains were different. George Soros wasn’t around yet, but the villains were for example, the pope or it was revolutionaries in Russia who, admittedly, were doing some horrible things. They were pulling all the strings here, whereas in fact, they had no direct influence in the United States at all.

And this conspiratorial thinking was so prevalent that I think the greatest single example of it was this, In early nineteen twenty, the Democratic attorney general, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, a Mitchell Palmer, who was the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president and the conventions coming up that summer. He repeatedly declared, and it was headline news all over the country that on May first, May day, the International Communist holiday, May first nineteen twenty, there would be a communist uprising in the United States. He said this again and again and again and, you know, they put the National Guard on alert. New York City called in all three shifts if it police force. One shift was on the street.

The other two were waiting in station houses. JPMorgan and other Big Wigs hired extra guards as they posted security everywhere at bus terminals and ferry terminals, the whole country waited for this uprising. May first came, and absolutely nothing happened. It took the wind out of attorney general Palmer’s presidential campaign which was a good thing. Well, that’s good that we’re

consequences back then for being full of it. That’s good.

But it really shows you the the extent to which this conspiratorial thinking spread throughout the country. Here was the attorney general who believed all this stuff.

I also remember, I’m I’m thinking back to, you know, talking about the way we remember the nineteen twenties. The first time that I saw a picture of this massive march on Washington, D. C. By the Kukhn’s Clan. I mean, it’s outside the four year period that that you’re writing about, but it’s very much part of this.

Was it that

nineteen twenty three, nineteen twenty four? I think it was nineteen twenty four, and you can actually find film of it on YouTube, all these guys in their white robes, you know, marching down, you know, like with the Washington Monument in the background. It’s incredible.

This was a big deal, and they were still a major force in Democratic Party politics, including at the famous nineteen twenty four, Democratic national convention where they had what, you know, hundred and five ballots, hundred and six six ballots. So, you know, that that endured that you had that kind of nativest, racist, anti semitic undercurrent American politics. It

was very much there, and the clan had flourished after the civil war when the south was basically dismantling reconstruction. Then it sort of got eclipsed. During the period, I was writing about nineteen seventeen to twenty twenty one. It had come back to life, but people with that impulse were mainly involved in other organizations. And I talked about one in American midnight, which was something called the American Protective League.

Which was basically a vigilante group chartered by the justice department, which went around arresting people doing citizens’ arrests on tens of thousands of young men who were suspected of evading the draft. They arrested in the largest of these slacker raids as they were called. They arrested fifty thousand people, more than fifty thousand in New York City in nineteen eighteen. They held them sometimes up to several days at a time while their papers could be checked. Only a very tiny percentage of them actually were trying to evade the draft.

But this organization, the American Protective Week, had two hundred and fifty thousand members. And when the justice department finally disbanded it, at the end of the war, many of its members moved on into the cloud. Well, I probably

have a better memory of of the things you’re talking about, not because I’m that old, but because I’m I’m from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And those of us here in Milwaukee have everybody’s got a story about what it was like because this was a heavily German city and so felt the brunt of much of the paranoia that hit the country and and back during World War one. I mean, the whole idea. I mean, if people were upset about, you know, Docsons and, you know, things like that, nor or hot dogs, you can imagine what it would have been like in a city like Milwaukee. And of course, we had a congressman, Victor Berger, who lost his seat.

Because he descended from the war. So, I mean, this hit home. And so it it was very, very concentrated here that this was a period where all Americans were not equal and the first amendment was not gonna protect you against this sort of thing. Yeah.

Victor Berger got in trouble both because he was German speaking and because he was from a socialist party, and he didn’t lose his seat because of a decision of the voters. But because the House of Representatives refused twice to seat him — Mhmm. — he was actually from the moderate wing of the Social list party, but that was not enough. He was denied his seat in congress. I heard a little growing up about the anti German hysteria because My father who was in his early twenties at this time lived in New York.

His father was a Jewish immigrant from Germany. And they spoke German around the dining room table at home, but they knew they would get beaten up if they did so on the street. Many states passed laws against speaking German in public or on the telephone. There were bonfires of German language books all over the country. It was you you have to use the word hysteria applied to this period.

And then it morphed very smoothly into hysteria that the Russian revolution was gonna spread to the United States, something that realistically, I don’t think there was any chance of whatever. But that provided a pretext for cracking down on socialists and radicals of all kinds. And on people who were not particularly radical, but, you know, like senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, and as a Wisconsinite, You know about him. He was not a socialist. He was not an anarchist.

He was a progressive republican. But he critic of the war was he was a critic of the war. And he said rightly so, I think if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy, Wilson’s famous statement, why aren’t we pushing for self determination, for Egypt, for India, for Ireland, These were, of course, colonies of our new ally, Great Britain. And for that, he started receiving nooses in the mail. He was booted out of a club he belonged to in Madison, Wisconsin.

They

burned

him an effigy at the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater. And he had a had a terrible time. So I

think it is accurate to describe what happened as his stereo, and we were it felt like we were we in Wisconsin were kind of ground zero to that hysteria, but the hysteria was nationwide as well as the nativism that you’re describing and they’ve used towards sub liberty. So I guess the question is, did the fever break or did it just go underground? Because we don’t think of the twenties as being this hysterical period that you’re describing now. I

think it both did break, but a lot of it did go underground, and we’ve seen it surface again later. It broke apartly because what I was just talking about, you know, Palmer, the attorney general predicted this nationwide uprising, which never came. By mid late nineteen twenty, it was clear the Russian revolution was not going to spread to the United States. Also some of the economic stress that had, you know, caused a lot of agitation in a huge wave of strikes in nineteen nineteen when there were four million returning war veterans and not enough jobs for them because all of the factories making tanks and guns and planes and artillery shells and so on were shutting down, that began to ease in nineteen twenty and you know, people went to the beach and not to the barricades. So I think people realized they had gone overboard.

On this. And it’s interesting to see that this LaFollette, who had been a very harsh critic of the war, got reelected to Congress. And in fact, he received about a sixth of the popular vote nationally when is an independent candidate he ran for president. In nineteen twenty four, I believe. So millions of people around the world realized I think that the first World War, which they had all endorsed so patheonically and enthusiastically when it began nineteen fourteen in Europe and nineteen seventeen for the United States.

They realized that the war had remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way and that they faced better, angry, resentful, Germany, and of course, we know what the consequences of that were. So they were inclined to be much more forgiving now to people who had been critics of the war. And Warren Harding, who became president in nineteen twenty one, actually said off the record that the US had made a terrible mistake to enter the war. And he let Eugene Debbs whom Wilson had in prison out of prison remitted his his sentence and invited Debbs to come and visit him in Washington on the way home. And when Deb’s left the White House, he told reporters, you know, I’ve run for the White House five times.

But this is the first time I’ve ever gotten here. No. It it

is a reminder of how strange history can be that it’s Woodrow Wilson who’s remembered as this great progressive hero who jailed Eugene Jeb’s and Warren Harding who is reviled as a sort of mediocre corrupt Republican who who actually freed him So you’re talking about the lessons that people learned from World War I in in the aftermath. Well, many people also drew obviously the the wrong conclusion as the country became isolationists turned inward. And obviously, the nativism did not abate considering that in the nineteen twenties, they did pass what we’ve described as one of the most racist immigration policies. I really want to have a more optimistic view of this. But, you know, as you wrote, one of the reasons for optimism is that a new generation of Liberals learned what not to do from Wilson, and they influence policy during FDR.

But FDR was also responsible for what I think can fairly be called one of the worst abuses of civil liberties in American history the internment of Japanese Americans, so that lesson was not completely learned, was it?

Absolutely. I mean, FDR was a paradox ago president that way, the internment was an awful thing. On the whole, I I like him a whole lot better as president than do Wilson. But Wilson, to come back to him, was a very paradoxical man. He did preside over this enormous repression of of civil liberties in this country.

I think really the worst since the aftermath of slavery. Nothing else comes close to it. We haven’t even talked about press censorship, which was extreme during this period. Seventy five newspapers and magazines forced to close down by Wilson’s press center. At the same time, he was a man of paradox because he was genuinely idealistic about his pet project, the League of Nations, and he was so committed to that that it really shortened his life because when he was in ill health, he went in nineteen nineteen on a long speaking tour around the country talking up the league of nations, which the senate was threatening to voke down and eventually did vote down.

And Wilson so exhausted himself on the speaking tour and doing a speaking tour a hundred years ago, meant shouting because there were no public address systems. So if you want to address, you know, ten thousand people in a baseball stadium, you have to shout. And it was during that tour that he had the first of two almost fatal strokes rushed back to the White House had the second stroke and was really out of commission for the last year and a half of his presidency. Would his vision of the league of nations actually have stopped the world from going to war again. I doubt it.

I doubt that it would have been that what he envisioned which was a league of nations with the United States, the most influential player in it. I doubt that it would have been any more effective than the UN has been since nineteen forty five in preventing conflict. But nobody can argue with the idea that it’s better for nations to talk out their differences than to fight about them. And this was the same man who presided over censorship, political imprisonment, repression of free speech, on a huge scale at the same time as he was pushing this very idealistic note. How do you

explain that? He’s a former president of Princeton University we would think of somebody coming from academia as having some more respect for freedom of thought, academic freedom. What is your take on on that? That weird dichotomy of literal Wilson. Well,

I think he was so convinced of his own rightness about everything. That he saw anybody who disagreed with him as a threat. Mhmm. And he pushed hard for a censorship provision to be in the espionage act. And he urged Congress to give the government the powers of censorship Congress actually defeated that section of the bill, but they allowed censorship by a different provision of the bill.

Which was that they gave to the postmaster general, be power to declare a publication unmailable. Now this, of course, didn’t affect mainstream daily newspapers, which were sold on street corners and delivered to people’s homes. But for weeklies, one threes, journals of opinion and the vast majority of the country’s foreign language press, the male was essential because before the Internet, before radio and TV, there was no other way of reaching their subscribers. And the postmaster general who had this power was an awful guy, Albert Burelson, former congressman from Texas, arch segregationist, when he was born, his family had owned twenty slaves. And he loved being chief sensor and, you know, banned hundreds of specific issues and of newspapers and magazines from the mail, forced seventy five publications to close.

And every once in all, he would do that to some magazine where you know, the editor had a connection to Wilson and would write to Wilson and say, you know, you can’t do this. And you shouldn’t do this. And Wilson would send a note to Burelson and say, can you look into this case? And Burelson would write back and say, yes, that these people have violated the espionage act, and Wilson never pursued any of these things at all. And indeed, there are cases and I cite one or two in the book where he saw something that annoyed him in the in publication and asked, Burelson, or is attorney general, can you shut this

thing down? So, was Woodrow Wilson what we’d now describe as an authoritarian because we’re talking, you know, obviously, there’s been a lot of, you know, buzz about the increased authoritarianism around the world, the tendency in American politics. The way you describe him sounds like a classic authoritarian somebody who is so imbued with a sense of his own righteousness and the the power of government to make everything better. That he really wasn’t a libertarian. He he may have had these visions for the international order, but Woodrow Wilson, was he the first real authoritarian president America has ever had?

That’s a good

question. I think there are other presidents before him who had authoritarian tendencies in their personality. I’m no expert on this, but certainly Andrew Jackson had some of that. But I think Wilson did have this tendency to believe that once he’d made up his mind, he was right.

He

was also somebody who had no appetite, whatever, for the sort of backstage wheeling and dealing that is the stuff of Democratic politics, Democratic with a small d. You know, there are presidents who get things done know that you have to do that. You have to negotiate with your enemies. You have to give them a few things and take a few things in return. And somebody like Linda Johnson got the civil rights bills through Congress by doing that.

Mhmm. Wilson had no interest in this at all. And he was supremely convinced of his own righteousness. And that’s always something dangerous and a political leader even if it’s in a democratic system like ours, and we see the dangers of it

in, you know, Russia and China today. So the reason why I’m so in this question of did the fever break or did it go underground? Because now fast forwarding to

twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and everyone’s looking around saying, you know, how did this happen? Where did this come from? You know, why did we miss the depth of, you know, anti immigrant sentiment? Where does the contempt for free speech come to? Where is this?

You know, where is the white backlash been? The conspiracy theories? The willingness to suppress the liberties? And part of the answer seems to be, it’s always been there. And that maybe we told ourselves different stories, but it’s been an undertone since at least nineteen seventeen that a lot of this is does echo.

So clearly, where we were a hundred years ago, which means what we’ve been for the past hundred years, although we told ourselves a different story. You take a more optimistic view than that though. Well,

I think you’re basically right about that, Charlie, that it’s always been there. And it was there before nineteen seventeen. You know, the no nothing riots even before the civil war where at that point the immigrant group that they were upset about was Irish Catholics. And there were people killed in these riots. So that’s always been there.

I do think today I’m somewhat optimistic that we have more respect for the idea of civil liberties. But how widely that respect extends throughout the population is an open question. And when we have a political system where through gerrymandering, through the structure of the US senate, select somebody president, somebody who wins a minority of the popular vote can become president. So, you know, when you have those structural dangers It means you don’t necessarily have to have the majority

of the

population convinced of something to have something very nasty prevail. The book

is American midnight, the great war of violent peace and democracies forgotten crisis, Adam Hochschild, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Well, thank you, Charlie. It’s been

a pleasure to be able to talk about this. The

Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Seres. I’m Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. We’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll do this all over again.

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