How World War One Devastated The American Left | Adam Hochschild | TMR

Sam and Emma host Adam Hochschild, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism, to discuss his recent book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Adam Hochschild then joins as he dives right into the decade leading up to his World War I era of “American Midnight,” parsing through the various arenas of violence that were simmering at the start of the 20th Century, with mass suppression of labor struggles, immigrant movements, and Black communities all boiling over with the start of the War. Next, Hochschild focuses on Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, highlighted by a crackdown on civil liberties alongside an expansion of the federal presence both domestically and internationally, using the War as an opportunity to establish the US as a military power, before parsing more carefully through the role of the Espionage and later Sedition Acts, and the Wilson administration’s attack on public dissidents. Continuing post-war, Adam, Emma, and Sam walk through how the treatment of the Espionage Act evolved, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s eventual Supreme Court dissent and the reaction to the over 1000 arrests under these laws and their local counterparts, also exploring the impact of this suppression on the socialist and labor movements in the US, before diving into the story of Mitchell Palmer’s anti-immigrant crusade to help bolster a run for the presidency and how he was thwarted. Wrapping up, Hochschild tackles the role of prohibition in the American Midnight and explores the impact this period had on the American political pendulum moving forwards.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

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Image Credit, 109th Infantry soldier wearing a gas mask.

The image has been cropped and the color has been altered.

Is a pleasure to welcome you to the program Adam Adam Hochschild is a lecturer at the University of California Berkeley School of Journalism and the author of his latest book American midnight the Great War a violent peace and democracy's forgotten crisis. Adam welcome to the program. thank you, Sam. good to be with you. so this is a fascinating era of I was just saying to Emma at the beginning of the show like one of my favorite periods is reconstruction. and sort of post-reconstruction. and this may be my second favorite era of American history. because well like you say it's arguably I mean I guess it's right in the title American midnight it's arguably one of the darkest periods of of our history. let's just give us a sense of what was happening just in the years before prior to this. because you started up in 1917 give us a sense of like maybe the decade prior. yeah well there's a difference between the myth what we were taught in high school American history class and what things really were like. we were taught that this was a peaceful ever more prosperous country it had become the largest economy in the world. it was functioning quite smoothly. then World War One began all those backward nations of the old world started tearing each other apart. and finally reluctantly the United States joined the war in 1917 and those Doughboys and their Broadband hats went to Europe won the war.