American Midnight
From award-winning,New York Timesbestselling historian Adam Hochschild, a fast-paced, revelatory new account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath, when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known, among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
8mentions
2people
2022–2025years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Unfortunately the postscript to liberty being writ clear like this is quite dark. Merely a decadeatter Albert Sidney Burleson became postmaster general.
> "Has been called the worst postmaster general in American history, but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say however that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general -G. J. Meyer
This guy shows up time and time again in Hochshild's amazing American Midnight, to keep careful watch over & to ban various inconvenient political, civil, labor, racial, and anti-war folks from being able to send their letters. Empowered via the 1917 Espionage Act, by a Congress where many members quite loudly vociferously argued for it for letting the government shut down the left's ability to express problems of the world and a desire for a better world. Then as now (at least at POTUS level), to wish for a better state was perceived by the right as hating America, as a form of treason, as propaganda.
Burleson solicited post offices everywhere to send him anything suspicious. He also was a frequent at Wilson's Whitehouse, and would distribute postmaster positions in return for voting certain ways on bills. But in general, banning publications is the main of his legacy as a rotten evil fucker. He banned 15 publications in the first month after passage of the Espionage Act, largely for anti-war sentiment, and sent a huge huge huge chill through what journalism was permitted.
The foes of democracy are legion and oh have mercy, the snowflakes are back in power again. At war with and trying to run out of business a press that reports after them.
Apologies for my shitty post. I'm not worthy. Please please please read American Midnight. It's insane what this country was up to 100 years ago, how lopsided & vulgarly self-dealing & unjust the power was arrayed against the left & speech & progress & peace. Hopefully this trip around to the darker side of mankind is much shorter and much less a cooption of the state for political and economic exploitation.
- Sure maybe there was some inertia from the benevolent bettering institutions of the New Deal that have given a chance to Americans.
I just think you'd have to be so willfully in denial as to miss the darkness we are descending into. To miss how bitterly the GOP and the wealthy are building empires of lies and bespoke manufactured realities to make up down and left right, to cover for horrible treacherous actions against the possibility of the individual, stacking the deck for empire and inherited wealth. (And Dems are frequently unwilling to bite the donor class that makes winning elections possible, after the courts have obstructed democratic funding reforms.) Are actively opposing the possibility of people doing good for themselves & the world.
I strongly recommend folks go read one of the darkest periods of America, before enough was enough Adam Hochschild's American Midnight (2022) tells an amazing story of a circa-WW1 state that had radicalized against people, that had been totally overrun by well monied powers. Of Hoover using the full power of the police state to surveil as Ralph Van Demand had done during the Philippines civil war, of of the postal service run by someone using it for information control, of American Defense vigilanism.
Its not a tale of what happened next, how that broke, just a long amazing story of how dark America got, how badly the state was an extension of capital and power, and how deeply it subverted the individual, the union, any attempt for everyday humans to make any claim to life liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
We face today not quite such amassed power, but a completely warped infosphere where these bespoke realities create lifestyle beliefs where people are on board with incredible trains of lies crafting false enemies, supporting the opposite of the signalling they claim. Its different than dark; the world today is overloaded by hell's din, by monsters of abuse, doing their worst to harm us for greed and for the possibility of undoing the good of the world.
- Schenck case (1969), overturning the incredibly domineering WW1 atmosphere of government controlled speech:
> "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Utterly unsurprised to find it was WW1 time-period constraint, as I'm reading the utterly fabulous American Midnight about how the USG built a huge surveillance network & vigilante groups to destroy labor, human-rights, socialistic causes, and anyone not signing up for an incredibly propogandized Big Business lead war.
So... Is TikTok creating incitement of illegal acts? What other clear standards might apply to curb citizens use of this medium? Keeps smellingike horseshit to me.
- It's easy to say when times are good. Government basically sort of tries & does good. But as others have pointed out, America has some ghastly data-collection-against-the-people situations in the past 100 years alone.
For example, Ralph Van Deman[1]. After being instrumental in the Philippine-American war (1899-1902)'s military intelligence division, creating some of the first (and incredibly far reaching) catalogs of potential enemies & associates & basically anyone anywhere near-by & using torture regularly to extract confessions/information, he came home to America... to start enormous files as leader of the new Military Intelligence on anti-War, labor, human rights & basically any American standing up or making any noise. Or who happened to be a couple degrees of separation away. Sending under-cover agents out to report back with unsigned reports, working under a veil of secrecy, & calling them "enemy agents" for not being happy-dumb American's & advocating voices.
Among many truly awful things, this lead to the sheriff of Bisbee gathering a vigilante posse of 2000, taking over the telephone network, and then leading the group by a car with a machine-gun mount on it (owned by the local mines of Phelps & Dodge), through Bisbee breaking into homes & pulling people out of beds at gunpoint. The strikers were told at gunpoint to get back to work, and 1186 refused & were shoved into passenger & cattle cars & hauled 180 miles under armed guard. Van Deman is far from personally responsible here, but he is an early leader of the modern world in weaponizing information against potential or related threats. You might be innocent, but if you talk to the wrong people or go to the wrong place, suddenly you're suspect, and maybe men with guns will come into your house & put you on a train out & that's that.
Creating systems that resist the impulse to corruption is necessary. "Abuse of power comes as no surprise", is one Holzer-ism. And what's safe today may not be safe tomorrow (power changes hands but records endure). And I think there is some essential need for human privacy at some level, that it's a gross & disgusting world if humans are deprived of a sense of independent identity, are too closely handled from above.
My example comes from American Midnight, which is a very very very long tale about awful things the US did just 100 years ago. It's well written and as the title says incredibly dark. A huge amount of the book touches on the power of information. We've seen other horrific examples in other states. It seems essential we have privacy, that we give people a sense that they have their own lives to live, with free choices.
- I generally agree, wholeheartedly. "We are being levelled down"[1] isn't quite the same song, but similar tune.
There is enormous profit being made, and it's always less and less shared, but to some degree I do just worry that the economy has grown uncompetitive, that we've let costs of living spiral too high & that we (& much of the world) simply consume too much. Within the nation, we need some real redistribution. And some reforms, to our way of life at large, to figure out how to make like more affordable, how to sustain ourselves with less consumption & more sustainable medium & long term approaches.
Which relates somewhat to Reich's 1997 memoir after resigning as Clinton's Secretary of Labor, Locked in the Cabinet, where-in we never actually try to improve the system. Wikipedia[2]:
> In the book, Reich criticizes the Democratic Party as "owned by" business and Washington as having two real political parties during his tenure: the "Save the Jobs" party, which wanted to maintain the status quo, and the "Let 'Em Drown" party.
This article is good, but the topics facing us are also about more than labor power; the real crisis is about making the whole system work better & more efficiently, finding our root needs & going beyond neoliberalism to serve those ends better & more systematically. But yes, labor power is also a key component, & something missing, and Powell here is actively eroding it, back to the "let em drown" path.
For sake of comprehensiveness, I was going to chime in & say "I still agree, but also note that immigration is way down," which would affect labor supply considerably. But I just did some searching around online, and from what sources I can see that include 2022 immigration statistics, it seems like immigration has more than made up for lost time.
Sort of side note, but very much meta-on-topic; I'm reading American Midnight (2022) about the suppression of labor, progressives, & anything standing in the way of capital around WW1, and it's amazing & sad. About the economic & military, & especially especially the social mobilization of a society towards war, and the grinding up of any force inconvenient towards this end.
The willingness of Americans to police, assault, vigilante, bully, spy, & shout down on anyone outside the perceived local mainstream is stunningly on display. And such a huge swarth of it was directly to the benefit of & often instigated by vast incredibly profitable industries & wealthy men. It's wild to see, 100 years latter, still such enduring & overwhelming hatred for the basic idea of a reasonable social contract, of having a decent livable society with a somewhat fair shake. Or looked at the other way: the idea that anything can get in the way of making money still seems unfathomable, impossible; the needs of the almighty buck, of the wealth-holders, still constitute a force majeure against the effort to make a nation livable & decent.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34566502
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich#Return_to_influen...
- I havent opened it yet but the book American Midnight came highly highly recommended, which covers this time period & this event.
A power hungry intolerant federal government mandating War-fervor & jingoism, suppressing all outside voices (largely liberal & progressive), clamping down on how people think & what they say. passing the Sedition Act & charging many under these wartime powers, before it's repeal.
This book supposedly makes quite the case for this being one of thr darkest times in America. Excited scared/sad to start reading it.
