Title: American Midnight
Rating: 4 Stars
After saying that I was done with World War I after finishing A Farewell to Arms, it turns out that I lied. I have at least one more book in me.
There’s a pretty good chance that historians are going to look back at 2017 through 2021 and see it as a toxic time for our country. Blocking immigration from ‘shit hole’ countries, blocking immigration that was, behind the tissue of disingenuousness, based on religion, talking about ‘migrant caravans’ like they were some mongrel horde preparing to invade our country, and having a policy of heartlessly separating immigrant children from their parents are just a few of the lowlights that will be condemned in the decades to come.
Weirdly enough, nearly the exact same thing happened exactly a century ago. In fact, the period from 1917 through 1921 was even more extreme in its persecution of immigrants. This is in addition to the usual horrendous acts of violence perpetuated upon the American Black population. All of this is the subject of American Midnight, by Adam Hochschild.
Although there had been a long running series of conflicts between the forces of labor/socialism and US business/US government for decades, it all came to a head in the build up to and during the US involvement in World War I.
This seems odd to me. I’ve written before about how confused I am by the actual causes of WWI. If anything, the US involvement is even more confusing.
Sure, I get the basic causes. There’s the Zimmerman telegram (decrypted and gleefully shared by British intelligence) where the German ambassador to Mexico promised to restore Mexico’s losses from the Mexican American War if Mexico joined in on their side. Since Mexico didn’t ally with Germany (and I’ve seen nothing that would tell me that they even semi-seriously contemplated it) and given Mexico’s chances in a war with the US, the whole telegram seems absurd.
There was the sinking of the Lusitania with American civilians aboard. Tragic it was, but it has been determined that Lusitania was also shipping military supplies, which makes it a legitimate target. Germany had announced unlimited U-boat attacks on even neutral ships. That wasn’t great, but the fact is that the US was shipping material to the Allied Powers to help their war effort, the British navy was enforcing a severe embargo on the Central Powers, and once convoys were established, the U-boat threat was severely diminished anyway.
Looking at from a purely financial perspective, the Allied Powers were in serious debt to the US, both through the purchase of bonds as well as loans for supplies. If the Allied Powers were to lose the war, it would have a significant impact upon financiers and lenders. True enough, but does the actual person on the street care whether some Wall Street banker loses their shirt?
On the other hand, the US is a nation of immigrants. This includes tons of people from Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and of course, England. You’d think that with such a hodge-podge of ethnicities spanning all parties in the conflict, that the US would want to stay out.
Be that as it may, once President Woodrow Wilson declared war on the Central Powers, war fever broke out all over the US. The military was deluged with recruits. Local governments outlawed speaking German in public. Companies with German sounding names changed them. German streets were renamed.
It wasn’t just Germans. With the Bolshevik takeover of Russia; socialists, communists, or even just your every day Eastern European immigrant suddenly became targets. Since Americans associated socialism with Jewish people, they also came under attack.
This was not just happening at an ad hoc local level. The federal government, through the US Postal Service, the Department of Justice, and especially the Bureau of Investigation (led by the then 24 year old J Edgar Hoover), all conspired to strip away rights from immigrants and/or suspected socialists. This included rounding them up on bogus charges and then trying to get them deported to Russia.
If you were wondering how the Postal Service got into the act, in those days papers were distributed through the mail. From his perch atop the organization, the Post Master General was able to arbitrarily and unilaterally decide which newspapers were somehow not in the best interest of the US. Any paper that breathed a word of socialism or even the mildest criticism of the war or, for that matter, of the Postal Service itself, found itself banned in the mail. For any kind of paper that boasted a reach beyond its local municipality, it was a death knell. In so doing, many small rural papers were shuttered.
Private organizations got into the act. The American Protective League, which I must reinforce had no legal standing, went around with their own issued badges and investigated and arrested people. They were very interested in finding draft shirkers. If you were a draft age man and one of them collared you and you didn’t have your draft registration card, they’d haul you off to some mass site of incarceration. Hopefully, at some point some relative could find you and provide the necessary evidence to procure your release. The league had at least the tacit approval of the federal government.
In 1919, Mitchell Palmer became the Attorney General. Originally thought to be progressive due to his previous actions and Quaker heritage (apparently he still spoke in Thee and Thou), all of that changed when his home was bombed one night. This unleashed something inside of him. This led to the so-called Palmer raids (which should probably have been called Hoover raids since J Edgar was actually the one leading them) that really went after Italians, Eastern European immigrants, and supposed socialists/communists/anarchists.
Considering the fact that Ellis Island was the portal that welcomed millions of immigrants to the US, it is the height of irony that during this time Ellis Island was used as a prison to incarcerate immigrants. It was actually from here that Emma Goldman was deported from the US to Russia.
Under the subject of ships passing in the night, the book lists several chance encounters between historically significant people that I was not aware of. As Emma Goldman was being deported, she had a quick conversation with J Edgar Hoover. Even weirder, the great socialist and union leader, Eugene Debs, was finally released from prison. Immediately after his release, he went to Washington DC and had a meeting with President Warren Harding. Can you imagine a President today meeting a radical union leader days after having they had been released from prison?
As I said above, immigrants weren’t the only target. This was also a time of change for Black Americans. First of all, this was during the time of The Great Migration, when millions of Black people moved from the South to Northern cities to escape Southern racism and enjoy better economic opportunities. Southerners were unhappy to be losing their trapped low wage workers while Northerners were unhappy with wage competition and the mass influx of people that did not look like them. At the same time, Black soldiers, having fought bravely during WWI, expected to come back to a country that would recognize and reward their duty to their country. In response, lynchings (occasionally with the victim still wearing his military uniform), ‘race riots’ (more appropriately named white riots), and other acts of brutality came to the forefront.
Eventually, the fire of this tumult died down. Even so, ramifications from this time did carry forward. One of the results of this was an immigration law that throttled immigration from many countries for forty years.
It’s bizarre to me that so much of this was triggered by a war that no rational person could claim was in service to US vital interests.
Once again, as I read US history, I’m reminded of the line from the old Talking Head song: “Same as it ever was”.
dorkenstein 