American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

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By Adam Hochschild
Mariner Books, 2023
Reviewed by Jim Gallen

American Midnight is the tale of an era during and in the wake of the Great War in which popular sentiment and law focused on anyone deemed disloyal, un-American, or just different. It was a time in which labor unrest and war combined to foment a perfect storm that swept away rights normally accepted as the American birthright. The precipitating force that brought underlying tensions to the surface was American involvement in the Great War. Led by a president, Woodrow Wilson, who saw dissent as treason, Americans united to purge disloyalty from the nation.

Guilt was established by association. Membership in the Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies,” was sufficient to draw investigation, prosecution, and imprisonment. German names established disloyalty and subjected their holders to vigilante violence. Unwillingness to purchase Liberty Bonds merited social ostracisation and worse. In St. Louis, their purchase was offered as satisfaction for speeding tickets.

Suppression of dissent was enforced by patriotic individuals, quasi-official investigators, and direct government action. In Collinsville, Illinois, a row erupted between 30-year-old German native Robert Prager, either because he was preaching socialism or was a company spy, it was not clear which. Though having been rejected by the U.S. Navy due to a glass eye, Prager was seized by a group of miners from his home, stripped to his underwear, and forced him to walk barefoot down the street draped in an American flag. After being rescued by a policeman, police stepped aside while a larger mob removed him and hung him from a hackberry tree.  Commentary in the Washington Post observed, “In spite of such excesses as lynchings, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior part of the country.”

The American Protective League, APL, “Organized with Approval and Operating under Direction of the United States Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation,” enabled its members unable to go to France to fight the “enemy” domestically. To business leaders it provided forces to fight organized labor. Among APL’s accomplishments were getting 50 Wobblies fired from military plants in Philadelphia and Wobbly farm workers purged from the wheat fields of South Dakota, inspiring a Justice Department official to hail the South Dakota APL as “The Ku Klux Klan of the Prairies."

Postmaster General, Albert S. Burleson

Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson excluded from the mail publications “calculated to…cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny…or otherwise embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war.” Among indiscretions deemed worthy of banishment were saying “that the Government is controlled by Wall Street or munition manufactures, or any other special interest” to “attacking improperly our allies.”

Wisconsin Senator Robert M. Lafollette’s opposition to the war was investigated by the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections to determine whether he deserved expulsion.  Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who had collected over six million votes in 1912 and whose party elected over one thousand state and local officials, was a target due to his opposition to the war. In a June 1918 speech Debs stated the following: “They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourself be slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.” That provided the evidence for indictment and conviction under the Espionage Act. His ten-year sentence kept him imprisoned until President Harding commuted his sentence to time served in December 1921.

American Midnight chronicles a time in our history during which American rights melted under the pressure of martial fervor. I recommend it to Roads readers seeking to look beyond the smoke and the sound of the guns for other battlegrounds in which the Great War was waged and the shadow it cast Over Here.

Jim Gallen