A story worth telling, and in American Midnight, the historian Adam Hochschild...recounts it with verve and insight ... This is, to be sure, history with a purpose, not a search for a 'usable history' that seeks a past that provides comfort and moral elevation for the present. The purpose here is prevention ... In examining this forgotten hiccough in the country’s history, we encounter several unforgettable figures who come to life on these pages ... This book is, above all, a chronicle of dissent in a democracy, setting forth in vivid languages the abuses and extremes that characterized the period during and shortly after the great crusade ... Much of what Hochschild examines in this volume will be news to his readers. It is, ultimately, news we all can use.
Masterly ... Something of a specialist in the annals of atrocity, Hochschild spares no detail in American Midnight ... Hochschild in American Midnight stages a morality tale. There is an extensive cast of villains ... Hochschild includes every twist and turn ... Hochschild’s sharp portraits and vignettes make for poignant reading, but at times skirt fuller historical understanding. We hear about newspapers and magazines being shut down, but little about what was being argued in them ... Hochschild attributes much of the failure of American socialists to expand their ranks to the racism and xenophobia that bedeviled the white working class. But there were also significant problems of organization in the American labor movement.
Hochschild compiles ample research and evidence to remind readers of a shameful chapter in U.S. history that has echoes in many conflicts since ... Hochschild realizes that the tragedy comes with a dash of absurdity, even comedy ... American Midnight is a potent reminder of what happens when open discourse is systemically punished.
A fine book about a grim period a century ago that has largely disappeared from national memory ... Hochschild... adeptly juggles multiple narrative threads. His tale does include an unexpected happy ending that might encourage contemporary American readers.
... an enraging, gruesome, and depressingly timely story about the fragility of American democracy, as both institution and concept ... And, as the book lays out in stark and relentless detail, there was repression ... The story of uprising and repression that American Midnight tells is overwhelmingly a story of men: of industrial workers, politicians, secret agents, soldiers, vigilantes, protesters, and prisoners. Hochschild’s goal, it seems, is to emphasize how far the anti-Red crusade was an expression of what we might now call toxic masculinity, the urge to assert racial and gender dominance by those who felt their authority and virility fading...The appeal of war, with its rigid reinforcing of the gender binary, is therefore obvious...It’s also somewhat reductive. Women had, after all, been openly agitating for their rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. Why did their demands seem so threatening in this moment? ... without a fuller picture of the role of women in these years, the argument about the fundamental misogyny of the moment feels less convincing ... Most strikingly, Hochschild does not discuss the way the government treated suffrage leader Alice Paul and members of the National Woman’s Party between 1917 and 1920, an important illustration of how a crackdown on public protest could quickly morph into a wholesale violation of Americans’ constitutional rights.
[Hochschild's] talent for characterization and storytelling serves him here in portraits of little-known figures ... Hochschild’s books are concerned with social justice, and he doesn’t paint in moral shades of gray. Wilson was the most complex and enigmatic of presidents—idealistic and harsh, cold and passionate, liberal and bigoted, arrogant and self-doubting. Here he comes across as merely authoritarian ... Wilson, thus flattened, drains the story of its tragic irony and some of its more interesting implications.
[Hochschild's] prose is sparkling and accessible, free from academic jargon. In particular, he has a good ear for the pungent quote, examples of which are sprinkled throughout the book ... Hochschild is not an academic historian, and his text includes some inaccuracies, as well as failures to fully flesh out an argument.
During the United States’ current tumultuous times, it is important to remember and revisit the forgotten injustices of the previous century. Hochschild succinctly does so here.
Hochschild deftly weaves the skeins of the many distressing historical facts he has mined, creating a portrait of the US that may awaken many to the need for reexamination of basic values.
The book is exceptionally well written, impeccably organized, and filled with colorful, fully developed historical characters. A riveting, resonant account of the fragility of freedom in one of many shameful periods in U.S. history.
Expert and eye-opening ... Meticulously researched, fluidly written, and frequently enraging, this is a timely reminder of the 'vigilant respect for civil rights and Constitutional safeguards' needed to protect democracy and forestall authoritarianism.
