American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis – A Gripping Historical Account of 20th Century America

Adam Hochschild examines the period between America's entry into World War I and the early 1920s, when the nation faced threats to its democratic foundations from war, pandemic, and violence tied to conflicts over race, immigration, and labor rights. During this era, mobs burned Black churches, courts imprisoned thousands for their speech, vigilantes conducted mass arrests, and approximately seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and shut down. The government frequently intensified rather than restrained these abuses. The period was marked by lynchings, censorship, and brutal treatment of conscientious objectors in military prisons. Currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and disregard for the rule of law from this time extended through subsequent decades into the present. The book features figures including Woodrow Wilson, antiwar advocates Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman, labor leader Eugene Debs, J. Edgar Hoover, and an undercover agent working for Hoover who was also a leftwing activist. Hochschild documents both the repression of this four-year period and the Americans who resisted it, connecting their struggles to contemporary issues.