Ultimately, writes the author, “a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home.” Labor leaders, socialists, and anti-war activists such as Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, along with government officials such as Sen. Woodrow Wilson presided over the entire toxic political and social landscape. Among numerous others, those who benefitted most politically were J. From the country’s entry into World War I until Warren Harding became president, the federal government and law enforcement agencies joined with the civilian-staffed American Protective League and union-busting industrialists to censor newspapers and magazines fabricate communist conspiracies surveil and imprison conscientious objectors and labor leaders (particularly the Wobblies) harass socialists, German immigrants, pacifists, and Jews deport foreigners without due process and stand aside as police and vigilantes killed labor activists and destroyed Black communities and formed lynch mobs. “Never was raw underside of our national life more revealingly on display.” Those years, he writes, were rife with “the toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law have long flowed through American life”-and clearly still do today. It gave the postmaster general the power to declare a publication un-mailable.A history of the early-20th-century assault on civil rights and those the federal government deemed un-American.įor Hochschild-the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among many other honors-one of America’s darkest periods was between 19. This happened under the Espionage Act, which was passed soon after the US entered the war.

This was before radio, before TV, before the internet, so print was the way you reached people. The US had severe press censorship for four years and forced some 75 newspapers and magazines to cease publishing. Trump was always railing against the media, “the press is the enemy of the people.” But Woodrow Wilson, who was president of the United States in this period, did one better he shut them down. For one thing, there was something Trump would have liked to do, but wasn’t able: to shut up dissenting media. It was reflected in several ways that have been unparalleled by anything since then, including even the nasty stuff that happened under Trump.

First, the US entering the war, then the Russian Revolution, set off this period of hysteria in the United States. That was before the January 6th insurrection, which I think maybe puts the Trump hysteria a little bit ahead.ĪDAM HOCHSCHILD: No, I think I would still award the prize for hysteria and violence to the 1917 to ’21 period. METTA SPENCER: I was really surprised couple of years ago when in a conversation you said that that period was worse than the Trump period.

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