American Midnight by Adam Hochschild

This was a painful book to read because it demonstrates quite clearly that the MAGA faction is merely rearing its ugly head again rather than created out of whole cloth--which of course is not really news so much as a reminder, but when it happened 100 years ago it was far worse than what we have endured to date. What’s normal in our past is the American vulnerability to mythical enemies, demagogues and ignoramuses. These dangerous forces abounded in the years Hochschild describes, from 1917 to 1921. World War I is what defined the era. For the European powers involved in that killing spree, the war began in 1914, but an isolationist America remained aloof until April 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson finally declared war on Germany and its allies. Seventeen months later, after millions of American doughboys had taken up arms in Europe and 117,000 were killed, the Germans surrendered. The nation’s delayed entry to the war stimulated intrigue and violence in the United States that set Americans sympathetic to Germany and those sympathetic to our traditional allies in Britain and France at odds. Wilson at first sought to stand apart from the propagandizing on both sides, and he waged a 1916 reelection campaign on the ultimately misleading slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” In 1917, when the Germans began indiscriminate submarine warfare in the Atlantic that sank American ships, Wilson went all in for war. Wilson is the bad guy in this tale. He is also one of the most complex, contradictory figures in American history. Raised in Augusta, Ga., by a family that supported the Confederacy, Wilson clung to a Southern segregationist’s ugly racial views all his life. The first and last holder of a PhD to occupy the White House, he was the president of Princeton University before becoming governor of New Jersey in 1911. As governor and then as president (elected in 1912), he was a progressive reformer on economic issues and an internationalist. But once he led America into war, he became a dedicated jingoist He signed the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918, two laws that allowed restrictions on freedom of speech that were draconian by today’s standards. Once America joined the war effort, Wilson had no apparent qualms about imprisoning dissident Americans, including the Socialist Party candidate who had run against him for president in 1912 and won 6 percent of the vote, Eugene V. Debs. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a speech in 1918 that the Wilson administration interpreted as discouraging participation in the war. The list of his shortcomings goes on and on, but suffice it to say that Debs could run for president from jail, and so could another past president.