America Has Had It Worse

You could be forgiven for thinking that we live in uniquely horrible times. Four 21st-century horsemen haunt us—a baking planet, the next pandemic, technological singularity, and nuclear war. In the immediate present, Russia has declared war on the West, liberal democracy is weakening around the world, and the United States, at once stagnant and berserk, is suffering possibly irreversible decline, while Americans stare at the return to power of a would-be dictator. In rich countries the terrors are mostly anticipatory, and they coexist with unprecedented comforts. Waiting for the end of the world while ordering dinner on Seamless is its own kind of slow-motion Armageddon.

One value of reading history at a moment like this is to be reminded of the many ways that the past was actually worse—that progress is possible. Adam Hochschild’s is a narrative history of the repression that accompanied the United States’ entry into World War I. The similarities to our own time are obvious enough that Hochschild doesn’t have to belabor them: nativism, racial backlash, deterioration of the rule of law,