Summary of American Midnight By Adam Hochschild: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of American Midnight By Adam Hochschild: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

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Adam Hochschild's InAmerican Midnight is a "masterly" reassessment of the period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties. Selected as one of the most anticipated books of Fall 2022 by the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215021842

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Summary of American Midnight By Adam Hochschild: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

No Ordinary Times

Summary Part I

Summary Part II

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Summary of American Midnight

By

Adam Hochschild

The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

––––––––

Willie M. Joseph

NOTE TO READERS

This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis designed to enrich your reading experience.

DISCLAIMER

The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

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No Ordinary Times

One had not lost a workday in ten months; another was the father of ten children and owned a mortgage-free home. Judge found them all guilty and fined them $100 apiece (the equivalent of some $2,000 a hundred years later). From 1917 to 1921 is a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans, and far more that is not marked by commemorative plaques, museum exhibits, or Ken Burns documentaries. Never was this raw underside of U.S. life more revealingly on display than from 1917-21. During those four years more than 450 people were imprisoned for a year or more by the federal government.

The federal government also attacked the press, both during and well after the First World War. They were tied to a tree and whipped with heavy rope soaked in saltwater and a blacksnake. According to one eyewitness, the lynching was done with a long leather whip weighted with shot. His father was horrified to learn of the deaths of his two beloved male cousins after the war. The American Defense Society declared that speaking German resembles the murder of a million helpless old men, unarmed men, women and children.

A Minnesota pastor was tarred and feathered because people overheard him praying in German with a dying woman. My father tried desperately to get into the army, hoping that a uniform could protect him and his family. Greene: Until 1917, U.S. surveillance in this country had been almost entirely the work of private detectives. Between 1917 and 1921 there was also, to be sure, some violence from the left. But the greatest ferocity by far came from federal and state governments.

The paranoia ignited by the First World War empowered government spying and infiltrating. Such surveillance remains part of American life to this day. Two men led the mob that tarred and feathered those Wobblies. One had joined the Ku Klux Klan and built a mansion modeled on Robert E. Lee's home. This is a tale of Americans who fought for justice and defied bigotry during a dark period in American history.

Summary Part I

Tears of Joy

Woodrow Wilson played golf on the morning of April 2, 1917. He was trying to clear his mind before a speech he was to give that evening. His companion on the course was his second wife, Edith.