Despite the booming American economy and a thriving modern culture that would soon sweep the globe, Wilson found that he had taken control of the equivalent of a creaking galleon in an age of submarine warfare. The state’s financial coffers were heavily reliant on excise and customs revenues. Constitution - constrained the executive branch, requiring two-thirds of the Senate to ratify foreign treaties. In 1917, as Hochschild recounts, the U.S.

Despite prompt invasions of Mexico and Haiti during Wilson’s first term, the country was hardly prepared for a major war. He wanted to transform moth-eaten American institutions into a sleek administrative state. When Wilson became president in 1913, he was hailed as a progressive visionary. “He is where he belongs,” Hochschild quotes The New York Times declaring of the imprisoned Debs. But only Wilson went the distance: He jailed his charismatic Socialist opponent, the 63-year-old Eugene Debs, for opposing America’s descent into the carnage of the First World War, with the liberal press in lock step.

It may be recalled how, when Donald Trump was a presidential candidate in 2016, his followers ignited a media storm when they threatened to lock up his challenger. President Woodrow Wilson’s terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.Īs Hochschild vividly details, the Wilson administration and its allies pioneered the police raids, surveillance operations, internment camps, strikebreaking and legal chicanery that would become part of the repertoire of the American state for decades to come. The United States during that time saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression rarely rivaled in its history. By some measures - and certainly in many quarters of the American left - the years 1917-21 have a special place in infamy. AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, by Adam HochschildĪt a time when professional doom-mongering about democracy has become one of the more inflationary sectors of the American economy, it is tonic to be reminded by Adam Hochschild’s masterly new book, “American Midnight,” that there are other contenders than the period beginning in 2016 for the distinction of Darkest Years of the Republic.

American Midnight by Adam Hochschild