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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
pj_wehry:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with the He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of California, Berkeley. He's the author of 11 books, including King Leopold's Ghost, Spain in Our Hearts, Americans in the Spanish Civil War, and his latest book, which we'll be talking about today, American Midnight, The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracies for a Gotten Crisis. Mr. Hochschild, wonderful to have you today.
adam_hochschild:
Good to be with you, DJ.
pj_wehry:
And tell me a little bit why this book, what got you into, in 1917 to 1921.
adam_hochschild:
Well, I love to write about history, and I love to find parts of history that seem to have some sort of echo or resonance for the present. This book was written mostly during the Trump administration, and I wanted to write about this time because it was really the Trumpiest time in American history
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
adam_hochschild:
before Trump. Four years that were filled with politicians thundering against immigrants and refugees, to sing a crackdown on the left. If the word woke had been invented at that point, they would have been screaming about woke. And all kinds of racial tensions. There just seemed to be a lot of stuff going on in those four years that echoed some of the same conflicts we have in America today.
pj_wehry:
That's really interesting to me. I see that your background is really journalism. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship you see between history and journalism?
adam_hochschild:
These days mostly write history, but I talk about myself as practicing history without a license because
pj_wehry:
Ha ha.
adam_hochschild:
I never went to graduate school. My early experience was in journalism. I was a daily newspaper reporter for several years, then a magazine editor and writer for several years, actually for about ten years. Then I turned to mostly writing history, but I still put on my journalist hat when I have a chance to meet somebody interesting. interesting, follow them around, write a profile for a magazine, or go somewhere interesting and report on what's going on. And I have done magazine reporting that's been published from five different continents. But I love best of all, I think, digging into a piece of history. Because if it's back a ways, you can at least have the illusion that you can understand the basics of what was going on. Something you can't always feel about. today's world which changes so rapidly.
pj_wehry:
I love that phrase, history without a license. What do you think history is? Or how do you think of it in your mind when you attempt to do it?
adam_hochschild:
Well, I think it's trying to understand the people who came before us, who were our ancestors in a national sense, in an international sense, and I love to find parallels, as I said, to things going on today that were way back in time. For example, one book I did was about the anti-slavery movement in the British Empire, where nearly 250 years ago, invented every basic tool of political campaigning that we use today. A logo for a political organization. A pamphleteering, speech making on street corners and other places. The consumer boycott.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
All kinds of techniques which we still use today. And it was a thrill to discover these being used in 1880s. 80s and 1890s London. So I like to see those kinds of parallels.
pj_wehry:
And you've said this a couple of times. When you talk about parallels, how do you find those? And what makes a parallel kind of a salient or important to you when you're looking through history? And you're like, that's something that we need for today.
adam_hochschild:
Well, for example, in the period that I wrote about in American midnight, roughly 100 years ago in this country, one of the parallels I see is this. The United States has always had recurrent scares about immigrants. And today, of course, it's folks on the right who profess to be deeply upset about an invasion coming across our southern border. It's people, you know, coming into this country in large numbers from Latin America. that they're worried about. 100, 110 years ago, there was not much immigration from Latin America. What people were worried about then was immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. In other words, Italians, Poles, and Jews. These were the people that demagogues railed against. And I think this country has always had a sort of politics where people whose ancestors have been here for two or three generations. get upset about the newcomers
pj_wehry:
Hehehehe
adam_hochschild:
and think that there's something un-American about them and that they're bringing something strange and alien and foreign into this country. So I was interested to see how this anti-immigrant stuff played out a hundred years ago. It didn't play out very well because it culminated and I should just say, you know, it was so strong that four leading figures running for both the Republican and Democratic nominations for president in the 1920 presidential elections, campaigned on promises of mass deportations. None of them happened to win, but the ball was already rolling in Congress and the period culminated in 1924 with the very restrictive the door on immigrants coming out of this country for the next 41 years. That was the act that kept out hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees from the Holocaust who would have otherwise liked to come to the United States.
pj_wehry:
Is that the that act? Is that the one written by Albert Johnson?
adam_hochschild:
That's right, and Albert Johnson is one of the characters in my book, whom I follow. I like to try to bring a piece of history alive by finding eight or ten people whose lives weave through it and interact with each other, and Albert Johnson, a very demagogic congressman from Washington State, is one of those people who sort of winds through this story.
pj_wehry:
And I think what you're often trying to do too is to show, you pick people who represent certain movements so that people have that like personal interest. And that's part of what makes your books so readable. And let me say that it's immensely enjoyable to read your writing, not a slam on other historians, some very academic historians, maybe people with a license who I read them and I have a hard time not falling asleep. But you do a great
adam_hochschild:
Me too.
pj_wehry:
job
adam_hochschild:
Me
pj_wehry:
of.
adam_hochschild:
too.
pj_wehry:
But you do a great job of making it enjoyable, but also tying it to the bigger movements of the of the day. I think you know maybe the first thing and I think it's kind of what you start with. You know you mentioned the wobblies at the beginning. And I love that you even mentioned like nobody knows why they were called the wobblies. But then you go on to talk about Woodrow Wilson and the incredible tension in his presence between this man who is in many ways seen as an icon for progressivism and is thoroughly entrenched in some of the worst attitudes and the most shameful things that we look back in our American history.
adam_hochschild:
Yeah, I like to find people at the political extremes. Woodrow Wilson was president during that period. This book roughly spans his second term in office. The Wobblies, the industrial workers of the world, was the country's most militant labor union. And the most colorful, they had the best music. They had wonderful songs. They designed the best posters. And they had a very sort of open, hard-ed approach to labor union organizing where everybody was welcome, men and
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
women, black and white, immigrant and native born. And that was not true of most other labor unions. Were they effective as a union? Not wildly, but they were greatly
pj_wehry:
you
adam_hochschild:
feared by the government. And in part of the political repression that characterized this period, they were essentially United States government in the fall of 1917 in this time of hysteria kicked off by American entry into World War I in April of 1917 and heightened by in later months by the hysteria over the Russian Revolution and a fear that it might spread to the United States. The Wobblies were one of the chief victims. Hundreds of thousands of them were rounded up and put trials, more than a hundred in Chicago, which in the trial that was and remains the largest civilian criminal trial in American history.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
By the time the trial ended after four months, there were only about 98 of them still on trial. They were charged with four counts, which, you know, multiply four times 98 and you have nearly 400 separate verdicts that the jury supposedly The jury deliberated for less than an hour and found everybody guilty on all counts. And the judge passed out a total of 807 years of prison time.
pj_wehry:
Wow. Yeah, you know, even as you mentioned this time and kind of how you, you know, you started with the wobblies and you also mentioned your own personal history, you know, going back with your parents to, I thought it was really interesting that your mother would have been at least loosely tied with the the Wilson's,
adam_hochschild:
That's right.
pj_wehry:
right?
adam_hochschild:
My mother's father, my maternal grandfather was a professor at Princeton University and a lifelong friend of Woodrow Wilson. He'd actually been Wilson's professor in my graduate school when Wilson went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins. And then Wilson himself was president of Princeton University for a decade and my grandfather was a professor there. And when he was elected president in the 1912 election, my grandfather took his three daughters over to Wilson's house to congratulate him. So for my mother, he was a familiar figure on the streets of Princeton. My father had a quite different relationship to that period because he was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany. My mother was Anglo-Saxon. My father was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany, and they spoke German at home. But when the hysteria ticked off by the U.S. entering the war began, there was a ferocious things German. Some states banned speaking German in public or on the telephone. Schools burned German books. There were literally dozens of bonfires of German books. You know newspapers attacked German culture so my grandfather and his family were terrified to speak German on the street. They had to do it just around the family dinner table. So from my two parents I got sort of very memories
pj_wehry:
Ha!
adam_hochschild:
of that period.
pj_wehry:
I would say so. And one thing I appreciate too that you draw on, and it's just, I don't know why this is, and maybe this is just me personally, but it seems like there's this huge gap around the, like, the year 1900, where it's like, you have the Civil War, and then you have World War I, and they seem like two very distinct periods. But one of the things I really appreciate that you did is you tied not only those histories together, but you showed the motivations for some of the decisions that were made. based in the Civil War, based in figures who had lived through, you know, you talk about the dismay they had watching President Jefferson set right, being marched down the streets of Atlanta.
adam_hochschild:
Jefferson Davis, you're
pj_wehry:
Jefferson
adam_hochschild:
thinking of,
pj_wehry:
Davis.
adam_hochschild:
the
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
adam_hochschild:
president of the Confederacy, yeah,
pj_wehry:
Yes.
adam_hochschild:
who was the gun prisoner at the end of the war, yeah. Yeah. No, those stresses were very much a part of this period that I wrote about in American Midnight. I think you have to look at the big picture in history, which was basically the Union won the Civil War in 1865. And then over the next 40 or 50 years, the Confederacy won the Civil War very harsh Jim Crow laws imposed a regime of systematic lynching where there was often one lynching a week
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
somewhere in the south in order to keep black people in what white Southerners felt was their place. This was very much a part of the United States in those years. One result of it was around 1910 the Great flee the South to get away from that terror, to find places where they had a better chance in life than in the highly segregated South. They began moving to the cities of the Midwest and the North and even the far West, California. And that was something going on during this period. But the period I zeroed in on an American midnight was one of tremendous racial tension.
pj_wehry:
Mm.
adam_hochschild:
One of the things that exacerbated that, several things exacerbated that, was the that. One was that many unions would not take black members. So when these guys arrived in the north, coming from the south, desperately looking for work, the Steel Workers Union or whatever would not let them in, that meant that they could easily be recruited as strike breakers by companies
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
trying to break strikes. So that made use of existing racial tension and exacerbated bad feelings between blacks and whites in this period. Then when World War I happened, some four million American men were drafted into the armed forces. In 1919, almost all four million of them were released from military service, came home to a country where there were very few jobs because the factories that had been making tanks and ships We're no longer doing so. So black veterans and white veterans were competing for scarce jobs and in that year 1919 we had some of the worst racial violence this country has ever seen really the worst since the end of slavery
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
Nobody knows the exact death toll. It's believed to be in the high hundreds the reason we don't know it exactly is that the greatest part of the violence took place in a town called Elaine, Arkansas where federal militia and local vigilantes violently suppressed an attempt by black sharecroppers to organize a union and there were hundreds of victims but their bodies were simply tossed into the Mississippi River and floated downstream and we don't know exactly how many there were.
pj_wehry:
Hmm. And I think that's, I just want to dwell on the weight of what you just said, right? Like, part of the value of what you're doing with these parallels is not that history repeats, but that it rhymes, that old proverb, and help us to not relive the mistakes of the past. It's a very, our past is unfortunately, marred by several, not several, many stories like that. As we talked about, you know, kind of drawing together what you've talked about with racial tensions and even Woodrow Wilson. It's a little bit before your book, but I used to teach American history and one of the things I did was show a good chunk of birth of a nation
adam_hochschild:
Yeah. Yeah.
pj_wehry:
to my students to help them understand and I think it was a You know as we talked about the value art has for culture making we see the very first blockbuster and and the first film shown at the White House by Woodrow Wilson, or at least two Woodrow Wilson, was about the valor and bravery, and I use the air quotes there, for the of the Ku Klux Klan and rescuing
adam_hochschild:
That's right.
pj_wehry:
the South. And so, and I think that even as we look at that, you know, you talk a little bit about general Albert Burleson. Um, and you've mentioned a little bit about propaganda and censoring. Uh, can you talk a little bit about that and about, um, the mechanisms that were being put in place to, yeah, you talked about your, your own mother not knowing about a lot of this stuff because
adam_hochschild:
for
pj_wehry:
of the blanket that was being
adam_hochschild:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
put down.
adam_hochschild:
Now, this was a time of great censorship. And as I said, the two things that really kicked us off were the hysteria that accompanied American entry into the First World War, April 1917, and then some months later, the Russian Revolution and people's hysteria that that might spread to the United States. So how was this reflected? One way was in censorship. Albert Burleson, whom you mentioned, of Texas congressmen who had been made postmaster general. And the chief instrument of repression during these years was a law called the Espionage Act, an amended version of which is still in effect. And that Espionage Act gave to the postmaster general the power to declare a publication unmailable, which meant that the many, many hundreds, if not thousands of publications that depended on the US mail their subscribers, he could say simply, no, you can't mail it. So, weeklies, monthlies, journals of opinion, the great bulk of the country's socialist press, the great bulk of the country's foreign language press, depended on the US mail. Burleson loved being chief censor, and he used that power to essentially put some 75 newspapers and magazines out of business in these years. Even though supposedly because of the war and the importance of, you know, not, uh, secrets and unpatriotic material in the newspapers, he happily continued censoring for two and a half years after the war ended, right up until the last day of the Wilson administration. So that was one way in which, you know, dialogue discussion of the important issues was suppressed. The government was terrified to let people who opposed the war, and there were many, speak out. Another way sending them to jail.
pj_wehry:
Mm-hmm.
adam_hochschild:
During those four years, 1917 and 1921, roughly a thousand Americans were sent to jail for a year or more and a much larger number for shorter periods of time solely for things that they wrote or said. That's something that I think has never had never happened before in our history on that scale and happily so far anyway has not happened since then. But you know these political prisoners, and I think you have to call them that, included all sorts of people. For example, another parallel today, you know, in 2016 Donald Trump's followers chanted, Locker up, Locker up, Locker up about Hillary Clinton. Well, in 1918 Woodrow Wilson did lock up somebody who'd run against him for president. Eugene Dibbs, the number of who had won 6% of the popular vote in the 1912 election. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
for speaking out against American participation in World War I. As it happened, the judge who sentenced him was the former law partner of Wilson's Secretary of War and Demps was still in jail. Such was the degree of repression in this period. He was still in jail in November of 1920. more than two years after the war ended when he received 900,000 votes on the socialist ticket running for president from his jail cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
pj_wehry:
Just to help me understand, when you talk about those 75 newspapers and magazines, are there any that stick out to you as especially important that were shut down? I mean, obviously, shutting down newspapers in general is not a good thing, but were there some that you were like they were kind of crucial?
adam_hochschild:
Yeah. Yeah. The I mean, there are a number of cases you could point to. One of the first newspapers to be shut down, if not the very first, it may have been actually the very first, was a newspaper, a socialist weekly published in Halletsville, Texas called The Rebel. Why did Postmaster General Burleson want to shut them down? Because this very paper had exposed in the preceding several years repeatedly had done articles about Burleson's abuse of laborers on land that he owned. He had tenant farmers living on land that his wife had inherited. He evicted them and replaced them by Mexican American people who would make a better deal with for sharecropping, better deal for his purpose. pushed the Mexicans off and replaced them with convict labor hired from the Texas prison system. You know, guys working in striped uniforms and being whipped when they didn't work hard enough. So this newspaper had exposed him and he shut it down as a result once he had the power to do so. Probably the most famous case of censorship that he participated in was closing down a newspaper. called The Masses, which was monthly by far the liveliest general interest magazine in the country at that point. It was left-leaning but not doctrinaire. It published many of the best writers of the day, the young Walter Lippmann, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sherwood
pj_wehry:
Wow.
adam_hochschild:
Anderson, John Reed. It was very much a precursor of The New Yorker with a mixture of fiction, reportage, poetry, and and it pioneered the kind of cartoon for which the New Yorker later became famous, where you have one line of dialogue as the caption. Well, this magazine, The Masses, was very much opposed to American participation in the war, carried a lot of reporting to that effect, and, you know, several months after the U.S. entered the war, Brelsen shut it down. One of the cartoons that attracted his rage was one that showed the Liberty Bell
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
So the magazine was in effect closed. August 1917, the editors were put on trial. Actually, there was a hung jury. They had to be a second trial. But the writer, John Reed, was so eloquent that he was able to convince the jury not to convict them. So the editors of that publication never did go to jail. But the editors of a number of others did.
pj_wehry:
We talked a little bit about the shutting down, the closing off, that censorship part. Can you talk to us a little bit about the propaganda machine, the work that was done to, you know, we closed off the wrong opinions and we forced
adam_hochschild:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
the right opinions?
adam_hochschild:
That was a big part of it. The US maintained during the war the largest propaganda operation in its history. It was something called the Committee on Public Information. It was run by a former journalist named George Creole, an enthusiastic supporter of Wilson. Had an office just a few blocks from the White House. And they published books. They published magazines. They published an encyclopedia. about the war, they provided newspapers with feature stories which newspapers were usually glad to print because they weren't allowed to have embedded correspondence at the front lines, and this was the only war news they could get very often. They deployed speakers around the country, a core of people known informally as the four-minute men. They were all men. There were And they had pre-prepared speeches of four minutes each, and they would give them at Rotary clubs, Kiwanis clubs, and above all in movie theaters, where in the days of, excuse me, just begin again, in the days of silent films, there was a four-minute gap when the projectionist changed the reels of a film. And the audience was accustomed to seeing advertisements, projected on the screen during that time. But instead now there would be a little notice saying you're about to hear from a representative of the US government and then one of these four-minute men would get a little canned speech about the bravery of our boys at the front and the need to support them and that kind of thing. Hey, excuse me.
pj_wehry:
Another thing that's, you know, the American machine, both censoring and propaganda was very strong. One of the ones that I found really interesting, and I was familiar with the Zimmerman Telegram. I loved your description of the British gleefully intercepting and redirecting, right? So excited to receive that telegram. But can you talk a little bit about the British and their own, you know, and they weren't the only ones, but the foreign governments in American politics through propaganda.
adam_hochschild:
Well, the British were the ones who really went to town on the score. Britain from the very beginning and French had been terribly eager to get the United States to join them in fighting Germany because especially by early 1917 or so the war was a stalemate. Both sides lost enormous numbers of men. By early 1917 there had been probably five million military deaths. and a much larger number of people wounded often very seriously. And the British mounted a huge propaganda operation directed at the United States. One of the first things they did, the moment the war broke out, there was a British ship waiting at the right spot in the English Channel. It lowered a grapple, pulled up all five telegraph lines, undersea telegraph lines, wires, and that connected Germany with the Americas and cut them all. So Germany had no way of communicating with the United States by telegraph. Britain did, and telegraph was a tremendously important way of communication at that point. Then the British mounted a very skillful propaganda operation directed at the Americans where they sent people to tour the country. leaflets and things supposedly authored by Catholic priests in Britain, which would be mailed to Catholic priests in the United States and other religious groups to their counterparts. They pushed propaganda into American newspapers. They tightly censored what American journalists in Europe, some of them at or near the front with British troops, could write to make sure all of these stories were very favorable to Britain. and the British had a very good espionage operation which was able to catch and decode the Zimmerman telegram which you mentioned which was a telegram from the German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman to his ambassador in Mexico telling him to go to talk to the Mexican government and tell them that if Mexico entered the war on the German side they would be rewarded with their lost territory. in Arizona and New Mexico, which of course the U.S. had taken in a war of some decades previously. And of course Americans were outraged at the thought that some of their country might be parceled off and given to Mexico. At least that that's what the Germans had in mind. So the Germans as soon as they decoded this immediately passed it to the United States and created a tremendous ruckus. And it was really one of the things that help spur the US to enter the war.
pj_wehry:
Even as you talk about parallels, my day job is as a digital marketer. And one of the things I found really interesting was how the British would push the most extreme German propaganda to the American people in order to inflame them.
adam_hochschild:
That's right.
pj_wehry:
And I see that with digital marketing, they have what they call the horseshoe effect, is that the people who need to hear, are you familiar with the horseshoe effect?
adam_hochschild:
No,
pj_wehry:
No.
adam_hochschild:
tell me about it.
pj_wehry:
So you have the intended audience. that the algorithm sends news to, or it sends different pieces of content. But then the people who are most likely to be angry who are anti that, the people who don't care are kind of in the middle, but the two ends of the horseshoe, the people who are most angry are also very likely to receive that because they know that they'll be interested in reading it. And it just, as you talk about those parallels, a good reminder that, yes, there are people stuff, right? Like, they're like, I want you to see my content. But there's also people like, No, I want you to see their content because I want to make you angry, right? And
adam_hochschild:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
it is a common tactic.
adam_hochschild:
And that's what the Brits did very effectively, because there was no shortage of strident German nationalists who believed Germany had a destiny to dominate Europe and make its culture the leading one of the world and so on. And they would pick some of the most extreme of these folks and translate their material and be shortlist published in the US in English to get Americans riled up and more enthusiastic about joining the war on the British side.
pj_wehry:
I think it's closely related to this discussion of propaganda censorship. You mentioned your own special interest and even your own personal experience with surveillance. Can you talk about surveillance and your own perhaps even historical method in what you learn from surveillance notes?
adam_hochschild:
Well, my experience with surveillance is this. In the late 1960s and early 70s, I was very active in the movement against the Vietnam War. And then when we had a lot of revulsion in this country against some of the things that the CIA had done overseas and so on, in the mid-70s, they passed the Freedom of Information Act, which meant that you could get the reports on yourself filed by federal intelligence agencies, FBI, CIA, military intelligence, and so on. If you wrote to the government and asked for this stuff, so on, they were compelled to send it to you, and they theoretically still are. They send it with names of undercover informants blotted out and so on, so it doesn't compromise any of their sources. But when I finally got my files under the Freedom from Information Act, which was, like, 1970s, they had more than a hundred pages on me. And I was very small potatoes in the anti-war movement. I was by no means a leader. I was way down at the bottom. So people who were really big cheeses in that movement, I'm sure, had thousands of pages. And it was fascinating stuff because it reveals, intelligence files often reveal as much about the watcher It also revealed how they get things garbled and get things wrong. I'll give you one example. My wife and I had briefly been civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. And when we got married the following year, we asked people to send, in lieu of sending us wedding presents, to send contributions to one of the civil rights organizations we've worked for. And in the FBI report, into gave his wedding presence to goodwill. So,
pj_wehry:
Ha ha
adam_hochschild:
you know, these folks are not always the most alert. But
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
adam_hochschild:
that whole experience, seeing the files they had on me, made me realize that as a historian, intelligence records are a rich, rich source to use. And in three or four books, I've been able to use them, because after 50 or 100 years, everything is declassified and you can see, you know, without names being blotted out, what people were really saying. And in this book, you know, when I was following people like Emma Goldman, the anarchist leader all around Firebrand, or Eugene Debs, you know, who we already talked about, I wanted to see what the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor was saying about them as they snooped on these folks. The most fascinating thing I discovered was this. The Bureau of Investigation, predecessor of the FBI, they just added federal to the name some years later, was very concerned about the situation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, big industrial city center for a lot of war industry and so on. And they sent somebody to infiltrate a wobbly branch that was being formed there. And this guy, Leo Wendell, was his name, was so good at this job that he managed to get himself elected recording and financial secretary of the Pittsburgh wobbly branch. And he served there for three or four years. He joined the Socialist Party. He was active in the city's radical library. He found himself leading marches and demonstrations, you know, demanding that the US leave the war, give rights to workers and so on. And the whole time he was sending three or four reports a week to the Bureau of Investigation. Periodically they tried to maintain his credibility among his fellow wobblies and socialists by arresting him, often very conspicuously, in one case
pj_wehry:
Yes.
adam_hochschild:
when he was giving a speech to 50 people and protesting and streaming he was carried off to jail. fellow radicals didn't seem to question why after this happened you always managed to surface again three or four days later and never went to prison for a longer stretch. But his reports were fascinating to me. And you always wonder, what's motivating somebody like that? I wish he was still around so I could ask him, but he died in 1945. Can't ask him. There's nothing in them that shows an excess of patriotism. There's nothing that shows, you know, disgust or disdain for the people he's spying on. And I
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
suspect like many undercover people throughout history, for him the big thrill was deception. Just the fact that I'm somebody that these people around me don't know who I am.
pj_wehry:
the thrill of being smarter in many ways. Like
adam_hochschild:
Bye.
pj_wehry:
there's an inherent sense of superiority. It's like, oh, if you only knew.
adam_hochschild:
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah.
pj_wehry:
Can you talk a little bit about that transition? And this was fascinating to me, because I mean, one of the really cool things about history is the opening up of questions that I didn't even have. And one was the transition from these big private agencies, to these government-run associations. What motivated that and what did those changes create? What became different about surveillance after that?
adam_hochschild:
Well, up until the First World War, undercover operations in the United States were almost entirely a private thing. Because the years preceding the war were very bitter years in terms of labor relations. For decades, that had been something very violent, dozens of people killed every year. Just for instance, in 1913-14 alone, more than 70 people, some of the women and children, were killed and fighting between striking minors in Colorado. and company detectives and state militia. So private detectives was a huge industry, the three largest detective agencies together employed 135,000 people, smaller agencies, still more. And corporations hired them to break strikes, to infiltrate labor unions being formed and report back to the employers on what was happening and so on. Once the US entered the war, the government was very worried about anti-war agitation, because a lot of Americans felt the US had no business entering the First World War. There was much more feeling of that sort on the left, but it was not limited to that. I think for many Americans, there was a sense that this was a quarrel between people in Europe. You know, we have no dog in that fight and shouldn't be involved. The government was very worried about this, very worried that it was going to interfere with the nationwide draft, with production of arms and ammunition for the war, and so forth. So some of the private detectives, like this guy Leo Wendell, we were just talking about, left the agencies they were working for and came to work for the government. Some for the Bureau of Investigation and some for military intelligence, because the U.S. have a huge intelligence operation spying on American citizens.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
Some thousand people, military and civilian, snooping on dissidents, potential dissidents, here at home. So this era sort of saw the birth of this tremendous government snooping on us, something which has not gone away, I discovered in the 1960s, which of course still goes on today. As we've learned as the January 6th invaders have gone on trial, there were FBI informants in some of their organizations.
pj_wehry:
There's part of it just wants to be really sarcastic. Like what are government spying on us right now? I can't believe it. No. Um,
adam_hochschild:
Although I must say today, I'm much more worried about the amount of information about us that corporations have, because they know everything we click on on the internet, everything we buy on Amazon and other websites. All that is going into their computers somewhere. And I think they know much more about us right now than Amazon knows much more about each of us than the US government does.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've mentioned it on this podcast before, but I think the classic example of that was Target getting so good at its demographics that it predicted when women were pregnant. And
adam_hochschild:
Yeah,
pj_wehry:
yeah,
adam_hochschild:
yeah, yeah. Amazing thing.
pj_wehry:
which is literally, they got in trouble with a dad who, you know, I've mentioned this before, but they knew that his daughter, his 16 year old daughter was pregnant before did, which he was not very pleased with. I
adam_hochschild:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
think for a good reason. Yeah, no, I think that's a fair point. You give some heroes during this time. It wasn't all just demagogues and snoopish superior pickertons. You mentioned Lewis Post and Emma Goldman. Do you want to talk a little bit about those people you see as kind of fighting Eugene Debs? for the rights of the common man.
adam_hochschild:
out.
pj_wehry:
Or is that how you'd word that?
adam_hochschild:
Well, they were fighting for all kinds of things, for the rights of ordinary people, for the rights of free speech, for the rights of people to oppose a war, to speak out against it. Eugene Debs, we already talked about a little bit. He was a very saintly man who managed to charm even his enemies. Once on a speaking tour, he dropped in to have lunch with a sheriff who was in charge of a jail where he spent six months. Some years later, before, managed to charm everybody. And his big, big thing during this period was he felt the United States should not be drawn into this terrible war in Europe. And for saying that, he went to prison. Emma Goldman, same thing, you know, a tremendously feisty, lively, outspoken person. The moment the war began, began organizing against the draft. And she was sent to prison for two years because of that. deported from the country after that. Lewis Post, whom he mentioned is a fascinating figure and in some ways I think the least known hero of the ones that I talk about in American midnight. And here's what he did. Lewis Post was assistant secretary of labor and in 1919 sort of by accident he became acting was on sick leave, the man who normally would have taken his place had just resigned to a run for Congress. Post was the third ranking person there, and so he became acting secretary of labor. This was a tremendously important position for this reason. At that time, A. Mitchell Palmer, who was Wilson's attorney general, was planning a run for president on the 1920, you want to get the 1920 Democratic nomination, And he wanted to run on the fact that he was going to supervise mass deportations, and he wanted to build a track record of deporting thousands of people. So he could say, folks, this is what I'm already done, and I'm going to do more of it. He rounded up some 10,000 people in a series of arrests known as the Palmer Raids. Several thousand of them were found to be deportable not US citizens. People were kind of casual about getting naturalized as US citizens in those days. The country had seemed to be welcoming immigrants. There was a lot of formalities to go through and if you didn't speak English well or something, people often skipped it. However,
pj_wehry:
No parallels there.
adam_hochschild:
yeah,
pj_wehry:
Sorry.
adam_hochschild:
yeah, however, the deportations, the Justice Department had the power to arrest people and they did arrest these. that roughly 10,000 people. But deportations had to be approved by the immigration bureau, which fell under the Department of Labor.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
So, Rousseff Post, acting Secretary of Labor, refused to sign off on the great bulk of these deportations. He found legal problems with the arrest warrants. He was a well-trained lawyer and a very skillful bureaucrat.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
He found that people right to representation by an attorney and all sorts of other things. And he foiled this plan of Palmer and of Palmer's assistant, who was the very young, at that time 25 years old, J. Edgar Hoover, just beginning his long, long career in the federal government. So Post was a great hero to whom several thousand people owe the chance to remain in this country. Palmer and Hoover were furious at what he did. They orchestrated a campaign against him. They got the American Legion to demand that he be fired. They got Congress to investigate him. But Post was very skillful and managed to hold on to his job.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, even as we talk about parallels here, I mean, some of the negative ones is in many ways why you wrote this book. What are some of the strategies that were used by Eugene Debs, by Emma Goldman, by Lewis Post, that you see would be useful for us today when dealing with unlawful kind of these obstructions of civil liberties?
adam_hochschild:
wish I could say they had a magic secret, which
pj_wehry:
Thank
adam_hochschild:
we really
pj_wehry:
you.
adam_hochschild:
have to adopt, and we would vanquish a lot of the craziness that's on all sides of us right now. It's not so simple though, but I do think we can learn several things from this period. One is the importance of organized labor, which is something that has been weakened in the U.S. over the last couple of decades. our private workforce unionized than almost any other major industrial country. And I think it shows in the weakness of the social safety net that we
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
adam_hochschild:
have. And I take heart from the fact that at places like Starbucks and Amazon and so on that haven't been organized before, there are the beginnings of labor organizing now. And I think we can all be encouraged by that. I also think all of these folks Emma Goldman, Debs, Lewis Post, and many others simply remind us of the importance of free speech, the importance of being able to dissent when your government does something crazy. You know, we can still argue about whether or not it was a good thing for the U.S. to join the First World War. I tend to side with those who feel it wasn't. But there are other decisions is made such as the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago, which turned out to be catastrophic. And I'm glad we were able to speak out against it at the time, even though we couldn't stop it.
pj_wehry:
It's a 400 plus page book. You know, won several awards. And I'm looking at if, what did you have to cut from the book that you wish you could have put in?
adam_hochschild:
Wow, what's on the cutting room floor? Uh, actually, I find it fairly easy to cut things, because I'm acutely aware of what is going to leave a reader bored or,
pj_wehry:
Ha ha.
adam_hochschild:
uh, impatient or whatever. As a reader myself, I noticed that I very seldom finish a nonfiction book. and wish that it had been 100 pages longer. That never happens. But I very often read a book and I felt well why would maybe 100 pages too long? I didn't need all those extra characters. So I try to keep track very carefully of how many characters my reader is going to keep and be able to keep in mind and eliminate the extra ones. There were certainly many other colorful people during this period that I could have said more about. But actually, my previous book, the one I wrote just before this, a book called Rebel Cinderella, which is a biography of a remarkable woman named Rose Pasteur Stokes, was about some of those people. And I felt, well, I covered them in that book, so I don't need to cover them so thoroughly in this book. So I have no regrets about stuff that got left out. And I hope what's in there is just enough and not too much. make that judgment.
pj_wehry:
but a great ad for Rebel Cinderella, right? It's like, well, if you feel like something's left out, then buy my other book. No, I love that.
adam_hochschild:
Thank you.
pj_wehry:
How would you, one of the things that's interesting to me during this time period, and it isn't the topic of your book, so please don't take this as a criticism, but some of the other topics that were big were things like eugenics, things like the Spanish flu. those in terms of the context of the time and playing into these obstructions of civil liberties.
adam_hochschild:
Well, eugenics, you're right, was a big thing, and I do talk about it a little bit in this book, and it was very much used by the anti-immigration crusaders who had so-called scientific proof, you know,
pj_wehry:
Right.
adam_hochschild:
having to do with measurements of skulls and so on that Jews were depleting the racial stock in the United States, and we shouldn't have got any more in. So they definitely were enthusiasts for the eugenics movement. The Spanish flu did happen, during this period. And I think it's a little bit hard to say, did it really change things and make stuff happen that wouldn't have happened otherwise, other than killing a huge number of people, didn't kill as many people as COVID had been killed a much higher proportion of the population of the country,
pj_wehry:
Right.
adam_hochschild:
killed some 675,000 Americans at a time when we had only million people. So that was approaching 1% of the population. I think it added to the eeriness of things
pj_wehry:
Mm.
adam_hochschild:
because the worst wave of the flu hit in the fall of 1918 when the United States was still at war and because of censorship nothing about it could appear in the newspapers. For example, the worst hit city was Philadelphia. And it was one day in the fall of, in October, I believe, of 1918, when Philadelphia had more than 700 excess deaths. That means more than 700 more people than would have normally died in the city that day. And that's generally looked at as sort of the worst day and the worst period of the worst wave of this thing in the United States. I
pj_wehry:
Mm.
adam_hochschild:
looked at the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. for the next morning. Not a word about any of this.
pj_wehry:
Wow.
adam_hochschild:
So here were people living in this city and many other American cities where they knew something terrible was going on because they could see mortuary wagons waiting outside the morgue that was overflowing. They could hear, you know, pleas in the newspapers and so on from hospitals, you know, for extra extra coffins. They knew something
pj_wehry:
Mm.
adam_hochschild:
terrible was going on. They knew people who were dying or people who were sick and dying in their own families, but there was nothing about it in the press. Among the very few mentions in the press were statements from government officials poo-pooing this, saying it's really nothing serious, and then sometimes suggesting, well, this was actually something deliberately spread by Germans, and it's believed that people from a German submarine came ashore at New Orleans and spread this virus, complete nonsense. But of course, neither side in the First World War, and the Germans were suffering from this just as badly as we were, wanted to leave any clues for their enemies about just what a terrible toll it was taking.
pj_wehry:
Right. And that is the kind of interesting thing in terms of censorship is those moments where it's like you don't want to give away war secrets. And it is amazing what you can draw from the press, but at what cost. Mr. Hochschild, I've been wonderful to have you on today. If there's one thing you could leave with our audience, if there's one takeaway from today that you would want them to think about and meditate on through the rest of the week, What would it be?
adam_hochschild:
PJ, I think it's this. We need to remember always that democracy, civil liberties, is something fragile. In this period, over a hundred years ago, we saw how rapidly it disappeared and was substituted for by repression, censorship, imprisonment, political imprisonment, and so on, when there was the stress of a war. came on January 6th of 2021. You know, if that day had unfolded a little bit differently, it could have been a huge blow at, you know, democratic elections in this country. So we need to be on guard because there will be other stresses that will come in the future, whether from ambitious demagogues, whether from the pressures of climate change, which are already both in this hemisphere and in the other. facing stresses in the future, we have to value the constitution, the democratic safeguards, the Bill of Rights, and remember how fragile they are.
pj_wehry:
a tremendous way to summarize what is so important about what you shared today. Mr. Hochschild, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure.
adam_hochschild:
Okay, thank you PJ. Good, I hope you got what you need. Good.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, well, okay.