Adam Hochschild’s latest book, American Midnight, examines a dark era in US history in which it was the liberals who were the ones crusading against civil liberties.
Too many Americans are indifferent to their own history and know too little about it. This ignorance makes the present more baffling than it needs to be. Adam Hochschild has written a fine book about a grim period a century ago that has largely disappeared from national memory but seems painfully relevant to America in the 2020s. "American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy s Forgotten Crisis" describes vividly a time when racism, white nationalism, and anti-foreign and anti-immigrant sentiment were rampant. Reading it is almost therapeutic. Realizing (thanks to this book) that American democracy survived that dark moment and a decade later began half a century of democratic renewal made this reader more hopeful than he has been in quite a while.