to be with you because really there is no kind of person i more enjoy talking with than teachers of history. teachers of history have been tremendously important in my life from high school, from college, and also people who are involved in teaching public history by working in museums and historical sites, and so forth. all of that has had a huge influence on my life. i don't think i would be writing history today were it not for two very good history teachers that i had when i was in high school. let me tell you a little bit about how i came to the subject that i'm going to talk about today. i have, for a long time, as long as long as i can remember, been obsessed with the first world war. i had relatives on both sides of my family who fought in several different armies. and it has always sort of seemed to me, as one historian put it best when he described the first world war as the original sin of the 20th century, and so much of what has afflicted us in the last 100 years comes directly out of that war. so i have always been fascinated by it. i did a book called "to end all wars" that came out about 10 years ago which was about the first world war, focused on the british experience, because that is where the conflict was sharpest between people who thought the war was a noble and necessary crusade and the people who thought, correctly i think, that it was absolute madness and would make the world turn for the worse in every conceivable way. the book that jenny mentioned that i just finished, "rebel cinderella," is the story of an american woman who lived through that period, and that kind of woke me up to what life in the united states was like in the first world war and its immediate aftermath. and that is what i am writing about right now. so, the thoughts i'm going to share with you today are not from a book that is published, but from a book in progress. so, let's go ahead -- i just want to make sure -- and are you folks seeing my screen here, or do i have to click share screen again? ok, good. you are seeing my slideshow, that's fine. let me go ahead. i want to first describe the usual way that we remember america in the first world war. and then talk about aspect of that history that we tend to ignore. the way the story is usually told, the european powers had been battling themselves to a stalemate for nearly three years, starting in 1914. the british, the french, the germans. the war produced untold millions of deaths, an even larger number of wounded, and destruction beyond that of any previous european war. it left a devastated landscape as well, and still, the carnage went on and on, leaving the powers of the old world exhausted. then, german submarines started sinking american ships. president woodrow wilson, who was in power at that time, declared enough is enough. and on april 2, 1917, he went before congress and asked it to declare war, and congress promptly did so. wilson picked general john j. pershing to lead the u.s. troops who went to europe. pershing arrived in france, declared famously, lafayette, we are here, and by mid-1918, some two million american troops were in europe. they fought bravely, they helped to win the war, swiftly, the armistice came, which was really a german surrender, greeted with tremendous fervor here and in all the warring countries, tickertape parades welcomed the american troops home, general pershing was greeted as a great hero. and that is where the chapter on world war i in so many american history textbooks ends. the country is at peace. the next chapter of american history begins, the 1920's, flappers, prohibition, speakeasies, babe ruth, the model t ford, and so on, right? but this skips over a great deal. so, i want to go back and look at the war years more closely, and then at the two years that followed the so-called peace. from the moment the united states entered the war, there was a fierce propaganda barrage from the government. this is a u.s. army recruiting poster. and just look at it for a second, and at the image of ferocity that it contains. there was a tremendous paranoia about spies. why? not because there actually were a lot of german spies in the united states. there had been, but almost all of them had been rounded up fairly early in the war because their paymaster made the mistake of leaving his briefcase behind on a new york elevated train, and it was promptly collected by the american agent who was tailing him. so there really were no german spies by the time the u.s. entered the war, but there was this tremendous paranoia in the air, i think in part because the united states had a huge foreign-born population. and the first reflection of that was paranoia about spies and then a paranoia about everything german, sometimes mixed with a long-standing anti-semitism. look at this poster, for example. the guy, the evil spy has a german helmet, but maybe a jewish nose? now, i heard about the atmosphere of this time from my father, who was 25 years old in 1917. he was the son of a jewish immigrant from germany. the family spoke german at home, but they were terrified of doing so on the street. some states actually passed laws against speaking german in public. german language instruction stopped in schools and universities across the country. signs appeared like this one in a park in chicago. and amazingly, there were burnings of german books. here's a bonfire outside a high school in baribou, wisconsin, of german language books and textbooks. another picture of that fire. and if you can read the slide, chalked on the sidewalk it says "here lies the remains of german in baraboo high school." robert prager was a minor in collinsville, illinois. he tried to enlist in the u.s. navy but was turned down because he had a glass eye. he had the bad luck to be german-born. one day in 1918, prager was seized by a mob, wrapped in an american flag, forced to sing the star-spangled banner, and lynched. here are the people who lynched him. they were put on trial. the jury deliberated for 10 minutes and then found them innocent while a military band played outside the courthouse. there was anti-german craziness in the air in other ways. no more german songs were played. weddings were played without mendelssohn's wedding march. berlin, iowa became lincoln, iowa. east germantown, pennsylvania became pershing. sorry, east germantown, indiana became pershing, named after the general. families named schmidt became smith. the frankfurter became the hotdog. there was ferocity in the air at the very highest level. for example, this is the former secretary of state, former secretary of war, senator from new york. in 1917, he was a special emissary of president wilson. he told an audience in new york in the summer of 1917 that "pro german traitors" were threatening the war effort. and here is what he said, in his own words. there are men walking about the city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason. there are some newspapers published in this city every day, the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason. with his hatred of the media, he would be right at home in the trump administration. people like him were as fierce as they were about the war because there was considerable resistance to it. this is another thing that gets left out of our history books. there was a group, for instance, called the women's pieced party that agitated against the war, both before and after the united states joined. here's an advertisement for an antiwar meeting that was to take place on the very eve of the war itself, the day before wilson went to congress to ask for the declaration. two days later, this organization's office just two blocks away from the white house was vandalized and smeared with yellow paint. there were popular antiwar songs like this one, and there were newspapers, publications that took a strong antiwar stance, like this socialist newspaper in new york city. a national magazine that was a strong voice against the war, which was by far the liveliest magazine in america at the time, a magazine that published john reed, walter lippmann, sherwood anderson, many others, many of the best artists and cartoonists of the day. in many ways, it was a precursor of today's "new yorker." it published antiwar cartoons like this one, christ being shot by a firing squad. and if you look carefully at the different hats and helmets, you will see all of the warring countries are represented in the firing squad. there were prominent political figures who spoke out against the war, like socialist party leader eugene debs, the five-time socialist candidate for president. and the very charismatic anarchist leader emma goldman, who started organizing against the draft. several u.s. senators were strongly against the war, of which the boldest voice was that of robert le pollock of wisconsin. he asked, for instance, on the floor of the senate, if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy, as wilson probably proclaimed, why shouldn't there be self-determination for ireland, for egypt, for india? he told his fellow senators that you could still be a patriot and oppose a particular war, and in the 19th century, he gave examples of how both daniel webster and abraham lincoln had done so. he began receiving missives in the mail, he was hanged in effigy on the campus of university of wisconsin, and his fellow senators opened an investigation, should he be expelled from the senate? debs and goldman had worse fates. we will come back to that. the government moved quickly to suppress antiwar demonstrations. and anyone who refused military service was sent to prison or locked up in grim camps like this one in fort douglas, utah. here is one such resistor, an antiwar activist and social worker named robert baldwin, who was sent to prison. we will come back to him. now, one of the things that really characterized this period was the rise of vigilante groups. organizations sprang up around the country. the largest was something called the american protective league. and this is the badge that its members got to wear. and i think you can read it on the screen. operative american protective league, auxiliary to the u.s. department of justice. because the organization did indeed have justice department support. by the end of 1917, the american protective league had more than 200,000 members. it was made up of men, only men, no women, who were too old to fight but who wanted to feel somehow that they were defending their country at home. what did they do? among other things, they carried out what they called slacker raids, to find people who had not registered for the draft, and make citizens arrests on them. also, sometimes a slacker was somebody who had failed to buy a war bond. here, for example, are some of the young men who were arrested in a slacker raid in new york city in 1918, in which 60,000 people were rounded up because they had no draft cards. but these slacker raids by the american protective league were a comparatively mild side of the vigilanteism that really took off in these years. other expressions were much worse. cartoons like this glorified vigilante violence, and sometimes people acted on that urge. here's a newspaper headline about one such episode involving wobblies -- members of the most militant labor group, wobblies as they were called. 17 wobblies in tulsa, oklahoma were beaten, tarred, and feathered. what this article does not say is one of the leaders of the mast vigilantes who carried out this action was the local police chief, who had tipped off the newspaper in advance to have a reporter on the scene when this took place. here's a photograph of another victim of tarring and feathering, a man who was a farmer from luverne, minnesota, who was attacked by a group of masked men in 1918 because he refused to buy war bonds. the men who attacked him were put on trial and found innocent. someone else, a wobbly organizer, had a worse fate. he was seized from his bed in butte, montana in the middle of the night and hanged from a railroad bridge outside of town. here is his body. frank little, 38 years old. his crime was coming to organize workers for the wobblies in a mining town, butte, montana, where an underground fire several weeks earlier had taken the lives of more than 160 miners. and that brings us to an important point, which is that the real target of oppression during the war years in the u.s. was not really draft dodgers or alleged pro-germans, it was the left, and it was organized labor. this was an era of enormous labor strife. starting in about 1909, for the next 10 or so years, there were huge strikes every year in the united states with hundreds of thousands of workers walking off the job each year. and they were met with force. sometimes, it was national guard or state militia that put down strikes. these are state militiamen in massachusetts. facing some striking clothing mill workers. or they were put down police. that is a striking garment worker in chicago being arrested. and the war gave the federal government and big business the perfect excuse to crack down on organized labor in every way. their impulse to do so was only exacerbated by the rise of the bolsheviks in russia. the american establishment was terrified at the prospect of the russian revolution spreading to the united states. and i think this is what led, starting in mid-1917 for the next three years or so, to the worst time of political repression in the united states since the end of slavery. and it is an era that has largely been forgotten about. and i want to emphasize that this political repression happened not just during the first world war, it continued for more than two years after the war ended, and it happened on several fronts. there were a series of laws passed, the most important of which was the espionage act of 1917. actually, an amended version of that law is still with us, and people like national security agency whistleblower edward snowden has been arrested under it. but the law of 1917, the espionage act that year, among other things, gave the government the power to censor the press. remember the magazine "the masses" that i talked about? this issue, august, 1917, was its last. that issue was printed, but it was banned from the u.s. mail. why? because sensors objected to several pieces of text and several cartoons in this issue. here's one of the cartoons they objected to and thought subversive. the liberty bell crumbling. and so, the best magazine in the country was forced to cease publishing. over the next four years, the spring of 1917 through the spring of 1921, more than 400 issues of american newspapers or magazines were banned from the mail from 75 different publications. and in many cases, that meant the publication shutting down entirely. who was america's chief press censor? it's the guy in this picture. albert s. burleson. he was the postmaster general, and the law gave him the power to censor what went through the mail. he was a former congressman from texas, actually the first texan to serve in a cabinet. very conservative, an arch segregationist. when he was born, his family owned 20 slaves. and he loved being the chief censor. right after the armistice in november 1918, president wilson declared an end to censorship. the war was over, so why do we need censorship anymore? burleson paid no attention. he kept on banning publications he didn't like. wilson didn't seem to mind, paid very little attention, and on occasion, explicitly backed him. another facet of the repression was the way the government moved to jail critics of the war. i earlier showed you a picture of eugene debs, the socialist leader, and the leader before that of the rail workers union. here he is as a federal prisoner, sentenced for speaking out against the war. like so many were critics, he was still in jail two years after the war ended. in november 1920, while debs was convict number 9653 in the atlanta federal penitentiary, he was the socialist party candidate for president and received more than 900,000 votes. far from the only person sent to jail for speaking out against the war, someone else imprisoned was kate richards o'hare, a fiery socialist party activist and martyr. in prison, she became good friends with emma goldman, the war opponent who we talked about earlier, also jailed for opposing the war. goldman spent two years in prison, but after that, the government also deployed another weapon against her. it deported her from the united states, where she had lived for more than 30 years. she and 248 other radicals the government was eager to get rid of were shipped off to russia just before christmas of 1919 on this decrepit troop ship, the ss beaufort. in a way that feels eerily familiar today, in 1919, the united states was swept by a frenzy about deporting people. no less than three people eyeing the democratic and republican presidential nominations in 1920 were campaigning on promises of mass deportations. when this deportation frenzy began in 1919, it was a very -- the war was over, but the cost of living had soared, we were in the midst of the biggest strike wave in american history, one in five american workers went on strike during the year 1919. these are chicago police called out because of the steelworkers strike in chicago. the year 1919 was also the year of some of the worst racial violence in american history. why? in part, because of returning war veterans. 400,000 blacks and several million whites were competing for jobs, and the jobs were scarce because the war industries had closed down. it was a tough time to be a black person in the united states. and at some of the worst violence was in the north. this was a crowd of white people in chicago stoning a black man. you can't see him because he's trying to hide under the back porch of that house there. in several cities, martial law was declared, and the national guard or state militia called out, like these soldiers questioning a man on the street in chicago. again, a lynching in the north, in omaha, nebraska, and that attempt to hang the mayor of omaha, incidentally, came when he intervened to try to stop a lynching. he was cut down just in time, but the black man he was trying to save was not so lucky. martial law was declared in omaha and in a number of cities in 1919. that year, 76 black americans were lynched, the highest total in more than a decade. and the total death toll of the 1919 race riots was in the hundreds. all but a handful of the dead were black. i mentioned that various people hoping to campaign for president in 1920 were doing so on a platform of deporting people. one of them was the attorney general, a. mitchell palmer. his name, we were remember best today in connection with the so-called palmer raids of late 1919 and early 1920, in which an estimated 10,000 radicals around the country were arrested, namely those who palmer hoped could be deported because they were not american citizens. remember, this was a country filled with recent immigrants and some not-so-recent from decades before like emma goldman. many of these folks have never bothered about getting officially naturalized, because it was a time when the country had been welcoming immigrants. but now this was a tool that could be used against them. here are some of the people palmer ordered arrested, rounded up, and awaiting deportation at ellis island in 1919. ellis island had previously been a place of great hope because it was the first sight of the united states tens of millions of immigrants had as they sailed into new york harbor. in the course of these palmer raids, the raiders also seized and destroyed radical literature. these are federal and local police in boston with some of their haul there. justice department agents and local police also took the occasion to trash the offices of the radical groups where they made their arrests. this is the new york city office of the industrial workers of the world, what it looked like after the palmer raids. and note that the raiders were proud of having done something like this. they invited newspaper photographers to come in and take pictures of their handiwork. there was, however, an unexpected hero of this very dark time. his name was lewis f. post, and he was the acting secretary of labor. and here is how he came into the picture. the arrests of the people that attorney general palmer wanted deported were carried out by the justice department. but deportation had to be approved by the immigration bureau, which fell under the department of labor. and post happened to be acting secretary of labor because the secretary was sick, the number two person in the department had just resigned to run for congress, and so now post, who was a progressive former newspaperman, was in charge of the labor department. and he was outraged by the planned deportation, by the idea that thousands of people could be expelled from the united states solely because of their political opinions. he was also a very shrewd bureaucratic maneuver, he was a lawyer who knew the law, and he used his position of power to invalidate warrants on which la. he used his position of power to invalidate the warrants on which many of these folks had been arrested, to let them out of jail. he was able to save several thousand people from being deported from the united states. enraged course, attorney general palmer and it assistant, thes real architect of the raids. hoover -- j.aeger edgar hoover. thelong afterwards he was head of the bureau of investigation that became the fbi. a post hoover occupied for decades. hoover was enraged against post. he got the american legion to demand post be fired. he got congress to investigate post. but post held on, kept his position. hoover lost his battle with post, but he went on to win many others. hoover really got his start in those years. greatly enlarged government infiltration and surveillance of left-wing groups of all sorts. something that would last for almost a century to come. that work that hoover did included the planting of provocative wars. for example, he was the front page of a newspaper from pittsburgh, pennsylvania about some people arrested in an alleged bomb plot by the iww in 1919. there were three suspects, but look closely at the one in the upper right. he is the secretary of the local branch, supposedly named leo walch, but his real name was louis m. wendell, agent 836 of the bureau of investigation. predecessor to the fbi. for two years, he had been active in the branch in pittsburgh, periodically slipping away to meet j. edgar hoover in washington and new york and brief him. some of what the pittsburgh wobblies were accused of doing was actually instigated by him. another aspect of these very repressive years, 1917 to 1920, is that not only did the justice department greatly increase in spying on progressive activists of all sorts, but so did the american military. the key figure here was a man named lieutenant colonel ralph h. van deman. he was a career army officer. he had gotten his start in intelligence work in the philippine war. 1899 to 1902. an extremely brutal conflict where torture was routine by the u.s. army against filipinos who had the effrontery to want their country to be independent. van deman handled army intelligence operations and set up a vast operation on filipino independence advocates and mobilized hundreds of u.s. army officers across the island to feed him information for this cardfile. then he had other posts in the military, but was stationed in washington when the united states entered the first world war in 1917. he immediately went to the secretary of war and asked to set up an army intelligence operation. but this was not army intelligence to find out what the germans were up to, because the british and french had been doing that for several years already. it was rather an excuse to spy on so-called subversives here at home. within a year, van deman had over 1000 people working for him in the united states, military and civilian, gathering information on black activists, one of the people they spied on was martin luther king's grandfather. on labor activists of all kinds and people who were against the war, massing tens of thousands of pages on such americans here at home. van deman moved on, but the practice of military intelligence, spying on american civilians, continued for decades. for example, i was active in the antiwar movement in the 1960's, working against the vietnam war. in the 1970's, under the freedom of information act, i was able to get records that army intelligence had compiled on me in that period, as they had on thousands of american citizens. going back to 1919-1920, the military in this era were very worried about trouble from many sources, and they thought always in ethnic terms. italians were possible anarchists. jews were possible socialists and communists. irish were possible irish republican army sent with -- sympathizers. black americans were an all-around threat to be contained. here is the reflection of military thinking at the time. it is part of an ethnic map of new york city in the northeastern corner of manhattan. it was prepared in 1919 by the former head of military intelligence for new york. it's color and letter-coded by ethnicity. is for russian jews, showing where they lived. c for italians. j, dark grey, for "negro," as they were called then. e, the blue at the bottom right, is for irish. the numbers refer to union halls, iww offices and the like. the blue stars with numbers are offices of suspicious publications, from the naacp magazine, to socialist newspapers in english and other languages. the military fear of an uprising was so great that the army actually prepared a contingency plan for putting the united states, the whole country, under martial law, complete with the wording of a proclamation the president should issue. happily, things did not reach that point, but it is a reminder of how close to the brink we came. basically, several things happened that stilled the hysteria. by the early 1920's, the economy picked up, was booming, the on -- the unemployment rate was low. the russian revolution did not spread to the united states, and the labor movement had been effectively crushed. but those who had been active against the war did not stay put. -- quite. remember the young social workers sent to prison for refusing the draft? here he is decades later outside the supreme court, the institution on which he had a huge impact because he became the founder and moving spirit for decades of the american civil liberties union. remember kate richards o'hare, the jailed antiwar activist i mentioned earlier? once she got out of prison, she led a cross-country march demanding release of other political prisoners, and they picketed the white house for two months with the support of the aclu, and she was finally successful. in 1921, warren harding became president, and under pressure from that ticketing and those -- picketing and those demonstrations, he finally let the remaining prisoners out of jail. he even invited eugene debbs to visit him on the way home from prison. here is debbs leaving harding's office after that visit. he joked he had run for president five times, but this was the first time he'd actually gotten to the white house. so, what can we conclude about this era? i think it was a time when american democracy came very close to losing its soul, and it's also what time that reminds us that there are currents of xenophobia, nativism and a eagerness to fund hundred scapegoats that have long run -- to hunt for scapegoats that have long run below the surface of this country and still run there today. i think it's a good time to remember words that emma goldman said in court in 1917 just before she was sentenced to prison. remember, she was on trial for organizing against the draft, and was accused of being unpatriotic. she said to the jury, "gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriotism, but may there not be different kinds of patriotism? our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes, is enchanted by her beauty yet sees her faults." it was a good definition of patriotism then, and i think it still is today. so, thank you very much, and i would be glad to hear any comments or questions people have. >> adam we do have a number of , questions coming in to the question and answer box, and please continue to type them and we will be happy to take them. before i get to those, i am wondering, just because what is happening today, i wonder if you could speak to the role of the flu pandemic in 1919 and its relationship to all these other events. is it just something also happening then, or is there an interplay between some of the violence and unrest happening in 1919? >> well, the flu pandemic was closely tied to the war, and spread by the war. the first case of that deadly influenza that actually drew notice from doctors was at an army base in kansas that was one of the bases where u.s. soldiers were being trained to be sent in vast numbers to europe. then they can trace how it spreads from their across the atlantic, and from the french port of brest where many of the ships carrying american soldiers landed. today, we're all being told correctly so to practice social distancing. well, one kind of event where you cannot practice social distancing is warfare, because you are jammed together with other soldiers in a barracks, in a crowded troopship, in a trench in france. so the flu spread like wildfire, and the press censorship at the time did not help, because many newspapers were under pressure to downplay the urgency of the epidemic. >> thank you. certainly seems a difficult time period. we have a number of questions, just looking through here. let's see. ross wants to know if there were legal challenges to censorship during and after world war i? >> legal challenges. yes, there were. i am not as up-to-date on the cases as i should be, because i have not gotten yet to that part of the book that i'm writing. [laughter] i am still in 1917 and 1918. but there were legal challenges. one of them was turned down by the supreme court, and it was then that oliver wendell holmes issued his famous statement in writing the opinion that freedom of speech does not extend to the freedom to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. but a year -- actually later that same year, 1919, he and justice brandeis actually dissented from another supreme court case on freedom of speech, the so-called abrams case, and wrote a very vigorous dissent which essentially said this censorship has gone way too far. ask me in a year, and i will have a much better answer for you when i reach that point in my book. >> also, a legal note. rich wants to know, is there any legal basis for martial law, is there a way it is constitutional? >> good question. again, because i'm not a lawyer, it's not something i know as much about as i should. certainly, in national emergencies, the state governor has the power to declare an emergency and call the national guard, and under certain circumstances the president has the power to federalize the national guard or call out the army. eisenhower did that to enforce school integration in the city of little rock. but the full legalities of that i don't know. i think it would depend on what one's definition of a national emergency would be. i can imagine many people trying to challenge that in court if our president declared one today. >> thank you. rob wants to know, in what ways did the oppression of this era inspire or shape the movement for civil rights, with the actions of organizations like the naacp and newly formed organizations like the aclu and national women's party? >> well, i think the establishment of the aclu was a tremendously important thing for civil rights in this country. the left progressives generally went into a period of considerable hibernation in the 1920's, because the movement was smashed so ruthlessly in 1918, 1919, 1920. the iww, for instance, was essentially eviscerated by the government. the most militant labor union. they arrested more than 100 top officials of the iww, raided every single office around the country, confiscated five tons of documents which were later burned by the justice department. put more than 100 wobblies on trial in a four-month show trial in chicago in 1918, and sent these folks to prison. the largest mass trial ever in american history. essentially a signal that the government was crushing the most militant wing of the labor movement. in the early 1920's, even the very moderate american federation of labor lost millions of members. the united states, warren harding, calvin coolidge, herbert hoover was not friendly to the left in any way, and the labor movement didn't really come back to life in a big way until the 1930's under franklin roosevelt. >> thank you very much. we have again just wonderful questions coming in. this is a group of history educators, of course. >> i can see. i can see from the questions. >> you can see them? in fact, it's, i'm seeing a number of questions about your primary sources, if some of them are available digitally, particularly that map you showed, or will they be cited and reproduced in your upcoming book? i think we all are pretty enamored with those documents. >> that amazing map i found online. i couldn't tell you exactly the website involved, but i think if you google "ethnic map of new york, military intelligence 1919," it will very quickly bring something up. one set of resources that are online now, through an organization, a website called fold3.com, associated with ancestry.com, has digitized a vast number of military records. they've also digitized the records of the bureau of investigation's spying on subversives during this period, because this is a military, patriotic group and they regard these folks as having fought the war at home. i don't regard hoover's bureau of investigation as being patriotic by my definition, but i am delighted to find hundreds of thousands of pages of their records online. another tremendously useful resource, which i am sure almost all of you probably know about, is the library of congress's chronicle of america database of old newspapers, the period before the copyright law kicks in in the mid-1920's. there's many millions of pages of old newspapers. that's a useful source. and of course, those of you connected with universities and other institutions that have subscriptions through their libraries know about the happy trust, which has digitized millions of pages of old newspapers and other publications. so, there are a lot of things, a lot of things out there, that are a lot more easily available than they used to be. and i'm discovering new ones, all the time. fascinating case i stumbled on the other day, thanks to someone i met who told me about it. there was a clothing mill in the state of georgia, which somehow or other, somebody at georgia tech found out this company had a stash of old paperwork and records and so forth in its basement, and the georgia tech library people asked, can we have a look at this stuff? they took it over, went through the collection, discovered all sorts of business records going back to 1900 or so, and among them were reports by private detectives who had been hired to infiltrate the labor force of this plant, and reporting to the managers on what they found in the labor force. i love sources like that. because normally, reports of undercover agents is the kind of thing you can't easily find. they get destroyed. they get hidden. so, there's an awful lot of sources out there, and when this book is done, just as all the other books i have written, historical books, there will be very full source notes that tell you exactly where to find the material. >> mche is a member of the library of congress primary sources consortium, so i'd make a pitch, for chronicle of america, if you are not using it, do use it, it goes all the way to 1963 now. those digitized newspapers are free and available. if you have a moment, sylvia wonders if you could address the impact of black soldiers protesting a not getting support following the war. the vets who camped out outside d.c. following the war. >> black americans had a terrible time during this period because they were eligible for the draft, 400,000 black men went into the army. usually, they were always confined in segregated regiments, and often assigned the worst jobs. but a great many of them were in combat. they came back to the united states, where there was a boom in lynchings, and where white workers were terrified that the jobs they expected to come home to might be taken by a black man. that's what produced these terrible rioting and protests. of course, when the police charged them to break up fights and so on, it was almost always the blacks who got arrested, and sometimes killed, and very very seldom the whites. there are at least 10 or 12 cases of black returning vets who were lynched in their army uniforms in the south. >> thank you for addressing that. to finish up, we have a question about you and your work. oliver wants to know, you have done and continue to do great work as a historian on many topics. king leopold's ghost struck a chord with serious students of history and popular history. anyone with a cursory interest in researching the congo will find your name first. how do you reflect 20 years later that this particular book has taken this place? >> it has been quite amazing to me, for a couple of reasons. one was that i had a very hard time getting that book published. at the time i went looking for a publisher, which was now about 25 years ago, i had a good literary agent, i'd published three other books, won minor awards, nice reviews in the "new york times" and so forth. but of the 10 publishers who received the book proposal for "king leopold's ghost," a very detailed memo, of the 10 publishers who received it, three of whom i knew personally, nine of the 10 turned it down. i still have letters from some of them saying, we think it is a good idea but nobody is interested, and there isn't even an african history shelf in most bookshelves and most bookstores or why don't you try this as a , magazine article first? but the 10th publisher sort of got it, and that's the publisher i have been with ever since. i think -- you know, i think part of the reason the book caught on was that i tried to tell a story in a way where i could tell a story through the people in it, and history had handed me some extraordinary characters. as if handing me the ingredients on a platter for a great dinner, and all i had to do was just to mix them up. here was this brilliant, voraciously greedy king in belgium, who was an absolute master of public relations. he could have taught 20th century tobacco companies a thing or two about public relations. here were explorers, missionaries, crusading journalists, black and white, american, european, african, trying to expose the things the king was doing. and for me, it was history that demanded to be told to the characters. -- through the characters. i think one of the problems in history writing often is that, although there is a tradition in certain areas of telling stories that way -- i mean, look at the number of biographies and collected biographies we have for example of the founding fathers or abraham lincoln, the people around him. or books about the civil war, world war ii, particular generals, particular people who went through those wars. in many other areas, the people writing them don't tend to tell history that way because they are scholars writing for other scholars. often doing extraordinary research, finding out things that people like me can make use of, but they think of their main audience as being other scholars in that particular specialty. i'm trying to reach a general audience, and i never went to graduate school, so i have no special training as a historian. but i spent 10 years as a magazine editor, and i think in many ways that was very good training. what a magazine editor is thinking about all the time is, what do we have to do to make people read the story? is it too long for the space? is it too short for the space? could it be enlivened by the addition of certain characters? is there enough suspense? that is where i went to school, in a way, and i've just tried to apply those skills to writing history, while at the same time trying to be absolutely accurate, have source notes, bibliography, all of that kind of stuff. >> well, thank you. i think we are all very grateful for your work. we are going to close out in just a moment here, but we actually have a request. if you could read that quote about patriotism one more time? >> ok. let me find it here. >> not to put you on the spot. >> all right. this was something emma goldman said. she and her longtime comrade alexander berkman were put on trial in 1917 for organizing against the draft. and she begins, "gentlemen of the jury," because of course in those days there were no women on juries. and here's what she said. "gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriotism, but may there not be different kinds of patriotism? our patriotism is that of a man who loves a woman with open eyes. he is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults." it is really one of my favorite quotations, and i'm condensing it from her full speech, which i think you could pretty easily find online, because again, anything of that era without a copyright, the books are going to be on google books. if you search a few phrases from that quote, you can find the whole speech. >> thank you. i think that's a wonderful way to end. we so appreciate you being with us, adam, especially in a changed format. your willingness to be flexible is really quite extraordinary, so we thank you, all the history educators who have been here, about 100 people joining us today. that is wonderful. not just history educators, but enthusiasts from across the country. we really appreciate that. 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