this is about an hour. >> okay. it's 11:00. i think we know you are excited to be here and to hear adam hochschild tell us about the legacy of the first world war today. thank you for being with us over these past three days. it's been very exciting for us to see how excited and engaged history educators are. thank you so much for that. if i didn't say it, i'm grace leatherman. we are loving doing this online conference with you. >> it's a pleasure 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, historical sites and so forth. all 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 i can remember -- been obsessed with the first world war. i had relatives on both sides of my family who fought in it in several different armies. it always has sort of seemed to me -- i think the historian simon shama described the first world war was the original sin of the 20th century. so much of what's afflicted us in the last 100 years comes directly out of that war. so i've always been fascinated by it. i did a book called "to end all wars" that came out about ten years ago, which was about the first world war, focused on the british experience, because that's where britain was -- britain is where the conflict was sharpest between people who thought the war a noble and necessary crusade and 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 jennie mentioned is the story of an american woman who lived through that period. 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's what i'm writing about right now. so the thoughts i'm going to share with you today are not from a book that's published but from a book in progress. so let's go ahead. i just want to make sure -- are you folks seeing my screen here? do you have to click share screen again? okay. good. all right. so you are seeing my slide show. that's fine. let me go ahead then. i want to first describe the usual way that we remember america in the first world war. then talk about aspects 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, french, germans. the war produced untold millions of deaths and 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 te the powers of old world exhausted. then german submarines started sinking american ships. president woodrow wilson, who was in power at that time, declared enough is enough. 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, la ffayette,e are here, and by mid 1918, 2 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. ticker tape parades welcomed the american troops home. general pershing was greeted as a great hero. and that's where the chapter on world war and so many american history textbooks end. the country is at peace. the next chapter of american history begins. the 1920s, flappers, prohibition, speakeasies, the mode model-t and babe ruth. this skips over a great deal. 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. just look at it for a second. at the image of ferocity that it contains. there was a tremendous paranoia about spies. why? not because there 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 pay master made the mistake of leaving his briefcase behind on a new york elevated train. it was promptly collected by the american agent who was tailing him. so there were really no real 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. the first reflection of that was paranoia about spies, then paranoia about everything german. sometimes mixed with a longstanding 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 owed 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 is a bonfire outside a high school in wisconsin of german language books and textbooks. another picture of that fire. if you read the slide, it says, chalk down the sidewalk, it says, here lies the remains of germ german at bhs. robert pregger was a minor in illinois. he tried to enlist in the u.s. navy, but he got turned down because he had a glass eye. he had the bad luck to be german born. one day in 1918, he was seized, 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 ten minutes and 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 music was played. weddings took place without the wedding march. names were changed. berlin, iowa, became lincoln, iowa. east germantown, indiana became pershing, named after the again. families named schmidt became smith. there was ferocity in the air at the very highest level. for example, this is former secretary of state, secretary of war, senator from new york, now in 1917 he was a special emissary of president wilson. he told an audience in new york in the summer of 1917 that, quote, pro-german traitors were threatening the war effort. here is what he said in his own words. there are men walking about the streets of this 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 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 peace party that agitated against the war both before and after the united states joined. here is an advertisement for an anti-war 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 an titi-war songs like this one. and there were newspapers, publications that took a strong anti-war stance, like this socialist newspaper in new york city. a national magazine that was a strong voice against the war was "the masses" which was the liveliest magazine in america. it was the magazine that published john reed, walter lipman, 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 anti-war cartoons like this one. christ being shot by a firing squad. if you look carefully, the different hat and helmets, you 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 debbs, the five-time socialist candidate for president. and the very caharismatic emma goldman who started organizing against the draft. several u.s. senators were strongly against the war. the boldest voice was from wisconsin. he asked on the floor of the senate if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy, as wilson had proudly proclaimed, why shouldn't there be self-determination for ireland, for egypt, for india? he told his fellow senators that he could still be a patriot and oppose a particular war. in the 19th century, he gave examples of how daniel webster and abraham lincoln had done so. he began receiving mail. he was hanged on the campus of the university of wisconsin in effigy. his fellow senators opened an investigation, should he be expelled from the senate. debbs and goldman had worse fates. we will come back to that. the government moved quickly to suppress anti-war demonstrations. anyone who refused military service was sent to prison or locked up in camps like this one, fort douglas, utah. here is one such resister. an anti-war activist and social worker named roger baldwin who was sent to prison. we will come back to him. one of the things that really characterized this period was the rise of vigilanteism. organizations sprang up around the country. the largest was something called the american protective league. this is the badge that its members got to wear. 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. 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. sometimes also 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. 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 of it were much worse. cartoons like this one glorified vigilante violence and sometimes people acted on that urging. here is a newspaper headline about one such episode involving members of the country's most militant labor group, the industrial workers of the world. 17 in tulsa, oklahoma, were beaten, tar and feathered. it doesn't say that one of the leaders of the masked vigilantes who carried out the 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 is a photograph of another victim of tarring and feathering. a man named john mikes, who was a farmer from minnesota. he was attacked by masked men in 1918 because he refused to buy war bonds. the men who attacked him were put on trial but found innocent. someone else, an organizer, had a worse fate. he was seized from his bed in 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 in the mining town where an underground fire several weeks earlier had taken the lives of more than 160 miners. that brings us to an important point. the real target of repression during this war, during the war years in the u.s., was not really draft dodgers or alleged pro-germans. it was the left. it was organized labor. this was an era of enormous labor strike starting in 1909 for the next ten or 12 years there were huge strikes every year in the united states with hundreds of thousands of workers walking off the job each year. they were met with force. sometimes it was national guard or state militia that put down strikes. these are state militia men in massachusetts facing some striking clothing millworkers. they were put down by police. that's a striking garment worker. the war gave the federal government and big business the perfect excuse to crack down or 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. i think this is what led, starting in mid 1917, the next three years or so, to the worst period of political repression since the end of slavery. it's an era largely forgotten about. 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 whistle-blower 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 sensor 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 the issue. here is one of the cartoons they objected to and thought subversive. the liberty bell crumbling. so the best magazine in the country was forced to cease publishing. over the next four years, spring of 1917 through spring of 1921, more than 400 issues of american newspapers or magazines were banned from the mail, from 75 different publications. in many cases, that meant the publication shutting down entirely. who was america's chief press sensor? it's the guy in this picture. albert s. burlson. he was the postmaster general and the law gave him the power to sensor what went through the mail. he was a former congressman from texas, actually the first texan to serve. very conservative. when he was born, his family owned 20 slaves. he loved being the chief sensor. right after the armistice in november 1918, president wilson declared an end to censorship. the war was over. why would we need that anymore? he paid no attention. he kept on banning publications he didn't like. wilson didn't seem to mind. paid very little attention. on occasion, explicitly backed him up. another facet of the repress was the way the government moved to jail critics of the war. i earlier showed you a pictures of eugene debbs, the socialist leader and leader before that of the railway workers union. here he is at a federal prisoner, sentenced for speaking out against the war. like so many war critics, he was still in jail two years after the war ended. in november 1920, while debbs was convict number 9653 in the atlanta federal pen ten , he red more than 900,000 votes for the socialist party. far from the only person sent to jail for speaking out, someone else was kate richards o'hare, socialist party activist. in prison, she became good friends with emma goldman who we talked about earlier. also jailed for owe poepposing war. goldman spent two years in prison. 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 ship. in a way that feels 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 stormy time. the war was over. during it, 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 a steel workers strike in chicago. the year 1919 was also a 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 had -- were competing for jobs. 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. some of the worst violence was in the north. this is a crowd of white people in chicago stoning a black man. you can't see him because he is trying to hide under the back porch of that house. in several cities, martial law was declared. the national guard or state militia were called out like these soldiers questioning a man on the street in chicago. again, a lynching in the north in omaha, nebraska. that attempt to hang the mayor of omaha came when he intervened to try to stop a lynching. he was cut down just in time. 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, 78 black americans were lynched. the highest total in more than a decade. 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 pollen. his name we remember best today in connection with the so-called palmer raids of late 1919 and early 1920. an estimated 10,000 rad kaicals around the country were arrested. mainly those who he hoped could be deported because they were not american citizens. this was a country filled with recent immigrants and not so recent who had come decades before like emma goldman. many of these folks had never bothered getting officially naturalized because it was a time when the country had been welcoming. now this was a tool that could be used against them. here are some of the people he 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 that tens of millions of immigrants had as they sailed into new york harbor. in the course of the raids, the raiders also seized and destroyed radical literature. these are federal agents and local police in boston with some of their haul there. justice department agents and local police 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 raids. note that the raters weiders wed of having done stuff like this. invited newspaper photographers to come in and take pictures. there was, however, an unexpected hero of this very dark time. his name was lewis f. post. he was the acting secretary of labor. 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. deportation had to be approved by the immigration bureau which fell under the department of labor. 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. so now post, who was a progressive former newspaper man was in charge of the labor department. he was outraged by the planned deportations, 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 maneuverer. he was a lawyer who knew the law. he used his position of power to invalidate the warrants on which many of the folks had been arrested, to let them out of jail where they were being held. and he was able to save several thousand people from being deported from the united states. this, of course, enraged the attorney general palmer and it enraged palmer's assistant who was the real architect of the raids, 24-year-old hoover, then head of the justice department's radical division, of course, not long afterwards head of the bureau of investigation that became the fbi. the post hoover occupied for decades. hoover was enraged against post and prepared a huge dossier of material against him. he got the american legion to demand post be fired. hoover got congress to investigate post. 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 and 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 provocateurs. for example, here is 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. look more closely at the one at the upper right. he is the secretary of the local wobbly branch supposedly named leo walsh. his real name was lewis m. wendell. he was agent 836 of the bureau of investigation, predecessor of the fbi. for two years he had been active in the branch in pittsburgh,pin meet hoover and brief him. some of what the pittsburgh group was accused of doing was instigated by him. another aspect of these very repress receive ye repressive years is that not only did the justice department greatly increase its spying on progressive activists of all sorts, but so did the american militar military. the key figure here was a man named lieutenant colonel ralph h. van demon. he was a career army officer. he had gotten his start in intelligence work in the philippine war. if you are familiar with that war, i'm sure, an extremely brutal conflict where torture was routine by the u.s. army against filipinos who had the affro affrontery to want their country to be independent. he headed army intelligence operations in that war. he set up a vast system of card files on filipino independents and he mobilized hundreds of u.s. army officers across the island to feed him information. then he had other posts in the military. but he 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 in europe. it was rather an excuse to spy on so-called subversives here at home. within a year, he had more than 1,000 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. labor activists of all kinds, people outspoken against the war, amassing tens of thousands of pages on such americans here at home. van demon moved on, but the practice of military intelligence spying on american civilians continued for decades. for example, i was active in the anti-war movement in the 1960s working against the vietnam war. in the '70s 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 civilians. going back to 1919, 1920, the military in this area -- in this era were very worried about trouble from many sources, and they thought always in ethnic terms. italians were possible anarchists. jews was possible socialsociali. irish were possible irish republican army someboympathize. black americans were a threat to be contained. here sis a reflection of militay thinking at the time. it's part of an ethnic map of new york city. it shows the northeastern corner of manhattan. it was prepared in 1919 by the former head of military intelligence for new york. it is color and letter coded by ethnici ethnicities. red is for russian jews. c or brown is for italians. j, dark gray, is for negro as they were called then. e, the blueish color just at the bottom right is for irish. the numbers on them 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 had actuallypared a contingency plan to put the whole country under martial law, complete with the words of proclamation that the president should issue if that happened. happily, things did not reach that point. but it's a reminder of how close to the brink we came. basically, several things happenehappen happened. the russian revolution did not spread to the united states. the labor movement had been effectively crushed. but those who had been active against the war didn't stay quiet. remember the young social worker 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 founding -- the founder and moving spirit for decades of the american civil liberties union. remember kate richards o'hare, the jailed anti-war 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. under pressure from that picketing and those demonstrations, he finally let all 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 actually got to the white house. what can we conclude about this era? i think it was a time when american democracy came very close to losing its soul. it's also a time that reminds us of the dark currents of xenophobia, nativism and eagerness to hunt for scapegoats that have long run below the surface many thin this country which 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 she was accused of being unpatriotic. and 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, he is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults. it was a good definition of patriotism then. and i think it still is today. so thank you very much. i would be glad to hear any comments or questions that people have. >> we do have a number of questions coming into the question and answer box. continue to type them there. we would be happy to take them. before i get to nose,those, i wondered if you could speak to the role of the flu pandemic in 1919 and its relationship to all these other events. is it something that's 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. it was one of the bases where u.s. soldiers were being trained to be sent in vast numbers to europe. and then they can trace how it spread from there across the atlantic and outward from the french port where many of the ships carrying american soldiers landed. of course, today we're all being told that -- 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 troop ship, in a trench in france. so the flu just spread like wildfire then. the press censorship at the time did not help, because many newspapers were under pressure to downplay the urgency of the epidemic. >> thank you. it seep seems like a difficult period. we have a number of questions. looking through here. ross wants to know if there were legal challenges to censorship during and after world war i. >> legal challenges, yes, there were. i'm not as up to date on the cases as i should be, because i haven't gotten yet to that part of the book that i'm writing. i'm still in 1917 and 1918. but there were legal challenges. one of them was turned down by the supreme court. it was then that oliver 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 -- 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 vigorous dissent which said censorship has gone too far. ask me in a year and i will have a better answer for you, once i reach that point in my book. >> also on a legal note, rich wants to know, is there any legal basis for martial law? is there a way it's constitutional? >> good question. again, that's -- 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 out 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 and for school integration famously in little rock. buttal fu lthe full legalities 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, existing organizations, as well as newly formed organizations like the aclu and national women's party. >> certainly, 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 hype aibernation. the movement was smashed in 1918 to 1920. the iww, for instance, was essentially eviscerated by the government. most militant labor union. they arrested more than 100 top officials of the iww. raided every single office arndt country, confiscated five tons of documents which were later burned by the justice department. put more than 100 people on trial in a four-month show trial in chicago in 1919 -- in 1918. sent these folks to prison. it was the largest mass trial ever in american history. it was essentially a signal the government was crushing the most militant wing of the labor movement. in the early 1920s, even the very moderate american federation of labor lost more than a million members. the united states, harding, coolidge, hoover, was not friendly in the left in any way. i think the left and the labor movement didn't really come back to life in a big way until the 1930s under roosevelt. >> thank you very much. again, just wonderful questions coming in. this is a group of history educators. we're very interested in the sources. >> i can see from the questions. >> you can see them, too. in fact, if there are favorites -- i am seeing a number of questions about your primary sources. if some are available digitally, particularly that amazing map you showed, or if they will be reproduced in your upcoming book. we are ee nonamored of the documents. >> that map i found online. i couldn't tell you exactly the website involved. 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, which is associated with ancestry, has digitized a number of -- a vast number of military records. and they have also digitized the records of the bureau of investigation spying on subversives during this period, because this is a military know 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'm delighted to find hundreds of thousands of pages of their records online. another fleetremendously useful resource is the library's conicaling of old newspapers. and, of course, those of you who are connected with universities and other institutions that have subscriptions through their libraries now about the hathy trust, which is digitized, millions of pages of old newspapers and other publications. so there are a lot of things -- there are 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 some inmet who toi met who told me a it, there was a clothing mill in the state of georgia which somehow or other somebody at georgia tech found out that this company had a stash of old paperwork and records and so forth in its basement. and the georgia tech library people asked, you know, could we have a look at this stuff? and they took it over, went through the collection, discovered all sorts of business records gag baoing back to 1900 so. and among them were reports by private detectives who had been hired to infiltrate the labor force at this plant. and reporting to the managers and what they found in the labor force. i mean, i love sources like that because normally reports of undercover agents is the kind of thing that your know, you can't easily find. they get destroyed, they get hidden. so there are an awful lot of sources out there, yeah. and when this book is done, just as with all the other books i've written, historical books, they'll be very, very full of source notes and exactly where you can find the material. >> and nshg is a member of the library of congress consortium so i would like to make a pitch for chronic cal americans, you must use that. those digitized newspapers are free and available, if you look at those. if you do have a moment, sylvia wonders if you could address the impact of black soldiers protesting, not getting support following the war. the vets who camped outside d.c. following the war. >> yeah. it was, you know, 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 there wethey were alway confined in segregated regul re and often assigned the worst jobs. but they went to combat. but they came back to the united states where there was a boom in lynchings and where white workers were terrified that the jobs that they expected to come home tonight be taken by a black man. that's what produced, you know, this -- this terrible rioting and protests where, of course, when the police charged in to sort of break up fights and so on, it was almost always the blacks who got arrested, and sometimes killed and very seldom the whites. there are at least ten 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 do 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. yet king leopold struck history. people will almost certainly find your name first. how do you reflect 20 years later that this particular book has taken on this sort of life? >> well, it's 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 published three other books, a couple won minor awards, received nice reviews in the "new york times" and so forth. but, of the ten publishers who received the book proposal for king leopold's ghost, that's the very detailed memo you write to tell a publisher that you're going to include in the book. of the ten publishers who received it, three of whom were people i knew personally. nine of the ten turned it down. and i still have letters from some of them saying, yeah, it's a good idea but we don't think anybody's interested or there isn't even an african history shelf in most bookshelves and most book stores. or, why don't you try this as a magazine article first. but the tenth publisher sort of got it, and that's the publisher i've been with ever since. i think -- you know, i think part of the reason why the book caught on was that i tried to tell the story in a way where i could tell the story through the people in it. and history had handed me some extraordinary characters, as if, you know, handing me the ingredients on a platter for a great dinner and all i had to do was just mix them up. you know, here was this brilliant, veraciously 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, you know, explorers, missionaries, crusading journalists, black and white, american, european, african who were trying to expose the things that the king was doing. and, for me, it was his thattort demanded to be told through them. and one of the problems with history writing often is that although there is a tradition in certain areas of the telling stories that way, i mean, look at the number of biographies and collective biographies we have, for example, of the founding fathers, of abraham lincoln and the people around him. or books about the civil war and world war ii particular generals and people that went through those wars. in many other areas, the people who are writing in them don't tend to tell history that way because they're 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. about i spent ten years as a magazine editor. i think in many ways that was very good training, because what a magazine editor is thinking about all the time is, what do we have to do to make people read this 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 in it? that's 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 everything foot footnoted, source notes, bibliotography, all that kind of stuff. >> we're going to close close out in a minute, if you could read the quote about patriotism one more time. >> okay. >> let me find it here. >> all right. this was something ema goldman said she and her long time comrade alexander burkman were put on trial in 1917 for organizing against the draft. and she begins at, gentleman of the jury, because, of course, in those days there were no women on juries. and here's what said. gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriottism, but may there not be different kinds of patriotism? our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. he is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults. it's -- it's really one of my favorite quotations. and i'm condensing it from her full speech, which think you could pretty easily find online because, again, anything, you know, of that era we're out of copyright and the books are going to be there and google books, whatever, i think if you search by a few phrases in that quote you'll easily find the whole speech. >> well thank you. i think that's a wonderful way to end. we so appreciate you being with us, adam, especially in a changed format, you're willingness to be flexible is really quite extraordinary. we thank you. all the history educate towards, we had just about a hundred people joining us today, that's wonderful. history enthusiasts from across the country. we really appreciate that. >> announcer: tonight on american history tv the c-span cities tour explores the american story with a look at the great depression era. hear stories and visit places around the nation related to this historic economic downturn to. fold by city tours stops featuring the history of chapel hill, north carolina, ama rail low, texa amarillo, texas. watch c-span 3 on tv now and on the radio. in his new book, he details why he thinks people make inaccurate judgments about people they don't know. >> you can step on out now. >> i don't have to step out of my car. >> step out of the zblar i'm goi going to drag you out of here. >> you're going to drag me out of my own car? >> get out of the car! >> she's imprisoned and a few days later she hangs herself in her cell. a tragic and unexpected result. but the whole -- that exchange that we saw, which, by the way, goes on and on and on, we only saw a small snippet of it, is -- that was the kind of -- when i first saw that online, that was when i realized what i wanted to write about. because if you break that exchange down moment by moment, you see multiple failures of understanding, of empathy, of a million things. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q&a. having lived through a loss of confidence in our institutions, a wave of cynicism that has left us unable to trust what we are told by anyone who calls themselves an expert, it becomes very difficult for us to rise to a challenge like this. our first reaction is to say, no, they're lying to us, they're only in it for themselves. a lot of our national institutions have got to take on the challenge of persuading people again that they exist for us, that they're here for the country. >> sunday, june 7th at noon eastern on in-depth, a live conversation with author and american enterprise scholar. his most recent book is a time to build. other titles include the great debate, and the fractured republic. join the conversation with your phone calls, tweets, texts, and facebook messages. watch in-depth on book tv on c-span 2. [ cannons firing ]. on september 26th of 1980 tine, they launched the meuse argonne offensive. they attacked along the four hundred mile western front.

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