The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Would Donald Trump actually have loved being president back in 1917?
[1] That's the argument from the author of a new book called American Midnight, The Great War, a violent peace, and democracies forgotten crisis.
[2] The Boston Globe writes in its book review that those years around 1917, where a brutal chapter of American history almost always omitted from high school textbooks and the standard history offerings at the nation's university, the author of American Midnight, Adam Hoekshild joins me on the podcast.
[3] Good morning, Adam.
[4] How are you?
[5] Good to be with you, Charlie.
[6] Adam is a lecturer at UC Berkeley's School of Journalism and the author of 11 books.
[7] So, okay, so we're talking about a book written about the Wilson administration more than 100 years ago.
[8] Tell me why you wrote it.
[9] What were you thinking at the time you began writing it back in 2017?
[10] a hundred years to the date from what you're describing.
[11] That's right.
[12] It was exactly 100 years earlier.
[13] That period has always fascinated me, in part because my parents, who had me when they were quite far along in years, lived through it and often used to talk about it.
[14] And I've always thought of the First World War as the time when our whole world sort of took a turn for the worst.
[15] Simon Shama talks about the First World War as the original sin of the 20th century.
[16] And one of the ways that's reflected in the United States was a terrific crackdown on domestic descent of all kinds.
[17] And when I plunged into this period, it was just at the time that Donald Trump became president.
[18] And so many of the things that he was talking about, you know, criminalizing the news media and, you know, building walls along the border and keeping immigrants out of the United States and so forth, were to me echoed so much things that happened during this period 100 years ago.
[19] And the more the time went on, the more I realized that Trump would have loved being president back then, because not only could he have trumpeted about a lot of the things that he did talk about, like, you know, cutting down on immigration of all kinds, but he could have done things he would have liked to do, like shutting down dissident media, like throwing his political opponents in jail.
[20] You know, when he was campaigning in 2016, his followers chanted, lock her up, lock her up about Hillary Clinton.
[21] Well, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, went one better and actually did lock up a sizable number of his political opponents.
[22] What I find really interesting about this book is I have a thing for histories of underappreciated periods of American life.
[23] And you read in this book, never was the raw underside of our nation's life more revealingly on display than from 1917 to 1921.
[24] It's the story of how a war who was supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home.
[25] And as you just mentioned, a lot of this took place under the presidency, almost all of it took place under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who's normally identified as this progressive icon.
[26] And yet, and yet, as you described, you know, oversaw the censorship of speech, jailing of political opponents, deporting immigrants, fail to protect black citizens.
[27] And, you know, this is one of those, you know, moments we look back on, you know, the quirks of history.
[28] Because when I was growing up, you know, Woodrow Wilson was this progressive giant, right?
[29] It was only later, I think, I think it was Jonah Goldberg's book was the first time that, you know, I ever heard him described as somebody who was a, who was a white racist, who, who aired birth of a nation in the White House, who was engaged and, you know, who was the, you know, presided over the red scare.
[30] So, I mean, there's a real irony in history there that this period that echoes Donald Trump was actually, you know, what we thought of at the time as a, and for many years afterwards, as a progressive era.
[31] That's true.
[32] And I think the lesson of it is that you don't have to be a loudmouth showman to preside over a period of great repression.
[33] In personal style, nobody could be more different than.
[34] from Donald Trump, then Woodrow Wilson.
[35] He was as genteel, as dignified, as professorial, a person as you could imagine.
[36] He was a Democrat.
[37] He was indeed elected as a progressive.
[38] And, you know, in his first term in office from 1913 to 1917, you know, there was some mild progressive measures, a little more regulation of business, progressive income tax, child labor law, a few things.
[39] like that.
[40] But then he really did preside over this extremely harsh repression.
[41] Two things kicked that off.
[42] The first was when the United States entered the First World War in April of 1917.
[43] That set off an absolute frenzy of mindless super patriotism of all sorts and provided the excuse for all kinds of crackdowns.
[44] The Espionage Act was passed immediately after that happened.
[45] Ironically, the same law, an amended version of which is still in effect, which could get Donald Trump in trouble today over those classified documents at Mar -a -Lago.
[46] Then the second thing that intensified this midnight period that I write about was the Russian Revolution, November of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, the most extreme faction of the Russian revolutionaries, seized power in that country.
[47] And many people in the American establishment were terrified that the Russian revolution was going to spread to the United States.
[48] So that added more impetus to the crackdown.
[49] So one of the things that I think is interesting looking back at this period is the period before the war, the run up to the war, you know, appear to be an era of good feeling.
[50] You had the avant -garde, flour.
[51] and literature, art, and music, as you write, people were convinced the world was changing in a good way.
[52] So it felt as if the culture was headed in a different direction.
[53] And the war and the Russian revolution either broke this or did it reveal something that was always under the surface?
[54] I guess that's the question we keep coming back to in the Trump era.
[55] How much is Trump, you know, is Trump -centric?
[56] And how much of it is Trump as a symptom of an underlying condition.
[57] So how much of this was there?
[58] Because you're talking about anti -immigrant rhetoric, attacks on the media, white backlash, conspiracy theory, suppression of civil liberty.
[59] Was all of that sort of paper thin and we were just revealed how vulnerable it all was back then?
[60] Well, you know, I think both Trump himself and these events a hundred years earlier that I just mentioned, the entry into the First World War and the Russian Revolution, they were both like setting on fire or increasing the flames under something that was already smoldering because the myth was that the United States was a peaceful country that was drawn reluctantly into this terrible war that was going on in Europe.
[61] But the United States, even though that period, as you said, before the First World War was one of great optimism that things were getting better, was not a peaceful country.
[62] There were a lot of very severe conflicts going on, business versus labor.
[63] Dozens of people were killed in labor violence each year.
[64] In 1913, 1914 alone, more than 70 people were killed by the National Guard in a Colorado Miner's strike.
[65] That was one smoldering conflict that entering the war turned up the flames under.
[66] Another was that between nativists and immigrants.
[67] which has long been there in the United States where people whose ancestors came a couple of generations ago have always been uneasy about people who are coming from new and different parts of the world in their own time.
[68] Today, of course, it's people who are upset about immigrants coming in mainly from Latin America.
[69] A hundred years ago, there was almost no immigration from Latin America, but the majority of the white population of the U .S. were people who'd come, whose ancestors had come from northwestern Europe, Great Britain, British Isles, Germany, Holland, Denmark, and so forth.
[70] They were upset with the newer waves of immigrants who were coming primarily from southern and eastern Europe, that is, Italians, Poles, and Jews, who in the eyes of these older stock Americans were, so to speak, not yet white.
[71] And so there was a tremendous move to restrict this immigration.
[72] The leading presidential candidates up to the very last minute in 1920 on both sides, Republican and Democrat, campaigned on promises of mass deportations.
[73] And they continued into the 1920s with the passage of very, very restrictive, racially -based immigration laws.
[74] That's right.
[75] In 1924, they basically slammed the door on immigration for the next 41 years.
[76] That's what kept out refugees from the Holocaust.
[77] And then the third conflict that was going on was the long one between black and white Americans.
[78] Many people, especially in the South, never really wanted to admit that the South had lost the Civil War.
[79] Most black Americans, you know, in 1917, were working in horrible, low -paid jobs as sharecroppers picking cotton and stuff like that.
[80] they were starting to flee the South in the Great Migration, the war and the boom and industrial production that it unleashed, speeded that up, but a lot of white northerners in the northern big cities didn't want them coming in.
[81] And we saw in 1919 the worst racial violence in American history since the South had rolled back reconstruction in the 1870s.
[82] So both the war and the Russian Revolution speeded up.
[83] and intensified these conflicts that were already there.
[84] So I want to keep going back and forth between these echoes of what happened from 1917 to 1921 and the current situation.
[85] There are a lot of concerns about attacks on civil liberties, the possibility of insipion fascism, the breakdown of the various guardrails.
[86] But as you write, what we had after World War I was the greatest repression of civil liberties in the country since the end.
[87] end of slavery.
[88] So Donald Trump may have, you know, chanted lock her up about Hillary Clinton, but Drew Wilson actually did lock up the socialist candidate for president from 1912, Eugene Debs, for posing the entry into the war.
[89] So, I mean, back then, in fact, you could be jailed for things you said or you wrote.
[90] A rather remarkable period in American culture.
[91] And I guess the question is, for people who say, well, that can't happen here because we have the First Amendment, it did happen.
[92] And so what was the climate of speech and First Amendment protections back during this Wilson era?
[93] Well, during these four years that I'm focusing on, early 1917 when the U .S. entered the war to early 1921 when the Wilson administration left office, the best estimate is that roughly 1 ,000 Americans spent a year or more in jail and a much larger number, shorter periods of time, solely for things that they wrote or said.
[94] Just an astounding figure.
[95] More than 450 of those people were in federal prisons.
[96] A slightly larger number, it's estimated, were in state prisons because states around the country passed copycat laws similar to the Espionage Act, some of which were actually drafted by the Department of Justice.
[97] And it's an astounding degree of repression.
[98] I think actually that, if I can be optimistic for a second, I think we do have a greater appreciation of civil liberties today than existed 100 years ago.
[99] And, you know, civil liberties is something that's beyond political partisanship.
[100] For example, a very influential organization came out of this period, the American Civil Liberties Union, which began its life under a slightly different name as an advocate for imprisoned draft resistors in 1917.
[101] So I think there is more of a sense of the importance of the Bill of Rights today than there was 100 years ago, but we still face an awful lot of dangers.
[102] And I don't need to tell you because the bulwark has been writing about those things in a very articulate way.
[103] We can come back to this because I certainly hope you're right about the optimism.
[104] My takeaway, however, from your work was a reminder of how fragile these things are and perhaps how thin the adherence to liberal values are because this was an ugly period in American history and that we went through it.
[105] And so let's come back to that in a moment.
[106] You know, you talked about some of the other things that happened, the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, and I've talked about this numerous times now on the podcast, and I continue to be slightly embarrassed, no, not slightly, considerably embarrassed, about the fact that I was really unaware of this until relatively recently.
[107] And I guess the question is, how could so much of this have been erased from our history, you know, reading about the palmer raids, these raids on radicals, you know, the jailing of, you know, prominent political figures.
[108] And as you point out, we memory hold a lot of that.
[109] So it raises questions about the American memory and the American sense of self, that a lot of our history that leaves out things like that does feel very, very whitewashed.
[110] That's true.
[111] I think every country has a strong impulse to play up the good, noble -sounding parts of its history and to downplay the bad parts.
[112] I've written about this as applies to other countries.
[113] You know, one of my books, King Leopold's Ghost was about Belgian colonization of the Congo, which was a very nasty business, which led to a decrease in that population's territory of some 10 million people.
[114] And this thing was almost completely left out of Belgian history books.
[115] Same thing in Great Britain when they talked about the heritage of slavery and the British Empire, something else I've written about.
[116] And the United States is no different on that score.
[117] The period that I wrote about in American Midnight, I think, usually gets left out of the standard high school history textbook.
[118] When I took American history in high school, in any case, there was one chapter on the first World War.
[119] The doughboys went off to Europe in those broad -brimed Forest Ranger hats.
[120] They fought the war bravely, helped to win, came back.
[121] Chapter ends, you turn the page, and then it's the Roaring 20s, prohibitions, speak -easies, Babe Ruth, and so on.
[122] So we do tend to sanitize our history.
[123] And, you know, we see it, for example, in how slavery is dealt with in history textbooks.
[124] Today, you know, there's a great deal about it.
[125] But it wasn't always the case.
[126] When I went to high school in the 1950s, we learned there was slavery in the United States, but it was important only as a cause of the American Civil War.
[127] We never read a slave narrative.
[128] When my kids went to high school in the 1980s, there were slave narratives that they read.
[129] They learned much more about it.
[130] Why?
[131] I think it was the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
[132] If, for example, before 1970, you had visited that wonderful collection of reconstructed 18th century buildings at Colonial Williamsburg and Virginia, there was nothing there that indicated that half the population of the original Williamsburg were slaves.
[133] After 1970, that started to change, and the whole exhibits are very different today.
[134] So what we see in our history usually doesn't change until somebody comes along that really pushes us and says, look at this, acknowledge this.
[135] And that's true across the board in all countries.
[136] And this is not revisionist history.
[137] This is filling in the gaps.
[138] You know, for example, and I do think that obviously these narratives are crucial to way a nation sees itself in the way it confronts its problems.
[139] So, for example, you were mentioning slavery.
[140] I was thinking about the way that I was taught about the Civil War.
[141] And I think still the dominant narrative is, you know, Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War, freed the slaves.
[142] And yes, there were problems after that, but that problem was solved in 1865.
[143] Whereas the history of reconstruction, you know, I remember the high school textbooks that I have.
[144] You know, reconstruction was about the carpetbaggers.
[145] And fortunately, that came to an end.
[146] Well, Reconstruction that led to Jim Crow was not one of the great eras of American history.
[147] And so it was an open sore that was never resolved.
[148] And when we have debates about race, if the assumption is that, you know, that closed the book on that, we solved there, you're going to have a very different reaction to then you remember, I'm sorry, we have had a, you know, a century and a half of not resolving what happened back then.
[149] And I feel the same way about the history that you're describing, the nativism, the conspiracy theories, the contempt for civil liberties, the, you know, willingness to throttle the media.
[150] Those are still out there.
[151] They very much are.
[152] And there's so many continuities to today.
[153] I mean, when you look at the number of conspiracy theories that are in circulation today, where everybody from George Soros to a Washington, D .C. pizza parlor gets blamed for all kinds of evil happenings in the world.
[154] This same stuff was going on a hundred years ago.
[155] The villains were different.
[156] George Soros wasn't around yet, but the villains were, for example, the Pope, or it was revolutionaries in Russia, who admittedly were doing some horrible things.
[157] They were pulling all the strings here, whereas, in fact, they had no direct influence in the United States at all.
[158] And this conspiratorial thinking was so prevalent that I think the greatest single example of it was this.
[159] In early 1920, the Democratic Attorney General, Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, who was the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in the conventions coming up that summer.
[160] He repeatedly declared, and it was headline news all over the country, that on May 1st, May Day, the International Communist Holiday, May 1st, 1920, there would be a communist uprising in the United States.
[161] He said this again and again and again.
[162] And, you know, they put the National Guard on alert.
[163] New York City called in all three shifts of its police force.
[164] One shift was on the street.
[165] The other two were waiting in station houses.
[166] J .P. Morgan and other bigwigs hired extra guards as they posted security people everywhere at bus terminals and ferry terminals.
[167] The whole country waited for this uprising.
[168] May 1st came and absolutely nothing happened.
[169] It took the wind out of Attorney General Palmer's presidential campaign, which was a good thing, I think.
[170] Well, that's good.
[171] There were consequences back then for being full of it.
[172] That's good.
[173] But it really shows you the extent to which this conspiratorial thinking spread throughout the country.
[174] Here was the Attorney General who believed all this stuff.
[175] I also remember, I'm thinking back to talking about the way we remember the 1920s, the first time that I saw a picture of this massive march on Washington, D .C. by the Ku Klux Klan.
[176] I mean, it's outside the four -year period that you're writing about, but it's very much part of this.
[177] Was it 1923, 1924?
[178] I think it was 1924, and you can actually find film of it on YouTube.
[179] All these guys in their white robes, you know, marching down.
[180] you know, like with the Washington monument in the background.
[181] It's incredible.
[182] This was a big deal, and they were still a major force in Democratic Party politics, including at the famous 1924 Democratic National Convention, where they had, what, you know, 105 ballots, 106 ballots.
[183] So, you know, that endured that you had that kind of nativist, racist, anti -Semitic, undercurrent in American politics.
[184] It was very much there, and the clan had flourished after the Civil War and when the South was basically dismantling a reconstruction, then it sort of got eclipsed.
[185] During the period I was writing about 1917 to 21, it had come back to life, but people with that impulse were mainly involved in other organizations.
[186] And I talk about one in American Midnight, which was something called the American Protective League, which was basically a vigilante.
[187] group chartered by the Justice Department, which went around arresting people doing citizens' arrests on tens of thousands of young men who were suspected of evading the draft.
[188] They arrested in the largest of these slacker raids, as they were called.
[189] They arrested 50 ,000 people, more than 50 ,000 people in New York City in 1918.
[190] They held them sometimes up to several days at a time while their papers could be checked.
[191] only a very tiny percentage of them actually were trying to evade the draft.
[192] But this organization, the American Protective League, had 250 ,000 members.
[193] And when the Justice Department finally disbanded it at the end of the war, many of its members moved on into the clan.
[194] Well, I probably have a better memory of some of the things you're talking about, not because I'm that old, but because I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
[195] And those of us here in Milwaukee have everybody's got a story about what it was like because this was a heavily German city.
[196] And so felt the brunt of much of the paranoia that hit the country back in and back during World War I. I mean, the whole idea.
[197] I mean, if people were upset about, you know, dachshunds and, you know, things like that, or hot dogs, you can imagine what it would have been like in a city like Milwaukee.
[198] And, of course, we had a congressman, Victor Berger, who lost his seat because he descended from the war.
[199] So, I mean, this hit home.
[200] And so it was very, very concentrated here that this was a period where all Americans were not equal and the First Amendment was not going to protect you against this sort of thing.
[201] Yeah.
[202] Victor Berger got in trouble both because he was German speaking and because he was from a socialist party.
[203] And he didn't lose his seat because of a decision of the voters, but because the House of Representatives refused twice to seat him.
[204] He was actually from the moderate wing of the Socialist Party, but that was not enough.
[205] He was denied his seat in Congress.
[206] I heard a little growing up about the anti -German hysteria because my father, who was in his early 20s at this time, lived in New York.
[207] His father was a Jewish immigrant from Germany, and they spoke German around the dining room table at home.
[208] But they knew they would get beaten up if they did so on the street.
[209] many states passed laws against speaking German in public or on the telephone.
[210] There were bonfires of German language books all over the country.
[211] You have to use the word hysteria applied to this period.
[212] And then it morphed very smoothly into hysteria that the Russian Revolution was going to spread to the United States, something that realistically I don't think there was any chance of whatever.
[213] But that provided a pretext for cracking down on socialists and radicals of all kinds and on people who were not particularly radical, but, you know, like Senator Robert LaFaloid of Wisconsin.
[214] And as a Wisconsinite, you know about him.
[215] He was not a socialist.
[216] He was not an anarchist.
[217] He was a progressive Republican.
[218] But he...
[219] Critic of the war.
[220] He was a critic of the war.
[221] And he said, rightly so, I think, if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy, Wilson's famous statement, why aren't we pushing for self -determination for Egypt, for India, for Ireland?
[222] These were, of course, colonies of our new ally, Great Britain.
[223] And for that, he started receiving nooses in the mail.
[224] He was booted out of a club he belonged to in Madison, Wisconsin.
[225] They burned him an effigy at the University of Wisconsin.
[226] his alma mater and he had a had a terrible time so i think it is accurate to describe what happened as hysterian we were it felt like we were we in wisconsin were kind of ground zero to that hysteria but the hysteria was nationwide as well as the nativism that you're describing and they use towards civil liberty so i guess the question is did the fever break or did it just go underground because we don't think of the 20s as being this hysterical period that you're describing now?
[227] I think it both did break, but a lot of it did go underground, and we've seen it surface again later.
[228] It broke partly because what I was just talking about, you know, Palmer, the Attorney General predicted this nationwide uprising, which never came.
[229] By mid -late 1920, it was clear the Russian Revolution was not going to spread to the United States.
[230] Also, some of the economic stress that had, you know, caused a lot of agitation and a huge wave of strikes in 1990 when there were four million returning war veterans and not enough jobs for them because all of the factories, you know, making tanks and guns and planes and artillery shells and so on were shutting down, that began to ease in 1920.
[231] And, you know, people went to the beach and not to the barricades.
[232] So I think people realized they had gone overboard on this.
[233] And it's interesting to see that this Lafalot, who had been a very harsh critic of the war, got re -elected to Congress.
[234] And in fact, he received about a sixth of the popular vote nationally when as an independent candidate he ran for president in 1994, I believe.
[235] So millions of people around the world really I realized, I think, that the First World War, which they had all endorsed so patriotically and enthusiastically when it began, 1914 in Europe and 1917 for the United States, they realized that the war had remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way and that they faced a bitter, angry, resentful Germany, and of course we know what the consequences of that were.
[236] So they were inclined to be much more forgiving now to people who had been critics of the war.
[237] And Warren Harding, who became president in 1921, actually said off the record that the U .S. had made a terrible mistake to enter the war.
[238] And he let Eugene Debs, whom Wilson had imprisoned, out of prison, remitted his sentence, and invited Debs to come and visit him in Washington on the way home.
[239] And when Debs left the White House, he told reporters, you know, I've run for the White House five times, But this is the first time I've ever gotten here.
[240] No, it is a reminder of how strange history can be that it's Woodrow Wilson, who's remembered as this great progressive hero who jailed Eugene Jebbs and Warren Harding, who is reviled as a sort of mediocre, corrupt Republican who actually freed him.
[241] So you're talking about the lessons that people learned from World War I in the aftermath.
[242] Well, many people also drew obviously the wrong conclusion as the country became isolationist, turned in.
[243] inward.
[244] And obviously, the nativism did not abate, considering that in the 1920s, they did pass what you've described as one of the most racist immigration policies.
[245] I really want to have a more optimistic view of this.
[246] But, you know, as you wrote, one of the reasons for optimism is that a new generation of liberals learned what not to do from Wilson.
[247] And they influenced policy during FDR.
[248] But FDR was also responsible for what I think can fairly be called one of the worst abuses of civil liberties in American history, the internment of Japanese -Americans, so that lesson was not completely learned, was it?
[249] Absolutely.
[250] I mean, FDR was a paradoxical president that way.
[251] The internment was an awful thing.
[252] On the whole, I like him a whole lot better as president than I do Wilson.
[253] But Wilson, to come back to him, was a very paradoxical man. He did preside over this enormous repression of civil liberties in this country.
[254] I think really the worst since the aftermath of slavery.
[255] Nothing else comes close to it.
[256] We haven't even talked about press censorship, which was extreme during this period.
[257] 75 newspapers and magazines forced to close down by Wilson's press censor.
[258] At the same time, he was a man of paradox because he was genuinely idealistic about his pet project, the League of Nations.
[259] And he was so committed to that that it really shortened his life because when he was in ill health, he went in 1919 on a long speaking tour around the country, talking up the League of Nations, which the Senate was threatening to vote down and eventually did vote down.
[260] And Wilson so exhausted himself on this speaking tour, and doing a speaking tour a hundred years ago meant shouting because there were no public.
[261] address system.
[262] So if you want to address, you know, 10 ,000 people on a baseball stadium, you have to shout.
[263] And it was during that tour that he had the first of two almost fatal strokes, rushed back to the White House, had the second stroke and was really out of commission for the last year and a half of his presidency.
[264] Would his vision of the League of Nations actually have stopped the world from going to war again?
[265] I doubt it.
[266] I doubt that it would have been that what he envisioned, which was a League of Nations with the United States the most influential player in it, I doubt that it would have been any more effective than the UN has been since 1945 in preventing conflict.
[267] But nobody can argue with the idea that it's better for nations to talk out their differences than to fight about them.
[268] And this was the same man who presided over censorship, political imprisonment, repression of free speech on a huge scale, at the same time as he was pushing this very idealistic note.
[269] How do you explain that?
[270] He's a former president of Princeton University.
[271] We would think of somebody coming from academia as having some more respect for freedom of thought, academic freedom.
[272] What is your take on that weird dichotomy in Woodrow Wilson?
[273] Well, I think he was so convinced of his own.
[274] rightness about everything, that he saw anybody who disagreed with him as a threat.
[275] And he pushed hard for a censorship provision to be in the Espionage Act.
[276] And he urged Congress to give the government the powers of censorship.
[277] Congress actually defeated that section of the bill, but they allowed censorship by a different provision of the bill, which was that they, gave to the Postmaster General the power to declare a publication unmailable.
[278] Now, this, of course, didn't affect mainstream daily newspapers, which were sold on street corners and delivered to people's homes, but for weeklies, monthlies, journals of opinion, and the vast majority of the country's foreign language press, the mail was essential because before the Internet, before radio and TV, there was no other way of reaching their subscribers.
[279] And the Postmaster General, who had this power, was an awful guy, Albert Burleson, former congressman from Texas, arch segregationist when he was born, his family had owned 20 slaves.
[280] And he loved being chief censor and, you know, banned hundreds of specific issues of newspapers and magazines from the mail, forced 75 publications to close.
[281] And every once while he would do that to some magazine where, you know, the editor had a connection to Wilson and would write to Wilson and say, you know, you can't do this.
[282] And you shouldn't do this.
[283] And Wilson would send a note to Burleson and say, can you look into this case?
[284] And Burleson would write back and say, yes, but these people have violated the Espionage Act.
[285] And Wilson never pursued any of these things at all.
[286] And indeed, there are cases, and I cite, one or two in the book, where he saw something that annoyed him in a publication and asked Burleson or his attorney general, can you shut this thing down?
[287] So was Woodrow Wilson what we now describe as an authoritarian?
[288] Because we're talking, you know, obviously there's been a lot of, you know, buzz about the increased authoritarianism around the world, the tendency in American politics.
[289] The way you describe him sounds like a classic authoritarian, somebody who is so imbued with a sense of his own righteousness and the power of government to make him.
[290] everything better, that he really wasn't a libertarian.
[291] He may have had these visions for the international order, but Woodrow Wilson, was he the first real authoritarian president America's ever had?
[292] That's a good question.
[293] I think there are other presidents before him who had authoritarian tendencies in their personality.
[294] I'm no expert on this, but certainly Andrew Jackson had some of that.
[295] But I think Wilson did have this tendency to believe that once he'd made up his mind, he was right.
[296] He was also somebody who had no appetite whatever for the sort of backstage wheeling and dealing that is the stuff of democratic politics, Democratic with a small D. You know, there are presidents who get things done know that you have to do that.
[297] You have to negotiate with your enemies.
[298] You have to give them a few things and take a few things in return.
[299] And somebody like Linda Johnson got the civil rights bills through Congress by doing that.
[300] Wilson had no interest in this at all.
[301] And he was supremely convinced of his own righteousness.
[302] And that's always something dangerous.
[303] And a political leader, even if it's in a democratic system like ours.
[304] And we see the dangers of it in, you know, Russia and China today.
[305] So the reason why I'm so interested in this question of did the fever break or do just go underground because now fast forwarding to 2017, 2018, and everyone's looking around saying, you know, how did this happen?
[306] Where did this come from?
[307] You know, why did we miss the depth of, you know, anti -immigrant sentiment?
[308] Where does the contempt for free speech come to?
[309] Where is this, you know, where does the white backlash been, the conspiracy theories, the willingness to suppress civil liberties?
[310] And part of the answer seems to be it's always been there.
[311] And that maybe we told ourselves different stories, but it's been an undertone since at least 1917 that a lot of this is, does echo so clearly where we were 100 years ago, which means what we've been for the past 100 years, although we told ourselves a different story.
[312] You take a more optimistic view than that, though.
[313] Well, I think you're basically right about that, Charlie, that it's always been there.
[314] And it was there before 1917.
[315] You know, the no -nothing riots.
[316] even before the Civil War, where at that point the immigrant group that they were upset about was Irish Catholics, and there were people killed in these riots.
[317] So that's always been there.
[318] I do think today I'm somewhat optimistic that we have more respect for the idea of civil liberties, but how widely that respect extends throughout the population is an open question.
[319] And when we have a political system where through gerrymandering, through the structure of the U .S. Senate, elect somebody president.
[320] Somebody who wins a minority of the popular vote can become president.
[321] So, you know, when you have those structural dangers, it means you don't necessarily have to have the majority of the population convinced of something to have something very nasty pervary.
[322] The book is American Midnight, The Great War of Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis.
[323] Adam Hochschild, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
[324] Well, thank you, Charlie.
[325] It's been a pleasure to be able to talk about this.
[326] The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Siri.
[327] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[328] Thank you for listening to today's Bullwark podcast, and we'll be back tomorrow and do this all over again.