The anti-German, pro-war fervor was only part of the story, however.

Any right to protest, question, or even simply ignore the distant conflict disappeared. “War means autocracy,” Woodrow Wilson told his navy secretary. The sweeping Espionage Act of June 1917 empowered Postmaster General Albert Burleson, a plantation-bred Southerner, to censor and restrict any publication he deemed anti-war, while librarians pulled books from shelves and pastors who did not fly the American flag were attacked. Many were tortured, several killed, and hundreds of immigrants were deported. Thousands of Americans all over the country were thrown in jail for speaking out against the war or belonging to groups deemed subversive or un-American: labor unions, foreign cultural organizations, and pacifist groups. Civil liberties, as we have come to understand them, could not survive in this frenzied atmosphere, and any right to protest, question, or even simply ignore the distant conflict disappeared. “War means autocracy,” Wilson told his navy secretary, in one of his less inspiring, but more sincere, moments. It was such a powerfully appealing line of thinking that “seldom would any later president depart from such rhetoric.” Most famously, Wilson urged his audience that “the world must be safe for democracy”-without anyone stopping to question whether its noble defenders had any idea what the word meant.Īnd, as the book lays out in stark and relentless detail, there was repression. In bringing the United States into the war, Wilson created a sunny myth of the nation as uniquely virtuous: peace-loving, despite its violent origins, and selfless, despite the hand-over-fist profits that the war was already bringing to American factories. The most prominent figure in this story is Woodrow Wilson, who enjoyed a benign-to-heroic reputation for most of the twentieth century. Back they came to more cheering crowds, and then it was the Roaring Twenties.Īdam Hochschild’s new book, American Midnight, explores “what’s missing between those two chapters”-an enraging, gruesome, and depressingly timely story about the fragility of American democracy, as both institution and concept. Despite their belated RSVP, the well-fed, well-bred American soldiers arrived in Europe as liberators, marched cheerfully into the protracted slaughter, and quickly put paid to the Hun.

In the history-textbook summary, the country remained above the fray until German submarine attacks forced President Wilson to renege on his 1916 election promise to keep the country out of the war. There are few episodes in national history as blithely misunderstood as America’s participation in World War I.

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