The story of any war is broader than its tales of the battlefield.  “American Midnight” is the saga of an era, during and in the wake of the World War I in which popular sentiment and law focused on any deemed disloyal, un-American or different.  It was a time in which labor unrest and war combined to incite a perfect storm that swept away traditional American rights. 

Underlying tensions were brought to the surface was American involvement in the World War I.  Led by a president, Woodrow Wilson, who saw dissent as treason, Americans united to purge disloyalty from the nation. 

Guilt was established by association.  Membership in the Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies” was sufficient to draw investigation, prosecution and imprisonment.  German names established disloyalty and subjected their holders to vigilante violence.  Unwillingness to purchase Liberty Bonds merited social ostracization and worse. In St. Louis, their purchase was offered as satisfaction for speeding tickets. 

Suppression of dissent was enforced by patriotic individuals, quasi-official investigators, and direct government action.  In Collinsville, Illinois, a row erupted between 30-year-old German native Robert Prager, either because he was preaching socialism or was a company spy, it was not clear which.  Though having been rejected by the U.S. Navy due to a glass eye, a group of miners seized from his home, stripped to his underwear, and forced him to walk barefoot down the street draped in an American flag.  After being rescued by a policeman, police stepped aside while a larger mob removed him and hung him from a hackberry tree.  Commentary in the Washington post observed “In spite of such excesses as lynchings, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior part of the country.” 

The American Protective League, APL, “Organized with Approval and Operating under Direction of the United States Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation” enabled its members unable to go to France to fight the “enemy” domestically.  To business leaders it provided forces to fight organized labor. Among APL’s accomplishments were getting 50 Wobblies fired from military plants in Philadelphia and Wobbly farmworkers purged from the wheatfields of South Dakota, inspiring a Justice Department official to hail the South Dakota APL as “The Ku Klux Klan of the Prairies.”  

Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson excluded from the mails publications “calculated to…cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny…or otherwise embarrass or hamper the Government in conduction the war.”  Among indiscretions deemed worthy of banishment were saying “that the Government is controlled by Wall Street or munition manufactures, or any other special interest” to “attacking improperly our allies.” 

Wisconsin Senator Robert M. Lafollette’s opposition to the War was investigated by the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections to determine whether he deserved expulsion.   Socialist Presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs who had collected over 6 million votes in 1912 and whose party elected over one thousand state and local officials, was a target due to his opposition to the War.   In a June 1918 speech Debs stated the following. “The have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourself be slaughtered at their command.  But in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.” That provided the evidence for indictment and conviction under the Espionage Act.  His ten-year sentence kept him imprisoned until President Harding commuted his sentence to time served in December 1921.

On June 2, 2019, eight northeastern cities experienced bomb blasts accompanied by pick leaflets proclaiming “class war is on and cannot cease without complete victory for the international proletariat.”  Targets included John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan Jr., Senator Lee Overman, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (later Commissioner of Baseball) and Postmaster General Burleson.  Perhaps the most significant attack was to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, then neighbor of William Howard Taft, Sen. Warren Harding and army officer Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Assistant Navy Secretary, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to check on the Palmers.  A series of mail bombs were later dispatched to public personalities.  The search for the bombers spawned a wave of raids aimed to catch wrongdoers and prevent further attacks. 

“American Midnight” chronicles a time in our history during which American rights melted under the pressure of martial fervor.  I recommend it to WHN readers seeking to look beyond the smoke and the sound of the guns for other battlegrounds in which the World War I was waged and the shadow it cast Over Here.