Book Discussion "American Midnight" by Adam Hochschild

Our book for May is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild.

From Amazon:
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens' arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.

This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons – a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own.

“A harrowing portrait of America in 1917–21, rife with racist violence, xenophobia and political repression abetted by the federal government. The book serves as a cautionary tale and a provocative counterpoint to our own era.” – New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice