American Midnight Quotes

“On Memorial Day 1927, a march of some 1,000 Klansmen through the New York City borough of Queens turned into a brawl with the police. Several people wearing Klan hoods were arrested, one of them a young real estate developer named Fred Trump.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Honesty was not high on the CPI’s agenda. One of its architects, the journalist Arthur Bullard, had written, with revealing candor, “Truth and Falsehood are arbitrary terms. . . . There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other. . . . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“The struggle of man against power,” wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“In Europe, the ambassador reported, conditions were “most alarming to the American financial and industrial outlook.” Britain and France were running out of gold to pay for the American supplies and munitions they bought, risking “almost a cessation of transatlantic trade. This will, of course, cause a panic [a recession] in the United States.” Huge new credits to the Allies from Washington would be needed to avert this, but “unless we go to war with Germany our Government of course cannot make such a direct grant of credit. . . . Perhaps our going to war is the only way in which our present preeminent trade position can be maintained and a panic averted.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Their fervor partly came from yet another front in the war at home: a long-growing tension over the changing positions of men and women. This was magnifying anxieties among American men. Fifty years before the First World War, most of them worked on farms, doing the strenuous field labor that had defined manhood for millennia. Farm wives and widows sometimes had to do such tasks as well, but men still traditionally preferred to imagine women as doing only women’s work, such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and fetching water from the well. The census did not even count such farm women as workers.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“To keep these dark forces from overwhelming American society once again will require a lot from us. Knowledge of our history, for one thing, so we can better see the danger signals and the first drumbeats of demagoguery. Brave men and women both inside and outside the government, like those who spoke the truth and stuck to their principles more than a hundred years ago. A more equitable distribution of wealth, so that there will not be tens of millions of people economically losing ground and looking for scapegoats to blame. A mass media far less craven toward those in power than it was in 1917–21. And above all, a vigilant respect for civil rights and constitutional safeguards, to save ourselves from ever slipping back into the darkness again.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

“the forces that had blighted the America of a century earlier would be dramatically visible yet again: rage against immigrants and refugees, racism, Red-baiting, fear of subversive ideas in schools, and much more. And, of course, behind all of them is the appeal of simple solutions: deport aliens, forbid critical journalism, lock people up, blame everything on those of a different color or religion. All those impulses have long been with us. Other presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have made dog-whistle appeals on the issue of race. The anti-Communist witch-hunting of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his imitators would prove far more influential in American political life than the country’s minuscule Communist Party, putting people in prison, wrecking careers, and causing thousands to leave the country. The American tendency to blame things on sinister conspiracies has found new targets; instead of the villains being the pope or the Bolsheviks, in recent times they have included Sharia law, George Soros, Satanist pedophile rings, and more.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“A rival politician once called Harding’s verbiage “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“We should be eternally vigilant against the attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“On Memorial Day 1927, a march of some 1,000 Klansmen through the New York City borough of Queens turned into a brawl with the police. Several people wearing Klan hoods were arrested, one of them a young real estate developer named Fred Trump. Ninety years later, his son, with similar feelings about people of color, would enter the White House. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the forces that had blighted the America of a century earlier would be dramatically visible yet again: rage against immigrants and refugees, racism, Red-baiting, fear of subversive ideas in schools, and much more. And, of course, behind all of them is the appeal of simple solutions: deport aliens, forbid critical journalism, lock people up, blame everything on those of a different color or religion. All those impulses have long been with us. Other presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have made dog-whistle appeals on the issue of race. The anti-Communist witch-hunting of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his imitators would prove far more influential in American political life than the country’s minuscule Communist Party, putting people in prison, wrecking careers, and causing thousands to leave the country. The American tendency to blame things on sinister conspiracies has found new targets; instead of the villains being the pope or the Bolsheviks, in recent times they have included Sharia law, George Soros, Satanist pedophile rings, and more.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“FORMER CONGRESSMAN ALBERT Sidney Burleson of Texas had landed in Wilson’s cabinet thanks to his longtime patron, Colonel House. Burleson “has been called the worst postmaster general in American history,” writes the historian G. J. Meyer, “but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“rival politician once called Harding’s verbiage “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Looming over this entire story is one of the most enigmatic of American presidents. A visionary internationalist, he staked his political fortune on his hopes for the League of Nations, where countries would settle their disputes by negotiation instead of warfare. Yet he presided over the greatest assault on American civil liberties in the last century and a half. And, despite his skill as an orator and writer, he showed few regrets over that contradiction”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“And no one was reporting from the prison at Camp Funston, Kansas, where conscientious objectors to military service were shackled to their cell bars on tiptoe for eight hours a day.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“A Minnesota pastor was tarred and feathered because people overheard him praying in German with a dying woman.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Right-wing TV networks did not exist in 1917, but in that year was born a presidential tool even more powerful, a lavishly financed government propaganda agency that operated in every medium of the day: films, books, posters, newspaper articles, and a corps of 75,000 speakers who gave more than seven million talks everywhere from movie houses to revival tents. In addition, the federal government also attacked the press, both during and well after the First World War.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Also during this period, army machine-gun nests appeared in downtown Omaha and tanks on the streets of Cleveland, and armed troops patrolled many other American cities, from Butte, Montana, to Gary, Indiana. The military crafted a secret 57-page contingency plan to put the entire country under martial law.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“The day’s most notable clash occurred when a group of pacifists visited Lodge, an acerbic Boston Brahmin with a white beard. Lodge was an enthusiastic proponent of war who thought Wilson weak-willed, snorting contemptuously at the president’s call for “peace without victory” of a few months earlier. When the senator stepped into the hallway outside his office to meet the pacifist delegation, its spokesman, Alexander Bannwart, a former minor-league baseball player, attacked Lodge’s enthusiasm for war. The senator was furious. “National degeneracy and cowardice are worse than war!” he told Bannwart, who retorted, “Anyone who wants to go to war is a coward! You’re a damned coward!” This was too much for the 67-year-old Lodge, who shouted, “You’re a damned liar!” and punched Bannwart, 36, to the floor. Bannwart fought back, slamming Lodge against a closed door. Office workers, police, and even a passing Western Union messenger joined the melee in defense of the senator. Lodge triumphantly yelled, “I’m glad I hit him first!” but it was the bloodied Bannwart whom the police hauled away in a paddy wagon.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis