American Midnight by Adam Hochschild

Author:Adam Hochschild
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

OVER THE COURSE of 1919, four million people, one out of every five American workers, would go on strike. They would include telephone operators in New England, blacksmiths in Ohio, streetcar drivers in Indiana, cigar makers in Baltimore, and even several thousand inmates in the army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In Portland, Oregon, and Tacoma, Washington, socialists, radical labor unionists, and discharged soldiers borrowed a word from the Russians and formed groups they called soviets. A thousand people came to the first meeting of the Portland soviet.

It was indeed a world on fire, and American business fought back. In the ensuing witch-hunt, comments the writer Eliot Asinof, the witch’s broom had a union label. The Ford Motor Company produced a cartoon short for movie houses showing an Uncle Sam–like farmer guarding bags of grain and calling out “Hark! I’ll fix that varmint!” as he grabs a shovel to kill a huge rat labeled “Bolsheviki (I.W.W.)” and toss it out a window.

In a day when popular magazines published thousands of pieces of fiction each year, several business groups began putting out the Open Shop Review for management to give to employees. It was filled with uplifting short stories about virtuous workers, evil unions—and, once again, the sacredness of the traditional family. In “How the Union Slugger Broke Up the Family,” the big, gentle Jacob Laboski crosses a picket line so that his children will have enough to eat—and is beaten to death. In “Ma Becomes a Socialist,” women show their striking husbands the error of their ways by going on strike themselves and refusing to do any housework. (The men then call off their strike.) In another story, a young worker goes to a socialist meeting where he finds a pamphlet that is, in ways too shocking to specify, “an insult to all womankind.” As the historian Kim Nielsen sums it up, this “Red Scare praise of male heroes underscored the notion that the nation needed patriarchal power . . . to withstand domestic subversion.”

The turmoil further inflamed those Americans who had long believed that if there was trouble, it must be caused by foreigners or immigrants. A graphic illustration of this was an unusual map produced in early 1919 by Military Intelligence. It divided portions of New York City into zones of 11 different colors, highlighting which dangerous ethnic group lived where: red for “Russian Jews,” orange for Italians, green for Irish, black for “Negro.” The map was also sprinkled with numbered blue stars and white circles. The 86 circles marked the locations of union headquarters, IWW halls, and other places “where radical meetings are held,” while the 44 blue stars identified offices of “radical and liberal” publications, from the Inter-Collegiate Socialist to the literary and political journal The Dial and the NAACP’s The Crisis.

The map was the brainchild of the Military Intelligence chief for the city, 40-year-old Captain John B. Trevor. Of Trevor, a critical journalist once wrote, “If a man’s love for his country is measurable by

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