AMERICAN MIDNIGHT - WOODROW WILSON

Adam Hochschild’s book, American Midnight, covers the years 1917-21 - 'years of Patriotic Frenzy and Political Repression.'

Book Review: 'American Midnight,' by Adam Hochschild - By Thomas Meaney


Wilson was born and raised in the South by parents who were committed supporters of both slavery and the Confederacy.

The government of Woodrow Wilson, and its allies, 'pioneered the police raids, surveillance operations, internment camps, strikebreaking and legal chicanery that would become part of the repertoire of the American state. '

'Wilson jailed his Socialist opponent, the 63-year-old Eugene Debs, for opposing America’s entry into the First World War, with the liberal press in lock step.'



'The Wilson administration whipped up anti-German hysteria.

'The surveillance state did not hesitate to outsource its violence to officially sanctioned vigilante groups.

The Wilson government closed down a number of publications that it did not like.



Wilson's Federal Reserve Act.[127] began operations in 1915, and it played a key role in financing the Allied and American war efforts in World War I.[128]



The Wilson government drew on America’s experience in the Philippines, importing torture and counterinsurgency techniques back to the USA.

Wilson got Gen. Leonard Wood — who had overseen a large massacre of Filipino people — to put down revolts across the American Midwest.

In 1914, the Colorado National Guard, which had fought in the Philippine War, killed 11 children while defending a Rockefeller coal mine from strikers.



“You can’t even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage,” the editor of The Masses, Max Eastman, told an audience in 1917. 

“They give you 90 days for quoting the Declaration of Independence, six months for quoting the Bible, and pretty soon somebody’s going to get a life sentence for quoting Woodrow Wilson in the wrong connection.” 

Wilson's Versailles Treaty 'laid the kindling for World War II'