Thi is a very good book BUT I have a couple of things I’d like to mention.  First – Hochschild is not a historian – not an academic one at any rate. He’s a journalist and teaches narrative writing for grad students at UC Berkeley – nothing to be sneezed at. Second – as a lifelong leftist (not an extremist), he definitely has his biases and they show. – Okay I said it..

American Midnight
The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
2023 / 422 p Kindle
Read by Jonathan Todd Ross 15h 6m
Rating: 9 / US history
(both read e-book and listened)

I may be the target reader because I have a BA in history (MA in something else) and have been a non-scholarly history buff ever since. Although I’ve read and loved some academic history, I have no preference as to that.

It’s possible if this book had been written by an academic historian that the footnotes would be easier to follow (this may be a problem with ebooks and cost factor). Also, the wording of the narrative would be more equivocating.  (“I would like to suggest …” “It would seem …”  “Perhaps …” etc.) The organization would have been tighter.   Other than that, the only difference I might see is that Hochschild seems at least somewhat light-handed about criticizing the media (newspapers from the New York Times to KKK rags).  But there are plenty of academic historians who share Hochschild’s views – would they do this? – hard telling. Zinn was actually worse but corrected his breath-taking (for the times) book A People’s History of the United States (1980).

Trump is unlikely to wind up in an orange jumpsuit, at least not on this indictment, and probably not before November 2024. Yet if that happened, he would not be the first candidate to run for the White House from a prison cell. In the Presidential Election of 1920, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, polled nearly a million votes without ever hitting the campaign trail. I’d totally forgot that but I think I did know it at one time.

On that day when the majority of the states elected Harding as POTUS, Debs was locked behind bars in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, serving a 10-year sentence for sedition (yes). It was a not a “trumped up” up charge (sorry). Debs had defiantly disobeyed a law he deemed unjust – see the Sedition Act of 1918.

 All that said, this is is such a fine book. -I’m giving it a 9 because although there may be some flaws in there and I think that’ really depends on what the reader is looking for. I don’t necessarily want an unbiased look at that era. For too long students of US history have been given an “abridged” version of our history with the emphasis being “nation building” and overlooked some unfortunate events and trends. We also blurred the problems we had underneath that. Hochschild nails a bunch of them during a brief time when we were facing some serious problems. 

I was always interested in the Red Scare and Palmer and the immigrants of the times and although it was touched on in many of my history classes, it was just a bare brush with the truth of it. Kind of like a history of Stalinist Russia without mentioning the gulags or the Stasi. (My grandfather came from Finland in 1899. He wasn’t “Red,” but he was understandably suspected by Czar Nicholas II.)

In many ways the things the US is going through since 9/11 with the Right Wing Nativists and the rage of Donald Trump and his supporters is quite similar to what we experienced then. We just haven’t actually gone to war yet. Even our Covid-19 and the earlier Spanish Flu mirrors the days. But we made it through those times, so Hochschild’s is message is not a thoroughly negative one; “We made it through worse times than these.“

This is a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR according to the New York Times,Washington Post, New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, New York Post, Fast Company and more.