Officially the worst review of this great book yet!
The article fails again and again to mention what Wilson was such a horrible authoritarian against. The book is about the destruction of labor-organization, destruction of socialistic ideas/ideas. It was a purification towards capitalism & war-industrial forms.
It's astounding how far this article can go to talk up the threat of authoritarianism, can regurgitate some of the core what happened, but ignores so much of the conflict of why it was all happening, what the actual clashing ideologies were.
And it feels, in light of what the book is saying, false to accept the review's initial premise: that Wilson was acting progressive at all, through this time, through these events. Those were who he was busy jailing, best he could.
This period also has the earliest (to my current knowledge) documented use of a gather-targeting-information-then-triangulate-the-social-graph-clique-by-clique propaganda campaign.
>With the specter of Russia looming so large, socialism terrified Americans more than anarchism did. “Over the next few years,” Hochschild writes, “people would blame Bolshevism for everything from strikes to anti-lynching protests to loosening sexual mores to untrimmed beards.” When the Boston police went on strike, the Wall Street Journal hysterically announced that “Lenin and Trotsky are on their way.” A Los Angeles Times editorial asked, “Has Bolshevik Russia presented any more alarming spectacle than this?” The cops did not mount a communist putsch. They just wanted pay raises, shorter shifts, and the same right to unionize that local firefighters enjoyed. Instead, the strike ushered in a more prosaic kind of disaster: with so few police officers on duty, looters smashed their way into stores, and criminals from other cities took trains to Boston to grab some loot of their own. Wilson lamented that Boston was “at the mercy of an army of thugs” and described the episode as “a crime against civilization.”
>In November 1919 and January 1920, with the Red Scare nearing its apogee, Palmer’s men rounded up thousands of suspected socialists, anarchists, and communists and threw them into makeshift prisons, where they awaited deportation. He singled out the Wobblies, of course, but also the Union of Russian Workers, often on the flimsiest evidence. In Detroit, for instance, agents interrogated every theatergoer watching a Russian-language play. No court ever convicted a single member of violence.
Taking shots at "university students" is also completely unrelated to reviewing a book. The author is also not an academic or appear to be a relevant expert.
Quillette is not right wing. It’s the new “anti-woke liberalism” like IDW. Just because you disagree with wokeness doesn't make you right wing. Its just a schism in the left. There is same schizm on the right. Log cabin republicans are not right wing. In fact most republicans are not right wing. They are just liberals driving the speed limit.
> [Under President Wilson] It became a federal offense to send “seditious” newspapers and magazines through the mail, which was the only way anyone could subscribe to them in the days before the Internet. Masses magazine, for instance, was deemed “unmailable” after it published a political cartoon that showed the Liberty Bell crumbling. A pamphlet titled “Why Freedom Matters” was banned not for criticizing the war but for criticizing censorship. At least the author of the pamphlet knew why. “Sometimes,” Hochschild writes, “as if anticipating the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial, a journalist could not even learn what he or she was accused of.” Newspapers and magazines in foreign languages were likewise banned whether they criticized the government or not. Who knew what kind of diabolical speech might appear in a paper that censors couldn’t read?
Admittedly without being American, or looking into the 20s much, is it potentially an oversimplification to say "problems back then, problems now, they're all the same, so we're all good"? Is the vastly different technology stage, and global economic scene not critical to the current issues?
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadhttps://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/06/the-unluckiest-m...
The article fails again and again to mention what Wilson was such a horrible authoritarian against. The book is about the destruction of labor-organization, destruction of socialistic ideas/ideas. It was a purification towards capitalism & war-industrial forms.
It's astounding how far this article can go to talk up the threat of authoritarianism, can regurgitate some of the core what happened, but ignores so much of the conflict of why it was all happening, what the actual clashing ideologies were.
And it feels, in light of what the book is saying, false to accept the review's initial premise: that Wilson was acting progressive at all, through this time, through these events. Those were who he was busy jailing, best he could.
Alas, completely expactable that we'd get a review like this, from this website. Here are some other reviews: https://www.ft.com/content/61a319b2-4930-4f1e-b048-ec4647b7c... https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/02/american-mid... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/american-mid... https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/09/29/arts/brief-era-brutal...
See also the recent post, on jailed socialist presidential candidate Eugene V Debs' 1918 anti-war speech, https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/360-spring-2003/a-1918-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33754957 (330 points, 21d ago, 256 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
>With the specter of Russia looming so large, socialism terrified Americans more than anarchism did. “Over the next few years,” Hochschild writes, “people would blame Bolshevism for everything from strikes to anti-lynching protests to loosening sexual mores to untrimmed beards.” When the Boston police went on strike, the Wall Street Journal hysterically announced that “Lenin and Trotsky are on their way.” A Los Angeles Times editorial asked, “Has Bolshevik Russia presented any more alarming spectacle than this?” The cops did not mount a communist putsch. They just wanted pay raises, shorter shifts, and the same right to unionize that local firefighters enjoyed. Instead, the strike ushered in a more prosaic kind of disaster: with so few police officers on duty, looters smashed their way into stores, and criminals from other cities took trains to Boston to grab some loot of their own. Wilson lamented that Boston was “at the mercy of an army of thugs” and described the episode as “a crime against civilization.”
>In November 1919 and January 1920, with the Red Scare nearing its apogee, Palmer’s men rounded up thousands of suspected socialists, anarchists, and communists and threw them into makeshift prisons, where they awaited deportation. He singled out the Wobblies, of course, but also the Union of Russian Workers, often on the flimsiest evidence. In Detroit, for instance, agents interrogated every theatergoer watching a Russian-language play. No court ever convicted a single member of violence.
I particulalry enjoyed the part where the author snidely attacked college students for being aware of history:
> University students today insist that he was a racist—which he certainly was—but his faults hardly end there.
"Insist" is such a weird word choice here.
I'm always surprised when it shows up on HN, because usually the crowd here is interested in factual, rational discussion rather than agitprop.
Interesting times, indeed.