Hochschild, Adam
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Nov 22, 2022guest: adam hochschild is the author of eleven books, including the contemporary classics king leopold's ghost and to end all wars (both finalists for the national book critics circle award), spain in our hearts (a new york times bestseller), and bury the chains (a finalist for the national book award and winner of the los angeles times book …
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Nov 2, 2022The Red Scare, McCarthyism, and MAGA all seem fed by the same source: the recurring fear among "real Americans" that their homeland is threatened by foreigners, traitors, and alien ideologies....
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/12/a_century_after_wwis_end_adam
Between 1914 and 1918, about 10 million civilians perished in World War I, and almost 10 million soldiers were killed. Another 21 million were wounded. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the celebrated armistice credited with ending the war. But the agreement, which signified German surrender, was a shock to the people of Germany, says journalist and author Adam Hochschild—and it guaranteed the continuation of a brutal wartime naval blockade that saw over 400,000 Germans die of malnutrition. A right-wing backlash in Germany followed after the armistice, leading into World War II and the Holocaust. Hochschild says WWI, like the Iraq War, holds important lessons for today’s leaders to avert another war. “Wars almost always cause more problems than they solve,” he says. “Anybody at any time should take that lesson from this first of the terrible wars of the 20th century.”
AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron stirred controversy when he suggested that he would honor Marshal Philippe Pétain, along with seven other marshals, as part of Armistice Day commemorations this weekend. During the Second World War, Pétain collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews from France. After the Second World War came to an end, he was convicted and jailed for treason. Macron clarified his remarks Thursday.
PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON: [translated] I’m looking at history as it is. And as I’ve said yesterday, there is one Marshal Pétain who was one of the figures and one of the great soldiers of World War I. No one can erase that. So now I simply said you can’t erase history. We are not the judges of history. But there was never any question of him receiving an individual commemoration. And so, what I’ve always said and wanted to do and to be done is for the army marshals to be remembered and for there to be no individual commemoration for Pétain, as has been the case since former President Jacques Chirac’s time.
AMY GOODMAN: Adam Hochschild, if you could talk about Pétain and the role he played, from World War I to World War II, and how you believe World War I, the way it ended, led to World War II?
ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Right. Well, Pétain was sort of an odd case, because he was a great military hero in World War I, and then, in World War II, he of course became the leader of the French regime that collaborated with the German occupiers, most notoriously in assisting them in rounding up the Jews of France and Jews from other countries who had tried to take refuge in France, and shipping them off to the death camps. So, a very controversial figure and a strange person to pick to honor.
In the First World War, one reason that Pétain was a military hero was that he suppressed, successfully, a widespread mutiny in the French Army. In 1917, tens of thousands of French soldiers refused orders to take part in new attacks. They had just been through a fruitless offensive where some 30,000 French soldiers were killed, one of these typical World War I attacks where soldiers were ordered to climb out of their trenches and advance into machine-gun fire and just get mowed down by the thousands. Mutiny spread through the French Army. Soldiers refused to attack. One group of soldiers hijacked a train and tried to drive it back to Paris. Other soldiers said, “We’re not going to leave our trenches, but we will be here to defend France, but we’re not going to take part in any attacks.”
This was the greatest such catastrophe to hit the Allied armies in the West, and Pétain was brought in and, with a mixture of carrot and stick, managed to suppress the mutinies. He had some mutineers shot. Many others were sentenced to death. And then he reprieved their sentences, so they felt grateful to him to be able to be allowed to live. He improved the food sent to the Army. He granted people leave on a more regular basis. And basically, things got calmed down, although the French Army did make no more of those absolutely suicidal attacks. So, that was really his role.
Your other question, Amy, was about how the First World War led to the second, right?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Yeah. You know, there were a couple of peculiar things about the way the First World War ended. I think there’s no way it could have ended well, when you had so many people killed. You know, Germany lost 1.8 million soldiers killed; France, 1.4 million; Britain, three-quarters of a million; you know, close to 2 million in Russia. Every nation felt deeply bloodied and deeply wounded, hurt, losing all these sons, husbands, brothers. And there were many civilian casualties, as well.
But one peculiar thing about how the war ended was that because of the tightly controlled propaganda apparatus, especially on the German side, the German people, in the last months of the war, really had no idea that their army was losing. It was easy not to realize that, because the fighting was still taking place almost entirely outside of Germany. The German Army, even though it had retreated a couple hundred miles, it was still in France and Belgium by November of 1918. On the Eastern Front, in Russia, Germany and Russia had made a peace deal, and Germany now occupied a huge swath of what was then the Russian Empire, is today Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states. So Germans felt, you know, “There’s no fighting on our home territory. We haven’t been told anything about defeats or anything. Why is there suddenly an armistice?” And then the terms of the armistice became clear immediately that Germany had to retreat from all this land it occupied, and furthermore, there were going to be reparations, and Allied troops were going to be occupying part of Germany, the Rhineland, the area of Germany on either side, particularly on the western side, of the Rhine River.
So, that set things up for the legend of the stab in the back, the belief that the right wing in Germany encouraged very strongly, that their army had been poised for victory in this great and terrible war, and then it was stabbed in the back by Jews, socialists, communists, pacifists. And even before Hitler began talking this way, there were right-wingers in Germany who were already muttering along these lines in the last months of the war, because they knew that their military was losing, which the general public did not know. They needed to have somebody to blame, and the German high command helped ensure that it would be a Socialist government in the last days that would have to take the blame for signing the peace agreement, the armistice. The armistice was really a German surrender, and whatever government signed that was going to be blamed for losing the war. The high command didn’t even send particularly senior military representatives to the signing ceremony, because they didn’t want any photographs of the key generals there. They sent a naval captain and a major general, which is rather low-ranking. And it was a civilian Cabinet minister who led the delegation that signed that peace agreement. So, that kind of set things up for a German public that was astonished to find out that they had lost the war, was ready to be told that somebody was to blame for this. And this really paved the way for Hitler.
There was another part of that armistice agreement also that created an enormous amount of ill will, which was this. Throughout the war, Germany had been under a tight naval blockade. The British Navy controlled the seas, and their ships surrounded Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary, so that no foreign ships could get through. This created a great deal of hunger, because Germany, on the eve of the war, had imported a quarter of its food, and then, once the fighting started, its production of food, its homegrown food, greatly diminished because the young men who would normally be tilling the fields and herding the cattle and so forth were all off at the front being killed. So, Germany quickly ran short of food. The population was on the edge of famine for much of the war. It’s estimated by scholars that more than 400,000 Germans died of malnutrition. The average German lost 10 to 20 percent of their body weight during the war. There are statistics on children’s growth during that period that shows the average German child of any given age in 1918 was an inch shorter than the average German child of any given age in 1914. So, Germans suffered terribly from this food blockade and then were horrified to find that when the armistice was signed, it provided that the blockade would continue until Germany signed a final peace treaty. And everybody knew that was months off. And indeed, it didn’t happen until nearly eight months later, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. So Germany had to continue to endure this wartime starvation for months after the armistice.
And in that article I wrote, I quote the American journalist Oswald Garrison Villard writing from Germany four months after the armistice and talking about how little food people have to eat. He visits one hospital where all they have to give their patients of any sort is just carrot soup, nothing else. And he talks about how “Now I’m hearing a kind of bitterness in the air that I didn’t hear a couple months ago, when I first got here.”
AMY GOODMAN: Adam, we only have a minute to go, but what lessons can we learn today from World War I?
ADAM HOCHSCHILD: A couple, I think, Amy. One is that wars almost always cause more problems than they solve. Everybody thinks that starting a war is going to solve a particular problem. We’re going to get some tyrant out of power. We’re going to punish a country for doing this or that. And then, you know, 10, 15, 20 years later, you find yourself dealing with consequences that you never anticipated.
And I think that was the case with World War I, where it led to a second, even more destructive war and the Holocaust, as well. That’s the lesson of the U.S. war in Iraq, for example, where we know today that ISIS began to form in the prison camps of that war, when Islamic militants came together with veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army. So, I think, think long and hard before starting a new war. Anybody at any time should take that lesson from this first of the terrible wars of the 20th century.
AMY GOODMAN: And particularly what President Trump should learn?
ADAM HOCHSCHILD: In particular, I think he should learn that any wars he might contemplate—and it’s a little hard to figure out what they might be, but he’s made all sorts of threatening noises against the Chinese, against the Iranians, previously against the North Koreans, and possibly again against the North Koreans, because he and Kim seem to be falling out of love at this point—that, you know, to carry any of those threats farther into war is almost certain to be a disaster. It’s hard to imagine any military conflict with any of those countries ending up well and not causing more problems than it solves.
AMY GOODMAN: Adam Hochschild, I want to thank you for being with us, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, now lecturer at Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, where he’s speaking to us from today.
"We have no facilities for that.” dr in EU
adam hochshield
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/the-crushing-of-american-socialism/
https://www.c-span.org/video/?470040-1/rebel-cinderella
MARCH 5, 2020
Rebel Cinderella
Historian Adam Hochschild recalled the early 20th century Russian emigre Rose Pastor Stokes, who was a founding member of America’s Communist Party and married to New York millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, America's Real War
Posted by Adam Hochschild at 6:47am, :{August 1, 2019.
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In recent times, not just U.S. Army troops but National Guardsmen have been dispatched in significant numbers to the U.S.-Mexico border. They are supposedly there to stop what our president likes to call an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants -- especially “caravans” of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans from lands initially unsettled by American-backed wars and other machinations as well as, in more recent years, crime, violence, the drug trade, and climate change. In mid-July, for instance, 1,000 troops from the Texas National Guard were dispatched to join approximately 2,000 guardsmen already stationed there, fulfilling the president’s desire for, as he likes to tweet, “STRONG Border Security.” Once upon a time, however, the National Guard had other tasks when it came to threats (real or imagined) to this country. In his monumental work, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, historian Eric Foner writes,
“In the aftermath of 1877, cities retrained and expanded their police forces, while the militia and National Guard were professionalized and equipped with more modern weapons. In the next quarter-century, the Guard would be used in industrial disputes over 100 times. Meanwhile the federal government constructed armories not in the South to protect black citizens, but in the major cities of the North, to ensure that troops would be on hand in subsequent labor difficulties.”
Recently, historian and *TomDispatch* regular Adam Hochschild, whose latest book is *Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays*, has been exploring just a few years in the early twentieth century when another American president was fixated on exploiting not fears and phantasms from abroad but fears and phantasms about the then-developing labor movement at home. It’s a grim tale of all-out repression, which echoes strangely and deeply in the Trump era. Tom
A Political 100-Year Flood
Trump’s Venom Against the Media, Immigrants, “Traitors,” and More Is Nothing New
Along rivers prone to overflowing, people sometimes talk of preparing for a 100-year flood -- a dangerous surge of muddy, debris-filled water so overwhelming it appears only once a century.
In our political world, we are now seeing a 100-year flood of toxic debris. The sludge washing ashore includes President Trump’s continuing cries of “fake news!” and “traitors”; his rage at immigrants and refugees; his touting of an “invasion” at the southern border; and his recent round of attacks on “the squad,” four young congresswomen of color who, he raged, should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” (Three of them, of course, were born in the United States.) When he talked about the fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a legal immigrant from Somalia, the inflamed crowd at his July 17th reelection rally in North Carolina began spontaneously chanting, “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!”
Donald Trump, of course, has along history of disliking people of color, going back to the days when he and his father tried to keep them out of their New York real estate dynasty’s apartment buildings. Presidents, however, usually find it politic to keep such feelings under wraps. Nonetheless, Trump’s particular brand of xenophobia, racism, and media hatred isn’t completely unprecedented. The last time we had a similar outpouring from Washington was almost exactly 100 years ago and it, too, involved a flood of angry rhetoric and a fear of immigrants -- and it included repression on an enormous scale.
Fear of Immigrants, 1917 Version
The 100-year flood I’m thinking of lasted for three violent years during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson -- from early 1917 to early 1920. Except for lynchings in the Jim Crow South, it would prove to be the harshest burst of political repression and fear-mongering in either twentieth- or twenty-first-century America. It began suddenly when the U.S. entered the First World War in support of England and France and against the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Schools, colleges, and universities abruptly stopped teaching the “Kaiser’s tongue” -- a move loudly backed by the ever-strident former president Theodore Roosevelt. Iowa forbade the use of German over the telephone or in public. In Shawnee, Oklahoma, a crowd burned German books to mark the Fourth of July. German music being out, marriages took place without Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” Berlin, Iowa, changed its name to Lincoln. Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel became the Hotel Randolf. Families named Schmidt became Smith and Griescheimer, Gresham. The hamburger became “the liberty sandwich.” German shepherds were redubbed Alsatian shepherds.
My grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Germany and spoke German with his children. Now, however, they were terrified to do so on the street. In his twenties at the time, my father desperately tried to get into the Army, for a uniform was obvious protection from mob violence -- and violence there was. In Collinsville, Illinois, for example, a crowd seized Robert Prager, a coal miner, and lynched him because he had been German-born. (He had tried to enlist in the Navy, but was turned down because of his glass eye.) In Washington, when a man failed to stand up as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, a sailor right behind him shot him dead.
Congress rushed the draconian Espionage Act to a vote two months after the country entered the war. It outlawed anything that would “cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military.” There was, however, not the slightest danger of mutiny among American troops sent to the Western Front in France. Many were so eager to fight that their commanders found gung-ho rear-area soldiers “deserting to the front.” Nor was there much danger of espionage. In those years, only 10 people would be charged under the Act with being German agents.
The president who oversaw this particular 100-Year Flood was no Donald Trump, not in his manner anyway. Rabid invective was hardly Woodrow Wilson’s style. He carefully kept his image as an above-the-fray idealist by outsourcing inflammatory rhetoric to others, such as his special emissary to Russia, Elihu Root.
A corporate lawyer and former secretary of war, secretary of state, and senator from New York, Root would prove the prototype of the “wise men” who moved between Wall Street and Washington to form the twentieth-century foreign policy establishment. “Pro-German traitors” were threatening the war effort, Root declared to an audience at New York’s Union League Club in August 1917. “There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason... There are some newspapers published in this city every day the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason.”
Fake news indeed! The actual bullying of those newspapers Wilson left to Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, of Texas. The Espionage Act gave the Post Office great powers over the press.Newspapers were censored, editors jailed, and publications shut down, most famously Max Eastman’s *The Masses*, the Greenwich Village radical monthly that was one of the liveliest magazines this country has ever seen. Some 75 newspapers and periodicals either had specific issues banned or were forced to close entirely.
As today on the U.S.-Mexico border, vigilante groups sprang up across the country. The largest was the American Protective League, an official auxiliary of the Justice Department,which even enjoyed the franking privilege of sending mail for free. With a membership that swelled to 250,000, its ranks were filled with men too old for the military who still wanted to do battle, at home if not abroad.So they regularly broke up antiwar meetings and, by the tens of thousands, beat up or made citizens’ arrests of suspected draft dodgers.
Such was the frenzy in the air that two policemen in Guthrie, Oklahoma, hearing a man reading something aloud that spoke of abuses and oppression, promptly arrested him. When he protested that it was the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson, one cop responded: “Okay, where is this Jefferson? We want him, too!” When a leftist student at Rutgers University refused to speak at a rally to sell war bonds, he was stripped, blindfolded, covered with molasses and feathers, and paraded through town behind a sign that read: “This is what we do with pro-Germans!”
People who opposed the war were prosecuted by the hundreds. Among them were anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman and her comrade Alexander Berkman, put on trial for organizing against the draft. In court, addressing the “gentlemen of the jury,” Goldman asked, “May there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty?” Her own American patriotism, she explained, was like that of “the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” The jury found her guilty and the pair was sentenced to two years in prison. “It took a world war,” the Wall Street Journaldeclared, “to put Goldman and Berkman where they should have been years ago.”
As in the age of Trump, deportation was used as a political weapon. The search for radicals who had never bothered to become American citizens lay behind the seizure of thousands of people in the notorious Palmer Raidsorchestrated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The government then deported as many of them as they legally could. Goldman and Berkman, for example, were among 249 deportees loaded onto a decrepit former troopship and sent off to Russia.
The ferocity of the moment was so extreme that people were prosecuted for things they said in private. Charles Schoberg, for example, was a 66-year-old cobbler in Covington, Kentucky. Although German-born, he had lived in the United States since childhood and had been both a police officer and city council member. In the spring of 1918, a suspicious local vigilante group, the Citizens Patriotic League, hired a private detective to put a microphone in his shoe shop. An eavesdropping detective, listening in from a nearby building, picked up Schoberg and two friends making sour and critical remarks to each other about the U.S. armed forces. A typical comment was “You can’t hold the Germans back” -- not an unreasonable observation at a moment when the Kaiser’s rapidly advancing army looked as if it was about to capture Paris. Schoberg was sentenced to 10 years in prison, one of his friends to seven years, and the other to five.
“The Christian Men to Whom God... Has Given the Control of the Property Interests of the Country”
This patriotic delirium, however, was more than just an upwelling of public opinion. It was carefully stoked. Vigilante groups like the one that snooped on Charles Schoberg or the American Protective League were heavily funded by big business. And not because the country’s industrial and political elite particularly cared about catching German spies or outing pro-German Americans. They were focused on crushing the labor movement.
In the early twentieth century, American workers and their unions had few legal rights and business wanted to keep it that way. During a coal miners’ strike in 1902, the president of a railroad declared that wages, hours, and union recognition should be decided “not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”
As the century went on, those “Christian men” felt increasingly threatened. The public imagination had been captured by the country’s most radical union, theIndustrial Workers of the World (IWW), known to all as the Wobblies. It was led by Big Bill Haywood,a charismatic, one-eyed former miner famous both for using his fists in labor struggles and quoting long passages of Shakespeare by heart.
In 1912, Haywood and other Wobblies organized a strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which was victorious despite the police and militia murders of several strikers. A Wobbly-organized walkout of New York City hotel and restaurant waiters that same year, though less successful, still caused consternation when some 800 strikers blocked Fifth Avenue, a central artery of American capitalism. The police had to fire their revolvers into the air to disperse them. An uprising of Colorado coal miners saw more than 70 people killed before it ended in December 1914 -- and more strikes followed.
The war changed all that, though. Since almost any industry could now be deemed essential to the war effort, the powers that be had the perfect excuse to come down hard on labor. Previously, such battles, though numerous and violent, had been scattershot: the National Guard suppressing one strike, private detectives another, sheriffs' deputies a third. Now, business had the pretext for a coordinated nationwide crackdown -- and had the backing of the White House.[CF NAT'L SECURITY DJT]
On September 5, 1917, federal agents raided every IWW office in the country as well as the homes of Wobbly activists. From the group’s Chicago headquarters alone, the raiders took five tons of material, including some of the ashes of the martyred Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, shot by a Utah firing squad in 1915 after a murder conviction based on much-disputed evidence.
In police vehicles and sealed boxcars, more than 100 Wobblies were brought to trial in Chicago. With more defendants in the dock than at any other trial in American history, all the accused were found guilty on all counts. The judge passed out sentences totaling 807 years of prison time and fines of more than $2.4 million, which, of course, no Wobbly had the money to pay. Along with his comrades, Big Bill Haywood was packed off by special train to the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. “We never won a hand,” that onetime saloon card dealer wrote to radical journalist John Reed. “The other fellow had the cut, shuffle, and deal all the time.”
The list of violent acts against American labor in these years would prove long indeed, but one of the most egregious was against a veteran Wobbly named Frank Little. He had helped organize a strike in Butte, Montana, after a fire in a local copper mine killed 164 miners. Two months later, on August 1, 1917, six masked men entered the boardinghouse where he was staying and seized the crutches he needed for a broken ankle. They then tied Little, still in his underwear, to the rear bumper of a car and dragged him to a railroad bridge at the edge of town, where they lynched him.
A note pinned to his body read: “Others Take Notice. First and Last Warning.” The police made a conspicuously minimal effort to find the killers. Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall cynically coined a pun on Little’s name. In solving labor problems, he quipped, “A Little hanging goes a long way.”
The Real War of 1917 and Today
The crackdown -- including heavy press censorship -- continued after the First World War ended in German defeat and the troops came home, for it had never really been about the war.
Instead, the 100-year flood of vituperation, threats, and arrests was part of another, much longer war, a struggle against those trying to rectify America’s staggering maldistribution of its bounty. In 1915, the richest 1% of the population owned 35.6% of the country’s wealth. The biggest threat to their position was the militant wing of the labor movement, hence the Wobblies were among the greatest victims of repression.
Today, the richest 1% owns an even greater slice of the pie: 40% of national wealth. Sadly, there’s not much of a labor movement left for them to crush, but the wealthy have other targets. Progressives are advocating many measures that would help rectify the gross inequalities of this America of ours, from health insurance for all to free college tuition to bigger taxes on the highest incomes to taxing wealth itself.
Suppressing such efforts is the central aim of Donald Trump and the people around him. And to do so, he has whipped up a new 100-year flood of venom against invasions of undocumented immigrants supposedly ready to steal American jobs, refugees, the “squad,” and black football players who take a knee, among others. His demagoguery has made skillful use of an old American tradition: employing differences of race to make people forget huge differences of wealth. It’s exactly what Southern plantation owners did when they got non-slave-owning whites to join them in fighting for the Confederacy.
Forty-plus percent of the country identifies with Trump, while the rest of us get outraged. He separates children from their parents at the border and puts people in squalid, overcrowded concentration camps and again the country divides into attacking or defending him. The louder the argument, the happier he is, for it keeps the attention off the real war: his ongoing campaign to put yet more wealth not just in the hands of the top 1%, but the top .01%. Americans who forget about this truly do become his apprentices.
While the rest of us are furiously disputing whether he’s a racist or a patriot, he and his friends are quietly reaping the rewards of a tax cut that was a massive giveaway to billionaires, and his administration is fast-tracking oil pipelines, opening up federal land to drilling and mining, boosting for-profit diploma mills that exploit the poor, and putting foxes in charge of every henhouse in sight from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Environmental Protection Administration. These are the issues that the hundred-year flood distracts us from.
Adam Hochschild, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of nine books, including King Leopold’s Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. His latest book is Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.