How to Fix Democracy Season 5 | Adam Hochschild

foreign [Music] [Music] welcome back to how to fix democracy uh it's 2023 amazingly enough and we are on our fifth series of the show and uh in 2023 and 2024 we're going to be looking at the last hundred years of American democracy between 1924 and 2024 and what we're doing for this first show in the fifth series is setting the scene of America in 1924 What kind of country was America and what kind of democracy was it and who better to do it with then an old friend of the show uh Adam Fox Shield um uh best-selling author of many different books he was on the show back in series two when we were talking about the relationship between capitalism and democracy uh and since then he's come out with a new book American midnight a book about American democracy or perhaps the lack of American democracy between 1917 and 1920. it's a best-selling book and it's been acclaimed as most of his books are by the critics Adam is joining us from his home in Berkeley last time we did the interview Adam was in 2022 we sat in your lovely Garden this was in the midst of um covid much has happened between 2020 and 2023 but to begin let's turn the cop back Adam turn the clock back to 1924 What kind of country was America in 1924 to set the scene for our new series tell me about America in 2014 well I would say it was a post-traumatic country because it had just gone through a very difficult period a couple of years earlier starting in 1917 and Lasting through 1921 or so a period that is largely left out of our high school history textbooks there's specialized historians who study it but it's not part of the American history you get in school those of us who went to high school in this country there was a chapter in the textbook on the first world war where the American Doughboys as they were called went off to Europe and their broad brimmed forest ranger hats they fought bravely they won the war they were welcomed home by ticker tape parades and then you turn the chapter and the next chapter it's the 1920s prohibition speakeasies Babe Ruth the coming of talking movies but in between there was a very nasty time in this country uh it was a time that saw political repression such as we have really not seen since the end of slavery uh during those four years 1917 to 21 roughly a thousand Americans went to prison for a year or more and a much larger number for shorter periods solely because of things they wrote or said it was also a time when there was vigilante violence on a large-scale sponsored by the justice department and it was a time of press censorship some 75 newspapers and magazines were put out of business during this period by the federal government all these things we tend to have forgotten about but I think there were a severe trauma and in 1924 to go back to the beginning of your question the country was still recovering from that I'm intrigued by your your phrase post trauma what what does that mean for a society living after trauma was it a conscious trauma was there a recognition that that the first world war um had been in a sense a failure of course by 24 Wilson was out of power um he mismanaged the end of the war and his presidency ended in controversy and in some ways in disgrace um we always associate America with Martin Luther King's notion of of an arc and upward Arc but by 1924 was that Arc going backwards um uh Adam well it had stabilized by 1924 but certainly during the preceding decade the ark had really gone downwards um and I think there were really two events that triggered it one was American entry into the first world war a country Going To War uh full-scale always triggers a lot of Madness almost anywhere where it happens the second event was later in 1917. uh the Russian Revolution struck fear into the hearts of big businessmen and establishment political leaders all over the world certainly in this country because they were afraid it was going to spread here and both those two events I think kind of set fire to a lot of conflicts which had been simmering under the surface and sometimes not so far under the surface in this country for some years one was the conflict between nativists and immigrants something we still have a lot of tension around today this had been very severe for a long time there was a lot of hostility to immigration and going to war with Germany and then to fear of the Russian Revolution you know accelerated that another conflict was between business and labor in the decades leading up to 1917 dozens of people were killed in labor violence each year just 1913-14 alone more than 70 people some of them women and children were killed by company detectives and federal militia putting down a minor strike in Colorado once the U.S went to war that violence against labor could become more severe because then you know business could include could could accuse workers of impeding the war effort uh another thing that the these tensions accelerated was racial violence the year 1917 saw more black Americans die violently than any year since the immediate aftermath of slavery so these tensions were accelerated by America going to war by the Russian Revolution those pressures coming on a country that was filled with with attention and unresolved conflicts Adam it always seems to me somewhat odd that America changed so much in the first world war for better and worse so much dramatic sociological upheaval on the racial front on the gender front on the economic front and then when Wilson exited the scene America elected a a profoundly backward looking 19th century figure Harding what what what was going on there what does Harding's election tell us about the nature of American democracy in the early twenties well here's how I would interpret it the second term of Woodrow Wilson from 1917 to 21. uh was this period that I wrote about an American midnight that was really filled with hysteria with rage against immigrants and refugees with a great deal of Labor violence and with political repression and press censorship uh it reached its climax in a way in uh May 1920 where the then attorney general A Mitchell Palmer who was the leading Democratic candidate for president for the presidential nomination in 1920 predicted repeatedly that May 1st the international workers Holiday May 1st 1920 would see a nationwide communist uprising and people were hysterical about it they put the National Guard on alert cities called in extra policemen New York City had all three shifts in the police force on duty one shift down the street the others waiting in station houses JP Morgan hired extra guards the day came nothing happened and I think that sort of let the air out of the balloon of the Red Scare and hysteria of this period uh Palmer did not win the uh presidential nomination it sort of let the air out of his campaign and Harding the Republican candidate was elected on the slogan returned to normalcy I think people realized they had been in a state of of Hysteria and paranoia and they wanted to go back to something normal Adam most of our listeners and viewers won't be familiar with palmer but they will be familiar with the name J Edgar Hoover of course who whose career began under Palmer um and of course he became uh the wonderkind of the 1920s and built the FBI um to what extent can we see in 1924 the beginnings of uh what we might think of as a surveillance State the one that J Edgar Hoover fantasized about I think it had really begun uh seven or eight years earlier a couple things happened in 1917 when the U.S entered the first world war formally in April of that year uh one was this there had always been a huge number of private detectives at work in the United States who worked for corporations of snooping on labor unions infiltrating labor unions trying to disrupt strikes sometimes beating up Strikers all that kind of thing starting in 1917 a number of these folks moved went to work for the federal government some of them for the Bureau of Investigation which added Federal to its name some years later but it was essentially the the FBI as we know it some of them for military intelligence by the end of 1918 there were a thousand people in Military Intelligence in the United States who were doing surveillance of American civilians all of that stuff got born during this period and has not gone away uh you know this stuff is still with us the surveillance State I think there are other things we have to worry about today today I'm a little more worried about the surveillance of us all that goes on by private corporations but that's a different subject but yes the surveillance State really did get born in 1917. you mentioned your fear of contemporary surveillance which goes of course with the digital Revolution um and companies like Amazon and Google last time you were on the show you you articulated your fear of there's always the state of of media in in 24 um Adam American midnight covers the way in which the American state during this the first World War uh censored match media particularly media critical of the war through the post office uh can you give me a a a general view how free was American Media in 1924 well by that point the restrictions from the warp time uh years had eased one thing you have to say for Harding who was indeed not one of our greatest presidents uh is that the moment he took office in uh March of 1921 he ended censorship uh censorship had been established by the Espionage Act after the U.S entered the war in 1917 it was exercised zealously uh by the Postmaster General who had the power to determine what traveled through the U.S mail and in those days no internet no radio no TV the mail was everything a daily newspapers could be sold on street corners and delivered to people's homes but weeklies monthlies journals of opinion the vast majority of the Socialist press the vast majority of the foreign language press all depended on the U.S mail and Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General was a terrible guy a man named yeah you describe him in the book he he's absolutely appalling Albert Burleson former congressman from Texas Arch segregationist hated the black press uh he was the son and Grandson of Confederate Veterans and he loved being Chief censor and used his power over that second term of Woodrow Wilson's two uh in effect shut down 75 newspapers and magazines by not allowing them through the mail and banned specific issues of many others as well uh he left office with the rest of the Wilson Administration in March 1921 Harding came in Harding had actually been a newspaper publisher before he entered politics he didn't like censorship and he ended it uh so you have to say that for him the media in those days was almost entirely print uh there began to be some radio in the 1920s I don't know how much of it there was in 1924 certainly later in the decade uh there were newsreels in movie houses that was another important uh form of of media but no TV and of course no internet either one of the most colorful if not the most colorful figure in American midnight is Emma Goldman and you cover a number of other female activists particularly pacifists um in that MLK style Arc of Justice was the six years between the end of the war in 1924 and an upward Journey for female rights for women's rights to vote and for women women's participant participation in American democracy uh yes and no certainly the big step forward was when women throughout the country got the vote in 1920. uh this has been you know they've been agitation for this for years women did have the right to vote in some states but uh not throughout the country until a lot was guaranteed by an amendment to the Constitution in 1920. so that was a step forward also during the War uh women advanced in other ways because four million men had been drafted into the army and business and industry of all types needed somebody to do the jobs they've been doing uh in factories and offices and elsewhere and many business Executives discovered somewhat to their surprise that women could often do these jobs better than men and you can find traces of this in the business literature of the time uh this was upsetting to many men who of course wanted their jobs back when they returned from the war and I think the same thing happened over after World War II where when men came home from the war they went back to work and the women who had been working then went back to being Housewives and so on but not always happily so uh and you can certainly see a lot of traces of this tension between the genders uh during this period is I think there always is when something like a war disrupts what people think of as the normal Order of Things the great stain of course on American history is race you've written about it you've lived it Adam uh in many ways both within and outside the United States can one make some generalizations about the state of race relations in 24 of course it came out of the first world war you already touched on the way in which some African-American groups were persecuted and shut up during the first world war is that are there equivalents between the experience of black Americans and female Americans in the first world war in its Ultima well I think for black Americans also if we're looking at the year 1924 it was a post-trauma experience the preceding years had been incredibly difficult uh art of the source of that tension was The Great Migration of black Americans fleeing the South going north east west trying to get away from a region where there was often an average of one lynching a week they came North looking for better jobs they often found them but they found you know their white neighbors very often didn't want them there in part because they were willing to work for less money since they were coming from an extremely ill-paid jobs you know picking cotton as sharecroppers and doing stuff like that in the South so there was a lot of tension on that score which then accelerated when in 1919 those four million American men who had been mobilized into the army were all demobilized during that year and black and white veterans were competing for jobs and the jobs weren't there because the factories that had been making you know our ships and tanks and guns and planes and ammunition for the war were shut down so 1919 saw a huge amount of racial violence it's always in the history book says race riots but it really should be called White riots because in almost every case it was a matter of a white mob attacking black people this happened in major cities throughout the Northeast and the Midwest uh it left hundreds of people almost all of them black did we still don't know the full death toll because the largest single episode of that violence happened in a place called Elaine Arkansas troops and local Vigilantes suppressed a group of black folks who were trying to organize a sharecroppers union many of them were killed their bodies were simply tossed in the Mississippi River and floated Downstream and we don't know how many died but the best estimates were that it was hundreds there alone what was the shall we say the the ideological and organizational state of socialism and working-class movements in the early 20s particularly in 24. I would say the possible Forks in the road came earlier and later uh by 1924 the Socialist Party was a minuscule because it had been crushed so ruthlessly during this repressive period from 1917 to 21. uh dozens of socialist leaders former socialist candidates for office and so on were jailed some of them for long periods of time during this era the uh the party's high point I think came just before that happened which was in 1917 where the Socialist Party did extremely well in Municipal elections winning more than 20 percent of the vote in 14 of the country's largest cities more than 30 percent of several of them 22 percent in New York City this terrified the Wilson Administration and led to a lot of repression directed against the party um could it ever become a majority party in the United States I don't think so because I don't think American socialism much as we can imagine all kinds of nice things happening under it I don't think it ever would have attained majority status here because this country was so much made up of immigrants who came here from Europe wanting to raise their class status uh and I think that was the the ambition that predominated rather than wanting to battle as a working class against the capitalists uh but um I do think that if the party hadn't been so ruthlessly suppressed in this area in this era and had it lasted as a strong minority voice it might have pushed the U.S towards the kind of better social safety net and uh genuine comprehensive National Health Care system that exists in most Western European countries that exist across the border in Canada you know in in much of Europe these systems were put in place in order to steal a march on the Socialists who were you know demanding much more comprehensive reforms but that didn't happen in the United States yeah when we talked in in 2020 Adam you articulated um an Envy if you like for northern European systems particularly Scandinavian Social Democratic systems um and we noted again most people have noted this the uniqueness of the American Experience uh back in 24 and in the early 20s was the American experience as radically different from Europe as it seems to be now was America more like Europe do you think good question Andrew I'm not sure how I would answer that I think one thing that happily did not exist in the U.S at that time was there was you know there wasn't the kind of fascist movement that there was in Italy in 1924 there wasn't you know the incipient Nazi movement that there was in Germany there were certainly some nasty forces in the U.S 1924 actually was the Eek year of membership for the Ku Klux Klan uh but uh you know that never became the sort of majority majoritarian force in the U.S that the Nazis and the fascists did in in Italy and in Germany I think the the real break and Divergence from Europe came later on in the 1930s when not just Germany and Italy but uh all over Eastern Europe there were semi-fascist regimes uh military dictatorships everywhere from Lithuania to Greece to Portugal and in the United States I think we were very lucky to have Franklin D Roosevelt as president who took the country in a different direction and you know people were willing to support what he was trying to do Under the new deal to put people back to work So Adam let's conclude it's always hard as a historian you're a very very sophisticated one when stuff happens it seems inevitable when it doesn't it seems impossible but of course that's the wrong way of thinking about history um imagine we didn't know the future in 1924 I know that's an absurd way of thinking about it because we do but if we didn't cast yourself back to 1924 Adam um what was the promise of American democracy what was the great promise and what was the great fear well I think the promise of American democracy was that uh for many you know I think of the immigrants arriving from Europe was the promise that you wouldn't be held back here by your ethnicity by what language you spoke at home uh by the class that you had been born in this was a country for many people where their Hope was to get rich and their Hope was not to experience the Discrimination whether ethnic or religious uh that they'd experienced in Europe certainly especially for people like the the Jews from Eastern Europe who came here in large numbers uh so that was certainly a promise that had driven many people here but we shouldn't forget if we're talking about 1924 that that year was an important turning point because the immigration law passed that year essentially slammed the door on immigrants for more than 40 years to come and in American midnight I write a lot about the maneuverings leading up to that law although the law didn't go into effect uh until 1924. so in a way the very thing that many people coming to this country have felt as a great promise in preceding years was foreclosed from from 1924 on at least you know to newcomers uh coming after that point because there were so few of them sorry to interrupt Adam but there's no reason why America could not have maintained its democracy and restricted immigration no I don't think so uh I I think you're right that it it and it did maintain its democracy and I think its democracy did make some considerable forward movement uh in the 1930s under the pressure of the depression um but I think it's paradoxical that it came just as the door slammed shut uh and I'd like to think of democracy as one that that you know where we become a more and more democratic country but where we don't slam the door uh on people uh coming from other parts of the world especially if they are fleeing war and violence as so many of them are these days Adam finally uh you you've taught at UC Berkeley so you're good at giving grades uh over the 100 Years of its history between 1924 and 2024 what grade would you give American democracy ah you know my inclination because you know it's so easy to be critical of what you see around you is to give it a c or a c plus but then when I travel to other countries I tend to raise America's grade it depends where I go but I've I've lived in recent years for six months at a time uh uh one stretch in Russia and one stretch in India and I came back from both of those places sort of wanting to give American democracy a higher grade on the other hand when I travel to the Nordic countries and see some of the remarkable things they've done there I come back home and want to lower the grade so it depends who you compare our country to [Music] [Music]

Channel: Bertelsmann Foundation

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Length: 29min 40sec (1780 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023