“I have been accused of having obstructed the war. I admit it. I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone. I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace.” So said Eugene Debs on September 12th, 1918 to members of a jury tasked with deciding whether he had, as prosecutors argued, during a speech given a few weeks earlier to a crowd of socialists attempted “to promote insubordination [in the military]” and “propagate obstruction to the [military] draft.”
Debs - a socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of, among many leftist groups, the Socialist Party of America - would be convicted of and handy a lengthy prison sentence for violating the Espionage Act, pushed through Congress the year prior by former President Woodrow Wilson - just after the United States entered into the war in Europe.
Upon signing the Act - which made criminal dissent against the war - into law, Wilson, at once, began to use it to go after opposition to the establishment - communists, socialists, trade unionists - and continued to do so even after the war had ended.
This is just one of the many subjects of American Midnight, journalist and historian Adam Hochschild's recent book, in which he examines a period during which the United States saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression that makes McCarthyism look almost subtle by comparison - 1917-21.
On this episode of “Buried Treasure,” we sit down with Hochschild to look back on this all too often unremembered period that gave birth to the Espionage Act - some of the “darkest years of the republic” in which the government and political establishment weren’t at all opposed to blatantly illiberal approaches to achieving their desired outcomes.
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Trump: The Divider in Chief (Susan Glasser and Peter Baker)
BONUS: Conspiracyland S4 EP3 - "It’s Not What We Thought It Was"
BONUS: Conspiracyland S4 EP2 - "The Mystery of the Moscow Signal"
BONUS: Conspiracyland S4 EP1 - "A Broken Heart"
What Happened to Rudy Giuliani (w/ Andrew Kirtzman)
How the GOP Went Crazy (w/ David Corn)
Kabul Falling (w/ Nelufar Hedayat & Bradley Hope)
Biden’s FDR Playbook (w/ Jonathan Darman)
Trump and the Espionage Act (with Bradley Moss)
The Afghan Tragedy: One Year Later (w/ Elliot Ackerman)
The Mar-a-Lago Raid (w/ Mary McCord & Dana Milbank)
DOJ’s 1/6 Dilemma (w/ Mary McCord
The Sycophants of Trump World (w/ Mark Leibovich)
The Jan 6 Georgia Connection (w/ Charlie Bailey)
Tim Miller’s Road to Hell (w/ Tim Miller)
Cloud Cuckooland (w/ Alex Holder)
The end of Roe (w/ David Kaplan & Don Ayer)
January 6th: Will it matter? (w/ Julie Pace & Stephen Engelberg)
January 6th Committee Delivers (w/ Hugo Lowell)
The "definitely intoxicated" Rudy Giuliani (w/ Matthew Miller & Sol Wisenberg)
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