“You will not find the things I tell you,” remarked Adam Hochschild, “in school history books, which celebrate America’s participation in the First World War—and move on.” What these books leave out is the gut-wrenching truth of the years 1917-1919—a national government with all the violence at its disposal to destroy threats to its authority. Below at this site, you can hear a lecture by the author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.
Hochschild gave a version of this talk on September 6, 2023, to members of the Princeton Old Guard, an 80-year-old organization of retired men and women. Many are graduates of the university, seeking, with others, good fellowship and the opportunity to sharpen their wits on talks by formidable lecturers. A first irony: the years of the Great War and shortly thereafter was a time of brutal national tensions between classes and ethnicities. Despite his personal refinement and celebrated passion for democracy, the tensions were exacerbated under the racist government of Woodrow Wilson, himself a graduate of Princeton and from 1902-1910 its president. A second irony follows.
This reporter comes, nearly a century ago, from a petty-bourgeois, Jewish background, growing up in a Brooklyn enclave in the Depression years. His presence at Hochschild’s lecture marks the pinnacle of assimilation, for here he is a member of the Old Guard, appearing at Princeton University’s Carnegie Center every Wednesday morning in tweed jacket and striped tie and singing, along with several dozen ancient white-haired gentry, “God Bless America,” the obligatory prelude to Hochschild’s talk.
Assimilation suggests control: you have arrived at the position you wanted, presumably impervious to all the dimly-lit obstacles in your path. This control of contingencies can be undone. My presence at this lecture—which I will represent in the third person—provoked a play of irrational forces suggestive of those reported by Adam Hochschild. First, his virtually human cell phone, attentive to each of Hochschild’s words, disappears from his bag. Has it been stolen–in such a milieu? The loss of this pocket-sized simulacrum of his brain is shattering. In the hands of a thief, that brain and all its possessions can be abused, and he will be ruined. He makes a mad dash for repair to a dangerously situated AT&T highway office. The run has consequences: a timely appearance of blue lights behind him, a determined officer, and a ticket for speeding. His argument for justice, for the need to speed, is rejected–his driver’s license threatened with loss, another punishment. He can do nothing except advance further into this void of lost control: he pays for a horribly expensive replacement phone that … does not work, culminating, inevitably, in a fit of rage and the phenomenon known as “impulse momentum” that urges him to drive his car hard into a lamppost, followed by hours of chagrin and resettlement. Now, he thinks: there is a parable here. The American government, too, under Woodrow Wilson, had functioned in the grip of a murderous impulse momentum aimed at the destruction of all opposition, especially vicious to enlightened war resisters, German-speakers, Wobblies, feminists, and blacks. Though not alive in the years of Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, he now feels on his own body a loss of control, the failure of assimilation that heightens his sense of this earlier assault on America’s outlying human stock. All this takes place in a scene saturated with the historical memory of the very genteel Woodrow Wilson, yet someone now himself undone by the very institution to which he was perfectly assimilated: “On June 26, 2020, the Princeton University Board of Trustees voted to change the names of both the School of Public and International Affairs and Wilson College; the trustees concluded that Woodrow Wilson’s racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college whose scholars, students, and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms” This is in fact the normative thinking of today’s Old Guard; Adam Hochschild knows this is the case, for his impromptu remarks coming from the Left to condemn the well-remembered crisis of democracy in our own time were received by the audience with quiet enthusiasm and applause. For this reporter, it was a doubly ironical learning experience–and a warning, as it is said, for all concerned.