Nonfiction Reviews

American Midnight

The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

Adam Hochschild
Mariner Books ($29.99)

by Robert Zaller

Adam Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed study King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), has made a career out of unearthing the ghosts of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.  He might simply have made a single volume of that singularly bloody period, which saw the Western world’s hegemony collapse in two great wars and climaxed in the greatest atrocity in history and the most powerful weapon ever developed—a weapon that would soon prove capable of endangering human life on the planet.  But that story, in its broad outlines, is already familiar; in his work Hochschild has aimed instead to tell it indirectly and episodically—to do what a sequence of novels might do, but using the tools of a historian.

Like a novelist, Hochschild works with protagonists, but the consequential figures of history who lead his narratives are more than storytellers of particular events—to the author, it is the legacy of each that ultimately shapes them.  Leopold II is remembered for Belgium’s brutal colonization of the Congo, an imperial venture that set the pattern for Europe’s exploitation of Africa in the latter nineteenth century, including the precedent for German genocide in today’s Namibia.  His “ghost” is thus not merely what was done by him and in his name, but also what persisted until the collapse of Europe’s African empires fifty years after his death, which haunt the continent to this day.

The same spectral image defines Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Viking, 1994), which presents the Soviet dictator as an object of memory, defining the decades since his death for his nation as perhaps no other world personality has—a ghost now revived ominously in the figure of Vladimir Putin.  But dictators are an easy target, even if, as in The Unquiet Ghost, Hochschild is after a more multidimensional portrait.  In his most recent book, American Midnight, he fixes on the half-forgotten episode of a century ago colloquially known as the Red Scare, which he presents as a nadir of our history that has shaped it ever since. 

The Red Scare began with America’s entry into World War I, just as Russia’s ability to maintain a second front against Imperial Germany was in doubt.  Nominally neutral, the U.S. under President Woodrow Wilson had made extensive loans to the Western Allies, Britain, and France, which were unlikely to be repaid in the event of Allied defeat.  As Hochschild points out, this was a decisive factor in Wilson’s request for a declaration of war in April 1917—although, as he also notes, the enthusiasm for war in Congress mirrored that of the general population, for which war had partly the character of a great adventure and partly that of a natural extension of the position America had assumed as a Pacific imperial power at the turn of the century, as well as the world’s captain of industry. 

At the same time, Hochschild touches on the reluctance of many in the country to abandon George Washington’s long-held counsel to avoid foreign entanglements, and Wilson’s own boast, in his reelection campaign only months before, that he had kept the U.S. out of Europe’s war.  Some of the opposition to war, he notes, was ethnically based in the country’s large German population, and some in the only independent party of the Left, the Socialists. 

From the beginning, Wilson cast the war as a crusade, in his words, to make the world safe for democracy, even while privately admitting that it would mean “autocracy at home”—a marshaling of manpower and resources such as the country had never seen, and consequently a repression of dissent.  Wilson’s sloganeering would be, as Hochschild observes, a capstone for the idea of American exceptionalism that had developed in the nineteenth century and would define it in the twentieth and beyond.  In this, Wilson would shape American ideology profoundly, the personal tragedy of his failure to bring the U.S. into his postwar League of Nations notwithstanding.

To what extent Wilson expressed a hopeful idealism, and to what extent he was the partly cynical captive of his own rhetoric, is a subject that historians will long debate, and by foregrounding it Hochschild not only makes him the protagonist of this story but also places the legacy of our twenty-eighth president in a sharper light. As the war proceeded, Wilson’s rationale for it became broader and more grandiose.  It would be, he claimed, not only for the advancement of democracy but for the ultimate peace of the world.

Hochschild leaves us in no doubt of his conclusions about the cost of the war for American democracy, quoting the distinguished historian David Brion Davis: “The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.” By June 1917, Congress had passed the Espionage Act, the broadest and most draconian restraint of free speech, activity, and assembly in the history of the country, and still in force today.  The government’s chief targets were home-grown socialists, whose leader, Eugene Debs, received almost a million votes in the presidential election of 1920 while imprisoned under the Espionage Act, while its largest union, the International Workers of the World (IWW), was crushed by mass arrests culminating in the largest civilian criminal trial ever held in the U.S.

The war itself, of course, had many consequential results, which Hochschild details.  The government assumed virtual control of the economy, enriching giant corporations while putting antitrust regulations to sleep.  The military draft upended millions of lives and cost 116,000 of them.  But the chief focus of Hochschild’s story is less about the vast redistribution of national wealth or the cost of battle, and more about what he regards as its ultimate price: the suppression of native dissent.  The Great War would prove not merely a pause in American democracy, but, despite the enfranchisement of women at the end of it, an enduring degradation.  The country would not again know a worker’s movement such as the IWW, or a political party as progressively committed as that led by Debs.  American public discourse, in Hochschild’s view, has been hobbled by this ever since.

Hochschild makes his points through a series of vivid portraits of antiwar radicals silenced or thrust into prison or exile—Alexander Berkman, W.E.B. DuBois, Marie Equi, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Hayward, Kate Richards O’Hare, and John Reed—as well as a lone voice of dissent within the Wilson administration itself, Louis F. Post.  Against these figures, he depicts those who abetted the war in their efforts to curtail the Left and civil liberties in general.  The best-remembered among them would be J. Edgar Hoover, then at the outset of his career but already a powerful force, but together, as Hochschild demonstrates, their work would help to make Wilson’s second administration one of the darkest and most lawless periods in American history.

As for Wilson, his desire to justify the war and his vision of America’s world leadership led him to promote the League of Nations that his fellow countrymen would soon reject.  The result was a paralyzing stroke that left Wilson himself the mere spectator of the last eighteen months of his presidency, and the witness of the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that virtually guaranteed the far greater war that followed it twenty years later.  Beyond that, Hochschild’s account of America’s long-ago “midnight” has much to tell us about the politics we have inherited in our own day.

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A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Joanna Biggs
Ecco ($29.99)

by Ellie Eberlee

Evening, 1857. A thirty-eight-year-old Mary Ann Evans, later to achieve fame under her pen name, George Eliot, reads Jane Austen aloud. After decades of migraines, unrequited attachments, and the loss of her parents, Eliot is beginning to write fiction, and she seeks inspiration in Austen’s wry, imaginative prose. She also hopes to entertain George Henry Lewes, her lover and a member of the burgeoning London literati to which Eliot—an anonymous magazine editor—fervently aspires to belong.

A century later in 1964, the thirty-three-year-old divorcée Toni Morrison (née Chloe Anthony Wofford) accepts a job editing textbooks in Syracuse. A single mother supporting her toddler son and newborn after a fleeting marriage to a Jamaican-born architect, Morrison found the position listed among the New York classifieds. Fending off creative depression and loneliness, Morrison writes by night, packing and smoking a tobacco pipe in her poorly heated apartment before resuming work on an old manuscript (published in 1970 as The Bluest Eye).

What links these two women separated by time, an ocean, and circumstance? Eliot and Morrison led unconventional lives, encountering gendered, racial, and socioeconomic hurdles in their careers and relationships. Like many spirited, creative women before and after them, Eliot and Morrison fought fiercely for the right to live out to the limits of their talents and desires, pursuing writing as a conduit for making meaning as they did so.

These and similar battles form the backbone of Joanna Biggs’s joint autobiography and biography A Life of One’s Own. Examining “Nine Women Writers [who] Begin Again,” the book traces the writing lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. A senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work (Serpent’s Tail, 2015), Biggs casts herself as the unspoken ninth woman, starting anew following the dissolution of her marriage in her early thirties.

Initially, Biggs’s divorce spelled straightforward liberation. “I was free,” the author writes. “At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild.” Soon, though, Biggs yearned for a life she “would be proud of, that [she] could stand behind.” She wondered: how does a feminist reconcile drives toward independence and human connection? Does domesticity preclude a fulfilling writing career or intellectual life? Such questions “felt urgent as well as overwhelming. . . . I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others.”

Like many recent joint biographies of female creatives—for example, Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women (2018) or Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (2020)—Biggs splits her exploration of women’s literary and personal re-beginnings into distinct, individually focussed chapters. The book observes a broad chronology, beginning in the eighteenth century with Wollstonecraft, whose landmark political treatises and epistolary travelogues Biggs admired as an undergraduate at Oxford. It ends with Ferrante, whose resilient energies drove Biggs’s brief venture into small press publishing, and whose Neapolitan novels continue to inform many of Biggs’s longstanding female friendships. Each section supplies a thoughtful tessellation of personal memoir, vividly recounted biography, and joyful analysis of the various writers’ major works. A prime example is the chapter titled “Zora,” which relates Biggs’s initial reading of the first professional Black woman author while undergoing a depressive episode; tracks Hurston’s involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, among other national movements; and offers a keenly observed, self-reflexive reading of Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Occasionally, the sheer celebrity of many of Biggs’s chosen biographical subjects threatens to detract from the immediacy and inventiveness of her narrative (Woolf and Plath’s extensively speculated-upon struggles with mental illness pluck especially familiar strings). Still, Biggs’s deeply felt connection to each writer revitalizes established literary lore, reframing each woman’s trajectory through personally resonant lenses of resurgence and rebirth. Her literary analyses, too, exhibit tender yet considered admiration. She avoids the detached, properly critical attitudes championed at Oxford while emphasizing the exquisite literary quality of each woman’s labors; it’s from their words, as much their lives, that Biggs draws solidarity and a sense of possibility.

If any lasting complaint might be lodged against A Life of One’s Own, it’s that the author’s considerable wealth of source material often obscures her own engrossing autobiography. At its end, readers may be taken aback to learn that seven years have passed since Biggs’s separation. What happened in the intervening period? Biggs offers glimpses: a brief stint on antidepressants, Ferrante-themed parties, apartment hunts, hot baths reading Hurston, relocation to New York, rediscovery of Woolf’s novels on the train from Brooklyn. But our sense of the author remains patchy at best, a partial sketch in a gallery of otherwise polished, skillful portraiture.

Ultimately, the book’s central thread holds tight. It’s gratifying, albeit slightly unsurprising, to arrive at Biggs’s conclusion that “there are many ways of doing good work and living a happy life, and that is more unusual for that to happen within the conventional set-up than you might imagine.” Of course, her reading of these eight women writers proves fundamental to that takeaway: “I never thought I could be Simone de Beauvoir,” she writes, “but I’ve always known she existed.” Put another way, Biggs finds anchorage in the drift of her literary mothers. Through revisiting their words—the complex, hard-won languages of hope, loss, and love each woman developed and left behind—she locates the confidence to carry her own messy liberation forward. By the book’s end, she lives and writes from a position figuratively analogous to the one Mrs. Ramsay temporarily occupies in Woolf’s masterwork To the Lighthouse—looking out over a sea of female creative inheritance, observing how her chosen women’s lives and literature have “silvered the rough waves a little more brightly,” and feeling, above all, that “It is enough! It is enough!”

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I Need to Tell You

Cathryn Vogeley
WiDo Publishing ($17.95)

Cathryn Vogeley uses three hallmarks of effective storytelling in her memoir, I Need to Tell You: vulnerability, uncertainty, and vivid scenes. Consider the opening paragraphs:

My eyes squeezed shut while the ting of metal instruments broke the silence. As if my chest had lost its elastic, I breathed in short, tight spurts. The ceiling tiles with their tiny holes looked down on me as my chin tilted upward.
Exam gloves snapped; metal wheels moaned across the cold floor.
Dr. Franklin stood from behind the sheet.
“No doubt about it. You’re pregnant.”

Vogeley, unmarried in 1968, discovers she is pregnant after her first year of nursing school. Her boyfriend, Gavin, says he can’t get married—this pregnancy must be kept secret.  Vogeley’s Catholic mother arranges for her to see her priest cousin Edward, to talk about "the problem,” and the pair arrange for her to be admitted to Roselia, a home for unwed mothers.

When Vogeley goes two weeks past her due date, she suggests to another Roselia resident that they jog in the winter courtyard to induce labor. Her description of the gunmetal sky and the thin layer of snow on the ground pull the reader into the frigid scene. We can see her “gripping both edges of my navy wool coat . . . schlumping along the sidewalk, hands under my belly, a bushel basket with a floating watermelon.”

The girls of Roselia are warned not to look at or hold their infants for fear they will want to keep them. But when Vogeley is handed her baby in the taxi back to Roselia, she can’t help but look at her daughter. “Those moments in the cab, less than the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, were our entire lifetime together.”

As time passes and Vogeley begins to tell her story, she discovers the people in her life are accepting. Her sister shows compassion and love, and her next boyfriend, Jimmy, doesn’t seem to care. The couple are mismatched, but Vogeley’s urge to be married overwhelms her doubts. “Just the designation of ‘Mrs.’ before my name would give me status, announce that someone wanted me, and allow me the right to have a legitimate child,” she states.

Vogeley has two more girls, and she throws herself into being a wife, mother, and homemaker while working as a nurse. But she knows there is something missing in her life. She tells herself she cannot think of her first baby ever again, but the haunting guilt remains. As her children get older and begin separating from her, she feels increasingly alienated from her life, and after hitting a low point, she starts college classes and convinces Jimmy to go to counseling with her. He doesn’t engage, and they divorce.

Vogeley begins to build a new life, first achieving certification as an ostomy nurse, then a master’s degree in nursing. She meets her future husband, Charlie, through a dating service. With him, she finds real love and acceptance of her past, and when she realizes she exhibits symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, she begins counseling anew. The therapist suggests she look for her baby, a search that proves long and frustrating. As she moves from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Vogeley’s account of the process and her examination of the changing laws on secret adoptions are enlightening.

Throughout I Need to Tell You, questions build: Will she have the baby, will she keep her? Will she look for her daughter, and will she find her? How will she leave the past behind and finally accept herself? While a happy ending isn’t guaranteed, this moving memoir makes all these questions resonate.

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Tuesdays in Jail

What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates

Tina Welling
New World Library ($17.95)

by George Longenecker                                  

When she volunteered to teach weekly writing workshops at the Teton County Jail in Jackson, Wyoming, Tina Welling had little idea what she was getting into. She had never been in jail or visited anyone in jail.  As metal doors clanked open and shut, guards escorted her to her first class and watched her every move. Yet, before long, she found that a rewarding experience was in store for both her new students and herself.

Welling’s memoir is introspective and practical. A novelist and the author of Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature (New World Library, 2014), Welling brings her writing talent to Tuesdays in Jail, which is beautifully descriptive and fast-paced. She looks at reasons the men there are incarcerated and guides them in self-reflection. She also offers practical advice for others who might want to tutor incarcerated people.

It's not easy for a nature writer to adapt to being inside a bleak prison—the Teton County Jail offers a stark contrast to the natural beauty of Wyoming.  Usually, Welling’s meetings are held in a group circle, overseen by a guard. Occasionally, though, she is locked on one side of a glass partition, with her student confined on the other side:

Each of the five doors needed keys or a code in order to pass through; each was made of thick metal and slammed closed with a deep clang that echoed off the cement block walls.  My stomach tightened with discomfort as each door shut with finality behind me.  I couldn’t find my way out of this place even if I held the ring of keys and the memory of codes.

Though she never feels comfortable in the sterile jail, Welling finds solace in helping her students access hope through writing. She assigns them philosophical and pragmatic prompts: “Choose three . . . characteristics that you’d like to strengthen within yourself, and write them down.”

While Welling knows she can’t fix her students’ pasts, she sees how her classes can affect their wellbeing and mental health—and even their chances of ending up in state prison. She ends up fighting to get the Teton County Sherriff’s Department to make policy changes so that those about to conclude their jail term are not cut off from the communities they’ll soon reenter.

Tuesdays in Jail includes a workbook of fifteen journaling lessons that a prospective volunteer could use for a class with incarcerated people, and throughout the book, Welling reflects on her own life and self-confidence. These reflections, along with non-judgmental sketches of her students, make for a beautifully written memoir that is a must-read for anyone living, working, or thinking of volunteering in prison.    

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Watershed

Attending to Body and Earth in Distress

Ranae Lenor Hanson
University of Minnesota Press ($19.95)

by Elizabeth Bailey

The Danube is no longer blue, I hear as the PBS NewsHour covers the summer 2022 heatwave. Aerial shots pan along wan rivers. The voice-over catalogues the faltering crops, throttled hydroelectric power production, and impassable shipping lanes. The bridges catch my breath, their long spans straining over narrow trickles; lanky support pillars spike from exposed riverbeds dried to a pale suede. Drought makes these feats of engineering look foolishly overbuilt, even obsolete.

From the headwaters of climate change, many crises compound: economic, political, environmental, and social, but also the less newsy crisis of living in the Anthropocene. In Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress, educator and climate activist Ranae Lenor Hanson explores parallels between the lived experiences of climate change and severe illness. Adult-onset diabetes sent shock waves through Hanson’s life. With her frank account of the illness—its avoidance and disruptive diagnosis, its indignities and halting integration into daily life—she offers a personal map against which readers might chart their own ways through the uneasy waters of the climate crisis.

One parallel between bodily and planetary crises is in Hanson’s response to her escalating illness. At first, her symptoms are vague and ignorable: dizziness, fatigue, growing thirst. She copes by catching hold of a signpost at the bus stop when unsteady or perching “on the edge of a stool” when she can no longer stand up while teaching. This avoidance feels familiar: We all hope that a nagging discomfort will abate unaided, and tend to sidestep reckoning with deeper systemic issues, be they interpersonal, bodily, or environmental.

As Hanson’s symptoms worsen, diabetic ketoacidosis sends her to the hospital where she must finally acknowledge a new reality: without daily, even hourly attention to her health, she risks damaging her body, or shutting it down altogether. Later, she reflects on the difficulty of stopping to address crises; there are “exams to study for, jobs to get (or get to), children to raise,” and other duties and deadlines. After Hanson finally drags herself to an urgent care clinic, she begins to see that “like a diabetic crisis, climate trauma numbs our brains. The threat is too big to conceive, so we relegate it to the background. There it sits, unsettling everything, while most of us focus with increasing intensity on whatever task or diversion is at hand.”

Hanson’s midlife diagnosis upset not only her daily routines, but also her sense of herself as a capable individual treading lightly on the earth. Type 1 diabetes, with its required test strips, glucose monitors, insulin pumps, doctor visits, dietitian sessions, diabetes nurse educators, and medical device hotlines, abruptly ropes Hanson to numerous systems and the “ecological and social and infrastructure stability” needed to maintain health. This new dependency puts Hanson in tension with herself. She anxiously, almost obsessively, counts the “five used and useless strips” wasted while learning to test her blood sugar. Even once she gets the hang of the glucometer, she is pained by how much more trash she generates to stay alive as a diabetic, and bemoans her lost dream “to canoe off into the woods and survive on my own.”

A lifelong Minnesotan, Hanson’s rugged mentality was nurtured by a childhood in the “loosely connected, fiercely independent, unaffiliated Christian network of the north.” Her memories of the Minnesota backwoods have a timeless quality. Seasons roll past, drying peppermint and rosehips on window screens, drilling for fresh spring water, winter camping in trappers’ cabins operated on the honor system, and enduring the casual sexism of a grandfather refusing to teach his granddaughter to drive the tractor. Against this backdrop, certain moments bring the reader swiftly to a particular era. “Though the mosquitoes were thick” when men came to spray the yard with DDT, Hanson’s mother “had read Silent Spring and ran out in protest. . . . Laughing, they sprayed anyway.”

At the hospital, the doctor returns with “good news”: If Hanson “can find a deep, cool lake and a waterproof container,” she’ll be able to store insulin and “live in the woods for up to three months.” Hanson smiles, but then her thoughts turn to climate change. “All I need to do . . . is keep my lake cool.”

As Hanson struggles to navigate the challenges of her new reality, she returns to teaching classes in ethics, global studies, and ecofeminism at a Twin Cities community college. Her students come from many countries, and some “from more than one country by way of relatives and refugee camps.” In one class, students from Africa debate Nile water politics. For them, the implications of a new dam aren’t abstract; all the places the dam will affect—where it is built, where it takes water from, where it floods, where the water is sent, where war will “surely” break out—are personal, filled with “the grandparents of someone” and “the farms of someone else.” Their discussion is not only knowledgeable but undergirded by the firsthand knowledge that “Water is truly life. Or death.”

To some, the climate crisis may feel distant, a problem to be solved for the benefit of future generations. But Hanson’s students are already living amid the concentric crises (drought, famine, fighting) of climate change. For these students, this isn’t a future crisis. Catastrophe is ongoing. Disruption and upheaval have become their own way of life.

Watershed operates on this human scale. By braiding stories of individual struggles with climate-based calamity, Hanson encourages readers to honor and attend to the personal side of a global catastrophe. And what then? Hanson offers some of her suggestions in chapter titles and section breaks: “Pause to Survey,” “Consider the Need to Stop,” “Feel the Grief,” “Bear Witness,” “Practice for Mourning.”

One phrase in particular seems capable of holding the others: “Rely on a Deep, Cool Lake.” Each of us, this phrase suggests, would do well to find a reservoir from which to draw calm and strength. Let it sustain and replenish you, and learn what you can do to replenish and sustain it.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023