On 20th-Century America's Darkest Hour.

choi

Adam Hochschild, On 20th-Century America's Darkest Hour. Wall Street Journal, Dec 10, 2022, at page C14 (in the column 'Five Best [books]').
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiv ... st-hour-11670594788

Note: The online WSJ review was free when I read it Dec 10, 2022.
(a)
(i)
(A) The German Hochschild is "nickname for a fighter or soldier; a variant of [another German surname] Hauschild [which means 'hit the shield']. Hoch reflects a Frankish dialect form of [Modern German verb] hauen to hit.

German-English dictionary:
* Schild (noun masculine): "shield"  (The Modern English noun shield cam from Old English noun masculine scield.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schild
(B) The en.wikipedia.org  for "Adam Hochschild" pronounces the surname "hoʊkʃɪld."
(ii) WSJ introduces Hochschild as "The author of American Midnight; The Great War, a violent peace, and democracy's forgotten crisis." Mariner Book, Oct 4, 2022 (about America 1917-1921, which spanned Red Scare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
).

(b)
(i)
(A) Eugene V Debs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs
("On June 16, 1918, Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft. He was arrested on June 30 and charged with ten counts of sedition" for which he was convicted and sentenced for 10 years)
(B) sedition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition
(section 2 History in common law jurisdictions, section 2.10 United States: "In the Espionage Act of 1917, Section 3 made it a federal crime, punishable by up to 20 years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $10,000, to willfully spread false news of the United States Army or Navy with an intent to disrupt its operations, to foment mutiny in their ranks, or to obstruct recruiting. This Act of Congress was amended by the Sedition Act of 1918, which expanded the scope of the Espionage Act to any statement criticizing the Government of the United States. These laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1919 decisions Schenck v United States (concerning distribution of flyers urging men to resist the draft) and Abrams v. United States (concerning leaflets urging cessation of weapons production). * * * The laws were largely repealed in 1921, leaving laws forbidding foreign espionage in the United States and allowing military censorship of sensitive material")
(ii) Industrial Workers of the World
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World
(1905- ; "members of which are commonly termed 'Wobblies,' is an international labor union that was founded in Chicago in 1905. The origin of the nickname 'Wobblies' is uncertain. * * * Membership declined dramatically in the late 1910s and 1920s. There were conflicts with other labor groups, particularly the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which regarded the IWW as too radical, while the IWW regarded the AFL as too conservative and opposed their decision to divide workers on the basis of their crafts. * * * The IWW promotes the concept of 'One Big Union' [undivided by crafts]."/ section 1 History, section 1.1 1905–1950. section 1.1.1 Founding: "Eugene Debs [and another union leader] were involved but were unable to attend the meeting")


(c)
(i)
(A) J Edgar Hoover
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
(father was "was of English and German ancestry. * * * Hoover obtained a Bachelor of Laws from the George Washington University Law School in 1916 * * * and an LL.M. in 1917 from the same university. * * * Immediately after getting his LL.M. degree, Hoover was hired by the Justice Department to work in the War Emergency Division. * * * In August 1919, the 24-year-old Hoover became head of the Bureau of Investigation's new General Intelligence Division, also known as the Radical Division because its goal was to monitor and disrupt the work of domestic radicals.[18] America's First Red Scare was beginning, and one of Hoover's first assignments was to carry out the Palmer Raids")
(B) Bureau of Investigation (BOI) was created in 1908, rechristened the Division of Investigation (DOI) in 1933; DOI was changed to FBI in 1935.  en.wikipedia.org for "Federal Bureau of Investigation."

• A Brief History; The nation calls, 1908-1923. FBI, undated.
https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history

Quote:

"The chain of events was set in motion in 1906, when Roosevelt appointed a likeminded reformer named Charles Bonaparte as his second Attorney General. The grandnephew of the infamous French emperor, Bonaparte was a noted civic reformer. * * *

"He had no squad of investigators to call his own * * * By 1907, when he wanted to send an investigator out to gather the facts or to help a US Attorney build a case, he was usually borrowing operatives from the Secret Service. * * * they [secret service agents] reported not to the Attorney General [of US Department of Justice], but to the Chief of the Secret Service[, of US Department of Treasury]. This situation frustrated Bonaparte, who had little control over his own investigations.  Bonaparte made the problem known to Congress, which wondered why he was even renting Secret Service investigators at all when there was no specific provision in the law for it. In a complicated, political showdown with Congress, involving what lawmakers charged was Roosevelt's grab for executive power, Congress banned the loan of Secret Service operatives to any federal department in May 1908.
Now Bonaparte had no choice, ironically, but to create his own force of investigators [of 34 men]. * * * On July 26, 1908, Bonaparte ordered Department of Justice attorneys to refer most investigative matters to his Chief Examiner, Stanley W. Finch, for handling by one of these 34 agents. The new force had its mission—to conduct investigations for the Department of Justice—so that date is celebrated as the official birth of the FBI.

"With Congress raising no objections to this new unnamed force as it returned from its summer vacation, Bonaparte kept a hold on its work for the next seven months before stepping down with his retiring president in early March 1909. A few days later, on March 16, Bonaparte’s successor, Attorney General George W Wickersham, gave this band of agents their first name—the Bureau of Investigation. It stuck.

• Theodore Roosevelt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt
(1858 – 1919; political party: Republican; president Sept 14, 1901 – Mar 4, 1909; as vice president (Mar 4, 1901 - Sept 14, 1901), he "assum[d] the presidency after McKinley's assassination"/ Roosevelt "decided to stick to his 1904 pledge not to run for a third term" and Republican William Howard Taft succeeded Roosevelt as president)
(C) Juris Doctor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Doctor
(JD; section 3 Creation of the JD and major common law approaches to legal education, section 3.1 Legal education in the United States, section 3.1.1        Creation of the Juris Doctor: "The University of Chicago Law School was the first to offer the J.D. in 1902,[33]: 112–117  when it was just one of five law schools that demanded a college degree from its applicants. * * * Harvard, for example, refused to adopt the JD degree, even though it restricted admission to students with college degrees in 1909. * * * By 1962, the JD degree was rarely seen outside the Midwest. * * * the most prominent [law] schools were convinced to make the change: Columbia and Harvard in 1969, and Yale (last) in 1971" (footnotes omitted) )
(ii) Emma Goldman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman   
(1869 – 1940; born in "Lithuania (then within the Russian Empire), to an Orthodox Lithuanian Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885 [around 16]. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair; planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda but failed; deported under Anarchist Exclusion Act in 919 to Russia; "Goldman initially viewed the Bolshevik revolution in a positive light" but was turned off and left Russia in 1921; died in Toronto, Canada)
(iii) a square deal

square (adj): "5b: JUST, FAIR  <a square deal>  <square in all his dealings>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/square


(d) "If you're not familiar with John Dos Passos's extraordinary USA trilogy, this middle novel [titled ‘1919] is a great place to dive in. * * *  superb, crisp, prose-poem portraits of notable figures of the era, from Woodrow Wilson to JP Morgan to Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, shot by a Utah firing squad after a conviction based on much-disputed evidence. The novel's final pages are the masterpiece of the entire trilogy: a symphony of voices—a Congressional resolution, a presidential speech, a floridly patriotic news story, searing imagined fragments of a life cut short by a senseless war—evoking the burial of the Unknown Soldier in 1921."
(i)
(A) John Dos Passos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dos_Passos
(1896 – 1970)
was born in Chicago to unmarried Portuguese American parents who eventually got married.
(B) Portuguese-English dictionary:
* passo (noun masculine; plural passos): "step"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/passo
(ii) USA (trilogy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.A._(trilogy)
(ii)
(A) crisp (adj): "BRISK, LIVELY  <a crisp tale of intrigue>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crisp
(B) brisk (adj):
brisk (adj):
"4a : ENERGETIC, QUICK   <took a brisk walk> <at a brisk pace>
   b: marked by much activity  <business was brisk>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brisk
(iii) Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Arlington)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_Unknown_Soldier_(Arlington)
("The monument has no officially designated name"/ section 1 Tomb of 1921)

choi

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Democracy's Prisoner
By Ernest Freeberg (2008)
1. If you need any convincing that the years 1917 to 1921 were a shameful nadir for American democracy, start with this moving and gracefully written book. Eugene V Debs, who in 1912 won 6% of the popular vote as the Socialist candidate for US president, was a gentle, devout Christian, committed to nonviolence and the electoral process. He charmed even his jailors, stopping on one speaking tour to visit the sheriff who had once had him in custody for leading a railroad strike. In 1918, Debs called the backers of American participation in World War I "the same usurers, the same money changers, the same Pharisees" Jesus once denounced. For this speech he was found guilty under the Espionage Act, [Democrat] Woodrow Wilson's sweeping criminalization of dissent, and was sentenced to 10 years. As Convict #9653 in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Debs ran once more for president in 1920, receiving more than 900,000 votes. The next year President [Republican Warren G] Harding released Debs and invited him to stop in for a visit on his way home. Debs joked that he had run for the White House five times, but this was the first time he'd actually got there. Harding commuted Debs's sentence to time served, but didn't pardon him, which meant that Debs still did not have full citizenship rights, such as the right to vote. When a reporter asked how he felt about this, he replied, "Now I am only a citizen of the world."

Keep the Wretches in Order
By Dean A Strang (2019)
2. Dean Strang, whose writing is enlivened by his experience as a trial lawyer, tells the story of the largest civilian criminal trial in American history, which took place in 1918. Attempting to silence both the critics of the war and the militant wing of the labor movement, the government indicted several hundred "Wobblies"—members of the radical and flamboyant Industrial Workers of the World. More than a hundred of them were held in Chicago's Cook County Jail, where they published a handwritten newspaper, staged poetry readings and choral concerts, and gave interviews to journalists through steel cell doors. On Sundays they attended church services in a room that doubled as an execution chamber [not theirs; not for them]. No Wobblies were accused of acts of violence; the charges against them rested solely on words they had written or spoken. Nonetheless, President Wilson told his attorney general that they were "worthy of being suppressed." The jury deliberated less than an hour to find them guilty on all counts, and the judge passed out a total of 807 years of prison time. "The big game is over," wrote Wobbly leader William D "Big Bill" [which is a nickname] Haywood, "and we never won a hand. The other fellow [federal government] had the cut, shuffle and deal."

Young J. Edgar
By Kenneth D Ackerman (2007)
3. J Edgar Hoover was a mere 24 years old in 1919 when Attorney General A Mitchell Palmer picked him to head the Justice Department's new Radical Division. Using thousands of file cards, Hoover began keeping track of the extraordinarily wide range of people the two men considered subversive, including Sen Robert La Follette and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. The notorious Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920, when Justice Department agents corralled some 10,000 people, roughing up many and throwing thousands in jail, really should have been called the Hoover Raids. In one extraordinary scene, this premier Red-hunter had a dramatic face-to-face with one of the country's greatest radicals, Emma Goldman, as she made her way to the ship on which he had arranged for her to be deported. "Haven't I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?" he asked. "Oh, I suppose you've given me as square a deal as you could," she replied acidly, as she was ejected from the country in which she had lived for 34 of her 50 years. “We shouldn't expect from any person something beyond his capacity."

1919
By John Dos Passos (1932)
4. If you're not familiar with John Dos Passos's extraordinary USA trilogy, this middle novel is a great place to dive in. Read it selectively, though. It's like a feast where the best dishes are the hors d'oeuvres, salad and dessert. The novel's characters and plot aren't memorable, but interspersed throughout are Dos Passos's dazzling stylistic innovations: collages of excerpts from newspaper articles, song lyrics and advertisements; impressionistic stream-of-consciousness passages, some from his own experience; and superb, crisp, prose-poem portraits of notable figures of the era, from Woodrow Wilson to JP Morgan to Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, shot by a Utah firing squad after a conviction based on much-disputed evidence. The novel's final pages are the masterpiece of the entire trilogy: a symphony of voices—a Congressional resolution, a presidential speech, a floridly patriotic news story, searing imagined fragments of a life cut short by a senseless war—evoking the burial of the Unknown Soldier in 1921.

Conscience
By Louisa Thomas (2011)
5. Millions of Americans who lived through the Vietnam War remember how that conflict divided families. Louisa Thomas, who covers sports for the New Yorker, describes how another war did just that in her own family. Her great-grandfather Norman Thomas—eventually Eugene Debs's successor as the perennial presidential candidate of a much-shrunken Socialist Party—and his brother Evan were passionately opposed to US participation in World War I. Evan, a conscientious objector, was sent to a military prison where he endured solitary confinement, was force-fed when he refused to eat and was chained to his cell's bars nine hours a day when he refused to work. Meanwhile, two other brothers, Ralph and Arthur, served in the Army, one of them wounded in action. The author draws on interviews, letters and an unpublished memoir to bring alive the story of these men who, despite deep disagreements, still treated each other as brothers.