He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. history.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Although these threats to civil liberties were subsequently deflected, “almost all of the tensions that roiled the country during and after the First World War still linger today.” The book is exceptionally well written, impeccably organized, and filled with colorful, fully developed historical characters.Ī riveting, resonant account of the fragility of freedom in one of many shameful periods in U.S. Robert La Follette and Secretary of Labor Louis Post, resisted but with little success. Ultimately, writes the author, “a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home.” Labor leaders, socialists, and anti-war activists such as Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, along with government officials such as Sen. Woodrow Wilson presided over the entire toxic political and social landscape. Among numerous others, those who benefitted most politically were J. From the country’s entry into World War I until Warren Harding became president, the federal government and law enforcement agencies joined with the civilian-staffed American Protective League and union-busting industrialists to censor newspapers and magazines fabricate communist conspiracies surveil and imprison conscientious objectors and labor leaders (particularly the Wobblies) harass socialists, German immigrants, pacifists, and Jews deport foreigners without due process and stand aside as police and vigilantes killed labor activists and destroyed Black communities and formed lynch mobs. “Never was raw underside of our national life more revealingly on display.” Those years, he writes, were rife with “the toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law have long flowed through American life”-and clearly still do today. A history of the early-20th-century assault on civil rights and those the federal government deemed un-American.įor Hochschild-the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among many other honors-one of America’s darkest periods was between 19.
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