THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

[W]oodrow Wilson remains one of the most monstrous presidents in our country's history. University students today insist that he was a racist--which he certainly was--but his faults hardly end there. During his tenure, the United States assumed more characteristics of authoritarianism than at any time before or since.

Wilson's presidential campaign pledged to keep the country out of the meat-grinding war across the Atlantic, and he kept that promise for nearly three years until Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. But American Midnight isn't about the First World War. It's about what happened at home during and after it. The declaration of war in the House of Representatives passed by 373 votes to 50, and while most Americans approved of the decision, there were noisy pockets of dissent, as there are whenever democracies fight wars. Wilson feared that even the mildest bleats of complaint would undermine the morale necessary to sustaining the war effort. The upshot was the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which had almost nothing to do with actual espionage. Instead, it declared any kind of anti-war activity to be criminal, and defined "opposition" in ways that few modern critics of pacifists and isolationists would even recognize.

Anyone who "shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation of the military or naval forces of the United States" was subject to arrest. It would be a mistake to assume that the Wilson administration was only going after the purveyors of what we now call "fake news," or to get hung up on the words "with intent to interfere." Ordinary people were rounded up and prosecuted who had no intention of interfering with anyone or anything, and those convicted faced up to 20 years in prison--twice as long as the sentence Vladimir Putin metes out to his Russian subjects for similar offenses today.

A Texas man was jailed for saying, "I wish Wilson was in hell." Andreas Latzko's novel Men in War was banned for describing the war as a "wholesale cripple-and-corpse factory." Police officers arrested playwright Eugene O'Neill at gunpoint on Cape Cod because somebody saw sunlight reflecting off his typewriter and thought he was sending signals to German ships. Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was arrested for co-writing and producing a silent film called The Spirit of '76 about the American Revolution. Regardless of what happened in 1776, the presiding judge said, "we are engaged in a war in which Great Britain is an ally of the United States," and this was not the time for "sowing dissension among our people" or "creating animosity ... between us and our allies." Goldstein was handed 10 years in prison.

It became a federal offense to send "seditious" newspapers and magazines through the mail, which was the only way anyone could subscribe to them in the days before the Internet. Masses magazine, for instance, was deemed "unmailable" after it published a political cartoon that showed the Liberty Bell crumbling. A pamphlet titled "Why Freedom Matters" was banned not for criticizing the war but for criticizing censorship. At least the author of the pamphlet knew why. "Sometimes," Hochschild writes, "as if anticipating the protagonist of Kafka's The Trial, a journalist could not even learn what he or she was accused of." Newspapers and magazines in foreign languages were likewise banned whether they criticized the government or not. Who knew what kind of diabolical speech might appear in a paper that censors couldn't read?

This censorship was accompanied by a repressive clampdown that's hard to even imagine today. President Wilson's special emissary, a former senator named Elihu Root, said, "There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason. There are some newspapers published in this city every day the editors of which deserve conviction and execution." Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said he wanted Congress "to take away the citizenship of every disloyal American--every American who is not heartily in support of his Government in its crisis ... I would annul the citizenship of every such individual and confiscate his property."

The Department of Justice authorized former advertising executive Albert Briggs to deputize civilian vigilantes into the American Protective League (APL), which had 1,200 chapters and roughly 250,000 members. They tapped phones and placed bugs in the homes of those they surveilled. They raided houses and seized documents. They rode trains and listened for "disloyal" speech. The Seattle branch alone investigated more than 10,000 people and arrested more than a thousand, 499 of whom were charged with "seditious utterances." One official described a Midwestern chapter of the APL as "the Ku Klux Klan of the prairies." He meant it as a compliment. The Bureau of Investigation (which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation) likewise sent spies into legal organizations.

In Chicago, 10,000 APL agents went on a full-bore repression spree. "At movie theaters, vaudeville shows, and a Cubs doubleheader," Hochschild writes, "the raiders made everyone file out of designated exits, where each draft-age man had to show his card. Badge-wearing vigilantes checked every arriving train or steamboat, and combed parks, bars, restaurants, elevated train stations, and nightclubs. They stopped cars to question drivers and passengers and even appeared at the beaches in bathing suits, wading into Lake Michigan to interrogate suspects."

Even after the war ended, state repression and censorship continued unabated. A few senators introduced a bill to put a stop to it but got nowhere. Its failure, remarked progressive Republican Robert La Follette, "ought to make the framers of the Constitution open their eyes in their coffins."

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