Welcome to a special episode of the Raspberry Podcast, where we welcome our first guest author, Adam Hochschild, the author of American Midnight; The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. American Midnight is about the crisis of democracy that was precipitated when the United States joined The Great War on April, 2 1917.

The Great War, which ended up costing the United States 240,000 casualties, had been underway for almost three years by the spring of 1917, and the European belligerents were stuck in the trenches of the Western Front, grinding away in their stalemated static warfare. Tanks had only that month been introduced onto the battlefield as the horrors continued to accumulate. 1916 had been the most deadly year of the war.

In April 2017 the US, after resisting joining the fight for years, finally threw in with the Entente powers - Britain, France, Italy and Russia. Libraries of books have covered the fighting at the front but little has been written about what was happening here in the US. While President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed we were fighting to Make the World Safe for Democracy, here he led a fervent war Against Democracy, condoning torture, imprisonments and detentions of America’s internal enemies in an endless parade of bloody and repressive scenes as the official and unofficial organs of the government attacked dissenters, minorities, immigrants and organized labor. This edition is truly alarming and timely as 100 years later we are about to enter a second Trump presidency dedicated to similar goals.

Adam Hochschild writes frequently about issues of human rights and social justice. American Midnight is only the latest of his eleven books. He is a three-time winner of the Gold Medal for Nonfiction of the California Book Awards. His reporting from five continents has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other magazines. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.