An historian friend smugly assures me that professional historians have not neglected the years 1917-20, which saw American participation in the war in Europe and repression at home. That is no doubt true, but what distinguishes American Midnight from all the discussions of its various sub-histories is its insistence that the seemingly separate strands of violence and oppression form an inextricably bound whole. Veterans of the Indian Wars and the brutal suppression of the Philippine Moro freedom fighters brought their taste for and techniques of violence to bear on anarchist strikers and socialists at home and clamored for American involvement in the European meat grinder of World War I. Their taste for getting in on the violence in Europe required suppression of every criticism of a war that knew no justification beyond national vanity and ill-gotten gain. This in turn justified the domestic war against rebellious workers and resisters of unfettered capitalism, an offensive which in turn served to heighten the relentless violence against non-white and immigrant Americans. It amounted to a multi-front offensive that encouraged and relied upon hypocritical heavy-handed “protection” of women by keeping them subordinate to men—who in turn needed to confirm their alpha status by committing appalling acts of violence and suppressing even the non-conformism of speaking a foreign tongue. The specializations of academic historians and the sectarian narratives of particular groups that suffered—or worse, the eagerness to declare a special victim status—distorts in retrospect what was evidently more akin to a single massive weather front in which wind and hail and rain and killer tornadoes make for an all-encompassing disaster. The lynchings of Black people were far more numerous and horrible, yet they would be less comprehensible regarded without relation to the same treatment of certain white victims. By abstracting the violence into unrelated oppressions, we disguise its sordid motives. We obscure the echoes of that disaster when we tell ourselves: Oh, the wind isn’t quite as strong now. No lightening so far. The clouds hovering over us now take some different shape. Those with a reliable instinct for historical weather can smell the danger in the simplest measure: the current willingness across the political spectrum to sacrifice the value of truth. Hegel got it right: Das Wahre ist das Ganze. “The true is the whole.” Viewed as a whole, Hochschild’s panorama is a distant mirror of the age of Trump.
Hochschild strikes a responsive chord in me because I have written a similar social-historical characterization of my native region of Southern Illinois. The manuscript is accessible on my personal page of this blog. It’s a draft I wrote with the title of Egyptian Darkness and the Diaspora of Light. (See the pages beginning with “This is why I am turning my attention to the region where I grew up” and up to the section, prefaced by an intriguing quote from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?”).
My account of a region which in my youth was known as Little Egypt parallels Hochschild’s American Midnight. Like Hochschild, I focused on the genealogy of violence, beginning with Native American genocide and with slavery and reaching its bloody crescendo in synch with the European post-World War conflicts. Fascist Europe made its debut in Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome. Southern Illinois, rife with its own deep-rooted violence, brought forth a mini-Mussolini in the pathetic figure of S. Glenn Young whose prompt demise did not result from any lack of popular acclaim. Unlike Hochschild for whom darkness is a casual cliché, the “darkness” of my Egypt symbolizes something complex in our mentality, something having to do with intoxication, whether the thrilling allure of the unknown, the freedom from civilizing restraints, the rush of killing, or the ecstasies of inebriation, drugs, or religious fervor.
Worker resistance was sometimes accompanied by orgies of sadistic savagery. The 1922 Herrin miners’ strike and massacre of strike breakers was a battle in the class struggle. It was also an orgy of violence and hatred, the emergence of a “darkness” that had been incubating and morphing for over a century. For me, inner darkness is set off against the light of educational enlightenment; it is set off by dialogue and reflection. Thinking it through, I was reminded of the mysticism of Jacob Boehme about whom I’ve written. The mystic recognized a dialectical interaction of the “light that shines into darkness but isn’t grasped by the darkness.” The heart of darkness is a blind striving, cruelty, and greed. The vain attraction of the darkness to the light causes an obscure being to stir itself to life and longing; yet remaining blind and lacking an object, it contracts upon itself, hardening its heart and erupting in frustration and viciousness.
This is mysticism, but it has the advantage of recognizing that the “darkness” is more than absence: it is a primal state of ignorance and inner disorientation. Darkness is the selfishness, cruelty, and greed that can be resisted externally through popular opposition and social struggle; and it is the inner darkness, to be healed by cultural enlightenment. Earlier anarchists and socialists knew this and acted on the awareness by establishing libraries and worker education classes. In order to heal the sick, it’s necessary to heal the society; and in order to heal the society, it’s necessary to enlighten our individual darkness.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 