Adam Hochschild

In 1976 Adam Hochschild helped found Mother Jones magazine, and he has spent the decades since writing narrative history about people who took on entrenched power. A New Yorker born in 1942, he reported for the San Francisco Chronicle before turning to books, and King Leopold's Ghost, his 1998 account of Belgian rule in the Congo, has been continuously in print. American Midnight, published in 2022, turns to the United States between 1917 and 1921. Hochschild reconstructs the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, the deportation of foreign-born radicals, the jailing of Eugene Debs for a single speech, the breaking of strikes, and the vigilante violence against immigrants, Black Americans and union organisers that federal officials tolerated or encouraged. His argument is that this was the stretch when American civil liberties came closest to collapse, and that the country has largely mislaid the memory of it. Hochschild taught for many years at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley.