Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Read online

  “An elegant collection that showcases all of Adam Hochschild’s singular talents as a master essayist, historian, literary critic, and narrative writer. These pieces are special and enduring—a chronicle of our time, past and present, told always on an intimate human scale.”

  — Barry Siegel, Pulitzer Prize winner and Director of the Literary Journalism Program at University of California, Irvine

  “An inspiring but clear-eyed perspective on what has been—and what can be—accomplished through resistance, persistence, and vision. A wonderful book for our time.”

  — Eric Stover, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley and coauthor of Hiding in Plain Sight

  “These timely, trenchant essays offer a concentrated sample of Adam Hochschild’s unique gift for illuminating the history of present-day moral conflicts. Their range is amazing, from the Congo to Siberia to Berkeley, but they are united by Hochschild’s wry, compassionate sensibility and voice.”

  — Robert F. Worth, author of A Rage for Order and contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine

  Lessons from a Dark Time

  Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

  Adam Hochschild

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hochschild, Adam, author.

  Title: Lessons from a dark time : and other essays / Adam Hochschild.

  Other titles: Lessons from a dark time and other essays

  Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018009384 (print) | LCCN 2018012726 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520969674 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520297241 (cloth : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: World politics—20th century—Moral and ethical aspects. | Political ethics.

  Classification: LCC D443 (ebook) | LCC D443 .H5972 2018 (print) | DDC 909.82—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009384

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Harriet Barlow

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

  1 • Lessons from a Dark Time

  2 • Students as Spies

  3 • Hoover’s Secret Empire

  4 • The Father of American Surveillance

  5 • Prison Madness

  AFRICA

  6 • The Listening House

  7 • All That Glitters

  8 • A Showman in the Rainforest

  9 • Heart of Darkness: Fiction or Reportage?

  10 • On the Campaign Trail with Nelson Mandela

  INDIA

  11 • India’s American Imports

  12 • Palm Trees and Paradoxes

  13 • The Brick Master

  14 • The Impossible City

  EUROPE

  15 • Our Night with Its Stars Askew

  16 • Shortstops in Siberia

  17 • A Homage to Homage

  18 • On Which Continent Was the Holocaust Born?

  19 • Sunday School History

  AMERICA

  20 • Pilot on the Great River: Mark Twain’s Nonfiction

  21 • A Literary Engineer

  22 • A Nation of Guns

  THE CONTINENT OF WORDS

  23 • You Never Know What’s Going to Happen Yesterday

  24 • Practicing History without a License

  25 • On the Road Again

  26 • Books and Our Souls

  Acknowledgments

  Article Sources

  Photo Credits

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Nelson Mandela casts the first ballot of his life, 1994

  2. A page from the author’s CIA file

  3. Gold miners in eastern Congo

  4. Coffeehouse designed by Laurie Baker, Trivandrum, India

  5. Republican militiawomen, Spanish Civil War

  6. Mark Twain

  7. The author at the ruins of Butugychag Gulag camp, Russia

  Introduction

  FIGURE 1. Nelson Mandela casts the first ballot of his life, 1994.

  I DO NOT KNOW HOW THINGS will be by the time you read it, but this book goes to press at a grim moment. After spending much of my life writing either about forms of tyranny that we’ve seen vanish, like apartheid in South Africa or communism in the Soviet Union, or that belonged to earlier centuries, like colonialism or slavery, it is a shock to feel the ruthless mood of such times suddenly no longer so far away. As I write, much of Europe is awash in a bitter stew of revived nationalism, anti-Semitism, and hostility toward Muslims and refugees. Around the world, many a country that was once a democracy, or seemed on the path to being so, has turned repressive. From Poland to the Philippines, Hungary to India, Turkey to Russia, autocrats with little tolerance for dissent are riding high.

  Worse yet is that we Americans have elected a president who makes no secret of his enthusiasm for such strongmen and, with nothing but mockery for his critics and contempt for the constitutional separation of powers, would clearly like to be one himself. Donald J. Trump has bent and twisted the truth like pretzel dough, claimed his predecessor was born in Kenya, likened Africa to a toilet, slammed Mexicans as “rapists” and Haitians as all having AIDS, and included in a reference to “very fine people” the toxic collection of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klan members who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. One of these “very fine people” killed a woman and injured many others by ramming his car into a crowd. Almost day by day, Trump’s racism becomes more naked and his enthusiasm for torture, the death penalty, and nuclear weapons more strident. He has done his best to undermine the investigation into his Russia dealings and called Democrats who failed to applaud his 2018 State of the Union speech “un-American.” This list could be far longer. Gun lovers, conspiracy mongers, and the mushrooming array of camouflage-clad private militias in this country are energized in a way they have not been for decades.

  Around the world, not just the present but the past has become a battleground. Those right-wingers were in Charlottesville to protest a plan to remove a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. In Hungary, a German ally in the Second World War, monuments have been installed and museum exhibits altered to portray Hungarians, not Jews, as victims of the Nazis. In the 1990s, many Russians told me of their hope that a few of the old Soviet labor camps could be preserved or restored as memorials to those who died and reminders that such events must never happen again. Instead, at the only place where a restoration has been completed, near Perm, in the Ural Mountains, the camp has become a site of pilgrimage for enthusiastic followers of Vladimir Putin who want to celebrate the glorious days of Stalin’s rule.

  We have some tough years ahead of us. The title piece of this collection, about America’s early twentieth-century red scare, could just as well be called “Lessons for a Dark Time.” But when times are dark, we need moral ancestors, and I hope the pieces here w
ill be reminders that others have fought and won battles against injustice in the past, including some against racism, anti-immigrant hysteria, and more. The Trumps and Putins of those eras have gotten the ignominy they deserve.

  A few words about what you’ll find in these pages:

  I’ve chosen the articles for this book from a much larger number I’ve published over the past two decades or so. Most have to do with the forces that have prevented us, today or in earlier centuries, from living in a fairer and more humane world. Some are about people who tried to bring that world closer; others deal with writers who explored the injustices of their times. Some of what’s here reflects my travels: you won’t find Cannes or Tuscany, but you will find a prison in Finland, descendants of slaves gathering in a London park, and a day on the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela. Sadly, many of the men and women whose voices I was privileged to hear are no longer with us: Mandela, of course, plus the environmentally pioneering architect Laurie Baker, the Gulag survivor Nadezhda Joffe, and—dying much too young of a heart attack while weakened by malaria—the brave Congolese crusader against rape, Masika Katsuva.

  What has drawn me to such people, I think, has a lot to do with coming of age in the early 1960s, a decade that left its mark on so many of us. In Washington, the president was a young John F. Kennedy, who, despite his flaws, inspired a wave of hope and idealism unlike any this country has seen. In the South, the civil rights movement was reborn, awakening tens of millions of Americans to the harsh wrongs that should have been ended by the Civil War. As fellow college students of mine returned from “freedom rides” to desegregate Southern bus terminals, I saw that there was a world of ferment outside the campus, and I was hungry to explore it. And then, like all men subject to the draft, I found the Vietnam War looming over me and had to ask whether I was willing to risk my life in a senseless conflict on the other side of the globe. Living through that time gave me a lifelong interest in people who took a stand against despotism, who spoke out against unjust wars, or who saw the evils of institutions like slavery or colonialism when, all around them, others took such things for granted. Those are the kinds of subjects I’ve always been drawn to write about.

  The articles in the first section of this book also have their origins in those years, even though they were written decades later. Many of us working in the movement against the Vietnam War began to suspect that we were being watched. Sometimes, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI wanted you to know you were being watched: I remember a little group of four men in trench coats and fedoras glowering at the edge of a demonstration on the Boston Common, grabbing for the press releases I was handing out but not taking notes as reporters would have. Just how thorough the watching was I learned only in the late 1970s when under the Freedom of Information Act, after many delays, I was finally able to get heavily redacted copies of more than a hundred pages of files on myself from the FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence. What I found did not inspire confidence in the expertise of these sleuths. One example: my wife Arlie and I were married soon after having briefly been civil rights workers in Mississippi, and in lieu of wedding presents we asked people to make donations to a group we had worked with, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In a report by a CIA informant whose name had been blacked out, this was garbled into “gave his wedding presents to Goodwill.”

  Such experiences left me with a lifelong interest in government spying on civilians, which led me to the stories here about the FBI, the CIA, the shadowy figure of subversive-hunter Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, and the era of surveillance and vigilante justice that began when the United States entered the First World War. Because so many of the historical figures I’ve written about were activists, I was always curious about how they were seen by the equivalent, in other times and places, of those men in trench coats on the Boston Common. Reading such records often tells you not just about those watched but about the mind-set and prejudices of the watchers. My research for various books has taken me to Scotland Yard reports on the pacifists of 1914–18, FBI and Justice Department accounts of surveillance of American radicals over several decades, Soviet secret police interrogation transcripts, and a British officer’s confidential report to London in 1791 about rebellious slaves in the West Indies.

  The subject matter of the next section, Africa, for me is also is connected to the 1960s, when I spent a summer as a college student working for an anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa. It was a searing, life-changing experience to live in a police state for the first time, to see that battle for justice at close hand, to meet people who had been in prison and knew they were likely to be there again, and to realize, to my dismay, how complicit was the U.S. government with that regime. It led me to go back to that country several times in the 1980s, out of which came a book, The Mirror at Midnight, about the most repressive period of apartheid. After that, how could I not return to South Africa to cover the country’s first democratic election in 1994? A few months after returning from that trip, I began writing King Leopold’s Ghost, about the bloodiest single episode of the European colonization of Africa, the seizure of the Congo by Leopold II of Belgium. The articles here about Stanley and Livingstone and about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness stem from that interest. Immersion in that period of history made me curious to see the Belgian monarch’s former colony today, so when an investigator for Human Rights Watch invited me to come on a trip there, I immediately said yes, and two of the stories here report what I saw. We brought along a carton of my book’s French-language edition to distribute to local schools, which are desperately short of teaching materials.

  The articles in the section on Europe are also connected to previous books of mine, and so here, as elsewhere, please forgive the occasional patch of self-plagiarism. Without experiencing the ferment of the 1960s, I might not have been drawn to the Spanish Civil War, a time of hope and passion for an earlier generation. I was lucky to get to know several of the surviving American veterans of that conflict. In the course of writing a book about the war, I realized that a memoir that had helped form my picture of it, the American edition of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, had not been published in the form he wanted. Now at last it has been, and the essay on Orwell here is the foreword to that book’s new edition.

  In the 1780s, the early British abolitionists invented virtually every organizing tool I had seen used in the movements against segregation, the Vietnam War, and apartheid: the political poster, a campaign logo, the consumer boycott, the very idea of an organization headquartered in a national capital with branches around the country. I was fascinated by these remarkable organizers and wrote a book about them, Bury the Chains, which, in turn, made me curious about why their lives were so sanitized in a widely seen film. A long-standing love of Russian literature and history led me to the author Victor Serge, whom you’ll meet in these pages, and then to some months spent traveling across Russia, visiting the ruins of old prison camps and talking to their survivors in order to write The Unquiet Ghost, about how Russians were coming to terms with the legacy of Stalin. That, in turn, drew me to the subject of another article here, about Americans in the Gulag.

  Arlie, on sabbatical from her teaching job, had very tolerantly kept me company for the five months I spent researching the Russia book, beginning when we landed in January in Moscow, where the temperature promptly dropped to -40°. So for her next sabbatical she chose the country, which was what landed us in steaming-hot south India, the subject of several articles in another section. We spent most of our time in Kerala, which, although far from being India’s wealthiest state, has long boasted the country’s highest rates of literacy and life expectancy. But as you’ll see, we found Kerala’s story much more complex than it first appears.

  Coming back to our own continent, I’ve begun with Mark Twain (another foreword, this one to a collection of his nonfiction), because in his loathing of racism, his hostility to imperial conquest, and his puncturing of humbug, he is a model f
or us all. An America today awash in humbug—denial of global warming, “tax reform” that fills the pockets of billionaires, and much more—needs him more than ever. And surely a president whose three-story New York penthouse is decorated everywhere with 24-karat gold seems almost to spring from the imagination of the writer who brought us the term “Gilded Age.” Twain is also an intriguing example of something else I talk about in several pieces in this book: the way our collective memory of people and events gets distorted by those who appropriate the role of its keepers. It took a half-century after his death before all of Twain’s anti-imperial writings were published in full, uncensored form.

  • • •

  The French artist Pierre Bonnard was notorious for wanting to retouch his canvases years after he had first created them. He would try to borrow them back from people who had bought them or would sneak into a gallery at the Musée du Luxembourg with a small box of paints under his coat and have a friend distract a guard while he went to work. Writers often have the same impulse when they look back on what they’ve published, a feeling normally impossible to act on. But one enjoyable thing about putting together a collection like this is that you get to do some retouching. And so in the pieces that follow I’ve sometimes added a dab of paint here or smoothed out a wrinkle in the canvas there. I have not, however, updated events or statistics; instead, I’ve noted at the end of each article the year when it first appeared.

  You can read these pieces in any order you wish. Dividing them as I have, mostly by geography, is rather arbitrary, since so many of them deal with the connections between parts of the world. The work of European writers as different as Orwell, Conrad, and Sven Lindqvist, for example, was profoundly shaped by what they saw in the global South. Some roots of trouble in today’s Africa go back to the European colonialism that began a century and a half ago. And General Van Deman learned surveillance fighting America’s first counterinsurgency war in Asia, in the Philippines, then applied those skills back home against civilians in the United States. We live in a world whose parts are infinitely more connected than many people—including the owner of that penthouse full of gold leaf—are willing to see. I hope this book makes some of those connections clearer.