A Crowded Hour by Kevin Abing is Good Scholarship and Good Art

If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you know that a lot of nonfiction books just aren’t to my taste. Whether that’s because they try too hard to appeal to a lay audience (The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson) or get bogged down in clumsy prose (The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson), most of the histories I read just can’t seem to walk the tightrope that is modern nonfiction publishing. Maybe I’m just a snob. But when I find a book that manages to be both well-written and well-researched, I want to share it with the world.

Anyway, guess what I found this week.

As an end-of-year-assignment in my APUSH class, I have to do a research paper on a niche topic in American history. I chose to focus on German-language newspapers in Milwaukee during the First World War (WWI), and whether they changed their content to comply with the Sedition and Espionage Acts. Milwaukee in particular was viewed as suspect for its high percentage of German-Americans, who may have harbored pro-German sentiments, and for its Socialist city government. While I knew a little about this topic from my interest in Victor Berger and “Sewer Socialism,” I definitely needed to learn more about WWI and how it changed Milwaukee, politically and culturally. To aid me in my research, my mother recommended Kevin J. Abing’s book A Crowded Hour: Milwaukee During the Great War, 1917-1918.

This book was a useful secondary source for my project (thanks, mom). A Crowded Hour covers several political and social programs in wartime Milwaukee, including the elimination of German-American cultural institutions, crackdowns on sex work and the beginnings of Prohibition. Most relevant to my project is the chapter on the enforcement of the Sedition Act, which outlawed saying anything against America or its government. According to Abing, ‘disloyalty’ denouncements were particularly common in Milwaukee:

“Historians have grappled with why such oppression occurred in a society that characterized itself as a progressive beacon to the rest of the world. Many confrontations revolved around something as base as individuals using the cloak of patriotism to settle petty personal, professional or political scores. Some disgruntled parishioners of St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, for example, charged their pastor Father Polomsky with disloyalty because they preferred the priest who had previously run the parish. In another instance, a 12-year-old girl at Dover Street School informed the Department of Justice that Charlotte Albert, a teacher of German, refused to permit students to salute the flag. The investigating agent found the young girl ‘rather inclined to be forward’ and dismissed the allegation” (60)

Although only a few chapters turned out to be directly relevant to my research paper, the whole book was a joy to read. Abing has a very rare skill among academic historians—he can actually write. A Crowded Hour tells a compelling story within the conventions of a scholarly work, without neglecting the clarity of his prose or lapsing into nervous, faux-relatable babble. It should rank beside the greatest hits of Barbara Tuchman and Andrea Wulf as books that satisfy the rival desires for good scholarship and good art.

Yes, nonfiction is art, though it is often bad art. Anyone who disagrees clearly hasn’t slogged through the densest chapters of The Making of the English Working Class.

But A Crowded Hour is good art. It provides well-researched information on a topic I needed to learn about, and it was fun as heck to read. I hope I can meet Kevin Abing one day, and ask him important questions: how did ordinary Milwaukeeans react to the Berger or Debs trials? How did you learn to write nonfiction so well?

And when is the next book coming out?

“Though the war was hailed as an opportunity for the U.S, to be a beacon to the rest of the word, it was hardly one of the country’s or the city’s shining moments. As we mark the centennial of American involvement in World War I, Milwaukee’s volatile, layered and often short-sighted experience reveal the folly behind targeting a specific ethnic group during a time of crisis, not unlike current suspicions in today's world of international terrorism. The Great War’s “crowded hour” brought out the best and worst in Milwaukeeans, and from households to City Hall, it is a story that deserves to be told” (10)