“Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919”, by Ann Hagedorn

560 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0743243711

Ann Hagedorn’s Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 is a modern liberal’s look back at a difficult year in American history. While the subtitle of this volume promises hope as well as fear, it is the fear that is delivered. The year 1919 was fascinating and the book does a wonderful job of describing how dramatic this era truly was, though it is strongest in reminding all of the inhuman nature of lynching and the inexcusable race relations of the time; the juxtaposition of returning black veterans lynched in their uniforms and the brutality of lynching as a whole is heartbreaking, and the many murders committed as described by Hagedorn are monstrous. There are heroes of the First Amendment, like the attorney Harry Weinberger defending the free speech rights Anarchists and Communists, or the unflappable Mollie Steimer speaking truth to power (as she imagined it, at any rate), while there is also their implacable foe, a young J Edgar Hoover and his developing an index system to track these and other radicals; there is the almost unheard of story of the American troops fighting the Reds in Siberia (I certainly never read about that in school); or Carl Sandburg, the socialist journalist (which puts his bio of Lincoln in a whole new light). It is less convincing in painting President Wilson as a hero when he was actively unhelpful in easing America’s many and deep racial wrongs; furthermore, his peace plan was a failure due to his own political missteps in selling the idea and the more basic fact that many nations – especially the United States – were not really ready for an effective and armed collective security mechanism for the entire world.

Hagedorn’s history of 1919 is exhaustive and not without virtues, and the overall idea is a good one: contrary to popular belief the year after the end of World War I was not anticlimactic and was, in fact, was a vital year in American history. The adoption of the constitutional amendments giving women the vote and establishing Prohibition marked the high-water mark of the moral impulses of the Progressive era, while the racial unrest of that year marked a turning point in the history of U.S. race relations, especially Woodrow Wilson’s double standard of how minorities should be treated abroad versus how they should be treated in the States (and I thought the 60’s were rough). The stormy negotiations in Paris over what became the Treaty of Versailles, the influenza pandemic, the struggles over the Allied intervention in Russia, and the grotesque excesses of the internal security apparatus the Wilson administration had established during the war were all fateful events. At her best, Hagedorn writes lively and dramatic accounts of such milestones; unfortunately, her narrative is often too trite and tendentious to do justice to her subject, with the world divided into stock “progressive” heroes and “reactionary” villains. From her point of view, for example, the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks was an evil plot to suppress freedom, supported by bankers and other war-mongering, red-baiting, worker-crushing members of the bourgeoisie. Allied intervention in Russia may have been ill judged and futile, but there were many reasons why decent, honest friends of Russia – and of humanity in general – would have wanted to nip the horrors of Bolshevism and the Russian Civil War in the bud. Hagedorn also discounts the real threat of the followers of Lenin: 1919 saw a number of longstanding world empires crumble with the end of the Great War and the Reds had prevailed in Russia; given the tens of millions who later died in the USSR, I do not think it totally stupid for U.S. authorities to pay some attention to this domestic situation.