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In the aftermath of an unprecedented worldwide war and a flu pandemic, Americans began the year full of hope, expecting to reap the benefits of peace. But instead, the fear of terrorism filled their days. Bolshevism was the new menace, and the federal government, utilizing a vast network of domestic spies, began to watch anyone deemed suspicious. A young lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover headed a brand-new intelligence division of the Bureau of Investigation (later to become the FBI). Bombs exploded on the doorstep of the attorney general's home in Washington, D.C., and 36 parcels containing bombs were discovered at post offices across the country. Poet and journalist Carl Sandburg, recently returned from abroad with a trunk full of Bolshevik literature, was detained in New York, his trunk seized. A 21-year-old Russian girl living in New York was sentenced to 15 years in prison for protesting U.S. intervention in Arctic Russia, where thousands of American soldiers remained after the Armistice, ostensibly to guard supplies but in reality to join a British force meant to be a warning to the new Bolshevik government.

In 1919, wartime legislation intended to curb criticism of the government was extended and even strengthened. Labor strife was a daily occurrence. And decorated African-American soldiers, returning home to claim the democracy for which they had risked their lives, were badly disappointed. Lynchings continued, race riots would erupt in 26 cities before the year ended, and secret agents from the government's "Negro Subversion" unit routinely shadowed outspoken African-Americans.

Adding a vivid human drama to the greater historical narrative, Savage Peace brings 1919 alive through the people who played a major role in making the year so remarkable. Among them are William Monroe Trotter, who tried to put democracy for African-Americans on the agenda at the Paris peace talks; Supreme Court associate justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who struggled to find a balance between free speech and legitimate government restrictions for reasons of national security, producing a memorable decision for the future of free speech in America; and journalist Ray Stannard Baker, confidant of President Woodrow Wilson, who watched carefully as Wilson's idealism crumbled and wrote the best accounts we have of the president's frustration and disappointment.

Weaving together the stories of a panoramic cast of characters, from Albert Einstein to Helen Keller, Ann Hagedorn brilliantly illuminates America at a pivotal moment.

But why 1919? First, I consider the year a missing page in our history. We typically associate 1919 with the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations--all important aspects of the year, of course. But there is far more to the year than what happened in Paris. In fact, Savage Peace tells the story of what happened in America while Wilson was in Paris. Remember that 1919 was the aftermath of a world war, a flu pandemic, and the Russian Revolution. It was an uncertain, very intense year that shaped policies and attitudes for nearly a century in America. In many respects it was the year that made modern America. Consider that the foundation of our domestic intelligence system was firmly established in 1919; that our "cold" relationship with the Soviet Union emerged from events such as U.S. intervention in north Russia that year and the government’s raid on the Soviet Bureau in Manhattan; and that our response to the 1919 race riots (in 26 cities) was to use segregation as the solution instead of identifying it as the problem. One of the things that drew me to the year was that it offers us all an opportunity to observe democracy under extreme duress. This was a time when Americans were caught between the promise of democracy–-Wilson told us we were fighting the war to make the world safe for democracy--and the penalties for exercising democratic rights at home in the aftermath of the war. After the Armistice, certain wartime measures and laws were kept in place in the name of protecting the nation from the new threat of Bolshevism. This allowed the nation to stay immersed in the mentality of war, the culture of fear, and a state of perpetual crisis, which in turn justified an attack on Democratic rights and raised the issue of the delicate balance between national security and the safety of the constitution.

During World War I, a massive domestic intelligence system was put in place to protect Americans on their own soil, to outsmart German spies, and to identify German sympathizers. It was indeed the largest corps of homeland spies ever assembled in any nation during wartime and it included at least 300,000 volunteer spies in organizations such as the American Protective League, the National Security League, the Liberty League, the Home Defense League, the Sedition Slammers, and the Boy Spies of America. There were wartime laws too, such as the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a crime to obstruct the war and to criticize the war, and among other things, gave the postmaster general the right to censor "seditious" magazines and newspapers. The Sedition Act in 1918 (an amended version of the Espionage Act) went further and said it was a crime to "willfully utter, print, write or publish" any expression of disloyalty toward or criticism of the U.S. government, its Constitution, its flag, or its military uniforms.

In 1919, these laws and the domestic intelligence network were still in tact. Now the task was to identify those who favored leniency for Germany in the ensuing peace negotiations and, as the Justice Dept. told the Washington Post on Armistice Day, to keep a "vigilant watch over anarchists, plotters and aliens." Soon dissent in America was bundled into one package labeled Bolshevism. Hiram Johnson, the Republican senator from California who was loudly speaking out against U.S. intervention in north Russia–-a military adventure unauthorized and in fact unknown by most Congressmen and one that evolved into a civil war in which we were fighting with the White Army against the Reds--said in one of his speeches to the U.S. Senate, "It is a dangerous and delicate thing to speak of Russia and to even inquire concerning our activities there. During the war it became fashionable to call all who disagreed with any governmental policy pro-German. Now the fashion has changed: and any man who will not accept the wrongful edict of entrenched power is by that token a Bolsheviki."

In Savage Peace I show that one of the people who best understood just how hard it would be to free the nation and the Constitution from the emergency restrictions put in place during the war was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., then an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. In March of 1919 he issued an opinion saying effectively that the right of free speech could be taken away if the speech or circular contained wording that presented a "clear and present danger" of causing unlawful acts. His critics argued that expression could not be censored on the basis of the possibility that it might incite such acts as the acts could be punished when and if they occurred.

That summer and autumn Holmes reconsidered the limitations and the protections of free speech in America. And in November, he modified his view in a dissenting opinion that expanded the definition of protected speech in America. In that opinion he wrote: "When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas–-that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... We should be eternally vigilant against the attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purpose of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country."

Fortunately, Holmes' words outlived the hysteria of the year in which he wrote them. So did Democracy.

There is so very much more I could say about the importance of 1919, especially about what we can learn from that year. Savage Peace is as the Chicago Tribune wrote in its great review of the book "a potent reminder of the fragility of civil liberties and the power of conspiratorial fantasies propagated by true believers and opportunists alike during times of war and uncertainty."

Looking at the year 1919 indeed reminds us to listen to the voices in America's past who well understood that Democracy has the capability of correcting its errors only as long as its citizens can exercise their rights. I'd like to end this note to my readers with the words of one of the individuals portrayed in Savage Peace, New York attorney Harry Weinberger, who often represented people charged with violating the Espionage Act: "Democracy lives on the exercise and functioning of democracy. As a child learns and grows by doing, a people learn democracy by acting in democratic ways. I know from the history of other countries that even the best democratic constitutions did not prevent dictatorships unless the people were trained in democracy and held themselves eternally vigilant and ready to oppose all infringements on liberty."

Thanks for reading and enjoy the book!

--Ann Hagedorn

Average Customer Rating:

Great piece of history	Customer Rating:
I loved the level of detail in this book. Very interesting period in our history.

Very biased and negative

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This is a strange book, and I'm aware that I'm being something of an iconoclast by reviewing it negatively. I can't help myself, however: I really didn't think much of a considerable part of this book, and the parts that I did enjoy were overshadowed pretty thoroughly by those I didn't. I've never read anything by Ann Hagedorn before. She's a former journalist, and this is her third or fourth book, so she should know what she's doing by now. Thing is, I think she does, and that's what's so troubling: this is a profoundly negative book that takes a very biased view of American history, not actually distorting any facts, just emphasizing some things and leaving others out to make her point: America, in 1919, was a very dark, dismal place, full of evil and suspicion, heartache and despair, with only a few citizens willing to defend the rights of the downtrodden. A book that's the history of even a year in America can take any of a number of forms, and concentrate on almost any aspect of American life. Hagedorn spends considerable time (seemingly chapter after chapter) recounting in grim detail various lynchings that occurred in America that year. Lynching is a shameful and disgusting part of America's past, and it would be wrong to ignore it--but concentrating on it to this extent seems to me an error also, unless the book is *about* lynching. Women earned the right to vote the year after, and you'd think that this would get some attention in a book like this...but that's a positive step America took, and Hagedorn is more concerned with the negative aspect of things. She's also very concerned with the issue of domestic spying and intelligence. 1919 was the era of the first true Red Scare, the precursor to the McCarthy era in the 50s. Communism was of course new in 1919; the Russians hadn't even finished their Civil War yet. But there was mounting evidence of widespread slaughter and violence in Russia and elsewhere when "Soviet" worker-controlled unions took power, and there was a resulting backlash which wasn't (to my mind anyway) entirely unreasonable. To Hagedorn's mind, all of the socialist and communist agitators in 1919 were free-thinking people, pretty much heroes, and those who opposed them narrow-minded and petty for their enforcement of laws not intended to be used in the fashion that they were ultimately enforced. As I said, this is a strange book. The author spends considerable time talking about lynchings, the Versailles conference that ended World War I, and domestic spying, and then takes an abrupt break to recount the first transatlantic airplane flight, performed by a British aviator and his American navigator. She also spends some time talking about the American Army's intervention in Northern Russia, but lets that narrative peter out without much mention of how things worked out. This isn't a book without merit. Hagedorn recounts intelligently the lives of several people she finds interesting, among them Madam C.J. Walker, Henry Johnson, and William Monroe Trotter. All three were black: Walker was the first black millionaire, selling hair tonics to women; Johnson a war hero who was the first American of any color awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French; Trotter a journalist who campaigned vigorously for an end to lynching and a clause in the League of Nations charter advocating racial equality. All three are interesting characters now essentially lost to history, and the author does a good job of recounting their experiences and lives. Unfortunately, the domestic spying and lynching portions of the book overshadow everything else she writes. The book is well-constructed, prose-wise anyway. Hagedorn can write, whatever else you say about her. Portions of the book were interesting, but the overall effect was very disheartening and negative, and I can't say I enjoyed it much.

paranoia and pessimism

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This book is a masterpiece of research. 1919 was an exciting year which numerous authors have written about. This particular book emphasises how the U.S. goverment and vigilante groups spied and oppressed anyone with a dissenting view. While that is true, and these events did in fact happen, the book creates a somewhat distorted, paranoid view of the period. While the "they're out to get me" books are entertaining, they are usually not balanced and focus too much on certain parts of the picture while ignoring others. I still highly recommend reading the book, just prepare for a depressing, yet well written, account of humanity in 1919. Another great book on this period is: Alcohol, Boat Chases, and Shootouts! How the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs Fought Rum Smugglers and Pirates (Part I: 1919-1924)

Mostly Fear

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A modern liberal's look back on a difficult year in U.S. history. While the subtitle of this volume promises hope as well as fear, it is the fear that is delivered. The book is strongest in reminding all of the inhuman nature of lynching and the inexcusable race relations of the time. 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 U.S.--were not really ready for an effective and armed collective security mechanism for the entire world. The author also discounts the real threat of the followers of Lenin. In 1919 a number of longstanding world empires had recently crashed with the end of the Great War. The Reds had prevailed in Russia. Given the tens of millions who later died in the 1920s and 30s in the USSR, I do not think it totally stupid for U.S. authorities to pay some attention to this domestic situation. Finally, how does the British expedition to Brazil to prove the German's (Einstein) grand theory fit in a book focused on 1919 in America?

Interesting, enlightening in spots, but uneven

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Hagerdorn is at her best in this book in describing the 1919 Red Scare and connecting it with labor rights issues. (She has a nice thumbnail on the early rise to power of J. Edgar Hoover as part of this.) She also does well, in the context of race relations, in noting Wilson's refusal to meet with prominent black leaders, and getting the State Department to deny them passports for the Paris Peace Conference. But, she hamstrings herself with the "history of a year" concept by not delving deeper, much deeper, into Wilson's racism, starting with any 1912 campaign promises he made about equality. Second, in the lead-up to the Senate vote on the Treaty of Versailles, she gives short shrift to the pig-headedness of both Wilson and Senate Majority Leader Lodge. Third, rather than using the attempt of an interracial couple to marry in New Hampshire, and spending about 40 pages on it, why didn't she talk more about lynching in the North as well as the South, if she really wanted to look at civil rights in the North? Fourth, she didn't do a good job linking 1919 to the Roaring '20s. That includes having a scant analysis of the 1920 electoral contest, not looking at Babe Ruth being on the cusp of transitioning baseball to the live ball era, nor looking at how the Roaring '20s were a decade of escapism. And, other than burning Wilson in effigy, she says little about the suffragist movement and the progress of the 19th Amendment. Also, for a theoretically in-depth book, Hagerdorn gives relatively little attention to how the world of physics, outside of Eddington, reacted to Einstein's theory of general relativity and its confirmation. The book could have been 100 pages longer, well-written, and be the right length; it could be 100 pages shorter, in the same style, and too long. It could easily be longer, and better, because just such books have been written about Versailles alone. It could be shorter, and better, with much of the interracial marriage saga replaced with narrative of a few Northern lynchings, and more focus on sports and entertainment as they got ready to lead to the Roaring '20, plus a bit more detail on all the would-be presidential candidates.