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Written with the sweep of an epic novel and grounded in extensive research into contemporary documents, Savage Peace is a striking portrait of American democracy under stress. It is the surprising story of America in the year 1919.
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 thirty-six 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 twenty-one-year-old Russian girl living in New York was sentenced to fifteen 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 twenty-six 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.
- Sales Rank: #1365057 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Simon n Schuster
- Published on: 2008-04-22
- Released on: 2008-04-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.40" w x 6.12" l, 1.85 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 560 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
Book Description
Written with the sweep of an epic novel and grounded in extensive research into contemporary documents, Savage Peace is a striking portrait of American democracy under stress. It is the surprising story of America in the year 1919.
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. An Exclusive Note to Readers from Ann Hagedorn
Savage Peace is the biography of the year 1919 in America told through interweaving narratives that connect the reader to the individuals, events and themes that make the year so hugely significant. My quest is always to make history as accessible as possible to the general public using storytelling techniques and so I structured Savage Peace like a work of fiction with main characters and story arcs. It is, however, based firmly on facts gleaned from primary sources housed in archives nationwide, including declassified military intelligence and justice department records. I spent more than five years researching and writing the book in an effort of course to get to the very core of the significance of the year 1919 and to deliver that truth to you, the reader, in an entertaining style.
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
From Publishers Weekly
Former Wall Street Journal staffer Hagedorn (Beyond the River) makes a stylish entry into the history-of-a-year genre with this account of America in upheaval in the wake of WWI. In 1919, both the world and the U.S. were in need of reconstruction: soldiers returning from war needed jobs, and the influenza epidemic wasn't quite under control. Two threads Hagedorn follows are middle-class Americans' fear of Bolshevism, and the struggles of black Americans. U.S. Attorney-General Palmer instigated raids to try to root out leftist activists, and in what may have been "the State Department's first official interference in African-American politics," the agency denied black Americans' request for passports to travel to France and speak to the Paris Peace Conference about racial equality. In a year rife with lynchings in the Deep South, W.E.B. Du Bois, who had urged black Americans to shelve their grievances and fight the Germans, now argued that blacks, having served the nation, deserved to be accorded civil rights. Still, some exciting cultural developments presaged the roaring '20s: F. Scott Fitzgerald's star rose, and the nation's first dial telephones were installed in Norfolk, Va. This vivid account of a nation in tumult and transition is absorbing, and the nexus of global and national upheaval is chillingly relevant. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The armistice ending World War I was declared in November 1918. Americans could look forward to 1919 with a spirit of optimism. Business had boomed during the war, and Wilson's joyous greeting from Europeans as he attended the Paris Peace Conference seemed likely to usher in a period of peace and prosperity. In the view of Hagedorn, 1919 was anything but normal and tranquil. Racism reared its ugly head as lynching and the persecution of those who dared to bridge racial barriers continued. During the war, the government had constructed a web of domestic-intelligence agencies designed to root out those opposed to the war effort. Despite the armistice, these agencies continued to work aggressively. Particularly shocking, in retrospect, were the activities by members of the American Protective League, a government-sponsored organization. These zealots often conducted illegal searches, spied on their neighbors, and used crude intimidation tactics on a massive scale. This is a timely reminder of the dangers implicit in trying to achieve national security at the expense of basic freedoms. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating Era
By W. Holston
The year 1919 is fascinating. the book does a wonderful job of describing how dramatic this era was. The juxtoposition of returning Black Veterans and the brutality of lynching is heartbreaking. Black men in uniform were lynched. There are heroes of the First Amendment, like the attorney Harry Weinberger defending the free speech rights Anarchists and Communists. There's the unflappable Mollie Steimer speaking truth to power, a young J Edgar Hoover, developing an index system to track radicals. Then there is the almost unheard of story of the American troops fighting the Reds in Siberia. I certainly never read about that in school. there's Carl Sandburg, the socialist journalist. This is a really well written book. I found it a tad slow in places, so I gave it a four, but it's a close call to a five, because the era is just so interesting and the story is well told. One final matter, the passage on Helen Keller is short but worth the price of the book by itself. I had no idea.. won't spoil it for you.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Tumultuous year in fine detail.
By Jean Cheek
Reading Ann Hagedorn's Savage Peace: Hope and Fear-1919 allowed me to view and viscerally live a year in history that frankly, I had underappreciated. A compelling mosaic of a turbulent year, each detailed fragment is a well-crafted story in it's own right, but to then be masterfully woven together, illuminating the fears of Bolshevism, the frustration of the African-Americans returning from the war as heroes, but expected to `step down' upon return, or even the horrific fear of continued lynching juxtaposed to Madam C.J. Walker's phenomenal business success allows the reader to feel the conflictions of ideals, laws and everyday post-war life.
Yes, President Wilson and the peace treaties were important, but so were the riots, bomb threats, first nonstop transatlantic flight, eloquent speakers and writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Carl Sandburg, and the first international fame for Albert Einstein with the proof of his theory of relativity. The reader learns what Helen Keller, A. Mitchell Palmer, William Monroe Trotter were doing in 1919, and get to know forgotten people such as Mabel Pufffer and Arthur Hazzard and their tragic story. The big and the small, known and unknown, arranged in Hagedorn's narrative non-fiction gives credence and life to a very important year.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Well written and important book
By Thomas A. Fenton
How do you give five stars to a book that you found yourself hating while you read it? Or, more to the point, how do you give an outstanding rating to a book that alternately made you intensely angry and disgusted, and which you never found truly enjoyable to read? Normally, I love reading books about the history of our nation. In spite of my emotional reactions to reading "Savage Peace...", I only wish I could give it more stars. Let me give potential readers a warning: if you like sweet stories that make you feel good, don't read this book! If you want to "enjoy" what you read, don't read this book! I did NOT "enjoy" myself. One night, I took the book to bed to read myself to sleep, and opened to where I stopped last, to start at the beginning of Chapter 27. I started to read and after one sentence, closed the book, and laid it aside, knowing that I dared not start the chapter if I wanted to sleep. I knew I would not be able to handle it.
What Ann Hagedorn has done in "Savage Peace..." is to present America to her readers at a point in our history where injustice prevailed, fear was rampant, the Constitution of the United States wasn't worth the paper it was printed on as far as being our "guiding light". It is the most horrible picture I have ever seen of life in America at any point in our 234 year history. I was born in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, and was too young to be aware of the McCarthyism of the 1950's from any perspective but a faint awareness after the fact. Nineteen-nineteen is the one year, if Hagedorn is accurate in her presentation, that I thank God I did not have to live through as an adult. The title, "Savage Peace, Hope And Fear In America, 1919" is completely accurate and on target. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the hope that came with the end of the first World War (or, as I would personally title it, "World War, Part 1") is the terror surrounding the continued post-war usage of the Espionage Act (1917), the Alien and Sedition Acts (1918), and the Red Scare of 1919. There were the fears of Bolshevism, Communism, bombings, civilian spy groups cooperating with the government spies, that made George Orwell's "1984" seem imminent to me. There was the fear that anyone in any union was intent on destroying the very government itself. Every bit of unrest in the nation was blamed on either Bolsheviks or on pro-German sympathizers. There were the lynchings, beatings and burnings of black Americans with virtually NO resistance from the police, the BI (Bureau of Investigation, precursor of the FBI), the federal government, or even from the President himself. And, there was the sad and disgusting story, begun in chapter 23 and returned to in chapter 27. It was the story of a wealthy white woman in love with a black man, wanting to marry in Ayer, Massachusetts, at first, a friendly and sympathetic town. Both were adults. Both with sterling reputations, but they were threatened and finally victimized by her family and his, having her declared insane for wanting to marry a black man, and spiriting him out of town by deceit, then charging him with theft of the gifts she had given him. History tells us it did not have a "happily ever after" ending. And, 1919 was the year that J. Edgar Hoover got his start at the B.I. and almost single handedly turned it into both the best and the worst government agency in the history of these United States.
To be sure, there were good things that happened in 1919. The first non-stop transatlantic flights, the scientific community's successful viewing of the May 29, 1919 version of the Moon's total eclipse of the sun, the passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment and events connected with the defeat of Germany are a few, but the overwhelming story as Hagedorn tells it is centered on the words "savage" and "fear". That is, after all, the point of her book, and, as hard as it is for me to read, being an advocate of equality and justice, not to mention a proponent of simple human kindness, it is an absolutely essential period of American history to understand. Not for the purpose of possessing knowledge of terrible information about America, but for the purpose of possessing information that might help to prevent it from ever happening again. Truthfully, some of the hope and fear Hagedorn speaks of in this essential book are present today, and have been since September 11, 2001. I will admit part of my time is spent in fear, and fighting off fear of many of other ideologies that may come and try to take over my beloved America. I need this book to show me how ridiculous and how destructive excessive fear can be, and how to recognize it before it takes over.
Five Highly Disturbing Stars and this reader's appreciation.
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