From Depression To War Book

Amazing how little I knew about 1919, somehow--even after the Lehane book, and Dos Passos, and William Leuchtenberg, and everything. Big surprise here, I suppose, is the spying (followed at a close second by all the lynchings): Hagedorn reveals how closely and obsessively the federal government was allied with, and even led by, private spy types, and by military intelligence, which went right on spying in some areas even when told not to. (And on people like CJ Walker as well as WEB DuBois and various lefties. The major assigned to "colored" issues, black himself, ended up concluding that Bolshevism had little to do with unrest, and that white prejudice accounted for the vast majority of problems.)

Secret hero: William Monroe Trotter, who got himself off to Paris to agitate for equal rights, got ignored by Wilson (one of history's great what-ifs: no Vietnam War, maybe, better Civil-Rights progress, less lynching...Should be a lefty alt-history novel, instead of all these warmongering History-Book-Club tomes where the Confederacy gets guns or whatever). Other one: Carl Sandburg, whose journalism from WWI Europe and in Chicago's black belt I now want to read.