Reviews for Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919

The average rating for Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-27 00:00:00 Richard Steed I recall a college history professor, who constantly drew lessons from the period between the wars. As a young student, I initially found the era entirely uninteresting. I mean, there was World War One just a little earlier and World War Two just a little later. What possibly could have happened of interest in between events of that magnitude? Well, that college professor soon won me over. It turns out that a great deal happened "in between." The world in fact was shaped in those years. Politics, economics, law enforcement, race relations, gender relations, international relations and labor-capital relations all underwent major changes in those years. Author Ann Hagedorn here fine tunes the argument of my old history professor, making a compelling argument for accepting 1919 - the very first year of that era - as the most important of the period between the wars and as the beginning of hope for those who previously had been abused or ignored. From its title, "Savage Peace," to the end of its pages, this comprehensive and very well written volume considers the opposing forces busily at work in American Society in 1919 - the old establishment trying to hold on, to understand, to suppress and combat forces of change, and the growing, relentless wave of liberalism. The book provides a window into events as diverse as the Suffragette movement and the Black Sox baseball scandal. And it documents the heroic and often tragic struggles of the men and women who dedicated themselves to making the country and the world a better place for all.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-10-16 00:00:00 Nicky Horne 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.