Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919

Rebuttal to Jonathan Yardley I disagree wholeheartedly with Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley's review of Ann Hagedorn's Savage Peace. A year is a perfectly legitimate and even desirable way to categorize the passage of human events in our country's history. His review is petty and does not accurately reflect the true spirit of the book. For example, Mr. Yardley's statement "Wars don't begin on the first day of a year and end on the last, nor do presidencies or natural disasters or anything else except, of course, years themselves. But that doesn't prevent journalists, astrologers and other shady characters from attempting to set each year apart from every other and read its events and dominant personalities as if they were tea leaves." Yardley, completely misses the point of the book. The timeline of history is how we understand and make sense of the past and the course of events during a particular year is absolutely quantifiable from the vantage point of hindsight. "Tea leaves" are not the means of Hagedorn's relaying of the year 1918 as Mr. Yardley implies as he wholesale categorizes journalists as shady characters. Solid, meticulous and impassioned research is the engine behind the stories related. The fact that Hagedorn fleshed out the lives and activities of various people both well known and obscure during the year 1918 brings a color and vibrancy to history that educates as well as entertains. Yardley's subsequent attacks on Hagedorn's prose and credentials as well as her choice of subjects is simply unproductive reviewing. His meanspiritedness overwhelms the great reporting and research that is the true hallmark of this book It is Hagedorn's choice to decide which stories paint the portrait of 1918 and as Yardley state himself "Obviously not everything that happened during this tumultuous and difficult year can be squeezed into a single book." Again, Hagedorn's passion and vividness for the subject of 1918 transforms the reading of history which can be overly erudite in less capable hands. To lambaste her prose style is myopic and Hagedorn's pedigree as a front page Wall Street Journal reporter more than legitimizes her. The fact that Mr. Yardley does not care for her writing style hardly qualifies his final diatribe of a paragraph.

Pick a year, any year, a good historian can choose any year from this country's past and produce an important and interesting book on it. However few years make for as compelling a tale as 1919 especially when in the hands of so gifted a writer as Ann Hagedorn. Indeed "Savage Peace" reads like a novel replete with heroes, villains, treachery, barbarity, tragedy and pathos. 1919 is an obvious choice for a work such as this because it was so pivotal to this country's near and distant futures. The war in Europe was just over but there remained the tricky business of sorting out the peace to follow and the US role in maintaining it. Over too was the Progressive Era and the spirit of change it exemplified was taking a darker turn with sinister powers now in the hands of a few within government as epitomized by the rise of J Edgar Hoover. African Americans had served their country with valor during the war and inevitably were going to expect a more appropriate role in society. Dramatic change was possible and just how dramatic it could be was widely feared to the levels of paranoia. The "Great War" had been over for a few months when 1919 dawned but the assault on civil liberties that it had wrought in America continued unabated gradually morphing from a fear of all things German to a full blown Bolshevik paranoia. Dissent was rampant in manners ranging from bomb wielding anarchists to organized labor strife to legislative foreign policy debate. Levels of tolerance were low but no one suffered more than those who had already suffered the most -- America's Black citizenry. "Savage Peace" is most savage in its stories of virulent racism practiced throughout the country particularly the horrific lynchings precipitated mostly in the south. Even for seasoned readers of history such as myself, the specifics of some lynchings that Hagedorn relates with all the gory details are quite depressing indeed. As a partial antidote there are the stories of African American heroes such as W.E.B. Dubois and William Monore Trotter. Other heroes appear although who a particular readers admire will vary. Certainly Carl Sandburg, lawyer Harry Weinberger and Senator Hiram Johnson will have their boosters. Others may take a shine to pint-sized radical Mollie Steimer or even president Woodrow Wilson. America was a brutal angry country in 1919 but paradoxically it was full of hope and opportunity with a million new ideas and millions of characters of all stripes. No, "Savage Peace" doesn't capture it all. Surely there could have been more on the cultural scene, the daily lives of ordinary Americans and immigration and...well the list can go on. But it's quite unfair to take Hagedorn to task for what isn't in her book when there is so much that IS in it and it so masterfully captures the highlights. One of the best things a book like "Savage Peace" does is cause readers to be curious about some of the people and events it touches upon. The best books are the o

I loved reading this book! Ann Hagedorn taught me so much I didn't know about my own country. Her daring and unexpected book digs deep and looks at aspects of post-war life too often neglected. Tapping into her background as a research librarian, she's been able to dig up old documents, letters and articles that reveal new truths, using her journalistic skills to weave together seamlessly a staggering number of trends and personal stories. On top of all that, her compassion for people and her fierce concern for civil rights shines through.

Savage Peace reads like a finely-crafted novel and carries all the intellectual punch of a textbook. Ann Hagedorn gives us not only the facts about her characters and their role in history, but also insight into their lives, fears, and thoughts. The U.S. in 1919 resounds with similarities to the U.S. today, as evidenced by the recurring strands in Savage Peace which include terrorism and spies, race relations, scientific inquiry, and a search for global unity. I thoroughly enjoyed every page of this book! It is so refreshing to read good nonfiction that is also expertly written.

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.