"Fluently written, constantly surprising- and timely in a between the lines sort of way."
--*Starred review-Kirkus Reviews

"Stylish...vivid...
absorbing...chillingly relevant."
--Publisher's Weekly

"This is a timely reminder of the dangers implicit in trying to achieve national security at the expense of basic freedoms."
-- BookList.

From the book:
"At New York harbor, during the first half of 1919, dozens of ships coming from France delivered thousands of soldiers who, leaning over guardrails, reached out for their homeland as if touching it as soon as possible might transport them, just as quickly, back to the world they had left behind. New York harbor was the place where prayers were answered as soldiers and their loved ones spotted each other across the slowly narrowing gap between ship and shore. It was there that the rolling wave of hope from the Western Front met the rising tide of fear and intolerance back home."
--from Savage Peace, Chapter 8: Sergeant Henry Johnson

Synopsis

(cont. from home page...)

The book begins with a prologue on Armistice Day 1918, which describes what each of the main characters was doing on that day. The rest of the book moves through the year from season to season telling the stories of what happened to each of those individuals. Each early chapter sets a scene and introduces a character or several characters whose significance becomes clear as the book progresses. By the fourth or fifth chapters, the reader is moving swiftly through a year that is one of the most intense and remarkable in U.S. history. By the end, the characters and their stories touch in such a way that the reader knows deeply not only the historical significance of the year but also its emotional impact.

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 sixteen parcels containing bombs were discovered at a post office in downtown Manhattan. 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 intended as 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.

As the beginning of Chapter 32 describes it: “Nineteen-nineteen was a time in America when the pent-up hopes of a nation at war collided with the chaos of war’s aftermath. It was a time when bombs exploded on porch steps and grown men threw sharp-edged rocks at little boys whose skin was a different color. And it was a time when working people, having experienced the highly organized, collective character of waging war, came to believe that through organized labor they could claim the power to achieve the happiness they felt they deserved after surviving such a war. It was a year when race riots erupted in twenty-six cities; labor strikes occurred at an average of ten a day; and always there was the looming terror of the new enemy Bolshevism, which in other nations had already provoked revolution. It was indeed a year of struggle. A dark, apocalyptic time, some would say. Others would say it was the dark moment that precedes a new day. For struggle can also be a sign of progress and the foundation on which all change must be built. It is the cost of transforming dreams into reality. It is the way we progress.”

Adding a vivid human drama to the greater historical narrative, much like a nonfiction Ragtime, 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 and produced 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.

Savage Peace is an unforgettable chronicle of American democracy – not a clear, straight march to justice but rather a chaotic, daring, sometimes deadly journey – that gives us perspective on our world today.

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