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, who worked for them, too--Hagedorn makes the case, more or less convincingly, that he was trying to show the Americanness and patriotism of the civil-rights movement and thu pre-empt charges of unAmericanism [odd comparison to Orwell in the last few years of his life] 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 sneaked himself off to Paris
as a shipboard cook (the government had denied him a visa) 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), who was busy ignoring every non-white person's request for some of that democracy-safe world. Other one: Carl Sandburg, whose journalism from WWI
Europe and in Chicago's black belt, right before the race riots touched off, I now want to read.
Oh, and Helen Keller was in the IWW. I, for one, did not know that.
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