The Books of 1919–And The Life of The Times–In “The Year Our World Began”

1919—just the alliterative sound of it calls to mind the American Century and the birth of the post World War I era. The Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, the Red Scare, race riots and Woodrow Wilson. Dempsey versus Willard, Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox, Walter Hagen and Babe Ruth. Arthur Fields sang “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?”

 Lillian Gish starred in Broken Blossoms. Babe Ruth was traded from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees. Adolph Hitler became involved with the German Workers Party, the precursor of the Nazis, and Benito Mussolini formed his Fascist party. Mahatma Gandhi began a campaign of nonviolence against British rule in India.

1919 was tumultuous, the first year of peace after the long debacle of World War I. Given the importance of events in 1919 that foreshadowed the world to come, it’s no surprise to me that American historian William Klingaman subtitled his 1987 book about the year 1919 as The Year Our World Began. I’ve always thought this an apt description for 1919.

Many of us who study history seriously know that many social changes happen on a continuum, that there are cycles of change, growth, and decay, that things are fluid, that a period of progress may be followed by stagnation or regression. But certain years can have a watershed quality in which trends that shape the future stand revealed in retrospect, or a series of events occurs that shapes the decades to come. For me, 1919 is such a year—a year of tremendous upheaval that left its mark on the decades following. In this post I will take a look at some of the major events of the year 1919 and examine some of the books published in both the United States and overseas.

The First World War had ended in November of 1918. This conflict upended the old European order and ushered in significant geopolitical and cultural change. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of this war and its impact. Issues stemming from this conflict helped shaped the next world war and continued to ripple through the remainder of the twentieth century.

Notions of progress and human possibility that animated reformers, politicians, and thinkers earlier in the century seemed quaint after the carnage and devastation the war unleashed. 1919 was the beginning of the long road to a new geopolitical order as leaders from around the world adjusted to the dramatic changes wrought by this conflict. The war itself was not the only devastation. The 1917-1918 flu pandemic took millions of lives around the world, a catastrophe we can all better appreciate given our own experiences with the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The year is arguably best known for the series of negotiations leading to the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed on June 28, 1919. Historians have debated how much the Treaty actually set in play the forces that lead to war twenty years later. Some say the Treaty was too harsh, levying huge debts on Germany that fueled resentment and stoked the rise of Adolf Hitler. Others say it made possible Germany being able to pay reparations and was much more lenient than any treaty Germany and the other Central Powers would have foisted on the Allies. The fact remains that there was resentment of the treaty, resentment that Hitler skillfully manipulated in his rise to power. Just twenty years later war broke out again in September of 1939.

America’s crucial involvement in the war, despite the nation’s late entry into the conflict, propelled the United States into a prominent place on the international stage. President Woodrow Wilson seized the hour, pushing for his Fourteen Points and American involvement in the League of Nations. The centerpiece of Wilson’s last months as a truly functioning President would be his crusade for American membership in the League, something Congress ultimately rejected, despite Wilson’s grueling cross country speaking engagements in support of membership. Wilson’s unrelenting efforts severely damaged his health. He collapsed from exhaustion on September 25, 1919 in Pueblo, Colorado. In early October he suffered a massive stroke and was largely incapacitated for the remainder of his term, a condition that was hidden from the public and from legislators.

From this distance in time it is easy to cloak 1919 in nostalgia. Newsreel footage of doughboys sailing into New York harbor or silent film stars like the Gish sisters gazing wistfully out of old photos can cast 1919 in a sentimental glow. The reality is far different. 1919 was a year of turmoil and transition. For some in the United States it would be a year of suffering, injustice, and racial hatred. 

Each year here on Buckeyemuse I like to take a look at some books that were published a century before, and I usually include some background information on events that occurred during the year. I’m getting this post out later than planned. The more I explored in-depth the year itself I knew I had to go deeper, especially as I appreciated the idea that this year was so significant in shaping the years and decades to come. So I will get to the books a little further down. For now, here’s a look at the wild world that was 1919.

The noble, idealistic side of Wilson’s administration threw a long shadow. America’s entry into WWI was accompanied by hostility to domestic opposition to the war effort. The jingoism of World War I intensified suspicion of radical causes and leaders and set the stage for a “Red Scare” that occurred from 1917-1920. This was the first of two Red Scares that would leave troubling marks on the nation’s tradition of civil liberties during the twentieth century. The second was the McCarthy hysteria of the early 1950s. There were two aspects to this repression that emerged during and after the First World War. One concern was resistance to the war effort by draft evasion and expression of antiwar sentiment. The other was political radicalism, chiefly Bolshevism and anarchism.

American entry into the world war marked the first round of repression. The case of Indiana’s Eugene Debs is a good example of the crackdown on any sort of resistance to or even questioning of America’s war effort. In 1918, labor leader Eugene Debs was convicted of sedition and sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary. Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio in which he railed against social ills and a made a general case for working class objection to wars of the kind the nation had just joined.

It is noteworthy that Debs did not specifically urge draft resistance. Some federal officials were opposed to Debs being charged given the general nature of his statements, but one federal attorney pressed the case and Debs was indicted and convicted. In 1919 he reported to prison. He would serve his sentence in the federal penitentiaries in Moundsville, West Virginia and Atlanta, Georgia before President Warren Harding commuted his sentence towards the end of 1921. Despite his incarceration, Debs ran for President as a Socialist candidate one last time in 1920.

Since the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886, political radicals had become increasingly suspect in the United States. Anarchism in particular was a special concern of leaders in Europe and the U.S. in the late 1800s and the first decade of the twentieth century. Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, was an anarchist. 

Anarchists also assassinated a number of European heads of state in the late 1800s, including Russia’s Czar Alexander II in 1881, the president of France in 1994, and Empress Elisabeth, the consort of Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary, in 1898. Radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), nicknamed the “Wobblies,” were another worry. By 1917, American and European officials had another concern: the troubling new threat of Bolshevism with the establishment of the Soviet Union after the Czar’s deposal and the overthrow of the moderate Kerensky government. 

The rise of the Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky alarmed western nations. Leaders in the United States feared “Red” influence from agitators and radicals, whether immigrants or native-born, although immigrants in particular were especially suspicious to authorities. The Russians had negotiated a separate peace with the Central Powers, thereby removing themselves from hostilities against the Germans and eliminating one tier of support for the Allied cause. The idea that communists were interested in exporting their revolution to other nations was also a concern, as it would be for much of the century—another reason why the world taking shape around 1919 would leave long traces on the coming decades. The specter of “Red” insurrection was looming everywhere, and the possibility of communists infiltrating society, especially through organizations such as unions, left government leaders fearful. Paranoia and nativist sentiment found fertile ground in which to flourish.

The intensity of government repression and public anxiety is one of the enduring motifs of 1919. The trouble started early in the year when a shipyard strike in Seattle turned into a general strike joined by more than 100 other unions. This strike paralyzed the city and aroused the wrath of Mayor Ole Anderson, who would have a robust post-mayoral career denouncing Bolshevism.

The strike was peaceful. Union members voluntarily took over many of the necessary functions of the city, with even a contingent of union members who were war veterans monitoring the streets to prevent lawlessness. A major problem with this strike wasn’t that it was spearheaded by communists or radicals, although radicals such as the IWW were supporting the strike along with traditional unions. It was troubling rhetoric used by some workers and local radical writers such as Anna Louisa Strong that alarmed the government and public.

Strong, a Nebraska native and minister’s daughter who grew up in Cincinnati and Mount Vernon, Ohio. She wrote at the start of the strike, “We are taking the most tremendous move ever made by Labor in this country, a move which will lead—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!” For a country that had joined a world war, endured a pandemic, and longed for stability, this kind of language was disturbing, especially after the revolution that had broken out in Russia and Mayor Ole Hanson’s concerns about “Bolshevism.”   Other unions eventually abandoned the strike although the shipyard strike continued into the early spring, when the shipyard laborers returned to work having gained nothing.  There would be more strikes later in the year, and radicals and foreign agitators were often blamed as the forces behind them.

An era of repression in America usually seems to need some kind of government committee to fan the flames of fear and anxiety, and the nation found it in the Overman Committee, a five-man subcommittee of the Senate Committee of the Judiciary led by Senator Lee Overman of North Carolina. The Committee issued overwrought statements and reports concerning the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution, further troubling public dialogue and clarity on these issues.

There were real dangers. In April 1919, officials suspected that followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani were responsible for mail bombs sent to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, industrialist John D. Rockefeller, and other judges, businessmen, and public figures. Galleani preached a violent message of resistance to the state and was persuasive in his eloquent anger. Sacco and Vanzetti were both followers of Galleani. Most of the bombs were intercepted or failed to detonate, but one did explode at the home of Senator Thomas Hardwick in Georgia, resulting in injuries to his wife and housekeeper. His wife was badly burned and his housekeeper lost both of her hands.

In June of 1919 more mail bombs were delivered. These were eight larger bombs containing shrapnel. A second bomb to assassinate Palmer killed its creator and deliveryman, an anarchist saboteur named Carlo Valdinoci, but did serious damage to Palmer’s home. Another killed a night watchman named William Boehner in New York City.

Aside from these acts of domestic terrorism, there were other disturbances. On May Day 1919, rioting broke out in Cleveland, Ohio. On this day a crowd of 30,000 people led by Socialist Charles L. Ruthenberg marched from their headquarters at Acme Hall towards Cleveland’s Public Square in protest of both Debs’ imprisonment and the American government’s support for White Russian forces in the Soviet Union. The marchers included Socialists, IWW and AFL members and leftist veterans of World War One wearing their military uniforms. Many among the protesters were naturalized immigrants.The procession carried both red and American flags. A soldier who was a counter-protester attempted to grab one of their flags and violence erupted.  The violence resulted in two deaths, hundreds of injuries and 124 arrests, with Ruthenberg himself being arrested for assault. According to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, a website created by Case Western University, the only arrests were of leftists. Ruthenberg, who had served a prison sentence for refusing the draft and was subsequently tortured while in jail, soon moved further left, becoming a founder of the Communist Party USA. He is one of only three Americans to have his ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall–the other two are journalist John Reed and labor leader Big Bill Haywood.

More violence followed later that month when race riots erupted in Charleston, South Carolina after sailors attacked a black man. Race riots also occurred in Washington, D.C. when whites, some of them soldiers, attacked blacks. At least 150 were attacked as police refrained from intervening. More violence followed in high summer. On July 27 thirteen days of racial violence broke out in Chicago. It began when an African-American boy who was swimming in Lake Michigan accidentally drifted into an area of the beach that was reserved for white swimmers only. He was pelted with rocks and drowned. This was bad enough, but when the police refused to arrest the white suspect, violence erupted. Hundreds of black homes and businesses were destroyed during the following thirteen days as police and even the state militia tried to regain control. By the end of the conflict twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites were dead and 537 people were injured. Woodrow Wilson pointed the finger at white hooligans as the problem here, but others in the government claimed Red agitators were the cause of the disturbance.

Labor unrest increased during the autumn. The Boston police strike in September failed, but it boosted the national profile of Governor Calvin Coolidge, who famously declared, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Coolidge’s firm tone and quiet resolve struck a chord with Americans. Soon Calvin Coolidge would be the running mate of Ohio’s Warren Harding during the 1920 Presidential election and eventually Vice President and then President of the United States.

A lesser known but more important labor conflict was the 1919 steel strike, which resulted in a serious setback for organized labor. In September of 1919, workers represented by the American Federation of Labor went on strike against the United States Steel Corporation. More than 350,000 workers joined the strike. The workers were striking for an eight hour day day, union representation, and higher wages. It’s hard for us now to conceive of the lives workers led then. A steelworker possessed few rights, had little bargaining power without a union, and often worked twelve hours a day up to six to seven days per week. What was especially galling for workers in 1919 was that gains made during wartime mobilization were now under threat. Industries had agreed to recognize unions in exchange for promises not to strike during wartime, an agreement that had come about through the efforts of Woodrow Wilson’s wartime War Labor Board. But now industries were reverting to their hardline earlier positions and industry harassment of unions increased.

The steel strike began on September 22, 1919. The steel industry played on nativist fears, anxieties about Bolshevism, and bigoted stereotypes of workers. Strike leader William Z. Foster was targeted by the steel industry as an especially dangerous radical. The situation became uglier when black workers were brought in to work as scabs, resulting in a race riot. Industrialists won out in this case. They successfully persuaded the public that anti-American radicals were behind the strike, which collapsed in January of 1920.

One rare victory for labor in 1919 was the coal strike, which also began in the autumn. The United Mine Workers under the direction of the legendary John L. Lewis commenced their strike on October 31, 1919 with Lewis officially announcing the strike one day later.

Attorney General Palmer tried to stop it by invoking the wartime measure known as the Lever Act, which prevented any kind of interference with the production or transportation of necessities. There were two problems with this approach. One was that the war had ended. The other was that Samuel Gompers, perhaps the most respected labor leader of the time, opposed Palmer’s actions and stated that the Lever Act did not prohibit strikes.

Gompers had the support of Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson in this matter. Once again industry propaganda claimed that radicals were behind the strike. Lewis even withdrew his strike call, but his workers ignored him. With the onset of cold weather the public wanted an end to the strike, and on December 10 management and labor reached a deal.

An especially nasty event occurred in Centralia, Washington on November 11, 1919—-Armistice Day, now known as Veterans Day–that illustrates the collision of political animosities and competing visions of what was best for American life in the post World War I era. This clash involved two organizations that left their mark on twentieth century American culture, organizations that still exist today: the American Legion and the aforementioned Industrial Workers of the World, known also as both the IWW and the “Wobblies.” 

The local lumbermen’s business association had grown tired of IWW activity in their section of the Washington timber belt. Local businessmen wanted to run the Wobblies out of town and collaborated with the local American Legion post to rid their region of the radical union. This behavior by the Legion may come as a surprise to many readers. The American Legion is a veterans organization that has a well-earned positive reputation for charity work, veteran advocacy, and other forms of civic contribution. The group was instrumental in petitioning the federal government to create the GI Bill after World War II, a landmark piece of legislation that transformed American life and contributed greatly to postwar prosperity.

The organization was formed in Paris in 1919 by American military officers, one of which was Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Every American president who served in the military in the twentieth or twenty-first century, beginning with Harry Truman, was or is a member of The American Legion. The Legion post is a fixture in countless American cities and small towns. My father was a Legionnaire for decades and was very active with Hugh Watson Post 530 in Greenhills, Ohio after he retired from teaching. I have logged a lot of hours in the Legion hall attending events and known my fair share of Legionnaires. 

But in its early days some of its members around the United States engaged in anti-radical reaction and vigilantism, some of which was violent. In fact, reaction against the upsurge in Bolshevik and radical activism during the war was partly one of the reasons the Legion was formed. That reaction was in full display against the IWW in Centralia. The IWW was formed early in the twentieth century by a number of labor leaders, including Eugene Debs. Debs split from the IWW because he found their tactics too confrontational and wanted to stay focused on the socialist cause. The IWW believed in direct action, strikes, and work stoppages. The IWW was often accused of promoting anarchism and sabotage, although reliable information on whether they really practiced sabotage is sketchy. What was unique was that the IWW was open to all workers, including blacks, women, and immigrants. That in itself was threatening in early twentieth century America. 

Members at the local IWW hall had been attacked earlier in the year by vigilantes carrying pipes and rubber hoses. Now the pressure was on again. Word began to circulate of an impending attack on the IWW hall, which was headquartered in a local hotel. As a result the Wobblies fortified their hall and readied for the attack, which came on Armistice Day 1919. The Legion had scheduled a parade for the day.

The Legionnaires passed the IWW hall on their march, then turned around and walked back and stopped in front of it. It is unclear who started the attack or who fired first, but gunfire broke out. The Wobblies had armed men in the hall, on a nearby hillside, and in a building across the street, although some Wobblies inside the hall were unarmed. The Legion would claim it was an ambush. The IWW said they were attacked. During this melee four Legionnaires were killed. Wesley Everest, a lumberjack and World War One veteran, fired at the men in the parade. He ran out the back and was followed by the Legion men, who apparently took off after him not only because he had fired but because they believed in error that he was the union secretary. Everest turned around and told the men he would surrender to the local police, but when they came after him he shot a man named Dale Hubbard, a Legionnaire whose father was prominent in the local logging industry.

Everest was beaten and dragged to jail. A number of Wobblies were in custody at this point. There was a mysterious power outage that night and a mob entered the jail without any resistance from local law enforcement. They took Everest out to a bridge over a river and hanged him. The next day he was cut down and his body lay on the river bed until retrieved by the local sheriff, who threw his body into the cell where the other Wobblies were incarcerated, the rope still attached to his neck. Everest was later buried in a pauper’s cemetery. Seven Wobblies were put on trial for the murder of the four Legionnaires. The trial has been heavily criticized through the years by scholars as a heavily biased affair. All of the men jailed for murder were eventually released, with the last one finally freed in 1939. 

One of the lasting and most troubling legacies of 1919 were the Palmer Raids. This chapter, although important in itself, is also relevant to the idea that 1919 was a kind of bellwether for trends in American political and cultural life through the rest of the century. This government-led reaction and repression would be seen again, most notably in the McCarthy era in the early 1950s and again during the 1960s and early 1970s when the government responded with heavy-handed measures against suspected enemies. However, suspicion and overreach were not limited to these times only. An important part of American civil rights history of the last century is the continued surveillance the FBI conducted of a wide range of writers, artists, scientists, performers, politicians and other people who were perceived as a potential threat to domestic order from the 1920s through the Nixon years. Carl Sandburg and John Steinbeck, to name only two examples, had extensive FBI files. 

It was a rare thing for any prominent American writer in mid century not to have an FBI file.  It is worth noting that there have been spies, saboteurs and domestic terrorists during the past 100 years who attacked American institutions and killed their fellow citizens. But too often the legitimate quest for real threats was overshadowed by paranoia and often outright persecution of people with unorthodox or threatening ideas. The architect of that overreach began his rise during the hothouse atmosphere of 1919: J. Edgar Hoover.

In August of 1919, Attorney General Palmer hired Hoover to oversee the General Intelligence Division in the Department of Justice. Hoover was an official with the Bureau of Investigation, which would later become the FBI. Palmer, who had his eye on the Democratic nomination for President in 1920, organized a series of raids during the autumn of 1919 targeting supposed radicals and foreign agents with the objective of deporting radical immigrants. The raids resulted in hundreds and eventually thousands of arrests.

A raid that occurred on December 21 resulted in the arrests of 249 radicals, including the famous Emma Goldman, who was deported to the Soviet Union on the USS Buford, nicknamed the “Soviet Ark.” On January 2, 1920, thousands more were arrested in raids carried out by federal, state and city officials in more than thirty cities across the country. More arrests followed the next day. Things were clearly getting out of control as the number of arrests exceeded warrants.

Free Air by Sinclair Lewis (author’s photo)The book is very much a product of the early fascination with the automobile and its transformative effect on American life. Another Midwestern novelist had also found early car travel of interest. Theodore Dreiser’s nonfiction book A Hoosier Holiday, which detailed his return visit to Indiana by car, had appeared three years earlier in 1916.We might say that the “road book”—that is, a novel or nonfiction work centered on auto travel–began around this time. An excellent example of an early nonfiction account of a road trip by car on the unforgiving roads of rural America had appeared a couple of years earlier: Theodore Dreiser’s A Hoosier Holiday. This book is the story of Dreiser’s road trip from New York City back to Indiana in the company of artist Franklin Booth and their driver and mechanic, a man known only as “Speed” who has never been identified by researchers. It’s an entertaining and fascinating account of early auto travel that provides us with a different kind of lens with which to view 1910s America. This kind of long distance auto travel was still rare, and readers learn of the challenges these men faced traveling through an America that was still largely a horse and wagon nation outside of its major citieJames Branch Cabell’s Jurgen, which is probably his best-known novel, was published in 1919. This book was once considered risqué and Cabell actually ran afoul of some anti-vice societies in parts of the country. Cabell was a southerner, born in Richmond, Virginia in 1879 to an old southern family. A graduate of William and Mary, he worked as a reporter for the Richmond Times and later the New York Herald-Leader before becoming a freelance writer and working for a coal company in West Virginia for a two-year period. Cabell was prolific. His first novel appeared in 1901. From 1919 until his death in 1947 he produced a book a year.

His is an interesting literary case study, a writer who wrote escapist works of fantasy that caused quite a stir in his own time but whose reputation faded fast after the 1920s. Cabell still gets some occasional scholarly attention and has some readers, but the robust resurgence of interest that some critics have hoped for in the intervening decades has never materialized, despite the great vogue for fantasy literature today. However, he has influenced some science fiction and fantasy writers, and writers such as Edmund Wilson and H.L. Mencken admired his work and made efforts to keep reputation alive.

Jurgen is the story of a man, the title character, who searches for his wife Lisa, who has been kidnapped by Satan. In his wanderings he encounters dryads, centaurs, and other mythical creatures, and also meets Queen Guinevere. Jurgen is one of a number of volumes set in a mythical land called Poictesme situated near France and Spain. Parody and allusion are rich elements in Jurgen as the book references Homer’s Odyssey, other works of Greek mythology and medieval authors such as Rabelais.

The prolific novelist and nonfiction writer Upton Sinclair had two books published in 1919. One of these, The Brass Check, is a powerful indictment of American journalism exposing practices all too familiar to us today, such as corporate domination of news organizations and a tendency towards yellow journalism and sensationalism instead of coverage that serves the public interest. The Brass Check was one of six penetrating exposes that Sinclair published about corruption in American institutions. The other five addressed religion, university education, elementary and secondary education, the arts, and literature. Even a cursory examination of these books or synopses of their contents reminds us that nothing new is under the sun, and that corruption has always festered in our culture and institutions.

Like Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair had been writing novels for a while, in fact far longer. Sinclair began with juvenile novels back in the late 1890s. Sinclair is best known for The Jungle, and deservedly so, but he also wrote some other strong novels such as Oil! (adapted for the screen as There Will Be Blood) and August 22nd, about Sacco and Vanzetti. Social change was always paramount for him as a novelist rather than deep exploration of human character, but some works are more openly propagandistic than others—Jimmie Higgins is such a book.

“Jimmie Higgins” was a name coined by the two-time Socialist Vice-President candidate Ben Hanford, who ran on the Socialist ticket for President with labor leader Eugene Debs in 1904 and 1908. “Jimmie Higgins” was Hanford’s representative figure for those Socialist volunteers who did the grunt work that makes organizing success possible—things like setting up chairs at meetings, posting handbills, and mailing literature. “Jimmie Higgins” appeared as a character in a pamphlet Hanford wrote in the early 1900s. Sinclair’s 1919 novel is about this kind of dedicated volunteer.

Jimmie Higgins tells the story of its eponymous character, a man who labors long for the Socialist cause. The book parallels Sinclair’s feelings towards Socialism in relation to World War I. The war was divisive for Socialists, some of them seeing it as an opportunity to defeat German militarism, while others interpreted the conflict as a massive profit-making enterprise by western nations in which the working man did the fighting. Sinclair was for U.S. involvement, but objected to American and Allied forces being sent into Russia to aid the White Russians in their battle against Bolshevism in the period from September 1918 through July 1919). Sinclair’s Higgins, after his period of labor activism and military service, rebels against the Army’s involvement in counter-revolutionary warfare and is jailed in Russia.

The Song of Three Friends, a narrative poem by John G. Neihardt, was another work to see publication in 1919. John Neihardt is best known to readers today for his role in helping compose the book Black Elk Speaks, in which he transcribed the oral autobiography of the Sioux medicine man Black Elk. The book has become a classic of the American Indian experience in the Great Plains. Neihardt, who was born near Sharpsburg, Illinois in 1881 and died in Missouri in 1973, was also a poet whose major work was a five-book poem sequence about the mountain west, the second volume of which is The Song of Three Friends, following The Song of Hugh Glass, which appeared in 1915.

The Song of Three Friends tells the story of the famous riverman Mike Fink and his two companions Will Carpenter and Frank Talbeau as they travel on an expedition under the command of fur trapping entrepreneurs Andrew Henry and William Henry Ashley.

I look forward to profiling Neihardt more here on buckeyemuse.com. He is an enormously fascinating figure important in the literatures of both the Midwest and the American West and a man who had firsthand contact with the old American West. His work with Black Elk is but one aspect of a multifaceted career.

A western landscape of a different kind appeared between the pages of Zane Grey’s novel The Desert of Wheat in 1919. This novel concerns conflict between the Wobblies and wheat farmers set against the backdrop of World War I and divided family loyalties in the wheat growing country of Washington state. At the heart of the story is a young man named Kurt Dorn, whose father is German and believes that the U.S. has been misled by Great Britain in regard to the war.

The presence of the Wobblies in the region agitating for change and disrupting farming to undercut war production adds to the dramatic conflict. The unpleasant and counterproductive side of Wobbly activity is on display in this book—the IWW men intimidate farm workers into walking off the job and also lob phosphorus cakes into wheat fields, which start fires, one of which kills Dorn’s father when he helps to put it out. Kurt later fights heroically in the war, but returns wounded and disillusioned, but later finds strength and healing through the support of a woman named Lenore Anderson, who later becomes his wife. The book was later filmed, and one of the great joys in Grey’s life was when he returned home to Zanesville, Ohio in 1921 when the movie was shown in town and he was received warmly by many old friends and acquaintances in town. 

Like James Branch Cabell, Joseph Hergesheimer was once a well-known American novelist, although his focus was historical fiction rather than fantasy. Java Head is one of his most successful novels. Java Head is the tale of nineteenth century New England’s seafaring history and the region’s involvement in the China trade. The story centers on two seafaring families in Salem, Massachusetts. An important element in the book is the marriage of a Yankee sea captain to a Chinese woman and the resulting racial prejudice among the townspeople.

An important part of dramatist Eugene O’Neill’s development was composing one-act plays. O’Neill’s one-act drama The Moon of the Caribees was published in 1919. The Moon of the Caribees concerns conflict among the crewmen of a British tramp steamer docked at a port in the West Indies. O’Neill was slowly but steadily making his way as a dramatist. During the 1920s many of his best-known works were produced, such as The Emperor Jones, Desire Under The Elms, and Strange Interlude.

American poet John Crowe Ransom published Poems About God in 1919. Ransom, who was born in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1888, later became a renowned critic as well as poet. Ransom was one of the “Fugitive” poets connected with Vanderbilt University in the 1910s, along with figures such as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. These men and some of their fellow Fugitives would later be part of the Southern Agrarians in the 1930s, a group of southern intellectuals who spoke up for the South and criticized an American society and culture dominated by northern commercial values and interests. Ransom taught for many years at Kenyon College in Ohio and helped establish Kenyon as a school renowned for creative writing instruction. Ransom, who had served in France with the U.S. Army, was adjusting to civilian life and a return to the university when Poems About God appeared. Ransom later dismissed the work as juvenilia.

Poems by T.S. Eliot of Saint Louis, Missouri also saw print this year. Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s The Hogarth Press published this book of Eliot’s, which consisted of only seven poems, some of them in French. One of Eliot’s better-known poems, “Mr. Sweeney Among The Nightingales,” is featured in the book. The Hogarth Press began in 1917 and was the first publisher of a number of Modernist works. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land” appeared under the Hogarth Press imprint in 1923.

Two years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, John Reed’s famous work Ten Days That Shook The World was published, an account of that watershed event in twentieth century history. Reed, a famous radical journalist from Portland, Oregon, witnessed firsthand the events in what became the Soviet Union. Reed and his circle was the subject of Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds. Reed had his papers and other materials he obtained in Russia seized upon his return and it took him a number of months to get them back. When he did, he composed Ten Days That Shook The World. Although it was the work of a partisan, his book has still achieved a status as a journalism classic.

The First Series of H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices appeared in bookstores during 1919. Prejudices is a series of essays published in six volumes between 1919 and 1927. Mencken, one of the most vociferous social and literary critics of the time, wrote widely on a variety of topics and was often caustic in tone. The first volume of Prejudices includes articles on authors such as Arnold Bennett and H. G. Well and ruminations on topics such as New Thought and psychoanalysis. Puritanism, a favorite target of Mencken’s, also comes under attack in this first volume. Mencken was a Baltimore native who became a newspaperman, editor, and literary critic known for his excoriating attacks on all that he found empty and meretricious in American life.

Another book by Mencken, and likely a more enduring one, came off the printing press in 1919—the first edition of his The American Language. This is a study of American English. Mencken revised the book several times during his lifetime.

One of Theodore Dreiser’s nonfiction works appeared in 1919. Twelve Men is a series of biographical portraits of twelve men who mattered to him, including his songwriter brother Paul Dreiser, who went by the name Paul Dresser and composed the beloved song “On The Banks of the Wabash Far Away.” Dresser was a successful songwriter who was fourteen years older than Theodore One of Dreiser’s greatest novels was yet to be published when this book appeared in 1919. In 1925 his classic An American Tragedy was published, a book that is quite possibly his finest work.

The Arrow of Gold was one of Joseph Conrad’s last novels. It concerns the romance of a young sea captain and a beautiful young woman during the third Carlist War in Spain. Several more works followed this one, but Conrad’s best books had already appeared. He died in 1924.

Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence appeared in April of the year. The novel, inspired by the life of French artist Paul Gaugain, tells the story of an English stockbroker who leaves his job and family to pursue his calling as an artist. A film based on the book was released in 1942.

Night and Day, Virginia Woolf’s second novel, appeared in 1919. It tells the stories of two different women who are acquaintances. The novel explores their daily lives and romances and issues such as women’s suffrage.

One of the most fascinating and enduring cultural dimensions of WWI is the remarkable body of poetry created by a number of deeply gifted poets who served in the British Army and witnessed firsthand the horrors of this conflict. This group of men included Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Francis Ledwidge, Charles Sorley, and Edward Thomas. Sassoon and Owen are perhaps the two best-known poets of the group. Thomas, Ledwidge, Rosenberg, Sorley and Owen died during the war. Owen died in combat just a week before the Armistice. His friend Siegfried Sassoon, who won the Military Cross for bravery, published War Poems in 1919.

Sassoon is a fascinating man and poet and a complex figure. He was the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman and a Protestant Englishwoman. Sassoon was a gay man who later married a woman and had a son with her. He was a fierce warrior who won the Military Cross and was called “Mad Jack” by his men for his near-suicidal bravery in battle, but after a period of hospital convalescence he made a public declaration of pacifism which attracted considerable attention and put his military career at risk.

Rather than being court-martialed, Sassoon was treated for shell shock, where he was treated with compassionate care by Captain W. H. R. Rivers, a pioneer in the psychological treatment of battle trauma or what would we would call today wartime related post-traumatic stress disorder. This period of time was also fortunate for him as he met fellow poet Wilfred Owen while being treated for battle fatigue.

Sassoon eventually reconsidered his position and returned to his command in the trenches, serving out the remainder of the war. In later life he converted to Catholicism, making what he called “an unconditional surrender to God.” Sassoon’s family wealth made it possible for him not to work or have a career, so he spent his days after leaving college without taking a degree playing golf, fox hunting, and attending the opera. He also began to privately publish poetry and befriend other poets and writers. But there was something in Sassoon’s nature that wanted more than a life of leisure, and he entered the army at the start of the Great War.

Sassoon’s poetry about the war remains his best-known work, although he also wrote a famous three-volume set of fictional memoirs, three volumes of straightforward memoir and other works of poetry and prose, including biographies of English writers. Sassoon’s war poems are powerful and one of the great works of witness of the calamity that was The Great War of 1914-1918.

Thomas Hardy is best known as a novelist, but he was also a dedicated and gifted poet. Hardy considered himself a poet first. His first poetry collection had appeared in 1898. His Collected Poems appeared in 1919 as he entered the winter of his life. Hardy died nine years later in 1928.

 

Heartbreak Hotel is a play published by George Bernard Shaw in 1919 and later performed in 1920. The full title is Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes, which is Shaw’s nod to the inspiration of Anton Chekhov on the play’s structure. It is set in an English country house, the home of an eccentric inventor named Captain Shotover. A number of guests come to his house and various complications ensue. The plot is involved, but the play is generally a kind of commentary on the decline of Edwardian society.

1919 was a remarkable year indeed. I began composing this post in late 2019, and as the year 2020 has unfolded, I have been struck by the parallels between this time and our own. Racial unrest, political division, pandemics, a continuing uneasiness about baleful influence from Russia. What’s old is new again—perhaps exactly the proof that we are still living in a world that very much took shape in 1919: “the year our world began.”

Patrick Kerin 

 

Sources:

Books:

What Happened When: A Chronology of Life & Events in America by Gorton Carruth. Signet (Penguin Books USA). New York, New York, 1991.

Our Times: The Illustrated History of The 20th Century. Lorraine Glennon, Editor-In-Chief. Turner Publishing, Inc. and Century Books, Inc. New York and Atlanta, 1995. 

Great Events of the 20th Century: How They Changed Our Lives. Edited by Richard Marshall. The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. Pleasantville, New York; Montreal, London, Sydney, 1977.

1919: The Year Our World Began by William Klingaman. 1977. 

Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 by Ann Hagedorn. Simon and Schuster, New York, 2007. 

Upton Sinclair: American Rebel by Leon Harris. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, 1975.

Zane Grey (Revised Edition) by Carlton Jackson. Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1989.

Upton Sinclair by William A. Bloodworth, Jr. Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1977.

Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler by Randy Roberts. Grove Press, Incorporated. New York, 1980. Originally published by the Louisiana University Press in 1979. 

A Flame Of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring 20’s by Roger Kahn. A Harvest Book Harcourt, Inc. New York and San Diego, 1999. 

Much of the material on the books themselves comes from my personal acquaintance with them. 

Articles:

“Why The Great Steel Strike of 1919 Was One of Labor’s Biggest Failures.” www.history.com

“Great Steel Strike of 1919.” ohiohistorycentral.org

“1919 Steel Strike.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. case.edu

“1919 Seattle General Strike.” depts.washington.edu

“Setting The Record Straight On The Seattle General Strike.” www.seattletimes.com

“Seattle General Strike, 1919.” HistoryLink.org

“May Day Riots.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. case.edu

“May Day Riot.” clevelandhistorical.org

“The Red Summer of 1919.” www.history.com

“Chicago Race Riot of 1919.” www.britannica.com

“Red Summer in Chicago: 100 Years After The Race Riots.” www.npr.org

“Commentary: Let’s Remove Secrecy of the Centralia Massacre as Centennial Approaches.” Julie McDonald, The Chronicle (Lewis County, Washington).

“Photos Linked To Centralia Massacre Donated to Lewis County Museum.” Graham Perednia, The Chronicle (Lewis County, Washington). 

“Wesley Everest, IWW Martyr.” Tom Copeland. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct. 1986), pp. 122-129. 

“The Reds Won The 1919 World Series Fair and Square” by Scott Michael Powers. Cincinnati Magazine. September 17, 2019. www.cincinnatimagazine.com

“A 100 Year Question Mark: Black Sox scandal tainted Reds’ 1919 World Series Title over Chicago White Sox.” Jeff Seuss, The Cincinnati Enquirer. 

“Eight Myths Out: The Black Sox Scandal.” The American Society for Baseball Research