1919: America's Loss of Innocence

by Eliot Asinof

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556111509
• ISBN13: 9781556111501
• Release Date: May 1990
• Publisher: Dutton Books
• Length: 365 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Outrage glowing red

I don't know that after Homestead, Wounded Knee, Aguinaldo and Jim Crow, America had much innocence to lose in 1919, but Eliot Asinof, full of well-chosen invective, was right to finger it as a low, mean year, when America had something akin to a national nervous breakdown. Woodrow Wilson, our worst active president (although the four passive chief executives prior to 1860 did more damage), is the star of the piece. Asinof does not spare the whip: "The president was putting his enemies in power and his friends in jail." However, Asinof's view of party politics of that time should be adjusted by reading the first few chapters of Paige Smith's "Letter from My Father." Asinof sometimes (well, frequently) lets his moral outrage run away with him. There was plenty to be outraged about, but to label America's adventures in the Caribbean "savage beyond all humaneness" overstates it. When the Navy took over Haiti, it was after the local democrats had celebrated the election of a new despot by chopping up the old one and parading chunks of him around the street on poles. It might have been better to have left the Haitians to their own cherished savagery, but on the humaneness scale, the Americans do not shape up so badly compared with that. It was what we did to ourselves, not to the colonized, that made Wilson's years, and 1919 in particular, sordid. "1919: America's Loss of Innocence" was written in 1990, and for all his own savagery toward Wilson, Asinof lets him off more lightly than he deserved. By 1990, we knew (from Ronald Steele's life of Walter Lippmann) that Wilson had not been maneuvered into war by big business (as Asinof would have it) but had conspired to go to war even before the election of 1916. This was the most successful conspiracy in our history, but Asinof is too much of an ideologue to see it for what it was. He gets the effects right, though. Wilson led the most sustained and successful attack on civil liberties we have ever faced, with all the most respectable organs of the nation whooping him on: pulpit, press, military, business, academe. Joe McCarthy was never a patch on the Bible-toting racist from Virginia. And, despite the caterwaulings of the historically illiterate literati of the 21st century, the Bush-Cheney shenanigans were trivial: More important, in the 21st century no one feared to speak out about it. Speaking out may not have gotten the results the speakers wanted lately, but no one - not one - suffered the fate of Wesley Everest in 1919. Children may read this, so I won't spell them out, but Asinof does. 1919 provided four big crises, in all of which the American citizen failed to come up to the mark: the war hysteria and the sellout during the negotiations for the Peace Treaty; the Red Scare and union busting; Prohibition; and the Black Sox Scandal. Asinof wrote many books but is best known for "Eight Men Out," about the throwing of the 1919 World Series. The few chapters about it here are clearer, more s

Good overview of an American "sea change"

Contrary to those who babble on about America losing its "innocence" in the '60s, Asinof presents a deeply researched thesis positing that one year after WWI ended, America changed, mostly for the worse, on a number of fronts. Areas examined include the failure of America to join and sustain the League of Nations, Prohibition, and the "Black Sox" World Series scandal. Asinof is at his best on that last one (since he drew from the same sources when he wrote his classic "Eight Men Out"), but he provides great insight into all of the events chronicled. For most of us, this all happened well before we were born, so this volume provides a needed overview of a crucial year in American history.