Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 by Ann HagedornReview by: Walter Russell MeadForeign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 2007), p. 191Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20032534 .

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Recent Books during the Cold War. An early opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, he strongly supported the effort once the nation was committed and urged an all-out military effort rather than the step-by-step escalation favored by his old friend and colleague Lyndon Johnson. Woods' study of Russell's evolving approach to U.S. foreign policy is lucid, thoughtful, and concise. Woods does an excellent job of tracing the ways in which Russell's white southern background gave him an unusually subtle understanding of international power dynamics even as the pervasive racism of the section warped his vision and weakened his credibility at key points. Russell's South was pro-military, anticommunist, and acutely sensitive to the need to protect the nation's honor.

At the same time, the experience of defeat, occupation, poverty, and marginalization through which the South passed in the eighty years after the Civil War made Russell and other southerners, such as SenatorJ. William Fulbright, suspicious of the sometimes grandiose programs of Yankee liberal internationalists, such as National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert

McNamara-who were not above labeling Russell's skepticism about the prospects for democracy building in Vietnam as racist. These unsatisfactory debates con tinue today; Woods' nicely balanced study provides a helpful background, even as Russell's southern successors, now Repub licans, seem to have switched sides.

Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. BY ANN HAGEDORN. Simon &

Schuster, 2007, 560 pp. $30.00.

Hagedorn's history of i9i9 is not without virtues. The idea is a good one: 1919 was a vital year in U.S. history. The adoption of

the constitutional amendments giving women the vote and establishing Prohi bition marked the high-water mark of the moral impulses of the Progressive era. The racial unrest of that year marked a turning point in the history of U.S. race relations. The stormy negotiations in Paris over what became the Treaty of

Versailles, the influenza pandemic, the struggles over the Allied intervention in Russia, and the grotesque excesses of the internal security apparatus the Wilson administration had established during the war were all fateful events. At her best, Hagedorn writes lively and dramatic accounts of such milestones. Unfortunately, her narrative is often too trite and tenden tious to do justice to her subject, with the world divided into stock "progressive" heroes and "reactionary" villains. From her point of view, for example, the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks was an evil plot to suppress freedom, supported by bankers and other war-mongering, red-baiting, worker-crushing members of the bourgeoisie. Allied intervention in Russia may have been ill judged and futile, but there were many reasons why decent, honest friends of Russia-and of humanity in general-would have wanted to nip the horrors of Bolshevism and the Russian Civil War in the bud.

Edith Wharton. BY HERMIONE LEE.

Knopf, 2007, 896 pp. $35.00.

Lee's magisterial biography of the novelist Edith Wharton is not only an important contribution to American literary studies; it also offers students of U.S. foreign policy useful insights into how cultivated, in telligent Americans came to see their relationship toward Europe as the United States began to flex its muscles as a world

F O R E I G N A F FA I R S November/December2007 [191]

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