1919: America's Loss of Innocence - Softcover

Asinof, Eliot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556112696 ISBN 13: 9781556112690

Publisher: Plume, 1991

Synopsis

The author chronicles four dramatic events in the year 1919--Wilson's League of Nations; Red baiting; the birth of Prohibition and bootleggers, gangsters, lawlessness, and corruption; and the Black Sox Scandal

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Asinof considers 1919 a year of cowardice, gross political opportunism and the unleashing of furies. His dramatic examination focuses primarily on four occurrences that "wrenched the national psyche": the Senate's rejection of Woodrow Wilson's proposal for a League of Nations; the anti-Bolshevik hysteria that resulted in widespread violence; the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment and the advent of Prohibition; and the rigged World Series, which became known as the Black Sox Scandal. Asinof ( Eight Men Out ) traces the activities of leading "self-deceivers and opportunists," including President Wilson and his principal adviser, Edward House; Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer; gangster Alphonse Capone; and gambler Arnold Rothstein. He shows how the Red Scare, sparked by Palmer, led to brutal transgressions against civil rights, and argues that Prohibition was a period when Americans "became inured to the finer points of lawlessness." The Black Sox Scandal, according to Asinof, was the most telling incident in the country's loss of innocence, and he provides a detailed account of it in a dark but highly readable report on a traumatic year.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 1556112696
• ISBN 13: 9781556112690
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 370