Bad in the Teeth? Ruminations on 1919

William D. Miller begins this evocative study by recalling the marvelous aircraft and automobiles he saw as a small boy in Jacksonville, Florida, just after World War I, and the summer trips he took with his to a camp house where, living in the of an undefiled nature, he experienced the of family (pp. xi-xii). Reflecting on the guileless intrusion of technology into such natural places of and power, Miller notes what he knows now but could not then-that lynching was also commonplace, forming, like the frenzy of the Great War itself, a corrosive counterpoint to the concept of social harmony underlying Woodrow Wilson's vision of international community as well as William Miller's bliss (pp. xi-xii). Mechanization and unreason thus undermined the period's deep if childish craving for community, either subverting it with restlessness and tension or twisting it into the false menacing community of mob rage (pp. xiii-xv). Calling his book with a point (p. x), Miller uses President Wilson's efforts to secure a positive peace as his chief narrative line. Following a prologue that expands briefly upon the themes adumbrated in the introduction, eight chapters track Wilson from the armistice to his return from Europe with a draft treaty providing for a League of Nations. Material on the chaotic revolutionary bitterness of Europe and the savage assaults on civil liberties in America provide a context for the president's maneuverings. Chapters 9 through 14 focus on airplanes, popular entertainment, mob violence, prohibition, and other features of American society. Miller devotes another three chapters to Wilson's efforts to achieve ratification and his debilitating stroke before finishing with five short chapters on social topics ranging from mob violence to Greenwich Village, the Black Sox scandal, and the mass deportation of aliens to, finally, the works of Nicholas Berdyaev and Henry Adams. Miller's goal is not to unearth new material, and he generally does not do so. The chapters are unusually brief for serious historical scholarship, and

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