Intro: An Attempt at Peace
On 16 January 1920, in a gilded room at the Quai d'Orsay called the Salle de l'Horloge — the Clock Room — the Council of the League of Nations convened for the first time. The room’s name was accidental, but it did the era's work for it: a body assembled to declare that the war's clock had finally stopped, in a room that told the hour whether anyone was listening or not. Outside, the clock had not stopped. It had barely slowed.
The Covenant establishing the League had gone into force six days earlier, folded into the Treaty of Versailles as its first article, and the men who gathered in Paris that January believed, or said they believed, that they were inaugurating something genuinely new: an international body with the standing to arbitrate disputes before they became wars, a permanent alternative to the logic that had just killed some twenty million people. Woodrow Wilson had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the idea three months earlier. He was not in the room. Neither was his country. The United States Senate would vote in March against ratifying the treaty that created the League, and with it, against the seat reserved for America among the Council's permanent members — a chair that stayed empty for a body Wilson had done more than any man alive to build. The League opened, in other words, missing its own architect, a fact its members absorbed and then, mostly, worked around.
What the Council actually did in its early sessions is instructive. At its fourth meeting that April, held at the Palais du Petit-Luxembourg, the delegates took up, among other items, the status of Armenia, the protection of minorities in Turkey, and the repatriation of prisoners of war still stranded in Siberia. These were filed as agenda items, discussed, minuted, referred to committee. At the same moment, several hundred miles to the east, Armenia's status was being settled by other means. Turkish nationalist forces were advancing on the Armenian republic from the west; the Red Army was advancing on it from the north and east. By the time the League's first General Assembly convened in Geneva that November — a hundred delegates, ringing bells, a Swiss premier assuring the room that the absent United States could not stay away for long — Armenia had already fallen to the Bolsheviks, its independence a two-year interlude between empires. The League had discussed Armenia's status. Armenia's status had been decided by artillery.
This was, in miniature, the shape of the year. 1920 was the moment the war was formally, legally, ceremonially over — and the moment it became clear that ending a war on paper and ending it in fact were two different projects, proceeding on two different timetables. The armies that had fought under national flags in 1914 were mostly demobilized. The violence they had organized did not demobilize with them; it dispersed, changed uniforms, changed justifications, and kept going. Poland and Soviet Russia fought a war the peace conference had not anticipated and could not contain. Turkish nationalists, refusing the peace imposed on the Ottoman remnant, fought a war of their own against the treaty meant to dissolve their country. Ireland's war against British rule, already a year old, deepened into something closer to atrocity on both sides. In the United States, a bomb went off on Wall Street and the federal government rounded up thousands of people it judged dangerous by nationality and opinion — even as, in the same twelve months, women got the vote and a young organization called the American Civil Liberties Union incorporated itself specifically to contest the raids. Even art took the catastrophe as its subject and split into opposite responses: Dada's negation in Zurich and Berlin, Bauhaus's reconstruction in Weimar, two answers to the same rubble.
None of this was hidden from the men in the Clock Room. The League's own early business — Armenia, Danzig, the protection of minorities, the disposition of former Ottoman and German territory — was, item for item, a catalogue of the war's unfinished aftershocks. What the League could not yet do, in 1920, was resolve any of them faster than they were resolving themselves, by other means, on the ground. It would take most of the decade for the institution to acquire real diplomatic weight. In its first year, it was less a government of the peace than a waiting room for one — an assembly of good intentions convening punctually, in a room named for the clock, while elsewhere the war simply continued under new names.
Part I: The Soviets Test Their Boundaries
None of the wars fought in 1920 were declared in the way the war that had just ended was declared. There were no ultimatums, no mobilization orders read from balconies, no formal ruptures between recognized governments. Instead there were incursions, uprisings timed to coincide with them, ceasefires that dissolved before they were signed, and borders that moved because armies moved, with the paperwork — when it came at all — arriving afterward to describe what had already happened. This was the texture of the year's first conflicts: history continuing to convulse along the fault lines the war had opened, in places the peace conference had either failed to reach or reached too late.
In the east, the newly resurrected Polish state and Bolshevik Russia fought a war that the Paris peacemakers had no answer for. Poland, independent again after more than a century of partition, pushed into Ukraine in the spring under Józef Piłsudski, who dreamed of a federation of buffer states between Poland and Russia and who signed a treaty with the exiled Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura in April to that end. The war escalated into all-out warfare by spring 1920, following earlier border fighting in 1919. Warsaw took Kyiv in May. It did not hold it. The Red Army, its Civil War against the Whites effectively won, turned its attention west and drove the Poles back in a summer of retreat so rapid that by August the Bolsheviks had pushed to the outskirts of Warsaw itself, and foreign observers were predicting Poland's imminent collapse.
Lenin's ambitions for the campaign went well beyond Poland. The plan was for the Red Army to carry revolution west on its bayonets, with Polish communists expected to rise and welcome the invaders as liberators — a pattern the Bolsheviks intended to repeat in Germany and beyond. No rising came; Polish workers and peasants, whatever their politics, closed ranks against an invading army before they entertained its ideology. What followed at Warsaw in the third week of August has been mythologized ever since as the "Miracle on the Vistula" — a phrase coined, pointedly, by one of Piłsudski's domestic critics, sarcastic about the Marshal's earlier Ukrainian gamble. Norman Davies, who has written the standard English-language history of the war, is unambiguous that it was no miracle: a hard-fought battle won by the skill and discipline of the Polish defenders and by Piłsudski's counterattack, not by providence, whatever the coincidence with the Catholic Feast of the Assumption suggested to the faithful praying in Warsaw's churches that week. Piłsudski split his forces, held the Soviet main thrust in front of the capital, and on 16 August launched a flanking counterattack from the south that severed the Red Army's communications and sent it reeling into a disorganized retreat. A French officer attached to the Polish staff — the young Charles de Gaulle — wrote home that the Poles had grown wings. The war ended in an October ceasefire and a peace conference that would not conclude until the following spring, at Riga, dividing Ukraine and Belarus between the two powers roughly two hundred kilometers east of what would later be called the Curzon Line. Poland kept its independence and gained territory; the Bolshevik dream of igniting revolution in Germany by force of Russian arms was, for now, shelved. Nothing about the outcome felt settled. It felt, more accurately, like a war postponed — its terms recorded on paper that both sides understood to be provisional.
South of this conflict, along the spine of the Caucasus, empire's collapse worked a version of the same pattern with less international attention and considerably less mercy. Azerbaijan and Armenia — the Democratic Republic and the First Republic, respectively — had each declared independence in 1918 as the Russian and Ottoman empires that had governed them came apart. Both survived barely two years.
Azerbaijan fell first, and it fell in large part because of what it was sitting on. By early 1920 Soviet Russia desperately needed the oil supplies flowing from Baku, and on 17 March Lenin cabled the Caucasus Front's military council with blunt instructions: "We absolutely must take Baku". Azerbaijani Bolsheviks had spent months organizing underground; the Red Army's 11th Army, having just finished off White forces in the North Caucasus, stood ready at the border. In one of the small ironies with which 1920 abounds, Azerbaijan's own army had been sent south in March to suppress an Armenian uprising in Karabakh — the two young republics fighting each other over contested territory even as the ground opened beneath both of them, leaving the north undefended when it mattered most. On the night of 27 April, Soviet troops crossed the frontier as local communists staged uprisings in Baku, and by the next day parliament had transferred power to the Bolsheviks. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, not two years old, ceased to exist in a single day. Resistance was not entirely absent — as many as 20,000 people are estimated to have died opposing what was, in substance, a Russian reconquest — but there was no battle of Warsaw here, no counterattack that turned the tide. The oil was the point, and the oil kept flowing, now to Moscow.
Armenia held on a few months longer, squeezed between two forces that agreed on almost nothing except the convenience of Armenia's disappearance. Mustafa Kemal's Turkish nationalist movement, refusing the peace terms the Allies had imposed on the Ottoman government at Sèvres that August, needed to secure its eastern frontier before it could contest the terms in the west; Soviet Russia, for its part, had reached an understanding with the Turkish nationalists that summer trading tacit support for a freer hand in the Caucasus. The consequences for Armenia's population were severe enough that German and American officials condemned them at the time, and several historians have argued that only the subsequent Soviet intervention kept the conflict from completing the destruction begun in the 1915 genocide — a claim historians continue to debate in its particulars, but one that reflects how narrow the margin felt to contemporaries. Turkish forces under General Kâzım Karabekir crossed the frontier in September, took Kars at the end of October, and reached Alexandropol by early November. The war lasted barely ten weeks, from late September to early December, but it was enough to collapse a republic already exhausted by genocide, by the previous war, and by its own fight with Azerbaijan over Karabakh.
What happened next is one of the year's stranger sequences of paperwork. On 29 November, the Red Army's 11th Army crossed into Armenia from the west, and the Bolsheviks who arrived with it declared an Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic on the spot. On 2 December the government of the Republic of Armenia resigned by agreement, and two days later Soviet troops entered Yerevan. The Treaty of Alexandropol — the document formally ending the Turkish invasion, stripping Armenia of more than half its claimed territory and reducing what remained to a Turkish protectorate — was signed in the early hours of 3 December. By then the Armenian government that had authorized its foreign minister to sign no longer existed; it had resigned and transferred power to the Soviets the previous day, meaning the treaty was, from the moment of its signature, being executed on behalf of a government that had already ceased to hold office. Turkey did not ratify it either. Both sides understood it as provisional even as they invoked it, a settlement between a government that no longer governed and an assembly that had not yet formally become the state it represented. The actual border between Armenia and Turkey would be drawn the following year, at Moscow and Kars, by parties that had waited for the smoke to clear before making anything official.
Set beside the Miracle on the Vistula, the Caucasus offers no equivalent moment of reversal, no counterattack that changes the story's ending. Poland, by luck and generalship and the accident of Bolshevik overreach, got to keep the independence it had just won. Azerbaijan and Armenia did not. The difference wasn't sentiment or the justice of anyone's cause; it was geography, oil, and the proximity of armies willing to finish what the war had left unresolved. The League of Nations, convening that spring in Paris to discuss, among its agenda items, the status of Armenia, had no force to send and, in the end, nothing to offer beyond the discussion itself.
Part II: Wars of Independence
If the wars in Poland and the Caucasus were fought over where borders would fall, the wars in Ireland and Turkey that same year were fought over a harder question: which government, among several claiming the same territory, actually got to govern. In both cases an insurgent authority — a self-declared assembly in one instance, an underground republic in the other — was contesting the ground against an occupying power's paper solutions, and in both cases the paper kept arriving late, addressing a situation that had already moved on without it.
In Ireland, the war that would come to be called, informally, the Black and Tan War had been simmering since January 1919, when the first Dáil convened in Dublin and the Irish Republican Army began a campaign against the Royal Irish Constabulary. By early 1920, that campaign was working: RIC resignations were soaring, hundreds of barracks had been abandoned, and courts across large parts of the country had emptied of authority. The British response was to militarize rather than negotiate. Recruitment into the RIC opened in Britain, drawing thousands of demobilized war veterans who arrived in Ireland from March 1920 wearing mismatched surplus uniforms — khaki military and dark police issue together, which earned them their nickname, Black and Tans. A more heavily armed Auxiliary Division, recruited from former officers and effectively independent of ordinary police command, followed in July. Both units acquired reputations for indiscipline and reprisal that alienated opinion in Ireland and, increasingly, in Britain itself. By mid-1920 republicans controlled most county councils and British authority had effectively collapsed across the south and west, a situation serious enough that London began drafting emergency powers.
The war's defining month arrived in November. On the morning of Sunday the 21st, Michael Collins's intelligence unit — known simply as the Squad — assassinated more than a dozen British intelligence operatives across Dublin in a coordinated strike intended to blind the British administration's ability to identify IRA volunteers. That afternoon, a mixed force of Auxiliaries, RIC and soldiers opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, killing fourteen civilians and wounding dozens more; a British Labour Party investigation later found the shooting unprovoked, whatever the official denials. A week after what became known as Bloody Sunday, an IRA flying column of thirty-six volunteers under Tom Barry ambushed a two-vehicle Auxiliary patrol near the village of Kilmichael in County Cork, killing all but one of the eighteen men. What exactly happened in the ambush's final minutes remains disputed among historians: Barry's own account described a "false surrender" by the Auxiliaries that prompted his order to keep firing, while later research by Peter Hart argued the killing continued well past any surrender and that Barry's men took few if any prisoners by intention — an interpretation other historians have in turn challenged on the reliability of the sources involved. What is not disputed is the scale of the reprisal that followed. Martial law was declared across Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary on 10 December, and the next night, Auxiliaries burned much of central Cork city to the ground in retaliation for a separate ambush, gutting a swath of the city that included its main shopping street and city hall.
Westminster's answer to all of this, moving on its own legislative timetable and largely disconnected from the violence unfolding in Munster, was the Government of Ireland Act, which passed its final reading on 11 November — ten days before Bloody Sunday — and received royal assent on 23 December. The Act partitioned the island into two devolved territories, Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, each with its own home rule parliament, and it was intended as a durable constitutional settlement to a home rule question that had consumed British politics since before the war. It answered a question almost no one fighting in Ireland that year was still asking. Sinn Féin had already declared a republic in 1919 and had no interest in operating devolved institutions within the United Kingdom; the parliament created for Southern Ireland would meet the following June with only four members in attendance and never functioned as intended. The six-county Northern Ireland it created, however, would prove durable in ways its drafters may not have fully anticipated — the border it drew has remained, in one form or another, the most consequential line on the map of these islands for the century since.
A comparable contest over legitimate authority was unfolding, with far higher stakes and considerably more bloodshed, in Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal, a former Ottoman general who had returned to Istanbul in 1919 to find the city under Allied occupation, had spent the preceding months organizing a nationalist movement from the interior of the country in open defiance of the Sultan's government. On 23 April 1920, the movement he led convened its own parliament in Ankara — the Grand National Assembly — which elected Kemal as its president and declared itself the legitimate representative of the Turkish people, a direct rival to the Ottoman government still functioning, under Allied supervision, in occupied Istanbul. In June, before the Allies had even finished drafting their peace terms, the Assembly passed a law declaring invalid any treaty the Istanbul government might sign; when the Sultan's government duly signed the Treaty of Sèvres on 10 August, carving away most of Anatolia into Allied zones, Greek territory, and an independent Armenia, the Ankara Assembly had already preemptively refused it. Sèvres would never be ratified by anyone, and its authors would spend the following three years watching Kemal's forces make its terms irrelevant on the ground.
The nationalist movement fought that ground war on several fronts at once in 1920, against a coalition of adversaries who agreed on almost nothing except the value of a weakened Turkey. In the east, as covered above, Kemal's forces under General Kâzım Karabekir crushed the Armenian republic in a matter of weeks that autumn. In the south, Turkish nationalist forces engaged French troops occupying Cilicia, fighting that would push France toward a separate accommodation with Ankara within a year. In the west, Greek forces — which had landed at Smyrna in May 1919 with Allied backing and pushed steadily into the Anatolian interior — continued to advance through 1920, taking Bursa by the end of July and pressing toward Ankara itself, a threat serious enough that Kemal would not fully turn it back until the following year, at Sakarya. Underwriting much of this simultaneous defiance, from the autumn of 1920 onward, was a steady flow of gold and arms from Soviet Russia — the same power that had just finished absorbing Azerbaijan and would shortly help finish off Armenia, now backing Ankara against the western powers it, too, had reason to weaken.
Both wars, in other words, turned in 1920 on a government's ability to make its writ actually run rather than merely exist on paper. London had a paper solution for Ireland and a war it could not win on the ground; the Ottoman Sultan had a paper treaty for Turkey and no army willing to enforce it. In both places, the insurgent authority — the Dáil, the Grand National Assembly — was already functioning as a government in the places that mattered, months or years before anyone else was prepared to call it one. The wars that followed were, in large part, about closing that gap between recognition and reality. Ireland would close it partially, and violently, within two more years; Turkey would close it almost entirely, at Lausanne, within three.
Part III: The Uses of Form
Every art form that mattered in 1920 was, in one way or another, working out what to do with a world that had stopped making sense on the old terms. Some writers and painters answered by imposing form where the war had left only wreckage — a solvable puzzle, a total work of art, a design for living. Others answered by refusing form altogether, on the theory that pretending the wreckage could be tidied was itself a kind of lie. Both answers appeared this year, sometimes in the same city, and neither cancelled the other out.
F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in March, and it made him famous within weeks; the initial print run of three thousand copies sold out in three days, and Fitzgerald's fiancée Zelda Sayre, who had broken off their engagement over his poor prospects, agreed to marry him a week after publication. The novel is a loosely structured, semi-autobiographical account of a Princeton undergraduate named Amory Blaine, and its most quoted line described his generation as one that had come of age to find every inherited certainty in ruins — its gods dead, its wars already fought, its faith in people shaken. What made the book a sensation wasn't its craftsmanship, which even sympathetic critics found uneven, but its willingness to say the disillusionment out loud and to render the resulting hedonism — parties, drinking, a new frankness about sex — as a legitimate response rather than a moral failure. Fitzgerald was twenty-three and writing about the previous decade, but the public read the book as a bulletin from the present, and in a sense they weren't wrong: a generation that had watched its inherited meaning collapse was going to look for something to replace it, and in 1920 America a great many of them were looking in cocktail glasses.
Agatha Christie's first novel, published the same year, offered nearly the opposite proposition: a world in which meaning could still, with sufficient rigor, be recovered intact. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written during the war years but not published until John Lane's firm brought it out in the United States that October, introduced Hercule Poirot — pointedly written as a Belgian refugee, a man whose own country had been overrun and who had rebuilt a life, and a reputation for order, in England. The plot is a country-house poisoning, solved through the patient, methodical accumulation of physical clues until exactly one explanation survives. It is a small, deliberately artificial kind of confidence: the promise that a mystery, however tangled, admits of a single correct and fully knowable answer, discoverable by a sufficiently attentive mind. That promise had a particular appeal to readers who had just spent four years watching a catastrophe that no one could satisfactorily explain, whose causes remained disputed even as the peace conference wrapped up its business. Christie's novel, and the genre it helped establish, offered the puzzle the war itself had refused to be: contained, soluble, and finished by the last page.
The same tension between imposed order and declared meaninglessness played out, more violently, in the visual arts that summer in Berlin. From 30 June to 25 August, the gallery of Dr. Otto Burchard hosted the First International Dada Fair, nearly two hundred works by Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and others, under slogans painted directly onto the gallery walls: Take Dada Seriously, Dilettantes, rise up against art. The centerpiece, suspended from the ceiling, was Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter's Prussian Archangel — a mannequin dressed as a German officer with a pig's head, wrapped in a banner quoting a Christmas carol about a messenger descending from heaven. German military authorities charged the two artists with defaming the army; they were acquitted. Elsewhere in the exhibition hung Otto Dix's War Cripples, a painting of maimed veterans now known only through photographs, since the original was later destroyed, and Hannah Höch's photomontage Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch, which spliced the new republic's president in among the deposed Kaiser and his generals as if regime change had changed nothing structural at all. Dada's argument, insofar as the movement offered one, was that the war had discredited not just particular governments or generals but the entire cultural apparatus that had let the catastrophe happen with a straight face — including, especially, art that still pretended to dignity, coherence, or beauty. Mockery, collage, and deliberate nonsense were not a retreat from seriousness; they were, its practitioners insisted, the only honest response left.
A few hours' train ride away in Weimar, an institution not yet two years old was making the opposite bet. The Bauhaus, founded by the architect Walter Gropius in 1919, had opened under a manifesto whose cover bore a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger of a radiant Gothic cathedral — an image Gropius chose deliberately, invoking the medieval guilds that had once united architecture, painting, and sculpture into a single collective undertaking, and proposing that the same unity, the same total work of art, might be rebuilt for the twentieth century out of the war's wreckage rather than abandoned to it. The school's first full year of teaching, in 1920, was shaped less by the industrial rigor for which the Bauhaus later became famous than by the idiosyncratic mysticism of Johannes Itten, a devotee of the neo-Zoroastrian Mazdaznan movement who had students meditate, fast, and perform breathing exercises before letting them touch a single material, and who built, that year, a spiral stained-glass sculpture called the Tower of Fire that fused his religious convictions directly into Bauhaus form-teaching. It was also Itten, in 1920, who invited Paul Klee to join the faculty — a hire that would prove considerably more durable than the mysticism surrounding it. Whatever their disagreements, and there were many, Gropius and Itten shared the founding premise that art could still be a unifying, redemptive project: something built rather than something that could only mock what remained standing.
Underneath both impulses, in a study Sigmund Freud was finishing that same year in Vienna, sat a darker suggestion about why reconstruction and negation might be two faces of the same problem. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, broke with the assumption that had anchored psychoanalysis until then — that the mind was governed simply by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain — and proposed instead that some deeper compulsion drove people to repeat their traumas rather than resolve them: shell-shocked veterans reliving their injuries in recurring dreams, a small child re-enacting a parent's absence in a repetitive game, over and over, with no discernible payoff in pleasure at all. Freud named the drive behind this compulsion Thanatos, and set it against Eros, the drive toward binding, building, and life. He wrote much of the book while his daughter Sophie was, in his words, still alive and flourishing, and he insisted for the rest of his life that her death in the influenza epidemic that January had no bearing on his theory's darker turn — a claim his own circle debated at the time and biographers have continued to weigh since, without settling it. What is certain is the timing: a continent that had just spent four years demonstrating, on an industrial scale, humanity's capacity to repeat catastrophic violence past the point of any rational benefit was the setting in which one of its foremost theorists of the mind concluded that repetition, not pleasure, might be the more fundamental drive. Dada's compulsive mockery and the Bauhaus's compulsive rebuilding both look, from that angle, like two different treatments for the same wound — one insisting the wound be exposed and repeated until it lost its power to shock, the other insisting it could be sublimated into a new, unifying form. Neither, in 1920, had any way of knowing which one history would prove right.
Part IV: The American Paradox
No country demonstrated the year's contradictions more starkly, or more compactly, than the United States, which spent 1920 expanding its democracy, contracting its civil liberties, banning its own citizens' drink of choice, and formally turning its back on the very peace settlement it had done more than any other nation to design — sometimes within the same news cycle.
The contraction came first. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who had his own eye on the following year's Democratic nomination, had launched a wave of raids against suspected radicals in November 1919, and he opened 1920 with a second and larger one: on the night of January 2, Justice Department agents struck in thirty-three cities, arresting more than three thousand people, many of them immigrants swept up by nationality and association rather than evidence, some tortured or held for a week without food during questioning in Detroit. By the end of the month the total exceeded ten thousand arrests, the largest mass roundup in the country's history to that point. A young Justice Department official named J. Edgar Hoover, not yet twenty-five, helped run the operation. Palmer's efforts were increasingly frustrated from within his own government: the Acting Secretary of Labor, Louis Post, whose department held authority over deportation, personally invalidated more than fifteen hundred of the warrants Palmer's agents had secured, and when Palmer's congressional allies tried to have Post removed for it, Post's testimony before the House turned the hearing into a public accounting of the raids' abuses instead. Palmer, undeterred, warned of a Bolshevik uprising planned for May Day. May 1 came and went without incident, and what remained of Palmer's authority came apart with it.
Out of the raids came one of the year's few clearly constructive American institutions. Twelve prominent lawyers and legal scholars, including Felix Frankfurter and Roscoe Pound, had already begun documenting the Justice Department's illegal searches, entrapments, and incommunicado detentions; on January 19, a small group led by Roger Baldwin formalized their opposition by reorganizing the existing National Civil Liberties Bureau into the American Civil Liberties Union. Its first cases defended the immigrants and union organizers the Palmer Raids had swept up. It was, in effect, the year's civil-liberties answer to the year's civil-liberties violation, founded within weeks of the abuse it existed to contest — though the constitutional protections it invoked were, in 1920, still largely untested in court and correspondingly thin in practice.
The violence the raids had been meant to prevent arrived anyway, and unsolved, that September. At 12:01 pm on the 16th, a horse-drawn wagon parked outside the headquarters of J.P. Morgan & Co. at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets exploded, packed with roughly a hundred pounds of dynamite and five hundred pounds of iron sash weights turned into shrapnel. Thirty people were killed instantly and eight more died later; hundreds were wounded, nearly all of them clerks, messengers, and passersby rather than the financiers the bomb had presumably been aimed at. J.P. Morgan himself was vacationing in Scotland. No one ever claimed responsibility, and no one was ever charged; investigators suspected Italian anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani, who had carried out a string of bombings the previous year, but the case was still open when it was formally closed two decades later. Wall Street reopened for business the next morning, and a long-scheduled patriotic rally went ahead at the same intersection as planned — a small, deliberate act of civic defiance that the era seemed to specialize in, on both sides of its political divides.
Amid all this, the nation became officially dry on January 17 when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect at one minute past midnight. To enforce the mandate, the National Prohibition Act — famously known as the Volstead Act — was put in place, yet its first recorded infraction occurred within the very same hour. Six armed men in Chicago hijacked a pair of freight cars to steal $100,000 worth of whiskey, highlighting the immense enforcement challenges and discretion the law would demand. Prohibition would go on to remake, and largely corrupt, the machinery of federal law enforcement over the following decade, but its opening moment in 1920 was less a turning point than a preview: a righteous, popular, and almost immediately porous law, arriving at the same time as a government cracking down, with considerably less due process, on a different category of citizen it found threatening.
Against this record of contraction, the year's clearest expansion of American democracy arrived in August, and very nearly didn't. The Nineteenth Amendment needed one more state to reach the three-quarters threshold for ratification, and by summer the fight had narrowed to Tennessee, where the state senate had already voted yes and the House had twice deadlocked 48 to 48. The tie-breaking vote fell, by chance of alphabetical seating and legislative procedure, to Harry Burn, a twenty-four-year-old representative who had told his district he opposed suffrage but who arrived at the final vote carrying a letter from his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn, urging him to vote for it. He did, breaking the tie, and on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, making the amendment law in time for millions of women to vote in that November's presidential election — the first in American history in which they could do so nationwide.
What that expanded electorate voted for was, by design, very little. The Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles that March, discussed at the start of this essay, had already ensured the United States would sit outside the League it had conceived; the Republican nominee, Warren Harding, spent the following months campaigning on the explicit premise that the nation's business now was to stop changing. "America's present need is not heroics, but healing," he told Boston's Home Market Club in May, "not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment." The word wasn't standard English — normalcy, as opposed to the more common normality — and critics mocked it as a malapropism, but the sentiment needed no correcting to land: after a decade of war, pandemic, strikes, race riots, and now bombings, Harding was offering the electorate permission to stop being tested. They took it by the largest popular-vote margin in the nation's history, more than sixty percent, delivered to newly enfranchised women and long-enfranchised men alike, its results announced, for the first time, over the radio.
Nothing about 1920's American record resolves into a single direction. The same government that expanded the franchise to half its adult population also conducted the largest mass arrest in its history against people whose main offense was their nationality or their politics. The same public that founded an organization dedicated to defending constitutional rights also elected, by a landslide, a president whose entire platform was the promise of asking fewer questions. It was a country pulling in several directions simultaneously — enlarging its democracy, narrowing its tolerance, retreating from the world it had helped remake, and hoping, against the year's own evidence, that all of this somehow added up to normal.
Coda: The Last Coup
Venustiano Carranza had ruled Mexico for four years, and in the spring of 1920 he made the same mistake his own revolution had been fought to end: he tried to choose his successor. Barred by the unwritten logic of the Revolution from running again himself, Carranza passed over Álvaro Obregón, the general who had crushed Pancho Villa's army and lost an arm doing it, in favor of Ignacio Bonillas, a colorless career diplomat who had spent the fighting years representing Mexico in Washington and whom Carranza believed he could control. In April, government troops began arresting Obregón's supporters. Sonora's governor, Adolfo de la Huerta, and his fellow Sonoran general Plutarco Elías Calles joined Obregón in declaring the Plan of Agua Prieta, and within three weeks most of the army had gone over to them. Carranza fled the capital by rail on 7 May, then by horseback into the Sierra Norte, hoping to reach Veracruz as he had once before. He never arrived. In the early hours of 21 May, at a village called Tlaxcalantongo, a local commander who had offered him protection turned on his camp instead. Roused by gunfire, Carranza is said to have told an aide that his leg was already broken. He was dead within the hour, whether by ambush or, as some accounts still maintain, his own hand.
What followed had the texture less of victory than of settlement. De la Huerta took the interim presidency and spent his six months making peace with what remained of a decade of armed factionalism: Pancho Villa, the revolution's most feared cavalry commander, agreed by telegram that July to lay down arms in exchange for a twenty-five-thousand-acre hacienda and a private guard of fifty men, and retired to it without further incident. In September, Obregón was declared the winner of a presidential election against a single token opponent by a margin of 1,131,751 votes to 47,442 — a tally precise enough to look counted and lopsided enough to look arranged, in the way election returns in newly pacified countries often manage to be both. José Vasconcelos, who would shortly become Obregón's minister of education, wrote that Carranza's death had settled over the country like a wave of calm, old enemies suddenly ready to treat each other as countrymen again. Carranza's own children were less moved: offered a pension years later on the grounds of his services to the nation, they refused it and signed their reply "your loyal enemies."
Obregón took office at midnight on 1 December, the first man to complete a peaceful transfer of the Mexican presidency in a decade, in a country with an empty treasury and next to no functioning infrastructure to run. A photograph from around that time shows him addressing a large crowd from a balcony near the National Palace, wearing, over his own face, a false beard — a small theatrical addition his aides thought would lend the youngest man to hold the office some needed gravity. It was not the only performance of authority that year built to make a fragile new arrangement look more solid than it was.