The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism

“We are running a race with Bolshevism and the world is on fire.”—President Woodrow Wilson, 1919

While the Western leaders were hammering out a peace treaty in Paris to end the Great War, a new war had already begun. Bolshevism—the creed of the Russian Revolution—had burst on the scene in 1917 and seared itself into the world’s consciousness even faster than al-Qaeda would some eighty years later. The Allied powers tried to destroy it at its source by intervening, controversially and unsuccessfully, in the civil war in Russia. Elsewhere there were bloody revolutions and bloodier counterrevolutions in Germany, Hungary, and the Baltic States; massive strikes and civil unrest broke out in Britain, Western Europe, and in both North and South America. In the United States, a series of terrorist bombings created a wave of hysteria, later labeled the Great Red Scare, that threatened the very foundations of a free and democratic society. This book chronicles and examines the running battle with terror during the most revolutionary year since 1789.