Instead of normalcy, 1919 was a year of fragmentation that began with President Wilson triumphant on his European journey and ended with him in America broken and defeated. It was the year of the High Cost of Living (as inflation was then known), the year of the great steel strike, the Seattle general strike, the outlaw railway strikes, coal strikes, textile strikes, maritime strikes, telephone operators’ strikes, the Boston police strike, actors’ strikes, even strikes of rent-payers. At one point almost three million workers were out. Above all it was a year of antitheses. The first year of peace, it saw the United States reject the peace treaty. In Versailles the League of Nations was born, while in Berlin the Spartacist revolt was bloodily suppressed. The AEF paraded under Madison Square’s plaster triumphal arch in New York, and just before Christmas the Spanish-American War transport _Buford_—nicknamed the Soviet Ark—left Ellis Island for Russia with a load of assorted radical deportees that included Emma Goldman. Within a few months of each other the American Legion and the American Communist Party were founded. “Hell will now be for rent,” Billy Sunday announced triumphantly as Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the prohibition amendment; at the same time a crime wave surged from coast to coast. It was a year of violence. When President Wilson landed in Boston on February 23 after his return from the Paris Peace Conference, Secret Service men lined the roofs and all windows were ordered closed as he drove through the streets. The day before, two members of the Groupa Pro Prensa, a Spanish anarchist circle in Philadelphia, were arrested by Secret Service agents and accused of plotting the President’s assassination. On April 28 Mayor Ole Hansen of Seattle, who had been denouncing the Red Menace, received a bomb package in the mail. The following afternoon a maid at the Atlanta home of Senator Thomas Hardwick, former chairman of the Committee on Immigration, opened a package that blew off her hands. Subsequently, thirty-four bomb packages were put in the mails addressed to Attorney General Palmer, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of Labor, the Commissioner of Immigration, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge K. M. Landis (who had recently presided at an anarchist trial), Senator Lee Overman (chairman of a committee investigating Bolshevism), J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and others.