Only Yesterday. Frederick Lewis Allen.

Only Yesterday
Frederick Lewis Allen
New York: Bantam Books. 1931.

Why read it? Remember the 1920s? You will while reading this book, even though you did not live in the 1920s. Allen vividly re-creates the time that I think marks the beginning of modern society in the United States. You will recognize many of the practices that originated in the 1920s today in the 21st century. The era of the 1920s, from the end of World War I to the collapse of the stock market in 1929, is one of the most colorful decades in U.S. history.

Sample Ideas from the Book. Theme: “Whether the human race gains in wisdom as time goes by is uncertain; the one thing we can be sure of is that its absurdities take changing forms.” Topics: Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic view of a selfless victory in WWI; socialists; Coolidge; the Red Scare; the KKK; radio; tabloids; Sacco and Venzetti; disillusion among the veterans of WWI; preoccupation with sex; the automobile revolution; the social revolution; fashions; smoking; drinking; modernism; frankness in social relations, the theater and books; divorce; unmannerly manners; the revolution in values; Warren Harding; government scandals; the stock market; advertising; the worship of business and science; halitosis; urban tastes; the worship of wealth; mass-produced news and ideas; fads; the Scopes Monkey trial; Lindbergh; liberal intellectuals; Sinclair Lewis; Mencken; American expatriates; organized crime; racketeers; Herbert Hoover vs. Al Smith; consumerism; the stock market crash and the beginning of the Depression.

“Shout as the crowds might for Wilson and justice, they voted for Lloyd George and vengeance.” Wilson was accustomed to get his information from books, not from people; he underestimated the value of human contacts. Wilson, an idealist, pictured the world as he wanted it to be, not as it was. Harding: “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration…not surgery but serenity.” Calvin Coolidge: “The Governor of Massachusetts was an inconspicuous, sour-faced man with a reputation for saying as little as possible” “My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.—ship or shot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping place should be hell.”

The KKK: “…the preposterous vocabulary of its ritual could be made the vehicle for all that infantile love of hocus pocus and mummery, that lust for secret adventure, which survives in the adult whose lot is cast in drab places.” The KKK: “…to maintain forever white supremacy.” Radio: “And every other man you met on the street buttonholed you to tell you how he had sat up until two o’clock the night before, with earphones clamped to his head and had actually heard Havana!” “The tabloids, indeed, were booming—and not without effect…. They presented American life not as a political and economic struggle, but as a three-ring circus of sport, crime and sex, and in varying degrees the other papers followed their lead under the pressure of competition.”

Sacco and Vanzetti: “The division of public opinion on the case was largely a division between those who thought radicals ought to be strung up on general principles and those who thought that the test of a country’s civilization lay in the scrupulousness with which it protected the rights of minorities.” “Sex, it appeared, was the central and pervasive force which moved mankind. Almost every human motive was attributable to it: if you were patriotic or liked the violin, you were in the grip of sex—in a sublimated form. The first requirement of mental health was to have an uninhibited sex life…. And clergymen who preached about the virtue of self-control were reminded by outspoken critics that self-control was out of date and really dangerous.” Automobiles: “Meanwhile a new sort of freedom was being made possible by the enormous increase in the use of the automobile, and particularly of the closed car. The automobile offered an almost universally available means of escaping temporarily from the supervision of parents or chaperones, or from the influence of neighborhood opinion. The automobile had become a ‘house of prostitution on wheels.’ ”

Quote: “Soon the mists of distance would soften the outlines of the nineteen-twenties and men and women, looking over the pages of a book such as this, would smile at the memory—of those charming, crazy days when the radio was a thrilling novelty, and girls wore bobbed hair and knee-length skirts, and a transatlantic flyer became a god overnight and common stocks were about to bring us all to lavish utopia…. They would talk about the good old days.”