"Only Yesterday" by Frederick Allen

By Frederick Allen

Author: Frederick Allen

Rating: ★★★

This book is also available freely via Project Gutenberg Australia.

One of the best parts of living in New York is our custom of leaving finished books out on stoops or leaned against apartment buildings for others to pick up.1 I was walking back with my cart from Trader Joe’s a few weeks ago when I found Only Yesterday and picked it up. This book, written in the early 1930’s, was a chance, on the morning after the party, to answer “What the hell just happened?” for the decade that had just gone past.

As a history, it’s a lot more jaunty and fun than you might expect, and Lewis has dozens of delightful turns of phrase that really put the screws to the malefactors and high-minded boobery of the era: Prohibition, Teapot Dome, and religious fundamentalists meddling with science in schools, et al.

Noteworthy Chapter: “Back to Normalcy”

The book starts out stumbling and shell-shocked from the smoke of the Great War describing how the US went from being internationally-oriented in war to being isolation- and self-enrichment-oriented in peace. The mechanics of this change are recounted by tracking how Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded ideals for bringing Democracy and brotherhood to the world via the League of Nations got bogged down, laden with weight, and drowned within the swamps of DC as part of an exercise of Senatorial power helmed by Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson, the internationalist, sought to establish a world order that would avoid world-historical slaughters in the future while the nativist, America-first voice counseled a return to America-first-ism and advocated leaving the complexities of international order “to someone else.”

While Americans might not prefer to be yoked into the “entangling alliances” of Europe, to be irrelevant and to leave the democracy, economic stability, and supply chains vulnerable to the wolves that run Mafia- or fascist-states is decidedly worse as hindsight would show all-too-soon. While Wilson’s dream of The League of Nations has, in all my education, been portrayed as woefully out-of-touch or eye-rollingly utopianist, reading this on the eve of and through the first several days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I had to wonder whether facing up to the bureaucratic difficulty then might not have been desirable as we live in a now peppered by the deeds of Hitler, Tito, Ceaușescu, and now Putin.

Noteworthy Chapter: The Big Red Scare

Fear of participation abroad had its domestic partner, by Allen’s telling, in the whipped-up, unfounded fear of Bolshevik-sympathetic revolutionaries, anarchists, and dangerous ethnicities like Germans, Jews, and Italians. Reading this passage, I could basically recognize the formula for programming any given evening Fox’s Infotainment channel:

  1. Invent a bogeyman (“Teachers are making our kids trans!”)
  2. Play up its menace (“The liberal agenda is using school to make our kids trans!”)
  3. Froth rage and identity (“Isn’t loving a trans kid really child abuse? Are you for child abuse?”)
  4. Accuse the “other side” for having done it first and that your immoderate counter-response was really their fault (“Why, we wouldn’t have to enact laws like this if you hadn’t snuck your social justice woke-ism in through the educational establishment that you control!”)
  5. Play the victim as often as possible. Meanwhile, sell ad space
  6. And repeat

Said Allen:

They were listening to ugly rumors of a huge radical conspiracy against the government and institutions of the United States. They had their ears cocked for the detonation of bombs and the tramp of Bolshevist armies. They seriously thought–or at least millions of them did, millions of otherwise reasonable citizens–that a Red revolution might begin in the United States the next month or next week,

Multi-Chapter Arc: The Revolution in Morals / Pop Culture

Far from a political book, the author tries to also give a taste for how life was lived in popular culture. Music:

The jazz-band plays “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” the tune which Harry Carroll wrote in wartime after Harrison Fisher persuaded him that Chopin’s “Fantasie Impromptu” had the makings of a good ragtime tune. It plays, too, “Smiles” and “Dardanella” and “Hindustan” and “Japanese Sandman” and “I Love You Sunday,” and that other song which is to give the Post-war Decade one of its most persistent and wearisome slang phrases, “I’ll Say She Does.”

and “pictures:”

After dinner the company may possibly go to the movies to see Charlie Chaplin in “Shoulder Arms” or Douglas Fairbanks in “The Knickerbocker Buckaroo” or Mary Pickford in “Daddy Long Legs,” or Theda Bara, or Pearl White, or Griffith’s much touted and much wept-at “Broken Blossoms.” Or they may play auction bridge (not contract, of course). Mah Jong, which a few years hence will be almost obligatory, is still over the horizon. They may discuss such best sellers of the day as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons

Multiple chapters describe the changes in daily life:

  • ever-more-urban
  • ever-less-Victorian
  • ever-more fascinated by feats of derring-do like Lindbergh
  • ever-more exposed to (smoking! rolled-stocking!) women with ideas outside of the home
  • ever-less-committed to church
  • ever-more-committed to getting a drink
  • ever-more willfully ignorant to the fact that the drinking was making for an ever-more violent gangster unto Alphonse Capone.

The most interesting cultural movement described was described in the chapter Revenge of the Highbrows which contextualizes a certain backlash in the mid-to-late 1920’s against the parochial attitudes of rural America that had somehow been taken as default.

  • If pre-war, rural-oriented America had been small towns with dusty, car-less Main Street, the “Highbrows” with a few years of distance from the internationalizing-while-horrific years of the Great War asked, “Well why shouldn’t it be a thrumming metropolis?”
  • If ante-bellum espoused loveless marriages for kids after chaste decades, post-war ethos asked “Well why shouldn’t some physical contact let people know whether they’re compatible first?”
  • If ante-bellum espoused that the Bible had all the answers and should be used as the basis of education, post-war ethos asked “Well why shouldn’t modern science and mathematics that’s proven its efficiency in war and industrialization replace the contradictions and nonsense of yesterday?“2

I had never really noticed this cultural pivot called out in American histories, but reading it from someone so close to it, suggests that there was a hole in my narrative. These “Highbrows” had endured a Great War, a sucker-public getting roped into over-hyped bogeyman panics, the moral turpitude of Warren G. Harding and 19th century politics, preachers and do-gooders taking their alcohol away, and all of it resulting in unneeded bloodshed or being the basis for a parade of hypocrisy. They were done with bowing to empty tradition and were done with giving it lip service out of politeness. Apparently, Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Babbitt were impactful in calling out contradiction and parochialism (I’ve read neither).

The Great Bull Market

In the closing chapter, after years of love of spectacle, selfish retreat from the international stage, and advertised promise of better living through wealth, America finds a new fascination in the late 1920’s that will open up new horizons and a decade of misery: the Great Bull Market. Allen presents data on the level of asset price growth and shows just how seductive the fear of missing out must have been. Just about the time demand couldn’t reach higher, banks found new ways to get more players in the game. As Allen says:

The lesson was plain: the public simply would not be shaken out of the market by anything short of a major disaster.,

…And then it comes in the Great Crash. The unresolved tensions of income inequality, prideful domestic know-nothingism, and rank envy prove to be a fertile soil in which those ignored seeds of fascism find root and come to define the next decade and beyond.

Notes

{
  "title": "Only Yesterday",
  "author": "Frederick Lewis Allen",
  "highlightCount": 34,
  "noteCount": 34,
  "annotations": [
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "This is the patent age of new inventions / For killing bodies, and for saving souls, / All propagated with the best intentions",
      "location": 1
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Further research will undoubtedly disclose errors and deficiencies in the book, and the passage of time will reveal the shortsightedness of many of my judgments and interpretations. A contemporary history is bound to be anything but definitive.",
      "location":  "vi"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Henry Cabot Lodge was a gentleman, a scholar, and an elegant and persuasive figure in the United States Senate. As he strolled down the aisle of the Senate Chamber-slender, graceful, gray-haired, gray-bearded, the embodiment of all that was patrician- he caught and held the eye as might William Gillette on a crowded stage.",
      "location":  "24"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "They were listening to something else. They were listening to ugly rumors of a huge radical conspiracy against the government and institutions of the United States. They had their ears cocked for the detonation of bombs and the tramp of Bolshevist armies. They seriously thought--or at least millions of them did, millions of otherwise reasonable citizens--that a Red revolution might begin in the United States the next month or next week, and they were less concerned with making the world safe for democracy than with making America safe for themselves.  Those were the days when column after column of the front pages of the newspapers shouted the news of strikes and anti-Bolshevist riots; when radicals shot down Armistice Day paraders in the streets of Centralia, Washington, and in revenge the patriotic citizenry took out of the jail a member of the I. W. W.--a white American, be it noted--and lynched him by tying a rope around his neck and throwing him off a bridge; when properly elected members of the Assembly of New York State were expelled (and their constituents thereby disfranchised) simply because they had been elected as members of the venerable Socialist Party; when a jury in Indiana took two minutes to acquit a man for shooting and killing an alien because he had shouted, \"To hell with the United States\"; and when the Vice-President of the nation cited as a dangerous manifestation of radicalism in the women's colleges the fact that the girl debaters of Radcliffe had upheld the affirmative in an intercollegiate debate on the subject: \"Resolved, that the recognition of labor unions by employers is essential to successful collective bargaining.\" It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict--in a very literal sense, a reign of terror.",
      "location":   "38-39"
    },
  {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "This latter group of communists and anarchists constituted, very narrow minority of the radical movement--absurdly narrow when we consider all the to-do that was made about them. Late in 1919 Professor Gordon S. Watkins of the University of Illinois, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, set the membership of the Socialist party at 39,000, of the Communist Labor party at from 10,000 to 30,000, and of the Communist party at from 30,000 to 60,000. In other words, according to this estimate, the Communists could muster at the most hardly more than one-tenth of one per cent of the adult population d the country; and the three parties together--the majority of whose members were probably content to work for their ends by lawful means--brought the proportion to hardly more than two-tenths of one per cent, a rather slender nucleus, it would seem, for a revolutionary mass movement.",
      "location":  "40-41"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "A number of forces were working together and interacting upon one another to make this revolution inevitable.  First of all was the state of mind brought about by the war and its conclusion. A whole generation had been infected by the eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit which accompanied the departure of the soldiers to the training camps and the fighting front. There had been an epidemic not only of abrupt war marriages, but of less conventional liaisons. In France, two million men had found themselves very close to filth and annihilation and very far from the American moral code and its defenders; prostitution had followed the flag and willing mademoiselles from Armentières had been plentiful; American girls sent over as nurses and war workers had come under the influence of continental manners and standards without being subject to the rigid protections thrown about their continental sisters of the respectable classes; and there had been a very widespread and very natural breakdown of traditional restraints and reticences and taboos. It was impossible for this generation to return unchanged when the ordeal was over. Some of them had acquired under the pressure of war-time conditions a new code which seemed to them quite defensible; millions of them had been provided with an emotional stimulant from which it was not easy to taper off. Their torn nerves craved the anodynes of speed, excitement, and passion. They found themselves expected to settle down into the humdrum routine of American life as if nothing had happened, to accept the moral dicta of elders who seemed to them still to be living in a Pollyanna land of rosy ideals which the war had killed for them. They couldn't do it, and they very disrespectfully said so.  \"The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us,\" wrote one of them (John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1920), expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries. \"They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties.\"",
      "location": "78-79"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "For city-dwellers the home was steadily becoming less of a shrine, more of a dormitory--a place of casual shelter where one stopped overnight on the way from the restaurant and the movie theater to the office.",
      "location":  "81"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "The principal remaining forces which accelerated the revolution in manners and morals were all 100 per cent American. They were prohibition, the automobile, the confession and sex magazines, and the movies.",
      "location":  "83"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Middletown [a book].",
      "location":  "83"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Whether prostitution increased or decreased during the decade is likewise uncertain; but certain it is that the prostitute was faced for the first time with an amateur competition of formidable proportions.",
      "location":  "95"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Newspaper-readers echoed these amiable sentiments. Substantial businessmen solemnly informed one another that mistakes might have been made but that it was unpatriotic to condemn them and thus to \"cast discredit on the Government,\" and that those who insisted on probing them to the bottom were \"nothing better than Bolsheviki.\" One of the leading super-patriots of the land, Fred R. Marvin of the Key Men of America, said the whole oil scandal was the result of \"a gigantic international conspiracy . . .of the internationalists, or shall we call them socialists and communists?\"",
      "location":  "128-129"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "The American Tobacco Company's slogan of \"Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.\" Trade journals were quoted by the Reader's Digest as reporting the efforts of the furniture manufacturers to make the people \"furniture conscious\" and of the clothing manufacturers to make them \"tuxedo conscious.\" The salesman must have the ardor of a zealot, must force his way into people's houses by hook or by crook, must let nothing stand between him and the consummation of his sale. As executives put it, \"You can't be an order-taker any longer--you've got to be a salesman.\" The public, generally speaking, could be relied upon to regard with complacence the most flagrant assaults upon its credulity by the advertiser and…forgive every sin committed in the holy name of business.",
      "location":  "140-141"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "The possession of millions was a sign of success, and success was worshipped the country over.",
      "location":  "146"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "So frequent was the use of the Bible to point the lessons of business and of business to point the lessons of the Bible that it was sometimes difficult to determine which was supposed to gain the most from the association.",
      "location":  "148"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "If church attendance declined, it was perhaps because, as Walter Lippmann put it, people were not so certain that they were going to meet God when they went to church. If the minister's prestige declined, it was in many cases because he had lost his one-time conviction that he had a definite and authoritative mission. The Reverend Charles Stelzle, a shrewd observer of religious conditions, spoke bluntly in an article in the World's Work: the church, he said, was declining largely because \"those who are identified with it do not actually believe in it.\"",
      "location": "163-164"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "It was a savage encounter, and a tragic one for the ex-Secretary of State [Wm. Jennings Bryan]. He was defending what he held most dear. He was making--though he did not know it--his last appearance before the great American public which had once done him honor (he died scarcely a week later). And he was being covered with humiliation. The sort of religious faith which he represented could not take the witness stand and face reason as a prosecutor.",
      "location":   "171"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "And when the reports of Lindbergh's first few days in Paris showed that he was behaving with charming modesty and courtesy, millions of his countrymen took him to their hearts as they had taken no other human being in living memory.",
      "location":  "181"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Why, then, this idolization of Lindbergh?  The explanation is simple. A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature which it had allowed itself to entertain!",
      "location":  "183"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "For years the American people had been spiritually starved. They had seen their early ideals and illusions and hopes one by one worn away by the corrosive influence of events and ideas--by the disappointing aftermath of the war, by scientific doctrines and psychological theories which undermined their religion and ridiculed their sentimental notions, by the spectacle of graft in politics and crime on the city streets, and finally by their recent newspaper diet of smut and murder. Romance, chivalry and self-dedication had been debunked; the heroes of history had been shown to have feet of clay, and the saints of history had been revealed as people with queer complexes.",
      "location":  "183"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Ballyhoo had given the public contemporary heroes to bow down before--but these contemporary heroes, with their fat profits from moving-picture contracts and ghost-written syndicated articles, were not wholly convincing. Something that people needed, if they were to live at peace with themselves and with the world, was missing from their lives. And all at once Lindbergh provided it. Romance, chivalry, self-dedication--here they were, embodied in a modern Galahad for a generation which had forsworn Galahads. Lindbergh did not accept the moving-picture offers that came his way, he did not sell testimonials, did not boast, did not get himself involved in scandal, conducted himself with unerring taste--and was handsome and brave withal. The machinery of ballyhoo was ready and waiting to lift him up where every eye could see him. Is it any wonder that the public's reception of him took on the aspects of a vast religious revival?",
      "location":  "183"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "For Lindbergh was a god.",
      "location":  "184"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Pretty good, one reflects, for a stunt flyer. But also, one must add, pretty good for the American people. They had shown that they had better taste in heroes than anyone would have dared to predict during the years which immediately preceded the 20th of May, 1927.",
      "location":  "184"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "For the average American now identified his own interests with those of business. But outside of business he thought he knew how people ought to behave, and he would stand for no nonsense.",
      "location":  "189"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "The bright young college graduate who in 1915 would have risked disinheritance to march in a Socialist parade yawned at Socialism in 1925, called it old stuff, and cared not at all whether the employees of the Steel Corporation were underpaid or overpaid. Fashions had changed: now the young insurgent enraged his father by arguing against monogamy and God.",
      "location":  "189"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "They were never an organized group, these embattled highbrows. They differed vehemently among themselves, and even if they had agreed, the idea of organizing would have been repugnant to them as individualists. They were widely dispersed; New York was their chief rallying-point, but groups of them were to be found in all the other urban centers. They consisted mostly of artists and writers, professional people, the intellectually restless element in the college towns, and such members of the college-educated business class as could digest more complicated literature than was to be found in the Saturday Evening Post and McCall's Magazine; and they were followed by an ill-assorted mob of faddists who were ready to take up with the latest idea. They may be roughly and inclusively defined as the men and women who had heard of James Joyce, Proust, Cézanne, Jung, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Petronius, Eugene O'Neill, and Eddington; who looked down on the movies but revered Charlie Chaplin as a great artist, could talk about relativity even if they could not understand it, knew a few of the leading complexes by name, collected Early American furniture, had ideas about progressive education, and doubted the divinity of Henry Ford and Calvin Coolidge. Few in numbers though they were, they were highly vocal, and their influence not merely dominated American literature but filtered down to affect by slow degrees the thought of the entire country.",
      "location":  "190"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "...would hardly have gathered imposing force as soon as it did had Sinclair Lewis not brought out Main Street in October, 1920, and Babbitt some two years later. The effect of these two books was overwhelming. In two volumes of merciless literary photography and searing satire, Lewis revealed the ugliness of the American small town, the cultural poverty of its life, the tyranny of its mass prejudices, and the blatant vulgarity and insularity of the booster. There were other things which he failed to reveal--such as the friendly sentiment and easy generosity of the Gopher Prairies and Zeniths of America--but his books were all the more widely devoured for their very one-sidedness. By the end of 1922 the sale of Main Street had reached 390,000 copies. The intellectuals had only to read Lewis's books to realize that the qualities in American life which they most despised and feared were precisely the ones which he put under the microscope for cold-blooded examination. It was George F. Babbitt who was the arch enemy of the enlightened, and it was the Main Street state of mind which stood in the way of American civilization.",
      "location":  "191"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "The magazine lustily championed writers such as Dreiser, Cabell, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis, who defied the polite traditions represented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters;",
      "location":  "192"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "The Mercury made an immediate hit/it was new, starling, and delightfully destructive./It crystallized the misgivings of thousands. Soon its green cover was clasped under the arms of the young iconoclasts of a score of college campuses. Staid small-town executives, happening upon it, were shocked and bewildered; this man Mencken, they decided, must be a debauched and shameless monster if not a latter-day emissary of the devil.",
      "location":  "192"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "He pelted his enemies with words and phrases like mountebank, charlatan, swindler, numskull, swine, witch-burner, homo boobiens, and imbecile; he said of sentimentalists that they squirted rosewater about, of Bryan that \"he was born with a roaring voice and it had a trick of inflaming half-wits,\" of books which he disliked that they were garbage; he referred to the guileless farmers of Tennessee as \"gaping primates\" and \"the anthropoid rabble.\" On occasion--as in his scholarly book on The American Language--Mencken could write measured and precise English, but when his blood was up, his weapons were gross exaggeration and gross metaphors.",
      "location":   "193"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "[if] you had informed the average American citizen that prohibition was destined to furnish the most violently explosive public issue of the nineteen-twenties, he would probably have told you that you were crazy.",
      "location":   "204"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "It turned public opinion against everything German--and many of the big brewers and distillers were of German origin.",
      "location":  "206"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Illicit distilling could be undertaken almost anywhere, even in the householder's own cellar; a commercial still could be set up for five hundred dollars which would produce fifty or a hundred highly remunerative gallons a day, and a one-gallon portable still could be bought for only six or seven dollars.",
      "location":  "207"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "Anybody who believed that men employable at thirty-five or forty or fifty dollars a week would surely have the expert technical knowledge and the diligence to supervise successfully the complicated chemical operations of industrial-alcohol plants or to outwit the craftiest devices of smugglers and bootleggers, and that they would surely have the force of character to resist corruption by men whose pockets were bulging with money, would be ready to believe also in Santa Claus, perpetual motion, and pixies.",
      "location":  "208"
    },
    {
      "type": "Highlight",
      "highlight": "The lesson was plain: the public simply would not be shaken out of the market by anything short of a major disaster.",
      "location":  "256"
    }
  ]
}

Footnotes

  1. I had originally supposed that this custom was due to our relatively small living footprints. Holding on to extensive collections of paper was a space luxury many of us simply couldn’t bear. Being good liberals, naturally, we’d want to cut our books’ eco-footprint damage and Promote Knowledge™ by facilitating dissemination of the knowledge. But in the years that I’ve lived here though, and having seen a few of our building neighbors make that final decision to leave the city for the next realm, I’ve come to realize that some of these cast off books were beloved volumes that the next-of-kin simply couldn’t be bothered to schlep, trash, donate, or preserve. Thus resigned, the volumes are a final in memoriam donation along New York’s footways. I’m put in mind of the tombstones that lined the viae outside of Rome.
  2. The Scopes “Monkey Trial” is given some pages of coverage and describes H.L. Mencken, arch saint of the HIghbrows, delivering the gleeful commentary of Clarence Darrow’s intellectual pantsing of arch-fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan.