A wonderful book with a POV that is exciting to this day. I cannot throw away because I will reference it again, even though one corner has been chewed away. ( )

A lively and intriguing book. I knew tidbits about the 1920s—flappers, Al Capone, Lindbergh—but this puts it all together in a meaningful narrative. Dramatic, too, especially the full chapter on the Big Bull Market of 1928 and 1929, when we all know what happens on October 29, 1929.

I kept making connections while reading. At one point, he was describing the major changes in literature, and I realized that this had to line up with when photographers broke with pictorialism and went to straight photography. Yep, Ansel Adams left behind pictorialism in 1922, Weston in 1923, and the Group f.64 exhibit in 1931 displayed the work done during the decade.

The acknowledgments are a reminder that the author lived the decade he's writing about. His account of Woodrow Wilson at the end of his life comes from visiting the man in 1923. His source for the founding of Simon & Schuster is William F. Simon. And so on. ( )

Lessons That Go Unheeded

History teaches many lessons but people are bad pupils. Not just people today, but people throughout history have ignored the lessons taught by events preceding them. Consequently, we repeat mistakes over and over again. Those new to Only Yesterday will only have to read a few chapters to see how true these statements are, because the parallels between the 1920s and current times are numerous. Errors made then are still being made today. Read it for yourself to see the truth in this.

Only Yesterday is a contemporaneous history published two years after the 1929 stock market crash, as well as shortly after the Florida Land Bubble bust that began in 1925 (and is argued to be the precipitating cause of the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton in his recent book, Bubble in the Sun). Frederick Lewis Allen worked as a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, later, in 1941, assuming the position of editor-in-chief. Readers will enjoy his breezy and often tongue-in-cheek style, making this anything but a dry trudge.

Allen covers all the highlights of the years 1919 through 1929, among them the incapacitated years of Woodrow Wilson, the scandal-plagued presidency of Warren G. Harding, the Red Scare spearheaded by AG Mitchell Palmer, the complacent and laissez-faire presidency of Calvin Coolidge, the disaster that was Prohibition, the rise of organized crime that features Al Capone, the rising popularity of spectator sports starring Tunney, Ruth, and others, the adoption of more liberal mores, the books and intellectual arguments of the times, and the financials of the day, among them the above mentioned Florida Land Bubble, the plight of American farmers, intermingling of business and religion, margin buying, unregulated mutual trusts, boosterism, and other like factors resulting in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Readers cannot help but be struck by the similarities, especially in government and business, to what we are experiencing today.

To emphasize this, readers will find much that rings true in this brief quote from the Red Scare pages: “There is a certain grim humor in the fact that what Mr. Palmer did during the next three months was done by him as the chief legal officer of an Administration which had come into power to bring about the New Freedom.” Palmer-ism burned hot in America for a time with some pretty terrible consequences, as this passage reveals: “The intolerance of those days took many forms. Almost inevitably it took the form of an ugly flare-up of feeling against the Negro, the Jew, and the Roman Catholic. The notions of group loyalty and of hatred, expanded during war-time and then suddenly denied their intended expression, found a perverted release in the persecution not only of supposed radicals, but also of other elements which to the dominant American group—the white Protestants—seemed alien or ‘un-American.’” Yes, it is as if we are gazing into a mirror and seeing ourselves.

So, here’s a book of its times that speaks as truly of our own, with lessons for us all. Americans should spend a couple of hours with it, and maybe, hopefully, draw some lesson from it.

( )

Lessons That Go Unheeded

History teaches many lessons but people are bad pupils. Not just people today, but people throughout history have ignored the lessons taught by events preceding them. Consequently, we repeat mistakes over and over again. Those new to Only Yesterday will only have to read a few chapters to see how true these statements are, because the parallels between the 1920s and current times are numerous. Errors made then are still being made today. Read it for yourself to see the truth in this.

Only Yesterday is a contemporaneous history published two years after the 1929 stock market crash, as well as shortly after the Florida Land Bubble bust that began in 1925 (and is argued to be the precipitating cause of the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton in his recent book, Bubble in the Sun). Frederick Lewis Allen worked as a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, later, in 1941, assuming the position of editor-in-chief. Readers will enjoy his breezy and often tongue-in-cheek style, making this anything but a dry trudge.

Allen covers all the highlights of the years 1919 through 1929, among them the incapacitated years of Woodrow Wilson, the scandal-plagued presidency of Warren G. Harding, the Red Scare spearheaded by AG Mitchell Palmer, the complacent and laissez-faire presidency of Calvin Coolidge, the disaster that was Prohibition, the rise of organized crime that features Al Capone, the rising popularity of spectator sports starring Tunney, Ruth, and others, the adoption of more liberal mores, the books and intellectual arguments of the times, and the financials of the day, among them the above mentioned Florida Land Bubble, the plight of American farmers, intermingling of business and religion, margin buying, unregulated mutual trusts, boosterism, and other like factors resulting in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Readers cannot help but be struck by the similarities, especially in government and business, to what we are experiencing today.

To emphasize this, readers will find much that rings true in this brief quote from the Red Scare pages: “There is a certain grim humor in the fact that what Mr. Palmer did during the next three months was done by him as the chief legal officer of an Administration which had come into power to bring about the New Freedom.” Palmer-ism burned hot in America for a time with some pretty terrible consequences, as this passage reveals: “The intolerance of those days took many forms. Almost inevitably it took the form of an ugly flare-up of feeling against the Negro, the Jew, and the Roman Catholic. The notions of group loyalty and of hatred, expanded during war-time and then suddenly denied their intended expression, found a perverted release in the persecution not only of supposed radicals, but also of other elements which to the dominant American group—the white Protestants—seemed alien or ‘un-American.’” Yes, it is as if we are gazing into a mirror and seeing ourselves.

So, here’s a book of its times that speaks as truly of our own, with lessons for us all. Americans should spend a couple of hours with it, and maybe, hopefully, draw some lesson from it.

( )

An easy and entertaining read, this book by Fred Allen was written in 1930 to reflect on the 20’s and how life in the US changed during that decade.
Fascinating in its immediacy, this book has only aged and dated a little. It was both reassuring (most of this has happened before) and depressing (have we learned nothing in a hundred years?). A lot of focus is, of course on the enormous financial bubble of the late twenties and its ultimate collapse. What the book lacks in mature, studied analysis is more than compensated for by the feeling that the reader is right there, watching events unfold.
Allen writes engagingly. This book is highly recommended
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