Vintage Reading by Robert Kanigel

1832, and soon set to work on what would be his enduring classic, Democracy in America , published in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840. To this day no book about the American national character is so often, and so profitably, quoted.
    America is something new, says Toqueville—the most advanced expression of a universal and irresistible human urge to break down the old feudalism and all its rigid class distinctions. “I saw in America more than America,” he tells his readers in an introduction. “It was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we [in Europe] have to fear or hope.”
    He is not American democracy’s unalloyed admirer. There is, first of all, the maddening mediocrity that seems to flourish on our shores. And a lowering of the level of intellectual debate to that below what a Parisian could expect in any sidewalk cafe. And a “tyranny of the majority” that leaves littleroom for originality of either thought or opinion.
    But overshadowing these defects are, among other things, American respect for laws; American democracy’s tendency toward slow, peaceful change; the difficulty faced by evil-doers in controlling enough levers of power to do harm; and a narrowing of extremes of wealth.
    Though disquisitions on lawmaking and other such textbook staples occupy their share of it, Democracy in America will interest not only students of history and government; virtually every aspect of the American national character swings into focus under Tocqueville’s microscope, from race relations, to the family, to religion, to manners, to the arts.
    Occasionally, as when he sees Americans as little more than transplanted Englishmen (without benefit of immigrant cross-fertilization), or when he pictures Americans as unlikely to make major advances in theoretical science, he is revealed as merely human. For an instant, the reader may actually feel miffed, only to abruptly realize he’s so disappointed Tocqueville is wrong only because Tocqueville is right so astoundingly.
    Tocqueville describes Americans as people whose lives are “so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that little time remains for them for thought.”
    He says of democratic institutions that they “awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never satisfy.” He could be describing Edison as well as the Apollo Moon Project when he says that “in America, the purely practical side of science is cultivated admirably... The Americans always display a clear, free, original and creative turn of mind.”
    Tocqueville even anticipates mass production. In a democracy, the people’s desire for goods “outrun[s] their means and [they] will gladly agree to put up with an imperfect substitute rather than do without the object of their desire altogether...” One solution “is to find better, quicker, more skillful ways of making it. The second is to make a great number of objects which are more or less the same but not so good... “
    It would be the best part of a century before the first Model T came rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line.

Only Yesterday
    An Informal History of the 1920s
    ____________
    By Frederick Lewis Allen
First published in 1931
    On October. 24, 1929, in the offices of J. P. Morgan & Company, reporters eagerly awaited the words of Thomas W. Lamont, a representative of the mighty financial house. Lamont looked grave. “There has been,” he said, “a little distress selling on the Stock Exchange.”
    October 24 was the first panicky selling day of the Crash of ‘29. In the first two hours of trading, United States Steel dropped 12 dollars a share. Montgomery Ward plummeted from 83 to 50. Dozens of stocks lost all they had gained in the preceding months of the bull market.
    That was Thursday. Monday brought even more precipitous declines. Then came Black Tuesday, when the bottom dropped out of the