market altogether and panic reached its heights: With a scream of financial agony the Roaring Twenties were over.
Today our image of the tumultuous Twenties is apt to be colored by nostalgia, distorted by TV and movies, or simply dimmed by ignorance. To us it was the heyday of our parents or grandparents’ generation. In 1931, on the other hand, when Frederick Lewis Allen wrote his “informal history” of the decade, the Twenties were still “only yesterday.”
At the end of World War I, the country was exhausted. It craved what the next president, Warren Harding, would call “normalcy.” America wanted to keep out foreigners and kick out Reds; both were European, alien, and dangerous. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone to play, and to make money. The Klu Klux Klan was resurgent, its membership reaching 4.5 million by 1924. Bolsheviks and those suspected of sympathizing with themwere rounded up on a scale worthy of the McCarthy era three decades later.
Meanwhile, hemlines rose. Women stopped hiding behind Victorian bustles. Sex and Freud became the stuff of dinner party conversation. Automobiles, and automobile culture, spread across the land. Prohibition brought speakeasies, and hip flasks, and Al Capone’s beer trucks roaring across Chicago—and Al Capone’s thugs shooting up anyone who tried to get in the way.
And everywhere—except on the depressed farms—big bucks were being made. By Florida real estate developers. By publicists for the waves of stunt fliers who followed in the wake of Lindbergh’s heroic solo Atlantic crossing. And by everyone—everyone, it seemed—on the Stock Exchange, where it was buy, buy, buy, and still the chattering ticker tape in your local broker’s office told the tale of fortunes to be made, always and forever, world without end.
Until finally the great, overstretched balloon of American prosperity burst.
The stock market collapsed. Consumers stopped buying. Factories stopped producing. Workers stopped working. The ballyhoo days were over. The world became a more serious place.
The same financiers who in the Twenties had offered their pronouncements as gods, had no answers for the unemployed of the Thirties. The need, Allen writes with prescience, was for someone wise enough to know what to do and strong enough to get the chance to do it. The name of Franklin D. Roosevelt appears nowhere, not even parenthetically, in Allen’s account.
Everything had happened so fast. The face of America transformed overnight. How could Allen make sense of it, from a distance in time offering such meager perspective, while the country was still immersed in a terrible Depression whose end was not yet in sight? That he did, somehow, is Only Yesterday’s triumph.
It would be like writing, in 1971, a history of the 1960s—surely no one would take the trouble to write one of the 1970s—with the national mind still reeling from hippies and acid trips and assassinations and Black power andthe insanity of Vietnam. No one has done it, even now, not the way Allen did with the Twenties. This is one measure of his achievement.
Another is that while Only Yesterday mostly remains as fresh and immediate as when it was written, its interpretations have stood the test of more than half a century. In his introduction to a 1957 edition of the book, one critic, Roger Butterfield, wrote, reasonably enough: “It is time to say what has long been apparent—that this is an American classic.”
Microbe Hunters
____________
By Paul de Kruif
First published in 1926
Among the pioneers of medical research Paul de Kruif portrays in Microbe Hunters , none are soulless technicians, grey accountants of dreary fact, or objective seekers after truth unmoved by visions of glory; de Kruif thus makes short work of some of the more common stereotypes about scientists.
But not all—not, for example, that of the Mad Scientist: Most of the author’s microbe hunters are, in fact, just a bit daft.
Not
Today our image of the tumultuous Twenties is apt to be colored by nostalgia, distorted by TV and movies, or simply dimmed by ignorance. To us it was the heyday of our parents or grandparents’ generation. In 1931, on the other hand, when Frederick Lewis Allen wrote his “informal history” of the decade, the Twenties were still “only yesterday.”
At the end of World War I, the country was exhausted. It craved what the next president, Warren Harding, would call “normalcy.” America wanted to keep out foreigners and kick out Reds; both were European, alien, and dangerous. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone to play, and to make money. The Klu Klux Klan was resurgent, its membership reaching 4.5 million by 1924. Bolsheviks and those suspected of sympathizing with themwere rounded up on a scale worthy of the McCarthy era three decades later.
Meanwhile, hemlines rose. Women stopped hiding behind Victorian bustles. Sex and Freud became the stuff of dinner party conversation. Automobiles, and automobile culture, spread across the land. Prohibition brought speakeasies, and hip flasks, and Al Capone’s beer trucks roaring across Chicago—and Al Capone’s thugs shooting up anyone who tried to get in the way.
And everywhere—except on the depressed farms—big bucks were being made. By Florida real estate developers. By publicists for the waves of stunt fliers who followed in the wake of Lindbergh’s heroic solo Atlantic crossing. And by everyone—everyone, it seemed—on the Stock Exchange, where it was buy, buy, buy, and still the chattering ticker tape in your local broker’s office told the tale of fortunes to be made, always and forever, world without end.
Until finally the great, overstretched balloon of American prosperity burst.
The stock market collapsed. Consumers stopped buying. Factories stopped producing. Workers stopped working. The ballyhoo days were over. The world became a more serious place.
The same financiers who in the Twenties had offered their pronouncements as gods, had no answers for the unemployed of the Thirties. The need, Allen writes with prescience, was for someone wise enough to know what to do and strong enough to get the chance to do it. The name of Franklin D. Roosevelt appears nowhere, not even parenthetically, in Allen’s account.
Everything had happened so fast. The face of America transformed overnight. How could Allen make sense of it, from a distance in time offering such meager perspective, while the country was still immersed in a terrible Depression whose end was not yet in sight? That he did, somehow, is Only Yesterday’s triumph.
It would be like writing, in 1971, a history of the 1960s—surely no one would take the trouble to write one of the 1970s—with the national mind still reeling from hippies and acid trips and assassinations and Black power andthe insanity of Vietnam. No one has done it, even now, not the way Allen did with the Twenties. This is one measure of his achievement.
Another is that while Only Yesterday mostly remains as fresh and immediate as when it was written, its interpretations have stood the test of more than half a century. In his introduction to a 1957 edition of the book, one critic, Roger Butterfield, wrote, reasonably enough: “It is time to say what has long been apparent—that this is an American classic.”
Microbe Hunters
____________
By Paul de Kruif
First published in 1926
Among the pioneers of medical research Paul de Kruif portrays in Microbe Hunters , none are soulless technicians, grey accountants of dreary fact, or objective seekers after truth unmoved by visions of glory; de Kruif thus makes short work of some of the more common stereotypes about scientists.
But not all—not, for example, that of the Mad Scientist: Most of the author’s microbe hunters are, in fact, just a bit daft.
Not
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