Frederick Lewis AllenReseñas

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.

3/24/22

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
.½

Reminded me of why I was a history major in the first place.

Great US 1920s overview, published 1931 by Frederick Lewis Allen, a Harvard-educated historian and editor of Harper's. Jacket reviews: "marvelously absorbing.... Only Yesterday tells the story of the 1920s from the collapse of Wilson and the New Freedom to the collapse of Wall Street and the new era." -- Stuart Chase, Books. Includes Chapters: Prelude May 1919, Back to Normalcy, The Big Red Scare, America Convalescent, the Revolution in Manners and Morals, Harding and the Scandals, Coolidge Prosperity, the Ballyhoo Years, the Revolt of the Highbrows, Alcohol and Al Capone, Home Sweet Florida, the Big Bull Market, Crash!, Aftermath 1930 - 1931

This is, as the title suggests, the history of the 1920s, chiefly in the USA. My first surprise with the book was that it wasn’t written recently but in 1930 and first published in 1931. This fact cannot be spotted immediately, thus it is a rare kind of the historical text that remains valid.
It is true that the book omits or pays a little attention to some themes, which other more modern books on the period describe, most importantly life of African-Americans and jazz music. At the same time it illuminates in detail such advances as a sexual revolution (not in the 60s), appearance of tabloids and sensational press – I’ve learnt a new word – ballyhoo from it :)
It is astounding how the life drastically changed during the roaring 20s – out of my four decades on this Earth I cannot select one that shifted the world so drastically. Despite the fall of the USSR, rise of the internet and election of non-white as a president of the USA.
It is interesting how open the author speaks about prohibition and Al Capone, I thought that a lot of details were open to general public much later. Other flashlights: the Red Scare of 1920, Lindbergh’s flight, Ford model A, boom and crash of the stock market, Harding and corruption, Wilson and the world peace.
Recommended as a forgotten jewel of the early 1930s to anyone who has the basic knowledge of the period

Many books have been written about the 1920s, but this is the only one I've read that was written in the 1930s. While there is none of the objectivity that comes with time, Allen brings an immediacy and familiarity that he expects his reader to share. Some of it translates to the 21st century, and some does not, but it is a fascinating look at a culture examining itself.

This is an approachable, fascinating overview of the 1920s, covering everything from popular culture to hemlines to the Florida land boom to the stock market crash. The original edition was published in 1931 (and is available as a free legal download through the New York Public Library at archive.org).

Written only at the beginning of the Thirties, this is probably the first book concerning the Twenties ever written, and probably one of the closest to the matter at hand.
Maybe this is why I had great expectation about it. This is certainly not the first social history book about the Twenties I've read, but because it was written so close to that period, I was expecting a different take at it.

Well, regarding the subject matter, it's not very different from other books about the Twenties I- and this is probably a merit to the author that was able to capture the most important aspects of a time he did live - but on the other hand, its flavour is maybe a bit amateurish, the analysis of causes and effects are sometimes questionable... in my opinion. This doesn't really sounds like a study of the period, but more like the remembrance of someone who lived it, and was also quite critical about it. The style is very colloquial and judgmental at times, which is, in my opinion, the weakness of the book as well as its strong point. We don't really get an objective treatment of the Twenties, but we do get the feeling of how people lived this period of incredible, sometimes shocking changes.

The author covers the political life of the country in details, although here too we don't really get a scholarly examination of facts and circumstances, but more an `inside view', the version of someone `who was there' and maybe isn't detached enough to really make an analysis of the matter. Some parts sounded even a bit gossipy to me.
A section in devoted to the changes in the lifestyle of people, with particular regard to young people. And honestly I did expected a bit more from here. The social analysis of the huge change in behaviour and feelings of what was acceptable, with special regard to young people and women in particular, seems a little superficial to me. I was also surprised that so little space was dedicated to Prohibition and the jazz, and I wonder whether this depends on the author failing to see their reverberations on the following decades - which of course can't be blame on him, he just wasn't in the historical position for judging it. On the other hand, space is devoted to things that are never covered in other books on the matter, things like the popularity of the game of Mah Jong and the success Freudian ideas had inside that society. Maybe this is because they weren't after all as significant as the author thought, but they do give an additional facet to the decade. Events that marked the time, like the two important trials - the Scopes and the Sacco-Vanzetti - are swiftly dealt with and never entered in an in-depth social analysis - which is quite a shame.
The last part, which includes a few chapters, covers the building up, the explosion and a brief followed up of the Big Crash. Here the author becomes quite technical, so much so that I had a hard time following his analysis.

On the whole, it's a nice book on the Twenties, certainly worth reading. It does give a sense of the decade from a first-hand source. Just don't content yourself with this if you are interested in the Roaring Twenties.

Summary: A social history of the United States from 1900 to 1950 chronicling the expansion of the middle class, the technological changes that occurred, and the impact of two World Wars and the Depression.

Want to know what life was like for your grandparents or great grandparents, and the changes they saw in their lifetimes? This is a great book for understanding what the U.S. was like during the first half of the Twentieth Century. It was fascinating for me, as someone born two years after this work was first published in 1952. The book ends just before I began and the last chapters describe well the Baby Boom years of the early 1950s, and describe well the changes my own parents saw in their growing up years.

Frederick Lewis Allen was a popular, rather than academic historian who served in a variety of editorial positions including editor-in-chief of Harpers Magazine from 1941 until shortly before his death in February of 1954. He was a contemporary of such popular historians as Allen Nevins, Douglas Southall Freeman, Bernard DeVoto, and Carl Sandburg. The Big Change was his last work, and a National Book Award finalist in 1953. He also wrote histories on the decades of the 1920's (Only Yesterday) and 1930's (Since Yesterday) as well as an economic history of the U.S. from 1890 up to the Depression (The Lords of Creation). All of these works have been re-published recently by Open Road Integrated Media.

While not having read the other works, I sense that this book is a synthesis of all of them that not only summarizes each of the periods covered by the others, but does so with an eye to the transformation of the United States from an economy with a small percent of very rich who lived in extravagant homes and vast disparities of wealth and poverty to a post-World War II economy with a huge expansion of consumer goods, mass communication via radio and TV, and changing cities with the vast migrations from rural to urban setting, including Blacks (called Negroes in Allen's time) from the Jim Crow South.

The first part of the book covers the beginning of this period, describing the technology of the period, including the beginnings of the automobile age, the robber barons and their wealth and a relatively limited government, at least until Teddy Roosevelt. Part two chronicles the changes Roosevelt and the muckrakers brought, the growth of mass production, including the revolution Henry Ford led, the 1920's as the last gasp of the old order, the grinding experience of the Depression, and the acceleration of economic and social change brought on by the war experience. The third part talks gives an economic and social description of the country at the end of the period, describing the growing middle class, the reduction of wealth disparities due to progressive taxes, and the alternative form of luxury spending of the period known as the expense account. He also chronicles the leveling influence of education, mass media, and the wide availability of goods once the exclusive preserve of the wealthy.

He concludes with the apprehensions of the early years of the Cold War and McCarthyism, the concerns about an increasingly large government and large corporations, and the growth of educational and economic opportunities for many and the vibrancy of private organizations and individual initiative in the country. Discussions of racial faultlines anticipate both the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, and the growing affluence anticipates the counter-culture reaction of the later 60's and early 70's.

His style is very readable, even a bit "chatty". The origin of the book was a Harpers article and it has the feel of a well-informed communicator who knows his audience well enough to engage with them directly. Reading this nearly 65 years after it was first published brings home to me how much we have changed since then--the complexities of a post-Soviet, post 9/11 era, the boom in information technology and the interconnectedness of everything, and the social changes of an increasingly diverse nation. This is a transformation I've lived through and makes me wonder who will write "Big Change II." Whoever that may be, Allen's book provides a great jumping-off point.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher via Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

I just reread this after reading this originally in High School. It is a great social history of an important decade in American history

After reading the two classics by Frederick Lewis Allen, ""Only Yesterday" and "Since Yesterday", I was very much looking forward to reading "The Big Change." The original text of "The Big Change" is great and is worth reading just for the comparison to today. It is a great survey of the political and social changes from the first half of the 20th century.

The kindle edition is listed with Guy Foster as "co-author" although he was born after the book was first published. He has added a very opinionated, conspiratorial survey of the history of the Federal Reserve that has little relation to the Frederick Lewis Allen original and contradicts many of the things explained in Only Yesterday about the lead-in to the 1929 crash. It is as though Guy Foster hijacked by Guy Foster. Although many of the statements in the preface are difficult to swallow and are probably wrong, the preface does provide a nice, short survey of the topic. It just has nothing to do with the original book.

Despite the preface, I can very much recommend the Allen book. It is easy to read and very informative. Tthe Kindle edition is also good, although my download did not include the cover shown on the Amazon site.

Interesting history of the 1920's

I read this in high school and thought it was really boring, but then I read "Since Yesterday" a few years ago and liked it. Maybe I'll have to go back and read this one sometime if I ever run out of things to read (like that'll ever happen).

I had to read this book for a class I was taking and was absolutely fascinated with Allen's look inside the 1920s.½

A classic history of the 1920s, written the early 1930s, so without the knowledge of what would come later. Still a great read.

310. Since Yesterday The Nineteen-Thirties in America, by Frederick Lewis Allen (read 24 Feb 1947) I obtained a card permitting me to borrow from the Dubuque Public Library on Feb. 15, 1947, and this is the first book I checked out, since I was so entranced by the predecessor volume, Only Yesterday. I started the book on Feb 15 and said: "a good book." My comment on the day I finished the book, Feb 24: "Good."

253. Only Yesterday An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, by Frederick Lewis Allen (read 21 May 1946) I started reading this book on May 19, 1946. The next day I said: "Reading in Only Yesterday. Golly, what queer people lived in the 1920's." I made no further comment on the book but I well remember that I was utterly fascinated by the account of the 1920's, of which I had no memory whatsoever since I was not born till 1928.

Allen looks at the 1920s in a way that would be impossible today. He wrote the book in 1931, while the nation was in the early throes of the Great Depression. More recent accounts look at the 'twenties with the realization of the length and depth of the depression.

Allen covers it all--from flappers to prohibition, from gangsters to fundamentalists, from the red scare to the mania over Florida property, and from Babe Ruth to Charles Lindbergh. He is quite hard on the Republican presidents of the decade, blaming them for allowing the economy to rev too fast and ultimately collapse. He even delves into the belief that Harding's death was not from natural causes. What emerges in the pages of his book is a nation full of confidence (perhaps even hubris) that nothing bad could ever happen. If something bad did happen, it would only be temporary. He even notes that Herbert Hoover claimed that the US had banished poverty.

This is a well-written social history of the US during the roaring 'twenties, speeding unknowingly to the cliff that was the 1930s.

In the early thirties Allen wrote Only Yesterday, about America in the twenties, fascinating because it described the causes and effects of 1929 crash just after it had happened. Since Yesterday, Allen's history of the thirties, is just as interesting. The Big Change also starts off well, with a compassionate description of the lives of the citizens of the early 1900s. The poor lived in cramped, insanitary conditions, close to starvation. Life expectancies were less than fifty years.

Allen's thesis is that mass production brought prosperity, education and democracy to the working classes, dragging them out of poverty. This is, he says "THE American story of the first half of the twentieth century." The statistics Allen presents certainly seem to support the claim that Americans in the fifties were far better off than they had ever been before.

Th problem is that Allen is too concenrned with countering the criticisms of unnamed "European" critics. When the critics claim, for example, that the majority of African-Americans (negroes in this book) still live in poverty, in fear of lynchings, Allen counters that lynchings are fewer, and the people on the bottom of the economic heap are better off then they were in 1910. The Europeans just do not understand American society. This boosterism reduces the credibility of the book, which is unfortunate because the first two thirds are well worth reading. The ending is oddly abrupt, as though Allen suddenly ran out of time.

The Big Change is available free on Project Gutenberg Australia, as are the previous two books.½

I found this to be one of the most fascinating history books I have ever read. The book was originally written in 1931, so the information and comments in the book were untainted by later events. Allen's writing style is casual, informative, and peppered with hilarious asides that kept me engaged through the whole book. My very favorite part was a quotation from John F. Carter in the September 1920 issue of Atlantic Monthly: "The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. 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." Sound familiar? I read this simultaneously with a book about 1890-1918, and a book about the stock market in the 2000s, and realized that it is true: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I bought this book because it was referred to favorably in two other books I've read: The Great Crash 1929 and Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. It is an almost contemporaneous history of the US in the 1920s, in that it was written in 1931, and it is fascinating for several reasons. First, despite it being almost "instant history," the author has a great deal of perspective on the decade, including the Teapot Dome scandal (first time I ever understood it), the revolution in "morals," Prohibition, selling swampland in Florida, and the Scopes trial, among other topics. Even more interestingly, it is clear that the roots of what we consider modern US culture today lie in the 20s, when the dramatic growth in automobile ownership and the development of radio began the switch to suburban living and mass national communication, fads, etc. On top of all this, the author has a lively style and a sense of humor.