Strange Interlude
Only Yesterday. By Frederick Lewis Allen. (Harcer's. 12s. Bd.) THE average American exists. ' He is more real than (say) the average Englishman or the average Swiss ; and there are many more of him, both actually and in relation to the total of his compatriots. It is therefore important to study him. It is also possible to study him. As little conscious, as little resentful of publicity as a fish in an aquarium, he spends a great deal of his life in full view of the curious ; through the thick but not invariably distorting glass of statistics we can get a sound general idea of what he is up to most of the time. His health, his vanity, and his religion : his life, his loves, and his death : all his convictions, and even some of his doubts—to these and to many other factors in his development there are clues to be fished out of a sea of statistics covering everything in America from the mileage of lipstick annually consumed to the number of bombs annually exploded.
Mr. Allen uses his figures sparingly, but with effect. In telling the story " of what may in future be considered a dis- tinct era in American history : the eleven years between the end of the War with Germany (November 11th, 1918) and the stock-market panic which culminated on November lath, 1929," he has concentrated largely on charting " the changing state of the public mind," by reference to the "sometimes trivial happenings with which it was preoccupied." To the political and economic forces at work behind the scenes, and to the personalities who guided them, Mr. Allen gives due weight but less attention. The dominant figure on his canvas is i'homme moyen set:suet, the average American, and he stands out in amazingly just perspective against a garish, composite background of headlines, fashion-plates, dust-covers, adver- tisements, tunes, catchwords, and crazes. Small beer to the orthodox historian : but it once had the power to intoxicate, and truth in not the least important of her guises is to be found at the bottom of that tankard.
1918-1929 was an era of elaboration rather than of change. Things got bigger and better. Sometimes, of course, there were quite new things ; but creation, like improvement, was conditioned by the soaring standards of material prosperity. The fact that the number of private cars on the road nearly quadrupled in ten years is a fair indication of the extent and the nature of national development. But in the shadow of the great god Prdsperity innumerable lesser idols were set up. In 1918 there was Victory. On the day that Armageddon ended " 800 Barnard College girls snake-danced on Morningside Heights in New York," 15.5 tons of ticker-tape were thrown out of office windows, a girl sang the doxology before hushed crowds in Times Square, and the Kaiser was burnt in effigy all over the place. But the average American cold-shouldered the peacemakers at Versailles, being hag-ridden with his own domestic fears which foreshadowed, with a very small degree of justification, a Bolshevist Revolution in the United States. Riots and infernal machines and lynchings were the " front page stuff " of 1919. Hysteria was nourished on rumours and stimulated by Jingoism. Intolerance became a national virtue. The Ku Klux Klan sold nearly four million mem- berships in five years.
The Red scare died a tardy but a natural death. Issues more frivolous but no less " red hot " began to mark'the dizzy peaks of a convalescent country's temperature chart. There were ephemeral booms in boxing, bail a beauties, Mah-jong, Coueism, and crossword puzzles. There were less transient slumps in corsets and morals and a sense of the value of privacy. Hero-worship flared and died, leaving only Lind- bergh permanently ensconced on the pedestal where he had succeeded football-players and pugilists. There were hys- terical outbursts of interest in graver matters like the Harding scandals, the Evolution Trial a Dayton, and the Sacco- Vanzetti case. (When the English counterpart of this book comes to be written, I hope the author will not overlook that memorable occasion when The Times, in a kind of ecstasy of impartiality, reversed a precedence as hallowed as that of Swan over Edgar and referred in a headline to Vanzetti and Sacco). And then there was Prohibition which, while it beneficently lessened, dangerously redistributed the Demon Alcohol's power, bringing another class and another sex under his mandate : so that what was once deplorable among your inferiors became de rigueur among your friends.
It is fair to assume—though Mr. Allen does not specifically draw this implication—that the proportion of average Ameri- cans in the total population of the U.S.A. was all this time steadily increasing. Mass-production, rationalization, and the cult of efficiency were among the more obvious reasons for this ; the well-planned grooves in which every year more and more men spent their working day grew steadily more sitnilar as they grew steadily more commodious. Concurrently, forces were at work in their private lives which stamped a pattern on their thoughts and canalized their fancies. There was the advent of the radio, " which was destined ultimately to alter the daily habits of Americans as profoundly as anything that the decade produced " ; the rise of the tabloids, which " presented American life, not as a political and economic struggle, but as a three-ring circus of sport, crime, and sex " : and the spread of the " chain " habit, and of the use of syndi- cated material among newspapers. The number of news- papers dwindled as their circulations increased. From coast to coast editors relied on central organizations in New York to supply them with " features." Fewer things were said, but they were said more loudly, more authoritatively, and to a wider public. The edges were being rubbed off individuality all round.
From the point of view of the general public, Only Yesterday is the most important hook which has been written about America since Professor Andre Siegfried's America Comes Of Age. It is a dispassionate, ironical account of the way in which she celebrated her majority : a picture of a people so whole- heartedly preoccupied with a succession of ramps, scares, fads, and stunts (all of them entirely irrelevant to anything of value in life) that they threatened to remain immutably callow, per- petually immature. Daring the lust decade their march down the road to prosperity began to look less and less like a crusade, and more and more like a crocodile or queue. To-day econo- mics have called a halt ; rumours of a cut de sac run down time column. It seems that there must be an end for a time to the monotheistic cult of the Golden Calf, which threatened, as calf- love so often does, to turn its devotees into bores. Now there will be fewer niches for the parvenus, and perhaps more horizons for the pioneers.
R. P. F.
Previous page
