Gotham Diary:
Yesterday Indeed
18 September 2014
Progress so speedy you can see it from day to day! The foundation of street-level structure has been largely surrounded by packed dirt — the new roadbed. I thought I’d never live to see it, and if it hadn’t been for antibiotics, I wouldn’t’ve.
The morning is my best time, and I gave yesterday morning to paying the bills. Shockingly late, to be sure, but, under the circumstances, more than understandable. I didn’t see to them the moment I got back from Fire Island because the apartment had developed an Augaean fringe. I thought I’d take care of bills on the Sunday after Labor Day, little reckoning that I might be spending that day in the hospital. When I came home, I paid three bills, one of them very important (Quicken prints three checks at a time). So there were only nine left to deal with yesterday. Sometime when we’ve all got nothing else to do, I’ll tell you why I don’t pay bills online. Yet.
Last night, for dinner, I had two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and I ate them without difficulty. Such are the banal, nursery-like steps of early convalescence. Which isn’t, properly speaking, convalescence at all, since it’s the antibiotics that I’m recovering from!
***
Sometime in midsummer, Ray Soleil heartily recommended Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, a classic “informal history” of the 1920s. I first heard about the book at prep school, where we read instead Allen’s Fords, Flappers and Fanatics, a companion volume (I suppose) that explores matters that are passed over in the first book. (At least, the fanatics are. Aimée Semple McPherson is mentioned only once.) Although I don’t remember how Ray and I came to be talking about it, his enthusiasm suggested that he had just read the book. In fact, he read it in high school. Which, as all people my age know, is only yesterday.
Allen can’t have known how apt his title was, because it applies to his book as tightly as it does to his topic. Here is Allen on the aftermath of the Florida land boom of 1925-6:
All through the decade, but especially during and immediately after the Florida fever, there was an epidemic of ambitious schemes hatched by promoters and boosters to bring prosperity to various American cities, towns, and resorts, by presenting each of them, in sumptuous advertisements, circulars, and press copy put out by hustling chambers of commerce, as the “center of a rising industrial empire” or as the “new playground of America’s rich.” Some of these ventures prospered; in California, for example, where the technic of boosting had been brought to poetic perfection long years previously, concerted campaigns brought industries, winter visitors, summer visitors, and good fortune for the business man and the hotel-keeper alike. It was estimated that a million people a year went to California “just to look and play” — and, of course, to spend money. But not all such ventures could prosper, the number of factories and of wealthy vacationists being unhappily limited. City after city, hoping to attract industries within its limits, eloquently pointed out its “advantages” and tried to “make its personality felt” and to “carry its constructive message to the American people”; but at length it began to dawn upon the boosters that attracting industries bore some resemblance to robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that if all of them were converted to boosting, each of them was as likely to find itself in the role of Peter as in that of Paul. And exactly as the developers of the tropical wonders of Florida had learned that there were more land-speculators able and willing to gamble in houses intended for the polo-playing rich than there were members of this class, so also those who carved out playgrounds for the rich in North Carolina or elsewhere learned to their ultimate sorrow that the rich could not play everywhere at once. And once more the downfall of their bright hopes had financial repercussions, as bankrupt developments led to the closing of bank after bank. (247)
Like so many of the short-sighted “business man” schemes and mass-society, “madness of crowds” phenomena that Allen considers throughout Only Yesterday, this sounds neither more ridiculous nor more fraudulent than the recent home-mortgage fever. But, more than that, the writing, as cant-free as E B White’s (if somewhat richer), lightly poached in the mordant sarcasm of S J Perelman, has not dated. It hasn’t, at any rate, dated for me. But then, I’m an old man; I can remember when this is what The New Yorker sounded like. (I have to look for the sarcasm, because the distress at human folly is so overwhelming. It’s no longer amusing to laugh at nonsense. I read about the Big Bull Market and the Crash, subjects of the last two chapters, on the edge of tears.) At no time did I feel that I was reading an “old” book. The most difficult thing to accept about Only Yesterday as I read was, in fact, nothing in the text at all.
[Hoover] was an able economist and an able leader of men in public crises; yet his attempts to lead business out of depression had come to conspicuous failure. (301)
Everybody knows that! But this is where Allen stops. He does not mention FDR and the New Deal, or the introductions of safeguards such as Social Security and the Securities Act of 1933. (Or the late lamented Glass-Steagall Act, which preceded almost every other reform.) Allen doesn’t look forward to the repeal of Prohibition. He can’t. He is wrapping up his book for publication at the end of 1931. 1931! Only yesterday — he really meant it!
The publication date is obscured in the text by Allen’s stout-hearted determination to refrain any kind of hand-wringing. (Might it have been Perelman’s tonal influence that stayed his hand?) Only Yesterday is about America from the Armistice to the Crash, not about cleaning up the decade’s messes. Allen points to various problems (many of them worse than “problems”), shows how intractable many of them were, but never wails, or even asks, “What is to be done?” This must have called for a remarkable intestinal fortitude, grounded perhaps in the faith, which I find it difficult to share, that the American people sooner or later find their way out of every crisis.
I have for some time been in search of a seminal moment or time that would mark the beginning of modern America. Perhaps the association bias of being a Baby Boomer has always inclined me to look for it in the wake of World War II. I have also been aware that great swaths of the United States — rural ones, mostly — were touched only very lightly touched by the modernizations of the 1920s; the new mass culture would not mature for some time. But Allen has convinced me the Twenties are what I’m looking for, if only for the emergence of advertizing as we know it. The familiar symbiosis of business development and mindless public enthusiasm began then. The current crisis in professional football clearly springs from ground laid during the heyday of Dempsey and Tunney. One could go on.
Only Yesterday tempted me to believe that, after all, the American public has learned a thing or two since the Twenties, in addition to submitting to generally wise legal and institutional restraints. Perhaps it has — but I remind myself that the lessons deal with old vicissitudes. What would Allen have had to say about the legal and loosely-regulated private ownership of automatic weapons, something that Americans of his day only dreamed of in nightmares about gangsters in fast cars?