Only Yesterday

In 1931 (two years after the 1929 crash), Frederick Lewis Allen, wrote a book entitled,  Only Yesterday. The book is an informal history of the eleven years between the end of World War I with Germany (November 11, 1918) and the stock-market panic (November 13, 1929) which ended the years known as Coolidge (and Hoover) prosperity.  I first read the book as a high school student and have read it a number of times since, which is evident from the book’s present unsightly condition.   I would urge everyone to read the book (still in print and available) because I believe Allen’s Only Yesterday of the twentieth century, bespeaks of our “Only Yesterday” in the twenty-first.

James Howard Kunstler wrote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  Any person reading  Only Yesterday will find a lot of “rhyming” between the stories of “then and now.”  The decade of the twenties was caught up in a blind faith in the power of capital (money, deals, and business) and American prosperity.  It was an era of “America First.”  Weary of foreign entanglements (World War I) the American people turned a deaf ear to Woodrow Wilson’s plea for the League of Nations.  They were caught up in radical conspiracy theories that they believed threatened the government and the institutions of the United States (The Red Revolution, foreigners, and Labor Unions).  Making the world safe for democracy was not on their agenda.  They only wanted to make America safe for themselves.  Sound familiar?

Allen wrote, “It was an era of disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror.”  Under the war-time Sedition Act, aliens (who were thought to be anarchists, “sinister and subversive agitators” or as it is today, “rapists, murderers, etc.”) were rounded up for wholesale deportation. The Ku-Klux Klan blossomed into power in that twentieth century yesterday, fueled by the various conspiracies and were seen as defenders of the white against the black, of Gentile against Jew, and of Protestant against Catholic.  This all happened only yesterday (1918-1929).  It rhymes with our todays that quickly turn into twenty-first century Only Yesterday.