He reports the 1920s through this lens, not objectively. Allen’s main air is one of supercilious superiority he knows what is good for the country, and he is pleased to be able to report that the benighted masses are generally getting with the program advocated by their betters. But Allen still distorts, because he is preaching to the choir-he is writing to people like him, members of the 1920s professional-managerial elite, sympathetic to the Progressives and Woodrow Wilson, violently opposed to Calvin Coolidge, and eager to find and support a candidate like Franklin Roosevelt, although he is nowhere mentioned in this book.

Up to a point, that’s true, since he couldn’t simply lie like many modern historians do. It would appear that since all his readers lived through the period he covers, Allen could not distort history.

Print (PDF)Īfter reading this book, I conclude the latter seems more likely. Either today’s common imagination correctly reflects the reality of the 1920s-or today’s common imagination was shaped by men like Allen, with their own agenda, and does not fully reflect reality. Only Yesterday contains nothing that is not precisely in-line with today’s common imagination about the decade, which suggests one of two things. The HBO series Boardwalk Empire gives a flavor of the times-or at least reflects the common imagination. In today’s common imagination, the 1920s are the “Roaring Twenties”-an economic boom combined with a new focus on the freedom to do as one pleased (even if Prohibition was the law of the land). But I found, to my sorrow, that I learned little new, and I was instead again reminded of how early the rot in America’s ruling classes set in. Thus I thought that Only Yesterday, a semi-famous history of the 1920s, published in 1931 by a mass-market journalist/intellectual of the time, Frederick Lewis Allen, might teach me something new about that decade. Their biases, if they have any, are usually obvious. Earlier historians were often more objective, ideology being less prevalent. Sometimes, therefore, reading history written in the past can offer better information. Much modern popular history is mendacious, written with an ideological agenda that deliberately distorts, or omits, or simply lies about, the truth.

Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen