Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

by Frederick Lewis Allen

Wilson was “accustomed to getting his information, not from people, but out of books, documents, letters—the written word,” and consequently “underestimated the value of … human contacts.” At written negotiations he was a past master, but in the oral give and take about a small conference table he was at a disadvantage.

When Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando got him into the Council of Four behind closed doors, where they could play the game of treaty-making like a four-handed card game, they had already half defeated him.

Late in 1919 Professor Gordon S. Watkins of the University of Illinois, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, set the membership of the Socialist party at 39,000, of the Communist Labor party at from 10,000 to 30,000, and of the Communist party at from 30,000 to 60,000. In other words, according to this estimate, the Communists could muster at the most hardly more than one-tenth of one per cent of the adult population of the country; and the three parties together—the majority of whose members were probably content to work for their ends by lawful means—brought the proportion to hardly more than two-tenths of one per cent, a rather slender nucleus, it would seem, for a revolutionary mass movement.

The temper of the aftermath of war was at last giving way to the temper of peace. Like an overworked business man beginning his vacation, the country had had to go through a period of restlessness and irritability, but was finally learning how to relax and amuse itself once more.

(In 1919 hardly more than 10 per cent of the cars produced in the United States were closed; by 1924 the percentage had jumped to 43, by 1927 it had reached 82.8.)

A storm of criticism from church organizations led the motion-picture producers, early in the decade, to install Will H. Hays, President Harding’s Postmaster-General, as their arbiter of morals and of taste,

Each of these diverse influences—the post-war disillusion, the new status of women, the Freudian gospel, the automobile, prohibition, the sex and confession magazines, and the movies—had its part in bringing about the revolution. Each of them, as an influence, was played upon by all the others; none of them could alone have changed to any great degree the folkways of America; together their force was irresistible.

the tendency of women to drop off one layer of clothing after another became so pronounced that in 1928 the Journal of Commerce estimated that in 15 years the amount of material required for a woman’s complete costume (exclusive of her stockings) had declined from 19¼ yards to 7 yards.

The divorce rate, however, continued its steady increase; for every 100 marriages there were 8.8 divorces in 1910, 13.4 divorces in 1920, and 16.5 divorces in 1928—almost one divorce for every six marriages. There was a corresponding decline in the amount of disgrace accompanying divorce.

it was significant that almost every one of the novelists who were ranked most highly by the post-war intellectuals was at outs with the censors, and that the Pulitzer Prize juries had a hard time meeting the requirement that the prize-winning novel should “present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood,” and finally had to alter the terms of the award, substituting “whole” for “wholesome” and omitting reference to “highest standards.”

sudden rise to affluence on the part of Secretary Fall. For some time previously Fall had been in financial straits; he had not even paid his local taxes for several years. But now all was changed. Mr. Fall had even purchased additional land near his New Mexican ranch,

Women were wearing less and less cotton.

Shrinking dresses.

The South was held back by cotton, the agricultural Northwest by the dismal condition of the wheat growers, New England by the paralysis of the textile and shoe industries.

In 1919 there had been 6,771,000 passenger cars in service in the United States; by 1929 there were no less than 23,121,000. There you have possibly the most potent statistic of Coolidge Prosperity.

Even as early as the end of 1923 there were two cars for every three families in “Middletown,” a typical American city.

The Lynds and their investigators interviewed 123 working-class families of “Middletown” and found that 60 of them had cars. Of these 60, 26 lived in such shabby-looking houses that the investigators thought to ask whether they had bathtubs, and discovered that as ...

villages on Route 61 bloomed with garages, filling stations, hot-dog stands, chicken-dinner restaurants, tearooms, tourists’ rests, camping sites, and affluence.

there was no such thing as radio broadcasting to the public until the autumn of 1920, but that by the spring of 1922 radio had become a craze—

In 1922 the sales of radio sets, parts, and accessories amounted to $60,000,000.

1922—$ 60,000,000 (as we have just seen) 1923—$136,000,000 1924—$358,000,000 1925—$430,000,000 1926—$506,000,000 1927—$425,600,000 1928—$650,550,000 1929—$842,548,000 (an increase over the 1922 figures of 1,400 per cent!)

two significant facts at opposite ends of the scale of wealth. Between 1922 and 1927, the purchasing power of American wages increased at the rate of more than two per cent annually. And during the three years between 1924 and 1927 alone there was a leap from 75 to 283 in the number of Americans who paid taxes on incomes of more than a million dollars a year.

When stocks were skyrocketing in 1928 and 1929 it is probable that hundreds of thousands of people were buying goods with money which represented, essentially, a gamble on the business profits of the nineteen-thirties.

There was a rush of innocents abroad. According to the figures of the Department of Commerce, over 437,000 people left the United States by ship for foreign parts in the year 1928 alone, to say nothing of 14,000 odd who entered Canada and Mexico by rail, and over three million cars which crossed into Canada for a day or more.

The innocents spent freely: the money that they left abroad, in fact (amounting in 1928 to some $650,000,000), solved for a time a difficult problem in international finance: how the United States could continue to receive interest on her foreign debts and foreign investments without permitting foreign goods to pass the high tariff barrier in large quantities.

Rotary, the most famous of them, had been founded in 1905; by 1930 it had 150,000 members and boasted—as a sign of its international influence—as many as 3,000 clubs in 44 countries.

The number of Kiwanis Clubs rose from 205 in 1920 to 1,800 in 1929;

the Lions Clubs, of which the first was not formed until 1917, multiplied until at the end of the dec...

the formation of no less than 55 chains controlling 230 daily papers with a combined circulation of over 13,000,000.

the revolt of the highbrows against this emotional and æsthetic starvation, and against “the mania for petty regulation” to which it led, would hardly have gathered imposing force as soon as it did had Sinclair Lewis not brought out Main Street in October, 1920, and Babbitt some two years later.

In two volumes of merciless literary photography and searing satire, Lewis revealed the ugliness of the American small town, the cultural poverty of its life, the tyranny of its mass prejudices, and the blatant vulgarity and insularity of the booster.

By the end of 1922 the sale of Main Street had reached 390,000 copies.

The intellectuals had only to read Lewis’s books to realize that the qualities in American life which they most despised and feared were precisely the ones which he put under the microscope for cold-blooded examination. It was George F. Babbitt who was the arch enemy of the enlightened, and it was the Main Street state of mind which stood in the way of American civilization.

Wrote Walter Lippmann, “What most distinguishes the generation who have approached maturity since the débâcle of idealism at the end of the war is not their rebellion against the religion and the moral code of their parents, but their disillusionment with their own rebellion. It is common for young men and women to rebel, but that they should rebel sadly and without faith in their rebellion, and that they should distrust the new freedom no less than the old certainties—that is something of a novelty.”

When the Eighteenth Amendment came before the Senate in 1917, it was passed by a one-sided vote after only thirteen hours of debate,

When the House of Representatives accepted it a few months later, the debate upon the Amendment as a whole occupied only a single day.

The state legislatures ratified it in short order; by January, 1919, some two months after the Armistice, the necessary three-quarters of the states had fallen into line and the Amendment was a part of the Constitution. (All the rest of the states but two subsequently added their ...

the forces behind the Amendment were closely organized; the forces opposed to the Amendment were hardly organized at all.

To meet all these potential threats against the Volstead Act,

the Government appropriations provided a force of prohibition agents which in 1920 numbered only 1,520 men and as late as 1930 numbered only 2,836;

if the whole army of agents in 1920 had been mustered along the coasts and borders—paying no attention for the moment to medicinal alcohol, breweries, industrial alcohol, or illicit stills—there would have been one man to patrol every twelve miles of beach, harbor, headland, forest, and riverfront.

The agents’ salaries in 1920 mostly ranged between $1,200 and $2,000; by 1930 they had been munificently raised to range between $2,300 and $2,800.

Anybody who believed that men employable at thirty-five or forty or fifty dollars a week would surely have the expert technical knowledge and the diligence to supervise successfully the complicated chemical operations of industrial-alcohol plants or to outwit the craftiest devices of smugglers and bootleggers, and that they would surely have the force of character to resist corruption by men whose ...

A rational observer would have supposed that the obvious way out of this situation would be either to double or treble or quadruple the enforcement squad or to change the law. But nothing of the sort was done.

it was easier to denounce the opponents of the law as Bolshevists and destroyers of civilization and to hope that the tide of opinion would turn again. Congress was equally unwilling to face the music; there was a comfortable dry majority in both Houses, but it was one thing to be a dry and quite another to insist on enforcement at whatever cost and whatever inconvenience to some of one’s influential constituents.

The state governments were supposed to help the Prohibition Bureau, but by 1927 their financial contribution to the cause was about one-eighth of the sum they spent enforcing their own fish and game laws. Some legislatures withdrew their aid entirely, and even the driest states were inclined to let Uncle Sam bear the brunt of the Volstead job.

diverse forms of smuggling were conducted with such success that in 1925 General Lincoln C. Andrews, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of enforcement, hazarded the statement that his agents succeeded in intercepting only about 5 per cent of the liquor smuggled into the country;

Even if a clear majority of the American people were able to decide to their own satisfaction what was the best way out of the morass, what chance was there of putting through their program when thirteen dry states could block any change in the Amendment? No problem which had ever faced the United States had seemed more nearly insoluble.

Within three years it was said that the boy from the Five Points had seven hundred men at his disposal, many of them adept in the use of the sawed-off shotgun and the Thompson submachine gun.

While all of federal officials nationwide to enforce prohibition numbered 2300. Ha!

there were over five hundred gang murders in all.

In the course of a little over fifteen months—from October 11, 1927, to January 15, 1929—no less than 157 bombs were set or exploded in the Chicago district, and according to Gordon L. Hostetter and Thomas Quinn Beesley, who made a careful compilation of these outrages in It’s a Racket, there was no evidence that the perpetrators of any of them were brought to book.