Only Yesterday Quotes

“the influenza epidemic, which had taken more American lives than had the Germans, and had caused thousands of men and women to go about fearfully with white cloth masks over their faces, was only just abating;”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“He fell into the pit which is digged for every idealist. Having failed to embody his ideal in fact, he distorted the fact. He pictured the world, to himself and to others, not as it was, but as he wished it to be. The optimist became a sentimentalist. The story of the Conference which he told to the American people when he returned home was a very beautiful romance of good men and true laboring without thought of selfish advantage for the welfare of humanity. He said that if the United States did not come to the aid of mankind by indorsing all that had been done at Paris, the heart of the world would be broken. But the only heart which was broken was his own.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“Prosperity is more than an economic condition; it is a state of mind.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“Something that people needed, if they were to live at peace with themselves and with the world, was missing from their lives. And all at once Lindbergh provided it. Romance, chivalry, self-dedication -- here they were, embodied in a modern Galahad for a generation which had foresworn Galahads.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“The new code had been born in disillusionment, and beneath all the bravado of its exponents and the talk upon entering a new era, the disillusionment persisted. If the decade was ill-mannered, it was also unhappy. With the old order of things had gone a set of values which had given richness and meaning to life, and substitute values were not easily found.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“A time of revolution, however, is an uneasy time to live in. It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place . . .”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“Nor did the Roman Catholics escape censure in the regions in which they were in a minority. Did not the members of this Church take their orders from a foreign pope, and did not the pope claim temporal power, and did not Catholics insist upon teaching their children in their own way rather than in the American public schools, and was not all this un-American and treasonable?”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“. . . it is always hard to mobilize an unimaginative public against a vague threat.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“Why, then, this idolization of Lindbergh? The explanation is simple. A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature it had allowed itself to entertain.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“The country had bread, but it wanted circuses -- and now it could go to them a hundred million strong.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“One of the striking characteristics of the era of Coolidge Prosperity was the unparalleled rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of tremendous trifles -- a heavyweight boxing-match, a murder trial, a new automobile model, a transatlantic flight.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“. . . there was another factor to be reckoned with: the growing apathy of millions of Americans toward anything which reminded them of the war. They were fast becoming sick and tired of the whole European mess. They wanted to be done with it. They didn't want to be told of new sacrifices to be made -- they had made plenty.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“Human nature, the world over, was beginning to show a new side, as it has shown it at the end of every war in history. The compulsion for unity was gone, and division was taking its place. The compulsion for idealism was gone, and realism was in the ascendant.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“. . . even as this glorious peace began to seem a reality and not a dream, the nation went on thinking with the mind of people at war. They had learned during the preceding nineteen months to strike down the thing they hated; not to argue or hesitate, but to strike. Germany had been struck down, but it seemed there was another danger on the horizon. Bolshevism was spreading from Russia through Europe; Bolshevism might spread to the United States. They struck at it -- or what they thought it was.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“Alien Property Custodian), T. B. Felder (attorney for the Harding group), President Harding, Mrs. Harding, and General Sawyer. They had all died—most of them suddenly—within a few years of the end of the Harding Administration. No matter how much or how little credence one may give to these latter charges and their implications, the proved evidence is enough to warrant the statement that the Harding Administration was responsible in its short two years and five months for more concentrated robbery and rascality than any other in the whole history of the Federal Government.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“In scores of cities all over the United States, when the Communists were simultaneously meeting at their various headquarters on New Year’s Day of 1920, Mr. Palmer’s agents and police and voluntary aides fell upon them—fell upon everybody, in fact, who was in the hall, regardless of whether he was a Communist or not (how could one tell?)—and bundled them off to jail, with or without warrant. Every conceivable bit of evidence—literature, membership lists, books, papers, pictures on the wall, everything—was seized, with or without a search warrant. On this and succeeding nights other Communists and suspected Communists were seized in their homes. Over six thousand men were arrested in all, and thrust summarily behind the bars for days or weeks—often without any chance to learn what was the explicit charge against them. At least one American citizen, not a Communist, was jailed for days through some mistake—probably a confusion of names—and barely escaped deportation. In Detroit, over a hundred men were herded into a bull-pen measuring twenty-four by thirty feet and kept there for a week under conditions which the mayor of the city called intolerable. In Hartford, while the suspects were in jail the authorities took the further precaution of arresting and incarcerating all visitors who came to see them, a friendly call being regarded as prima facie evidence of affiliation with the Communist party. Ultimately a considerable proportion of the prisoners were released for want of sufficient evidence that they were Communists. Ultimately, too, it was divulged that in the whole country-wide raid upon these dangerous men—supposedly armed to the teeth—exactly three pistols were found, and no explosives at all. But at the time the newspapers were full of reports from Mr. Palmer’s office that new evidence of a gigantic plot against the safety of the country had been unearthed; and although the steel strike was failing, the coal strike was failing, and any danger of a socialist régime, to say nothing of a revolution, was daily fading, nevertheless to the great mass of the American people the Bolshevist bogey became more terrifying than ever. Mr. Palmer was in full cry. In public statements he was reminding the twenty million owners of Liberty bonds and the nine million farm-owners and the eleven million owners of savings accounts, that the Reds proposed to take away all they had. He was distributing boilerplate propaganda to the press, containing pictures of horrid-looking Bolsheviks with bristling beards, and asking if such as these should rule over America. Politicians were quoting the suggestion of Guy Empey that the proper implements for dealing with the Reds could be “found in any hardware store,” or proclaiming, “My motto for the Reds is S. O. S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping-place should be hell.” College graduates were calling for the dismissal of professors suspected of radicalism; school-teachers were being made to sign oaths of allegiance; business men with unorthodox political or economic ideas were learning to hold their tongues if they wanted to hold their jobs. Hysteria had reached its height.”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

“Darrow declared that his purpose in examining Bryan was “to show up Fundamentalism … to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States,”
― Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s