Scary and Screwy

SINCE YESTERDAY -- Frederick Lewis Allen--Harper ($3).

In Frederick Lewis Allen's best-selling story of the 1920s, Only Yesterday (1931), the nation's readers took much the same pseudo-rueful pleasure as a man might get out of being reminded how he cut up at the Country Club that night in 1924 ("I never did any such thing!" etc.). In Since Yesterday, which is Mr. Allen's record of the 1930s, readers will probably find a more genuine pain in the pleasures of recollection.

Only Yesterday was practically alone in its field at the time it appeared. (Not until 1935 did Mark Sullivan add his record of the '20s to the rich documentary fruitcake of Our Times.) Since Yesterday, however, is published after America in Midpassage by Charles and Mary Beard (TIME, May 22) and is in almost every way a slighter job. Yet Mr. Allen, although he has neither the historical grasp nor the mordant style of the Beards, has the advantage of doing his job in 346 pages to the Beards' 949. His story embraces neatly the scary and screwy decade from Sept. 3, 1929 to Sept. 3, 1939.

The latter readers still remember as the day England and France declared war on Germany. The first date Allen recalls with sketchy vividness. The day after Labor Day, 1929, when the Dow-Jones average of stockmarket prices hit an all-time high, was a scorcher from Nebraska to Maine. On the streets you could see a few back less dresses and bare legs, practically no tinted nails. Bobs were shingled in back, banged on brows, swept on cheeks. A man named Garnet Carter of Lookout Mountain, Tenn., got on a train for Miami, where he was to install the first Miniature Golf Course in Florida. Liberal weeklies were referring to John L. Lewis as an autocratic reactionary of Labor. Singin' in the Rain was a popular tune. The average price of a radio set was $135. Disney's first Silly Symphony was just out (Allen does not name it; it was The Skeleton Dance}. President Herbert Clark Hoover returned from the weekend at his camp on the Rapidan. City people descending in the evening to the little, barred window of their favorite speakeasy were aware of the appointment of the Wickersham Commission to study how to enforce the unenforceable.

Of what trouble followed Sept. 1929 few U. S. citizens need to be told. Mr. Allen tells it with enough street-corner detail to suggest its charms. In 1930-31, for instance, steamship lines began running week-end cruises, or saturnalia, outside the Twelve Mile Limit. Apple salesmen shivered on wintry corners. Free wheeling was added to necking as a thing to do with cars. Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries ("Don't take it serious, it's too mysterious"*) expressed the nonchalant response to Depression. Bobby Jones had a Manhattan triumph after winning the British Amateur and Open tournaments. Eugenie hats appeared, and so did the beautiful body of Starr Faithfull on a Long Island beach. Richard Whitney spoke in Philadelphia on "Business Honesty," while "in many pretty houses, wives who had never before--in the revealing current phrase--'done their own work' were cooking and scrubbing."

To convey the gathering desperation of 1932-33 is a job to which Frederick Lewis Allen's cool writing is inadequate. But each reader may remember it for himself, touched off by such items in the story as the Lindbergh kidnapping and consequent hysteria (in which the nation saw its demoralization mirrored), antiforeclosure rebellions among Midwest farmers, a free-for-all fight for a full garbage can in Chicago, the pathetic Bonus Army and what happened to it, the confession of Steelmaster Charles M. Schwab: "I'm afraid, every man is afraid."

Of the seven years, enormously crammed with history, since the jittery camaraderie of the 1933 bank holiday ushered in the New Deal, Allen has many acute if not deeply penetrating things to say. As they follow his record of drought, floods, migrations, strikes, disasters and politics, readers may be impressed at what they have lived through, may even feel again the shock of such episodes as the Memorial Day, 1937, "riot" in South Chicago. Yet Allen's book would be better if it noted more local trivia like "Knock, knock. Who's there?" The tone is serious, though nowhere does it attain the solemnity of Mark Sullivan's immortal question: "Is Gimme A Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh? really any more elevated than the cry of the whip-poor-will to his mate?"*;

* Misquoted by Allen as "Don't make it serious. Life's too mysterious."

* Answer: Mr. Sullivan insulted the whip-poor-will.

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