The Morning After

Only Yesterday, by Frederick Lewis Allen

[Harpers, $3.00]

IT is the penalty of writing books like Mr. Mark Sullivan’s Our Times that similar books will spring into being. Mr. Allen himself acknowledges in his preface what Mr. Sullivan has done ‘to develop this method of writing contemporary history.’ The book, however, is not at all to be dismissed with

It is very much a creation of the author’s own — and an admirable creation.

History of the quorum pars fui variety is necessarily limited, for writer and reader alike, by considerations of age. Mr. Allen, a man of about forty, with the innumerable impacts of an active publishing experience upon his vision, is of precisely the right age and the right equipment to deal with the nineteen-twenties. He had arrived at maturity by the time the old order and the war came to their nearly simultaneous ends. With standards of measurement carried forward from an earlier day, he was yet young enough for the flexibilities essential to any adjustment of outlook upon a new world in the making.

The making of it had many qualities of a prolonged spree, and this book is of ‘the morning after.’ The collapse of idealism, the heyday of ’these wild young people,’ the Augean episode of Harding and his friends, the Maxim-silencing of Coolidge and the prosperity that bore his name, ballyhoo, the new intelligentsia, the concomitants of prohibition, Florida and the avenging hurricanes, the Big Bull Market and the avenging crash — these, for the most part, are the matters with which Mr. Allen has concerned himself. There is little to which the intelligent historian of liberal sympathies can point with unmixed pride. On the other hand, Mr. Allen does not overindulge himself in ‘viewing with alarm.’ His rôle is rather that of the comprehending observer.

The spree that is ended was not his spree, and his head is therefore all the clearer for appraising its results. It is not the noisiest member of a wild party who can come nearest to rationalizing it the next morning. If age and hardening of the sympathies have not separated him too sharply from his comrades of the night before, he will certainly have the good sense not to preach to them. The American who can look in this glass and proceeds straightway, forgetting what manner of man he has been since 1919, is not an encouraging object. He may not seize this moment to swear off, but at least be will have to ask himself whether something of the sort must not be considered.

M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE