Since Yesterday
By . Harper and Brothers, $3.00.
BY way of sequel to the same author’s Only Yesterday, this is a review of American life through the decade 1929—1939. What first impresses one is Mr. Allen’s remarkable success in organizing his work, or, as a painter might say, composing his picture. The mass of material is so great, so fragmentary and diverse, that picking the right thing for the right place, correctly adjusting the right amount of the right kind of detail in order to produce the right blend of light and shade everywhere throughout the narrative — this is about as ticklish a business as any writer would wish to take on, and one could hardly hope to do better with it than Mr. Allen has done.
In another respect he has done equally well. One great trouble, perhaps the chief trouble, with writing the history of one’s own times is keeping one’s sympathies and opinions from coloring events or damaging perspective. Mr. Allen had to deal with a long series of uncommonly spectacular political and economic phenomena following one another in hot succession — the panic of 1929, floods, dust storms, shifts of population, the kaleidoscopic course of the New Deal from the spacious days ot the Blue Eagle down to the present; riots, sit-down strikes, economic stagnation, the Brain Trust, pump-primings, collectivist coups d’etat, ‘social legislation,’ dishonored obligations, mountainous debts — and he has done it so impartially that at any given point it is quite impossible to say where his sympathies lie.
The public of all countries allows its officeholders a fairly large credit of mendacity, chicane, and general knavery, upon which they may draw at sight and remain blameless, provided they can make it appear that they do it for their country’s good. Historians make the same allowance as a rule, whenever possible, and Mr. Allen makes it everywhere; he always tacitly assumes that all the public men he deals with are au fond honest and patriotic, that they always do the best they can, and that their errors are of judgment rather than motive. This is a wise course to follow in a work on contemporary affairs, for any other leads into the slough of dissent and disputation. Mr. Allen was right in taking this course, even at the risk of appearing overgenerous, as he pretty regularly does. His readers will easily see that his assumption is necessary and purely formal, and that it leaves them quite free to put their own moral interpretation on the facts which he presents.
And so Mr. Allen unrolls his panorama of what certainly is the greatest show on earth. One looks at it in amazement, wondering whether there was ever anything in the world like it. Did one really live through a decade of events so preposterously and incredibly bizarre, and really witness them with one’s own eyes and ears? It is almost beyond belief, yet there it is. Mr. Allen has not the first instinct of a showman; the facts are there, he merely puts them on his screen and lets them speak for themselves. What they say can be best summed up in the words of Mr. Jefferson, ‘What a bedlamite is man!’ The only merit of man’s collective lunacies is that they are almost always vastly entertaining; and the spectacle reproduced on Mr. Allen’s panorama has an entertainment value which one is fain to believe will never be surpassed.
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