Type of bind: Paperback
Label: Bantam
Manufacturer: Bantam
Page Count: 292
Printing Date: 1961
Publishing house: Bantam
Sale Popularity Level: 183354
Studio: Bantam
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
First paperback issue of Allen's classic book about America in the 1930s.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Completed in 1939, Frederick Lewis Allen's "Since Yesterday" was a sequel to his immensely successful "Only Yesterday: an Informal History of the 1920s". Writing in the same jaunty, gossipy style, Allen mingles serious political history with such ephemera as the invention of miniature golf, fashion parades, and candid camera. Even so, this sequel never achieved the perennial popularity of the earlier book, perhaps because the foibles of life in the '30s could never match the iconic insanity of the '20s. But "Since Yesterday" is an immensely valuable primary source for social historians, providing an in-depth portrayal of what Americans thought of themselves and their deeds during the decade of the Great Depression.
Along with the may-flies of trivia, Allen also delves into the social significance of phenomena such as gangsterism, the rise of team sports to a national passion, the mania for dam construction, swing jazz, and science fiction. On a more earnest level, he wrestles with what to make of charismatic eccentric figures such as isolationist/proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh, thorough fascist Father Coughlin, and Populist demagogue Huey Long. The dominating figure of the book and of the era, however, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Allen's portrayal of Roosevelt is detached, admiring yet critical, quizzical to the end, and well aware that the end as of 1939 was probably the beginning of a much darker and more dangerous decade. Allen's Roosevelt was always in the lead but never quite in charge, a depiction later historians have largely confirmed.
"Since Yesterday" begins with the financial crisis of 1929, and covers Hoover's opera buffa term as President in four solid chapters. The New Deal arrives in chapter five, in 1933. The various programs for recovery proposed by the Roosevelt administration are analyzed with sharp skepticism, and yet Allen demonstrates clearly that, from the contemporaneous perspective, recovery did occur, the New Deal did work... until 1937, when once again the financial markets crashed and the gains of the reformers were temporarily erased. From Allen's perspective in 1939, there was not one Great Depression but rather an uphill-and-down succession of crises. What caused the second crash? Allen grudgingly suggests that silk-stocking and southern reactionaries finally blocked any progress toward the ideals of reform. The balance sheet of the decade, nevertheless, showed clear long-term gains for the interests of organized labor, despite violence surrounding major strikes and efforts to unionize America's industrial serfs.
Stated with bold oversimplicity, the glittering prosperity of the Roaring Twenties was based on relatively high wages, newly-developed easy credit mechanisms, installment-plan buying, and the marketing of radios and automobiles. Once everyone had bought a radio and a Ford on credit, the properity stalled. Lack of fiscal responsibility and weak regulatory mechanisms magnified the recession of '29 into Hoover's Depression, as it was called by people who lived in it. Sound at all familiar and relevant?
Rated by buyers 
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What makes this book unique is that it was written in 1941, so you get the perspective of the timeperiod written by a trained historian, but done right after 1930's are over. My work site does living history from 1939, and this is a very useful resource, particularly for what was occupying people's thoughts at the time.
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