Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, September 3, 1929–September 3, 1939 by Allen, Frederick Lewis-Book Review

 

Book Review - Five Stars

Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, September 3, 1929–September 3, 1939 by Allen, Frederick Lewis

From Roaring 20s, prohibition, speakeasies, lawlessness and out of control runaway stock market speculation that nose dived creating a worldwide depression known as the “Hoover days” to WWII when FDR became a four-term President, this amazing book takes you on that wild roller coaster ride.

Excerpts: Perhaps the onrushing agricultural industrialism would prove as short-lived as the earlier epidemic of tractor farming which had promised so much for the Great Plains during the nineteen-twenties—would lead once more to depletion of the soil and thus to its own undoing as well as the land’s.

Industrial uses for farm products; du Pont, for example, was using farm products in the making of cellophane, Duco, motion-picture film, rayon, pyralin, plastecele, fabrikoid, sponges, window shades, hair ornaments, handbags, alcohols, and a lot of other things which one would hardly associate with the old-fashioned farm.

For a generation or more the conservationists had been warning the country that it was squandering its heritage of land and forests and fields and minerals and animal life: that in effect it was living riotously on its capital of national resources. But to most citizens the subject had seemed dull, academic.

Now, in the Dust Bowl, the Lord had “taken a hand” in instruction. And hardly had the black blizzards blown themselves out when—as if distrustful whether the country properly realized that droughts and floods were not incompatible phenomena, but were associated results of human misuse of the land—the Lord drove the lesson home. The rivers went on a rampage.

Despite all the miseries of the Depression and the recurrent fears of new economic decline and of war, the bulk of the American people had not yet quite lost their basic asset of hopefulness. It was still their instinct to transform a suburban swamp into a city of magic and call it “The World of Tomorrow.” In that world of tomorrow the show which they liked best of all and stood in hour-long queues to enjoy was the General Motors Futurama, a picture of the possible delights of 1960. They still liked to build the biggest dam in all creation and toy with the idea of the happy farmsteads it would water, the enormous engines it would drive, the new and better business it would stimulate. They still liked to stand with elbows on the fence at the edge of the farm and say, “Sooner or later I aim to buy those forty acres over there and go into this thing on a bigger scale.” They still scrimped to give their sons and daughters “a better education than we ever had,” feeling obscurely that a better education would be valued in the years to come. A nation tried in a long ordeal had not yet lost heart.

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