Only Yesterday. Frederick Lewis Allen. Continued.

Significant Sentences. Ironic view of the 1920s.

Walter Lippmann: If you start with the belief that love is the pleasure of the moment, is it really surprising that it yields only a momentary pleasure? p. 85.

The nation is spiritually tired. p. 88.

Harding: I can't make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then--God!--I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but hell, I couldn't read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don't know where to find him and haven't the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God! What a job! p. 89.

But the harshest condemnation on the part of the press and the public was reserved, not for those who had defrauded the government, but for those who insisted on bringing the facts to light. Senators Walsh and Wheeler [were referred to as]: "The Montana scandal mongers," "assassins of character," the "Democratic lynching-bee," "poison-tongued partisanship, pure malice, and twittering hysteria," "contemptible and disgusting." p. 109.

The automobile came even before the tub! And as it came, it changed the face of America. Villages which had once prospered because they were "on the railroad" languished with economic anemia; villages on Route 61 blossomed with garages, filling stations, hot-dog stands, chicken-dinner restaurants, tearooms, tourists' rests, camp sites and affluence. The interurban trolley perished or survived only as a pathetic anachronism. Railroad after railroad gave up its branch lines, or saw its revenues slowly dwindling under the competition of mammoth interurban buses and trucks snorting along six-lane concrete highways. p. 115.