Fever Chart

THE YEARS OF THE LOCUST (America, 1929-1932) -- Gilbert Seldes -- Little, Brown ($3).

Gilbert Seldes has gone Mark Sullivan and Frederick Lewis Allen (Our Times, Only Yesterday) one better. With amazing celerity, great industry and a comprehensive focus, Seldes has drawn up an interpretative history of the last three years in the U. S., so that those who are still on the run may read. Calling his book a "fever chart," he plots the curves of recent U. S. public opinion, shows how it followed the swoops of economic graphs. Written with wit and wisdom. The Years of the Locust is a serious book not aimed at mental moppets, well worth a tycoon's time.

The panic is over, says Seldes, for "the boom was our panic. . . . America in 1928, and the first months of 1929. was a mob. . . . The responsible leaders, the statesmen and the financiers and the industrialists, were paralyzed, precisely as the British Government was paralyzed in July and August of 1914. The situations are almost parallels. In each case, a disaster threatened; in each case, authority refused to check the force of events lest the very movement of checking should bring on catastrophe. The memoirs of Grey of Fallodon match the apologies made for Coolidge and Hoover." Calling the 1929 crash not inevitable but predictable and predicted, Seldes shows how the U. S: gradually began to disbelieve official explanations of the Depression and official prophecies that it would soon be over. He disagrees with "the incompetent business man" who "let it be known that fortunes were made by fools like himself, but only God can make a depression."

With the expanding frontier (both physical and industrial) gone, the U. S., says Seldes. has changed quickly out of some people's knowledge: notably Herbert Hoover's, who "deeply believed in the common words of flattery always given to America and was evolving out of them a philosophy of American life. He risked his popularity and his re-election to stand by his beliefs. It was unfortunate that the actualities to which his beliefs correspond had vanished from America a generation before." Seldes thinks public opinion in the last three years has gone far to catch up to the facts: "The years from 1929 to 1933 were, for America, a succession of breaking idols and abandoned faiths, some of them the notions of willful children, some deeply ingrained in the character of the nation."

Concluding as he began, in skepticism. Seldes quotes Abbe Sieves' reply when he was asked, many years later, what he had done during the French Revolution: "I lived through it."

The Author. Versatile but able, Gilbert Vivian Seldes is the only man who has ever contributed steadily and simultaneously to both the (late) Dial and the Saturday Evening Post, the (late) Manhattan Evening Graphic and the New Republic. He has been music critic, military expert, war correspondent, editorial writer & foreign correspondent (Philadelphia Public Ledgers), political correspondent (L'Echo de Paris), associate editor (Collier's), managing editor (The Dial). contributing editor (The New Republic), dramatic critic (Manhattan Evening Graphic). At present he writes a Hearst-syndicated colyum. His adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata was a 1930 box-office success. Harvard-man (1914), married (to Alice Walhams Hall), with two children, he lives quietly in Manhattan, shuns publicity, misses few tricks.

Other books: The Seven Lively Arts, The Stammering Century, The Wings of the Eagle, The Future of Drinking; under the pseudonym of "Foster Johns," two mystery novels: The Victory Murders, The Square Emerald.

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