The Washington Post
There is perhaps no more clearly definable decade in American history. Nathan Miller has done a fine job of getting it within the pages of a single book and making sense of it into the bargain. — Jonathan Yardley
Publishers Weekly
Miller (Theodore Roosevelt: A Life; FDR: An Intimate History; etc.) quite eloquently illuminates the United States as it existed under presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, using the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with all its peaks and valleys during the 1920s, as the backbone of his narrative. But Miller's book is much more complex than a mere discussion of Fitzgerald or such related phenomena as the Lost Generation and the Jazz Age. In addition to events in the arts and sciences, Miller details bitter labor struggles, the rise of the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan and Prohibition. Woven into this text are vivid portrayals of such personalities as H.L. Mencken (who coined the famous phrase, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people") and the young, relatively unknown Franklin Roosevelt, dealing with the onset of polio. Miller's provocative prose dovetails such notables as Al Capone, evangelist Billy Sunday, birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger and aviator Charles Lindbergh. In addition to personalities, Miller is also keen to depict key trends and events, and, where appropriate, he notes them as distant mirrors of our own age. This is particularly Miller's ambition when it comes to the rampant stock market speculation of the 1920s and such corporate scandals as the Teapot Dome affair. In sum, this volume comprises an excellent chronicle of that turbulent, troubled and tempestuous decade called "the roaring '20s." Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Miller, an accomplished journalist and historian (Theodore Roosevelt: A Life; FDR: An Intimate History), turns his attention to one of the pivotal decades of U.S. history, the 1920s. Like Frederick Lewis Allen's classic Only Yesterday, this too is an engagingly readable narrative history. But unlike Allen's well-regarded account, Miller's work benefits from 70 years of scholarship on the subject. Miller is thus able to provide a perspective on race relations and labor that Allen did not. He is also able to dispel some myths of the period, such as those surrounding the nomination of Warren G. Harding at the 1920 Republican convention. Between the lines, Miller sees the turn toward conservative politics, denial of festering social and economic issues, and moral excess as parallels to our own time. Based on solid scholarship, Miller's book is an eminently readable history and an excellent addition for public and undergraduate collections. In contrast, David J. Goldberg's Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s is more academic and more focused on issues of race and ethnicity. Highly recommended.-Daniel Liestman, Florida Gulf Coast Univ. Lib. Svcs., Fort Meyers Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Total immersion in the Jazz Age, viewed through its key personalities. Flappers, the Model T, F. Scott Fitzgerald, bootleg hooch, and free love all parade by as expected, but historian/biographer Miller (Star Spangled Men, 1998, etc.) zeroes in on the White House, who got elected to it, and why, as crucial in shaping the modern America of the title. First he sketches the dark period leading up to the Roaring ’20s, a time of postwar chaos and turmoil that seems strangely contemporary. (Politicians distracted the nation from labor unrest and racial violence with the massive 1919 Red hunt, during which one man was arrested simply because "he looked like a Bolshevik.") The election of Republican Warren G. Harding in 1920 was the first in which women could vote, its results the first ever broadcast by radio, and the ensuing creep of corruption by his "Ohio gang" cronies set records of its own, culminating in the Teapot Dome oil-lease scandal. One in three Americans worked on farms in the ’20s, Miller notes, and 44 percent of the population was still counted as rural in 1930. The real story of the decade, he neatly sums up, "is one of constant struggle between city and countryside for the nation’s soul." Harding’s death in office ushered in "Silent Cal" Coolidge, whose legendary frugality and business-boosting policies (including four rounds of tax cuts that made him a model for then-teenager Ronald Reagan) created a wave of prosperity doomed to crash in the nation’s worst depression. Even Miller’s asides are gemlike, as when he mentions that Rin Tin Tin, leading movie star at mid-decade with his own limo and chauffeur, collapsed during a workout and died in the arms of blonde bombshell JeanHarlow. Spellbinding account of growing pains in an often-gullible society.
