Books: Boom to Gloom

AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE—Charles A. Beard & Mary R. Beard—Macmillan ($3.50).

Seldom have Americans been so beset by history as in the decade from 1928 to 1938. In those ten years, history rushed at them like an attack of modern high-speed tanks. Business stagnation, unemployment, hunger, despair, menaced millions hourly. Kept on the run, bewildered people had no time to take stock of the very events they were running from.

For such fugitives from history, learned, liberal Historians Charles and Mary Beard this week provided America in Midpassage (the third volume of their Rise of American Civilization), a condensed but still...