Members of the reactive Lost Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1883 and 1900; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1980.1 Their parents were either the last wave of the adaptive Progressive Generation or the first wave of the idealist Missionary Generation, who nurtured in a remarkably underprotective way.
The Lost Generation (of the Nomad archtype in the Great Power Saeculum, or Cycle) grew up as underprotected and criticized youths during a spiritual awakening (the Missionary Awakening of the late Nineteenth Century), matured into risk-taking, alienated rising adults, mellowed into pragmatic midlife leaders during a secular crisis (the Great Depression and World War II), and received respect (but little influence) as reclusive, conservative elders. This generation grew up amid urban blight, unregulated drug use, child sweat shops, and massive immigration. Their independent, streetwise attitude lent them a bad-kid reputation. After coming of age as flaming youth, doughboys, and flappers, they were alienated by World War I, whose homecoming turned sour. Their young-adult novelists, barnstormers, gangsters, sports stars, and film celebrities gave the roar to the 1920s. The Great Depression hit them in midlife, at the peak of their careers. The buck stopped with the pugnacious battlefield and home-front managers of a hot war and their frugal and straight-talking leaders of a new cold one. As elders, they paid high taxes to support their world-conquering juniors, while asking little for themselves.2
There died a myriad . . .That is how the thirtyish Ezra Pound described what Missionaries liked to call America's "Crusade for Democracy."3
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
World War I was cruel enough to soldiers in the trenches, but the homecoming was humiliating. In 1919 and 1920, their next-elders meted out the Volstead Act to purge them of liquor, "Red Scare" Palmer Raids to purge them of radicals, and John Sumner's Society for the Suppression of Vice to purge them of pornography. "The season 'tis, my lovely lambs,/ of Sumner Volstead Christ and Co.," lampooned 26-year-old e.e. cummings. "Down with the middle-aged!" joined in John Dos Passos, age 24. These literati would soon know themselves as the Lost Generation, scrambling survivors in a world of pomposity and danger.4
As the 1920s dawned, some were already getting into trouble--like John Reed, dying an unrepentant "Red" in Moscow, or Harry Truman, whose clothing store was going bust. But amid this sea of alienation, the post-Armistice years dealt lucky draws to a few who were "Puttin' on the Ritz": Babe Ruth (blasting home runs for the Yankees); "Scarface" Al Capone (setting up "business" in Chicago); Irving Berlin (scavenging in Tin Pan Alley); and young writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill (striking it rich with blockbuster hits). Embittered 30-year-olds fought ideology with pleasure, Babbittry with binges, moral crusades with bathtub gin and opulent sex. "America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history," bubbled Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, setting the tone for the "Roaring Twenties."5
Fitzgerald described his generation as at once "prewar and postwar." With a rowdy childhood and a tired old age as bookends, the Lost lifecycle was divided roughly in thirds by two world wars. ("In the meantime, in between time, Ain't We Got Fun?")6
The story began with streetwise kids who grew up fast--too late to join in the spiritual high of their next-elders, but fast enough to stay one step ahead of Missionary efforts to clean them up later on. They were, wrote Fitzgerald, "a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." So they lashed back at "the lies of old men" and the finger-wagging of grim dowagers.7
They led America through a dazzling decade, waiting for Hemingway's bell to toll for them. When it did--with the stock crash and Depression--they fell back exhausted at first, and then stepped forward as clear-eyed managers for their elders and as selfless protectors of their juniors. The Great Depression dealt them its cruelist blow, robbing them of what should have been their peak income years and ushering in public action that ran against their grain.8
But lacking confidence in their own moral judgments, the Lost joined the national effort, lending what they liked to call "brains"--and what was, in effect, a keen realism about human nature. After providing outstanding generalship in World War II, gaining top command by the war's end, the Lost mellowed into a cautious old age. Their elder survivors presided as social anchors over an era of strengthening families, warm nurture of the young, and sharply improving economic fortunes for the generations behind them.
"Mama, I have been a bad boy. All my life I have been a bad boy," murmured author Thomas Wolfe just before his death, a burned-out wreck at age 38, after a lifetime of wildness. "I was a bad kid," echoed Babe Ruth, the carousing and hard-drinking Bambino. "I had a rotten start." Such confessions were, in effect, the credo of a demeaned generation. When they were children, the media were obsessed with the problem of "bad boys." Popular magazines featured stories such as "Bad Boy of the Streets" and "Making Good Citizens out of Bad Boys." From the decade before to the decade after 1900, while city-dwellers fretted over a rising tide of street crime, the number of published articles on "juvenile delinquency" rose tenfold.9
By World War I, Missionaries shifted their public attention to the vices of young adults--their lust, drunkenness, violence, and "Black Sox" corruptibility. The taint followed them through what Frederick Lewis Allen would later call "the Decade of Bad Manners," and era of gangsters, flappers, expatriates, and real-estate swindlers. By the late 1920s, elders looked upon the Lost as a social time bomb threatening to blow America to pieces. Missionary General MacArthur ran his cavalry over their unemployed veterans' march on Washington to public applause--as if their joblessness (and the crash) had somehow been their fault. When a new Missionary President promised a few months later to purge "a generation of self-seekers" from "the temple of our civilization," Americans of all ages knew who those "money changes" were.10
My candle burns at both ends;Edna St. Vincent Millay had earlier predicted. She was right. By Pearl Harbor, virtually every one of their zany cultural heroes of the 1920s and 1930s had hit "The Crack-up," as Fitzgerald named one of his last essays. The glittery Lost veneer evaporated, but the "bad boy" survivalism lingered on--with "Blood and Guts" Patton and "Give 'Em Hell" Truman.11
It will not last the night,
Yet so did the stigma of selfishness and unreason. Scarred by their youthful encounters with next-elder moralists, many midlife Lost became anti--New Dealers and isolationists. ("The war fever is on. New uniforms for soldiers were designed," warned radio star Father Charles Coughlin. "Once more, we must begin hating the 'Hun' and bleeding for Great Britain and France.") Roosevelt, in turn, called them "Copperheads" and in 1944 got his most rousing campaign response by asking entire crowds to join a chant against three Lost isolationists: "MARTIN, BARTON-- AND FISH!"12
Condemning defeatist "Tories" such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish called his peers The Irresponsibles, while soon after D-Day the elder Henry Stimson pointedly reminded America that "cynicism is the only mortal sin."13
Daunted once again, the Lost entered postwar elderhood without fanfare, making way gracefully for an aggressive new batch of scoutlike G.I.s. Still accepting blame in old age, the Lost preserved their pride by refusing to ask for favors. They repeatedly pulled the lever for Republicans who promised not to help them in the 1950s and 1960s, feeling inferior to richer and smarter juniors who lacked their fatalism about life.
Gertrude Stein, a sympathetic Missionary, told Hemingway that his was a "lost" generation. He adopted her name at the beginning of The Sun Also Rises, a 1926 novel that popularized the European wanderings of Americans his age and persuaded readers that "the Great War" had wasted those whom Fitzgerald called All the Sad Young Men. True, the horrors of mustard gas and trenchfoot catalyzed their generational identity. (The term lost generation had a literal application for the young men of Europe who died in the trenches; European countries emerged from the war with a marked scarcity of males. American Doughboys, by comparison, got off fairly easy.) But years before Eddie Rickenbacker "barnstormed" the Siegfried Line, Missionary elders were already finding plenty they didn't like in these smooth, undereducated, daredevil kids.14
In 1911, Cornelia Comer spoke for many of her prim fortyish peers when she wrote an Atlantic Monthly "Letter to the Rising Generation," accusing them of "mental rickets and curvature of the soul," of a "culte du moi," and of growing up "painfully commercialized even in their school days." While admitting that "you are innocent victims of a good many haphazard educational experiments" that "have run amuck for the last twenty-five years," Comer asked: "What excuse have you, anyhow, for turning out flimsy, shallow, amusement-seeking creatures . . . ?"15
And already the young Lost were taking the message to heart--while groping for a voice of their own. Responding to Comer, 25-year-old Randolph Bourne explained simply that his generation was the logical "reaction" to universal parental neglect. "The modern child from the age of ten is almost his own 'boss,'" he observed, and while "it is true that we do not fuss and fume about our souls . . . we have retained from childhood the propensity to see through things, and to tell the truth with startling frankness."16
To the Lost, the greatest human need was a clear head. Existence before essence. Coming of age as America's first existential generation, they often returned to those stark nihilisms which seemed to make sense out of the chaotic world of their childhood: surrealism, Dadaism, expressionism, futurism, Freudian relativism--all overshadowed by pessimistic theories of social entropy and decline. They couldn't fathom their next-elder Missionaries, so busy trying to find meaning in life. They thought they knew better--that behind those loudly trumpeted principles, there was no meaning. "What is moral is what you feel good after," declared Hemingway, "and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."17
Few of the Lost made effective reformers or preachers. Instead, they became the most stunningly original generation of artists and writers in American history. They never stopped using what they called their "revolution of the word" to pour ice-water realism on their generational neighbors and to express their incorrigible aversion to grandiosity. To "Kingdom of God" Missionaries, the young Hemingway mockingly announced in 1933, "Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name." To "Great Society" Greatest G.I.s, the eightyish Henry Miller quipped in 1974: "It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons."18
From Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mae West to Jimmy Cagney, Paul Tillich to Reinhold Niebuhr, the Lost never expected that anyone would look to them for greatness or goodness. All they asked was the chance to remind their elders and juniors how life really worked, and the opportunity to do what needed doing--quickly, effectively--when nobody else would stoop to the task. Meanwhile, they were content to bear the blame so long as public-spirited crusaders kept their distance. They would make their own amends for their own shortcomings.
Most of today's 70-year-olds recall as children the presence of at least one Lost parent, probably the one who embraced them fondly if too frequently during the dark years of the Great Depression. Most of today's 50-year-olds recall as children at least one reclusive Lost grandparent, or maybe just that foreign-born "granny" down the street who scowled (with a twinkle in her eye) whenever a baseball rolled across her yard. You couldn't pull the wool over their eyes.
Nor could you make them forget a lifetime brimming with adventure: Ellis Island and sweatshops, sleek Pierce-Arrows and the Battle of the Marne, speakeasies and hangovers, a giddy bull market and a global crash, soup lines and dust-bowl caravans. They hid their early years from those nice-looking, TV-age youngsters they got to know in their old age--most assuredly because they didn't want any kid to try reliving them.19
Here is a table of contents for a deeper exploration of the Lost Generation's lifecycle:
Birthyears for the Lost Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation