"We have in our unregenerate youth . . . been forced to become realists," declared 23-year-old John Carter shortly after the Armistice. "At 17 we were disillusioned and weary," recalled Malcolm Cowley. The Lost Generation came of age hearing sixtyish Progressives describe how civilization must inexorably climb to higher levels of Edwardian refinement and control, but a series of disasters that no one could explain (including the San Francisco earthquake and the sinking of the Titanic) made them wonder.31
They watched Missionaries rise to power pontificating about a society whose seamy and rapacious underside--from sweatshop children and young prostitutes to widespread drug abuse and gang violence--only teenagers could see with clarity. Most 20-year-olds turned a deaf ear toward older, campus-touring radicals such as Jack London and Upton Sinclair. "College students are more conservative than their professors because they too often regard college as a back door to big business," observed one disappointed student organizer.32
The Lost were America's first generation to grow up amid widespread adult-approved narcotics use. In 1900, while opium and chloral hydrate consumption was still rising, many other newly synthesized and unregulated drugs were entering the marketplace, including paraldehyde, sulphonal, veronal, and heroin. Cocain or coca--a wondrous midlife discovery to Sigmund Freud, "Sherlock Holmes," and many like-aged Progressives in America--was routinely sold in cough syrup, lozenges, and (until 1904) Coca-Cola. Yet when the Missionaries rose to power on the eve of World War I, the Lost took most of the blame for drug-related violence and crime.33
At age 20 (in 1910), the Lost were 50 percent more suicide-prone than last-wave Missionaries had been at age 20 (in 1900). From childhood on, moreover, the Lost have been more suicide-prone than the next three generations--Greatest, Silent, and Boom--at every phase of life.34
Well before World War I, the first signs of alienation had surfaced. In 1908, a youthful Van Wyck Brooks wrote Wine of the Puritans, his title popularizing a word that fresh Ivy League graduates (in Seven Arts) would soon paste on their next-elders. In 1913, magazines proclaimed "Sex O'Clock in America," announcing what soon became known as a "revolution in morals." Then came the "Flapper of 1915," who (reported Mencken) "has forgotten how to simper; she seldom blushes; and it is impossible to shock her."35
These youth crosscurrents came together in World War I--a war they would call "the sausage machine," the ultimate evidence of their elders' colossal blindness. When Lost young men took the first "I.Q." tests during World War I, the results showed that half the draftees had a "mental age" of under 12, and those, no doubt, were the ones ground into sausage. Literati such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cowley, and cummings, on the other hand, volunteered as ambulance drivers and were immediate eyewitnesses to and reporters of the worst carnage. "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates," wrote Hemingway.36
The great influenza of 1918, the deadliest epidemic in American history (and fatal mostly to young adults), killed about 250,000 Lost--five times the number who died in combat during World War I. Decades later, the Lost's unusually high rate of Parkinson's disease in old age has often been attributed to this flu (or, some think, to their early contact with toxic industrial chemicals).37
After the war, while many young intellectuals lingered in Paris ("I prefer to starve where the food is good," chided Virgil Thompson), most doughboys returned home to a nation firmly in Missionary control. There, wrote Fitzgerald, "men of fifty had the gall" to tell veterans of thirty how to behave. The Lost Generation "Flaming Youth" instinctively bucked and turned toward pleasure-seeking.38
In 1915, Bruce Barton penned A Young Man's Jesus, almost a parody of Missionary evangelism, urging "those of us who are this side of thirty-five to unite and take back our Jesus, . . . a young man glowing with physical strength and the joy of living" and possessing "our bounding pulses, our hot desires." Soon after the war, Sinclair Lewis scored two more salvos in Main Street and Elmer Gantry.39
Triggering the "roar" of the Twenties, the Lost Generation prompted Missionaries to roar back about the "Problem of the Younger Generation." The Lost knew they were bad, yet refused to take all the heat. In his 1920 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "'These Wild Young People' By One of Them," John Carter observed that "magazines have been crowded with pessimistic descriptions of the younger generation"--but added, "the older generation has certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us."40
From 1900 to 1920, while the Lost came of age, America's homicide rate rose by 700 percent. Just before it peaked in the early 1930s, Lost street hoodlums had matured into America's biggest-ever crime kingpins: Al Capone, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, and Legs Diamond. The Lost coined the word underworld, as well as gangster, mobster, racketeer, moll, and getaway car. Equally inventive with the lexicon of music and sex, they coined get hep, jive, cat, cathouse, floozy, party girl, trick, sugar daddy, boy-crazy, hot pants, and "fast" or "loose" woman.41