"The shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper," Fitzgerald wrote from New York City in 1926, at the height of the fun, "but all these did not really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early--they were hard and languid. . . . The city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cakes and circuses, and a new expression, 'O yeah?' summed up all the enthusiasm. . . ."42
Uptown, Lost Generation blacks streaming in from the South touched off a cultural explosion. The Lost accounted for the first black "Great Migration" out of the rural South and into the urban North. After growing up during the rise of Jim Crow and coming of age during the Wilson-era job boom, about 1.5 million black Americans emigrated out of the South from 1910 to 1930--nearly three times the prior number of black emigrants since the Civil War. While "Garveyism" held out new hopes of racial independence and Claude McKay wrote Home to Harlem, Alain Locke proclaimed the birth of "the New Negro," free of "cautious moralisms" and "the trammels of Puritanism." W.E.B. DuBois and other old Missionaries did not always approve. "The leaders of the NAACP," explains literary historian Sterling Brown, "felt that the characterization of Harlem sweet-backs and hot mammas did injustice to their propaganda and purposes."43
But music named after a black idiom for sex--"jazz"--drew crowds of white urbanites and put its stamp on an era of youthful hedonism and what-you-see-is-what-you-get cynicism. As male bootleggers built entreprenerial empires in defiance of Prohibition, blasé garçonnes such as Dorothy Parker and Zelda Fitzgerald disappointed older suffragettes. "The Jazz Age . . . had no interest at all in politics," recalled Fitzgerald.44
But if their ideas were languid, Lost Generation dancing was "jitterbug" kinetic. These 30-year-olds cherished money, leisure, and style--from chromy Art Deco and Metropolis futurism to Arabian luxury. Lost-directed movies scorched audiences with what one producer called "neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers."45
During the 1920s, the so-called "threat of the feeble-minded" turned many midlife voters against immigration and prompted the Missionary psychologist Henry Goddard to invent technical terms (moron, imbecile, and idiot) to identify every gradation of stupidity.46
The children of the Lost Generation were either the heroic, civic-minded Greatest Generation or the adaptive Silent Generation, who tended to be nurtured in an overprotective way.
By their early forties, Lost entrepreneurs were inventing supermarkets and shopping centers, soda fountains and cafeterias, frozen foods and automats--all for their faster pace of living. "Self-help" experts Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale knew how to counsel a generation that cared far more about success than expressing any feeling of self-worth. ("Win, win, win . . . but always avoid the pronoun 'I.'")47
As Fitzgerald declared that "living well is the best revenge" and the Great Gatsby pined after Daisy--"her voice is full of money"--"Kingfish" Huey Long made points with the luckless in Louisiana by declaring "every man a king" and then picking every man's pockets. Like Ty Cobb, sliding spikes high into home plate, the Lost Generation directed their most savage competitive instincts against their own peers.48
This generation of grown-up entrepreneurs resisted collective action. Despite a tight labor market, union membership declined from nearly 5 million in 1921 to under 3.5 million in 1929.49
The mood began darkening in 1927 with the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, pathetic victims of Missionary zeal. Wrote Vanzetti bitterly just before his death: "Our words--our lives--our pain: nothing!" "For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late," wrote Eugene O'Neill in The Emperor Jones. "For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks." Come 1929, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre shocked public opinion ("lousy public relations," admitted Al Capone).50
Sinclair Lewis ridiculed the "chilly enthusiasms" of elder New Humanists, but in A Preface to Morals Walter Lippmann reflected ominously on his generation's mental and ethical chaos. Fitzgerald kept his room full of calendars and clocks, ticking away toward the collective "crash" his peers could sense was coming. A few (like Joseph Kennedy) sold out just in time, but the typical youngish investor had the bad luck to buy into the market relatively late, making the bust all the more painful.51