Malcolm Cowley called 1930 a year of "doubt and even defeat" for his generation--a year of broken friendships, sudden poverty, and suicide. It was the start of their collective midlife hangover, the Great Depression. Their party over and their style suddenly repudiated, the Lost Generation faced the future armed only with the courage of despair. "Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth," observed Fitzgerald, though he suspected that his was "a generation with no second acts."52
The alienation of 1920s-era intellectuals now reached the poor and the rural. Sullen "Hoovervilles" filled with unemployed men approaching the prime of life without hope. Since jobs were scarce, priority went to household heads--narrowing women's horizons and recasting many unemployed husbands as "breadwinner" failures.
Assuming the social responsibilities of midlife, the Lost gave the 1930s their gritty quality. "Everything depends on the use to which it is put," explained Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society, warning against "poles of foolishness" and setting the moral tone for a generation now bent on doing the right thing with or without faith.53
As the 1930s unfolded, midlife veterans watched the German soldier generation they had already met in battle turn into on-the-march fascists. A few joined the call for national preparedness, including the tortoises who began overtaking the hares among the Lost elite--from Raymond Moley and his FDR "brain trust" to a new cadre of Jewish and immigrant intellectuals.
Knowing firsthand the horror of war, however, most Lost were uninspired by another call to global altruism. Opinion leaders such as Senator Gerald Nye feared that a Roosevelt-led crusade might enslave America under what Moley (by now anti-Roosevelt) called the "iron hand of the Government." Still less did they admire the New Deal. Edmund Wilson called it "the warning of a dictatorship." But Missionary leaders knew how to hit back where it hurt. While Harold Ickes ridiculed Huey Long for "halitosis of the intellect," FDR quipped that "Americans are going through a bad case of Huey Long and Father Coughlin influenza."54
In 1941, when the Lost Generation at last attained a congressional majority, Wendell Willkie and Arthur Vandenberg quashed their peers' truculence in the face of obvious danger. (The Lost attained a majority share of Congressional seats and governorships later in their lifecycle--58 years after their first birthyear--than any other American generation. On a per-cohort, or per-birthyear, basis, no other generation has been as weakly represented in national leadership posts over its lifetime.) In World War II, the Lost were the charismatic "G.I.'s generals" whose daring (George Patton), warmth (Omar Bradley), and patience (Dwight Eisenhower) energized younger troops. Fiftyish civilians administered the home front with the homely and unpretentious composure suggested in the paintings of the like-aged Norman Rockwell.55
By war's end, Truman asserted a pragmatism borne of a lifetime of "hard knocks." Doing lonely battle like Hemingway's bullfighter, Truman took "the heat" and ultimately succeeded in showing the door to two pompous old Missionaries: General MacArthur and John L. Lewis.56