Hemingway once described "the wisdom of old men" as a great fallacy: "They do not grow wise. They grow careful." Like so many of the Lost literary elite, Hemingway never reached old age himself--but his description was prescient for those who did in the 1950s and 1960s. Recalling a lifetime spent scrambling away from grand public crusades, the old Lost balked at expressions of lofty ideals and hesitated to approve of anything they considered too bold, too daring, too dangerous. Their leaders' grandest national vision was, as Eisenhower described it, to project a "respectable image of American life before the world."57
Golf-playing "Ike" took few chances abroad, enacted few new programs, and opposed any newfangled "moon rocket." America's last President to resist deficit financing, he also set a stable economic foundation for the Go-Go Sixties (for which Greatest Generation Presidents would later take credit).
Midway through only their third elected Presidential term, the Lost Generation learned they had already overstayed their welcome. In the off-year election of 1958, they were annihilated at the voting booth by younger Greatest (nearly all Democrats), and two years later Eisenhower heard himself attacked by both of the younger Presidential candidates. In return, after musing over the new cult of bigness and energy, he offered a farewell warning against what he labeled the "military-industrial complex."58
The Lost Generation was now off the stage, evidently unprepared and unfit for the challenges of the "New Frontier" (and the scientific competition with the Soviets). Perhaps their intellectual deficits were part of the reason. After 1950, when the Lost began to reach their mid-sixties, the learning gap between the elderly and nonelderly rapidly widened. In 1970, the educational disparity between all adults over 25 (who averaged 12.2 years of schooling) and adults over 65 (who averaged 8.7 years) was the largest ever measured in this century.59
Also, the Lost Generation was already dying off. From the early 1950s through the 1960s, as Lost replaced Missionaries as elders, old-age mortality rates stopped falling. Last-wave Lost males showed no gain over last-wave Missionary males in life expectancy at age 65.60
They were psychologically unprepared for "Camelot." In longitudinal surveys taken in the 1960s and 1970s, the Lost scored higher in "suspicion" and lower in "self-sentiment" than later-born Greatest at the same age.61
In any event, their exit from the public eye was sudden and complete. By the time Kennedy was taking "longer strides" in 1961, the Lost already seemed an antediluvian memory: "old whale" mayors and tobacco-chewing "Dixiecrats," fading bureau chiefs like J. Edgar Hoover and Lewis Hershey, grimy mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Truman's Pendergast hacks (squinting under the spotlight glare of Greatest inquisitors).62
A decade later, though, a few Lost Generation survivors saw their image revive. Sam Ervin emerged as a national dispenser of country justice, Claude Pepper as a protector of younger Greatest then on the brink of retirement. The Pepper-advocated expansion of elder benefits came too late for his own peers, most of whom never saw a "COLA" (cost-of-living adjustment) or a Medicare card.
Then again, few Lost had ever asked for them. In 1959, when Ethel Andrus founded the American Association of Retired Persons (which became a powerful Greatest lobby), she refused "to bewail the hardships of old age . . . nor to stress the potential political strength of older folk, nor to urge government subsidy." In 1964, after Barry Goldwater broadly hinted that he would weaken Social Security, he ran far stronger with the Lost than with any other generation. That's how the Lost preferred it: no favors for a generation that always knew, deep down, they were "bad boys."63
Hit by the Great Depression during their midlife earning years, the Lost occupied the one age bracket never targeted by a New Deal relief program. After the war, as the Greatest built and inhabited sparkling suburbs, the Lost mostly stayed put. Nearly half never lived in a house or apartment with two or more bedrooms and bathroom. In 1985, compared with a typical Greatest retiree in his late sixties, a surviving Lost elder (who was at least twenty years older) had one-third less total income, received one-fifth less in Social Security, was far less likely to have a private pension or own his own home, and was roughly twice as likely to live in poverty.64
Throughout their adult lives, the Lost have been the most Republican-leaning of generations. As elected congressmen, they were more likely than elder Missionaries had been to oppose the New Deal in the late 1930s. As voters, they chose Willkie in 1940, split roughly 50-50 for Goldwater in 1964, and gave Reagan his biggest generational proportions in 1980 and 1984. As Presidential contenders, they were mostly Republican: Alfred Landon, Wendell Willkie, Dwight Eisenhower, and "Mr. Republican" Robert Taft. Two others were third-party socialists: Norman Thomas and Henry Wallace. Their one incumbent Democrat, Harry Truman, won (barely) once; and their one other Democratic contender, Adlai Stevenson, lost (badly) twice.65
Having grown up in an age of horsecarts and Russian Tsars, they grew old feeling like aliens in their juniors' space-age world. During the 1950s, while younger Greatest "gerontologists" defined retirement as "permission to disengage," a younger Greatest playwright (Arthur Miller) let the worn-out salesman Willie Loman "fall into his grave like an old dog." Younger audiences winced, but not the Lost. As Dorothy Parker proved--"poor son of a bitch," she said when she saw Fitzgerald's body--this generation never cared much for mincing words.66