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The Sad Young Men
Rod W. Horton and Herbert W.
Edwards
1 No aspect of
life in the Twenties has been more commented upon
and
sensationally romanticized than the
so-called Revolt of the Younger Generation.
The slightest mention of the decade
brings nostalgic recollections to the middle-aged
and curious questionings by the young:
memories of the deliciously illicit thrill of the
first visit to a speakeasy, of the
brave denunciation of Puritan morality, and of the
fashionable experimentations in amour
in the parked sedan on a country road; questions
about the naughty, jazzy parties, the
flask-toting
vagaries of the
wild?
Generation
problem?
Generation Problem;
social behavior at the time can now be
seen in perspective as being something
considerably less sensational than the
degenerauon of our jazzmad youth.
2 Actually, the revolt of
the young people was a logical outcome of
conditions in
the age: First of all, it
must be remembered that the rebellion was not
confined to the
Unit- ed States, but
affected the entire Western world as a result of
the aftermath of the
first serious war
in a century. Second, in the United States it was
reluctantly realized by
some-
subconsciously if not openly -- that our country
was no longer isolated in either
politics or tradition and that we had
reached an international stature that would
forever
prevent us from retreating
behind the artificial walls of a provincial
morality or the
geographical protection
of our two bordering oceans.
3 The rejection of
Victorian gentility was, in any case, inevitable.
The booming of
American industry, with
its gigantic, roaring factories, its corporate
impersonality, and
its largescale
aggressiveness, no longer left any room for the
code of polite behavior and
well-bred
morality fashioned in a quieter and less
competitive age. War or no war, as the
generations passed, it became
increasingly difficult for our young people to
accept
standards of behavior that bore
no relationship to the bustling business medium in
which
they were expected to battle for
success. The war acted merely as a catalytic agent
in
this breakdown of the Victorian
social structure, and by precipitating our young
people
into a pattern of mass murder it
released their inhibited violent energies which,
after the
shooting was over, were
turned in both Europe and America to the
destruction of an
obsolescent
nineteenth-century society.
4 Thus in a changing world
youth was faced with the challenge of bringing our
mores up to date. But at the same time
it was tempted, in America at least, to escape its
responsibilities and retreat behind an
air of naughty alcoholic sophistication and a pose
of Bohemian immorality. The faddishness
, the wild spending of money on transitory
pleasures and momentary novelties , the
hectic air of gaiety, the experimentation in
sensation -- sex, drugs, alcohol,
perversions -- were all part of the pattern of
escape, an
escape made possible by a
general prosperity and a post-war fatigue with
politics,
economic restrictions, and
international responsibilities. Prohibition
afforded the young
the additional
opportunity of making their pleasures illicit ,
and the much-publicized
orgies and
defiant manifestoes of the intellectuals crowding
into Greenwich Village
gave them a
pattern and a philosophic defense for their
escapism. And like most escapist
sprees, this one lasted until the money
ran out, until the crash of the world economic
structure at the end of the decade
called the party to a halt and forced the revelers
to
sober up and face the problems of
the new age.
5
The rebellion started with World War I. The
prolonged stalemate of 1915 -- 1916,
the increasing insolence of Germany
toward the United States, and our official
reluctance to declare our status as a
belligerent were intolerable to many of our
idealistic
citizens, and with typical
American adventurousness enhanced somewhat by the
strenuous
jingoism of Theodore Roosevelt, our
young men began to enlist under
foreign
flags. In the words of Joe Williams, in John Dos
Passos' U. S. A., they
to get into the
fun before the whole thing turned belly
up.
1916-- 1917, was still a romantic
occupation. The young men of college age in 1917
knew nothing of modern warfare. The
strife of 1861 --1865 had popularly become, in
motion picture and story, a magnolia-
scented soap opera, while the one hundred-days'
fracas with Spain in 1898 had dissolved
into a one-sided victory at Manila and a
cinematic charge up San Juan Hill.
Furthermore, there were enough high school
assembly orators proclaiming the
character-forming force of the strenuous life to
convince more than enough otherwise
sensible boys that service in the European
conflict
would be of great personal
value, in addition to being idealistic and
exciting.
Accordingly, they began to
join the various armies in increasing numbers, the
wherever else they could
find a place. Those who were reluctant to serve in
a foreign
army talked excitedly about
Preparedness, occasionally considered joining the
National
Guard, and rushed to enlist
when we finally did enter the conflict. So
tremendous was
the storming of
recruitment centers that harassed sergeants
actually pleaded with
volunteers to
wanted to suffer the disgrace of being
drafted, the enlistment craze continued unabated.
6 Naturally,
the spirit of carnival and the enthusiasm for high
military adventure
were soon dissipated
once the eager young men had received a good taste
of twentieth-
century warfare. To their
lasting glory, they fought with distinction, but
it was a much
altered group of soldiers
who returned from the battlefields in 1919.
Especially was this
true of the college
contingent, whose idealism had led them to enlist
early and who had
generally seen a
considerable amount of action. To them, it was
bitter to return to a
home town
virtually untouched by the conflict, where
citizens still talked with the naive
Fourth-of-duly bombast they themselves
had been guilty of two or three years earlier. It
was even more bitter to find that their
old jobs had been taken by the stay-at-homes, that
business was suffering a recession that
prevented the opening up of new jobs, and that
veterans were considered problem
children and less desirable than non-veterans for
whatever business opportunities that
did exist. Their very homes were often
uncomfortable to them; they had
outgrown town and families and had developed a
sudden bewildering world-weariness
which neither they nor their relatives could
understand. Their energies had been
whipped up and their naivete destroyed by the war
and now, in sleepy Gopher Prairies all
over the country, they were being asked to curb
those energies and resume the pose of
self-deceiving Victorian innocence that they now
felt to be as outmoded as the notion
that their fighting had
democracy.
also had to face
the sodden, Napoleonic cynicism of Versailles, the
hypocritical
do-goodism of Prohibition,
and the smug patriotism of the war profiteers.
Something in
the tension-ridden youth
of America had to
resentment, it
behavior.
7 Greenwich Village set the
pattern. Since the Seven-ties a dwelling place for
artists and writers who settled there
because living was cheap, the village had long
enjoyed a dubious reputation for
Bohemianism and eccentricity. It had also harbored
enough major writers, especially in the
decade before World War I, to support its claim
to being the intellectual center of the
nation. After the war, it was only natural that
hopeful young writers, their minds and
pens inflamed against war, Babbittry, and
still cheap in 1919) to pour
out their new-found creative strength, to tear
down the old
world, to flout the
morality of their grandfathers, and to give all to
art, love, and
sensation.
8
Soon they found their imitators among the non-
intellectuals. As it became more
and
more fashionable throughout the country for young
persons to defy the law and the
conventions and to add their own little
matchsticks to the conflagration of
youth
fad. Each town had its
in reality this self-conscious
unconventionality was rapidly becoming a standard
feature
of the country club class --
and its less affluent imitators --throughout the
nation. Before
long the movement had
be-come officially recognized by the pulpit (which
denounced
it), by the movies and
magazines (which made it attractively naughty
while pretending
to denounce it), and
by advertising (which obliquely encouraged it by
'selling everything
from cigarettes to
automobiles with the implied promise that their
owners would be
rendered sexually
irresistible). Younger brothers and sisters of the
war generation, who
had been playing
with marbles and dolls during the battles of
Belleau Wood and
Chateau-Thierry, and
who had suffered no real disillusionment or sense
of loss, now
began to imitate the
manners of their elders and play with the toys of
vulgar rebellion.
Their parents were
shocked, but before long they found themselves and
their friends
adopting the new gaiety.
By the middle of the decade, the
commonplace a factor in American life
as the flapper, the Model T, or the Dutch
Colonial home in Floral Heights.
9 Meanwhile,
the true intellectuals were far from flattered.
What they had wanted
was an America
more sensitive to art and culture, less avid for
material gain, and less
susceptible to
standardization. Instead, their ideas had been
generally ignored, while
their behavior
had contributed to that standardization by
furnishing a pattern of
Bohemianism
that had become as conventionalized as a Rotary
luncheon. As a result,
their
dissatisfaction with their native country, already
acute upon their return from the
war,
now became even more intolerable. Flaming
diatribes poured from their pens
denouncing the materialism and what
they considered to be the cultural boobery of our
society. An important book rather
grandiosely entitled Civilization in the United
States,
written by
rallying
point of sensitive persons disgusted with America.
The burden of the volume
was that the
best minds in the country were being ignored, that
art was unappreciated,
and that big
business had corrupted everything. Journalism was
a mere adjunct to
moneymaking, politics
were corrupt and filled with incompetents and
crooks, and
American family life so
devoted to making money and keeping up with the
Joneses that
it had become joyless,
patterned, hypocritical, and sexually inadequate.
These defects
would disappear if only
creative art were allowed to show the way to
better things, but
since the country
was blind and deaf to everything save the glint
and ring of the dollar,
there was
little remedy for the sensitive mind but to
emigrate to Europe where
things
better.
of its contributors had taken
their own advice and were Wing abroad, and many
more of
the artistic and would-be
artistic had followed suit.
10 It was in their defiant,
but generally short-lived, European expatriation
that our
leading writers of the
Twenties learned to think of themselves, in the
words of Gertrude
Stein, as the
attitude nevertheless acted as a common
denominator of the writing of the times. The
war and the cynical power politics of
Versailles had convinced these young men and
women that spirituality was dead; they
felt as stunned as John Andrews, the defeated
aesthete In Dos Passos' Three Soldiers,
as rootless as Hemingway's wandering
alcoholics in The Sun Also Rises.
Besides Stein, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, there
were Lewis Mumford, Ezra Pound,
Sherwood Anderson, Matthew Josephson, d. Harold
Stearns, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cumminss,
Malcolm Cowley, and many other novelists,
dramatists, poets, and critics who
tried to find their souls in the Antibes and on
the Left
Bank, who directed sad and
bitter blasts at their native land and who, almost
to a man,
drifted back within a few
years out of sheer homesickness, to take up
residence on
coastal islands and in New
England farmhouses and to produce works ripened by
the
tempering of an older, more
sophisticated society.
11 For actually the
time, bitter, critical, rebellious,
iconoclastic, experimental, often absurd, more
often
misdirected- but never
above, such fisures as Eugene O'Neill,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzserald,
William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis,
Stephen Vincent Bené
t, Hart Crane,
Thomas Wolfe,
and innumerableothers
could never be written off as sterile ,even by
itself in a moment
of self-pity. The
intellectuals of the Twenties, the
called them, cursed their luck but
didn't die; escaped but voluntarily returned;
flayed the
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