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 "sheik," and the moral and stylistic vagaries of the "flapper" and the "drug-store cowboy." "Were young people really so wild?" present-day students ask their parents and teachers. "Was there really a Younger Generation problem?" The answers to such inquiries must of necessity be "yes" and "no"--"Yes" because the business of growing up is always accompanied by a Younger Generation Problem; "no" because what seemed so wild, irresponsible, and immoral in social behavior at the time can now be seen in perspective as being something considerably less sensational than the degeneration of our jazz mad 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 United 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 large-scale 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 "wanted to get into the fun before the whole thing turned belly up." For military service, in 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 "intellectuals" in the ambulance corps, others in the infantry, merchant marine, or 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 "go home and wait for the draft," but since no self-respecting person 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 "made the world safe for democracy." And, as if home town conditions were not enough, the returning veteran 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 "give" and, after a short period of bitter resentment, it "gave" in the form of a complete overthrow of genteel standards of 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 "Puritanical" gentility, should flock to the traditional artistic center (where living was 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 "flaming youth", it was Greenwich Village that fanned the flames. "Bohemian" living became a fad. Each town had its "fast" set which prided itself on its unconventionality, although 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 "wild party" had become as 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, "thirty intellectuals" under the editorship of J. Harold Stearns, was the 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 "they do things better." By the time Civilization in the United States was published (1921), most of its contributors had taken their own advice and were living 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 "lost generation". In no sense a movement in itself, the "lost generation" 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, Harold Stearns, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, 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 "lost generation" was never lost. It was shocked, uprooted for a time, bitter, critical, rebellious, iconoclastic, experimental, often absurd, more often misdirected- but never "lost." A decade that produced, in addition to the writers listed above, such figures as Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzserald, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benét, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, and innumerable others could never be written off as sterile ,even by itself in a moment of self-pity. The intellectuals of the Twenties, the "sad young men," as F. Scot Fitzserald called them, cursed their luck but didn't die; escaped but voluntarily returned; flayed the Babbitts but loved their country, and in so doing gave the nation the liveliest, freshest, most stimulating writing in its literary experience.

(from Rhetoric and Literature by P. Joseph Canavan)

NOTES

1. Horton and Edwards: joint authors of the book, Backgrounds of American Literary Thought (1967), from which this piece is taken.

2. The Sad Young Men: a term created by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his book All the Sad Young Men to describe the disillusioned post-World War I younger generation, especially the young writers who lived as expatriates in west Europe for a short time. They were also called the "lost generation" by Gertrude Stein.

3. flask-toting: always carrying a small flask filled with whisky or other strong liquor

4. crash of the world economic structure: referring to the Great Depression in U.S. history, the severe economic crisis supposedly precipitated by the U. S. stock-market crash of 1929. The American depression produced severe effects abroad, especially in Europe.

5. Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt (1859-1919), 26th President of the United States (1901-- 09). He drew considerable criticism for his glorification of military strength and his patriotic fervor. After the outbreak of World War I he attacked Wilson' s neutrality policy; and when the United States entered the war he pleaded vainly to be allowed to raise and command a volunteer force.

6. Dos Passos: John Dos Passos (1896--1970), American novelist. Publications: Three Soldiers; Manhattan Transfer; U. S. A. ; District of Columbia, etc.

7. turn belly up: to finish, to end; a term borrowed from fishing. A fish that floats belly up is dead.

8. the strife of 1861--65: the Civil War between the Northern (Federal) States and Southern (Confederate) States, which resulted in victory for the former and the abolition of slavery

9. fracas with Spain in 1898: the Spanish-American War (1898), a brief conflict between Spain and the United States arising out of Spanish policies in Cuba. It was, to a large degree, brought about by the efforts of U. S. expansionists. On May 7, a U. S. squadron under George Dewey sailed into the harbor of Manila, Philippine Islands, and in a few hours thoroughly defeated the Spanish fleet there.

10. San Juan Hill: in East Cuba, near the city of Santiago de Cuba. It was the scene (July, 1898) of a battle in the Spanish-American war, in which Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders took part.

11. National Guard: U. S. militia. In peace time the National Guard is placed under state jurisdiction and can be used by governors to quell local disturbances. In times of war or other emergencies, the National Guard is absorbed into the active service of the United States and the President is commander-in-chief.

12. Fourth-of-duly: U. S. Independence Day, commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Traditionally, it has been celebrated with the firing of guns and fireworks, parades, open-air meetings, and patriotic speeches.

13. Gopher Prairies: backward, undeveloped areas of the prairies

14. "made the world safe for democracy": The exact quotation from Woodrow Wilson' s Address to Congress (April 2, 1917) is, "The world must be made safe for democracy."

15. Napoleonic cynicism: As conqueror, Napoleon cynically rearranged the whole map of Europe. The victorious allies of World War I did the same at Versailles.

16. country club class: people rich enough to join the country clubs

17. Model T: one of the early Ford motorcars

18. Dutch Colonial home: spacious houses following the style of Dutch Colonial architecture

19. Floral Heights: referring, perhaps, to Floral Park on Long Island, a residential suburb of New York. It has a commercial flower industry.

20. Rotary (International): organization of business and professional men, founded (1905) by Paul Percy Harris, a Chicago lawyer. Besides Rotary clubs in the United States, other branches were established in many countries throughout the world. The name was derived from the original custom of meeting in rotation at the members' places of business.

21. Mumford: Lewis Mumford (1895--1990), American social philosopher. Among his books are: Technics and Civilization; The Condition of Man, and The City in History.

22. Pound: Ezra Pound (1885--1972), American poet, critic, and translator; An extremely important influence in the shaping of 20th century poetry, he was one of the most famous and controversial literary figures of this century-- praised as a subtle and complex modern poet, dismissed as a naive egotist and pedant, condemned as a traitor and reactionary. During World War Ⅱ he broadcast Fascist propaganda to the United States for the Italians and was indicted for treason. Pound's major works are: Homage to Sextus Propertius; Hugh Selw3rn Manberley, and the Cantos.

23. Anderson: Sherwood Anderson (1876--1941), American novelist and short story writer, best known for his novel Wines burg, Ohio

24. Josephson: Matthew Josephson (1899-- ), New York author, known for a time as a member of the post-war expatriate group. Some of his publications include Zola and His Time ; Portrait of the Artist as American ; The Robber Barons, etc.

25. Eliot: T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), English poet and critic. One of the most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century, T. S. Eliot won the 1948 Nobel Prize in literature. Some of his important works include: The Waste-land; Murder in the Cathedral ; The Sacred Wood, etc.

26. Cummings: E. E. Cummings (1894-1962), American poet. Among his 15 volumes of poetry are: Tulips and Chimneys; Is 5, and 95 Poems.

27. Cowley: Malcolm Cowley (1898-- ), American critic and poet. He lived abroad in the 1920s and knew many writers of the "lost generation", about whom he wrote in Exile' s Return and Second Flowering.

28. Antibes: a seaside resort on the French Riviera favored by writers and artists

29. Left Bank: left bank of the River Seine in Paris, famous for its open-air book stalls. The Latin quarter, the haunt of university students and teachers, is also on the left bank.

30. O'Neill: Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), American dramatist. Widely acknowledged as America's greatest playwright, O' Neill brought to the U. S. stage its first serious native drama. Among his famous plays are: Beyond the Horizon; The Emperor Jones; Desire Under the Elms; the Iceman Cometh, etc.

31. Millay: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), American poet. One of the most popular poets of her era, Millay was admired as much for the bohemian freedom of her youthful life style as for her verse. Among her poems are: Renascence ; A Few Figs from Thistles ; The Ballad of the Harp Weaver ; Fatal Interview, etc.

32. Fitzgerald: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), American novelist and short-story writer. Fitzgerald is considered the literary spokesman of the "jazz age"-- the decade of the 1920s. Among his famous works are: This Side of Paradise; The Beautiful and Damned; The Great Gatsby; Tales of the Jazz Age ; All the Sad Young Men, etc.

33. Faulkner: William Faulkner (1897-1962), American novelist. As a writer Faulkner's primary concern was to probe his own region, the deep south. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature. His best-known novels are: The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying ; Sanctuary ; A Fable, etc.

34. Lewis: Sinclair Lewis (1895-1951), American novelist. Probably the greatest satirist of his era, Lewis wrote novels that present a devastating picture of middle-class American life in the 1920s. In 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His best-known novels are:Main Street ; Babbit ; Arrowsrnith ; It Can't Happen Here, etc.

35. Benrt: Stephen Vincent Benrt (1898-1943), American poet and author. Publications: Heaven and Earth ; John Brown's Body; Ballads and Poems, etc.

36. Crane: Hart Crane (1899--1932), American poet. He published only two volumes of poetry, White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), during his lifetime, but those works established Crane as one of the most originaland vital American poets of the 20th century.

37. Wolfe: Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), American novelist. His well known novels are: Of Time and the River ; The Web and the Rock, and You Can't Go Home Again.