Lost Generation
The Lost Generation was the demographic cohort that reached early adulthood in the decade before, or during, World War I, and preceded the Greatest Generation. The cohort is generally defined as people born from 1883 to 1900, coming of age in either the 1900s or the 1910s, and were the first generation to mature in the 20th century. The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation." "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early interwar period.
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Western members of the Lost Generation grew up in societies that were more literate, consumerist, and media-saturated than ever before, but which also tended to maintain strictly conservative social values. Young men of the cohort were mobilized on a mass scale for World War I, a conflict that was often seen as the defining moment of their age group's lifespan. Young women also contributed to and were affected by the war, and in its aftermath gained greater freedoms politically and in other areas of life. The Lost Generation was also heavily vulnerable to the Spanish flu pandemic and became the driving force behind many cultural changes, particularly in major cities during what became known as the Roaring Twenties.
Later in their midlife, they experienced the economic effects of the Great Depression and often saw their own sons leave for the battlefields of World War II. In the developed world, they tended to reach retirement and average life expectancy during the decades after the conflict, but some significantly outlived the norm. The Lost Generation became completely ancestral when the last surviving person who was known to have been born in the Lost Generation or during the 19th century, Nabi Tajima, died in 2018 at age 117.
Two US Presidents were members of this generation: Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Terminology
The first named generation, the term "Lost Generation" is used for the young people who came of age around the time of World War I. In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914", for the year World War I began. In France, they were sometimes called the Génération du feu, the "fire generation". In the United Kingdom, the term was originally used for those who died in the war, and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite. Many felt that "the flower of youth and the best manhood of the peoples been mowed down", for example, such notable casualties as the poets Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen, composer George Butterworth, and physicist Henry Moseley.Date and age range definitions
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Lost Generation as the cohort born from 1883 to 1900, who came of age during World War I and the Roaring Twenties.Characteristics
As children and adolescents
Family life and upbringing
When the Lost Generation was growing up, the ideal family arrangement was generally seen as the man of the house being the breadwinner and primary authority figure while his wife dedicated herself to caring for the home and children. Most, even less well-off, married couples attempted to conform to this ideal. It was common for family members of three different generations to share a home. Wealthier households also tended to include domestic servants, though their numbers would have varied from a single maid to a large team depending on how well-off the family was.Public concern for the welfare of children was intensifying by the later 19th century with laws being passed and societies formed to prevent their abuse. The state increasingly gained the legal right to intervene in private homes and family life to protect minors from harm. However, beating children for misbehaviour was not only common but viewed as the duty of a responsible caregiver.
Health and living conditions
Sewer systems designed to remove human waste from urban areas had become widespread in industrial cities by the late 19th century, helping to reduce the spread of diseases such as cholera. Legal standards for the quality of drinking water also began to be introduced. However, the introduction of electricity was slower, and during the formative years of the Lost Generation gas lights and candles were still the most common form of lighting.Though statistics on child mortality dating back to the beginning of the Lost Generation's lifespan are limited, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that in 1900 one in ten American infants died before their first birthday. Figures for the United Kingdom state that during the final years of the 19th century, mortality in the first five years of childhood was plateauing at a little under one in every four births. At around one in three in 1800, the early childhood mortality rate had declined overall throughout the next hundred years but would fall most sharply during the first half of the 20th century, reaching less than one in twenty by 1950. This meant that members of the Lost Generation were somewhat less likely to die at a very early age than their parents and grandparents, but were significantly more likely to do so than children born even a few decades later.
Literacy and education
in factories had begun to appear from around 1840 onwards and by the end of the 19th century, compulsory education had been introduced throughout much of the Western world for at least a few years of childhood. By 1900, levels of illiteracy had fallen to less than 11% in the United States, around 3% in Great Britain, and only 1% in Germany. However, the problems of illiteracy and lack of school provision or attendance were felt more acutely in parts of Eastern and Southern Europe.Schools of this time period tended to emphasise strict discipline, expecting pupils to memorize information by rote. To help deal with teacher shortages, older students were often used to help supervise and educate their younger peers. Dividing children into classes based on age became more common as schools grew.
However, while elementary schooling was becoming increasingly accessible for Western children going into the 20th century, secondary education was still much more of a luxury. Only 11% of American fourteen to seventeen-year-olds were enrolled at High School in 1900, a figure which had only marginally increased by 1910. Though the school leaving age was officially meant to be 14 by 1900, until the First World War, most British children could leave school through rules put in place by local authorities at 12 or 13 years old. It was not uncommon at the end of the 19th century for Canadian children to leave school at nine or ten years old.
Leisure and play
By the 1890s, children's toys entered into mass production. In 1893, the British toy company William Britain revolutionized the production of toy soldiers by devising the method of hollow casting, making soldiers that were cheaper and lighter than their competitors. This led to metal toy soldiers, which had previously been the preserve of boys from wealthier families, gaining mass appeal during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Dolls often sold by street vendors at a low price were popular with girls. Teddy bears appeared for the first time in the early 1900s. Tin plated penny toys were also sold by street sellers for a single penny.The turn of the 20th century saw a surge in public park building in parts of the west to provide public space in rapidly growing industrial towns. They provided a means for children from different backgrounds to play and interact together, sometimes in specially designed facilities. They held frequent concerts and performances.
Popular culture and mass media
Beginning around the middle of the 19th century, magazines of various types which had previously mainly targeted the few that could afford them found rising popularity among the general public. The latter part of the century not only saw rising popularity for magazines targeted specifically at young boys but the development of a relatively new genre aimed at girls.A significant milestone was reached in the development of cinema when, in 1895, projected moving images were first shown to a paying audience in Paris. Early films were very short. They lacked sound but were accompanied by music, lectures, and a lot of audience participation. A notable film industry had developed by the start of the First World War.
As young adults
Military service in the First World War
The Lost Generation is best known as being the cohort that primarily fought in World War I. More than 70 million people were mobilized during the First World War, around 8.5 million of whom were killed and 21 million wounded in the conflict. About 2 million soldiers are believed to have been killed by disease, while individual battles sometimes caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.Around 60 million of the enlisted originated from the European continent, which saw its younger men mobilized on a mass scale. Most of Europe's great powers operated peacetime conscription systems where men were expected to do a brief period of military training in their youth before spending the rest of their lives in the army reserve. Nations with this system saw a huge portion of their manpower directly invested in the conflict: 55% of male Italians and Bulgarians aged 18 to 50 were called to military service. Elsewhere the proportions were even higher: 63% of military-aged men in Serbia, 78% in Austro-Hungary, and 81% of military-aged men in France and Germany served. Britain, which traditionally relied primarily on the Royal Navy for its security, was a notable exception to this rule and did not introduce conscription until 1916. Around 5 million British men fought in the First World War out of a total United Kingdom population of 46 million including women, children, and men too old to bear arms.
Additionally, nations recruited heavily from their colonial empires. Three million men from around the British Empire outside the United Kingdom served in the British Army as soldiers and laborers, while France recruited 475,000 soldiers from its colonies. Other nations involved include the United States which enlisted 4 million men during the conflict and the Ottoman Empire which mobilized 2,850,000 soldiers.
Beyond the extent of the deaths, the war had a profound effect on many of its survivors, giving many young men severe mental health problems and crippling physical disabilities. The war also unsettled many soldiers' sense of reality, who had gone into the conflict with a belief that battle and hardship was a path to redemption and greatness. When years of pain, suffering, and loss seemed to bring about little in the way of a better future, many were left with a profound sense of disillusionment.