seemed to them quite defensible; millions of them had been provided with an emotional stimulant from which it was not easy to taper off" (p. 78). Carter's statement is arguably a representative voice of a generation convinced of its special quality, a point to which we shall return in discussing the self-consciousness of the young-adult generation of the 1970s.
There appears to have been some degree of serious social analysis at work as well, notably in the arts and letters. Allen refers to "the revolt of the highbrows" (Allen, 1964, p. 188). There is also a view that the 1920s shift in cultural values had begun before the Great War and only came to maturity afterward. May refers to the period 1912-1927 as "a time of doubt and fragmentation, of upheaval in ideas, of the disintegration of tradition--in other words it was a pre-revolutionary or early revolutionary period. Nearly every phenomenon of the twenties from Freudianism to expatriation or the abandonment of politics was present before the war, on a smaller scale and with certain differences" (May, 1956, p. 133). on this view, what is unique about the 1920s is that the sense of rebellion and breaking from the past extended from the intellectual elite to the masses.
An alternative view is that the 1920s were not so rebellious or antiestablishmentarian as either the decade's contemporaries or its historians seem to believe. Nash sees the revolt of the intelligentsia as overblown:
An incomplete understanding of a small group of literati has shaped the understanding of American intellectual history in the 1920s. Intellectuals were by no means unanimous in professing the disillusionment of the expatriates, bohemians, and satirists, and even the degree to which they expressed it is moot. For a great many thoughtful Americans World War I did not mean intellectual derailment. The threads of continuity in the history of ideas are visible across the war years, as they a...