ABSTRACT
The torch of idealism that had kindled the revolt of the American conscience seemed to have pretty well burned itself out. In particular people’s public spirit, their consciences, and their hopes were tired. At any rate, by 1920 the rebellion against Puritanism and stuffiness was widely visible, and it gained in impetus as the decade progressed. Disillusionment and rebellion characterized the writers of the time, too: disillusionment over the crusading spirit that had accompanied the United States into World War I. The consensus was that a brisk enough salesman could sell it. And so the nineteen-twenties saw the canonization of the salesman as the brightest hope of America. If the nineteen-twenties constituted a sort of Indian summer of the old order, when Wall Street seemed more than ever to be the axis on which America turned, and when bankers and brokers walked the earth like kings.
