But if the hedonism of the sixties flowed from the hedonism of the Prohibition Era, there is this difference: that 1920s generation did not hate America. A few “Lost Generation” writers fled the country, but the social rebels of the 1920s were not revolutionaries. After all, they elected Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in the greatest Republican landslides in history. The sixties intelligentsia was different. As Eric Hoffer wrote, “Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.”
