The Delayed Generation

This is another college term paper by the middle aged man who went back to college:

The Delayed Generation

By Clevis O. Laverty

“My parents do not understand me” is a modern complaint of youth; it is an ancient one, too. Youth looks at pa and Ma and that is all he sees: No concept of their having been youths at one time, too. Oh, perhaps they were in some far distant past, but things were different then. It was ever thus. No age is unique in this attitude.

In my attempt to bring to life, by discussion, the youth of the early thirties, I would like to address this discussion to today’s youth. Perhaps, in all ages, our parents understand us better than we realize. Perhaps it is the parent who is not understood. It is possible to read and understand the trends of the flaming twenties, the series of events that contributed to the Great Depression, and to visualize Hoover, Roosevelt, Hopkins, and a host of others as very real people, and still not be able to associate Pa and Ma with it. We do not associate history with the people next door, much less with those with whom we have shared three meals a day for eighteen or twenty years.

Volumes have been written exposing the prosperous twenties as prosperous only to a chosen few. To those who grew up in that age it seemed to be a comfortable period, although there was an awareness of class distinctions; a select monied class, a class of the great majority, and an extremely poor class. Luxuries were few to the many, but there were few who lacked the necessities. The World War was just far enough away to make every boy believe that he had been born too late to participate in an exciting adventure which was related in pulp magazines in much the same manner as a football game, highlighted with a mixture of modern sportsmanship and medieval chivalry.

Our history books bring us a picture of feverish financial activity in the time preceding Tuesday, October 29, 1929, and we get the impression that everybody was following the stock market as it climbed—climbed—dipped a little—climbed some more. The enthusiasm of the rich for getting richer, the idealization of the business man, and the unwillingness of the United States to become involved in international affairs make the financial instability of the late twenties a dominant feature of the era to those who look back in study. John Q. Public was apart from most of this and to his children who were in or were entering high school in the early thirties, the panic that resulted from the crash of 1929 was a bolt from the blue.

To the average young person making a current events report in school, it appeared to be a world gone mad. To him there appeared to be a mad scramble by people to get into line in order to jump out of a hotel window—money must be terribly important. The school boy who had taken security for granted became very much aware of how much faster his shoes wore out when he scuffed his feet, and a pair of new ones became a milestone in his life.

As he progressed in high school the news was a succession of accounts of financial failure, political inability to do anything about it, bread lines, and astronomical unemployment figures. He imitated his elders in blaming the whole mess on the man occupying the White House, because that seemed to be the adult thing to do. If he had to draw his belt a little tighter and make things last a little longer, he didn’t blame his own individual parents; everybody on the street was in the same boat. His elders discovered that it was easier to blame the whole business on the government than it was to try to explain their own shortcomings to their children and, incidentally, to themselves.

I remember a high school graduation in 1934 very clearly in some respects and vaguely in other respects. The speaker’s voice, name, and appearance escape my memory completely, but the message he gave to that class of 185 hopefuls, who for four years had reported faithfully in their classes on the internal affairs of the nation and who had seen despair strike in some of their own homes and in the homes of their neighbors, I remember well. He followed a time-honored formula of telling this group that this was truly a commencement, and that the world was their oyster. He told them that perhaps the world was in tough shape, but it was only waiting for this class to go out, grasp the reins, and guide the team through the rugged terrain. Listening to this man repeat memorized maxims were the parents to today’s youth; some listened in rapt attention ready to do battle with the nearest windmill, while others wondered if anyone had told this man about the birds and bees.

Any good text will provide you with detailed information and lists of figures concerning the drop in the national income, the number of unemployed, an estimate of juvenile delinquency, and the number of bowls of soup handed out in the soup kitchens of some large city during some particular month, but their figures become very impersonal. It is difficult to think of Dad as one of sixteen million unemployed, he is much more important than that. He has been referred to as a member of the lost generation, but I imagine that he will be quick to say that it was just a generation that got a slow start.

After he left high school, what did this youth of 1930 do? Perhaps he went on to college, but chances are that he did not; and if he did, it is more than likely that he did not finish. We know a lot about him as an individual. He resented bread lines and soup kitchens. He made fun of the QPA as an army of men leaning on shovels, but he got his shovel and leaned on it, too. He read so many articles and heard so many speeches reminding him that his generation, born during a world war and making its debut during a world catastrophe, had not had a fair shuffle that he almost believed that his was a lost generation. He listened to reformers and social workers tell him that youth must be served and that his youth was his greatest asset. Then when he applied for that rare opportunity to secure employment, he was told he was too young and to come back when he had some experience.

Although the majority of these youths who became the fathers and mothers of today’s youth did not and will not make a line in recorded history, it will be eternally to their credit that with equal provocation they did not react in the same manner as the youth in other countries.

It was not the prospect of ease and plenty to eat that was the bait with which Adolf Schickelgruber, the mad paperhanger from Austria, lured the youth into goose-stepping groups all over the Third Reich or enticed young Italians into becoming enthusiastic young Fascists in a Mussolini dominated Italy. It was the prospect of having something to do and the prospect of being an essential part of the future of his country. The lure was potent and was not an insult to their intelligence, to become a useful member of society—although we know that usefulness was woefully misdirected and horribly distorted.

Our youth not only did not fall for Nazi, Fascist, and Communist propaganda, he was amused by it; he pointed his finger at the strutting, goose-stepping, arm swinging, heiling young snobs and yelled, “Sucker.” Opportunities for being distracted were all around him. Whenever there was a gathering, there were those who were ready to climb up on the soap box and expound on the wonderful cure their ism provided for the ills of an oppressed and betrayed people. Playgrounds and parks were infected to some degree with political misfits looking for a ready-made audience of unemployed and discouraged. In one of the colleges, a German exchange student organized Mein Kampf reading groups to include anyone who was studying the German language. Mein Kampf in the original German was the lure to a book hungry and lean purse student body, but it never got off the ground.

All was not peaches and cream, nor was our hero a hero to himself. Thousands of people saying no to his job applications, tramping the streets with burning feet inside of thin shoes, and the daily reminder that he was living off of someone else were definitely no encouragement to his self respect. There were periods of self pity and the periods of gloom were frequent, when it seemed as though politics and government were just so much alphabet soup. It was this reaction that Maxine Davis ran into when she asked a lad what he thought about the new National Youth Administration and why didn’t he associate himself with it.

“Naw, what’s the use?” he answered. “The politicials run everything, the dirty crooks. They’ll run this youth administration, too. We won’t get nothin. An’ the big boys run the politicians. I’m wise, Lady, I’m wise.”

There were many who were generous with their criticism. What is strange is that the older generation’s criticism of the younger generation of the thirties, in the middle of a general depression, was the same as the older generation’s criticism of the younger today in times of comparative prosperity. Maxine Davis cuffs them with one hand and pats them on the back with the other. She sounds very much the same as a 1959 parent when she says that the kids are spoiled and soft. Every generation thinks that the one following is getting softer and softer; yet the Olympic records go up and up. Miss Davis sums up her observations with: “Anyhow, here they are: —Sitting.”

Some of this sitting, I suspect, was conservation of energy and in other cases justly accused as apathy. The feeling was prevalent among youth that it was who you knew and not what you knew that was important in getting on in this chaotic and a bit unfair world. This was largely true. So many qualified people were after every job that knowing someone on the inside was a remarkable assist in getting the job. But it must also be remembered that it was, on the other hand, what you knew that kept you on the job. Competition among labor was at its highest point and few employers would penalize their business because you knew someone when they knew they could have the best in the labor market for subsistence wages.

Another criticism we heard was that they were quitters. The going got too rough so they left home and went on the bum. In some quarters we get the impression that they roamed the countryside in bands as a number one menace. Thomas Minehan compares them with the wide children of Russia. He obviously has the besprisoryni in mind. Although he goes no further than to liken American youth on the bum to “wild children of revolution-racked Russia” he leaves the implication that the United States was overrun with the same kind of problem that the besprisoryni presented to Russia with their wild bands of homeless children who roamed the countryside and ravaged cities with begging, stealing, and drinking.

There are always those who have less stiffening in their backbones than others and during this period of economic paralysis many did give up and make their way about the country walking, riding the rods, or hitchhiking from one “jungle” to another. Far from being marauding bands of looters, they became pitiful, half-starved singles, pairs and trios who lived by panhandling and petty theft.

There are many stories of these young tramps taken under the wing of a professional and taught the ways and codes of the open road. There were many attempts to glamorize the life among themselves. In the first place, it didn’t attract those with a potential for good citizenship. There were those who in more prosperous times would have been content to hang around home, but now that was unpleasant because the “old man” didn’t have a job. It attracted the sex pervert who was a misfit in society anyway, proponents of free love, and, unfortunately, those who ordinarily would have become decent respectable citizens but for whom the stresses and tensions became too much. Rather than becoming the glamorous free knights of the road, they were generally fed and sheltered by local police or by a refuge and hurried on the following day.

The more we look at this youth of 1930 to 1940, the more we wonder why he wasn’t lost. He doesn’t seem to have been encouraged to go to school or in any way better himself. In many parts of the country schools were shut down, resulting in the crowding of others. Some schools were further restricted as to length of term and size of their teaching staffs. Others were instructed to get rid of the frills, referring to music, manual training, Americanization classes, night schools, vocational schools, and medical care—all of which had become more necessary than ever before. Industry had practically closed its doors to any new help. During the years 1932 and 1933, General Electric took no new employees into their organization.

Miss Davis paints a dismal picture of the youth in regard to their faith. She compares her own youthful anticipation of church socials and Sunday School picnics which were looked forward to and well attended to the cynical attitude which she says she found prevalent among unemployed youth. She says they would observe another youth going to church and say that he was going just to be sociable. If he didn’t go to church he had no faith. It almost seems as though she started her trip with a negative attitude about some areas and her mood was catching.

The picture brightens with the advent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it would appear that many of America’s youth accepted it on faith. It was one of the most important measures that President Roosevelt was able to put over at an early date, and it clicked. It attracted thousands and thousands of more youths than were eligible—a boy had to be from a family on relief or a war veteran on relief. Regardless, many scrawny ill-fed boys from the city were transported to countrysides from the Atlantic to the Pacific to reclaim lands and to conserve the nation’s forests. They were given back their self-respect and their health. They were taught trades that would be of use to them as semi-skilled laborers.

In June of 1935, the National Youth Administration came into being with a capital of fifty million dollars for the purpose of finding employment for the unemployed, to train and retrain young people for technical and professional opportunities, to provide assistance for those who wanted it remain in high school or college, and to provide work relief on projects developed to meet the needs of youth.

Miss Davis and Ernest Lindley meet this NYA from entirely different points of view. Miss Davis says that this organization, which was the brain child of Aubrey Williams, deputy administrator of the FERA, was supported by only one qualification—that it had good intentions. She says of Williams that he was a visionary when he placed the administration of the NYA in the hands of youth with the comment, “youth shall serve youth.” She goes on to further state that these youthful administrators were not interested, had no experience, resented by older people with whom they had to deal, and lacked the human experience to discern what is good and what is bad. But she gives us little to substantiate her criticism.

Lindley, in his book A New Deal for Youth, goes through the entire 48 states relating the progress and programs of the NYA. With names and places he takes us into a group building a schoolhouse or a recreation center, converting unsightliness into beauty, uselessness into usefulness, and putting idle hands to work. These worked in small groups rather than armies of men.

Other organizations were at work. Youth had not been forgotten nor had youth arrived at the point where they would not help themselves. The YMCA was not as effective with the boys as the YWCA was with the girls, but it did work at finding something to do with free time, something constructive and at the same time interesting. They worked to promote health and healthy activities, and to educate the youth to the current social and economic questions.

This has not been nor was it intended to be a comparison of the youth of one age to the youth of another, but rather to show that the American youth of any era will meet the problems he faces and whereas he may be delayed, he will not be lost. When next you complain that the generation of your parents does not understand you, you are probably right; but his parents did not understand him either, and for a very different reason. His parents were so busy trying to find enough work to keep his healthy appetite under control that there wasn’t time to understand him. We are not now in the midst of a depression, but the times are not without their stresses and strains and it is there that the men are separated from the boys.

Davis, Maxine, The Lost Generation, New York, 1936.

Lindley, Betty and Ernest K., A New Deal for Youth, New York, 1938.

Minehan, Thomas, Boy and Girl Tramps of America, New York, 1934.