By
MIKE MALES
IRVINE--Tom
Brokaw's recent bestseller "The Greatest
Generation" lauds the youth of the 1930s,
who toiled through the Great Depression, won
World War II, then supplied three decades of
statesmen, can-do spirit and family stability, as
"the greatest generation any society has
ever produced." Conventional wisdom holds
that the nation's "goodness" has
grievously eroded with that generation's passing
because 1990s youth are the "worst
generation": apathetic, asocial, even coldly
murderous. As one remedy, California Gov. Gray
Davis proposes mandatory community service for
college students to get back to "the ethics
of the World War II generation" and its
"sense of obligation to the future."
The ironies
challenging this conventional wisdom are
startling. For example, surveys such as one from
the National Assn. of Secretaries of State reveal
that volunteerism by today's allegedly alienated
kids, especially for human services "such as
soup kitchens, hospitals and schools," has
risen sharply to "record high levels,"
reflecting contemporary teenagers' desire to
"help others in a personal way."
Another irony: Just
as today's young people are stereotyped as
frighteningly dissolute, so were the youth of the
1930s bitterly criticized by their elders. They
were called not the "greatest
generation," but a new type of "lost
generation." To look at 1930s press reports,
scholarly assessments and official declarations,
never had young people been so violent, mentally
disturbed, drugged, lazy, promiscuous, criminal
and hopeless. Even when compared with the usual
"wayward-youth" apprehensions voiced by
grown-ups dating back to ancient Greece, the
attack on Depression-era kids was vicious.
"[A]
generation, numbering in the millions, has gone
so far in decay that it acts without thought of
social responsibility," historians George
Leighton and Richard Hellman proclaimed in a
much-quoted Harper's Monthly article in 1936.
"High-school kids are armed, out for what
they can get . . . . The Lost Generation is even
now rotting before our eyes."
Columbia University
President Nicholas Butler summed up the grave
"youth problem" of 1935: "Day by
day the newspapers report one grave crime after
another, one moral delinquency after another, and
one dereliction of duty after another." A
prominent journalist, Maxine Johnson, traveled
10,000 miles studying this new "Lost
Generation," the title of her 1936 book.
Everywhere she found teenagers "confused,
disillusioned, disenchanted," in a state
"rapidly approaching a psychosis."
Yet, six decades
later, Brokaw renders a well-accepted verdict
that this same generation's
"sacrifices" and "sense of
duty" literally "saved the world"
and built modern America. But where Brokaw and
Davis laud the ethics and reliability of
Depression-era youth, the media of the 1930s
denounced them as a scourge of drugs, welfare and
degenerate values.
"Youth gone
loco: Villain is marijuana," was a headline
in a major magazine in 1938. "Organized
gangs are distributing drugs to every school in
this city," a 1937 government documentary
warned. "Dope peddlers infest our high
schools . . . in every community and hamlet in
our country. Hundreds of new drug cases involving
our youth come in every day." Sensational
press reports of brutal, youthful killers alarmed
a nation: "Drug-crazed teens have murdered
entire families!"
Journalist Isaac F.
Marcosson wrote a now-classic article for the
mass-circulation American Magazine in 1936, in
response to what editors called "literally
thousands" of readers bemoaning the
"youth problem." The article lamented
that 75% of the 100,000 young men tested by the
American Youth Commission "were suffering
from some health defect induced by mental
anxiety." The FBI reported in 1936 that
"the average age of criminals was 19."
Government
estimates of abortions and venereal disease in
the 1930s were the highest of any generation
before or since, one result, American Mercury
magazine reported in 1936, of "the drinking
bouts in which high-school and college students
frequently indulge, resulting in promiscuous
relations." Studies by noted social
scientists in the 1941 text "Personality and
the Family" found 80% of young men and 60%
of young women of the 1930s reported having
premarital sex. Stability was being eroded:
Marriages contracted in 1935 were four times more
likely to end in divorce than those of the 1880s.
The extreme
contrast between the despair with which
Depression-era youth were regarded by their
elders versus the reverence accorded them by
posterity raises a red flag: Is it possible that
conventional wisdom about the rottenness of young
people today is also misguided?
More pointedly,
does denigrating youth serve to whitewash the
failures of the adult generation and its
institutions? Monumental fiscal irresponsibility
from Main Street to Wall Street brought on the
Great Depression. Among adults, skyrocketing
crime, suicide, drunkenness and a murder rate
higher than today's devastated families and
communities in the 1930s. Similar trends are
evident now. Statistics show soaring rates of
violent and property crime, drug abuse and family
instability among adults over the past
quarter-century, along with unchecked
concentration of wealth in the richest fraction
of the population.
But there is a
surprise: Contrary to their bad press, today's
young Californians are behaving spectacularly
well. Over the last two decades, teenage rates of
felony and misdemeanor arrest are down 40%,
suicide and self-destructive deaths have dropped
60% and drug-abuse deaths have declined 90%. In
1997, no teenagers in Los Angeles County died
from heroin, cocaine, crack or methamphetamine
(drugs that killed 250 adults), one of many
positive facts about today's young that are not
discussed, perhaps because they violate the rigid
narrative that "kids today" are going
to hell.
Youth today seem
doggedly determined to survive disinvestment by
the elder generation. Even after 25 years of
massive public-school underfunding and classroom
crowding, students display higher school
enrollments, test scores, college preparatory
work and volunteerism than their forebears. Only
California's poorest youth, confronted by the
poverty and joblessness of a selective economic
depression whose attrition is every bit as
devastating to the young as the Great Depression
was, have shown increases in violence and
alienation. Yet, these are far less than the
dismal conditions imposed on them would predict.
For all their
grumbling, adults of the 1930s, led by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, created massive new job
and education programs for the young, despite a
strapped Depression-era budget. When New Deal
programs, the GI Bill and Social Security are
added up, Brokaw's "greatest
generation" turns out to have been the most
government-subsidized cohort in history. Young
people quickly justified the investment in
sweat-labor Civilian Conservation Corps camps and
World War II trenches.
But while Roosevelt
called on youth of the 1930s to help his
administration fight "the forces of
organized greed" that spawned a "a
society that hurts so many of them,"
President Bill Clinton and the Republican
Congress have abetted the amassing of corporate
wealth, excused their own abject moral failings
and loudly demanded a "personal
responsibility" ethic of young people that
those in power are unwilling to meet.
Just possibly, the
better behavior, personal optimism and volunteer
spirit of today's youth portend a greatness so
far obscured by their elders' torrent of
negativism. * - - -
Mike Males Is the Author of "Framing
Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation."
Los Angeles Times
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