The Crime Against Youth
VOLUME 151
NUMBER 6
JUNE 1933
BY ROLLO WALTER BROWN
Now that we have fallen to confessing our many grievous sins of the twentieth century, we may sooner or later discover that the one we shall have to agonize over longest is our violation of the spirit of youth. Already we are hearing much about isolated specific instances. We are reminded that big business has degenerated to a point where, like a starving sow with farrow, it devours its own young; that institutions of higher learning are kicking out their young instructors — their own product, be it remembered — in order to maintain a higher salary schedule for the elder members of faculties; that bodies of ministers of the gospel are proposing to admit no new candidates until the financial depression is over; that boards of education are employing no new teachers and are dropping some of the youngest ones already in service; that hospitals are closing their doors against student-nurses; that labor unions are reducing the number of candidates for apprenticeships in the trades; that cities are closing playgrounds for lack of appropriations; that tens of thousands of boys — not to mention girls — are roaming the country after the manner of the wild children of Russia. But little or nothing has been said about the swift development of the entire American scheme of life into a monstrous obstacle that blocks the way of youth, not merely to a specific attainment, but to any kind of enriching maturity whatsoever.
Here is the all-inclusive, ultimate crime against youth: a nation that has adopted as a philosophy the habits of mind of pot-bellied middle age. In any society where organization has been highly perfected, it is always easy enough to adopt this philosophy. Under pressure the individual gradually yields up his curiosity, his concern with explorations, his desire to take life apart and put it together again in more satisfying arrangements, and contents himself with the drowsy comfort of keeping things as they are. But in a society where organization not only has been perfected but has come to bo worshiped, the adoption of such a philosophy is much easier than not. The twentieth-century mania for organization imposed as a chief requirement upon the individual that he fit snugly, and make no disturbance of any kind. The natural result was a large and early crop of degenerate minds characteristic of lazy middle age. They took pride in giving up all long-distance views, all difficult mental conquests, all dreams of remote ideals, and settled down to the fleshly joys of consuming. They proclaimed that all other joys were piffle.
Copyright 1933, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.
Since they were well barricaded in organization, they logically became the dominant class. And since their philosophy was profitable to them, they did not want the foundations of it disturbed. They had learned to play the game under one set of rules; so they did not mean to have any of the rules changed. If anybody uttered a protest — murmured anything about conservatism — they swiftly marshaled to their defense all sorts of sentimental whimperings about ‘the faith of our fathers’ — as though they had the slightest capacity left to understand what the adventurous faith of their fathers had been! If anybody championed the needs of the youthful mind, they misappropriated some such glad cry as ‘life begins at forty’ and forthwith dismissed youth from consideration. ‘Yes, forty — or was it forty-five, or fifty? That’s when I was elevated by my brother-in-law to the vice presidency and began to receive my large bonus and draw dividends and sell stock that we had whooped up. Yes, life begins at forty.’
Their only concern was in having their place made secure. Through education, through economics, through religion, they sought to add to their number — as long as they could do so without loss of influence or profits. They squeezed into schools and colleges and taught the glories of Samuel Insull; they hired such economic experts as could be bought and through them proclaimed that at last new unfailing principles were at work; they endowed ministers to preach that, despite appearances, the Nazarene had always stood for the vast accumulation of riches. In truth, some of them discovered that Jesus had been a business man himself, although he had never risen to such heights as supporting Civic Opera in Chicago or floating loans for international match companies. In so far as they had any beliefs about youth, they supposed that youth should dawdle along in an educational scheme vaccinated against anything dangerous to middle-age philosophies, and then, when that process was once ended, fit into a corporation and earn dividends for the middle-aged until some vice president toppled over with fatty degeneration of the heart and left a swivel chair for a younger man.
II
In the suffocation of that philosophy we have forgotten what youth can do. If a man of thirty chances to be made the president of a college, or succeeds in publishing a distinguished book, or wins in a competition in architecture, the fact is publicly mouthed over as though it were something contrary to nature. And a man of twenty-five is treated as if mentally he were but an infant in arms. When Lindbergh flew to France — at just twenty-five — every newspaper had to dwell upon his youth. He was a mere kid. Yet he was as old as Keats was at death. He was a year older than Pitt was when he became prime minister of England. He was eight years older than Mendelssohn was when he composed his overture to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ John Ericsson, who did many things besides build the Monitor, was a draftsman at twelve and a full-fledged engineer at fifteen. Chatterton finished at eighteen; Galois, the mathematician, at twenty. Jane Austen was writing one of her best novels at twenty-one. Smollett was a physician, married, and busy as a man of letters at twentyfour. In round years, Shelley was through at thirty; Schubert at thirtyone; André Chénier at thirty-two; Mozart at thirty-five; Danton at thirtyfive; Bizet and Byron at thirty-six. Alexander Hamilton was a pamphleteer at seventeen, a member of Washington’s staff at twenty, a member of the Continental Congress at twenty-five, and of the Constitutional Convention at thirty. Moseley, the British scientist, had contributed his work and had given up his life in the Battle of Gallipoli at the age of twenty-seven. At thirty, Kipling had published a dozen volumes or more, including several of his best.
Anyone can leaf through a dictionary of biography and make similar lists in a half hour. In other words, anyone can remind himself that much of the significant record of the human race has been made by men and women no older than candidates for advanced degrees in American universities. More terrifying still, anyone can remind himself that no inconsequential part of the record has been made by men and women scarcely older than the hundreds of thousands of students who must mull along in crowd fashion, year after year, in our undergraduate colleges.
Nor can middle age offer any adequate defense of itself by arguing that the young do important things — or begin them — solely because they chance to be geniuses. It would be quite as near the truth to say that they are geniuses because they had a chance to begin young. The impressions made by an external world are not determined wholly by the quality of the mind that receives them, but in some part by the circumstances in which they are made. When Dean Henry W. Holmes studied the records of the students who had entered Harvard College during a period of ten years, and found that the boys who had come early from school to college had made the best records in their college courses, he corroborated in statistical method the experience of many another whose method is individual. It is not simply a question of the brilliant boy’s getting ahead or the stupid boy’s falling behind. Boys enter college early — any college — because of superior ability, to be sure; but also because of canceled steamship reservations to Europe; because a member of the family has been a teacher and has practised her profession a little at home; because a selfish parent wants to have her boy in school early and out of the way; because an older brother is going to college and the younger boy wants to catch up and go at the same time; because some school principal is in doubt and gives the boy the benefit of it; and because of a thousand other purely accidental circumstances which have nothing to do with a boy’s native ability.
But the boy who gets on the way early has the overwhelming advantage of a mental life that burns steadily, whereas the boy who dawdles has a mental life as uncertain as the flashes of a broken light filament that occasionally gets jostled into contact in the bulb. After all, there are right times for doing things. Then they can be done easily, for they are done naturally, and the results are quickly assimilated into one’s experience. If a boy is so delayed that he is forever arriving at a given point too late, he will be obliged to work with an artificial effort, and what he does will not so readily be assimilated into his stock in trade, because at the moment there is no natural place for it.
It must be recalled, too, that impressions may be distributed through a lifetime, one to each of sixty-five or seventy-five years, and produce no appreciable effects on the mind of the one who receives them, for the simple reason that they are too far apart. But if the same impressions come in white-hot succession to the same mind within the period of a single day they may be endless in their effects. For one thing, they are stimulating. And they are in such close proximity that the mind is invited — if not driven — to make all sorts of comparisons and contrasts and evaluations. It has a fair chance to become a creative mind.
III
Now, have the middle-aged in control of the United States given to youth any such fair chance? Instead, they have been so busy with enterprises guaranteed to bring new fatnesses without effort, so concerned with philosophies that would justify their own lazy-mindedness, that they have taken away from youth even what it usually manages to get itself if only left alone.
See, for instance, what the philosophy of the middle-aged has done to the mental experience of the boy who must submit to systematic education. He spends the years from six to twelve in elementary schools. He spends the next six years in junior and senior high school. Then he spends four years in college. Then he spends another four years in — let us say — medical school. Then he finishes off by spending two years as an interne in a hospital. If he is docile enough to keep perfectly in step in this regimented education and thereby miss no promotions, he will be ready, when he is approximately as old as Shelley and Schubert were at death, to turn away from half a lifetime of spoon-feeding and begin to wonder whether he will be able to feed himself in his approaching old age.
Periodically he rebels. But how much good does it do him? He might as well try to demolish a stone wall with his own youthful head. Everything is organized on the middle-age basis. He must surrender the satisfaction of growth. He must forgo the sinews of character that come from self-direction. He must give himself over body and soul to the long-drawnout process of being instructed. And this, too, at just the time when he ought to drive ahead under the pressure of his own will, and in the light of his own self-disciplined imagination.
And suppose that he should wish to marry. Despite all that is said to the contrary by the middle-aged and the faltering senile who like to revive the stirrings of sex by much talk, there are plenty of young men and women who wish to live in a monogamous state where sex and parenthood and permanence of abode are fused in what to them is a single reality. If a young man were not caught in an overprolonged succession of educational programmes, he might marry at twentythree or twenty-five — if he wished. But unless he is well off himself, or proposes to marry a girl whose father is not only well off but generous, he must put all thought of marriage out of mind until, according to the life span of many a distinguished fellow mortal, he is old enough to be dead. Possibly he can put marriage out of mind; but he cannot put sex out of mind, even if he is able to ascribe to sex a purely artificial place in human existence. The result is almost certain to be that he will become emotionally atrophied, or fall into perversions, or grow into a cynic in respect to all women and become contemptuously promiscuous. And these are not the states to be encouraged in anyone who would work with the highest concentration over long periods of time and maintain a harmonious relation between his own psychic existence and the social order in which he must live.
Until recently this prolonged period of mental and emotional agony for youth could always be held out by the middle-aged as a bait. ‘If you go through with it all, we will admit you to the vast world which we have created for our comfort. You can marry, especially if your wife is willing to work in an office, too; and join the country club; and settle down. After another twenty years you may wake up some day and find that you are a somebody.’
But now the promise of reward has been withdrawn. The middle-aged have been carried by their own philosophy to the point where they believe they can best keep what they have by seeing that nobody else has anything. They would stop admitting youth to industry, to commerce, to the professions, to the trades.
And as if this were not a great enough transgression, they would be guilty of another: they would deny to youth the privilege of even a slowmoving education. They deliberate over closing up institutions of learning that are alive with students. They restrict the capacities of others. They are so considerate of the vast numbers of individuals who find plenty of money to spend in consuming, and of such enterprises as public utilities that wish to have others pay the taxes, that they are ready to declare a partial or total moratorium on secondary education. They would halt youth in its peculiar task of becoming acquainted with its world. They would leave youth with nothing to do.
IV
They ought to see that they are more heartless in their attitude toward the young than the beasts of the forest are toward theirs! But the first symptom of the middle-aged mind is blindness.
When the middle-aged were told two or three years ago that there was something wrong with America, they only jeered. Who would pay any attention to the rantings of malcontents — probably imported by secret enemies of the country? Higher tariffs and lower taxes would set everything going overnight. They could see nothing significant in the restlessness of coal miners in Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, and a half-dozen other states. Were not coal miners a low-grade lot, anyhow? And when tens of thousands of men, disheartened by two or three years of unemployment, marched the streets in scores of American cities, it meant nothing really serious. ‘In fact, the number is exceedingly small when compared with the whole population of the country.’
They were likewise little impressed by the great communities of derelicts that sprang up in waste lands along river banks and in other out-of-theway places. When they were told that many of these men and women had been reduced by circumstances over which they had no control from the highest self-respect to the humiliation of living in huts of goods boxes and tarred paper, or tents that kept out only a part of the cold, they professed to believe that the obvious deterioration was but a fundamental lack of thrift. And any perturbation that they experienced was scarcely noticeable when at length they had to admit that ten or fifteen millions of their fellow citizens were without the means of earning food or clothing or shelter. ‘They will have to be fed — though not by a dole, of course — until the temporary slack is taken up. What more could anybody ask?’
Even when the middle-aged minds awakened one morning and found every bank in the country closed and their own comfort left dependent on what they had hoarded in safety boxes, they did not discover that the country was suffering from illness. The episode — the entire depression, in fact — was not only a good thing in disguise, but a beautiful thing in its nudity. It was redeveloping appreciation among the American people. As for putting two or three years together and seeing that they constitute one of the dramatic social revolutions of modern times, they still protest incapacity.
How, then, can such a generation be expected to discern the plight of youth? Many instances of what youth suffers are half concealed. Many others are in remote places where the middle-aged would not think it quite respectable to go. And still others are confused with all sorts of unpleasant matters like the rate of taxation. Can the blind middle-aged be expected to disengage such cases? Or can they be expected to see them after they have once been disengaged by somebody else?
V
Yet somebody must see. If somebody does not, the country will be confronted by a crisis that may well make the present one seem like the merest matter of bookkeeping. Hundreds of thousands of the young weeded from industry, from the professions, from the trades! Other hundreds of thousands on the way through college with unemployment guaranteed to a large percentage of them as soon as they are through! Still other hundreds of thousands in the public high schools, with a larger percentage of them denied both employment and college! And coming behind these — pushing along expectantly — are the millions in the grade schools, a still larger percentage of them denied not only employment, not only college, but any kind of education in high school. The most energetic part of the country’s population, in other words, is told that there is nothing for it to do except to hold itself indefinitely in suspense.
The middle-aged like to talk in conventional phrase about ‘the oncoming irresistible flood of youth.’ They would now dam up the irresistible flood and forget about it. Somebody ought to see that the flood may easily pile too high for management. Youth has a way of turning to all sorts of matters when it is denied the right to participate in the legitimate activities of its elders. As a last resort it can always engage in the interesting experience of going to the devil. And under favorable circumstances it can sweep the middle-aged along for company. The very least the middle-aged can hope for if they try to hold youth back indefinitely is to have to run for their lives when the dam begins to crumble.
Somebody must see, moreover, what lucky youth can do. To court disaster is stupidity; but a greater stupidity is to ignore salvation. What the American people in their present bewilderment most need is precisely what youthful minds could contribute — the very minds they refuse to let function. We have an overabundance of well-balanced administrators and members of national commissions who consume vast stretches of months in an effort to conceal their befuddled thinking, and then at last arrive at the startling conclusion that much remains to be said on both sides of the question. We have an overabundance of solid captains of industry and banking who cool-headedly invent highsounding terminology for newly devised dishonesties. We are cursed with level heads. We need a great influx of lopsided youths. The social order must be reconstructed by somebody who believes something, by somebody who has some enthusiasms, and not by the perfectly balanced men designed by nature or by their accumulated habits of life to be chief barbers and head waiters. If a youth believes too much, very well. If he is enthusiastic to the verge of craziness, all the better. All sharp edges will be worn down enough — perhaps too much — by time. But we must get out of the dead-centre habit of mind, whatever the initial inconvenience.
It is said that we must have new statements of the ideals of American life. If they are to be more than so many outworn platitudes, or a list of advertisers’ slogans, we shall have to go to the flat lands of Kansas, to the mountains of Virginia or California, to the East Side of New York, to the hills of New Hampshire, or anywhere else where the human race still multiplies, and entrust our needs to the youths we find there. They feel the injustice of the times into which they have been born. They hate the present enough to love the future a little—and to live toward it. They are the ones who have unblurred outlooks, clear conceptions, and language that has not been debased by dishonest use.
It is said that the American city has become such a monster that it not only dominates the political destiny of the nation, but befouls itself and the entire countryside with its smoke and filthy odors and mawkish signs and general hideousness. The city must be made a place fit to live in — since half of the people or more now live there — and the countryside must be saved from the city’s uglifying processes. I know personally more than a thousand young men and women who think day and night of little else, and would surrender all other promises of life if only they could work at this engrossing problem. They have little opportunity; the predominance of the middle-aged is too great. Yet they stand ready to make the contribution. And if it were once made, the middleaged, in their slow ways of coming to understand what is going on, would shout louder than anybody else over what had become an accepted part of the existing order.
It is said that the church must be resuscitated. In every corner of the country men cry aloud that the gospel preached by contented ministers in costly churches supported by well-fed parishioners is no richer in calories than canned sawdust. Their cries have the sound of hunger in them. In two hundred towns and cities I have sought to learn why. And the churches tell their own story. It can be read at a glance as soon as one enters. The entire performance is for people who have adopted the philosophy of comfortable middle age. They do not want to listen to anything disagreeable about what is — though they are beginning to hear a little. They want the minister to speak comfortingly without raising big questions, and to quote soothing poems from a leatherbound anthology that was presented to him by the men’s club of the congregation. They want to look at one another and feel how respectable they are, what a nice class of people their church draws from, and how undisturbed everybody is. It is perhaps too much to hope that the fieriest youthful spirits to be found anywhere could warm these to life. But at least youth could establish a church of its own, where undegenerate new wayfarers, and sinewy men who labor with their own hands and thereby understand creation, and poets, and inquirers, and other unhardened folk of all ages, could go and enjoy the growth which results from honest aspiration.
It is said that we must do a hundred other things that we neglected to begin in the years of our grand debauch. They are all of the kind that youth is especially qualified to do, for they all require creative minds. But the middleaged know that youth in the process of doing these many things might menace the lazy philosophy of living. They have a vague fear that it might become fashionable to exercise thought, to enrich the emotions, to follow exalted, difficult ways. So they resist.
If they were not so hopelessly blind, they would be able to see that what we ought to experience is not the overwhelming new deal with more wrecking than building in it which they invite, but an endless succession of less cataclysmic new deals. These ought to be made by free minds who have not too much regard for the past, but enough. Some things — most things, in fact — should be made over, not in anger, but in sympathy. We need the best from the past as well as the best from the present if we are to have the best in the future. Youth would be ready to work toward these high ends if it had as much as half an opportunity. But with youth ceaselessly coming along, with youth eager, with youth unoccupied, with youth impatient, with youth growing embittered, the middle-aged of mind put up signs everywhere: ‘It is forbidden to youth to enter.’ And so little accustomed are they to any exercisings of the imagination that they cannot comprehend the enormity of what they do. They bewilderingly profess ignorance, or even high motives, when their transgression is the basest one they have thus far made a part of their record.