A New Departure

[What are the aims, the experiences, and the perplexities of the Post-War Generation? The ATLANTIC intends to find out. Space has been reserved for the best letters written by men and women under thirty. The letters should, if possible, be compassed within 650 words, and those published will be paid for. Under special circumstances, anonymity will be preserved. — THE EDITORS]

THE SANITY OF FAITH

To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
This letter grows out of an uneasiness engendered after reading Margaretta’s epistle, which appeared in the August issue.
I am a man of twenty-nine. After college, I entered business for two years to find myself restless, with a feeling similar to a squirrel in a revolving cage. I left business and entered the ministry, after three years in a theological seminary. I have been married a year, and in a few months my wife will bring forth our first child.
The forebodings that fill Margaretta’s heart have never troubled me; although I, too, have been thinking of the future since becoming acquainted with the fact that fatherhood will soon overtake me. I feel that Margaretta is shivering on the bank of life, apprehensive of plunging in.
I am alive to all the ‘brutal realities of the world ’ that my child must meet and conquer — ‘the increasing unrest and misery of his brothers, the increasing barbarism of international relations, the gradual petrifaction of society within the nation.’
Margaretta says her husband has worked his way to a doctorate in history. She would do well, first of all, to gain from him the historian’s point of view. The poise of proper perspective is invaluable to help dissipate alarm over the contemporary scene, at home and abroad. When was there a time that the world was not filled with brutal realities? When was there a time that the world was free from periodic throes in which men and nations clashed as ‘armies on a darkling plain ’ to slough off the old and make way for the new? And, let us be thankful, when was there a time that the world did not emerge into some kind of new order — superior or inferior — in which the ordinary processes of childbirth and parenthood were carried on?
But more deeply do I feel that Margaretta is doing herself an injustice and her progeny (if she musters the courage to have any) a greater one in ignoring the Church, in which are unmeasured resources. Rather than being the home of evasion and sentimentality, the Church is the one agency that looks at the present scene with unblinking eye. Never was the Founder of Christianity an evader or sentimentalist. ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation,’ or ‘Ye shall hear of wars, and rumors of wars.’ Young parents to-day need a boundless conviction that the present world order, while constantly shifting and changing, is, even as it moves, under the direction of an invincible Cutter who is shearing a pattern, and courageous men and women who listen for the sound of His scissors can become His cutting edge. The true motive of the life that the Church would enkindle, however, is not content with inner peace, and power, and joy, and love, but urges one to share the burden of God. It is this thought, this privilege, that urges us from the shore of life and impels us into the swirling stream. It is this idea that causes me to rejoice in the prospect of bringing a new life into the world, that he (or she) may take up the battle against these brutal realities — injustice, poverty, war, and so forth.
Surely the testimony of Dr. Henry Link, Director of the Psychological Service Center of New York, is worth Margaretta’s attention From the countless maladjusted people he has treated he has gathered a piece of important evidence. He declares that people who are attached to the Church are better equipped to deal with life. Such people are more sane, more wholesome, and altogether normal. It is the modern pagan who creates out of his own fancy an artificial world that has no relation to the realities of life, who conjures up oppressive and hopeless difficulties that imprison him in a private world without armor or weapons.
In conclusion, I am very glad to be alive in this present day and relish the opportunity of waging battle in my small corner in the war between right and wrong. And I welcome my offspring as one who shall take up the struggle when I shall have to put by my weapons.
SANCTUS

[Twenty-nine years old, Sanctus is the minister of a Presbyterian parish in Pennsylvania.]

A NARROWING HORIZON

To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
I am of the shopgirls and the factory workers, the country schoolteachers and the small-town politicians, the tenant farmers and the day laborers, the clerks and the stenographers, the mill hands and the WPA workers. We are undistinguished and of no particular importance as individuals, and yet — can you not believe it? — there are some of us down here in the lowest income brackets, working nine and ten hours a day, six days in the week, for our petty ten dollars, going out at night when we can manage a ‘date,’ trudging home late to rinse out hose and underwear, quarreling a little and mending the runs, falling into bed for a few hours, and up again as the alarm goes off (all the sordid, well-known routine) — there are some of us who have something that in a different day and era might have been enough to raise us out of our environment and establish us on a higher level economically, and, as a direct consequence, socially. But if the doors of opportunity are closed against the well-educated and the specially trained, how much more are they closed against the little fellow trying to lift himself up by his bootstraps!
I myself am but a case in point, and this is what happened to me.
I boast no college degrees. The backwash of the much publicized depression caught my father just as I was finishing my second year in college. A wiser person than I might have borrowed the money to finish, but I thought not. I planned to teach a couple of years, save my money, and then go back to complete my course.
My hopes were very blind, my ambitions entirely ignorant, and I too much the optimist. For months I interviewed influential citizens and trustees of rural schools.
Country trustees! I talked to them on their front porches where they rested in their sweaty, grimy, blue denim overalls, their great bare feet spread out, tobacco juice oozing from the corners of their mouths, and a week’s growth of beard on their faces; I followed them to their churches, and tried to be one of them (I even sang the songs they sing — do you know them?); and I tracked them through the hot sunshine over miles of freshly ploughed earth to confront them in their fields. All of them promised to ‘do what they could for me.’ They must have been an impotent lot, for I never got a school to teach (after all, they had daughters and sisters and nieces of their own who were looking for work).
Instead of teaching, I went back to where I had graduated from high school, and enrolled in all the courses offered in the Commercial Department. At the end of the semester, I started work for a merchant in my home town, doing all the office work for thirty dollars a month. It was the only office work in that small town, and one of the very few jobs, and I was glad to get it. I worked there for two and one-half years.
When a cumulation of circumstances put an end to that job, I went to ‘the city,’ to New Orleans, looking for work. But everywhere employers were turning away old employees, and nowhere was anyone so much as accepting new applications.
Office work being out of the question, I finally secured a place through a newspaper advertisement as nursecompanion to an ancient and ailing Jewess. The old woman was a hyena, but that is another story; the job was short-lived, and I soon found myself back in my home town, still with no way of earning a living.
So I took a WPA job. For two years I worked hard at making work where there was none. When, finally, I was given a chance at a legitimate job (all praises to newspaper advertisers!), you may be sure I grabbed it. I found myself cashier in a new locality for a chain store at ten dollars a week. I have worked at this job for a year and a half. Now I am making thirteen dollars. If business improves, and I work hard, and stick with the job until I am forty-five or fifty years old, I may be making as much as eighteen or twenty dollars a week. I will still be just a cashier. (Chain stores pay their men much better than the girls — even the greenest stock boy is a ‘trainee’ for managership, and makes at least eighteen dollars a week.) But this being so, what, in the name of all the ancient holies, can the future hold for me?
It is impossible for me to believe that I have overlooked any opportunities. Nor will I concede that I am where I am because I am only ‘second-rate.’ Nor can I be convinced that it is simply childish rationalization when I say that in another era I might have realized some of my ambitions, attained a position that would have offered me some satisfaction in life.
I will not believe it is I who have failed. (And yet, that gnawing doubt; I am beginning to be a little afraid. Time is fleeting, too, and I am twentyeight years old. Soon there will be no time left even should there be anywhere to go.)
There are many others; I am not alone. We are weary unto death of depressions and recessions and doors shut in our faces. And, in all truth, is it not a great shame that there will never come to us at any time while we are young a sense of achievement, that we shall never know the lilt in the heart that comes with the realization that one is ‘going places’?
LOUISE MILNER

[From Laurel, Mississippi, Miss Milner 'attempts to give voice to the underprivileged masses, lest, through an excess of contributors from the better-educated, upper middle class, “ Under Thirty ” should fail to give a completely rounded picture.']

WANTED: A NEW BEGINNING

San Quentin, California
To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
I fell heir to a copy of the Atlantic for June 1938. ‘Under Thirty’ is truly a New Departure, so different that I read the Editor’s heading twice before I came to the conclusion that the phrase ‘from all walks of life’ means just that. I am twenty-seven, a member of the PostWar Generation.
In this period of social and political flux and change, with the man on the street becoming more willing to exchange the freedom that he cannot eat for the planned economy that promises economic security, it may be well to observe that his half a loaf is better than none; that the post-war upheaval has left some in a worse plight than most of the rest.
Convicts are ‘bad,’ I know. It is true that I have robbed and escaped, but the robbing took place in 1929, so long ago that I am sometimes quite sure that it was not I who committed the crimes. It must have been some other entity that borrowed this carcass of mine. I was ‘ bad,’ but to myself I do not seem ‘bad,’ or different from other people.
Perhaps no person is competent to judge himself, but I do believe that it is possible for an individual to enumerate the forces that have played a part in conditioning him. A child cannot train itself, or prepare itself for a place in a highly complex society. Parental affection and guidance are necessary for that, and they cannot be given by remote control, regardless of the circumstances that have broken up the family. Character cannot be built by furnishing food and shelter, and by an impersonal organization. I was raised by an aunt, and by a military academy.
Nineteen-twenty-nine laughed at Prohibition; the good citizens calmly committed felonies to obtain their drinks. A characterless eighteen-year-old, turned loose in a strange city with no friends or acquaintances to talk to, will become lonesome and follow anyone who takes the trouble to befriend him. I helped rob two banks. Fortunately there was no shooting or violence. So I was in prison before I really began to live. However, it does little good to hold a postmortem.
Someone or other, I think it was Oscar Wilde, has said that ‘Prison is a place where bad men are made worse.’ I will join in on the chorus. Is there anything more illogical than expecting a man to be a good citizen after he has been kept within walls for so many years that his hopes fade and his mind introverts to a dreamland of fantasy as he attempts to get away from miserable reality? If there is anything more illogical, it must be another prison. Yet, I do not think that any convict disputes society’s right to punish its offenders. Perhaps it would be best to turn us over to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and let them put us out of the way, painlessly.
I have studied, and done a lot of nonfiction reading; attempted to equip myself for whatever future there may be. But there are things that make it futile even to hope for a future, let alone plan on one.
Sometimes I stop and think of the eight years that I have yet to serve; I shall be thirty-five — and five years away from the industrial scrap heap, according to the employment surveys. Again, I have no ‘social experience.’ How does one go about courting a female? What must be said and done? And certainly the awkward mistakes that a youngster would make would not be forgiven an adult. What do ‘good’ people talk about, and how do they become acquainted? Would an employer take an ex-convict if he could get someone else? How about the flooded labor market?
Well, there is my problem.
KENNETH CHAPPELL

[As #47788, Kenneth Chappell is serving his sentence in San Quentin.]