Our Young Folks

As a member of the American Youth Commission, Dorothy Canfield Fisher studied intensively for six years the blighting of our young people in the Great Depression. In Thomas Huxley’s words, which she quotes, these boys and girls were undergoing “the severest shock which the human system can sustain,” namely, “the sense of uselessness.” They were victims of personality anemia ascribed by the author to the lack of a life-giving vitamin called work. Society had changed; the old family economy into which youthful helpers could fit was gone; power production was far ahead of consumption, and the age of material scarcity had ended. Yet their elders had not adjusted to that fact, and the young people waited and drooped in a vacuum. Mrs. Fisher has adjusted herself to the revolutionary fact of plentiful production with diminishing manpower, and her mind now probes a new psychology of work and leisure to correspond with the new pattern of production. The exploratory character of her thinking about the NYA. the CCC, equal rights for women in business, the danger of treating money as an end, and cognate topics makes even arid statistics bloom with new meaning. A far more radical book than meets the eye.