16-to-24

In 1925 the cry for buoyant U. S. Youth was "Let's the go!" In 1930 it was a cynical "Oh, yeah?" By 1935 it had degenerated to a hopeless "So what?"

Thus Sociologist Eduard Christian Lindeman charts in current Survey Graphic the psychological nose dive taken in the past decade by the nation's youngsters. In support of this unsanguine appraisal, the Rockefeller-endowed American Youth Commission last week released results of a survey of 5,000,000 U. S. citizens between the ages of 16 and 24.

Physically, the Commission found the present generation of U. S. Youth an unpromising lot. From Life Extension Institute, which had examined 100,000 young men, it learned that 75% suffer from "some sort of health defect." Its own Medical Committee, sampling, turned up 33% with diseased tonsils, 34% with defective vision, 50% with carious teeth. Blamed for this condition was Depression, which curtailed free medical care, recreational facilities.

Harder to assess, the Commission found, were the spiritual ravages of Depression. Educational and vocational opportunities shrunk together. Hard times struck the nation's young folk with a cruel one-two punch. Last year, in the traditional Home of Free Education, only 60% of the youth of high-school age stayed in school while only 15% beyond high-school age squeezed into college. The rest, thought the Commission's Director Homer Price Rainey, "constitute not only an employment but an education problem."

Unsuccessfully searching for jobs, according to the New Deal's National Youth Administration, are between 5,000,000 and 8,000,000 youths. Director Rainey uses the lower figure, estimates that 4.700,000 of these youngsters are "unemployed, not in school, and seeking work"; another 300,000 are "unemployed, not in school, and not seeking work." Of the latter the gloomy survey observes: "When one has been without a job for . . . years, the ambition to secure a position gradually subsides."

On Federal Relief rolls the Commission found 2,875,000 people aged 1640-24. Of them, 765.000 had never held a job. A bare 281,000 had "worked in agriculture," many merely marking time on their families' farms. Of the urban 1,710,000, some 54,000 had enough industrial experience to call themselves "skilled artisans."

With such figures as these in mind, Washington Newshawk Maxine Davis lately packed into a Ford, circled the land to talk to youth, sound out its temper under stress. She chatted with young engineers in filling stations, young musicians in cinema ushers' uniforms, hundreds of others who sat around dully with no job at all. That most young men & women who had to shift for themselves during Depression will be permanently passed up in favor of younger, fresher, material, if & when employment does revive, is the conviction of many a U. S. observer. To Sociologist Lindeman, these economic undigested form the backlog of a future Revolution. Not so alarmed is Newshawk Davis. In her The Lost Generation* published last month, she observed that most youngsters she interviewed had adjusted themselves quietly to economic strain, were inclined to be pleasant, pliant, uncritical. At Revolution she sniffed: "Youth today . . . accepts its fate with sheeplike apathy. . . . Dixie's youth today would never fire on Fort Sumter. British tea and King George's taxes would be unloaded without protest by the young men of Massachusetts and Vermont."

* Macmillan ($2.50).

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