Across from my office are the bound volumes of TIME since its first issue early in 1923. In their pages most of us could find a running record of our youth.

What brought this to my mind was the thoughtful assessment of "The Younger Generation" which appeared in last week's issue. I wondered whether TIME had ever before attempted such a comprehensive assignment on youth, and found we hadn't. What I did discover, however, was that the pages of TIME have carried the deep imprint of the youth of each decade of our existence.

Even before we started publishing, our prospectus included a "catalogue of prejudices" which in part foreshadowed our later reports on youth. Prejudices five and six were:

"5. A respect for the old, particularly in manners.

"6. An interest in the new, particularly in ideas."

From the very beginning, our second issue, on March 10, 1923, noted that a University of California professor "told his mixed class in English that 7,000 of the 10,000 students at Berkeley 'should be attached to the handle of a pick or a frying pan.' "

Three weeks later students at the Louisiana Girls' College struck back, gave 23 faculty members an intelligence test. Among the teachers' answers: they defined sequins as fish, named Al Jolson as a wrestling champion, Maraschino a Premier of Russia and Filet Mignon an opera by Puccini."

In 1924 President Marion LeRoy Burton of the University of Michigan told a convocation: "You students are lazy. You loaf, you gamble." TIME carried his remarks in the March 24 issue, with a footnote recalling that Hamlet had berated his young contemporaries in Elsinore with the words: "You jig, you amble."

The young ladies of America stole the stage that summer. Minneapolis school officials split over the issue of starting a course for beauticians. Superintendent W. F. Webster of the Vocational High School was quoted by TIME: "The American women want bobbed hair . . . The new style . . . has created a new demand for a particular kind of service. This demand is as real as is the demand for dressmakers or milliners." Board of Education President A. P. Ortquist retorted: "It is criminal to spend the taxpayers' money to teach girls to bob hair and clean fingernails." (TIME noted on March 2, 1925 that the Daisy Chain ceremony would continue at Vassar, even though critics condemned it as "cheap and vulgar," resembling "a bathing-beauty contest.")

On Sept. 7, 1925, Manhattan Pastor John Roach Straton led that year's cry against youth when he told of a tour through New York dance halls. TIME quoted him: "In one dance hall. . . we saw between 5,000 and 6,000 young men and women . . . locked tightly in each other's embrace, in many cases with the cheek of the girl against the cheek of the man."

That year a matinee idol died at the age of 31. TIME reported of Rudolph Valentino's funeral that "traffic was choked with grieving thousands."

F. Scott Fitzgerald was recognized quickly as a mirror of his generation by our BOOKS section. On March 29, 1926, reviewing All the Sad Young Men, TIME noted that he was no longer writing about the young exclusively in terms of "petting and orange juice."

Other beverages quaffed by youth made headlines during the '20s. The night that radios blared the nomination of Al Smith for the presidency, federal prohibition agents raided more than a dozen Manhattan nightclubs, including that of Helen Morgan. TIME later reported the testimony of an agent who said Miss Morgan had told him: "The college boys drink gin. . . They generally have only about $20 to spend in an evening and bring their own."

The voice of Clara Bow, national symbol of young glamour, was first recorded for the movies in Paramount's The Wild Party, which TIME on April 15, 1929 said took place at a college "where all the girls are good-looking, talk musical-comedy English, make love instead of study, and wear clothes that must have cost . . .a pretty penny."

Hard times for youth were reflected almost from the start of the depression. TIME noted in 1932 that some colleges were accepting "farm produce for tuition." A more despairing note was evident by 1936, when one TIME article began': "In 1925 the cry of buoyant U.S. Youth was 'Let's go!' In 1930 it was a cynical, 'Oh, yeah?' By 1935 it had degenerated to a hopeless 'So what?' " The American Youth Commission, TIME said, had found "the spiritual ravages of Depression" difficult to measure. Sociologist Eduard Lindeman saw in the 2,875,000 federal relief clients from 16 to 24 "the backlog of a future revolution."

A June 6, 1938 article reported that the commission had found "even youth's fun depressing. The reason: youth hunts fun mostly alone or in pairs instead of in groups." (Contrast with 1951's Minneapolis girl who complained that group thinking, rather than individualism, is what is wrong with the newest generation of youth.) "A large part of U.S. youth today," said the 1938 report, "is apathetic, discontented, increasingly prone to look to the Federal Government to do its thinking and planning for it."

The ailment was one many of our correspondents noted still present today. In so doing, many of them, like many of our writers and editors, were talking of their own generation. A quick check shows that 34 names on TIME'S masthead represent the younger generation, defined as "18 to 28" in the article last week.

Coridally yours,

James A. Linen

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