[What are the aims, the experiences, and the perplexities of the Post-War Generation? The ATLANTICintends to find out. In this and successive issues, space will be reserved for the best letters written by men and women under thirty — letters that speak vigorously, honestly, and with free rein. Each letter should, if possible, be compassed within 650 words. Contributions are invited, and those published will be paid for. In special cases, anonymity will be preserved. — THE EDITORS]

CIVIL LIBERTIES

London, England
To the Editor of the Atlantic: — The attitude of my generation toward civil liberties is, I believe, the same as that of any other generation of Americans. We want them. They are guaranteed in our Constitution. Our ancestors rebelled in order to ensure them. Our three bloodiest wars were fought — perhaps under misapprehension — for them.
Civil liberties are vague, changeable. Fundamentally, however, we still conceive them as the rights enabling us to live our lives as we — and not our bosses — wish. Our generation, as any other, is willing to give up certain rights for the general good. Civilization demanded of our forefathers that they forsake murder and thievery so that they might be protected, while living in community with others, from murder and thievery. Likewise, we are willing to accept limitations on the speed with which we may drive our cars, the noise which we may make in the streets. As the complexities of living increase we are willing to make individual concessions which benefit the communal whole — and ourselves as component parts.
But the civil liberties in our country are based upon a tripodal foundation of freedom: in speech, assembly, and worship. When one of these crumbles, the structure falls. We will not allow the pillars to be weakened.
Around the world we see the edifice of liberty collapsing. Therefore, in our country, our generation becomes concerned. We have the better part of our lives before us. We do not intend to live according to the laws of the FuhrerPrinzip. If society may be likened to a pyramid, we still believe in ruling it through orderly processes from the bottom; we will not be whipped from the top. If I am in any way typical of my generation, it is with this frame of mind that we regard America and look for symptoms, search for the stomping of our essential liberties.
Our country, as a whole, professes to believe in the Voltairean credo that we may disagree with all our internal opponent says but we will die for his right to say it. Acting on this principle, we tolerate side by side Nazi groups, the Communist Party, bands of Fascists and of anti-Fascists. We view them sometimes with concern but we know that, unless they contravene our common laws, they are within their inalienable rights. Our generation, I hope, proposes to continue this mode.
However, when we do see assemblages not only curtailed but shot at, when we do hear speech gagged, then we begin to worry. It is not many years since the mayor of Duquesne, Pennsylvania, announced: ‘ Jesus Christ himself could not speak in Duquesne for the American Federation of Labor.’ It is little more than one year since ten workingmen were shot to death for attempting to picket in the mass about a South Chicago steel plant.
These, I believe, are obvious infringements upon the rights of free speech and assembly. It is not necessary to have pro-labor or anti-labor sympathies, to favor one family of unions against another; any person who believes in the cardinal guarantees of our form of government must protest against their violation.
A Senate committee, headed by Senator La Follette, has been inquiring into such transgressions. It is properly known to the public as the ‘Civil Liberties Committee.’ It has already uncovered evidence of unscrupulous and organized attempts to mash the rights of labor. It has exposed incontrovertible proof that business concerns have purchased arms, bombs, and poisonous gases for use in labor disputes. It has uncovered intricate company spy systems which hired men to tattle on union activity. It has demonstrated that formidable gangs exist which supply thugs to set upon workers. In Cleveland there is a fixed fee for hooligans hired to beat up union leaders.
If we wish to preserve our democracy — and I think the overwhelming majority of young men and women wish to — we must preserve its parts. There are no longer any unions worthy of the name in Germany, Italy, or Russia. There is no longer any democracy as we know it.
I have talked to many persons less than thirty years of age. Some, whether rightly or wrongly, care to classify themselves as conservative, others as liberal. Some are members of organizations popularly labeled as reactionary or radical. But they appear to agree — all of them — that they cherish their rights and the rights of others to oppose them.
In the world about us liberty is withering. The pendulum swings from liberty to autocracy. Our country was established as a haven for liberty. Perhaps the general conception of its form may alter during our lifetime. But I believe my generation of Americans, if it thinks, will attempt to preserve it. I hope so.
C. L. SULZBERGER

[An American, Mr. Sulzberger is twentyfive, a graduate of Harvard. He is now free-lancing abroad for magazines and newspapers.]

DEPRESSION AND THE UNBORN

Washington, D. C.
To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
I am a woman of twenty-five, sound of limb, less so of mind. I am afraid of one thing. I hesitate to tie myself closely to the main stream of life bygiving another life. I have been given every opportunity to know that life can be a rich, rare, and productive thing, yet that very knowledge can be a torment.
My husband is an admirer of Jefferson and a contemner of Jackson. But being out of key with the times troubles his deep faith in the goodness of life not at all. Leaving military service at the age of twenty-nine, he worked his way to a doctorate in history. Of the three years we have been married, he has been unemployed one. There is as yet no job for next year.
I know that my husband’s unflinching intellectual honesty, his broad, tolerant view, his quiet humor, should have a chance of continuance in sons and daughters. I feel that one child worthy of him would far outweigh the small dilettante historical work which now very pleasantly fills my days.
Yet it is a narrow world, one growing steadily narrower and grimmer. My child would not be born a German Jew or a Southern Negro, or a Harlan County miner-to-be. But is it much better to be a member of a society which permits and even condones conditions of oppression? For, if I could overcome the public school system, my child would not be the sort of American who finds comfort and refuge from the brutal realities of world and local scene in the wealth, might, and general superiority of his own country or economic group. Nor would he learn from his parents to turn to the Church for solace in his time of Sturm und Drang, for to us the Church seems the home of evasion and sentimentality.
My child, then, would be born into a world which is rent with bitter hatreds, which sanctions the crudest injustice. He would enter a home where there is no close allegiance to the political and religious institutions of to-morrow. There will probably never be any firm basis of economic security. He may or may not greatly miss an ‘education,’ for my husband and I feel that a passionate reader does not notice whether it is Widener’s marble halls or the plaster of Public Library Branch 10 which supplies background. We believe that the country-club aspects of college, which would not be his, do not greatly matter. Rubbing shoulders with the holy coterie of the Hasty Pudding would bring him no nearer Newman’s ideal of a gentleman. Provincialism is a hardening of the mind and sympathies which sets in before collegiate age.
But if my husband could transmit a synoptic view, a hunger and thirst after righteousness, would our child be wanted in 1958? Would he give his manhood and his promise to stopping one lead pellet? Given the continuance of our peace, would he fit into a society that is turning its back on the free play of the mind, on the integrity of man as man? Without ‘pull’ and connections, could he make for himself any job at all? Even if he could arrange his private life satisfactorily, could he feel himself so useful that he could endure the increasing unrest and misery of his brothers, the increasing barbarism of international relations, the gradual petrifaction of society within the nation?

The lamps of reason, says Mr. Laski, are being extinguished one by one all over Europe. If America is not the hinterland of Europe (apologies to Mr. Turner, Mr. DeVoto, et al. for the very suggestion), it is at least umbilically dependent. The fate of all our mother countries we share. My husband and I ask ourselves, ‘Is it our bounden duty to bring non-being into being?’ If the sins of the parents are to be visited upon the children, need there be children?
Sincerely yours,
MARGARETTA

[Margaretta is a Southerner who graduated from Wellesley in the early ,30s. Her husband has been teaching in Washington.]

DEPENDENTS

New York City
To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
The Great American Depression has encompassed my ‘aims, experiences, and perplexities,’ and I am under thirty. Aims I had in abundance when I graduated from college. Now they have been regretfully pigeonholed to await the dawn of a new day. Will that day ever come? The depression is giving me my living. Like thousands of other collegebred young persons, I have been drawn into the field of public social service, as the greatest field open to my generation. If business should improve to the extent of putting my relief clients back to work, I should be thrown out of a job. I should have to seek a new vocation.
I did not prepare for social work in college. I became a relief investigator because, with the curtailment of other lines of work, public welfare services constantly expanded. In my city, relief bureau employees are being put on civil service. I receive good pay, an adequate vacation, and the promise of a pension for my old age.
The work is educational. Aside from the thrill of being associated with the greatest problems of our day and seeing the havoc wrought by the depression at first hand, I am learning new skills. I have taken courses in social case work at night; the bureau offers courses through its supervisors to train us in the legal aspects of the job. We are in a career service. But is it to be a career?
In my city there was a staff of 18,000 administering relief in 1935 at the peak of the depression. At present there is a civil service list of 4000 relief investigators, alone, rapidly being assigned to the work. In 1935, one out of every five persons received some form of public assistance. Probably another fifth were employed to administer this assistance. What is the future of all these persons, receiving direct charity or helping to administer it? If business so improved that the relief bureaus were closed, or if political upheavals brought about a change in relief policies, all these people would be thrown into new ways of living.
In my work I meet all sorts of people. The staff is composed of investigators, supervisors, typists, dictaphone operators, and clerks, many from the ‘underprivileged ’ groups, supporting large families on their semimonthly pay checks. There arc some, like myself, who fell into the job by accident because the bureau wanted college graduates; others were chosen on a basis of ‘need’ when the bureau first opened. A few are radicals who use the bureau as a stamping ground for their pet theories and attempt to spread their doctrines among the staff and the relief recipients.
Among the relief clients whom I visit each day in my rounds, I find a divergence of types, also. There are chronic charity cases, families who have never known anything better than the tenement and who always received some form of charity to supplement their small incomes. There are theatrical people who find their profession dead and hope to get on the WPA arts projects. There are conservative whitecollar workers, humiliated by their failure to find employment, many of them thrown out of work after long service because they are over forty. There are prostitutes, drunks, people with airs, people who cannot read or write, Americans who cannot understand ‘the way the country is going,’ and foreigners who still find relief in America better than starving in Poland.
I also meet persons to whom the depression has meant a steady job with good pay. I refer to the thousands of WPA workers, particularly those in the theatrical, clerical, and educational jobs, who might never have found a suitable position in private industry.
As I look around my office every morning, and see the employees coming in so gayly because they have jobs, counting on these jobs to provide them with security for life, I wonder what the end will be. As I go through my district, making visits, I wonder what provision will be made for my relief clients in the next ten years. I wonder, too, about WPA workers who have had no other ‘career’ in the past eight years than this-or-that project.
My college alumnae catalogue comes to me every few months. As I turn the pages looking for familiar names, I am depressed by the number of my classmates in welfare work. Lydia Jones is with the Suffolk County Belief Board; Janet Smith heads the NYA in her town; Betty Gordon is a relief worker in Passaic.
A breakdown in the relief system will bring chaos into the homes, not only of relief recipients, but of thousands of young persons all over the country who have chosen social work as a career. What a strange world it is when youth’s aspirations are dedicated not to a new nation, conceived in liberty, but to one which is fast becoming dependent for subsistence on its government.
E. LOUISE MAGARY

[E. Louise Magary, a graduate of Western College for Women, Oxford, Ohio, is employed by the Department of welfare in New York City as a relief investigator.]