A New Departure

[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]

THE BREADWINNER

To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
I’m one of the more fortunate victims of the mess we’re in.
Oh, certainly I am. No doubt about it. I’m not on relief like half the fellows I was raised with. My family is n’t on relief, either — we never have been. I finished three years of college before things got too bad, and now we even manage to help the kid brother and sister get their education. We’re all healthy; we get enough to eat, keep the house together, wear decent clothes, keep up face pretty well. We’re a pretty solid American family.
And, besides that, I’ve got a job I enjoy in the field I want to be in. Fortunate? Why, I’m the luckiest guy in the world. Not a day passes in which some poor gent I was raised with does n’t tell me about it.
But it’s a situation such as Daniel Boone described. A friend asked him if he had ever been lost. ‘Nope, I never got lost,’ said Daniel, ‘but I was bewildered for three days once.’
I’ve been bewildered for five years!
It’s simple, really. We’re a family of five — unless you want to count a fouryear-old who does n’t figure much in the budget, and the budget is the problem that concerns me. We don’t own our own home, we don’t have a bank account, we lost all our insurance, we have n’t anything worth a red cent except my $35 a week and a car that is half paid for. We do own a sizable collection of debts. Two years ago they totaled about $5000. Since then, what with a small inheritance and a few bucks a week here and there, we have cut them down to about $1700. At the present rate we ought to have them all cleaned up by 1945.
That is n’t either a very terrible or a very unusual situation, admittedly. Lots of families are situated just about the same way. Lots of men got married, raised some kids, and wound up in the depression with the kids and debts on their hands.
That is n’t what bothers me. My problem is this: —
I’ve become head of a family. I never married, yet I have kids on my hands and a father and mother besides. I never ran up bills, — never had reason to, except for an occasional poker debt or a suit of clothes, — yet I had $5000 in debts to worry about and still have $1700 worth left. I never did any of the things normal, middle-class people do — yet I have incurred all the normal responsibilities and the job of paying bills (material and mental) that I never had the fun of creating. It’s like suffering hives for someone who ate strawberries.
Nobody’s to blame for it. None of us like things this way. Dad has n’t been able to get a job for six years — but there are thousands of others just like him. He did n’t lose his job through lack of ability, competence, or ambition. He always had a pretty good job, always made enough to keep us going along in good shape, always met his responsibilities — until the depression. Nothing could hurt him more than having to depend on me — the feeling that he is all caught up. Yet he accepts the situation without being ungracious or resentful. All in all, I have as thoughtful and good a family from top to bottom as anyone could wish for.
Yet things are n’t right. I should n’t be head of a family and they should n’t have to look to me for everything they need. It’s bad for all of us. Mentally, socially, morally, it warps us all. I can’t do the things I want to. I don’t have dates because there is always a gas bill past due or a grocery bill to meet — childish as it sounds, I keep away from girls for fear I’ll fall in love and make matters worse than they are. But these things are n’t most important.
One thing is important, however. I am a case of what a psychiatrist would probably call ‘arrested development.’ The first two years I worked I advanced quickly. For the past three years I have been as far as I can ever go with my present firm. Despite general lack of jobs, I have two jobs in other cities I can have to-morrow — jobs with unlimited opportunities in the field I’m in. But, even with more money, I can’t take them. Even with more money I can’t leave my home without leaving my family stranded. I’m tied down because we can get by better where we live on $35 a week than on $60 in a bigger city. So I can’t leave, and, meanwhile, I go to seed and lose opportunities.
If there was an end in sight it would n’t be bad. But there is n’t — not until the kids get out of school, pay back what they have borrowed for their educations, and get to work. And even then there is no guarantee I won’t still be at home paying the bills and digging deeper into my rut, losing contacts, and making my employer suspicious that I lack initiative because I don’t grab at opportunities he has thrown in my way.
I’m not crying. I’m glad to be able to do the things I do. But I’m roped into something I can’t fight.
Maybe those members of my generation (with long strings of degrees and no jobs) who write to you are discouraged, behind the eight ball, cornered by forces they can’t control.
But, somehow, I envy them. I envy them their freedom, strange as it sounds, sneer as they may at it. I envy them the fact that they are responsible for nobody but themselves, job or no job. I envy them their chance to worry about nothing but themselves and their own futures, and to hell with everything else.
H. O. F.

[Twenty-six years old, H. O. F. is an editorial writer on a Midwestern newspaper.]

A WOMAN’S PLAN FOR SECURITY

Boston, Massachusetts
To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
As I look around my own immediate family, there are three Phi Beta Kappa’s who earn less than the minimum union living-wage requirement for bricklayers! And all about me are my friends and contemporaries, young, alert, with much to give to a world which does not want it — a world which is already seemingly surfeited with youth!
How can we be expected to marry young, raise families, become citizens of the world, satisfy our intellectual curiosity, read Keats on a hillside? How can we do and be all these when we either have no jobs or else have mediocre ones which carry remuneration not even deserving of the term ‘salary’? And 1938 sees a fresh, new crop of youth let loose from our high schools, clerical schools, trade schools, colleges, and professional schools — yes, prison reformatories also — to what and for what?
Numberless thousands of us are huddled in the insidious security of $20-aweek bread-and-butter jobs, in law offices as ‘junior lawyers,’ in department stores as ‘assistant buyers,’ in large firms as ‘minor executives.’ The old idea of a ‘creative’ job, adequately rewarded, has become largely a myth except for a fortunate few. Under such conditions youth blindly feels its way, frustrated economically, frightened morally, and vegetating intellectually.
The vicious circle creates its own paradox: on the one hand, increased educational opportunities for all, together with the tempting leisure activities of our urban civilization; on the other hand, the crippled inability of this same civilization to give us an opportunity to enjoy the fruits thereof.
We have become so conditioned to uncertainty that the one thing we are sure of is — insecurity. All this is tied up with something far too powerful for us to cope with alone. We need help and need it now, from those who are in, the powers that be, our elders.
What is to become of us? Here are just a few unpleasant eventualities: —
1. Popular anthropologists talk of our reversion to the ape — in other words, modern man’s retrogression. Surely this concept is wrell supported by our crime and similar antisocial records.
2. There is a good chance that the Malthusian theory may work itself out; that is, we can conveniently be killed off by war, and so forth.
3. Or we can look at the state of German youth fifteen years ago, when Ph. D.’s were either waiting on tables or collecting the dole. In a like manner, the seeds of Fascism can well be sown in a culture medium of an unhappy, purposeless youth.
4. Or we can, at least temporarily, maintain the status quo, and grow old quickly, before our time, into a soulless middle-aged generation, the like of which America has never seen.
Give us a chance, help us, for we are the you of to-morrow! We are not ruthlessly trying to break down or disrupt what exists, nor do we expect a fullfledged planned society overnight. Here are a few random (neither rabid nor radical) suggestions, down-to-the-earth ideas, which if carried out might enlarge youth’s horizons.
1. Lower the retirement age of Federal, state, and city employees, such as clerks, teachers, librarians, and so forth, so that youth may be given a muchretarded opportunity to step in. This, in turn, may encourage a similar movement in private industry. Of course these are only indications of what can effectively be done; there are as many more ideas on the subject as there are young people under thirty in America.
2. After these many years let us now take steps to limit the Veterans’ Preference clause in Civil Service examinations, so that all may be judged on merit alone.
3. Tax the salaries of government, state, and city employees over a reasonable figure. Let the perennial objection of ‘taxing taxes’ be once and forever met by using the money to augment activity for youth.
4. Give financial assistance to help those who should marry, and aid of a similar nature to help finance parenthood.
If we are to take our place in the generations, if we hope to leave a splendid past and create a glorious future, give us a meaningful present in which to live.
SARAJO SAWYER

[Mrs. Sawyer graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Boston University in 1931. She and her husband are both twenty-seven.]

THE OPEN MIND

Princeton, New Jersey
To the Editor of the Atlantic: —
You asked about aims and perplexities! My problem has been to avoid the mistake everyone seems to make, that of forming definite opinions and prejudices at a time when the pull of emotion is stronger than that of reason.
I had always thought that all intelligent men possessed minds free from bias and endowed with a certain amount of fairness in judgment. Now I am undecided, torn between an ideal of an open mind and the reality of men who are intelligent, but prejudiced and easily deceived. Although many of them are active in education, they are apparently incapable of rising out of the mud of trivia and intellectual phobias. I once knew a professor of music who stated that Brahms was the best symphonic writer and Tschaikowsky the worst. I sat in course under another professor who ‘ loathed ’ realism, and I have many friends who are still convinced that all Germans are either war lords or sheep. I have looked for some middle-ground point of view in vain, for none existed.
Somewhere along the frontier of youth and maturity there is a force which crystallizes intellectual affectation into habit and turns the emotional judgments of Twenty into the rationalized intellectual prejudices of Forty. It is personally frightening to realize that one’s mental structure may be undergoing such a transformation.
Then, if one recognizes this transformation and evaluates its results, what are the reactions? First, there is a strong tendency toward skepticism, which in turn will lead to crystallization of a more harmful kind unless carefully controlled. Secondly, there can arise an extreme liberty of thought which may undergo a sea change and come out as inability to pass judgment.
For me, the third and only way out is the acceptance of the ‘middle ground’ as a solution to all questions. By that I mean merely the realization that nothing is ever entirely right or entirely wrong. Yes, you say — that’s nothing new. Well, perhaps the theory is old, but the practice is still unborn.
When I was ten or eleven I divided my toy soldiers into two armies. I then threw marbles at them, and when all the soldiers on either side had been overturned, that army was defeated. One division was either American, French, or English; the other was always German, and was always vanquished by the thunderbolts of marbles. Here was the concrete expression of an emotional judgment which had probably originated with my parents or in the pages of the Boy Allies at Verdun. By the age of fifteen, I had abandoned the thought of Germany as America’s Todfeind, and my methods of judgment in most things still had no ties with either emotion or reason.
Then came German Fascism, which has always been painted unfavorably in this country. That was the period, when I was about seventeen, when temporary emotional judgments started hunting for rational bases. One summer I went to Germany, intent on discovering the right and wrong of National Socialism. After talking with Germans violently pro-Hitler, and sitting in a long conversation with a very pleasant old lady even more violently against him, I returned to this country with no more definite opinion on the Third Reich than that no one was completely right or wrong. There was some middle-ground solution. But that many people should share my views is a strange and wonderful thing that I have yet to encounter.
Perhaps in that small example is my aim, my disillusionment, my perplexity, and a prayer. The aim is an open mind; the disillusionment is the realization that the ‘Elder Generation’ have crystallized their emotional judgments by the age of forty; my problem is how to retain the middle ground of judgment, and my prayer is that I may do so in the face of the obstacles which education, the press, and society in general have erected.
JOHN CLAIBOBNE DAVIS

[A graduate of Union College, Mr. Davis has been studying Romance Languages at the Princeton Graduate School.]