Doomed youth

This post follows on from History of Youth I, and incorporates much of John Savage's research from his book Teenage. The wars truly shaped what adolescence was to become. Three million adolescents were slaughtered during the first World War. By the end of the 'Great War', young survivors were no longer willing to automatically obey their elders. They felt they had earned the right to dictate their own course. They instead offered their sacrifice to a new youth class: ‘the generation that in their millions had fought each other, suffered together, and who would always be bound by that terrible experience.’
   
The insistence on the vitality of youth was central to the Fascist programme. Mussolini expounded the impetuousness and faith of youth. Hitler came to power by invoking youth in a similar fashion. He created the Hitler Youth, endowing German adolescents with a purpose and power against their parents. The Hitler Youth abided by the idea that youth is always right. The cornerstone of the Hitler youth was its organisation: it was run almost entirely by youth leaders in their twenties. Indeed, an SS publication contained the passage: ‘in every year of history one law has invariably proved its unchanging truth: youth will always triumph over age.’
   
In America, youth as a generation was becoming aware of its social power. Attention from media advertisers increased the generation gap between the mature and the young. G. Stanley Hall followed up his massively popular book with an essay titled, ‘Can the Masses Rule the World?’ in which ‘he felt that the one cause for hope in the mass society was an almost worldwide youth movement that was striving toward a new religion…’ Certainly American youth began to feel that they should be involved in society to a greater degree. However, Savage makes the point that youth were confusing their status as vanguard consumers with real political power. This assumption, he says, was based on a fragile prosperity. When the Depression hit, it hit American adolescents hard.
   
Youth became an important part of the American political agenda when, in 1934, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt made the social group her specific concern by sponsoring the formation of the American Youth Congress. Mrs. Roosevelt was, according to Savage, highly aware that America’s provisions for youth were far too limited. She said she was terrified that America might be losing a generation. ‘We have got to bring these people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary,’ she wrote. Due in part to her contribution, American youth acquired a new value.
   
Adolescence remained a very ambiguous state. Savage quotes one girl of sixteen who complained that she had to lead a sort of Alice in Wonderland type of life - feeling ten inches tall at one moment and more than nine feet tall the next. ‘You are grown up at fourteen if you want a railway ticket, sixteen if you want to get into an ‘A’ film. At home you are a child if it is convenient for them but the moment that they want to put something on you they saw that you are grown up.’ Contributing to their ambiguous status was confusion over their role in society; the end of the war left a generation of youth that had been forced to grow up too quickly for a war they did not start.
   
It was at this time that a magazine launched which pulled together youth identity with democracy, marketing and consumerism. Seventeen magazine celebrated the economic importance of young women. This magazine acted effectively as a guide telling youth exactly what they were supposed to be and how they were supposed to act - it gave them the direction they had been severely lacking, and solidified the existence of a youth or ‘Teenage’ state. In fact, Savage quotes the New York Times, which published an article in June 1945 entitled ‘Teen-Agers are an American Invention,’ which read: ‘Defining young people as “teen-agers”, that is, not ready for the serious matters of adulthood, invites their absorption in the frivolous matters of “teenage culture”, and the leisure and the unprecedented affluence of teenagers predispose them to accept the invitation.’
   
Savage concludes that the many possible interpretations of youth had been boiled down to just one: the adolescent consumer. The teenager was ‘living in the now, pleasure-seeking, product-hungry, embodying the new global society where social inclusion was to be granted through purchasing power.’
   
Savage’s extensive account of the creation of the teenager provides significant support for the argument that youth identity has been constructed to be distanced from politics. Savage shows that from the very start, when the transitory phase between childhood and adulthood became complicated by worldwide events, to the present, youth identity has been and will continue to be a social construct. Indeed, his point about marketing and media having a massive effect on the moulding of youth identity does much to explain why youth have attained the image they have in today’s industrial societies as pleasure-driven consumers, too concerned with their own lives to worry about the political happenings around them. My issue with Savage’s argument is not in what he says but in what he does not say. Savage implies that a global youth culture has emerged. I would agree with this, however, he neglects to include examples from non-industrial cultures. His account is incredibly West-centric, ignoring how youth in cultures around the world were affected by the wars, and how changes in the global economy would have affected their existence and status within their own countries. It seems that Savage is implying that youth as a status was formed predominantly in America and Western Europe and then possibly exported around the world. Research into international youth studies falsifies this implication. Youth, it seems, is a highly researched biological state that is common to human beings around the world.

We will look at these biological implications in a later post.