Those Dreadful Young Persons. . . A Popular Myth of the Present Day
By Reese Carmichael
There are some people who are forever rolling up their eyes and exclaiming how much they dote on children, somewhat in the manner of Mr. Wells’ delicious Lady Beach-Mandarin with her “oh, the dears! The little things!”--and while I would not try to say how much of this is honest sentiment and how much of it is dishonest sentimentality assumed for effect, I personally declare here and now that I do not like all children any more than I like all grown people.
There are, however, among my juvenile acquaintances and friends many whom I love and find interesting, and others whom I love and do not find interesting, and even some whom I do not love at all, but nevertheless find exceedingly interesting.
In this last class is the Terrible Little Boy!
His parents are my friends, his mother a talented and gracious woman, his father a man of character and breeding. How their offspring could be such a veritable Child of Satan I do not know, unless it can be explained by the modern theory of inheritance and suppressed desires. If so, the Terrible Little Boy has a line of ancestors who suppressed every impulse of evil for untold years. For oh, he is selfish, obstinate, saucy, rude, destructive and dishonest. He has been known to pilfer money from his mother’s purse. He has been known to Use Language to his father. He is the bane and despair of all their guests.
And how he loves his naughtiness! With what gusto he relates his acts of vandalism! How, when he acquires another word-we-are-not-concerned-with from one of his playmates, he uses it in season and out to the scandal of all hearers! How he brags about his fights, his pinching little girls, his exasperation of the servants, his—what shall we call it?--entire juvenile thuggishness! Like Weelum he might well exclaim, “I glory in ma shame.” Yes, there is no question but that he is a Terrible Little Boy. His best diversion is the “See how bad I am” game.
But here is the significant fact: He is, so far as character and behavior go, the sole hopeless sinner in my wide circle of friends, but because of his unique character he gets more comment and attracts more attention than all of the good ones put together. And the more I think of him, the more I observe him, the more sure am I that he is a prototype in miniature of the wild young men and girls we hear so much about nowadays.
My youth has been gone, so far as years have to do with it, for 20 years—time for a new generation to grow up. Of course I flatter myself that I am still youthful at heart, and all that sort of thing; but that is decidedly another story, possibly fiction. From the perspective of my 20 years I look back at the young people of my day and time and compare them with the debutantes and college boys of to-day, and I am bound to confess that I cannot, for the life of me, find any special difference, save in a few non-essential habits.
Why then all this to-do, these shudders, this general hue-and-cry about the dreadful decadence of present-day youth, their shrill disobedience, their score of convention, their rebellion against precedent and their denial of any authority save their own desires and pleasures—all of which are alleged to be unworthy and perhaps improper?
Why, when two or three elders are gathered together, does the conversation invariably turn to such topics as the way young girls dress nowadays, the dissipation of young men, the way the young people dance, their frank speech, their general and horrific wildness? Is it true? Can it be that we have raised up a totally “wicked and froward generation?” And I wish to arise in open meeting and remark, loudly, “No,” to both questions. It is not true, nor are our young people half as bad as they are reported to be; in fact, on honest and wide examination, they differ not at all from their own parents in youth.
If we who are a generation ahead of the game will look back and speak with honesty, and with no desire to make ourselves appear the least bit better than we really were, if we will not yield to the subtle temptation to gloss over the past with rose color and observe the present through blue goggles, we must remember, we must grant that in every social stratum, even of our own times, there were certain girls and men who did daring, foolish, irresponsible things. Perhaps you, Mrs. Respectable Matron, were one of those girls. Perhaps you, Mr. Pillar of Industry, were one of those young men. Such things have been known to be.
In fact, were I to tell tales on my old friends, I could point directly at one lively lady of unblemished reputation, a respected wife, and an honored mother, who was at 17—let us speak frankly—listed as “incorrigible” by maiden aunts and despairing teachers. I could also give the name of a man high in the state, a man whose probity both in private and public life is unquestioned, even by his enemies, but who, while in college indulged in excesses and deviltry which were little less than penitentiary offenses.
But oh, if I could tell you how strict and how repressive these two are with their own respective offspring! And how severe they are about modern young folks’ ways and manners!
Nothing like that in their day, they will tell you. And as long as no one who knows it recalls the past to them, they, in our modern parlance, “manage to get away with it.”
But I must point out again that even these two were, so to speak, “high lights.” Ninety-nine out of every 100 of any given group had not enough imagination or original sin to be wicked. And this is just as true to-day as it was 20 years ago. It is that little lone one out of every 100 who is kicking up all the pother, and the more I look into the matter, the more I am convinced that this is so. Just as my one Terrible Little Boy excites more comment than all his fairly average good little mates, so do the isolated and unique Terrible Little Grown-up Boys and Girls distract the eyes and the mind from the ninety-and-nine who are not terrible, who do not caper and make faces, who are not always calling our attention to themselves with their own version of the little boy chant: “Oh, look how bad I am! Look! I’m the original terror, I am. I’m a bad lot. Please, please look!”
Because, please note again, the grown-up bad children have found an able spokesman, a precocious snowman, who goes about beating a big drum, shouting out all the sins of his time, and feeling exceedingly elated and excited over them. I say a spokesman, though there are several, but the most successful and notable one is a lad of twenty-two or three who recently had the industry to write a full-length novel which celebrated in informal prose the story of a very young man who kissed girls! Who didn’t study at college! Who fell in love at various times, and finally quite hopelessly with a practical-minded young woman who presently jilted him for a man with a larger purse and steadier purpose! And who, through the writer of these experiences, which do not seem in any way unusual, presently ran through his small competence and in his poverty, acquired a tedious and windy immature socialism, the exposition of which forms the latter part of the story, and precious dull it is.
And all the way through the book the hero things himself such a devil of a fellow, such a rake, such a gay dog, such a reveler! How solemnly he tells of a certain university glee club trip on which he and others of his stripe simply swam in a sea of juvenile delinquency. And the wicked roisterers went into restaurants and ate good dinners and got out without paying the bills. And they stayed up very late and talked about Life and Love and Girls! Oh, weren’t they just too dreadful.
How anyone over 30 reading that book could keep from smiling at the blessed innocence and immature conceit of it, I do not known. And as for those wicked pranks the roisterers played—gentle reader, take down our old copy of “The Virginians” some fine day and read a little of the exploits of Harry Warrington and his friends, their gaming, their drinking, their women. It will make our modest youthful misdemeanours fade from scarlet into palest pink, by contrast.
But the book in question did one thing: It convinced a large proportion of the reading public that this was a truthful picture of all the young women and men of to-day, instead of being, as it really is, not more than the disrespectful gestures and “snoot-making” of one fooling lad who is largely sui generis.
And oh the objurgation that has been heaped on the present modern use of the verb “to pet.” I’ve heard middle-aged men and women fairly pale with horror at the utter crass commonness and vulgarity of it, forgetting—how short our memories can be!--the way their parents and elders held up their hands and raised their agitated eyes to heaven some 20 years ago over the synonymous verb then in vogue, “to spoon.” Where are our memories, once we have come to 40 year! There is one test that we are all capable of making, a test which cannot help but prove that youth is not so bad as it would fain paint itself, and this test is simple. Observe the girls and young men who are the decadent, immodest, indecorous creatures which their spokesman assures us they are, or whether they are something quite different.
This is the test that I made, and I acquired a considerable number of striking disproofs of youth’s slanderings. First on my list is Lucy, a Wellesley junior, a Southern girl, as pretty as a pink, with a string of beaus that does credit to her ability to attract the other sex. She doesn’t even use a lip-stick, but then, she doesn’t need it, for she has the red lips of health. She meets her men friends frankly and has a ripping good time with them, swims and sails and dances with them in summer, rides and motors and dances with them in spring and autumn, skates and coasts and teas and theaters and dances with them in winter. None the less she is a keen student, she reads, she even gives signs of a budding ability to think. She is not extravagant, doesn’t run over her allowance, and is unusual in the girls of this or the past generation in the fact that she knowns how to use her hands in sewing and the like. Lucy has been known to make herself a couple of little summer dresses in less time that it takes to tell about it. She knits her own and her mother’s sweaters, t5hough that is not so unusual since the war set every woman to clicking her needles. But to think of Lucy in any way as a “juvenile delinquent” is an absurdity.
Oh, yes, she is dreadfully silly at times, and very much afflicted with youthful intolerance and sureness that what she thinks and feels is unique and new in the world of mind and heart. But if she were otherwise she would be abnormal.
Lucy’s girl friends are very much of her own sort, allowing for differences in ability and environment. Her men friends are college boys mostly, and she has a dozen or more of them, for she is enormously popular. But not even the keenest seeker of sensation could discover anything shocking or decadent about Lucy and her circle. No one writes books about them, for they are too jolly and foolish and normal. But oh, how reassuring is an hour with them after you have been listening to some valiant croaker of despair over the folly and general worthlessness of American youth.
But Lucy is not my only specimen. Here is George, a lad who spends his days in an importing house where he works hard, very hard, and intelligently, his superiors tell me. He is just out of college and his life is a busy one. Fraternity meetings, alumni meetings, squash in winter and tennis in summer, dinners with college friends, dances, and managing a boxing club for boys at a settlement house in the slums keep him on the jump. He likes to read, too, with a surprising predilection for history and biography. Once every two weeks he and the three fraternity chums with whom he lives take a Sunday off to tramps in the country and—I wrong this from him—to read poetry together. They chant Vachel Lindsay, and dote on Sandburg, and could quote you practically all of Ralph Hodgson and much of Masefield.
George and his friends are not perfect Galahads—far from it, but they are very far from being the blasé little animals who are so preached about. They are, in fact, part of the unwritten and unsung 99 out of every 100 before mentioned.
Then there is Joan, a metropolitan debutante, 19 years old, slender, sophisticated in appearance, smartly dressed, with a train of youths as numerous as Lucy’s, which she handles with consummate skill. She surely must be one of the wild ones! Well, listen: Joan gave up her cherished desire of going to college so that she might carry out the wishes of an exacting invalid mother who wanted her daughter to take her place in society. Joan is a devoted, loving, clever attendant to that mother at all times, and in addition she runs the big house they live in, manages the household staff, which includes two nurses as well as the eight regular servants (and let me tell those who have never tried it that managing a house and a group of servants successfully indicates executive ability of a high order); sees to the general welfare of three younger brothers and sisters and her father; in short, she is an expert business woman as well as a social butterfly. Why shouldn’t she look sophisticated with a burden like this to carry!
Yet if we are looking for “wildness,” for “silliness,” for “insubordination” and “disrespect,” for “immodest dressing,” for “vulgar speech” you will have to look elsewhere than to Joan, for these things are not in her nor of her. True she wears her skirts short; it is the style, and a style far more sensible than the long trailing skirts and the ridiculous huge sleeves her mother wore when she was Joan’s age. It is also true that Joan sometimes improves her complexion by the aid of art, but I submit that this is a practice so universal to all ages and conditions nowadays that it cannot be called a high crime any longer. The worst that can be said of it is that it is often ugly and funny. No, Joan is distinctly modern, but it is the best of modernity, not the worst.
Another young butterfly that I have lured under my collector’s net and purpose to display here for the multitude to gaze at is Clarissa, who has come to New York from a Western metropolis to study art. Clarissa is 19 and practically ran away from home because she does not fancy her stepmother. First of all she went straight to the fashionable finishing school, where she was graduated last year, and asked for a job, and got it, as assistant chaperone to the girls on their matinee and shopping trips—and she made good. But of course in a couple of months her father came on, and an arrangement has been made whereby she is to quit this work, to have an allowance, live in a place of her father’s selection and go on with her chosen studies.
It is no use blinking the fact that Clarissa is as sophisticated at Joan—or more so; and that she also wears her skirts extremely short. She uses no make-up—a glorious color of her own prevents it. Neither does she drink nor smoke nor use “frank” language; she will tell you bluntly that girls who have any sense don’t do these two last, only the “simps”--and Clarissa ought to know. With all this, Clarissa is personally an amazingly lovely thing, a real beauty, and her beaus and suitors are numerous. So the fact that a girl behaves herself with self-respect and decency does not debar her from masculine attention, as we have been so frequently assured.
Here is Dan, just out of law school, two years late because of his service in the war. He has put his good-looking nose on the grind-stone in earnest, because he must make u for that two years of lost study. The aftermath of his strenuous soldiering is an equally strenuous belief that he must put the world to rights as speedily as possible, and that it is everyone’s duty to help and help hard. Dan likes a pretty girl as well as any lad his age, but in the man-sized job that he has chosen for himself there is no place for promiscuous “fussing” as he calls it. Dan’s requirements in girls are only two: “sense” and “looks.”
I might go on indefinitely, citing cases, both girls and young men, who are like Joan and George and Clarissa and Dan and Lucy and their friends. These have been deliberately chosen because they come from homes of moderate wealth, since it is against the children of such homes only that the charges of juvenile delinquency are brought. No one has yet dared to say that the boys and girls who are forced by necessity to go early from school to the inevitable job are light-minded, rebellious and shameless in thier social behaviour. No, the indictment has been brought only against the children of the well-to-do, whose youth has a background of leisure and irresponsibility.
And against event these if falls flat when it is considered fairly, by the evidence of the majority and not only by the small minority of wastrels and freaks. Wastrels and freaks exist, but they have always existed in every age, in every society.
Wild oats is not a crop unique to this year nor to the present generation. There have always been and there will always be “wild” and “fast” young people, but they are mere froth on a deep sea of normal, healthy-minded youth. If we will be truly honest, if we will judge by the 99 out of every 100, we will see that they differ from their fathers and mothers only in non-essentials. Why not disregard the Terrible Little |boy, grown up but still capering and making faces and calling out, “See how bad I am”--disregard and laugh at him? He no more represents typical American youth than does the other extreme, the college “grind” with nose in books, pale from lack of exercise, mentally pale from lack of human contacts.
The cry of age against youth is no new thing. You will find it in every age, in every time, in every literature. The Bible tells us “childhood and youth are vanity,” and again inveighs against “a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith,” with other words of like tenor. So it behoves us to be calm, to wait a little. Life comes on fast enough with its various disillusions and responsibilities, its weight of experience, its inevitable call to work, to weave our own bit of color as closely and as well as we can into the complicated web of existence. So if our young people laugh a great deal at things that seem too silly for laughter to us oldsters, let them do it unrebuked, for young laughter is pleasant to hear and there is never enough of it. If they are full of high spirits and show the daring that comes from inexperience and ignorance, don’t let us mistake these qualities for license and base intentions. Oh, I wonder sometimes if half the condemnation of youth isn’t envy of it! And don’t let us fall into the mistake of libelling our younger generation simply because they have a few black sheep among them. Our own particular flock of 20 years ago was not quite spotless. Was it—honestly?
From the Ladies Home Journal, May, 1921
