People: THE YOUNGER GENERATION

IS it possible to paint a portrait of an entire generation?

Each generation has a million faces and a million voices.

What the voices say is not necessarily what the generation believes, and what it believes is not necessarily what it will act on. Its motives and desires are often hidden. It is a medley of good and evil, promise and threat, hope and despair. Like a straggling army, it has no clear beginning or end. And yet each generation has some features that are more significant than others; each has a quality as distinctive as a man’s accent, each makes a statement to the future, each leaves behind a picture of itself.

What of today’s youth? Some are smoking marijuana; some are dying in Korea. Some are going to college with their wives; some are making $400 a week in television. Some are sure they will be blown to bits by the atom bomb. Some pray. Some are raising the highest towers and running the fastest machines in the world. Some wear blue jeans; some wear Dior gowns. Some want to vote the straight Republican ticket. Some want to fly to the moon.

TIME’S correspondents across the U.S. have tried to find out about this younger generation-by talking to young people, and to their teachers and guardians. What do the young think, believe, and read? Who are their heroes? What are their ambitions? How do they see themselves and their time? These are some of the questions TIME’S correspondents asked; the masses of answers-plus the correspondents’ interpretation-contain many clashing shades of opinion, but nevertheless reveal a remarkably clear area of agreement on the state of the nation’s youth.

Youth today is waiting for the hand of fate to fall on its shoulders, meanwhile working fairly hard and saying almost nothing. The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today’s younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the “Silent Generation.” But what does the silence mean? What, if anything, does it hide? Or are youth’s elders merely hard of hearing?

They Are Grave and Fatalistic

Listen to their voices, in a college bull session:

“I think the draft has all the fellows upset . . . They can’t start figuring in high school or even in college what they want to do … First thing you know, Uncle Sam has tagged them off base.”

“The boys are upset about the Korean business because they can’t tell from one day to the next what they are going to be doing, going into the Army or what.”

“Sure, the boys say, ‘What’s the use? I’d just get started and whammo, I’m gone.'”

“It’s hard to get married when you don’t know what the deal is. Maybe your husband is off to Korea or somewhere, and there you are.”

“With maybe a baby on the way.”

“It’s better to get a job and wait.”

“That’s the worst part.”

The “Korean business”-and a lot of other business that may How_is the dominant fact in the life of today’s youth. “I observe that you share the prevailing mood of the hour,” Yale’s President A. Whitney Griswold told his graduating class last June, “which in your case consists of bargains privately struck with fate-on fate’s terms.” The hand of fate has been on the U.S. with special gravity since World War I; it has disturbed the lives of America’s youth since the ‘305, through depression and war. The fear of depression has receded; the fear of war remains. Those who have been to war and face recall, and those who face the draft at the end of their schooling, know that they may have to fight before they are much older.

But youth is taking its upsetting uncertainties with extraordinary calm. When the U.S. began to realize how deeply it had committed itself in Korea, youngsters of draft age had a bad case of jitters; but all reports agree that they have since settled down to studying or working for as long as they can. The majority seem to think that war with Russia is inevitable sooner or later, but they feel that they will survive it. Reports TIME’S Los Angeles Bureau: “Today’s youth does have some fear of the atomic age. But he does not feel as though he is living on the brink of disaster, nor does he flick on the radio (as was done in the ‘405) and expect his life to be changed drastically by the news of the moment. There is a feeling that the world is in a ten-round bout, and that there will be no quick or easy knockout.”

Hardly anyone wants to go into the Army; there is little enthusiasm for the military life, no enthusiasm for war. Youngsters do not talk like heroes; they admit freely that they will try to stay out of the draft as long as they can. But there is none of the systematized and sentimentalized antiwar feeling of the ‘205. Pacifism has been almost nonexistent since World War II; so are Oxford Oaths. Some observers regard this as a sign of youth’s passivity. But, as a student at Harvard puts it: “When a fellow gets his draft notice in February and keeps on working and planning till June, instead of boozing up every night and having a succession of farewell parties, he has made a very difficult, positive decision. Most make that decision today.”

They Are Conventional and Gregarious

On a sunny Sunday not long ago, Sociology Professor Carr B. Lavell of George Washington University took one of his students on a fishing trip. He is a brilliant student, president of his class, a big man on campus, evidently with a bright future in his chosen field, medicine. In the bracing air, professor and student had a quiet talk. Why had he gone into medicine? asked the professor. Answer: medicine looked lucrative. What did he want to do as a doctor? Get into the specialty that offered biggest fees. Did he think that a doctor owed some special service to the community? Probably not. “I am just like anyone else,” said the student. “I just want to prepare myself so that I can get the most out of it for me. I hope to make a lot of money in a hurry. I’d like to retire in about ten years and do the things I really want to do.” And what are those? “Oh,” said the brilliant student, “fishing, traveling, taking it easy.”

Then they stopped talking, because the student had a nibble.

Perhaps more than any of its predecessors, this generation wants a good; secure job. This does not mean that it specifically fears a depression, as some aging New Dealers claim. The feeling is widespread that anyone who wants to work can find a decent job; the facts confirm that feeling (and the starting pay is better ‘than ever). But youth’s ambitions have shrunk. Few youngsters today want to mine diamonds in South Africa, ranch in Paraguay, climb Mount Everest, find a cure for cancer, sail around the world, or build an industrial empire. Some would like to own a small, independent business, but most want a good job with a big firm, and with it, a kind of suburban idyll.

An official of the placement bureau at Stanford University finds college graduates mostly interested in big companies-and choosy about which ones they will work for. “Half the time a guy will turn down a good job because he has to work in the city [meaning San Francisco]. They all figure there’s no future in being holed up in a little apartment in town for ten years or getting up at 6 in the morning to commute to work and then not getting home until after dark. So they all want to work down on the peninsula where they can have a little house in the country and play golf or tennis and live the good life.”

Says one youthful observer who still likes his dreams bigger: “This generation suffers from lack of worlds to conquer. Its fathers in a sense, did too well. Sure, there are slums left-but another Federal housing project can clean up the worst. Most of the fights in labor have simmered down to arguments around the bargaining table. Would-be heroes find themselves padded from har-and hope-like lunatics in a cell. In business, the tax structure, social security and pension plans promise to soften the blow of depression or personal misfortune-and forbid the building of new empires. In science there is the great corporation (or the Government) glad to furnish the expensive machinery now necessary for the smallest advance-and to give its name, or that of its group research boss, to the new process, while plowing back the profits. A man goes bounding, with no visible bruises, among the pads of an over-organized society.”

The facts are that the U.S. is a highly organized society, must be, and will get more rather than less organized; that the big corporation is here to stay (and is a progressive instrument of U.S. capitalism). What is discouraging to some observers is not so much that youth has accepted life within the well-padded structure of organized society and big corporations, but that it seems to have relatively little ambition to do any of society’s organizing. What is even more disturbing is youth’s certainty that Government will take care of it-a feeling which continues despite a good deal of political distrust of Government. Reports TIME’S Seattle Bureau: “The Pacific Northwest is only yesterday removed from the frontier, but the ‘root, hog, or die’ spirit has almost disappeared. Into its place has moved a curious dependence on the biggest new employer-Government. A 28-year-old aerodynamics specialist at Boeing says: ‘I hope to work toward an income of $500 or $600 a month, after taxes. You know, only on a sliding scale for inflation. I’d just like to net $600, and then my family would always be O.K. You start earning more than that, and it’s taxed away from you, so what the hell.'”

Says a 26-year-old promotion manager in Dallas: “Sure, I’d like to do something on my own, but I want to get well fixed first-make plenty of money and then maybe start some innovations.”

This cautious desire to be “well fixed” and a little more has many causes: the war; the lingering shock of the Big Depression (which this younger generation felt or heard about in its childhood); and the hard-to-kill belief (still expounded in some college economics courses) that the frontiers of the U.S. economy have been reached.

There is also the feeling that it is neither desirable nor practical to do things that are different from what the next fellow is doing. Said a girl in Minneapolis: “The individual is almost dead today, but the young people are unaware of it. They think of themselves as individuals, but really they are not. They are parts of groups. They are unhappy outside of a group. When they are alone, they are bored with themselves. There is a tendency now to date in foursomes, or sixsomes. Very few dates are just a boy & girl together. They have to be with a crowd. These kids in my group think of themselves as individuals, but actually it is as if you took a tube of toothpaste and squeezed out a number of little distinct blobs on a piece of paper. Each blob would be distinct-separated in space-but each blob would be the same.”

The Girls Want a Career-and Marriage

At the corner of Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street stands a 23-story building populated entirely by women, in which men are not permitted above the first floor. This does not mean that its inhabitants are not interested in men. The Barbizon hotel for women is considered a good, respectable address for out-of-town girls who have come to make a name for themselves in New York. In the small green lobby, through which moves a constant stream of eager young women carrying an air of determination, one aspiring young actress from Providence, R.I. said: “The men in New York are all the same. They’re out for what they can get. I have a boy friend from home who comes to see me about every three weeks. He’s a real home-town boy, all-American, clean-cut. He wouldn’t speak the same language as these New York men. They’re all trying to be big shots. I go out with them when he isn’t here, but since I’ve been in New York I haven’t met one man I can call a friend … I won’t marry until I’ve convinced myself that I’ve gotten everything I can out of acting. Back home, everybody’s a homebody, wants to raise big families. I’m not ready for that yet.

If I married this fellow from home, I know I’d have to quit acting right away. He just wouldn’t stand for it. I don’t think I could do both, anyway.”

American young women are, in many ways, the generation’s most serious problem: they are emotional D.P.s. The granddaughters of the suffragettes, the daughters of the cigarette-and-short-skirt crusaders, they were raised to believe in woman’s emancipation, and equality with man. Large numbers of them feel that a home and children alone would be a fate worse than death, and they invade the big cities in search of a career. They ride crowded subways on which men, enjoying equality, do not offer them seats. They compete with men in industry and the arts; and keep up with them, Martini for Martini, at the cocktail parties.

There is every evidence that women have not been made happy by their ascent to power. They are dressed to kill in femininity. The bosom is back; hair is longer again; office telephones echo with more cooing voices than St. Mark’s Square at pigeon-feeding time. The career girl is not ready to admit that all she wants is to get married; but she has generally retreated from the brassy advance post of complete flat-chested emancipation, to the position that she would like, if possible, to have marriage and a career, both. In the cities, she usually lives with a roommate (for respectability and lower rent) in a small apartment, fitted with chintz slipcovers, middlebrow poetry and a well-equipped kitchenette. Rare and fortunate is the bachelor who has not been invited to a “real, home-cooked dinner.” to be eaten off a shaky bridge table, by a young woman who during the daytime is a space buyer or a dentist’s assistant.

Says a Minneapolis priest: “The young American male is increasingly bewildered and confused by the aggressive, coarse, dominant attitudes and behavior of his women. I believe it is one of the most serious social traits of our time-and one that is certain to have most serious social consequences.”

Their Morals Are Confused

The shrieking blonde ripped the big tackle’s shirt from his shoulder and Charlestoned off through the crowded room, fan-dancing with a ragged sleeve. In her wake, shirts fell in shreds on the floor, until half the male guests roared around bare to the waist. Shouts and laughs rose above the full-volume records from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The party, celebrating the departure of a University of Texas coed who had flunked out, had begun in midafternoon some three hours earlier. In one corner, four tipsily serious coeds tried to revive a passed-out couple with more salty dog (a mixture of gin, grapefruit juice and salt). About 10 p.m., a brunette bounded on to the coffee table, in a limited striptease. At 2 a.m., when the party broke up, one carload of youngsters decided to take off on a two-day drive into Mexico (they got there all right, and sent back picture postcards to the folks).

The younger generation can still raise hell. The significant thing is not that it does, but how it goes about doing it. Most of today’s youngsters never seem to lose their heads; even when they let themselves go, an alarm clock seems to be ticking away at the back of their minds; it goes off sooner or later, and sends them back to school, to work, or to war. They are almost discreet about their indiscretions, largely because (unlike their parents) they no longer want or need to shock their elders. The generation has “won its latchkey.” It sees no point or fun in yelling for freedom to do as it pleases, because generally no one keeps it from doing as it pleases. It is not rebellious-either against convention or instruction, the state or fate, Pop or Mom. Toward its parents, it exhibits an indulgent tolerance. As one young New Yorker put it with a shrug: “Why insult the folks?”

The younger generation seems to drink less. “There is nothing glorious or inglorious any more about getting stewed.” says one college professor. Whether youth is more or less promiscuous than it used to be is a matter of disagreement. Fact is that it is less showy about sex. Whatever its immoralities, it commits them on the whole because it enjoys them, and not because it wants to demonstrate against Victorian conventions or shock Babbitt. In that sense, it is far less childish than its parents were. As a whole, it is more sober and conservative, but in individual cases, e.g., the recent dope scandals, it makes Flaming Youth look like amateurs.

The younger generation is tolerant of almost anything, shocked by little. Young men who may personally think sex experience before marriage wrong are perfectly tolerant toward anyone who disagrees. Gay blades report that young women, when they turn down what is still known as a “pass,” do so apologetically, as if they were exhibiting a social shortcoming like an inability to mambo. The girl’s usual excuse: “I am so sorry, it’s just the way I was brought up.”

A paratrooper at Fort Bragg told a TIME correspondent that he had nothing against premarital sex: “Before the property is yours, I don’t see why anybody can’t use it.” But a buddy added: “After marriage, some guy taking my wife would be like taking my car and putting on a few extra miles. It might improve through use, but I like to drive my own.” A student editor at Emory University states a widespread phenomenon among American women: “There are few who have any strong moral feelings against having affairs. They may be afraid. But if they kid themselves into falling madly in love, then it’s all right.”

Considering that its parents gave the younger generation few standards, few ideals, and an education increasingly specialized, i.e., without cultural breadth, youth’s morals have turned out far better than anyone had a right to hope. Almost of itself, it has picked up the right instincts from an American tradition older than its parents: it wants to marry, have children, found homes, and if necessary, defend them.

They Expect Disappointment

Intellectually, today’s young people already seem a bit stodgy. Their adventures of the mind are apt to be mild and safe, and their literature too often runs to querulous and self-protective introspection, or voices a pale, orthodox liberalism that seems more second-hand than second nature. On the whole, the young writer today is a better craftsman than the beginner of the ‘205. Novelists like Truman Capote, William Styron and Frederick Buechner are precocious technicians, but their books have the air of suspecting that life is long on treachery, short on rewards. What some critics took for healthy revolt in James Jones’s From Here to Eternity was really a massively reiterated gripe against life. But Jones is not the only young writer to wallow in a world of seemingly private resentments. Most of his fellow writers suffer from what has become their occupational disease: belief that disappointment is life’s only certainty. The young writers of the ‘205 were at least original enough to create personal styles. Today the young writer’s flair sometimes turns out to be nothing more than a byproduct of his neuroses.

Educators across the U.S. complain that young people seem to have no militant beliefs. They do not speak out for anything. Professors who used to enjoy baiting students by outrageously praising child labor or damning Shelley now find that they cannot get a rise out of the docile notetakers in their classes. The only two issues about which the younger generation seem to get worked up are race relations and world government; but neither of these issues rouses anything approaching an absorbing faith.

Many students and teachers blame this lack of conviction on fear-the fear of being tagged “subversive.” Today’s generation, either through fear, passivity or conviction, is ready to conform.

Marxism seems dead among the U.S. young; belief in democracy is strong but inarticulate. The one new movement that has begun in the younger generation is what Poet-Professor Peter Viereck calls the revolt against revolt-an attempt to give youth a conservative credo to stand up against the bankrupt but lingering political radicalism of the ‘203 and ‘305.

One of the most significant facts about the younger generation is that increasingly larger numbers of it are seeking their faith not in secular panaceas but in God.

They Want a Faith

Near the Mount Zion Methodist Church just outside Atlanta, on Highway 41, a onetime barbecue pit has been turned into a Bible classroom. One evening recently, eleven disciples watched Robert L. West go over and flip off the light switch. “It’s kinda dark in here without the lights,” apologized West, as he walked behind the crepe-wrapped white cross now lighted up by two candles, “but I would ask you to look upon this symbol-perhaps the greatest in the world.”

West, an 18-year-old son of a paper-plant foreman, who quit Georgia Tech because he found nothing but “hard, cold facts of engineering,” looked like a church -ly Frank Sinatra, in his Paisley bow tie and purple jacket, his big ears enlarged in shadows on the blackboard behind him. He read his long text (Luke 9: 20-27: “. . . And be rejected of the elders . . .”), and in a businesslike manner proceeded to expound it-the job of youth today. “Unless we, the young people of today, go to work, we’re going to lose in the end. This symbol has stood for thousands of years. To us today it stands for sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice that He made for us … And it stands for a call, a call to work

. . But we’re afraid to take on something if we have to call on God to do it. We’re ready to do anything if we can handle it with our own two hands. But we’re afraid to try something too big, a job that takes God’s help . . . This place should be filled … As we stand in front of this cross, lift up our shamed hearts to the work that is ours . . .”

The younger generation is looking for a faith. The fact that it has not found one -that it isn’t even sure where to look;is less significant than the fact that it feels the need to believe.

The generation of the ‘205 was devoutly iconoclastic. It put on (in the words of T. S. Eliot) “the black cap of jem’en joutisme”-of I-don’t-give-a-damn-ism. It discovered with a mixture of horror and delight that it was living in a brand-new age, the 20th Century, and it decided to burn all the old cultural furniture. This huge fire, while it caused incalculable damage, cast a sharp, new light across U.S. civilization-and encouraged the younger generation of that day to do a whooping war dance around it. Gertrude Stein christened it the “lost generation,” but she may have spoken too soon.

To some, it seems that today’s youth is really the lost generation. It does not believe that the wrecking of the ‘205 made sense, and even if it did, the ‘205 did not leave many values to wreck. Present-day youth has no living heroes and few villains. Said a professor of sociology: “We spend all our time debunking. We have no heroes, so how can you expect the young people to have any? We destroy them all. We’ve even done it in the sports world. Kids today feel they have to go all the way back to Babe Ruth to find a hero. Today the only heroes are the ones whom they can’t destroy. And who are those? The heroes of the comic strips.”

There is no formal religious revival among the young. God, for most young Americans, is still a vaguely comforting thought, theology a waste of time, and denominations beside the point. To large numbers of them, religion is still merely an ethical code. But God (whoever or whatever they understand by that word) has once more become a factor in the younger generation’s thoughts. The old argument of religion v. science is subsiding; a system which does not make room for both makes little sense to today’s younger generation. It is no longer shockingly unfashionable to discuss God.

Church attendance among the young has increased, partly because churches have made strong efforts to win new followers through social and sport activities. But there is an unquestioned spiritual need at work, too. Says Dean Robert Strozier of the University of Chicago: “They all have a conscience.” Says Historian Viereck: “They believe they believe ; they do not necessarily believe. Not many of today’s young people say they have seen God, but they think everybody needs to see God.”

They Will Serve

Beside a Quonset hut at Kimpo Airport, more than 100 tired, unshaven infantrymen lolled in the dust, waiting patiently for planes that would take them to Tokyo. For some, Tokyo meant the first leg of the trip home. For others it meant only a temporary break in the dirty business of war. They had no yarns to swap, no desire to learn any more than they already knew about war. From a few groups came the click of dice, and the only voices audible over the distant roar of engines were the urgent pleas of crapshooters. At one group, a Red Cross worker paused to chat with a sergeant who had spent 13 months in Korea. Said the sergeant: “For 15 months the guys have been running up and down these mountains getting their fannies full of lead. And what have we proved? I got news for you, Mister; the next time this boy fights to defend anybody’s country, it’ll damn well be his own.” But an officer said: “You seen Seoul? We11.. I’d hate for that to be Decatur, Illinois.”

The soldier in the combat zone is too preoccupied to do much thinking about the underlying reasons for his presence in Korea. He is concerned almost exclusively with personal problems, and the personal problem that overshadows all others is the problem of getting home. To justify his personal yearning to go home, he often subscribes to the thesis that Korea was a mistake (once back in the States, he will probably change his mind). In Korea, he does his job-because of his sense of duty to his country and his buddies, and because of his pride in his country and himself.

G.I. Joe’s younger brother is better informed and educated, much better trained, and less sorry for himself. Mauldin cartoons today would not find the popularity they did in World War II. The AWOL rate is down, even the use of profanity has fallen off (at least in Stateside camps). “Little Joe” gripes about his officers, distrusts politics and government (it is universally believed that “Harry Vaughan can transfer any man”). He does not go in for heroics, or believe in them. He is short on ideals, lacks self-reliance, is for personal security at any price. He singularly lacks flame. In spite of this, he makes a good, efficient soldier-relying on superior firepower.

The best thing that can be said for American youth, in or out of uniform, is that it has learned that it must try to make the best oj: a bad and difficult job, whether that job is life, war, or both. The generation which has been called the oldest young generation in the world has achieved a certain maturity.

Young people do not feel cheated. And they do not blame anyone. Before this generation, “they” were always to blame. It was a standard prewar feeling that “they” had let them down. But this generation puts the blame on life as a whole, not on parents, politicians, cartels, etc. The fact of this world is war, uncertainty, the need for work, courage, sacrifice. Nobody likes that fact. But youth does not blame that fact on its parents dropping the ball. In real life, youth seems to know, people always drop the ball. Youth today has little cynicism, because it never hoped for much.

Says a TIME correspondent in Boston: “Young people most bitterly know the frightful cost of living to keep peace in the world, and they willingly submit to the cost, not from want of spirit, but from a knowledge that it is the best thing to do. You cannot say of them, ‘Youth Will Be Served,’ because the phrase suggests a voracious striking out from security, wealth and stability. The best you can say for this younger generation is, ‘Youth Will Serve.'”

-TIME’S working definition of the younger generation: 18 to 28.