Letters, Nov. 26, 1951

The Younger Generation

Sir:

All praise to TIME [Nov. 5] for its portrait of “The Younger Generation.” Doubtless some of them will take exception to their reflection in your mirror, but as one who has spent the greater part of his time over the past 30 years in attempting to understand successive younger generations and to interpret them to themselves, and who finds this present younger generation in many ways the most puzzling and interesting in the series, your article seems to me by all odds the ablest and truest analysis which I have seen. I wouldn’t alter a phrase or add a sentence.

HENRY P. VAN DUSEN Union Theological Seminary New York City

Sir:

A most excellent, down-to-earth article. Incidentally, what is to become of those few of us who do still wish to climb Mt. Everest and mine diamonds in South Africa?

F. W. SHEPARD Yale University New Haven, Conn.

Sir:

First I experienced indignation—then the sickening realization that everything you said was coldly accurate.

LENORE CARRERO Stephens College Columbia, Mo.

Sir:

. . . “But youth is taking its upsetting certainties with extraordinary calm.” To us, those certainties are apparently the natural order of things, therefore not too upsetting, but the word should be “apathy,” not “calm.”

B. VINCENT DAVIS JR. Nashville

Sir:

… A new generation of Babbitts is the price of security at any cost.

CAROLYN BARTHOLF Mount Holyoke College South Hadley, Mass.

Sir:

. . . Thank you for printing what I have been feeling myself.

RICHARD F. CHAPMAN (’56) Yale University New Haven, Conn.

Sir:

The man who shot your portrait of the younger generation used a fast shutter. The image was clear, exact, and unblurred . . . JAMES T. POTTER St. Paul

Sir:

… I am an ´English woman, 21 . . .a child of “gay ’20s” parents. A child living, since seven or eight, under threat of war, total war and an uneasy peace. My father left home for service in India when I was nine—I never saw him again ’til I was 15. The world I was born into has been overturned. As I grew up I heard, “When we get back to normal again . . .”—but we never have, we never will . . . What is there for us to say ? … It is a terrible, endless, weary task that is our heritage.

(MRS.) MARY SALMON Rosedale, Toronto, Canada

. . . Your article was disturbingly close to my own line of thinking on practically everything, and after a rereading I asked myself: Am I really such a schnook? . . .

GENE GORMAN Los Angeles

Sir:

Your . . . article . . . proves what I have suspected all along. Our youth are calmer than the older people. In their hands we must put our final trust.

A. G. D. WILES Charleston, S.C.

Sir:

… It was all well and good for E. Hemingway to march off to Italy in 1917 with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other, and feel that he was a hero. Remember, in those days a bomb destroyed but one building, and when people said “A war to end all wars,” they believed it …

Some 21 years and millions of heartaches later, they started all over again . . . Bombs came by the gross and changed great cities into masses of smoking rubble, and when people said, “A war to end all wars,” they prayed to God it would be so. More important, they believed that victory, purchased at so fearful a price, had given them a second opportunity to create, at last, that free, new world of peace . . . But no. There is a fly in the ointment. Once more we seem doomed to repeat that awful cycle of murder and destruction . . . Why then should we not be fatalistic, silent, stodgy—even weary?

PHILIP S. YEDINSKY University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia

Sir:

. . . You express understandable concern over the aggressiveness of the modern young woman. Perhaps you forget that a woman reacts to a “mousey” man by increased domination as an unconscious desire to punish him for his lack of masculinity . —Maybe more assertiveness on the part of the dominated man will give him more “say” and make his wife more docile and much happier than she was before.

(MRS.) JOYCE R. COUPAL Butte, Mont.

Sir:

… To hell with the “career girl” . . . Here’s a silent prayer from G.I.s all over the world: may that Golden Age soon come when the American girl again becomes the sweet, lovely, charming and soft-spoken creature she used to be.

(CPL.) JOHN A. BREITENSTEIN U.S.A.F. Fairbanks, Alaska

Sir:

… I most heartily agree with the remark made by the Minneapolis priest who decried the modern American woman’s aggressiveness and will to dominate. The good father said a mouthful!

GILBERT K. SMITH

New York City

Sir:

TIME has mistaken for apathetic servitude youth’s quiet and patient attempt to rebuild the world . . . Our elder statesmen are too busy spending their reclining years wintering in mink and summering in the deep freeze. So youth has decided that this generation must provide a “found generation” . . . The values that can’t be taught to Presidents and politicians might be taught babies.

The younger generation has few soapbox orators and fewer still head-in-the-clouds poets reminiscent of the generation of TIME’S editors. Beside Flaming Youth, Prohibition, Greenwich Village sofas, Gertrude Stein, and stubble-bearded Marxists, this generation probably seems like a mass-membership of the Union League Club. Youth attends church, belongs to the P.T.A., works on community programs, writes its Congressman (admittedly with tongue in cheek), will probably vote out badly governed government next year . . .

(MRS.) DOROTHY H. ERVIN Los Angeles

I can speak only for the little space buyers and dentist’s assistants who live in chintzy apartments with roommates and middlebrow poetry. They do serve real home-cooked meals on shaky bridge tables, God bless them.

May the rare and unfortunate bachelor who wrote that paragraph be chained in a dark corner of a men’s grill for the rest of his natural eating days. He can brood over his menu, his ulcers, and the coarse behavior of his generation of women. Or maybe he’d prefer to eat words.

MARION TRAVIS New York City

Sir:

I was nauseated over the allegedly “brilliant” premedical student at George Washington who had chosen medicine “to make a lot of money in a hurry.” I have news for that confused lad.

As one who … is undergoing specialist training (surgery), I charitably suggest he reconsider his choice of professions. Medicine in any form is a back-breaking and heart-twisting task before it becomes remunerative quickly, if at all … If money be his total motivation, I offer my sincere condolences—to him and his patients.

THOMAS G. PARKER, M.D. Washington, B.C.

Sir:

. . . Modern youth may be on the verge of discovering that it is more important to be a good man than it is to be a rich man. If he is moving in that direction, he is discovering that he needs a concept of character . . If youth is turning this corner . . . it needs all the encouragement and illumination it can receive, from TIME as well as from T. S. Eliot . . .

LAWRENCE M. BURKE JR.

Seattle

. How can we be boastful about anything ‘when fine young men, squad leaders in Korea, are so beaten by repeated fighting on “unnamed and unnumbered hills” that they can only mumble, to the psychiatrist, I just can’t take it any more”?

FLORENCE MARVIN Morgan Hill, Calif.

Never before has a generation been subjected to so many admonitions, accusations, reminders, analyses and lectures from its parents, graduation speakers, employers and newsmagazines. In fact, it’s just possible that the younger generation is not silent at all—merely drowned out.

ROBERT J. PIERSOL

Los Angeles

Having just turned 27, I suppose I am to’be considered a part of your article. On reading it, I realized something that hasn’t occurred to me recently. We are the Before-Our-Time Generation.” We grew up with a rush, many of us before we hit 20 And why not? Millions were overseas, som wounded and killers of fellow men before we ever had to shave . . . Upon returning horn with a chance of a free education, we combined that, many of us, with marriage an parenthood; and still in our very early 20s. Yes, we’re a generation who can’t remember when a bitter war wasn’t raging somewhere Why, the first newspaper I recall seeing was the Herald Tribune’s rotogravure section with pictures of the Sino-Japanese war in Manchuria. Most of us never knew a President who wasn’t named Franklin or Harry . . .

THILIP BREWSTER

Rye, N.Y.

Shame on you TIME . . . My husband is a young physician in his fourth postgraduate year following medical school. The amount of money he makes isn’t worth mentioning. He doesn’t complain (and neither do I), but no one can pay him enough for the amount of time he puts in, either now or in the future. That isn’t particularly why he’s doing it. You would like him to go to Africa and mine diamonds I take it. He would be delighted to go to China and study disease (they have so much there), but that doesn’t seem quite the thing to do at the moment. A friend of ours isn’t interested in “finding a cure for cancer” —he happens to be too busy looking for a cure for polio, with all the complicated tools research demands these days . . .

I don’t happen to be one of the younger generation who longs for a home in suburbia. I rather sympathize, however, with some friends of ours who have four children. They have been living in a succession of tarpaper shacks while the husband went through medical school . . .

DORIS ENTWISLE

Brighton, Mass.

Sir:

. . . You state that young women desire marriage and children, but you do not look into the attitude of those young women who have married and produced a family. I am one of that group, and I feel we have quite a problem. We were raised to believe we were man’s intellectual equal. Yet to achieve emotional tranquillity, i.e., home, marriage, children, we must confine our mental exercise to the question of [when] a baby should have solid foods, or which is the most economical cut of meat … As one of my friends put it, ‘It’s like saying all men must be plumbers—whether they are physically, mentally or emotionally equipped to be or not.”

I feel my place is with my husband and children, and will spend my life being intellectually frustrated. A friend will follow a career as soon as her children are school age. Neither of us is satisfied with the solution. _ … BETTEJEAN HILL San Mateo, Calif.

Sir:

. . . The trouble is in our education. After years of listening to a bunch of dreamy bookworms whose sole delight is tearing down the credos of earlier generations, we don’t know how to act. This is too bad. The security we want is what the Pilgrims and pioneers wanted. They knew how to work for it …

JUNE ELLINGSON New York City J

. . . That nothing is really secure in life—except God—has come to our generation a little earlier than it has come to generations before us …

(MRS.) VIRGINIA RAMSAY Albion, Mich.

Sir:

… A great failure and lack in my generation is the complete absence of any kind of discipline—mental or physical—that should have been impressed upon us by your generation. In the “psychological” home you let us run around un-channeled. Respect and taste were completely neglected in the half-baked theory that any regimentation would warp our sensitive personalities … It has resulted in a general feeling in my generation that anyone behaving decently, learnedly, or intelligently is either a comic figure or most unnatural . . .

[As for] careers—you sigh nostalgically that today’s generation has no adventurous, imaginative lads ready to seek the weird heights, far away from the stereotyped big-company jobs. Well, your . . . generation has substituted oafish earnestness and the plodder’s mentality for ability, brilliance, drive and talent . . . After all, it’s easier to take the plodding, army-like promotions and security of big companies with two outings a year . . . live in a little house in the suburbs with a wife in Peck & Peck tweeds who knows all about zinnias and planned parenthood, and have two dirty-faced moppets playing on the lawn, than it is to start a new magazine when starving in an attic in the Village or be bursting with potential in the mailroom at $27.50 a week . . .

When your generation feels smug and sly about this “dead wood generation,” just remember you raised us—gave us, in large, a half-baked cultural and intellectual background. You sent us off to war … It is your generation that pays our salaries and keeps us conventional and mediocre; it is your generation that confuses our morals, not us … However, as you say, we will serve—for you, the generations before you and ones after us—because we really love America and the American idea, and—we have a sense of humor.

FREDERICK W. ROLOFF JR. New York City

Sir:

I got news for you, too. I resign from the younger generation.

FRANK FITZGERALD (AGE 22) Boston University