American Notebook: The American Student: a Profile
Rawick, George
During the past few years a number of articles have appeared characterizing the "younger generation" as one which does not "issue manifestoes, make speeches, or carry posters," a generation...
...The Philistines refused to give way before the avant garde...
...World War II had been for them a time of collecting scrappaper and tin-foil, the depression a time of cribs and kindergartens...
...History has not come to a dead stop...
...The holy war had ended in the debacle of Versailles...
...It is complex and hazy, easier to sense than to describe, since almost any description is likely to be more precise than the actuality...
...Despite Stalinist inspiration of the Wallace movement and the fact that on most campuses the active leaders of the Young Progressives were Stalinists or fellow-travellers, a quite considerable number of students was involved in the Wallace campaign, students who could by no stretch of the imagination be called Stalinists...
...All political tendencies were comparatively active...
...They continue to be suspicious of political movements and ideologies, yet they try hard to think and work things out for themselves --and their capacities for intellectual dissent, while clearly not available at the present moment to any movement or ideology, are larger than is commonly supposed...
...Those who "live for rather than off ideas" make up only a tiny minority of the student population...
...On the other end of the scale are the campus esthetes...
...Those older people who have lived through the experiences of the past twenty years and who remain honest, have seen many of their commitments turn into wickedness, sloth, or failure...
...Cleon Holmes, in the New York Times, less optimistically saw the generation as "beat," pushed up against itself by the anxieties of the nineteen-forties...
...The pattern of adherence to non-political, or if political, conservative, ideologies, as well as the failure of many to make any commitment, is produced not only by confusion, but also by fear...
...They yearn for the kind of society they vaguely imagine to have existed in the vague past, a society whose goal was the "refinement of thought and taste" rather than the accumulation of ma terial necessities and comforts...
...The differences between the disillusioned and those who never were in the position to be disillusioned, except vicariously, are profound...
...While they did not engage in political activity or create political organizations, the names of such of their little magazines as secession, transition, broom (to make a clean sweep of it), breathed a spirit of denial and revolt...
...NOTES OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN Philosophy: a diamond-studded shoe-string...
...The New Industrial Society, characterized by a new social responsibility, did not emerge Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 393 —the business of America remained business...
...snatches of the melody lingered on...
...But those who know only the end product without having known the struggle have nothing to modify or reaffirm...
...For them the fantasies of science fiction seem more real than the sitdown strikes of the thirties...
...The intelligent student of today struggles at least as hard with his uncertainties as the student of two decades ago struggled for his certainties...
...Commitments in the post-World War II era to either liberalism or socialism were more tentative, expectations were more "realistic" and limited, and those who played the role of radical social critic did so with a certain humility...
...As Edouard Bernstein, commenting on the reaction to the Cromwellian Revolution, observed, those who live through "untold sacrifices, without any satisfactory results," who observe "political struggles (succeeding) each other without bringing the solution of social difficulties any nearer," who have seen "men who had been hailed as deliverers, when once raised to power (assume) the mien of oppressors," often reach the conclusion that the "chief evil (lies) in man himself, in the weakness of human nature...
...It is a bureaucratic collectivist state, but this is not a matter for wailing, for all modern industrial societies inevitably (and perhaps beneficently) move in the same direction...
...Although men who think too much have always been in danger, it is only in periods in which there is a failure of belief that the failure of nerve takes on significant proportions...
...Pushed on into life, but cut off from understanding or belief, their mood has perhaps been best expressed by one of them who ended a friendly yet critical review of the first issue of Dissent by honestly declaring, "And if we were asked, `What kind of magazine did you expect?', we should probably be unable to answer with anything but vague impressions...
...A sense of their own ignorance and impotence pervades many of the Aufumn 1954 • DISSENT • 395 most socially conscious campus intellectuals, who are disillusioned—for the most part, vicariously—with both liberalism and socialism...
...While many students would still commit themselves to working against certain evils, they refused strict ideologies...
...But not for long...
...The tone was that of E. M. Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy rather than Stephen Spender's Forward From Liberalism...
...Until a long-run shift in the political and intellectual temper of the United States takes place, we should not expect too much social or political ferment in the colleges...
...some campus newspapers displayed a militant nonsectarian radicalism...
...For others, a positive conservative ideology which justifies some form of corporatism—albeit a corporatism minus racism and persecution—is emerging...
...Some students among this group are even somewhat friendly to Stalinism, on a level quite different from that of Popular Front...
...Their seriousness and intensity made for a certain intellectual vitality in the crowded college towns...
...At present, a "job-consciousness," once only characteristic of upperclassmen, pervades even freshmen who often give as their excuse for refusing to participate in any type of liberal or radical activity the fear of getting on "the List" and thereby being barred from employment, medical or law school, and military commissions...
...For many intelligent students not only are the answers hard to find, but the questions seem impossible to formulate...
...The crusade had not succeeded...
...times of crisis and confusion have been weathered before...
...While the majority of the classes of 1955, 1956, and 1957 accept a status quo far to that right of that accepted by earlier generations, a small Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 397 group which has not been corrupted by a sense of guilt for being previously sympathetic to Stalinism, or by an acceptance of the ethos of the new Roman Empire, has appeared...
...They feel, even if they do not say, "Yes, Stalinist Russia is not a classless society, nor is it going in that direction...
...No human society has yet been free from the mortal sins of slavery, exploitation or oppression, which doom each society in turn to decay, degradation, defeat...
...The experiences of the war and the demands of post-war life created a need for political expression...
...The people," to many American students, no longer seem the repository of hope or virtue...
...But this is hardly a reason for wailing about the "beat or silent generation...
...The present group of young undergraduates did not share, even indirectly, in any of the experiences of the nineteen-thirties, the war, or the immediate postwar period...
...If lacking in knowledge and sophistication, these students have nevertheless begun to question and find their own way...
...Groups spontaneously opposed to McCarthyism have appeared, often going under the name of Robin Hood clubs—a response to attempts to ban Robin Hood from textbooks...
...It had better be recognized that a primary motivation for attending college is the belief that it will lead to financial and sexual success...
...For many in the late thirties, however, radicalism regrettably became synonymous with the vague and generalized liberalism of the Stalinists in the Popular Front period...
...That almost instinctive commitment to a democratic ideal which had been true for most American students is now no longer quite so certain...
...Most of them have known only hectic prosperity, suburbania, schools which consciously placed their emphasis on conformity (known to post-Deweyian educators as "adjustment"), television sets, the Korean war, the acceptance of the military as the norm rather than the unusual...
...The atmosphere is such that a militant liberal organization could organize a moderately successful campus movement in opposition to McCarthyism and to American foreign policy...
...The non-ideological character of the Popular Front had now turned into an anti-ideological mood...
...For most, the nineteen-twenties was the era of raccoon coats, jazz, parlor psychoanalysis, parties, speakeasies and travel...
...If Pyrrhus has you in his pay-roll, extoll the wisdom of his strategy and make no disparaging remarks about the cost of his victories...
...396 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 While the moods of this generation of college intellectuals are re lated to those of wider intellectual circles, there is an important difference in quality and meaning...
...In the 1948 Wallace campaign the political energies of the Popular Front of the late thirties reached their final spasm...
...With the failure of the Progressive Party and the departure from the campus of most of the veterans, a new mood set in...
...The working class, content at least in America with TV, beer and mass culture, does not inspire student intel lectuals to believe in social change...
...Decimating the campus, the war released a flood of patriotic-democratic devotion on the part of many young intellectuals, even though the day-by-day realities of the foxhole, the corvette, and the army camp called for a heroism more demanding and less immediately satisfying than their earlier fantasies...
...Even the miniscule student socialist movement has profited from this atmosphere...
...The ideas of the earlier period—remember that it is still the small minority of intellectually-conscious students we are speaking of—had become dimmed and flaccid, but simply because there was nothing with which to replace them, they lingered on into the early forties...
...Most accept America without dissenting, feeling that on its own terms, which they have internalized, it has for the most part succeeded...
...While this group shared vicariously in the life of the Left Bank or Greenwich Village, they only played at rebellion, art and sex...
...All we can do is to work, try to live satisfying lives, be good to one other, .occasionally protest a bit when the attacks on academic freedom come too close, while contributing a little to a body of knowledge which, in the long-run, may enable us— or our descendants—to act...
...The student sons and daughters of the middle-class were left financially strapped...
...The `silent generation...
...One perceptive commentator has observed of this group that they are "neither sufficiently naive to become disillusioned nor sufficiently romantic to become angry...
...The war ushered in a period in which the bouyant optimistic faith of the pre-war generation in scientific method and social progress were gravely shaken...
...Thus, for example, socialism for most members of the later generation is neither ".right" nor "wrong," it is merely irrelevant...
...simply doesn't believe that it is within the responsibility or the power of the individual to achieve the salvation of society...
...Despite these rumblings, the great mass of new students, as they learn techniques devoid of values, remain apolitical...
...A certain amount of fresh political activity, initiated by the new undergraduates, and not by older politicos on campus, has taken place...
...Despite its self-imposed spiritual and at times physical exile, the "lost generation" did not retreat solely to introspective probing...
...Fundamentally, they were intent on preparing themselves for the world of the young professional, in which, if progress was not inevitable, success was...
...The words of the thirties had been forgotten...
...A significant number of those who are not satisfied with either "socialscientism" or literary study turn toward ideologies which are pessimistic about human-nature...
...The period between 1919 and the present marks a unified epoch, for modern America fully emerged only in the nineteen-twenties...
...They are sceptical of democratic ideologies, seeing them as responsible for the bar barization of culture...
...In the immediate post-war period, the veterans provided the link with the values and experiences of an earlier decade...
...Some stir uneasily but do not move...
...The depression of the nineteen-thirties put an end to all this...
...Many of these students raise much the same set of historical questions as do those within the socialist tradition—many even acknowledge a major intellectual debt to Marx—but are cynical about movements for social change...
...By no means, however, did all of the college intellectuals feel as alienated...
...And since it is hopeless to attempt to characterize an entire generation, we shall limit ourselves to that group of college students who, seemingly, are in school because of an interest in intellectual and cultural matters...
...Many saw a moral justification for fighting a war against the horrors of the concentration camps and mass crematoria, even though few could specify what it was they were fighting for...
...They were characterized by no ideology at all...
...For these, the models of Peter Drucker, James Burnham, and Fortune magazine seem enticing, for they envision themselves as the technicians of a new bureaucratic society...
...The latter necessarily includes the former, but it is doutbful whether the former includes the freedom to be irreligious, unbelieving, gnostic...
...The advent of war left many feeling with W. H. Auden that the nineteen-thirties had been a "low, dishonest decade," yet a good deal of social and political concern carried through to the war period...
...the energies and emotions of social rebelliousness have not yet been rendered superfluous...
...they merely felt a vague sense of social malaise, a need to "do something," a misty faith in "the people...
...Many graduate students who were old enough to have gone through the war, as well as some of the younger students, not only are not politically oriented, they are ideologically committed to an antipolitical attitude...
...Wilder writes as a grand-uncle patronizing his nephews, while Holmes assumes a hard-bitten posture which takes narcotics, liquor, be-bop, and sexual promiscuity as the clues to "American youth...
...EDOUARD RODITI 398 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954...
...While there is some truth in these descriptions, they tend to be partial and a bit melodramatic...
...The Columbia Literary Monthly's prayer of 1917 that "While fighting for democracy in Europe, let us make sure that we are not losing our democracy here," was answered by the Palmer raids and the Ku Klux Klan...
...The attack on civil-liberties has a very powerful and mainly "underground" impact...
...What for one group seem to be important questions to which the wrong answers had been given, for the other seems literally non-sense...
...Sensing the malaise of their times in cultural rather than political terms, they still found themselves in opposition to the dominant values of an industrialcapitalist society...
...Whether through the lessons of their own economic crisis, a sympathy with the distress of others, or an identification with those young people who had gone out to organize the new CIO unions, a significant number of American students were radicalized in the nineteen-thirties...
...The last year or so has seen some change on the campus...
...Freedom remains an ideal that mankind has not yet known as a reality...
...Thousands participated in anti-war strikes, signed the Oxford peace-pledge, studied Marxist literature, argued the relation of art to propaganda, were touched in some way by the political left...
...During the past few years a number of articles have appeared characterizing the "younger generation" as one which does not "issue manifestoes, make speeches, or carry posters," a generation silent and undissenting...
...We must understand society...
...intellectual activity was eager, intense and anxious...
...Thornton Wilder has argued in Harper's that this is the "ruminating" generation, "facing the too-long delayed task of consolidating its liberty and impressing upon it a design...
...It may be worth trying to probe a little deeper, to place the present in an historical context, and to offer an analysis of the moods of those between 18 and 25 which will at least be written from the perspective of a "participant-observer...
...Indeed, it is rather difficult to intelligibly spell out precisely what is bothering us...
...Taking a quick look at the new America, young intellectuals loudly became expatriates...
...Placing their faith in social science, they seem to declare, "We must analyze...
...They never had, and can see no reason to acquire, either the Liberal Mist or the Socialist Vision...
...The young radicals of the 1930's, especially the majority consisting of fellow-travellers, had 394 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 enjoyed a convenient image of things to be against—war, fascism, Hearst --and somewhat surprisingly, this image survived into the early forties, if only because the war led to few intellectual changes or clarifications...
...They can be "beaten" by these experiences and grow tired, or they can go through a process of re-evaluation...
...Nonetheless, these post-war years had more in common with those that were to follow than with the mood of the thirties...
...Was Roosevelt's "freedom of religion" an improvement on the Eighteenth Century's "freedom of thought...
...Some got through college doing "busy-work" for WPA projects, while others alternately looked for work and went to school, for in a job-scarce world, what was the point in hurrying...
...And among the older students, those in the graduate schools, there remains a kind of stubborn, independent, though not at all dramatic sense of resistance...
Vol. 1 • September 1954 • No. 4
