Caught in the Rush

...Our generation, then, found ourselves for the first time in a society where most people were moving confidently toward rational if unexciting goals, and we were a little dazed by it all...

...The war was a situation for which my generation could not prepare itself, and to a great extent we abandoned the effort...

...A significant difference I suspect between the veterans of World War II and the young men who came home from the First World War is that the latter group had more time to settle into the peacetime routine—or at least they took more time, because they had not been away as long and because the whole pace of life was slower...

...Our education, although it left us ample time for reflection, led not to commencement but to induction...

...Our politics, which with the enthusiasm of youth labeled the early isolationists as reactionary fools or pro-Communist knaves, led us to accept an indefinite postponement of our own political activities...

...We couldn't afford much time off to think about the promises of postwar reconstruction, and when those promises began to crumble we were too busy taking our PhD's or studying law or getting started in our first jobs to pay much attention...

...Indeed the problems of the Depression era, pressing and perplexing as they were, lent themselves more readily to the approaches that one learned in the classroom...

...In the weeks after the piece was published there were several letters to the editor, most of them chiding the author and expressing a brave resolve to Stay and Fight It Out...

...But even generous travel allowances don't always tempt us...

...But that experience had a quality of intensity, just because we could not think of our college years as a preparation for life, but rather as an experience to be savored for itself...

...The other day I came upon a reference in a book of Lewis Mumford's to a magazine piece in the first volume of the Freeman in 1920 by Harold Stearns entitled "What Is a Young Man to Do...

...But he should be acknowledged as at least a necessary evil...

...We were different from our older brothers, who also came of age in a world they never made, but who had ample time to learn to accept it as at least a part of reality, not completely discontinuous with campus life...

...The military life was only a parenthesis, but a parenthesis of indefinite extension, so that we could not see where the main line of the sentence might be resumed...

...The contributors seem to be in general agreement that the newest generation of intellectuals lack adequate sources of political and esthetic inspiration, although there are wide differences as to the reasons for this lack and the prospects for the future...

...plished...

...My thesis is that the experience of my own generation supports what the financial analysts call a cautious optimism...

...Case Studies in Personal Security, published in 1955, was produced under his editorship and won wide critical acclaim...

...We are too much involved in our communities, tied down as much by the schedule of PTA meetings as of office routine...

...Rather they are marked out at the time each generation is thrust out of doors by its parents and teachers to face the world...

...Expatriation is not a serious idea for this generation...

...If an exception must be made for those prematurely wise youngsters cast adrift in childhood by major crises, this exception only proves the rule: For children of the streets, the age of responsibility has already arrived...

...The true children of the Depression were born into the era of the New Freedom and only reached the age of responsibility in the 1930s, just as the children of the fat postwar years were most of them born during the lean prewar years...

...A proper education does not of course guarantee the opportunities to use it, or, what is probably more important...

...Besides Podhoretz, the "young" participants in the symposium have been: Wallace Markfield, Arthur A. Cohen, Jascha Kessler, John Hunt, Alfred Sundel, Morton Cronin, Ned Polsky, William R. Yates, Robert DeMaria, Anatole Shub, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Richard1 Rose and Bernard E. Norwitch...

...And the measure of awareness, of generation-consciousness, is the extent to which the transition is consciously and deliberately accomWhile intellectual exercises are rarely subjected to the physical limitations of baseball or boxing, the generation under discussion, as defined by Norman Pod-horetz in his March 11 article initiating this series, is between 21 and 31 years old...

...Politically, my generation was marked by the discovery that we could be intellectuals in politics without being fellow-travelers...

...For them peace was an unexpected blessing...

...The lines between the generations are not drawn at birth...

...The war's end was then within sight, if not within reach...

...I suggest we have not completely forgotten the taste of that freedom, as one never completely forgets a foreign language spoken in childhood...

...We were free to concern ourselves with the nature of things, since we would soon enough receive our practical instruction, beginning with close-order drill...

...If we do go abroad, it will be on a specific mission, for a limited tour of duty, to administer foreign aid from behind steel-topped desks in the salons where other Americans once fled for refuge...

...At the end of the first war, no one offered any practical solutions to the question, "How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm...

...Measured by their expectations of the grown-up world, the postwar generation began shortly after D-Day, as soon as it became apparent that the invasion had been a success...

...Even the Depression children who were spared the training programs for gray flannel living postponed inquiry into the secrets of the universe, to dwell on the problems of a sick society...

...Curiosity led me to the piece itself, and I discovered that Stearns's answer to this question was that the young man should flee the materialist deserts of America to seek at least the possibility of spiritual and cultural salvation among the ruins of Europe...

...The editors did not explain why they planned to stay behind...

...There was a quality of abstraction to the whole affair, since most of those involved expected to be in uniform very shortly...

...What would we do with the children, for one thing...

...My own generation, now in its mid-thirties, never found the point at which it was admitted to man's estate...

...Perhaps the eager postwar planners of the mid-'40s are, at least in part, responsible for pushing us into school under the GI Bill, or back to work in order not to lose all reemployment rights, or into whatever program or project or scheme was currently popular...

...It seems to me that the contributions to this symposium have thus far focused on two separate, if related questions: The first goes to the sources of creativity in the rising generation, and the second goes to the sources of political faith...

...The letters were apparently numerous enough so that the editors felt they should take notice of them, and they did so with an editorial which offered no solace to the letter writers, but rather admonished them not to give way to the false notion that individual or local efforts could save the situation, but rather to acknowledge that the dark ages were upon us and to retire to the remaining citadels of culture where, under rigorous conditions, the lamp of learning might be kept burning...

...Currently Secretary of the Fund for the Republic, he is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, has practiced law in Washington, D.C., and was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed...

...And consequently the members of that young generation were free for a while to loaf and invite their souls, to observe the routine of life from which they were still disengaged, to raise and mature their doubts until those doubts were substantial enough to produce ideas...

...The revolt of the early Twenties was compressed for most of us into a brief few months...

...The war afforded extraordinary opportunities for reflection—I believe that I read more deeply and creatively then than at any other time before or since— but it afforded almost no opportunity for exchange of ideas, or even for creative expression...

...Thus Adam Yarmolinsky, 35 and the father of three, must be classified with the "old men" who preceded him, Daniel Bell, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Lekachman...

...But I suspect that as my generation finds its energies no longer fully occupied in earning a living and raising children, we may begin again to hear the voice of the turtle, and it may lead us to thoughts and deeds more expressive of life's possibilities than even a plunge into the Plaza fountains at midnight...

...The war gave my generation the gift of freedom in our youth...

...And we would have to leave the furniture (which we refinished ourselves) to the mercies of a tenant, or else crate it and ship it along with us...

...The length of our wartime experience was important for another reason...

...Our discovery made us skeptics and pragmatists, but it did not make us cynics or neutralists...

...When the routine of the world's work is upset, it is not surprising that the intellectual enters the world with more confidence in his education than he would if things were humming along and all the round holes were smoothly machined to take their round pegs...

...For our younger brothers the promises of the postwar world were inherently reasonable...

...The only novel I know of that period is Merle Miller's That Winter, which described an idyll as fleeting as a summer romance...

...When the parenthesis was closed (with a bang, not a whimper) we were rushed into responsibility, until one day we discovered we had passed that magic point on the graph where the ascending curve of actuality crosses the descending curve of expectation...

...Perhaps this is only a description of the onset of middle age, in a generation whose experience of youth was sharply curtailed...

...But the act of putting the organization together was a kind of affirmation, the effect of which is never altogether lost...

...Such an interchange is almost unthinkable in the last decade...

...the energy to take advantage of those opportunities...

...We came out of it after three or four or five years with the feeling that we had lost too much time to risk any more delay in getting on with our careers...

...We had no illusions that our education offered answers to practical questions, and therefore we felt free to address ourselves to inquiries of transcendental significance...

...I remember the organizing convention, at Christmas time in 1941, of something called the Student League of America, which we actually created as the first national liberal student organization without any fellow-traveling tinge...