Yesterday's Youth Revised

...the bottom line, though, was the money they earned to put food on their families' tables...

...While they worked hard, working was fun, too...

...cities, where the landscape was strange and where the familiar social rules no longer applied...

...Is there any reason to believe that Hine, an eyewitness, was mistaken about these "victims," and that Nasaw is observing them accurately...

...Nasaw can be commended for trying to popularize a historical subject...

...Unfortunately, the sugar-coated recollections of George Burns or Harpo Marx are probably the most unreliable depictions of the past one could find...

...In this positive emphasis Nasaw follows the lead of the new immigration historians who have reversed an older interpretation of the American experience...

...His premise is less praiseworthy: "Just as today children lead us into the computer age, 75 years ago they led the way into the 20th century...

...Nasaw's innovative approach falls within the relatively new tradition of writing about attitudes toward childhood in the past, which dates from the publication of French social historian Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood (1962...

...Nasaw also laments the subsequent restraining force of the older members of society...

...He cites several oral histories and numerous autobiographies written by city kids who went on to success, usually as entertainers...

...But the recent work of "reformers" such as Neil Postman and Marie Winn raises serious questions about where the kids of the TV Age are taking us...

...Aries argued that prior to the 17 th century young people were not distinguished from their elders as innocent and vulnerable, nor were they thought to need special protection and discipline at home or in school...

...Aries regretted the disappearance of medieval France, where children lived uncontrolled by adults...

...Taking expanded consciousness and material improvements as a single highway into the modern world, recent studies have addressed the pathological aspects of urban living (including an obsession with social control) as well as the physical growth of cities...

...True, the Scriptures also assure us we shall be led by children...

...Some attribute improved conditions to the psychological evolution of parents...

...But generally he writes as if such tensions did not exist, preferring to depict children as small adults, whether they worked at home as "little mothers" or outside as newsboys powerful enough to strike successfully against the Hearst and Pulitzer publishing empires...

...The only people unable to comprehend the toughness of these youngsters were the reformers who intruded on their world and tried to make it better through social control...

...Nasaw says his assessment is supported by the participants' memories...

...Now historians assert that the immigrants were able to transplant much of their traditional culture, thereby making a relatively easy transition to the New World...

...Nasaw does not identify the photos he viewed, but it is logical to assume they were the ones reproduced in his richly illustrated book...

...Nasaw does not go so far as to deny that parents and children of immigrant working-class families had problems with each other...

...It is fair towonderhow many of these successful survivors sought similar experiences for their own children...

...Reviewed by Joseph Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State University Turn of the century children, unaffected by rural nostalgia, took to city living better than the reformers who pitied and tried to help them...

...Like the turn-of-the-century social workers, educators, law enforcement officials, and other reformers, Nasaw had been inclined to pity these children until he scrutinized a photo exhibit at the New-York Historical Society and discovered them to be "alive, exuberant—not victims at all...

...indeed, one of his chapters discusses the battle over the issue of youthful wage earners having a right to their own spending money...

...Nasaw contends that the immigrant working-class kids were doing just fine in the role of junior capitalists...

...If so, many were taken by Lewis Hine, a reformer who intended to portray the foul conditions of urban childhood...

...Children especially fell out of line, being unwilling to respect the authority of age as they adapted to the new land more quickly than their parents...

...Similarly, although children in the past endured and occasionally triumphed, that does not necessarily mean they traveled the most nurturing paths to adulthood...

...Though mothers and nurses would coddle infants, kids over the age of five or six had to fend for themselves...

...It was previously said that European and Asian peasants were devastated by moving into U.S...

...Nevertheless, it is such afterthoughts that allowed him "to write about the children of the street from their perspective"—a perspective, he concludes, marked by trust in the future...

...This was the inspiration for Children oftheCity...

...Others, disputing Aries, claim the old days were hardly good for children, who—when not totally neglected—often suffered beatings, sexual abuse, or even murder...

...And what of those socially deviant Horatio Alger heroes so vividly portrayed in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America...

...A second group believes a dramatic transformation in child-care resulted from the emergence of capitalism and its focus on the individual—not to mention the affluence and technological progress that provided nutrition (including reliable bottled milk), central heating (putting an end to swaddling), washing machines and disposable diapers (yielding new attitudes toward toilet training), and larger homes (allowing personal privacy...

...So maintains David Nasaw in this book written from the perspective of the youths who played and worked (mainly worked) in the streets of urban America at the time...

...Significantly, Nasaw presents an image of the metropolis as a modern-age marvel before reminding us that its "other half' lived in slums, thus associating urban America more with excitement and hope than with social tension, discrimination and despair...

...It is appropriate to ask about the failures, the youngsters whose spirits were crushed by their urban experience and whose stories are neglected here...