Growing Up in a Time of Hardship
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Growing Up in a Time of Hardship "Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children By William M. Tuttle Jr. Oxford. 365 pp. $30.00 American Lives: Looking Back at...
...Note, for example, the conclusion of Tuttle's chapter on schoolchildren and the War effort: "Collecting scrap materials, buying war bonds, observing the rationing requirements, sharing the grief over the President's death, and, most of all...
...When the children of the '30s were interviewed in 1984, they roundly denied the Depression had affected their lives...
...Tuttle candidly informs us that, drawing on those published materials, he initially wrote "a 600-page history...
...Actually, the fit is often imperfect...
...Some students of the life course purport to see changes through which everyone passes," Clausen observes...
...But, as Clausen observes, "awareness is not a necessary condition for an event or circumstances to have had a strong influence...
...His focus in American Lives is on the cluster of youngsters that preceded the cohort of the '40s: "the children of the Great Depression...
...Adolescent planful competence, says Clausen, is comprised of self-confidence, intellectual investment and dependability...
...The study also included assessments of health, intelligence, physical strength, and so forth...
...Such participation was especially important to the school-age children—those who, beginning at the age of six or seven, had entered a new stage of life...
...It is the last, the ability to make far-sighted decisions early on, that is the centerpiece of Clausen's book...
...Clausen's objective, however, is not to demonstrate the singular effect of the Depression on his subjects...
...A central finding was that competence was best attained and sustained by the adolescents whose parents exercised considerable control, demanded high standards, called for responsible and independent behavior, and provided loving support...
...The findings brought to light in American Lives—and I have only touched upon some of them—may seem simple common sense...
...So he ran ads in newspapers across the country soliciting written memories of early 1940s childhoods, and was able to add 2,500 letters to his sources...
...Jean Piaget called it concrete operations...
...Nearly 300ofthem remained subjects in the study for over half a century...
...Our data do not support such a view...
...Two recent books, studies of childhood during a time of either war or economic depression, approach this question differently and offer what amount to dissimilar answers...
...Authoritarian and permissive parents were notably less helpful to their children...
...592 pp...
...The finished work goes beyond facts and description, though...
...The less competent subjects, furthermore, were found to be more prone to divorce and other crises, especially in their 20s, and were more likely to show personality changes over time...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History...
...Gender was found to be a factor, since parents had different expectations for sons and daughters, and there were more constraints generally on young women...
...few were even able to identify distinctive periods in their lives...
...Daddy's Gone to War" is an attempt to portray the full scope of the World War II experience of American children...
...The enormity of that undertaking is attested to by 80 pages of footnotes—the result of an exhaustive search of contemporaneous official publications and popular magazines, supplemented by postwar reflections and analyses printed in academic journals and books...
...Mothers, but not fathers, were questioned when the subjects were young, and follow-up interviews were conducted throughout their lives by professionals in the field...
...Not all highly competent boys made career success a priority, but on the whole they tended to focus on work earlier in life and only later on marriage and family, while among girls the reverse was true...
...Indeed, Clausen expresses surprise at the degree to which planful competence remained closely connected to measurements of the subjects' psychological health, from adolescence through old age...
...that was] essentially one-dimensional and boring...
...One might expect that mixing "thick description" with interpretive concepts of human behavior would produce easy illumination...
...Guaranteeing the school-age children's political socialization was the great outburst of patriotism that consumed Americans of all ages...
...There were, of course, other obstacles to achievement...
...to make wise choices relatively early in their adult lives...
...Clausen reminds us that, while the impact of economic privation should not be ignored, a lot more was important in shaping the children who lived through it...
...35.00...
...30.00 American Lives: Looking Back at the Children of the Great Depression By John A. Clausen Free Press...
...As Director of the Institute for Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley from 1960 to 1990, he had access to the longitudinal studies initiated on 500 infants and children during 1928-32...
...Tuttle, on solid ground when detailing the experience of children during the War, tends to sink in the quicksand of assigning it meaning...
...An earlier study of the same people, published by Glen Elder in 1974,had indicated that economic deprivation had unquestionably influenced their general orientation, family relations and early careers...
...Social class likewise played a role...
...hence the emergence of psychohistory, demographic history, ethnohistory and the like...
...His concern is the range of forces that shaped the lives of men and women whose childhoods happened to take place in the '30s—in particular the "combination of constitutional attributes, parental guidance, social contacts, and the ability...
...What was missing was authenticity—that is, the voices of the home-front children themselves...
...John A. Clausen, a social psychologist, is more at ease with a narrative grounded in behavioral science...
...Usually the behavioral and social sciences provide the means to do so...
...San Francisco Stare University DO HISTORICAL cataclysms have a major and lasting impact on the people who live through them, particularly the youngsters who appear most vulnerable...
...Nevertheless, the basic life issues remained fairly constant as these "Depression children" matured...
...The GI Bill recruited a wholly new postwar college population whose ancestors were glaringly absent from history textbooks...
...Clausen points out that although self-confidence, intellectual investment and dependability contributed to competence for both sexes, they did so in varying quantities: Self-confidence was a more important ingredient for adolescent boys, dependability for girls...
...The interest among historians in such disciplines as psychology, sociology and anthropology is itself largely the legacy of World War II...
...If so, muses Clausen, then "it is surprising that so many books and articles on the life course have failed to see what common sense should have revealed...
...He is bold enough to suggest that the experience must have some larger importance, but he fails to convey exactly what it is...
...While gathering his sources Tuttle received several grants that enabled him to complement his traditional historical training with study in the behavioral and social sciences, whose insights he has relied upon to invest his narrative with a wider and deeper significance...
...Sigmund Freud called it latency...
...His study should certainly be sobering to historians, who tend to teach about the '30s as if nothing but the Depression mattered...
...Yet it is unclear what more we should glean from the author's juxtaposition of fact and generalization...
...examines not only the relative minority of youngsters who had to cope with absent fathers and brothers, working mothers, and mobile households but also, more broadly, children's work and play, health and welfare, encounters with popular culture, and even the home-front hostilities between ethnic groups on the nation's playgrounds...
...questions of ethnicity are not dealt with here because the subjects were predominantly white...
...Presenting life histories that are not merely anecdotal but detailed, persuasive evidence, he weighs the impact of what he calls "adolescent planful competence" on personal development and success...
...In response to this state of affairs many historians, Tuttle among them, have been intent on writing ordinary people into the American past...
...Since he could not vouch for the typicality of his respondents' recollections, Tuttle decided to emphasize their range instead, and presented the data as "thick description"—anthropologist Clifford Geertz' term meaning "a dense amount of ordinary information about people and their cultures...
...Though such terms may sound vague to the layman, each has been carefully defined through the California Q-set—a standardized language for characterizing personality on the basis of 100 items relating to temperament, intellect, interpersonal issues, anxiety management, and, to a lesser extent, values and cultural beliefs...
...These statements, all of which we may take as correct, show the agreement of cognitive psychologists, psychoanalytic thinkers and political socialization theorists on one point: At the elementary school level children are most open to instruction...
...Men and women at every age level showed similar sources of satisfaction or dissatisfaction...
...imbibing in the nation's intense pride and unity—thus did the homefront children participate in the victory...
Vol. 76 • November 1993 • No. 13
