It’s hard to grow up when there isn’t enough man’s work. There is “nearly full employment” (with highly significant exceptions), but there get to be fewer jobs that are necessary or unquestionably useful; that require energy and draw on some of one’s best capacities; and that can be done keeping one’s honor and dignity. In explaining the widespread troubles of adolescents and young men, this simple objective factor is not much mentioned. Let us here insist on it.
By man’s work I mean a very simple idea, so simple that it is clearer to ingenuous boys than to most adults. To produce necessary food and shelter is man’s work. During most of economic history most men have done this drudging work, secure that it was justified and worthy of a man to do it, though often feeling that the social conditions under which they did it were not worthy of a man, thinking, “It’s better to die than to live so hard”—but they worked on. When the environment has been forbidding, as in wresting a living in the Swiss Alps or the Aran Islands, we regard such work with poetic awe. In emergencies it is heroic, as when the bakers of Paris maintained the supply of bread during the French Revolution, or the milkman did not miss a day’s delivery when the bombs recently tore up London.
At present there is little such subsistence work. Let us guess that one-twentieth of our economy is devoted to it. Production of food is actively discouraged. Farmers are not wanted and the young men go elsewhere. (The farm population is now less than 20 per cent.) Building, on the contrary, is immensely needed. One would think that ambitious boys would flock to this work. Here we find that building, too, is discouraged. In the great city of New York now for twenty years hundreds of thousands are ill-housed, yet we do not see that science, industry, and labor are enthusiastically enlisted for the quick solution of this definite problem. The promoters are interested in long-term investments, the real estate men in speculation, the city-planners in votes and graft. The building craftsmen cannily see to it that their own numbers remain few, their methods antiquated, and their rewards high. Nobody is much interested in providing shelter, and nobody is at all interested in providing new manly jobs.
Once we turn away from the absolutely necessary subsistence jobs, however, we find that an enormous proportion of our production is not even unquestionably useful. Everybody knows and also feels this, and there has recently been a flood of books about our surfeit of honey, our insolent chariots, and the follies of ex-urban ranch houses; our hucksters and our synthetic demand. Many acute things are said about this useless production and advertising, but not much about the workmen producing it and their frame of mind; and nothing at all, so far as I have noticed, about the plight of a young fellow looking for a manly occupation. The eloquent critics of the American way of life have themselves been so seduced by it that they think only in terms of selling commodities and point out that the goods are valueless; but they fail to see that people are being wasted and their skills insulted. (To give an analogy, in the many gleeful onslaughts on the Popular Culture that have appeared in recent years, there has been little thought of the plight of the honest artist cut off from his audience and sometimes, as in public arts like theater and architecture, from his medium.)
What is strange about it? American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use, that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless.
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Consider a likely useful job. A youth who is alert and willing but not “verbally intelligent”—perhaps he has quit high school at the eleventh grade (the median), as soon as he legally could—chooses for auto mechanic. That’s a good job, familiar to him, he often watched them as a kid. It’s careful and dirty at the same time. In a small garage it’s sociable; one can talk to the customers (girls). You please people in trouble by fixing their cars, and a man is proud to see rolling out on its own the car that limped in behind the tow truck. The pay is as good as the next fellow’s, who is respected.
So our young man takes this first-rate job. But what when he then learns that the cars have a built-in obsolescence, that the manufacturers do not want them to be repaired or repairable? They have lobbied a law that requires them to provide spare parts for only five years (it used to be ten). Repairing the new cars is a matter of cosmetics not mechanics; and the repairs are pointlessly expensive—a tail fin might cost $150. The insurance rates therefore double and treble on old and new cars both. Gone are the days of keeping jalopies in good shape, the artist-work of a proud mechanic. But everybody is paying for foolishness, for in fact the new models are only trivially superior; the whole thing is a sell.
It is hard for the young man now to maintain his feelings of justification, sociability, serviceability. It is not surprising if he quickly becomes cynical and time-serving, interested in a fast buck. And so, on the notorious Reader’s Digest test—the car with a disconnected coil wire—the investigators found 63 per cent of mechanics charged for repairs they didn’t make, and lucky if they didn’t also take out the new fuel pump and replace it with a used one. (65 per cent of radio repair shops, but only 49 per cent of watch repairmen “lied, overcharged, or gave false diagnoses.”)
There is an hypothesis that an important predisposition to juvenile delinquency is the combination of low verbal intelligence with high manual intelligence, delinquency giving a way of self-expression where other avenues are blocked by lack of schooling. A lad so endowed might well apply himself to the useful trade of mechanic.
Most manual jobs do not lend themselves so readily to knowing the facts and fraudulently taking advantage. In factory jobs the workman is likely to be ignorant of what goes on, since he performs a small operation on a big machine that he does not understand. Even so there is evidence that he has the same disbelief in the enterprise as a whole, with a resulting attitude of profound indifference.
Semi-skilled factory operatives are the largest category of workmen. (I am leafing through the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook, 1957.) Big companies have tried the devices of applied anthropology to enhance the loyalty of the men to the firm, but apparently the effort is hopeless, for it is found that a thumping majority of the men don’t care about the job or the firm; they couldn’t care less and you can’t make them care more. But this is not because of wages, hours, or working conditions, or management. On the contrary, the tests of Robert Dubin that show the men’s indifferences to the company, show also their (unaware) admiration for the way the company has designed and manages the plant; it is their very model of style, efficiency, and correct behavior. Maybe if they understood more, they would admire less. The union and the grievance committee take care of wages, hours, and conditions; these are the things the workmen themselves fought for and won. (Something was missing in that victory, and we have inherited the failure as well as the success.) The conclusion must be that workmen are indifferent to the job because of its intrinsic nature: the work does not enlist a man’s worthwhile capacities, it is not “interesting”; it is not his, he is not “in” on it; the product is not unquestionably useful; and he doesn’t care about the enterprise. And research directly on this subject, by Frederick Herzberg, shows that it is defects in the intrinsic aspects of the job that make workmen “unhappy.” (A survey of the literature, in Herzberg’s Job Attitudes, shows that interest is second in importance only to security, whereas wages, conditions, hours, ease, and benefits are far less important. But foremen, significantly enough, think that the most important thing to the workman is his wages.)
“Security” is always first; but in normal conditions a large part of security comes from knowing your contribution is useful, and the rest from knowing it’s uniquely yours: they need you.
What a remarkable thing such studies tell us! That men want to do good work and work that is somehow theirs. But they are thwarted. Is not this the “waste of our human resources” that is talked about?
The case is that by the “sole prerogative” clause in union contracts the employer has the sole right to determine what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, what plants are to be built and where, what kinds of machinery are to be installed, when workers are to be hired and when laid off, and how production operations are to be rationalized (Frank Marquart). Under these circumstances, it is not surprising if the factory operatives’ actual code has absolutely nothing to do with useful service or increasing production, but is devoted to “interpersonal relations”: (1) don’t turn out too much work; (2) don’t turn out too little work; (3) don’t squeal on a fellow worker; (4) don’t act like a big-shot (Elton Mayo; these are not Mayo’s principles). This is how to belong.
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II
Let us go on to the occupational outlook of those who are verbally bright. Among this group, just because they cannot help asking more general questions, the problem of finding man’s work is harder and their disillusion more poignant. The more intelligent worker’s “indifference” is likely to appear more nakedly as profound resignation, and his cynicism may sharpen to outright racketeering.
“Teaching,” says the Handbook, “is the largest of the professions.” So suppose our now verbally bright young man chooses for teacher, in the high school system or, by exception, in the elementary schools if he understands that these are the vitally important grades and require the most ability to teach well (and of course have less prestige). Teaching is necessary and useful work; it is real and creative, for it directly confronts an important subject matter, the children themselves; it is obviously self-justifying; and it is ennobled by the arts and sciences. Those who practice teaching do not for the most part succumb to cynicism or indifference—the children are too immediate and real for the teachers to become callous—but they certainly come to suffer first despair and then deep resignation. Resignation occurs psychologically as follows: frustrated in essential action, they nevertheless cannot quit in anger, because the task is necessary; so the anger turns inward and is felt as resignation.
For the job is carried on in impossible conditions of overcrowding and saving public money. Not that there is not enough social wealth, but first things are not put first. Also, the school system has spurious aims. It soon becomes clear that the underlying aims are to relieve the home and keep the kids quiet; or, suddenly, the aim is to produce physicists. Timid supervisors, bigoted clerics, and ignorant school boards forbid real teaching. The emotional release and sexual expression of the children are taboo. A commercially debauched popular culture makes learning disesteemed. The academic curriculum is mangled by the demands of reactionaries, liberals, and demented warriors. Progressive methods are emasculated. Attention to each case is out of the question, and all the children, the bright, the average, and the dull are systematically retarded one way or another, while the teacher’s hands are tied. Naturally the pay is low—for the work is hard, useful, and of public concern, all three of which categories tend to get lower pay. It is alleged that the low pay is why there is a shortage of teachers and why the best do not choose the profession. My guess is that the best avoid it because of the certainty of mis-educating. Nor are the best wanted by the system, for they are not safe. Bertrand Russell was rejected by New York’s City College and would not have been accepted in a New York grade school.
Next, what happens to the verbally bright who have no zeal for a serviceable profession and who have no particular scientific or artistic bent? For the most part they make up the tribes of salesmanship, entertainment, business management, Madison Avenue. Here of course there is no question of utility or honor to begin with, so an ingenuous boy will not look here for a manly career. Nevertheless, though we can pass by the sufferings of these well-paid callings, much publicized by their own writers, they are important to our theme because of the model they present to the growing boy.
Consider the men and women in TV advertisements, demonstrating the product and singing the jingle. They are clowns and mannequins, in grimace, speech, and action. And again, what I want to call attention to in this advertising is not the economic problem of synthetic demand, and not the cultural problem of Popular Culture, but the human problem that these are human beings working as clowns; that the writers and designers of it are human beings thinking like idiots; and the broadcasters and underwriters know and abet what goes on: “Fruitily, bubbily, Hoffman’s is dubbily good as good can be!” Alternately, they are liars, confidence men, smooth talkers, obsequious, insolent, etc., etc.
The popular-cultural content of the advertisements is somewhat neutralized by Mad magazine, the bible of the twelve-year-olds who can read. But far more influential and hard to counteract is the fact that the workmen and the patrons of this enterprise are human beings. (Highly approved too.) They are not good models toward looking for manly jobs that are useful and necessary, requiring human energy and capacity, and that can be done with honor and dignity. They are a good sign that not many such jobs will be available.
The rigged quiz shows, which created a scandal last year, were a remarkably pure distillate of our American cookery. We start with the brute facts that (a) in our abundant expanding economy it is necessary to give money away to increase spending, production, and profits; and (b) that this money must not be used for useful public goods in taxes, but must be ploughed back as “business expenses,” even when there is a shameful shortage of schools, housing, etc. Yet when the TV people at first tried simply to give the money away for nothing, there was a great Calvinistic outcry that this was demoralizing—just as we may gamble on the horses only to improve the breed. So they hit on the notion of a contest with prizes. But then, of course, they could not resist making the show itself profit-making and competitive in the (also rigged) ratings with other shows, so the experts in the entertainment-commodity manufactured phony contests. And to cap the climax of fraudulence, the hero of the phony contests proceeded to persuade himself, so he says, that his behavior was educational!
The behavior of the networks was correspondingly typical. These business organizations claim the loyalty of their employees, but at the first breath of trouble they were ruthless and disloyal to their employees. (Even McCarthy was loyal to his gang.) They want to maximize profits and yet be absolutely safe from any risk. Consider their claim that they knew nothing about the fraud. (In my opinion this was a plain lie.) If they watched the shows that they were broadcasting, they could not possibly, as professionals, not have known the facts, for there were obvious type-casting, acting, plot, etc. If they are not professionals, they are incompetent. But if they don’t watch what they broadcast, then they are utterly irresponsible, and on what grounds do they have the franchises to the channels? We may offer them the choice: that they are liars or incompetent or irresponsible.
The new direction of the investigation seems to me more important, the inquiry into the bribed disc-jockeying; for this deals directly with our crucial economic problem of synthesized demand, made taste, debauching the public and preventing the emergence and formation of natural taste. In such circumstances there cannot possibly be an American culture, we are doomed to nausea and barbarism. And then these baboons have the effrontery to declare that they give the people what the people demand, and are not responsible for the level of the movies, the music, the plays, the books!
Finally, in leafing through the Occupational Outlook Handbook, we notice that Armed Forces employ a large number. Here our young man can become involved in a world-wide demented enterprise with personnel and activities corresponding.
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III
Thus, on the simple criteria of unquestioned utility, employing human capacities, and honor, there are not enough worthy jobs in our economy for average boys and adolescents to grow up toward. There are of course thousands of jobs that are worthy and self-justifying, and thousands that can be made so by stubborn integrity. Extraordinary intelligence or special talent, also, can often carve out a place for itself—conversely, their usual corruption and waste are all the more sickening. But by and large our economic society is not geared for the cultivation of its young or the attainment of important goals that they can work toward.
This is evident from the usual kind of vocational guidance, which consists in measuring the boy and finding some place in the economy where he can be fitted; chopping him down to make him fit; or neglecting him if they can’t find his slot. Personnel directors do not much try to scrutinize the economy in order to find some activity which is a real opportunity for the boy, and creating an opportunity if they can’t find one. To do this would be a horrendous task; I am not sure if it could be done if we wanted to. But the question is whether anything less makes sense if we mean to speak seriously about the troubles of young men.
Surely by now, however, many readers are objecting that this entire argument is pointless because people in fact don’t think of their jobs in this way at all. Nobody asks if a job is useful or honorable (within the limits of business ethics). A man gets a job that pays well, or well enough, that has prestige, and good conditions, or at least tolerable conditions. I agree with these objections as to the fact. (I hope we are wrong.) But the question is what it means to grow up into such a fact: “During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good.”
Yet economically and vocationally, a very large proportion of the young people are in a more drastic plight than anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are not enough worthy jobs. But if our society, being as it is, were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present nearly full employment and there may be for some years, yet a vast number of young people are rationally unemployable, useless. This paradox is essential to explain their present temper.
Our society, which is not geared to the cultivation of its young, is geared to a profitable expanding production, a so-called high standard of living of mediocre value, and the maintenance of nearly full employment. Politically, the chief of these is full employment. In a crisis, when profitable production is temporarily curtailed, government spending increases and jobs are manufactured. In “normalcy”—a condition of slow boom—the easy credit, installment buying, and artificially induced demand for useless goods, create jobs for all and good profits for some.
Now back in the 30’s when the New Deal attempted by hook or crook to put people back to work and give them money to revive the shattered economy, there was an outcry of moral indignation from the conservatives that many of the jobs were “boondoggling,” useless made work. It was insisted, and rightly, that such work was demoralizing to the workers themselves. It is a question of a word, but a candid critic might certainly say that many of the jobs in our present “normal” production are useless made work. The tailfins and built-in obsolescence might be called boondoggling. The $64,000 Question and the busy hum of Madison Avenue might certainly be called boondoggling. Certain tax-dodge foundations are boondoggling. What of business lunches and expense accounts? fringe benefits? the comic categories of occupation in the building trades? the extra stagehands and musicians of the theater crafts? These jolly devices to put money back to work no doubt have a demoralizing effect on somebody or other (certainly on me, they make me green with envy), but where is the moral indignation from Top Management?
Suppose we would cut out the boondoggling and gear our society to a more sensible abundance, with efficient production of quality goods, distribution in a natural market, counter-inflation, and sober credit. At once the work week would be cut to, say, twenty hours instead of forty. (Important People have already mentioned the figure thirty.) Or alternately, half the labor force would be unemployed. Suppose too—and how can we not suppose it?—that the automatic machines are put to general use, instead of just getting rid of badly organized unskilled labor. The unemployment will be still more drastic.
To give the most striking example: in steel, the annual increase in productivity is 4 per cent, the plants work at 50 per cent of capacity, and the companies can break even working at less than 30 per cent of capacity. These are the conditions that forced the steel strike, as desperate self-protection. (Estes Kefauver, quoting Gardiner Means and Fred Gardner).
Everybody knows this, nobody wants to talk about it much, for we don’t know how to cope with it. The effect is that we are living a kind of lie. Long ago, labor used to fight for the shorter work week, but now they don’t, because they are pretty sure they don’t want it. Indeed, when hours are reduced, the tendency is to get a second, part-time, job and raise the standard of living, because the job is meaningless and one must have something; but the standard of living is pretty meaningless too. Nor is this strange atmosphere a new thing. For at least a generation the maximum sensible use of our productivity could have thrown a vast population out of work, or relieved everybody of a lot of useless work, depending on how you take it. (Consider with how little cutback of useful civilian production the economy produced the war goods and maintained an army of unemployed.) The plain truth is that at present very many of us are useless, not needed, rationally unemployable. It is in this paradoxical atmosphere that young persons grow up. It looks busy and expansive, but it is rationally at a stalemate.
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These considerations apply to all ages and classes; but it is of course among poor youth (and the aged) that they show up first and worst. These are the most unemployable. Our society has not been geared to the cultivation of the young for a long time. At present 42 per cent have graduated high school (predicted Census, 1960); less than 8 per cent have graduated college. The high school trend for at least the near future is not much different, there will be a high proportion of drop-outs; but markedly more of the rest are going on to college, that is, the stratification is deepening between those who have prospects and those who have none. Now the schooling in neither the high schools nor the colleges is much good—if it were better more kids would stick to it; yet at present, if we made a list we should find that a large proportion of the dwindling number of unquestionably useful or self-justifying jobs, in the humane professions and the arts and sciences, require education; and in the future, there is no doubt that the more educated will have the jobs in running an efficient highly technical economy and an administrative and verbal society. “Between 1947 and 1957, professional and technical workers increased 61 per cent, clerical workers 23 per cent, but factory operatives only 4½ per cent and laborers 4 per cent” (Census).
For the uneducated there will be no jobs at all. This is humanly most unfortunate, for presumably those who have learned something in schools, and have the knack to survive the boredom of those schools, could also make something of idleness; whereas the uneducated are useless at leisure too. It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Americans.
From this point of view we can sympathetically understand the pathos of our American school policy, which otherwise seems so inexplicable; at great expense compelling kids to go to school who do not want to and who will not profit by it. There are of course unpedagogic motives, like relieving the home, controlling delinquency, and keeping kids from competing for jobs. But there is also this desperately earnest pedagogic motive, of preparing the kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them. Otherwise, what will become of them, if they don’t know anything?
Compulsory public education spread universally during the 19th century to provide the reading, writing, and arithmetic necessary to build a modern industrial economy. Now with the over-maturity of the economy, the teachers are struggling to preserve the elementary system when the economy no longer requires it and is stingy about paying for it. The demand is for scientists and technicians, the 15 per cent of the “academically talented.” “For a vast majority [in the high schools],” says Dr. James Conant in The Child, the Parent, and the State, “the vocational courses are the vital core of the program. They represent something related directly to the ambitions of the boys and girls.” But somehow, more than 50 per cent quit.
(Let me make a comment on Dr. Conant’s vastly publicized report on the high schools. The important question that he fails to ask is why there are only 15 per cent who are “academically talented” enough to take hard subjects. Does he think that the general dullness of the high school population has occurred in a void? And why do large percentages even of the brightest—from 25 per cent to 50 per cent, depending on the region—shirk the hard courses or quit school? What is lacking in their motivation? If he were concerned, as he claims, about conserving human resources, his zeal would be to find why most are so inept and to invent techniques to unblock them and increase the pool of talent. But there is nothing of this in Dr. Conant’s report.)
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Let us sum up again. The majority of young people are faced with the following alternative: either society is a benevolently frivolous racket in which they’ll manage to boondoggle, though less profitably, than the more privileged; or society is serious (and they hope still benevolent enough to support them), but they are useless and hopelessly out. Such thoughts do not encourage productive life. Naturally young people are more sanguine and look for man’s work, but few find it. Some settle for a “good job”; most settle for a lousy job; a few, but an increasing number, don’t settle.
I often ask, “What do you want to work at? If you have the chance. When you get out of school, college, the service, etc.”
Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects. I’m pleased for them, but it’s a bit boring, because they are such squares.
Quite a few will, with prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped conceited fantasies like being a movie actor when they are “discovered”—like “Marlon Brando, but in my own way.”
Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that he knows very well what he is going to do, is indeed already doing it, which is the real test.
The usual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is “I don’t know,” meaning, “I’m looking; I haven’t found the right thing; it’s discouraging but not hopeless.”
But the terrible answer is, “Nothing.” The young man doesn’t want to do anything.
I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner’s Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say, “Nothing.” They didn’t believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they couldn’t care less. I turned away from the conversation abruptly, because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and pain in my breast. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). And it is out of that incident that many years later I am writing this report.
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IV
The simple job plight of these adolescents could not be remedied without a social revolution. Therefore it is not astonishing if the most well-intentioned public spokesmen do not mention it at all. But it is hard to grow up in a society where one’s important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it. The effect must be rather to feel disaffected, and all the more restive if one is smothered by well-meaning social workers and PAL’s who don’t seem to understand the real irk. The boys cannot articulate the real irk themselves, for they haven’t learned to say it.
For instance, what public spokesman could discuss the jobs? The ideal of a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semi-monopolies and advertised vices, it would be met with a ghastly stillness. Or alternately, to want a job that exercises a man’s capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is Utopian anarcho-syndicalism, it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the “sole prerogative” to determine the products and the machines. Again, to speak of the likelihood or the desirability of unemployment, like Norbert Wiener or J. K. Galbraith, is to be politically non-professional.
During, let us say, 1890—1936, on Marxist grounds, the fight for working conditions, for security, wages, hours, the union, the dignity of labor, was mentioned, and it gave the worker or the youth something worthwhile. But because of their historical theory of the “alienation of labor” (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands), the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself. What is surprising now if workmen accept their alienation, and are indifferent also to Marxist politics?
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When the objective factors cannot be mentioned, however, other things are said instead, and let us now examine their style, as applied, for instance to juvenile delinquency, on which there is a good deal of oratory.
In our times the usual principle of such speech is that the others, the delinquent boys, are not taken seriously as existing, as having real aims in a real world like oneself. They are not condemned, they are not accepted. Instead they are a “youth problem” and the emphasis is on their “background conditions” that one can manipulate, and they are said to be subject to “tensions” that one can alleviate. The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish “belonging,” although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible. When such efforts don’t work, one finally takes some of the boys seriously as existing and uses force to make them not exist.
Let me give a childish but important illustration how this works out. A boy has a few great sexual adventures, but then he has had the bad luck to get caught and get in trouble. They try to persuade him by punishment and other explanations that some different behavior is much better, but he knows by the evidence of his senses that nothing could be better. If he gives in, he lives on in a profound disbelief, a disbelief in their candor and a disbelief even in his own body feelings. But if he persists and proves incorrigible, then the evidence of his senses is attached to what is socially punished, explained away, and put away. The basic trouble here is that they do not really believe he has had the sexual experience. The objective factor is inconvenient for them; therefore it cannot exist. Instead, there is merely a case of insecure affection at home, slum housing, comic books, and naughty companions—tensions and conditions. My hunch is that this kind of early sexual adventure and misadventure is fairly common in delinquency. It is called precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, etc., an index of future delinquency. In my opinion that’s rubbish, but be that as it may; what is important in the particular case is that there is a stubborn new fact. Attempting to nullify it makes further growth impossible (and creates the future delinquency). The sensible course would be to accept it is a valuable part of future growth. But if this were done, they fear that the approved little hero would be a rotten apple to his peers who would now suddenly all have become precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, and prone to delinquency.
The sexual plight of these children is officially not mentioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy of Ibsen, Ellis, Dreiser, etc., etc., did not succeed this far. Is it an eccentric opinion that an important part of the kid’s restivenes in school from the onset of puberty has to do with puberty? (In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.) But since this objective factor does not exist in our schools, the school itself begins to be irrelevant. The question here is not whether the sexuality should be discouraged or encouraged. That is an important issue, but far more important is that it is hard to grow up when existing things are treated as though they did not exist. For then there is no dialogue, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be understood, to make a bridge between oneself and society.
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In American society we have perfected a remarkable form of censorship: to allow every one his political right to say what he believes, but to swamp his little boat with literally thousands of millions of newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, best-selling books, broadcasts, and public pronouncements that disregard what he says and give the official way of looking at things. Usually there is no conspiracy to do this; it is simply that what he says is not what people are talking about, it is not newsworthy.
(There is no conspiracy, but it is not undeliberate. “If you mean to tell me,” said an editor to me, “that our magazine tries to have articles on important issues and treat them in such a way that nothing can come of it—who can deny it?” Try, also, to get a letter printed in the New York Times if your view on this issue calls attention to an essential factor that is not being mentioned.)
Naturally, the more simply true a statement is in any issue where everybody is quite confused, the less newsworthy it will be, the less it will be what everybody is talking about. When the child in the story said, “But the Emperor has no clothes on!” the newspapers and broadcasts surely devoted many columns to describing the beautiful new clothes and also mentioned the interesting psychological incident of the child. Instead of being proud of him, his parents were ashamed; but on the other hand they received $10,000 in sympathetic contributions toward his rehabilitation, for he was a newsworthy case. But he had a block in reading.
Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty sure that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
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But let us return to our theme of vocation and develop it a step further. Perhaps the young fellows really want to do something, that is, something worthwhile, for only a worthwhile achievement finishes a doing. A person rests when he has finished a real job. If the object is important, it gives structure to many a day’s action and dreaming—one might even continue in school. Unfortunately our great society balks us, for it simply does not take seriously the fact, or the possibility, that people want this; nor the philosophic truth that except in worthwhile activity there is no way to be happy. For instance, in a standard questionnaire of a delinquent by Milton Barron, in a hundred headings there does not occur the question, “What do you want to be? What do you want to work at? What do you want to achieve?” (But Donald Taft’s Criminology, which Barron is adapting, here has the sentence: “Absence of vocational interest at the age when it is normal. . .is telltale of a starved life.”)
In despair, the fifteen-year-olds hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Without a worthwhile prospect, without a sense of justification, the made play of the Police Athletic League is not interesting, it is not their own. They do not do their school work, for they are waiting to quit, and it is harder than it used to be for them to get part-time jobs. Indeed, the young fellows, and not only delinquents, spend a vast amount of time doing nothing. They hang around together, but don’t talk about anything, nor even, if you watch their faces, do they passively take in the scene. Conversely, at the movies where the real scene is by-passed, they watch with absorbed fantasy, and afterward sometimes mimic what they saw.
If there is nothing worthwhile, it is hard to do anything at all. When one does nothing, one is threatened by the question whether one is nothing. To this insulting doubt, however, there is a lively response: it is a system of values centering around threatened grownup-ness and defensive conceit. This is the so-called “threatened masculinity,” not in the sense of being called a girl, but of being called, precisely, “boy,” the Negro term of insult. With this, there is an endless compulsion to prove potency and demand esteem. They don’t talk about much of interest, but there is a vast amount of hot rhetoric to assert that oneself is as “good as anybody else,” no more useless, stupid, nor cowardly. For instance, if they play a game, the interest in the game is weak; they are looking elsewhere when the ball is served, there are lapses in attention, they smoke cigarettes even while playing handball. The interest in victory is surprisingly weak: there is not much glow of self-esteem. But the need for proof is overwhelming: “I won you, didn’ I? I won you last week too, didn’ I?”
During childhood, they played games with fierce intensity, giving themselves as a sacrifice to the game, for play was the chief business of growth, finding-and-making themselves in the world. Now when they are too old merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since they have not been used up.
The proving behavior is endless. Since each activity is not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen and it does not bear much repetition. Its value as proof rapidly diminishes. In these circumstances, the inevitable tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive activity that proves one is potent and not useless. (This analysis applies equally to these juveniles and to status-seeking junior executives in business firms and on Madison Avenue.)
It is not surprising, then, that, as Frederic Thrasher says in The Gang, “Other things being equal, the imaginative boy has an excellent chance to become the leader of the gang. He has the power to make things interesting for them. He ‘thinks up things for us to do.’” At this point let us intervene and say what the Official Spokesmen say.
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V
Last summer, after a disastrous week when there were several juvenile murders, Governor Rockefeller of New York made the statement (New York Times, September 2, 1959): “We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folks and to provide an outlet for their energies and give them a sense of belonging.”
The statement is on the highest level of current statesmanship)—that is why I have chosen it. It has been coached by sociologists and psychologists. It has the proper therapeutic and not moralistic attitude, and it does not mention the police. (The direct appeal to force came a couple of weeks later, when there were other incidents.)
The gist of it is that the Governor of New York is to play the role that Thrasher assigns to the teen-age gang leader. He is to think up new “challenges.” (The word could not have been more unfortunate.) But it is the word “constantly” that is the clue. A challenge can hardly be worthwhile, meaningful, or therapeutic if another must constantly and obsessively be devised to siphon off a new threat of “energy.” Is not this raising the ante? Solidly meeting a real need does not have this character.
(“The leader,” says Thrasher, “sometimes controls the gang by means of summation, i.e., by progressively urging the members from one deed to another, until finally an extreme of some sort is reached.”)
My guess is that in playing games the Governor will not have so lively an imagination as the lad he wants to displace as leader; unlike the grownups, the gang will never select him. One of the objective factors that make it hard to grow up is that governors are likely to be men of mediocre humane gifts.
The psychology of the Governor’s statement is puzzling. There are no such undifferentiated energies as he speaks of. There are energies of specific functions with specific real objects. In the case here they might be partly as follows: In adolescents a strong energy would be sexual reaching. As with other adolescents, it is thwarted or imperfectly gratified, but these have probably not learned so well as others to cushion the suffering and be patient; so that another strong energy of the delinquents would be diffuse rage of frustration, perhaps directed at a scapegoat. If they have been kept from constructive activity making them feel worthwhile, a part of their energy might be envious and malicious destructiveness of property. As they are powerless, it is spite; and as they are humiliated, it is vengeance. As they feel rejected and misunderstood, as by governors, their energy is woe; but they react to this with cold pride, and all the more fierce gang loyalty to their peers. For which of these specific energies does the Governor of New York seriously plan to devise an outlet? Their own imaginative gang-leader presumably does devise challenges that fit the bill enough to let off steam for a few hours.
What is the sociology of “belonging” here? In the great society they are certainly uprooted. But in the gang their conformity is sickeningly absolute; they have uniform jackets and uniform morals. They speak a jargon and no one has a different idea that might brand him as queer. Since they have shared forbidden behavior, they are all in the same mutually-blackmailing boat and correspondingly guilty and suspicious toward the outsider. It is a poor kind of community they have; friendship, affection, personal helpfulness are remarkably lacking in it; they are “cool,” afraid to display feeling; yet does the Governor seriously think that he can offer a good community that warrants equal loyalty?
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Our society has evolved a social plan, a city plan, an economy and physical plant, in which this delinquent youth is an organic part. The problem is not to get them to belong to society, for they belong a priori by being the next generation. The burden of proof and performance is quite the other way: for the system society to accommodate itself to all its constituent members. But can it be denied that by and large the official practice is to write these boys off as useless and unwanted, and to try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness?
Suppose we look at it the other way. Like any other constitutional group they exert an annoying pressure, but they are inarticulate. In some dumb way they are surely right, but what the devil do they want? Has much effort been made to ask them and help them find words? We can guess that they want two broad classes of things: changes in the insulting and depriving circumstances that have made them ornery, spiteful, vengeful, conceited, ignorant, and callous—unable to grow; and objective opportunities in which to grow.
Let us go back to the Governor. On the same occasion, he issued to the press the following formal statement: “The problem of juvenile delinquency has no easy remedy. There is no quick or overnight solution. It is compounded of neglect by parents, broken homes, poor living conditions, unhealthy background, economic deprivation, mental disturbance, and lack of religious training.” This is not a bad list of background conditions; it satisfies every popular and scientific theory of etiology. The question is, does the Governor seriously not understand how organic these conditions are in our society? They cannot be remedied by gimmicks or social work. He speaks of broken homes; has he some plan to improve the institution of modern marriage, especially among folk for whom it is hardly an institution? The present day urban poor are largely Negro and Spanish, they are excluded from many unions, they often earn less than the minimum wage, they are unschooled; naturally there is economic deprivation, poor living conditions. How is their religion relevant if it is irrelevant to the basic community functions of vocation and war, and wrong on sex? There is no community and not even a community plan; naturally there is unhealthy background.
What great concerted effort is being led by the Governor to remedy these conditions, not overnight, but in the next five, ten, or twenty years?
Indeed, official policy has often worked to increase delinquency, rather than remedy it. For instance, in a characteristically earnest analysis, Charles Abrams has shown how the public housing policy has had this effect. Slums have been torn down wholesale, disrupting established community life. By not building on vacant land and by neglecting master planning, our officials have created insoluble problems of relocation and vastly increased the number of one-room flats, making decent family life impossible. (Suppose you were fifteen years old and returned home at 11 P.M., as the Mayor urges, to a room with mama and papa in one bed and two little brothers in your bed and a baby yowling; you might well stay out until four in the morning.) Again, families are ousted from public housing when their incomes increase, so eliminating and penalizing the better models; and on the other hand, other families are expelled on irrelevant moral criteria without thought of what becomes of them. And income segregation in large blocks was itself bound to increase tension, like any segregation. All of this has been official policy. The picture gets even grimmer if we turn to the quasi-official graft in Title I that for two-and three-year stretches has stalled either demolition or construction, while families pay rent in limbo.
Now finally (January 1960), the Governor’s practical anti-delinquency youth program is offered for legislation. Let me summarize its chief points: (1) Reduce the age of felonies to fifteen. (2) Space for 390 more in the forest camps (added to the 110 now there). (3) Admit a few older to these camps. (4) Establish “Youth Opportunity Centers”—residences for youths “on the verge of delinquency.” (5) Provide “halfway houses” for those in transition from institutions to freedom. (6) Certify boardinghouses to which the court can direct the youngsters. (7) Ease compulsory continuation school. (8) Permit after-school work from fourteen to sixteen. (9) Encourage work-and-study programs “to keep potential dropouts in school long enough to prepare for employment.” (10) Centralize probation services. (11) Increase probation staff.
Of these eleven points, eight seem to be aimed primarily at punishment or control: the boys are really unwanted, the problem is to render them harmless. Only two (8 and 9) envisage, very unimpressively, a substantive change. What on earth has happened to devising “new ways, constant challenges”? But let me call attention to the forest work camps (2 and 3). There is good evidence that these are excellent and have provided a rewarding experience. But then certainly they should be made available not for convicted delinquents as such, but for all kids who want to work there a year. Naturally, however, there is no money—not even for more than five hundred delinquent boys altogether. The question is whether or not such a program of camps for many thousand boys is less important than one of the Park Commissioner’s new highways to Westchester. Until they will face that question, our public officials are not serious.
Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in that is not always somebody’s property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system, they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and to eleven hundred more police on the streets.
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