Talking ‘Bout Their Generation

We have come to think of teenagers as a breed apart — ask any parent of one. But as a driver of culture, as a consumer niche, as a state of contrariness, the subspecies known as teenager wasn’t even identified until World War II, the point at which British music writer Jon Savage’s fascinating new book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945, ends. His 576-page trawl through the social commentary, memoirs and reportage of Europe and the U.S. in those decades shows how all the indicators of modern youth culture — the generational antagonism, the moral panics, the idealism, the shocking dress sense — were in place long before teenagers made a name for themselves.

Amid the chaos of mass urbanization in the late 19th century, teens were already notoriously drawn to trouble. The street gangs that carved up New York City back then were fueled by crime, but many members joined primarily for the sake of the fringe benefits — access to the forbidden pleasures of drink, drugs and sex. And then, as ever since, young toughs also had an eye to fashion. For example, the Parisian hoodlums of that era — known as Apaches — wore silk foulards and, writes Savage, “an air of bourgeois hauteur.” In England’s inner cities, where there were regular pitched battles between gangs — Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders, Liverpool’s High Rip or the Monkey’s Parade from London’s East End — the look was edgier. A youth worker in the 1890s noted that a proper Manchester “scuttler” could be identified by a loose white scarf, plastered-down hair, bell-bottom trousers and a girlfriend who “commonly wore clogs and a shawl and a skirt with vertical stripes.”

Poverty and lack of education were recognized early on as the root problem of these disaffected youths. Nobody understood this better than G. Stanley Hall, an American psychology pioneer who is the book’s unlikely hero. In 1898, Hall defined a new stage of life called “adolescence,” characterized by parental conflict, moodiness and risk taking. Contrary to the disciplinarian ethos of the day, Hall recommended that adolescents be given “room to be lazy.” His prediction that “we shall one day attract the youth of the world by our unequaled liberty and opportunity,” not only prophesied a culture that would revere youth but also patented it as American.

He was right. In Europe, any such optimism was overwhelmed by a half-century of war and talk of war. The view of a German lieutenant colonel, Baron Colmar von der Goltz, in 1883 that “the strength of a nation lies in its youth,” was pretty much shared by all the muscle-flexing European powers of that era (though few were crass enough to argue, as he did, that armies needed the young because “it is only the young that depart from life without pangs.”) World War I ultimately spent the lives of as many as 3 million of Europe’s adolescents, and the pangs were felt for decades. “The Great War,” Savage writes, “forever destroyed the automatic obedience that elders expected from their children.”

In the Europe of the 1920s, that generational dissent was mostly expressed either in the arts (Jean Cocteau, Fritz Lang, Aldous Huxley) or in outright decadence (at the haunts of London’s good-time toffs, say, or at just about any club in Berlin). But caught up in a renewed spiral to war, youths, many of them jobless, were soon being courted by political groups on the left and right. Nowhere more so than in Germany, where the Wandervogel, a popular, free-spirited, back-to-nature youth movement whose nonpolitical ideals had survived World War I, found itself hijacked in the ’30s by the Hitler Youth. By 1939, membership of the Hitler Youth stood at 8.9 million.

Despite the clamps on freedom during the first years of World War II, the pockets of youthful defiance that Savage describes in Germany and occupied France showed a daring contempt for fascist authority, expressing it to the beat of American pop culture. The self-styled Swing Kids of Hamburg and the Zazous of Paris paid a heavy price in beatings and scalpings for growing their hair, wearing Zoot suits, and dirty dancing to banned jazz. “Instead of uniformity, they proclaimed difference; instead of aggression, overt sexuality,” writes Savage, with as good a recipe as any for the teenage era that was about to dawn.

Teenage is a bracing reminder that the tides of teen rebellion after 1945 were always about more than loud music and fashion. That story has often been told, not least by Savage in his 1991 history of punk, England’s Dreaming. What’s yet to be accounted for is the curious disappearance in recent years of the generation gap between teens and their elders. In an age when the burning issue at middle-aged dinner parties is whether or not the Arctic Monkeys’ second album is up to snuff (definitely, I’d say), it sometimes feels like everyone is a teenager now.