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It was different in the U.S. From America's beginning, youth was not a shortcoming but a virtue, not a time of preparation to be got through but a glorious Eden to be prolonged and preserved. Americans do not really want to keep the young in their place; they expect that the young will stay there out of their own essentially good nature. America's alltime young hero is Huck Finn, but not in the role of the brave rebel which serious critics (including T. S. Eliot) have cast him in, but in the safe and comfortable role of a backwoods Penrod or Andy Hardy—the eternally lovable bad boy. Until very recently, the sheltered and privileged American young gladly went along with that role. Their hell-raising was equally far removed from Werther's despair and the political barricades. The U.S. was thus enabled to go on worshiping youth without really facing the traits of youth that all other civilizations have accepted as inevitable—rebelliousness, moodiness, shifting passions for shifting causes. Americans want to deny the basic conflict, not to say war, between youth and age. Thus when the young do flare up, their elders are surprised, hurt and disappointed.
In part, this situation was fostered by the immigrant nature of American society. The children of the immigrants were the pathfinders in a new world, and taught their elders its ways. This contributed to the child-centered—some say childridden—nature of American life. More recently, what has caused American youth to live increasingly in a separate enclave or "subculture" is the ever-lengthening education process. In no other civilization have so many of the young been kept so long from the responsibilities of adult life. This prolongation of the school years, argues British Sociologist Frank Musgrove, is partly a ploy by the adult world to keep the young out of competition as long as possible, for, he asserts, the "mature of Western society" regard the young "with hatred." With people living longer and retaining their vigor into advanced age, there is certainly less disposition by the mature to make way—although "hatred" seems overstating the case. Still, the diagnosis may yet prove accurate, unless the older generation keeps its cool about the young.
Search for Fidelity
Every parent should know that his child judges him; but he should also know that the judgment is that of a child. The U.S. has alternated between taking the judgment of its children not seriously enough—and too seriously. What is regarded as today's youthful nihilism is undoubtedly much less alarming than it seems. Whatever political causes the apolitical American young managed to find before have virtually disappeared—hence the concentration on the few remaining ones, such as civil rights and Viet Nam. Among the young bored by prosperity and consensus government, some observers discern a special group, the "New Puritans," who may be toting a protest placard alongside an anti-everything beatnik, but with an entirely different altitude inside.