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"The adolescent," writes British Sociologist Frank Musgrove, "was invented at the same time as the steam engine. The principal architect of the latter was Watt in 1765; of the former, Rousseau in 1761." Rousseau extolled puberty as "the second birth; then it is that man really enters upon life; henceforth no human passion is a stranger to him."
The Romantic poets added self-pity to Rousseau's definition. Keats, whose death at 26 enhanced the mystique, made beauty and truth dependent on youthful death—or at least transfiguration. Yet another was taking place at the same time. With the surge of medical advance that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, mortality rates dropped among the young (life expectancy today is 70 years v. 41 in 1860), while factories and urbanization made youth a political-economic force.
By 1741, the Elder Pitt, at 32, could sardonically concede "the atrocious crime of being a young man." In the century after the French Revolution, new youth movements throughout Europe were the harbingers of change:
Mazzini's "Young Europeans" in Italy; Russia's czar-bombing nihilists; the Balkan Omladina (rejuvenation); Germany's Wandervogel (birds of passage).
With their folk songs and philosophy—formed by Nietzsche and Ibsen, principally—they laid the groundwork for generations of activists to come.
Pines in the Storm. That youth movements can be perverted and captured by dictators and demagogues became all too clear: the successor to Germany's Wandervogel was the Hitler Youth, which the Communists took over intact in East Germany after 1945, changing only the name. Mao Tse-tung and his heir, Marshal Lin Piao, have shown that China's youth, steeped for millennia in a tradition of respect for their elders, can be turned in a moment into marauding anarchists. Indeed, there is even a superficial similarity of style between the Red Guards and their Western counterparts among the Now People. Their revolutionary favorite, The Young Generation, could have been written by Mao Tse-dylan: "We are not flowers in a greenhouse; we are pine trees in the storm."
Since World War II, activist youth has striven to regain the traditional, nonideological unity it had not possessed for a century. In the U.S., the leftist causes of the Depression remained inert in the immediate postwar years. Then the "Silent '40s" spawned the Beat Generation of the '50s, which reached deeply into such existentialist authors as Camus, Heidegger and Sartre, and cultivated a keen sense of social dislocation along with its beards. But their Zeitgeist was intellectual and stylistic; the 1960s brought a revival of true political dissent. Civil rights was the trigger, civil disobedience their weapon, marches and sit-ins the strategy.
Past Nietzsche. Because the nation endorsed the civil rights movement, America's youthful activists tasted victory in their pioneering cause. For the first time, commitment seemed to pay off, and a New Left was born: a grass-roots populist melange of organizations and splinter groups that struck in all directions—antipoverty, anticensorship, antiwar, antiestablishment. Says C.C.N.Y.'s Gallagher, himself a target of agitation: "Unlike the rebels of the '30s, who knew where they