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  • The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence
  • Robert E. May (bio)
The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence. By Kent Baxter. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2008.

This nicely conceptualized, lucidly argued work contextualizes popular U.S. young adult literature around the turn of the twentieth century, positioning it within a mostly imagined societal crisis about adolescence and modernization. Taking issue with Marcia Jacobson (Being a Bad Boy Again: Autobiography and the American Boy Book [1994]), who posited the 1920s as the period when literature first portrayed adolescence as a distinctive stage between childhood and adulthood, Kent Baxter contends that the transformation occurred earlier.

Baxter’s thesis is that America’s rapid urbanization and industrialization in the late nineteenth century led to nationwide panic about a statistically unverifiable young adult crime wave and vagrancy (“The Street Arab” in the lingo of muckraker Jacob Riis), which in turn spawned a spectrum of supposed social solutions including juvenile courts, Indian boarding schools, the Woodcraft Indian youth movement, scouting, and, most importantly for readers of this journal, novels intended to channel teen behavior into acceptable norms. Baxter traces virtually all of the “rehabilitative” movements under scrutiny to the widely disseminated theories about adolescence of the psychologist G. Stanley Hall as well as anthropologist Margaret Mead’s rejection of those concepts. Their theories starkly differed. Hall’s, announced in his 1904 two-volume Adolescence, were biologically deterministic: children transitioned to an adult “humanistic learning of culture” through adolescence, when they resolved the tension caused by the competing demands of naturally inherited primitive tendencies and the pull upon them of finer human traits. Mead’s work, on the other hand, was environmentally deterministic, arguing that adolescence was socially constructed and that it reflected a given society’s values. Thus, youths experiencing puberty in New Guinea’s Manus tribe experienced far less “storm and stress” (55) than teen urban dwellers in the United States. But both Hall and Mead, rejecting [End Page 203] Freud’s prioritizing of infantile sexuality, positioned adolescence as a precarious human phase begging for societal intervention, and their influence was profound.

Take the Indian boarding school movement. The United States had twenty-five such institutions, including the famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, by 1900. Baxter connects this movement to Hall’s popularization of the contemporary “recapitulative” theory of social evolution—which posited that childhood equated to savagery and that marginalized groups like Indians, Hawaiian natives, and Filipinos remained in such condition during the teen years. Moreover, according to recapitulative theory, all boys tended “to the state of primitive man” (96) and innate inclinations toward gang behavior, unless diverted until they were ready to assume adult roles. Ernest Thompson Seton, who founded the Woodcraft Indian Movement and played a contested role in the founding of the Boy Scouts, knew Hall well and based his magazine pieces on Hall’s theories. The co-founder of the Camp Fire Girls movement (Charlotte Gulick), which used Indian symbolism in an effort to steer teenage girls toward socially safe domestic tasks like cooking, counted Hall as a “teacher and personal friend” (112).

Baxter devotes two chapters, about one quarter of his book, to how the series books of Horatio Alger and Edward Stratemeyer, the era’s masters of the “juvenile,” correlated with these trends. Alger had connections to Charles Loring Brace, the New York urban reformer who founded the Children’s Aid Society and authored The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work among Them (1872), a work influential in triggering fears of juvenile delinquency. Alger’s “Ragged Dick” series contained frequent allusions to Brace’s society. Stratemeyer’s works, indirectly, had the same fountainhead, since they “borrowed” from Alger’s (140). Stratemeyer, moreover, served as ghostwriter for some of Alger’s unfinished works following the latter’s death. Both authors’ works served rehabilitative masters. Alger’s books promoted “moral economics”; that is, they revolved around enlightened benefactors changing the environment for wayward urban youths and established a nexus between virtue and cash, promoting a capitalist work ethic. Theft becomes the ultimate sin in Alger’s cosmology. Stratemeyer likewise...

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