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Chapter 5: “Youth Is Always Turbulent”: Reinterpretations of Adolescence from Bohemia to Samoa
- Rutgers University Press
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130 5 “Youth Is Always Turbulent” reinterpretations of adolescence from bohemia to samoa “The two generations misunderstand each other as they never did before,” declared Randolph S. Bourne in his 1913 manifesto Youth and Life (34).1 “Youth”—a loosely defined period that for Bourne stretched from the midteens into the early twenties—had changed radically for the new generation of young people. By the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, youth had transformed into a “time of contradictions and anomalies . . . . The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible gayety, bitter melancholy—all these moods are equally part of that showery springtime of life” (3). Bourne’s analysis of youth, which is to say the period of adolescence and early adulthood, sounds strikingly similar to the conventional wisdom both about teenagers today and, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, about the young working-class people living, laboring, and playing in the major cities of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his essays in Youth and Life, particularly in “Youth,” “The Two Generations,” and “The Virtues and Seasons of Life,” Bourne maps out the struggles and pleasures of the young people of his milieu. Implicitly, Bourne’s “youth” shared his demographic profile: middle class in origin, bohemian by inclination, highly literate (and mostly college educated), rebellious if not radical, freethinking, feminist (or at least antipatriarchal), determined to remake personal, sexual, and ideological relations.2 A full decade before the flaming youth of the 1920s ignited, Bourne’s bohemian peers were setting cultural fires in coffeehouses, underground bars, and magazine offices, and, as Christine Stansell has documented , in hours and hours of intense conversation. In this chapter I argue that the young bohemians of Randolph Bourne’s Youth and Life bear more than a passing resemblance to, faced many of the same struggles as, and were represented in much the same language as their working-class peers, and not merely by coincidence. Although bohemian scenes flourished in Chicago and San Francisco, as well as in smaller cities across the United States, the undulating center of American Bohemia bubbled out of New York’s Greenwich Village. And while the Village was bounded on “Youth Is Always Turbulent” 131 its eastern side by the old New York of Henry James’s Washington Square, “in the bohemian geography of the imagination, Greenwich Village was proximate and permeable to the Jewish Lower East Side, twenty blocks to the south, crawling with its own bohemians and sizzling with its own ideas of modernity” (Stansell, American Moderns 6), as well as to the radical center of Union Square to the north, the site of intermingling between immigrant sweatshop and factory workers, progressive heiresses, incandescent anarchists , and the bohemians who drew from all these groups. Moreover, I trace the pollination of these ideas across the country and over time from a variety of sources. Certainly, Bourne and the bohemians, living and working cheek by jowl with working-class young people, were one major source, particularly since artists, activists, and writers like Hutchins Hapgood, Jacob Epstein (born of the Lower East Side, but by identification and temperament an international artist), John Reed, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Max Eastman, Lincoln Steffens, and Susan Glaspell extended their reach beyond the enclaves of the Village into U.S. culture more widely over the course of the 1910s and 1920s. Along with bohemians, an active anarchist subculture , particularly as embodied by Emma Goldman, drew equally from working-class experience, high culture (one of Goldman’s most popular lectures was on Henrik Ibsen and modern drama), radical politics, and the movements for free love and “family limitation.” Goldman’s wide-ranging early career—which took her from Russia to Rochester to New York City to every major labor and political controversy of the first quarter of the twentieth century, from mining towns to major cities—is a symbol for the ways in which new ideas about youth and generational difference spread through the country, unevenly and fitfully, but with surprising speed. I end the chapter in the late 1920s, with the publication of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. During her time at Barnard and Columbia, Mead was involved in both the (by that point fading) bohemian scene and radical movements. Ruth Benedict, Mead’s friend and lover, had strong ties with the downtown coteries, and Franz Boas, Benedict and Mead’s mentor, was fascinated by the shifts in attitude...