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PARTISAN REVIEW
and the pre-war character of these years; the immediate threat has
blocked every future and made every problem and goal illusory. Others
say: an increasingly strong State paralyzes all initiative; one no longer
plans, one abandons oneself. And then among the interpreters appears
the fifty-year-old defeatist: America has become a country of very lim–
ited possibilities. He does not quite talk about a people without space;
but he complains that the world no longer stands open, since there are
no more frontiers to cross.
The question remains: Have there not been Younger Generations
which, in more restricting circumstances, had wider views? And are
not these investigators trying to take as a specifically American ,phe–
nomenon what the Paris art catalog reveals no less than the New York
periodical?
The Discussion
A reader who had been partIy impressed by these descriptions
and interpretations, partIy stimulated to contradiction, invited a number
of young people, some of whom had grown up in America, others in
Europe, to a discussion on the subject of this survey.
Little was said against the description. But each felt the reproach
in the picture and began with a justification; thereby admitting that
the likeness was correct. Some of the Europeans tried to dismiss this
old Younger Generation as "American"-and to explain it by the high
standard of living in the United States. In America, they said, it was
easy for young people to earn money and get somewhere; hence there
was no occasion to rebel and fight either for or against anything.... No
one replied to this that the militant password "Younger Generation" has
not always come out of "inability to get anywhere" and that very often
it has been precisely the sons of "good" families who fought in the front
rank.
A young American referred to the immense mass of material
culture-and how small and powerless one felt before that oppressively
solid reality. He could have read to us from the evening paper that
Professor Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, had
just given a lecture in which he referred to American universities as
"colossal housing projects" intended to keep young people away from
worse places until they find jobs. Othcrs made the cxcuse that individual
accomplishments were no longer possible. The day of the Edisons and
Einsteins was over. "Projects," financed by governments and corpora–
tions, had taken the place of inventors and researchers. Masses of scien-
