Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

PART I - 1875-1904

CHAPTER 1 - Heaven and Hell

CHAPTER 2 - Nationalists and Decadents

CHAPTER 3 - Hooligans and Apaches

CHAPTER 4 - A Sudden Vision of Heaven

CHAPTER 5 - The American Century

PART II - 1904-1913

CHAPTER 6 - Peter Pan and the Boy Scouts

CHAPTER 7 - High School Freshmen and Factory Fodder

CHAPTER 8 - Wandervogel and Neo-Pagans

CHAPTER 9 - Nickelodeons and Animal Dances

PART III - 1912-1919

CHAPTER 10 - Invocation

CHAPTER 11 - Sacrifice

CHAPTER 12 - The Class of 1902

CHAPTER 13 - Jazz Bands and Doughboys

PART IV - 1919-1929

CHAPTER 14 - Postwar Shocks

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16 - The Cinderella Complex

CHAPTER 17 - The Pursuit of Pleasure

PART V - 1930-1939

CHAPTER 18 - The Soldiers of an Idea

CHAPTER 19 - The Children’s Army and the New Deal

CHAPTER 20 - Biff Boys and the Red Menace

CHAPTER 21 - Jitterbugs and Ickies

PART VI - 1939-1943

CHAPTER 22 - Conquerors and Overlords

CHAPTER 23 - Reluctant Conscripts and Socialist Heroes

CHAPTER 24 - Sub-Debs and GIs

CHAPTER 25 - German Swing Kids and French Zazous

CHAPTER 26 - Zoot-Suiters and Victory Girls

PART VII - 1942-1945

CHAPTER 27 - The Peaceful Invaders

CHAPTER 28 - Helmuth Hübener, the White Rose, and Anne Frank

CHAPTER 29 - The Arrival of the Teenager

CHAPTER 30 - Year Zero

Acknowledgements

NOTES

INDEX

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Praise for Jon Savage and Teenage

Savage’s evocative, exuberant chronicle overflows with ideas it will probably take a dozen writers a decade to work out in more rigorous books. It’s safe to say that none of them are likely to be as marvelous or maddening as this one.

—Wendy Smith, The Washington Post

"Savage, author of England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, arguably the definitive study of 1970s youth culture, shows in this well-researched, readable new book the ‘symbiotic relationship between mass media and youth.’"

—Mark Coleman, Los Angeles Times

A writer on music and popular culture for British and American publications, Savage emphasizes the struggle to ‘conceptualize, define, and control adolescence’ between 1875 and 1950. The ideal of youth as a separate class, with its own institutions and values, he suggests, clashed often with economic and social realities and brute political and military force. Eventually, young people got a hearing, though not wholly on their own terms. . . . Savage has a keen instinct for the apt anecdote and the encapsulating quotation. —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Boston Globe

Rather than either celebrating the season of youth or lambasting it as simply a conspiracy among marketers, [Savage] wants to show us both what it felt like to be a teenager and how adults strove to use those feelings for both good and ill. . . . This enormous, stimulating book usefully educates the reader in the endless complexities of the world we all have inherited ever since. —Jesse Berrett, San Francisco Chronicle

Among his many talents as an author, Savage writes most memorably about music and pop idols. He perfectly captures the intensity of teen devotion to Rudolph Valentino, swing king Benny Goodman and crooner Frank Sinatra. His description of thousands of teens ‘dancing in the aisles and crowding the bandstand, while the ushers frantically tried to regain control’ at a 1937 Goodman concert predates Beatlemania by thirty years but feels just as electric. Much of the history Savage recounts has been told before, but it takes a writer of special gifts to provide such a brilliant and entertaining synthesis of the varied parts. —David Takami, The Seattle Times

"Teenage bounces along with . . . [a] bubbling mashup of high-culture pontification and low-culture speed-freakery. . . . What makes Savage such a powerful writer is his refusal to dumb down." —Philadelphia Weekly

"Teenage is an entertaining account of youth culture from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of World War II. . . . Savage’s decision to focus on earlier decades makes an over-familiar phenomenon less familiar, and we can see its fundamental dynamics more clearly by watching them play out in other times and places. The book is jammed with fascinating details, drawn from a wide variety of sources. . . . Teenage recalls the thinking of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. . . . It is a cultural-studies narrative that belongs to a postwar generation of thinkers who grew up listening to rock and tried to account for their own experience. Savage’s innovation lies in projecting this narrative of youth culture backward onto the first half of the twentieth century." —Austin American-Statesman

Remarkable . . . [A] capacious history of youth movements. —The Village Voice

"Teenage is the definitive history of youth in revolt, from the gaslight age to the dawn of rock. Jon Savage captures the hell and adventure of adolescence with stunning detail and the thrilling force of the first Ramones album." —David Fricke, Rolling Stone

"Teenage reads as a love letter to those heady, troublesome but hopelessly seductive years when everything is on the point of becoming but has yet to make its rude and disappointing entry into life. . . . To those of us for whom adolescence already seems like another country, this impressive history serves as map and reminder."

—Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph (London)

Jon Savage cunningly tracks the Tortured Teen from Young Werther, Dorian Gray and Peter Pan to Rupert Brooke, Dada and jitterbugs, handily proving there were many, many rebels before James Dean. He also imparts a deep sense of horror and outrage at how over a century a complacent establishment routinely sent and sends the young out to die. —Mark O’Donnell, Tony Award-winning author of Hairspray: The Musical

"Savage writes with great lyrical exuberance and passion—much like the youthful subjects he describes. The young lives presented in Teenage blast through reified postwar mythologies to reveal youth as an ongoing potent, volatile, dynamic social force. By shining a neon light on the secret histories of young people, Savage joins with cultural historians Natalie Davis and John Gillis, restoring the integrity and dignity of all young people, past and present."

—Donna Gaines, sociologist and author of Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids

This carefully researched and beautifully written book reveals that the cultural and psychological phenomenon in which adolescent rebellion helps reinvent societies predated Elvis by at least a hundred years. Synthesized over the course of numerous generations, Savage’s observations put into perspective today’s ‘adolescent issues’ and how the rest of us respond and should respond to them.

—Danny Goldberg, author of How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, and former CEO, Air America Radio, Mercury Records, Warner Brother Records, and Atlantic Records

"Teenage is a funny, moving and startling book. Jon Savage has an artist’s way with unexpected detail and chronological coincidence, and a historian’s sense of accident and inevitability. Jon Savage turns a story I thought I already knew into something altogether stranger and more inspiring."

—Simon Frith, author of Sound Effects and Performing Rites

PENGUIN BOOKS TEENAGE

Jon Savage is a writer and broadcaster. After graduating from Cambridge, he published a fanzine called London’s Outrage and worked for Sounds, Melody Maker, and The Face. His book England’s Dreaming, a history of the Sex Pistols and Britain in the late seventies, won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award presented by Rolling Stone. He has also published a collection of journalism, Time Travel, and The Faber Book of Pop, coedited with Hanif Kureishi. He regularly writes for The Observer and Mojo, and his television credits include the BAFTA-winning documentary The Brian Epstein Story. He lives in North Wales.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, translated by Phyllis Howard Kernberger with Katherine Kernberger. Translation © 1997 by Katherine Kernberger and the Estate of Phyllis Howard Kernberger. Used with permission of Chronicle Books, LLC.

Materials from the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex Library. Reprinted with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive. Copyright © The Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive.

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler and translated by Susan Massotty. Copyright © 1995 by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Generation Without Farewell from The Man Outside by Wolfgang Borchert, translated by David Porter. Copyright © 1971 by New Directions Publishing Corp. .

Illustration credits appear on page 551.

eISBN : 978-0-140-25415-0

1. Teenagers—History—20th century. 2. Youth—History—20th century. 3. Teenagers—Europe—

History—20th century. 4. Teenagers—United States—History—20th century. 5. Popular culture

—History—20th century. 6. Subculture—History—20th century. 7. Social history—20th century.

I. Title. II. Title: Creation of youth culture.

HQ796.S284 2007

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TO JOSEPH LESLIE SAGE MC

AND

MARGARET DOROTHY SAGE

COMMERCIAL POSTCARD, EARLY 1900S

INTRODUCTION

America used to be the big youth place in everybody’s imagination. America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.

—John Lennon, born 1940, interviewed 1966

THIS BOOK ENDS with a beginning.

During 1944, Americans began to use the word teenager to describe the category of young people from fourteen to eighteen. From the very start, it was a marketing term used by advertisers and manufacturers that reflected the newly visible spending power of adolescents. The fact that, for the first time, youth had become its own target market also meant that it had become a discrete age group with its own rituals, rights, and demands.

The invention of the Teenager coincided with America’s victory in the Second World War, a decisive world-historical event which created the empire that still holds sway in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the definition of youth as a consumer offered a golden opportunity to a devastated Europe. For the last sixty years, this postwar teen image has dominated the way that the West sees the young, and has been successfully exported around the world. Like the new world order that it heralded, it is in need of redefinition.

But postwar youth culture is not as new as it might seem. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there were many conflicting attempts to envisage and define the status of youth—whether through concerted efforts to regiment adolescents using national policies, or through artistic, prophetic visions that reflected the wish of the young to live by their own rules. The narrative begins in 1875, with the autobiographical writings of Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse Pomeroy, and ends in 1945; during that period every single theme now associated with the modern Teenager had a vivid, volatile precedent.

This, then, is the prehistory of the Teenager.

In January 1980, I became involved in a possible television series about the history of youth subcultures. At that time, I was a researcher at Granada Television in Manchester, a company then well-known for its innovative and socially conscious programming. With the backing of my then producer, Geoff Moore, we worked up a proposal that aimed to tell the story of all the postwar cults: teds, beats, mods, rockers, hippies, skinheads, glitterboys, punks, as well as rude boys and rastas.

The impetus for the Granada idea came from Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which, published during 1979, had deservedly bridged the gap between academia and a wider audience. Subculture was a product of the interdisciplinary approach pioneered by Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Fusing sociology with literary interpretation and French theory, Hebdige’s book offered a synoptic history of the many British postwar youth cults, while not ignoring factors like class and race.

Hebdige’s allusive approach chimed with my own observations of the London punk scene, where during 1976 the pioneers of this as yet barely named movement threw together almost every single youth-cult style, stuck them together with safety pins, and then proudly paraded the results. A sixties mod jacket might be worn with zoot-suit trousers and teddy boy brothel-creepers: huge, thick-soled shoes not unlike those worn by the Parisian Zazous during the 1940s. The effect was at once striking, hallucinatory, and threatening.

This living bricolage, it transpired, had been suggested by the clothes sold in the various incarnations of 430 Kings Road, the shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Between 1971 and 1976 the shop’s name changed several times, from Let It Rock (Teddy Boy costume), to Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die (rocker and zootist gear), to Sex (fetish wear) and Seditionaries (designer punk rock clothes for heroes). Each phase had been marked by a rare degree of research and attention to detail.

But punk’s historical collage also marked the moment when the linear forward motion of the sixties was replaced by the loop. Suddenly, all pop culture time was accessible, on the same plane, available at once. In retrospect, this process had begun during 1966—at the very height of pop modernism— but it had taken ten years to become a living, working part of youth culture. Taken even further in the early 1980s by the latest youth style, the New Romantics, this plundering of the past reaffirmed the fact that there was a long, ill-documented youth history that went back beyond the Second World War.

During the course of the next eighteen months, the youth culture material that my producer and I wrote for Granada Television became a pilot for a potential documentary series. Called Teenage, the first hourlong show covered British youth culture in the years between 1945 and 1957: the transition between postwar austerity, the very first appearance of the Edwardians, later to be called teddy boys, and the impact of rock ’n’ roll during 1956 and 1957. For various reasons, however, the pilot was unfinished and the TV series canceled.¹

However, my interest in the topic held. During the next decade or so, I continued to collect any materials related to the topic of youth culture— particularly those marked by the buzzword teenager. The more I read, the more I perceived that there was a whole back-history that predated the Second World War. Reading about the Wandervogel or the American college market of the 1920s, I realized there was an untold story that did not chime with the generally accepted view that teenagers began in the mid-1950s.

My thinking was further crystalized when I found a copy of G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence in the early 1990s. Hall’s preface contained a prophetic manifesto for the postwar youth culture that was still half a century away when he wrote. His view of adolescence as a separate stage of life subject to enormous stresses and strains—and therefore to be treated with special care and attention—was grounded, for the first time, in a very specific age definition. Within the two volumes of this mammoth book, it seemed, was one beginning of the story.

Adolescence also harmonized with two other founding twentieth-century documents: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Both were highly romantic, uncannily predictive, and striving to define something that was in the air but which did not yet have a definitive name. At the turn of the century, the idea that youth would be defined as a separate stage of life was in its infancy, but these imaginative works explored the various possibilities of a sensibility, if not a whole society, based on the promise of youth, transitory or eternal.

This promise was embodied within America, the rising power of the new century. Hall explicitly linked his country—a fiat nation—with the life stage that he was attempting to define: The very fact that we think we are young will make the faith in our future curative, and we shall one day not only attract the youth of the world by our unequaled liberty and opportunity, but develop a mental, moral, and emotional nurture that will be the best preparation for making the most and the best of them and for helping humanity on to a higher stage.

At the same time the European strain, epitomized by the Romantics and the revolutionary youth of the late eighteenth century, remained powerful. The Western empires of the late nineteenth century were undergoing similar developmental problems—urbanization, industrialization, and rearmament—that resulted in a greater focus on the subject of youth. The dialogue between the United States, the United Kingdom, and northern Europe on juvenile delinquency had started during the mid-nineteenth century and formed a major part of G. Stanley Hall’s copiously cited research data.

The prehistory of the teenager, therefore, could not be told simply through America, but had to include Britain, France, and Germany. I originally included material from Italy and Russia—including the fascinating story of the bensprizorni, the wandering youth of the 1930s—but it had to go for reasons of space. The same considerations initially informed my decision to stop the book in the mid-twentieth century. However, the more I went on I realized that the narrative had to end with the nearly simultaneous coinage of the word teenager and the explosion of the atom bombs that changed the notion of the future.

The book, therefore, tells the history of the quest, pursued over two different continents and over half a century, to conceptualize, define, and control adolescence. Apart from the dialogue between America, Britain, France, and Germany, it contains several different elements that encapsulate the tension between the fantasy and the reality of adolescence, and between the many varied attempts to exalt or to capture this fugitive and transitory state.

Personal testimony—in the shape of diaries written at the time by actual adolescents attempting to make sense of themselves and their world—is placed next to media reports and government policies. The ideal of youth as a separate, cohort-based class is contrasted to the realities of economic and social class. The many different attempts by sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists to normalize youth—as a stage of life that everybody has to go through—are counterpointed by stories of extraordinary adolescents, the ones who seem to embody an era or point forward to a future that has yet to occur.

Above all, the concentration brought by these societies to this topic reinforced youth’s own conception of itself as important. It is fascinating to note, as the twentieth century gets into its stride, how the voices of youth become less corralled by adults and more frequently heard on their own terms. On another level, this book contains the story of how youth struggled to make itself heard, if not totally on its own terms, then on terms it could recognize and accommodate itself to. The eventual success of the teenager as a ruling concept owed much to this delicate balance.

Although this book covers a period of which I have no direct experience, it contains disguised autobiographical elements—if only in the selection of the material. I was born in September 1953, near the end of the first postwar baby boom. My father had served with distinction in the Second World War, about which he rarely talked, while my mother’s early adolescence had been dominated by those six years. Her subsequent love of international travel was partly informed by her wish to break free after the years of rationing and restriction.

For the first thirteen years of my life, I was brought up in Ealing, a West London suburb: an environment almost designed to offer a tabula rasa after years of suffering and horror. My adolescent reaction against suburbia is now tempered by the understanding that this move was a natural, if not the only rational, reaction on the part of the wartime generation. The inner cities were still badly war-damaged—the bomb sites in central London lingered on until the mid-1980s—but the suburbs were safe, comforting, and in retrospect a great place to spend my first thirteen years.

Each generation has its own task. To try to abrogate another generation’s experience is pointless, and potentially dangerous. Having experienced the storms and stresses of a 1960s and 1970s teenage, I came to realize that part of my cohort’s task was to help to deal with our parents’ war damage. The unresolved horror of that period, as well as the huge existential question posed by the fact of the H-bomb, informed the extreme manifestations of youth culture within which I thoroughly immersed myself.

Much later, I was able to talk to my father about his youth in the 1930s and 1940s, which helped me to understand what he went through. I was also fortunate enough to have a close relationship with my maternal grandfather, who was born in January 1904. His stories about life in the 1920s and 1930s fueled my imagination, while his love of jazz and American popular music—he went to see the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1920—stimulated and legitimated my own musical obsessions.

The experiences of my family, therefore, have offered a way of orienting myself within the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, I have attempted to be as thorough as possible with the material, and I hope to have left no major movement or manifestation totally unturned. If there are any sins of omission, they are purely my responsibility. However, it should be remembered that my brief and my inclination have been to produce a work of popular history rather than a multivolume academic work.

There is one final point. It may be argued that I have concentrated too much on the extraordinary rather than the ordinary, the extreme at the expense of the routine. I would counterargue that these particular youths are set against the attempts by academics, youth experts, and governments to standardize youth, and against the mainstream youth of the time. For instance, the small minority of German youth who resisted Hitler are contrasted with the millions of their contemporaries who joined the Nazi state organization, the Hitler Youth.

There is a dialectic within the book, therefore, between the extraordinary and the ordinary. However, if I have to make the choice, it would always be to find the extraordinary within the ordinary. This is informed both by my temperament and by the subject itself. It’s an argument that goes back to the first publication of Adolescence. In an April 1905 review of the book, one J. M. Greenwood charged G. Stanley Hall with prioritizing what one may call ‘the freaks of the race,’ without giving sufficient weight to the average steady-goers who make up the great bulk of humanity.

This is a fair comment, but I think it misses the point. By its very nature, youth has long been charged with representing the future: the perennial mass-media typecasting of the adolescent as a genius or a monster continues to encode adult hopes and fears about what will happen. To ignore those who stand out as harbingers in favor of those who cleave to the status quo is to refuse engagement with the future if not to misunderstand the nature of youth itself. Like G. Stanley Hall, I am proud to be a romantic about the subject, if only because I hope for a better world.

PART I

1875-1904

CHAPTER 1

Heaven and Hell

Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse Pomeroy

Man is not meant to remain a child. He leaves childhood behind him at the time ordained by nature; and this critical moment, short enough in itself, has far-reaching consequences. As the roaring of the waves precedes the tempest, so the murmur of rising passions; a suppressed excitement warns us of the approaching danger.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, book 4 (1762)

MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF, 1870S

JESSE POMEROY, 1874

"I WAS FLYING, very high above the earth, holding a lyre in my hand. The strings were constantly unstrung, and I could not produce a single sound from it. I continued rising, seeing immense horizons, clouds—blue, yellow, red, mixed, golden, and silver—torn, strange. Then everything grew grey and dazzlingly bright, and I was still rising until I reached a most frightening height, but I was not afraid. The clouds seemed wan, greying and shining— like lead. Then all grew dim. I continued holding my lyre with the loosened strings. And far below, under my feet, hung a reddish ball—the earth."

Marie Bashkirtseff awoke from this dream very early on the morning of Monday, December 27, 1875. The seventeen-year-old had drunk too much wine at supper and found further sleep impossible. She decided to unburden herself of her turbulent thoughts, and prepared to make ritual confession. Now that it is 2.00 in the morning, she began, and I am locked in my room, dressed in a long white peignoir, barefoot, and my hair loose like a virgin martyr, I can very well devote myself to better thoughts.

Marie’s confession was made, however, not to the priests of her Catholic religion, but to the notebook that was her refuge: This Journal contains all my life; my quietest moments are those when I am writing. They are probably the only calm ones that I have. To burn everything, to be in exasperation, to cry, to suffer everything and live, and live! Why do they let me live? Oh, I am impatient. My time will come. I certainly want to believe this. But something tells me that it will never come, that I will pass all my life waiting, waiting.

The journal was not just a safety valve but a bid for secular immortality. Marie wanted attention and fame. If I should die young, she continued that night, I shall burn this journal; but if I live to be old, people will read it. I believe, if I may say so, that there is no photograph as yet of a woman’s existence, of all her thoughts. Yes, all, all. It will be interesting. If I should die young soon, and if by bad luck this Journal is not burnt, it will be said, ‘Poor child, she was in love with Audiffret, and all her despair comes from that.’

This impassioned outburst came at the end of a turbulent year. Returning to her family’s adopted city of Nice that spring, Marie transferred her schoolgirl crush on the unattainable Duke of Hamilton onto the twenty-four-year-old Emile Audiffret. Over the next few months, she obsessively recorded the progress of her first real love affair. On December 26, Audiffret canceled a date, a serious slight. Marie’s mother had given the invitation, a piece of parental meddling that infuriated her fiery daughter.

In the autumn of 1875, Marie had turned seventeen. This prompted a major outburst. I am tired of my obscurity, she wrote. I mildew in the shadows. The sun, the sun, the sun! Let’s go—have courage. This time is only a passage that will lead me to where I’ll be all right. Am I mad? Or fated? Be it one way or another, I’m bored! She was often bored: with the slowness of her mother, with the tedium of family holidays, with the inertia of the world. Life wasn’t coming fast enough for a young woman who found herself in a race against time.

As the favored daughter of wealthy Russian émigrés, Marie was impatient and spoiled. Her dresses were handmade in Paris to her own extravagant designs. She accompanied her family on their travels throughout Europe, reveling in their contacts with the beau monde. She had a whole suite of rooms in the Bashkirtseff house on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, within which the inner sanctum was a bedroom that, covered with sky blue satin and topped with a Sevres chandelier, resembled the inside of a glove box.

Although highly indulged, Marie was charged with a special destiny. During her early childhood, her mother was informed by a fortune-teller that her daughter would be a star. From that moment, Marie was brought up to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most magnificent, and was encouraged in her whims. This feeling of being special gave her a confidence shared by few young women of her age and time. When she began recording her thoughts and her emotions in a journal, she had little doubt about its impact on posterity: it would be, of course, the most interesting book of all.

Her early entries were much concerned with her looks: one day she would feel quite beautiful, the next a figure not even Satan would recognise. She felt like Frankenstein: We know that I have a good posture, that I have broad shoulders, a high chest, hips and derriere well-rounded and prominent, and small feet. Within five minutes, I became a flat monster, emaciated, with sunken chest, and one shoulder higher than the other, which pushes everything else out of shape. My feet became flat and long, my eyes sunken and my teeth black.

Bodily self-consciousness was, however, the least of her problems. As she began to enter society, Marie realized that her family was shrouded in ill repute. Both Marie’s uncle and younger brother Paul were in constant trouble with the law. Marie’s mother had separated from her father, while her aunt Sophie was dogged by a long-running court case. Marie herself was suspect, thanks to her ebullience and her extraordinary fashion sense: a skating dress with trailing ostrich feathers was a little too fast for Nice’s small-town mores.

The effect of these scandals was to bar the Bashkirtseffs from local society. Marie keenly felt the slights: My name is tarnished, and that’s killing me, she wrote after her family had been slandered by the Tolstoys, fellow Russian émigrés. I cried like an animal, dismayed, humiliated. By the age of fourteen, Marie had added revenge to her already considerable drive: I would be received in society because I’ll not be a celebrity coming from a low class or a dirty street, she proclaimed in March 1873. I dream of celebrity, of fame.

Propelled by the fortune-teller’s prophecy and further fired by the snubs of provincial Nice, Marie poured all her resentments and frustrations into her notebooks. Almost every day, she wrote about herself and her family with an extreme candor, as if to purge herself of all the falsity that surrounded her. She saw no point in lying or pretending. It was all out there on the page: her switchback changes of mood, her sibling rivalry with brother Paul, her first experiments with alcohol and tobacco, her rebellion against adults and their institutions, her obsession with her appearance.

This was not what was expected from young women in the 1870s. As Marie’s biographer Dormer Creston later commented, this was the period when large sections of the upper and middle classes, and in particular the women, were brought up with a deformed sense of piety. Marie consciously reacted against the contemporary feminine ideals of self-repression, resignation, and intense domesticity. As she scornfully observed, Well, they really have a good time—the men. The woman is always the victim. I would like to be a man. I would surpass every one of those gentlemen.

Already burning up with impatience and frustration, Marie received a mortal blow during the summer of 1875. I have pain in the chest, she revealed that June. It seems to me I have tuberculosis. But this chest pain worries me, and for the last five days I have spit blood. It’s awful. This self-diagnosis would not be confirmed for a further seven years, but Marie was shocked to find that her more melodramatic rhetoric—death for me is a close relative, she had stated that spring—had become likely fact. Time became ever more precious.

Marie’s 1875 dream sourced an archetypal image of her faith and her name: the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But it also evoked the same sense of boundless possibility that the Romantics had already attributed to pubertal youth. At sixteen Jean-Jacques Rousseau had believed that I could do anything, attain to everything. As he remembered in his Confessions, I had only to launch myself forth, to mount and fly through the air. I entered the vast world with a feeling of security; it was to be filled with the fame of my achievements.

However, Marie was too alert not to catch the threatening notes emanating from her subconscious: the unstrung lyre, the leaden clouds. She had all of her life in front of her, yet against this weightlessness were set severe constraints. Although she wanted to break the bounds of class, gender, family, and even her physical body, she knew that her time was flowing very fast. The dream ended in queasy suspension: would she plunge earthward, like Icarus, or continue to soar with her lyre magically restrung?

While Marie was grappling with her illness, another young person was engaged in autobiography. Like Marie, Jesse Pomeroy was facing a life-or-death struggle, but in his case it was of his own making. During the summer of 1875, he was incarcerated in Suffolk County Jail in the American state of Massachusetts, having been found guilty the previous December of first-degree murder. Although he was only fifteen—almost exactly one year younger than the Russian émigré—he faced the mandatory death penalty.

Pomeroy had already achieved fame, or, to be more accurate, its shadow: notoriety. Almost as soon as he had been arrested for the murder of Horace H. Millen in April 1874, his name had become a byword for a hitherto inconceivable depravity. His four-year-old victim had been found severely mutilated on the marshy South Boston coast: Pomeroy had stabbed him several times in the chest, punctured his eyeball, slashed his throat so deeply that the head was nearly severed, and finally indulged in an attempted castration. Not for nothing had he become known throughout America as the boy fiend.

The hysteria mounted when Pomeroy’s sadistic spate of abductions and mutilations was revealed. His ten victims had been, with one exception, boys aged between four and eight, and all had been subjected to a horrific catalog of humiliations, beatings, and stabbings. In one instance, Joseph Kennedy had been slashed on the face, back, and thighs, and was then made to rub saltwater into his fresh wounds. When the body of Katie Curran, Pomeroy’s first murder victim, was discovered in July 1874, the boy fiend would have been torn limb from limb if he had not already been imprisoned.

Although he had been sentenced in December 1874, Pomeroy had received a stay of execution while his fate was decided. His youth, coupled with the extreme atrocity of his crimes, had already prompted a fierce national debate about capital punishment.²Although the jury had recommended that his punishment be commuted to imprisonment for life, the majority view, expressed in newspaper editorials and hundreds of letters and petitions, was that Pomeroy should hang.

On July 2, 1875, Pomeroy’s death sentence was confirmed by the state gov-ernor’s executive council: all that remained between him and the gallows was the governor’s signature. While his life hung in the balance, Pomeroy was kept in solitary confinement. Instead of a Sevres chandelier, sky blue satin walls, and a shell-shaped bed resting on carved lions’ feet, he had an iron-framed cot, a wooden chair, and two slop buckets. The extreme isolation of his conditions, coupled with the prospect of imminent execution, exacerbated his desire to justify his actions.

He had two opportunities that summer. The first was provided by the Boston Times, which printed a two-part autobiography of the moral monster. Instead of admitting his undeniable guilt, Pomeroy evaded the issue. These are the reasons why I THINK THAT IF I DID THOSE THINGS I WAS INSANE or that I could not help doing it, he wrote, before concluding, but notwithstanding all that, as I have said, I DO NOT THINK I DID THOSE THINGS. Elsewhere he insulted the trial witnesses and jurors, whom he called twelve jackasses.

The real Jesse was revealed, however, in a series of letters he wrote in prison. During June 1875, a fourteen-year-old named Willie Baxter was arrested for theft and found himself in the next cell to the notorious killer. Although contact was strictly forbidden between prisoners, the two young men contrived to keep up a correspondence that lasted until Baxter was tried a few weeks later. Pomeroy was extremely glad of human contact: Let us write good long letters to each other and so beguile our captivity but don’t make too much noise.

Pomeroy was fascinated by his fame: Tell me all you have heard of me, everything bad and don’t think I will be angry. He also confessed to the murders that he had denied in court: "The girl came in the store one morn and asked for paper. I told her there is a store downstairs. She went down, and I killed her. Oh Willie you don’t know how bad I feel for her and also the boy. What I said to the boy I have no reccollection [sic] but you know I killed him too. I feel very bad for him, and believe me I can’t tell you the reason I did those things."

This was the extra element that fueled Pomeroy’s notoriety: the overwhelming urges for which there was no vocabulary in Gilded Age America. Compounding the cruelty of his crimes was the seeming impossibility of their explanation: not only did he refuse to take responsibility for them, but he could give no account beyond the barest language of compulsion: Something made me. The best he could do was to describe a pain, almost like an electrical charge, that crossed from one side of his head to the other and triggered the attacks.

Pomeroy burst into the American consciousness as a horrific new type. There was nothing in the existing legislation to explain his affectless savagery, despite the fact that youth crime had been discussed and defined throughout the nineteenth century. The phrase juvenile delinquent had been coined in the 1810s, and in 1824, the first legislation defining Juvenile Delinquents had been passed in New York City. This held delinquents to be under twenty-one, the common-law division between children and adulthood.

With increasing urbanization, there had been a transatlantic pooling of youth crime data. In her influential 1853 book Juvenile Delinquents: Their Condition and Treatment, Mary Carpenter suggested that younger children, as those in their second decade were still called, should be dealt with separately from adults in their early twenties, already hardened criminals. This taint of corruption, added to the diminished responsibility imputed to children, began to push the legal definition of juveniles lower, down to sixteen in some cases.

By the existing definitions, Pomeroy was still a child—fourteen when he committed his crimes—yet he was facing an adult’s sentence. Despite the fact that his age would suggest diminished responsibility, the authorities and the public were faced with a youth who seemed very much in control of what he was doing and who was capable of distinguishing between right and wrong. Indeed, his demeanor throughout his interrogations by the police and cross-examinations in court offered nothing but an obdurate, precocious composure.

In the gap between the shocking reality of Pomeroy’s crimes and the existing conceptions of juvenile delinquency, there was room for many different explanations. The most popular solution to the mystery of the young killer’s motivation came from the then fashionable discipline of phrenology.³This claimed that criminals were throwbacks to a more primitive stage of human development, and that their physiological atavism was marked by irregularly shaped skulls, facial disfigurements, and other deformations.

Although Pomeroy was of average height, his head was markedly large for his body, and his right eye was covered with a milky film. For one journalist, a single glance at the boy’s countenance was enough to see how it was possible for him to perpetrate the outrages for which he was taken into custody. His eyes were sullenly, brutishly wicked, with an unsympathetic, merciless gaze. With the pallor of his complexion and the shuffling of one whose thoughts are of the lowest kind, he represented a textbook genetic throwback.

Another possible solution was found in Pomeroy’s avid consumption ofdime novels, the cheap paperbound adventure stories then popular among American youth. Titles like Rangers of the Mohawk and Calamity Jane, the Heroine of Whoop-Up described the battles between American Indians and red-blooded American frontiersmen in gory detail. Jesse was particularly taken with the activities of the Indians, identifying with the famous white turncoat Simon Girty, and reveling in the descriptions of torture and murder.

This line of inquiry led to a particularly obtuse exchange between the young prisoner and the famous publisher James T. Fields. When asked whether his homicidal passions had been excited by dime novels, Pomeroy mentioned with approval the blood and thunder pictures, tomahawking and scalping. However, he shied away from admitting that they influenced his behavior: I have thought it all over and it seems to me now that they did. I can’t say certainly, of course and perhaps if I should think it over again, I should say it was something else. What else? Well, Sir I really can’t say.

The puzzle represented by Pomeroy’s actions dictated the terms of his murder trial. The only way to avoid the mandatory death sentence was to establish that he was of unsound mind. His attorney called in two insane experts as key witnesses. Dr. John E. Tyler thought that the defendant was suffering from a compulsive mental derangement and was therefore not responsible for his actions. Dr Clement Walker went further and blamed an obscure form of epilepsy for the murderer’s lack of control.

The pioneering testimony of the alienists cut no ice with the general public. As far as they were concerned, Jesse Pomeroy’s crimes were the result of a horrible monomania. For most people, he was just a young demon or a mad dog to be put down with dispatch. The American Law Review gave this theme a rhetorical gloss: If the boy’s impulse is under his control, there is surely no reason for sparing his life. If it is not, how does he differ from a wolf, except that he had the intelligence of a man, and is therefore more dangerous?

It suited Americans to think of the young murderer as something subhuman. However, the one line of inquiry that was barely considered at the time would have shed a harsh light on the wider society. Pomeroy was a product of the continent’s urban stews, the cities sprawling under the accelerating rate of immigration. Within this brutal environment, the young were often left to fend for themselves. There was very little schooling, endemic child labor, and puberty marked the moment when the fight for survival began in earnest.

In midcentury, the pioneering reformer Charles Loring Brace had commented on the immense number of boys and girls floating and drifting about our streets with hardly any assignable home or occupation, who continually swelled the multitude of criminals, prostitutes and vagrants. Slum children were routinely demonized in press reports that highlighted the inexorable growth of organized gangs: the lawless youngsters that the New York Times, in 1873, called half-drunken, lazy, worthless vagabonds.

Pomeroy was brought up in Chelsea, a poor district of Boston. His parents’ marriage was marked by the drunken violence of his father, who was thrown out of the family house in 1872, around the time that the boy committed his first serious assault. While his mother worked to pay the bills, Jesse was left to roam the city. With his milky eye, he looked odd, and was a target for bullying. His insecurity about his appearance came up in one of his letters to Willie Baxter: What do you think of me, he asked. Do I look like a bad boy. Is my head large.

However, it was the furious beatings that he received from his father that left the deepest scar. His prison letters revealed an obsession with floggings. I will tell you about the hardest licking I got, he wrote to Baxter. "I played truant and stole some money from mother. My father took me into the woodshed and I had to strip off my jacket & vest and two shirt [sic] so as to leave my back naked. Father took a whip and gave me a very hard whipping. It hurt me very much and every time I think of it I seem to be undergoing the flogging again."

Undiscovered for over a century, these letters might have helped to solve the vexed question that Jesse Pomeroy posed for Gilded Age America. He had simply learned all too well from adult example. As it was, he was dehumanized and abstracted into a symbol of pure evil. In contrast to the naughty but lovable scamps to be found in contemporary boy novels like Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick or Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy, Pomeroy was a blast of chill horror: a Frankenstein’s monster straight from the urban laboratory.

Like Mary Shelley’s famous creation, Pomeroy was allowed no way back into society. He predicted his fate: If they say I must die, I am dead. If they send me to prison for life, I am dead too. After his confidant Willie Baxter left Suffolk County Jail in the summer of 1875, the young murderer sweated for another year before his death sentence was commuted to life in permanent solitary confinement. Although he refused to ever accept his captivity, he would remain cut off from all human contact for the next forty-one years.

During 1887, while Jesse Pomeroy was making his fifth, sixth, and seventh serious attempts to escape his cell, Marie Bashkirtseff ’s journal was published. The years after 1875 had seen some of her wishes fulfilled. At the age of eighteen, she threw off the provinciality of Nice and moved to Paris to study as an artist. Although she took constant cures, her tuberculosis advanced inexorably. In response, she painted as though her afterlife depended on it. Exhibiting at the Salon, she gained recognition for her portrait of slum children, Un meeting.

Marie finally succumbed at the age of twenty-five in April 1884. Earlier that year, she had written a preface to what she hoped would be her lasting testament: I want my journal to be published. It cannot fail to be interesting. Does my anticipation of its being read spoil or destroy the merit of such a book? Not at all. I wrote for a long time without dreaming of being read. And now it is just because I hope that I will be read that I am absolutely sincere. If this book is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason to be.

It was this candid quality that helped to make the journal a bestseller on its first French publication. In giving a frank and exhaustive picture of her youthful psyche, Marie Bashkirtseff exposed a kind of perception that was not recognized by the culture and the media of the day. Her book was compared to Rousseau’s Confessions, but there were two crucial differences: Marie wrote from the female perspective, and she jotted down her feelings and experiences as they occurred rather than recalling them in late life.

Offering an unprecedented account of pubescent life from within, the journal’s impact spread throughout Europe, America, and Great Britain. There were articles about her in magazines like the Woman’s World and The Nineteenth Century, where the British prime minister, William Gladstone, called the author a true genius, one of those abnormal beings who in this or that country seem to be born into the world once or twice in a generation. Marie had finally achieved the fame that she had so ardently sought, as a true mind liberator.

However, as she had foreseen, this success was tinged with irony. The journal was a Faustian pact with her mortality: it was the knowledge of her telescoping life that had given her writing its force, but such intimate and iconoclastic material could only have been published after her demise. Her natural intensity had been ratcheted by her fatal diagnosis, but it was this very heightened atmosphere that made the book so attractive to the young. Marie embodied the Romantic vision of an accelerated life sealed by an early death.

Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse Pomeroy shared more than their time. In their different ways, they forced their respective societies to recognize that the existing rituals between childhood and adulthood were obsolete. The physical stage of puberty, usually beginning around twelve or thirteen and ending at eighteen or nineteen, remained constant. However the true genius and the boy fiend showed that it was no longer adequate to think that adulthood immediately followed childhood: they were the harbingers of a new intermediate state that as yet had no name.

It wasn’t as though they had arrived totally unannounced. There already existed a considerable body of work on this very topic. Indeed, Marie and Jesse both epitomized the critical moment of which Rousseau had warned over a hundred years earlier. In Emile, a tract so scandalous that it was burned upon its publication in 1762, Rousseau argued that puberty had such fundamental emotional and mental effects that it represented a second birth. The symptoms were a change of temper, frequent outbreaks of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind.

Rousseau’s ideas were developed a decade later by Goethe’s classic Sturm und Drang novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which mapped the emotional disintegration of a gifted but suicidal young man. Werther’s fictional letters displayed much of the pubescent pathology that Marie would exhibit a hundred years later: the extreme mood swings, the sensitivity to social slights, and the self-pitying rhetoric—I see no end to misery but my grave. Although Werther had the sacred and inspiring ability to create new worlds around himself, he was a man out of his time.

The international success of Goethe’s 1774 novel sealed the Romantic view of youth as beset by storms and stresses, so much so that premature death— by suicide or accident—was symptomatic. This tendency reached its apogee in the work of the British Romantics, whose avatar was a young poet and forger named Thomas Chatterton. After he died from arsenic poisoning at the age of seventeen, he was commemorated by Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in a sequence of poems that celebrated him as a misunderstood genius whose youth, made permanent by death, would never fade.

The Western conception of youth was also altered by the economic and political turmoil of the late eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution initiated huge migrations from the country to the city and inaugurated a new society based on materialism, consumerism, and mass production. In the anonymous, swarming cities, the traditional structures of work, neighborhood, and family broke down. Youths and children bore the brunt of this revolution, working in dangerous and repetitive tasks, or roaming wild in the filth evoked by Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens.

At the same time, there were new governments that proclaimed true democracy. Having forcibly thrown off the despotism of the British king, the thirteen united States of America made their Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. In comparison to the feudalism of old Europe, the young continent of America was open to everyone.

These democratic ideals were reaffirmed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man issued by the revolutionary National Assembly of France during August 1789. Explicitly based on the American model, it stated that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Four years later the National Council added another eighteen codicils. Article 28 stated that one generation cannot subject to its law the future generations. Within a revolution dominated by youth, the meaning was clear: the idea of the generation gap started here.

The consequences of these events were played out throughout the nineteenth century. Tied into the new radical politics of equality, youth became on the one hand a source of hope and a symbol of the future, and on the other an unstable and dangerous cohort. At one extreme, its involvement in revolutionary movements like Chartism, socialism, and, after the Russian example, anarchism and Nihilism, showed that generational consciousness, converted into radical ideology, could be a threat to the social order.

At the same time, youth was associated with the drive toward mass inclusion, if not true democracy. The full inception of the mass age in the second half of the nineteenth century gave rise to the realization that no section of the population should be overlooked in the new social order. That resulted in fresh attention being paid to hitherto neglected classes like the urban working poor or youth itself. The growth of the mass media accelerated that process. By the 1870s, the young could read about themselves and buy products, like dime or boy novels, that were principally aimed at their age group.

The anonymity of the huge cities also offered its own opportunities. Within an age when life for most youths was severely constricted, the more determined could attempt the life first defined in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème. Focusing on a group of struggling artists and working girls in 1840s Paris, Murger’s stories promoted the idea of an urban zone where prevailing moralities were relaxed, where dissident and artistic young individuals could pursue their visions and delay adulthood. Thirty years later, these bohemian enclaves had spread to Berlin, London, and New York.

These changes were not always regarded positively, as youth became a litmus test for adult fears. The Industrial Revolution and its contemporary political revolutions had set in motion forces that were barely within the control of men and their governments. The slum children, the boy murderers, the anarchists: they all represented a future that could be subject to savage, atavistic forces. Just as Frankenstein’s creature turned against its creator, so could the young of the West turn against their parents and their institutions.

With his unusual empathy for the young, Rousseau had recognized the pubescent potential for extremes in Emile, and concluded that the interval between childhood and adulthood should be prolonged: The period when education is usually finished is just the time to begin. By the 1870s, his recommendations were being taken seriously: after the shocking reality of wild children had been exposed by reporters, reformers, and novelists alike, the governments of America and Europe began to create the institutions of compulsory education.

But Rousseau was not just talking about an ideal school. He proposed a deeper kind of education that would recognize puberty as a separate life stage and offer it sympathetic guidance so that society would be spared its more virulent manifestations. In the mid-1870s, Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse Pomeroy symbolized the twin poles of youth: genius or monster, creator or destroyer of worlds. The furious impulses exposed by the young diarist and the young murderer would lead inquiring minds to take up Rousseau’s proposals. At stake was the future: would it be dream or nightmare, heaven or hell?

CHAPTER 2

Nationalists and Decadents

The European Counterrevolution

I envisage a war, of justice or strength of a logic beyond all imagining. It is as simple as a musical phrase.

—Arthur Rimbaud, Guerre (1874)

CHURCH LADS’ BRIGADE LEAFLET, 1890s

THE TRADITIONALISTS OF Europe knew what to do with all that excess pubescent energy. Never mind about allowing the young time to develop, what these savages needed was sports-based schooling, then regimentation into premilitary cadet organizations. During the 1870s, this impulse was given an extra impetus by the industrial ascendancy of Germany, an aggressive new nation-state that destabilized the old European order and began what would become a forty-year arms race.

At the same time, there was a strong reaction against the new militarism from the artists, writers, and thinkers who assumed the Romantic and bohemian view of youth as a separate stage of life. They sought both to escape from the materialistic demands of nineteenth-century mass society and to plumb the deepest regions of the youthful psyche. The so-called decadents, while they did not originate their name, nevertheless reveled in their moral and physical sickness as they simultaneously explored what it could be like to be forever young.

With the looming deadline of the new century, the decadents and the nationalists engaged in a struggle to imprint their visions of the future on European youth. The battle might have been as deadly as it was unequal, but both sides shared a romanticism that elevated youth by freezing it at its zenith. Whether it took the form of the hero, fallen in battle in his physical prime, or the shooting star represented by the pubescent prodigy, eternal youth was the Holy Grail: whether killed or self-immolated, it would never reach adulthood.

The clearest exposition of the militarist vision for youth was given by a forty-year-old German lieutenant colonel, Baron Colmar von der Goltz. In his 1883 book, The Nation in Arms, von der Goltz accurately foresaw that, as one of the revolutionary changes in the science of war, the whole population would be involved in any national conflict. Having as its aim the complete subjection of the enemy, the new condition of total war would demand complete commitment and major sacrifices from soldiers and noncombatants alike.

Von der Goltz observed that the time from the eighteenth to the twenty-fourth year was best suited to military service. He shrewdly suggested how to exploit the physical and psychological attributes of this age group: "The body is then quite vigorous enough to endure hardships, and the soldier is as yet free and unfettered. The grain of heedlessness, a quality peculiar to the freshness of youth, is an excellent incentive to martial achievement. A young field army, particularly one uniformly young, is greatly superior