Empirically – Youth Education leads to activism, and prevents the rise of fascism – 1930’s prove

During the Cold War many aspersions were cast upon young, leftleaning activists of the 1930s, often made by former young radicals themselves. That should not eclipse what they believed, the policies they pursued, and the goals they sought at the time. Looking at the 1930s through the perspective of activist youth allows for a greater understanding of the decade as a time of uncertainty when anything seemed possible: the end of capitalism in America, the rejuvenation of free enterprise; the spread of fascism, true political freedom; world peace, world war. During the decade, no one knew how it would all play out. Youth wanted to make sure they had a voice in the ultimate outcome because they believed their perspective was valid and because they wanted to make America live up to its promises. The 1930s, they therefore believed, was the opportune time to remake America politically, economically, and socially. It was activist, left- leaning youth who first recognized the potential for drastic change in America, seizing upon the desperation of Harlan County, Kentucky, coalminers in 1932 as the personification of economic deprivation. Rallying to the coalminers’ cause, young idealistic college students set out from New York City only to be met by the cruel reality of coal country’s brand of law and order. Regrouping, the organizers of the trek used the experience to establish youth- led organizations on the college campus, the most notable of which was the National Student League (NSL). The NSL and other student groups, like the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), found fertile ground on academic quadrangles, especially those located in New York City, where they hoped to plant their roots for radical change. Their concern for Reed Harris’s academic freedom at Columbia University, emerging just one week after the Harlan County trip, found a ready audience among students chafing against the authoritarianism of college administrators. Their demands for more economic opportunity were thus coupled with demands for more freedom and democracy. Extrapolating from their personal experiences, supporters of the left leaning groups began to expand their vision of what America should be from the college campus to the larger society and from New York City to the nation, all the while catalyzing a confluence between the local and national situations. The plight of the Scottsboro Boys highlighted the discrepancy between professed loyalty to freedom and equality and the reality of racism in America, unmasking the kind of hypocrisy they would not tolerate. In agitating for the Scottsboro Boys’ acquittal, they were fighting once again against the larger issues of discrimination and prejudice. This case allowed them a national platform upon which to base their calls for freedom, democracy, and equality. Yet the tenor of those calls was also determined by more immediate cases of prejudice, like those suffered by CCNY track star Welford Wilson. This constant pull between local and national events kept young activists’ ideology grounded upon pragmatic solutions at the same time they would brook no compromise with what they believed to be not only morally righteous positions, but those founded upon quintessential American ideals. In order to bring about the changes they desired, youth activists realized they would have to become political players and the only way to do that was to create larger, inclusive youth organizations to act as political lobbying groups. Such a conclusion coincided with the rising menace of fascism abroad, prompting youth to come together in forming popular front organizations where liberals, socialists, and communists worked together to promote peace as a way to ensure political, economic, and social freedom and equality. The resulting American Youth Congress, created in 1934, and American Student Union, established in 1935, were youth- led organizations that immediately began pressuring the New Deal Administration to do more for young people, basing their argument upon the premise that doing so would allow America to live up to its promise. It is true that membership in youth organizations represented only a small fraction of young people in the United States, but, as Joseph Lash argued, this is not a fair gauge of their influence because they became a motivating force in a wider coalition that recognized the great dangers con- fronting the country and the world.1 The synergistic outcome for activist youth was a fully formed worldview that sought to safeguard freedom, equality, democracy, and peace. Pressuring Congress for more appropriations for the National Youth Administration, making sure that agency provided equal opportunity for all young people through a democratic organizational structure, and lobbying for a more inclusive American Youth Act brought youth leaders into the American political mainstream. Yet at the same time, the AYC and ASU were actively promoting peace through radical methods, like the Student Strike Against War. The Janus- faced nature of working with the Administration on domestic policy, but maintaining a particularly critical stance toward its foreign policy meant the youth organizations acted independently in what they believed to be youth’s best interest, but it also meant that the relationship between the organizations and the Roosevelt Administration remained fraught with tension. That tension heightened during the Spanish Civil War. Seen by youth as a portent of the world war to come, they actively protested the war itself; but, at the same time, this was a war against fascism fought by the beleaguered Loyalists who, like young Americans themselves, were fighting for freedom, democracy, and equality. The Spanish Civil War, then, catalyzed the breakup of the youth’s popular front organizations as young people split ranks based on which ideal they prioritized as a necessary precondition for the others: peace on the one hand and freedom, democracy, and equality on the other. The policy impasse between the advocates of collective security and the advocates of pacifism led many socialists to withdraw from the ASU and AYC. With unity broken, the weakened organizations were left to face a world quickly dissolving into war. In 1939, the dimensions of the fascist threat to world peace were reconfigured around the Nazi- Soviet Pact and the subsequent German invasion of Poland and Soviet invasion of Finland. The difficulties in creating peace increased exponentially. As the war in Europe gained momentum with the Nazi invasion of Scandinavia and the low countries in April– May 1940, and the fall of France in June 1940, it exacerbated tensions within the youth organizations. Many withdrew from the ASU and AYC because of what they perceived as the imminence of a war from which the United States could not remain aloof. Continuing to pursue peace seemed futile. For others, there had never been a more auspicious time for dedication to peace. Once the Soviet Union—what many believed to be the last hold out for peace—was invaded, the possibility of avoiding world war crumbled, as did the youth organizations themselves. 230 Conclusion At the same time they were confronted with the fascist threat abroad, youth activists were attacked by the red- baiting House Un- American Activities Committee, chaired by Texas Democratic Congressman Martin Dies. Youth organizations’ reputations as communist safe havens, coupled with those organizations’ criticism of FDR’s foreign policy, caused a breach in the relationship between the young activists and New Deal administrators that severely damaged their ability to affect policy. As some youth leaders became increasingly supportive of American interventionism, other youth leaders found themselves advocating a program favored by isolationists. Liberals withdrew from the ASU and AYC in order to support America’s burgeoning war effort, further fragmenting the organizations that quickly dissolved after December 7, 1941. The demise of the youth organizations does not dispel their significance. The vision of and for America those organizations advocated expressed the desire of a generation of young people ravaged by Depression to create a better world—one in which America lived up to its ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality. Even as some former youth leaders went to work for the FDR Administration2 and the FDR Administration turned its back on youth programs,3 youth’s vision lived on.4 Some former youth leaders, such as Joseph Lash and James Wechsler, went to war.5 That war, Eric Sevareid said, “was for us not merely a crisis in our physical lives but an intellectual and moral purgatory.”6 And although “it would be possible, no doubt, and in an accepted tradition, to write of this university period with the humorous superiority of tolerant adulthood, to regard it as a natural manifestation of naïve idealism of youth,” Sevareid explained, “it would be easier, but it would be an error of judgment” because “we had a definite effect upon our times.”7 In like fashion, the times affected those young people. The events of the Depression decade spurred youth to action. It was their understanding of what each event meant for freedom, democracy, equality, and peace that determined their actions. It was not just their actions, then, but the understanding that girded them that helps bring to light the problems and possibilities of the 1930s.