The Undercurrents of Adolescence: Tracking Modern Adolescence & Delinquency Through Classic Cinema

By Bret Stephenson

Imagine a great movie about adolescence like Rebel Without a Cause or The Breakfast Club with a written commentary rather than a DVD audio one. For years I have used movies about teens to learn and grow from. As a movie fan, and as I became more entrenched in the world of teenagers, I found myself looking at teen movies in a couple different ways. With each new teen film, I would just turn off my brain and enjoy the movie. But then I found myself watching the same movie again with my ‘adolescent filters’ on and a legal pad & pen for keeping notes. I saw countless useful pieces in almost every movie, from hedonistic party-driven films like Dazed and Confused to true-life tearjerkers like Freedom Writers. Classics like West Side Story and American Graffiti or musicals like Footloose, all gave me great material to use in helping parents and other adults involved with teens a venue to learn from.

While researching for my first book, From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age, I learned of a somewhat unknown spike of delinquent and adolescent discontent in the 1950s. Beginning with Catcher in the Rye in 1951, through James Dean’s brilliance and into West Side Story, the undercurrent of teen problems was coming to the surface. The youth of the 50s were children of two wars, and not buying into the post-WWII I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best vision of America.

The section in my book about this period and films became one of the most popular components of my workshops. When on-line streaming and rentals, as well as inexpensive movie sales arrived, I realized I could finally write a book where readers could watch the film and read my comments on adolescence. By deeply paraphrasing each movie, even people who could not view each of the ten classic films I use in Undercurrents could learn a lot about teens and adolescence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483550879

Book preview

becoming.

Introduction

Imagine a great movie about adolescence like Rebel Without a Cause or The Breakfast Club with a written commentary rather than an audio one. For years I have used movies about teens to learn and grow from. I’ve always been a movie fan, and as I got more and more entrenched in the world of teenagers, I found myself looking at teen movies in a couple different ways. With each new teen film, I would just turn off my brain and enjoy the movie. But then I found myself watching the same movie again with my ‘adolescent filters’ on and a legal pad & pen for keeping notes. I saw countless useful pieces in almost every movie, from hedonistic party-driven Dazed and Confused, Porky’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High to true-life tearjerkers like Stand and Deliver, Lean On Me and Freedom Writers. Classics like West Side Story and American Graffiti or musicals like Footloose, Grease, and Bye Bye Birdie all gave me great material to use in helping parents and other adults involved with teens a venue to learn from. Bits and pieces of these movies found their way into my first book, From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age.

There were always parts in these movies I liked, and even aspects I could learn from scenes or plots I didn’t resonate with. As I started collecting teen movies for personal use, and occasionally watching movies from other eras, I kept realizing how much useful information was available in these movies and found myself referring to them when talking about teens, and using movie anecdotes, quotes or themes to educate people I was working with.

The idea for tracking the adolescent undercurrents through the past 100 years or so originally came to me from a teen, which seems appropriate. More than 25 years of working with adolescents has taught me a great deal, much of which I hope to share in this book. A handful of years ago I gave my nephew a quick tour of software I was using in some of my teen projects. I was managing an on-line class model for California foster parents who had trouble getting to local college classes for required or desired trainings.

Thus I was becoming proficient in building webs and using Photoshop to manipulate images. I also used PowerPoint slide shows in my own presentations and trainings across the country. A while later, my nephew, who is now a graphic artist living in New York City, sent me a copy of a "book report’ he had done on Catcher in the Rye for his high school class.

His report was a creative, 250+ PowerPoint slide show choreographed to music. It was riveting to watch, dynamic and led me to encourage other teens to be more creative in their own homework efforts. He told me he’d never hand write another report if he could help it after his teacher said she felt bad because she could only give him an ‘A’ for his effort on the project.

But more importantly, he began the report with a quick look at what was happening in 1951 when Catcher in the Rye was published and quickly became one of the most banned books in American history. In his first few slides, he pointed out that "It’s 1951 and the US is celebrating….the war is over….I Love Lucy started its first season….rock & roll was about to top the charts Next, my nephew explained that The US was happy…not realizing problems that were right under their nose. That’s why J.D. Salinger decided to publish a wakeup call."

I was not only blown away by his creativity, but by seeing, all of a sudden, the undercurrents of adolescent problems for the first time. As a youth worker, I had read Catcher and while it is not one of my favorite books about teens, I appreciated the adolescent angst and frustration it revolved around. But I had never looked at the whole era as one of a time period looking one way while actually being or feeling another.

Catcher was so volatile that it was banned throughout much of the world and was publicly burned in numerous cities and countries. From 1965 to 1977 it was THE most banned book in American schools and libraries. At the time of my nephew’s report in the late 1990’s, it was still one of the most banned books in history. Many schools in America still do not carry it or allow their students to read it.

If you haven’t read the book, it’s essentially the first and most graphic example of a teen, Holden Caulfield, saying how lame adults are, how messed up the adult world is, and how he doesn’t want to join the adult world. And this was in 1951, meaning that author Salinger was writing and thinking about the book a few years earlier. Most books and movies prior to Catcher were patriotic and supportive of the traditional American culture. A simplistic description of what a catcher in the rye is would be a protector of the innocents.

Catcher in the Rye has become even more notorious because of its association with three big cultural events. In 1980, Mark Chapman murdered former Beatle John Lennon while carrying a copy of the book on his person. Chapman later explained that he decided to kill Lennon after reading the book, when he realized that he (Chapman) was the true catcher in the rye, the protector of innocents, not Lennon. A year later in 1981 John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate President Reagan. Hinckley was carrying a copy of Catcher on him. In 1999, another former Beatle George Harrison was stabbed but not killed, and his attacker also had a copy of the book on him. These incidents obviously did not help adults relax their fear of the book’s content and message.

I was born in 1955 and still easily remember some of the 50’s and early 60’s as a safe and happy time. We stereotype the period with terms and titles like Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Milton Berle, Howdy Doody and so on. My nephew’s report made me start looking behind the happy and content façade of the time at what was brewing with teens.

During this time period, I was writing my first book which was originally called Slaying the Dragon: The Contemporary Struggle of Adolescent Boys--Modern Rules in an Ancient Game. A few years after publishing the Dragon, I picked up a new publisher and title for the book: From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age. The book was an effort to explain to adults not only how to work and deal with modern teens, but why modern teens seemed so much more problematic than their ancestors just a few years or generations removed.

As a movie fan, I started thinking about movies that might have come out around the same time as Catcher or that also showed a different side of the teen story. While most 50’s teen movies were wholesome and positive, I recalled a few that fit the undercurrents profile. A couple of classics and a couple of not-so-famous movies came to mind. In 1953 we first saw Marlon Brando as The Wild One, a reenactment of an actual motorcycle gang that had taken over a small southern California town. The wholesome town residents are completely lost in how to deal with a new form of trouble: delinquent and violent young people.

There’s a classic quote from the movie, at least for me that explains the undercurrents of The Wild One and growing adolescent unrest in modern America. While dancing in a bar with a local girl, she asks (Brando), Hey Johnnie, whatcha rebelling against? Unfazed, Brando looks back at her and replies, Whaddaya got? Talk about a rebel without a cause or clue; he was simply rebelling to rebel, frustrated and disenfranchised at the adult world he was forced to deal with during the week.

A couple years later brought us the discovery of James Dean in East of Eden, where Dean deals with sibling rivalry, an emotionally detached father, and a mother who is a whorehouse madam in his first role. A year later Dean excelled in the classic Rebel Without a Cause that we look at deeply later in this book. At the same time the movie version of Blackboard Jungle burst on the scene and blew audiences away with not only blatant delinquency, but violent teens in the schoolroom, a teacher who is almost raped within the school, and the apparent breakdown of American school as an icon of strength. We’ll also use Blackboard Jungle as one of the movies we discuss in this book.

When Elvis came on the scene, many adults were concerned about his sense of sexuality and music style. In his personal favorite role and one of his more realistic nonstereotypic screen roles, we see Elvis in in King Creole (1958); a high school senior disillusioned with school, his weak father, with his before-and-after part time jobs to support his family. The American Dream seems far away and not applicable to him, similar to Holden Caulfield’s feelings in Catcher in the Rye.

Readers of my book and participants in my trainings and workshops really seemed to enjoy the section I was evolving on the undercurrents of growing adolescent discontent. I was beginning to use the movies mentioned above to help give people a frame of reference for what appeared to be going on in society at one level versus what seemed to be manifesting at other levels elsewhere.

I decided not to just confine myself to only movies. The Internet had appeared and with it access to hard-to-find books. I found a half dozen or so rather obscure books written by psychologists, educators and sociologists in the 50’s that were also tracking adolescent dynamics under the radar. Writers in the 50’s were seeing a change in adolescents overall: less enthusiasm in school, growth of gangs and delinquency, violence and drug use, as well as other topics that were being glossed over by the wholesome 50’s.

As I added more movies, books and cultural events to my presentations like the Depression, World War II and the Industrial Revolution, people at my workshops really began liking this flavor of gathering information. Because many of these books and movies were difficult to find, I had to be content with just telling people about them, and/or hoping motivated parents and other adults would go to the trouble to find such books or movies to learn from. I began using the plots and book concepts to help explain adolescent information like developmental challenges, peer pressure, behavior management, fatherlessness, and more to curious audiences. I had found a fun and interesting way to pass along information within my workshops and lectures.

Soon we were well into the new millennium, and I realized that a couple things in the universe had changed that would allow me to bring this teaching dynamic to everyone. I’d wanted to write a book using great movies to help describe adolescent issues for a few years, kind of like the Catcher in Rye info above, but could not find an easy way for people to access the movies. Then eBay, Amazon Used and Out of Print, Netflix and Blockbuster On-line appeared, and I was in business.

Each of the movies we discuss in this book is readily available through both Netflix (an on-line movie rental business) or Blockbuster On-line as rentals. Or if you like to collect movies, try eBay or maybe Amazon Used & Out-of-Print features to buy the movies for your collection. I bought each DVD discussed in the book new for under $10 plus postage. Some movies are now streamable and if you are one of the fossils still using VHS, tapes are a dime a dozen on-line. And if you don’t want or can’t get these movies, I’ve paraphrased each movie so you can still read along and pick up the most salient points.

Here’s the way to get the maximum information and fun out of this book: Sign up with one of these Internet-based movie providers. Rent (or buy) the movie and read the applicable chapter to learn a lot about adolescence in general and adolescents in particular. Each movie will focus on a particular aspect of adolescence, and particularly with the earlier movies, the first time we ever saw certain dynamics on screen, like teen delinquency, gangs, classroom violence, and so on.

This book works like a DVD commentary using a voiceover conversation, except my commentary is written. I’ll be using the excellent information within the movie plots to discuss adolescent dynamics, as well as bringing in regular parenting and teen info almost everyone can use. This will give you a fun way to learn a lot about teens. And nothing says you can’t watch and discuss the info with your teens as well. I’m a big fan of a cards on the table approach with teens, keeping them in the loop of your teen education and involved in the process of guiding them into adulthood.

Secondly, my next goal is to help explain just what the heck happened in the past few generations to lead America to the dubious top of the dysfunctional teen list. As documented in From Boys to Men, the US leads the rest of the world in teen violence, gangs, drug use and countless other statistics.

My first thought was to choose one movie, the one I consider the best in content and usefulness from each decade to discuss, but then I ran into a few roadblocks with that idea. First, sometimes there was more than one movie from a decade I wanted to use, as in the 1930’s and 1950’s. Next, I’ve been unable to find a workable teen-based movie from the 1940’s I can use. We can attribute this to World War II and the plethora of pro-American movies made early in the decade. Then, after the war everyone seemed to want to get happy or deal with adult issues.

There’s a great novel from the 40’s called The Amboy Dukes, probably the first look in fiction of the growth of gangs, drugs and other dynamics typically not associated with the 40’s. A teen boy who’s father is off at war and mom is working double shifts at the factory has too much time and not enough supervision on his hands, and you can guess at the rest. The Amboy Dukes was turned into a mediocre movie called City Across the River, which changed the plot to focus more on the adults than the original teen. And for our purposes in this book, City Across the River was never transferred to DVD so it is very hard to find.

There are a few movies about the 1940’s I thought of, like Summer of ’42, but the plot was so specific to a place and time it didn’t give me much room to teach from. Similarly, I love the movie Red Sky at Morning, which is also an excellent book I’d recommend, but it never received a large scale release on DVD so copies are hard to find.

Similarly, I could not find a movie made in the 1970’s that fit my criteria, being a classic or having a plot I could teach from. The best, available movie was American Graffiti, which was actually about 1962. But because the award winning George Lucas film was so popular and successful, I thought about it some more. I felt it was interesting that during the Vietnam era, Nixon, hippies, and so on, the most successful movie about teens was from another time and universe: the early and mostly benign 1960’s. So I opted to use American Graffiti to represent the 70’s.

So let’s get to work. Here’s a breakdown of the book: Chapter One sets the tone for what was happening, and had happened, to cause a shift from millennia of low-teen drama to a full blown Youth Industry in a few decades. The first chapter looks briefly at the final 50 years of the Industrial Revolution, approximately 1880-1930, and how the shift from rural to urban living impacted our kids. Within this time period, we will look at a handful of critical societal shifts that deeply affected the teens of the day, and still set many tones for how we think of and deal with teens in modern times.

Included in this first chapter is a look how the shift from a rural, agrarian based society to an urban-based culture impacted our youth. At the core of this change was the invention of compulsory education, forcing youth to attend school by law. Next is the creation of status offenses, often called crimes against self. Status offenses are victimless crimes where no one except the teen involved was hurt that created a huge amount of control over teen behavior. While most other cultures never had to invent laws like these to control their teens, America felt it was necessary to control victimless crimes like curfew, truancy, underage drinking, and so on by law, punishable by incarceration. In essence, this was the beginning of the government taking parenting decisions away from the family and putting them into the hands of the courts and the new Juvenile Justice System.

During this time period child labor laws were also invented and enforced. While there is a common sense core to protecting young people from hazardous and demeaning work, many of the laws were designed or manipulated to support the desire to keep kids in school and out of the work force, as well as training them to work in the burgeoning field of factory work. This period of time also invented social work as a job and eventually an industry. Suddenly, the legal issues around controlling teens became big business, and is sadly why I doubt the modern Youth Industry will ever go away: too many people make a living at troubled youth.

The Depression, stuck between the end of the Industrial Revolution and World War II, also had some profound and direct impacts on teens. And because we are using movies as our vehicle of learning, we’ll look at the original Motion Picture Code developed in the 1930’s, which controlled the flavor of movies until the modern rating system took over in the late 1960’s.

In Chapter Two I actually use two movies to introduce the invention and introduction of delinquency in the movies: Dead End with Humphrey Bogart and Angels With Dirty Faces with James Cagney. But it is the Dead End Kids that are the stars for this book, prominent in both movies. The Dead End Kids were discovered on Broadway and introduced in the 1937 Dead End movie so I want to look at that, but they became more prominent two years later in the 1939 Angels With Dirty Faces as movie viewers became enamored with these new street urchin bad boys.

Chapter Three keeps us in the 1930’s with the classic Spencer Tracy/Mickey Rooney movie Boys Town that showed up in 1938 between our first two movies. While typically glossed over for Hollywood (as per the Motion Picture Code), Boys Town is a look at the real Boys Town started by Father Flanagan in 1917 Nebraska. Important to us is the need for a place that housed homeless, neglected and abused teens early in the 20th century, and that Boys Town was arguably the best treatment model developed in the century until the adults (social workers) of the 1940’s thought they could improve it after Flanagan’s death. Also very intriguing to me is that this took place in the Corn Belt and not some large metropolitan area like Chicago or NewYork.

Chapter Four skips the 1940’s as outlined above and heads into the 1950’s, which is where adolescent undercurrents really started coming to the surface. Kicked off in 1951 with the book Catcher in the Rye and 1953’s The Wild One movie, the 50s was, to me, the pivotal decade where adolescents and adults starting growing apart in the US. During the research for From Boys to Men I had found a dozen or so books by sociologists, psychologists and even the US government who were noticing a marked change in teens. We will be looking at two movies for the 50’s beginning with the award winning 1955 film The Blackboard Jungle, which was adapted from a 1954 book of the same name. This book gave startled viewers a look at teens not only disillusioned with school, but also becoming violent against teachers, previously unimagined in American movies. Jungle was the first of the genre in which an idealistic teacher takes on disillusioned students in the classroom.

Chapter Five continues our look at the 1950’s with the classic Rebel Without a Cause, which catapulted tumultuous James Dean into stardom. Released about six months after The Blackboard Jungle, Rebel takes us a step further from kids just being frustrated with school. Rebel gives a new look at parenting, or the beginning of the breakdown of modern parenting. All three of Rebel’s stars: Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood were all suffering from difficulty communicating and being understood by their parents. For me, Rebel notes the beginning of what I term old school parents versus new school youth. We’ll also look at the books of the time and what other changes to modern teens professionals were noticing.

We cross into the 1960’s in Chapter Six with another classic, West Side Story, released in 1961. West Side Story was a Romeo and Juliet adaptation from a Broadway play of the same name, which came out in the late 50’s and thus was being designed and written in the mid-50’s. Once again, the undercurrents of adolescent unrest were brewing at a time when most Americans didn’t notice. West Side Story gives viewers a first look at modern gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. In addition, careful study of the lyrics and dialogue points out that many of the youth are dealing with alcoholic or drug addicted parents, prostitution within the family, and physical abuse. Much of this poignant message was missed or lost in the spectacular dancing and other musical attributes of this great movie.

I mentioned earlier a lack of meaningful 1970’s movies on teens. The most successful teen movie of the decade is our topic for Chapter Seven: American Graffiti. This movie doesn’t look at the 70’s though, but at the ‘happy days’ of 1962 in California’s central valley. Much of America was, I believe, still caught up in the aftermath of Vietnam, Nixon and the hippies, so George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola’s wholesome movie about clean-cut teens making life decisions was more palatable at the time. The 60’s and early 70’s, I feel, was when youth became disenfranchised with the System, government and adults. Teens were admonished not to trust anyone over 30, and a split began that has only widened since.

Next, Chapter Eight introduces the turmoil of the 80s and what I consider the beginning of modern adolescence. This is covered by The Breakfast Club, my personal favorite of all the movies discussed. The Breakfast Club also looks at the tension between the growing numbers of teen cliques, as five youth with nothing in common have to spend a Saturday in detention together. The material in this movie is brilliant, as five different kids: delinquent, preppy girl, jock, brain and weirdo all find a common goal: deal with the grownups. The Breakfast Club also helped create the Brat Pack, (the modern version of the old Rat Pack) band of movie stars who worked together in various films including Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, among others. In The Breakfast Club we continue to see the withdrawal of teens from wanting to be like the adults around them, and becoming more attached to peer groups than the traditional adult groups they used to want to emulate.

The 1990’s are represented in Chapter Nine by Boyz n the Hood, a graphic look at how far gangs have come since the Sharks and Jets back in the early 1960s. I had originally intended to use Lord of the Flies to discuss the concept teens love about anarchy and no laws with a bunch of boys stranded on an island with no adult supervision. Some boys try to maintain order as they feel the adults would, while others revert to more primitive and aggressive behavior. However, Lord of the Flies just did not have enough content to work with, although I still recommend it highly. There are two movie versions to choose from. The 60s black and white version is closer to the book’s content but is filmed in a documentary kind of style I did not like much. The 90s version is in color and while updated a bit for modern audiences, the premise is intact.

I felt I had already covered the issue of gangs with West Side Story, but gangs had changed so much and what we currently see 20 years after Boys n the Hood was released is it is still sadly right on the money with inner city strife and struggles, teens selling drugs and using automatic weapons to solve their disputes. Also different from West Side Story was the shift from one ethnic group of youth fighting with other ethinic groups, like with the White Sharks and Puerto Rican Jets. Nowadays, the tendency is for Blacks to fight with Blacks, Latinos with Latinos, and so on. It’s a poignant, difficult film that is all too real. It makes me question why, as the greatest nation on earth, we still have and allow neighborhoods like South Central and Compton in Los Angeles, East St. Louis, and parts of Chicago which currently has the highest gang death rate in the US at the time of this writing.

Finally, we cross into the new millennium with Chapter Ten’s Thirteen, a dark and difficult movie to watch. Why? Because it is sadly so real. Thirteen is basically about a typical 13-year-old girl who quickly spirals downward and out of control into promiscuous sex, drugs, defiance and general dysfunction. I’ve seen this scenario countless times in my career; parents who describe a recently fun and functional child only to be astonished by how fast and how far out of control they can get. For me, Thirteen is a great example of modern parents who are too busy or dysfunctional to fully engage, with fashion conscious, media-driven teens who find everyday life shallow and materialistic, and youth who look at becoming adults in modern society as less than ideal.

I originally thought I didn’t want to end this book on the dark note of Thirteen. Recent years have brought a plethora of teen based movies, but none I’d really call classics. Probably the most successful teen series in recent years is the American Pie movies. While I find them hilarious and well done, they are also sad in how most parents and other adults are either missing or inept. They glorify teen sex and partying, with almost no positive adult influences.

I was very close to ending with the fun Mean Girls, which covered stereotypes (again) and I felt that Lindsay Lohan’s home-schooled, sheltered upbringing was just too far removed from reality to be applicable. I like that her best friends could be a gay guy and a kind of goth girl, and the map she is given on where all the cliques sit in the dining hall is still right on the money as far as pecking orders. But I don’t think teens are in a really good place right now, and just wanting to end a movie on a happy note was, well, so ‘Hollywood.’ After decades of Just Say No, No Child Left Behind, and tens of billions of dollars I can’t find one single person who feels any teen drug problems, or gangs, violence, diminishing school results and so on, are getting any better anywhere in America. Sadly, within the Youth Industry, business is booming. So for better of worse, Thirteen is where I chose to draw the line and let you out of my written theater.

The point of this book is to have fun while learning a lot about teens in the process. So head on down to the local movie store and rent the movies if you can find them. Take advantage of the Internet and rent them at Netflix or Blockbuster on-line, or buy them cheaply via eBay or places like Amazon Used and Out-of-Print features. Watch the movies with your kids, and use the rest of the information I pass along to inspire quality conversations with your teens and bring all the difficult aspects of adolescence to the surface where the family can work on them.

Even if you don’t want to deal with tracking down the movies or for some other reason cannot tap into them, this book will be helpful. In talking about the movie plots, I’ll be paraphrasing the plots and using applicable quotes and dialogues to highlight important points. Like me, after understanding how to draw useful information out of teen movies, you’ll probably never view them the same way. And when you go back and look at a movie you haven’t seen in a while, like To Sir With Love, Footloose, Grease or James Dean in East of Eden I suspect and hope you’ll enjoy them in a different way.

Chapter One

The Invention of Adolescence

Changes, Changes, Changes…

The picture we have of adolescence in modern America is not the norm worldwide. Indeed, there are still countless cultures and communities who deal with adolescence remarkably well without the need to incarcerate or medicate teens, put them in boot camps, send them to therapists or otherwise control their behavior.

In my first book, From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age, I spent a lot of time looking at how other cultures have successfully navigated the turbulent waters of adolescence gracefully and without most of the drama we modern people seem to take for granted. Adolescence is not just some unfortunate phase to get over. I also took readers on a basic path back through the past 100 years or so to describe some of the societal shifts that occurred which impacted teens and how we treat and view them.

Some of these dynamics included the Depression, World War II and the Industrial Revolution. I donated the better part of a chapter to the changes happening around and to teens, and how those changes were being manifested in the arts and through literature. As I continue to delve further into how things got to the way they are, I found further dynamics that strongly affected modern teens.

This book is supposed to be kind of fun, using movies to help explain and define adolescent dynamics for the readers. I didn’t want to write a sociology book with lots of facts and quotes, footnotes and references. Indeed, each of the dynamics we’ll look at in this first chapter before we get into the films and meat of the book could be topics for full books themselves, and some have.

I want to give you a quite broad look at societal shifts that strongly impacted teens and how adults look at and deal with teens. In the broadest sense, we’ll be looking at the Industrial Revolution, or at least part of it, and essentially the shift from rural life to urban life. And within the Industrial Revolution mindset of civilizing ourselves, came a few other changes that we need to understand as we progress into the era of depicting teen life through cinema.

An off-shoot of the Industrial Revolution era was the invention of compulsory education, mandating by law that youth attend school. Related to this topic were the changes in labor laws connected to youth, some logical and useful, others with less integrity and hidden agendas within them. Women, who were gaining power in modern society, spearheaded many of these new ideas.

The Great Depression of 1929 impacted everyone, but we’ll look at how teens specifically were affected. Another modern invention that we are all still dealing with was the creation of status offenses, often described as crimes against self or victimless crimes. Status offenses are offenses earmarked for someone of a certain status, such as by race, religion or in our case, youth. For the first time in history, it suddenly became not only inappropriate but actually illegal for a youth to skip school, sneak a drink, or be out at a certain time of night. With each of these dynamics there were pros and cons. A hundred years or so later I feel we need to rethink some of them and see how they weigh out in the 21st century.

Harvard professor Robert Epstein’s fascinating book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, mirrors much of my own thinking on this. Epstein lists what he believes are the causes for modern teen problems: The Historical Forces Behind Adolescence

"These, then, as I see them, are the major historical forces that have been driving the artificial extension of childhood in America since the mid-1800s:

• Nurturing tendencies by women (and some men) to protect the millions of young people toiling long hours in the new factories or getting into trouble on the streets.

• The elevated status of women, which gave them a powerful new voice in policy making.

• The widespread adoption of the new view that young people are tender, helpless and incompetent.

• Determined efforts by the new labor unions to protect the jobs and wages of older workers by pushing young people out of the work force.

• The desire of leading industrialists to sweep the streets free of troublesome youth and to prepare new generations of skilled laborers through mass education.

• The desire of leaders in the upper and middle classes to impose their moral standards on poor and working-class youth.

• The emergence of new businesses and industries that catered to the young and helped to create a ‘youth culture.’"

And finally, because we are largely dealing with movies as the springboard for our discussion on teens in this book, I’m going to spend a little time looking at the politics of movies. Specifically, we’ll be looking at the original Motion Picture Production Code, a guiding principle of American movies for decades that many Americans do not even know existed. We all know the results of the Code because of the flavor’ of many older movies it dictated: married couples sleeping in separate beds, no nudity or explicit references to sex, no swearing, not using words like pregnant’ and so on. The original Code was replaced in modern times by the Motion Picture Association of America and the rating system we all now use.

Within each of these subtopics were a handful of influential people who helped frame modern adolescence in both good ways and not so good ways. And of course many of these topics overlap one another, and could be discussed in multiple areas.

Again, I want to give you just enough frames of reference to get a feel for what was going on in the world at critical points in time. We radically changed the way we looked at teens and how we worked and lived with them. To me, in our desire to become civilized and modern, we made some choices that even 100 years ago, are still affecting our teens and us grownups.

Before we get into the history lesson, let me condense much of the material on teens from my first book From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age. Until about a hundred years ago, most cultures and communities did not look at their teens as a separate group between children and adults. Indeed, most societies had learned through trial and error that an extended period of adolescence was tedious for both the kids and us grownups.

Once kids started coming into adolescence, they were quickly initiated into the adult community through rites of passage. Adolescence was kept as short as possible. If teens want to act and be treated like adults, then let’s get them into the adult club. Children and teens had always been educated with whatever information and skills their community deemed necessary for them. In some societies this would mean that boys were taught to build weapons, hunt and trail animals, craft shelters, grow crops, and so on. In other modern communities, the youth might be taught to read, write, and do math.

Teens were not encouraged to just hang out with their age group, and had a lot of responsibility in helping their families thrive and survive. Teens worked alongside grownups in all kinds of cultures, helping with the farming or family business, taking up an apprenticeship in some trade, and generally getting woven into the fabric of the adult world.

What I’ll discuss in a few minutes is what we did that led to where we are in modern times. Not everything was a clear mistake, and most elements had pros and cons, and still do. Many aspects that were designed to help teens had good intentions behind them and the engineers of those social structures could not anticipate what would happen far down the road.

It’s kind of like the invention of the automobile. For some, this new invention after thousands of years of being limited to horse and cart was a godsend. For others the invention of the car has been less positive: 50,000 auto deaths every year; pollution and what to do with all the defunct cars and tires; long commutes to work, assembly lines and factories, and at the time of this writing gas at $4 per gallon, down from a previous high of $5.

If the creators of the auto industry could have looked forward a hundred years, might they have changed their approach, fuel choice and so on. The same holds true for the architects of modern adolescence. In many ways, our desire to protect our youth has backfired, and instead of being healthier and happier that the teens of 1908, we have in 2008 more teen violence than the next 25 industrialized countries combined, gangs, boot camps, juvenile prisons and many outcomes and approaches that folks a century ago could never have dreamed would manifest.

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is the period of time when industry: man and machines, started changing the face of humanity. Many scholars place the Industrial Revolution from the late 1700’s up until the end of the 19th century and often into the 1900’s. With the invention of the steam engine in the late 1700’s, changes such as railroads slowly began to change they way things had been for centuries or even millennia.

As with the automobile example above, for a couple thousand years men had to make do with getting horses or other beasts of burden to pull their carts and wagons. No one had ever traveled at 50 miles per hour or covered 500 miles in a day, so we had some paradigm shifts to work through.

Or like with weapons: for thousands of years men had to be content with bows and arrows, spears, trebuchets that simply threw bigger rocks, and so on. One day someone invented gun powder, which like the combustion engine for the automobile, created a way to make your weapon go faster and farther: bullets and bombs. Original flintlocks replaced bows and arrows and as Jared Diamond details in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, changed the face of history.

Those who invented guns and steel quickly overcame those who had not. Weapon growth continued until we had enough nuclear bombs to destroy our planet many times over. Thus, where a few centuries ago warfare had to be fought in close quarters, we also changed how far away we could be when we threw our weapons at our enemies.

For our purposes, I’m most interested in what some scholars call the Second Industrial Revolution, or the period from about 1880 to about 1930. An amazing amount of cultural change came to us in this 50 year span, including steam and other powered ships, automobiles, planes, refrigerators, air conditioning, and a plethora of inventions and changes that altered life as we knew it. J.D. Rockefeller put kerosene and light inexpensively into everyone’s home. Andrew Carnegie refined modern steel for America’s skyscrapers (and tenements). Vanderbilt ran railroads to all four corners of the country. J.P Morgan backed Edison’s DC current for household electricity while George Westinghouse supported electrical genius Nicholas Tesla’s AC model, which became and remains the standard for America and most of the world. Henry Ford invented the 8-hour day and factory line to put a car in almost anyone’s financial reach.

Looked at one way, the Industrial Revolution was the beginning of America’s shift from a rural, agriculture based society to an urban, industrialized country. And in this critical transition period, a number of innovations to help or control teens changed their world as well.

For example, a month or so ago my teen daughter was doing a report that included information on Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1792. When she asked me what the problem was with a machine that could replace 50 cotton workers, I explained that now there were likely 50 dads and husbands, moms and wives, who did not have jobs anymore. I helped her see that this made the former cotton workers adapt to a change in their field and livelihoods. Some succeeded and many did not.

Think about a typical farm tractor, combine, hay-baler or other useful tool. When each of these inventions hit the markets and then the farms, great numbers of farm workers found themselves out of work. The Industrial Revolution was about this shift. What was common was the migration of these former farmers or cotton growers, for example, to the new industrial factory cities like New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and so on. Suddenly, factories needed employees to make all these machines that often made our lives better in some way, but closed out a chapter in former employment.

Now relegated to an old cliché, the automobile made buggy whips extinct, and therefore the people who made and sold buggy whips. Of course this shift transferred to other aspects of the horse vs. car argument: buggy manufacturers declined, as did saddle makers, livery and stables, etc. Adapt or die is the mantra of business, so many of these displaced workers shifted into new, blossoming fields like automobile factory assembly lines, tires, combustion engines, and so on.

The 1880 census determined the resident population of the United States to be 50,189,209, an increase of 30.2 percent over the 38,558,371 persons enumerated during the 1870 Census. Fifty years later, a year into the Great Depression, Americans totaled 123, 076,741 in 1930. For comparison, the United States Census of 1790 was the first Census conducted in the United States. It showed that 3,929,326 people were living in the United States of which 697,681 were slaves, and that the largest cities were New York City with 33,000 inhabitants, Philadelphia, with 28,000, Boston, with 18,000, Charleston, South Carolina, with 16,000, and Baltimore, with 13,000.

Immigrants were pouring into the US, flooding the labor market. Following the American Revolution, immigrants continued mostly to be from Western and Northern European nations at a rate of approximately 60,000 people a year. In the 1840’s, the immigration rate tripled and in the 1850s quadrupled in part because of the Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine of the mid-1840’s and Germans fleeing crop failures, as well as the 1848 collapse of the country’ democratic revolution.

Between 1830 and 1860, approximately 2 million Irish immigrants and 1.5 million German immigrants arrived. The total number of immigrants for the same 30-year period was approximately 4.9 million, with the overwhelming majority coming from Europe. Numbers of immigrants declined slightly during the 1860s due to the Civil War but rose in the 1870s and exploded in the 1880s. ¹

During the period of our interest, from 1880 forward, about 24 million more immigrants entered the US by 1920. A quota system was put in place in 1924 to stem the flow of people, many now unwanted, into the US. People were pouring into the country as rural jobs were declining and factory jobs were growing.

In the late 1800’s, 34% of the US population worked. Of those, 73% were male and worked in the farming industry. A century later in 2000, 46% of the US population worked, fully 50% of them were and are women, and the dominant industry was white-collar jobs². As you can tell, there was a radical shift in how we worked, who worked, and what we worked on.

Times were changing fast and not just because of the steam engine and our ability to make machinery. Before the 19th century concluded, Pasteur had developed his pasteurization process, still a standard more than a century later. Darwin had published Origin of the Species and had the scientific and religious worlds turned upside down. Even in 2008 many people are trying to reconcile their creation beliefs against the growing evidence of evolution.

High strength steel was developed, which allowed for skyscrapers to jut up against the skylines of urban cities. Jules Verne invented science fiction with his prophetic writings, ahead of their time back then and old news a century later.

As we cross into the 20th century, the changes almost become exponential. Quite often, one small invention or leap forward would spawn dozens more. For example, in 1904 the first vacuum tube was invented, which laid the groundwork for decades of radios, TV’s, transmitters, and so on.

Many new technologies took years to become household names, or to find their niche in the real world. 1901 brought us x-rays and the safety razor. X-rays did not become commonplace for many years. 1902 brought us air conditioning, which took decades to find itself inexpensive enough for most normal people to afford. In 1903, Thomas Edison helped set up the first electric utility company and the Wright brothers evolved from their relatively new field of bicycles to flying, and ushered in the modern method of travel.

From a more humanistic perspective, the turn of the century brought us Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and helped usher in the century of psychology and self-help. From the symbolic to the microscopic, 1900 also brought us Quantum Theory, and a radical new concept of trying to describe the physical world we live in.

All during this time teens were also adapting to changes like everyone else. However, they had their own particular, personal set of issues to contend with. The societal and vocational changes sweeping the country had more and more people looking at what to do with all the teens that had previously been working on the family farm or perhaps the family business in the city.

Compulsory Education

One of the aspects that evolved through this period leads us into another of our main topics for this first chapter: compulsory education. Adults had been trying to make school mandatory all the way back to 1836, when in Massachusetts a law was passed requiring minimal schooling for youth under 15 working in factories.

When America was rural and agriculturally based, it was difficult to get parents interested in mandatory schooling. Not because parents back then felt their children did not need schooling, but the demands of farming and survival made school a luxury many families could not engage in fully. It was understandably difficult for parents to let their children, particularly the teens, leave the farms during planting and harvesting. For decades school attendance swelled and shrank during these seasons.

In 1852 Massachusetts passed the first full compulsory education law. Some parents met this new law with outrage, refusals, and sometimes violence. Parents did not like the concept of government dictating how they should parent and train their children. Further, they did not like, as mentioned above, someone else determining when their kids could be home and available or not. While we are used to the government having its fingers into our everyday lives, 150 years ago this was a new notion for the world’s newest nation.

The government did not pursue this attendance as vigorously as nowadays, but characters such as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer show us that as soon as people starting making school attendance mandatory, youth started rebelling by playing hooky.

Let’s take our first real teen segue, such as I intend to do starting next chapter with the material from our movies. Make a rule, and teens want to break it, or at least many of them do. The need to test boundaries is a critical component to adolescence. It is probably the single most frustrating dynamic of this time period for parents and others dealing with teens: they seem to question everything. Be home at 9 pm and they get home at 10:00. Ask them to take out the garbage and they look at you like you’ve just asked them to split the atom.

I spent a lot of time describing this aspect of adolescent development in From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age, so I won’t dwell too long here. But understand that adolescents are built to test the system. Why? To find out if what they have been told is the way things really are. Tell your 7-year-old son not to touch the burner because it is hot and he’ll thank you. Tell your 13-year-old son not to touch the burner and more likely than not, he will.

This makes no sense. It defies adult logic. Yep, so just let it go. See, when teens wake up from childhood, they start to see the world through new eyes. They no longer believe everything they are told. Now they want to see for themselves.

So just like the curfew and the hot burner mentioned above, guess what happens when you tell a teen