Rexroth: "These are new times, with new people, seeking new objectives by new methods"

The more things change...

San Francisco 50 years ago: From Kenneth Rexroth's Signs of a New Youth Revolt

These are new times, with new people, seeking new objectives by new methods. Something has been going on that, as so often before, the old folks have missed. For years after the last war everybody agreed that the youth of the land had lost their spunk. They were more conservative than their elders. They were interested only in security, a good job, a home in the suburbs. They never raised their voices or answered back. Those that took to the arts wrote flaccid poetry with all the rhymes in the right places, painted nice abstract pictures, wrote novels like bad imitations of Elizabeth Goudge and John Gould Cozzens. “The age,” said their professors, “of experiment and revolt is over.” Everybody was cool.

I was the first critic in the country to point out that under this cool surface of conformity there was growing up a whole little world of total dis-comformity. There was a small but significant group of young writers who rejected every value of the society in which they lived. They were so “far out” nobody knew they were there.

Well, once I had pointed them out, it didn't take the publishers, the picture magazines, television, the movies, long to discover and exploit them. As I have said so many times since, they made ideal television “rebels.” In the words of a famous book and movie, there were “rebels without a cause.” There is no sponsor they would possibly offend. Furthermore, their values, or anti-values if you will, were just those of their “enemies,” the commercial culture hucksters, turned wrong side out, and their amusements, booze, drugs and chaotic sexuality, fast cars and hi-fi records, were identical.

A snob is a person who tries to imitate the manners of the class he imagines above himself. A Bohemian is an under- or unemployed intellectual who gives up even the necessities of the poor so that he can enjoy some of the luxuries of the rich.

The point is — a revolt of snobs is not going to make the world a better place to live; it would make it worse, and it didn't take the youth of the land very long to find that out. Today, on campuses of all the colleges and universities of the country, if you want to label yourself a slightly dotty hick from a country high school, just break out in beard and sandals or sweatshirt and stretch pants and start talking jive.

I have come back from a long tour of American colleges and I have never seen more activity in my life, more concern, more responsibility. This is a wave of radicalism in the true sense of the word; a nationwide effort among large numbers of young people to get at the roots of the sickness and trouble and confusion that beset our time, to cut through the lies and expose the terrible dangers.

It is not political in the ordinary sense at all. The regular political parties don't even know it is there; the old political sects of the Left and Right, the Communists or the so-called New Conservatives, completely misconceive it. They think these new students are something like themselves and that they can convert them or at least use them. Nothing could be less true.

What is taking place is a great personal awakening. It is not the work of any organization of any kind, let alone any outside or national organization. What these young people are demanding is the direct application of personal morality to the great questions of mankind.

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