The dramatic events engaging Americans from 1929 to 1945 deeply shaped the lives of children, and young people made their own important contributions to the American experience during these significant years. Together with demographic shifts and other population trends, these events also contributed to growing debates about the role of public policy for children and their families.
The census of 1930 showed the median age of Americans as 26.4 and counted approximately 24 million individuals of less than 20 years of age. This significant group constituted 38 percent of the total population. Although the numbers suggest that America’s youngest citizens were statistically important, the 1930 census also revealed that children and adolescents comprised a shrinking proportion of the total U. S. population. One hundred years earlier, people under 20 made up a majority of the total population (56 percent), and the country’s median age was only 17.2. Over the next century, life expectancy lengthened and families became smaller, thereby reducing children’s share of the total population.
Despite the fact that young people were a smaller part of the total, by the 1930s and 1940s social policies directed at children combined with a revised cultural definition of childhood to bring positive changes for America’s youngest citizens. Beginning in the mid-19th century Americans moved toward a new middle-class definition of childhood and adolescence that was firmly grounded in law and culture by the 1930s and 1940s. In this new formulation, the average family (4.3 members) was approximately half of what it had been in 1830. Smaller families allowed parents to focus more attention on their offspring. Health care improved and overall life expectancy lengthened. A declining number of youngsters worked for wages and children spent more years in school. Compulsory school attendance fostered age segregation that increased the influence of peer groups and the development of a separate youth culture.
The Great Depression and World War II then presented different but difficult hurdles for America’s youngest citizens and produced ambivalence among adults toward expanded public policies for young people in the postwar years. As the U. S. Children’s Bureau noted in its 1933 report, the onset of the Great Depression often hit children the hardest. One-third of Americans were ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed—and of those, the majority were children. In addition, young people eligible to work found it very difficult to get a job. Americans 16 to 20 years of age had unemployment rates twice those of adults, and an estimated 23,000 homeless teens rode the nation’s railways and hitchhiked along its highways looking for work.
Several New Deal programs sought to help young people. The Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program open to males 16 through 23 years of age, but closed to females, provided jobs for unemployed young men. The National Youth Administration offered part-time jobs and tuition assistance to help young people remain in high school and college (and off the job market). The NYA included a division focused on the needs of young African Americans, a foreshadowing of postwar efforts to end racial inequality.
New Deal policymakers also took advantage of the fact that the economic crisis of the 1930s eroded opposition to federal legislation to regulate child labor and increased pressure on the government to keep young people under eighteen out of the paid LABOR force. Child labor regulations of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) immediately removed 150,000 young workers from payrolls. After the NRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935, child labor provisions of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act outlawed the employment of individuals under 16 in the manufacture of materials shipped across state lines. The law also regulated the hiring of young people aged 16 and 17, although agriculture and domestic service were exempted from the law. The new legislation did not end the exploitation of all young workers, but it combined with the decade’s labor crisis and existing compulsory school attendance laws to force the vast majority of individuals under 18 years of age out of the wage-labor market and into school.
During the 1930s, even Hollywood movies reflected the new social status of children based on the middle-class model emphasizing education. Films featuring the “Our Gang” kids, and child stars such as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Shirley Temple idealized childhood and adolescence as a time of schooling and fun absent from adult responsibilities. For the first time in American history a majority of 17-year-olds attended high school.
Young people also experienced greater independence. Dating moved adolescent boys and girls far from the watchful eyes of parents. Youth clubs such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, YWCA, and 4-H gained new members. Racial and ethnic segregation persisted, but comic books and other “kid”-centered aspects of popular culture crossed such social lines. Reflecting the evolution of a separate youth culture, a 1941 article in Fopular Science introduced the word “teenager” into the American print vocabulary for the first time.
Some of the programs involving children and youth begun during the New Deal era took on new aspects when the United States entered World War II. For example, nursery schools begun by the Works Progress Administration to provide unemployed teachers with relief jobs during the Great Depression expanded as a growing pool of mothers entered the wartime labor force. Many parents and child welfare advocates worried that day care was not good for children, but the wartime demand for women’s labor overrode such concerns.
The Title V program for maternal and child health of the Social Security Act was also transformed by wartime needs. As more men enlisted or were drafted into the military, authorities became concerned about maintaining high morale among the troops. Many soldiers and sailors worried about pregnant wives and newborns unable to get good health care. In response, Congress expanded Title V to include the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care program (EMIC), which provided free prenatal, delivery, postnatal, and infant health care to the wives and children of enlisted men. This far-reaching effort meant that one out of every seven children born in the United States from 1943 to 1949 could be called a “government baby.” And just in time, for overall birthrates rose during the war years—and then continued to climb for the next two decades. EMIC appears to have contributed to the continued decline in the U. S. infant mortality rate, which fell from 47.0 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1940 to 29.2 in 1950. However, despite the program’s popularity and the rising U. S. birthrate, Congress had designed EMIC only as a wartime measure to enhance morale among the troops. The program ended with the conclusion of demobilization in 1949.
Some child welfare advocates argued that the demise of EMIC reflected the growing ambivalence among adults about programs for children as the war came to a close. As more mothers worked outside the home, young people gained autonomy that some viewed as a threat to society. The postwar worry about juvenile delinquency actually began on the World War II home eront. The population exploded near military bases and war production centers, and critics raised concerns about unsupervised children and adolescents judged to be “out of control.” The 1943 riots against zoot-suiters in Los Angeles where U. S. sailors and soldiers attacked Mexican-Ameri-can adolescents, ironically underscored for many adults their perception of rising delinquency among young people. a 1950 report by the U. S. Children’s Bureau declared that such conclusions were false, but during the 1940s and 1950s adults became increasingly concerned about juvenile delinquency.
Of course, most children and adolescents did not engage in antisocial behavior during the war. Instead, they participated in scrap drives, war bonds sales, and other patriotic endeavors. Some youths took factory, service, or agricultural jobs. Older siblings cared for younger brothers and sisters while parents worked. The military draft included a deferment for all males through age 19 attending high school, but many younger boys lied about their age and joined up anyway.
Further reading: Robert H. Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); Joseph M. Hawes, Children between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920-1940 (New York: Twayne, 1997);-, The Great
Est Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2005); Kriste Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: The U. S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); William Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
—Kriste Lindenmeyer
World History
