In Paula Fass's memorable formulation, youth in 1920s America were either "damned" or "beautiful." Damned, according to traditionalists, because modern life had so frayed the fabric of social mores that youth were doomed to unravel with America's degenerating moral order. Beautiful, in the eyes of those who saw in the purity and malleability of youth America's best hope to transcend the past and realize an evolving, classless social utopia.' By the 1930s, however, youth seemed to slide over the edge of popular cultural consciousness. Damned or beautiful, too much of the present was at stake perhaps to worry overly about what kind of future one beheld in the gaze of youth. Of all the symptoms of crisis that gripped the imagination of the American people during the Great Depression-failing banks, free-falling prices, drought, dustbowl migration, populist demagoguery, and bitter labor battles at home, demonic dictators, tyranny, persecution and militarization abroad-nothing was as emblematic of the severity of the crisis as unemployment. During 1933, the worst year of the decade, unemployment peaked at 24.9 percent. Yet as late as 1938 joblessness among sixteento twenty-year olds ranged between 56.3 percent and 29.1 percent nationally, the highest rates for any age group in the United States. In the same year, of those employed below the age of twentyone, between 14 and 33 percent could find only part-time work.2 A sizable portion of this bubble of youth unemployment was owing to a conscious effort both in the private sector and by the state to hire and retain adult male workers, whether on the assembly line or in the New Deal's massive job programs. In response, educators and social welfare workers began to speak of an emerging national "youth problem." Less a mirror of cultural anxieties, as in the 1920s (youth's image upheld to reflect the state of the American soul within), the "youth problem" of the 1930s was a political problem and, more important, a deeply rooted technical, social problem: the long lag between school and work that had come to characterize the experi-