The Indianapolis times., 1931-12-22
Yonth-And the Depression

For ten years the American people have been sunk
first in the political lethargy of war-weariness and
then in the stupor Of the great imitation They are
coming out Of it.
There has been more thought and feeling
about public affairs in the last year than in the ten
which preceded it. There is, too, new generation
at the threshold of authority the generation which
survived the war and the postwar era and they have
no emotional commitments to that past
They are tired of the old dull calculating faces
They are tired of stuffed shirts They tired OF the
fawning and the attery of the eyaslveness and the
straddng of the soft and the fat and the timorous,
of the shoddy optimists the gnobly sef-indulgent,
the greedy and the parvenu who fattened upon the
distortion of values which the imitation produced
So writes Walter Lppman.
And now how does the new generation view things?
"The Press Box" is a column in The Williams
Record college publication edited by the new genera
ton. There read this:
ty is in a serious plight. Her economic
situation ut be compared to horse running down
a very s1-3 and never-endng hill, pulling wagon
load of rocks by rubber tongue. Every step that the
horse takes separates him little from the wagon,
but at the end of each step he kicks up stone into
Che wagon which makes it heavier and brings 1t a
little closer on his heels.
The faster the horse runs, the closer the cart
comes if he stops running the cart with its heavy
load of rocks, will come toppling down on him and
will destroy him. He can turn neither to the right
nor the lefhs only is directly down the hill
at an everlasting break meek speed.
The horse represents man and his wealth; the
cart the burden of the age of machinery Each step
that the horse takes represents mans enterprise with
capital the building of a bridge, the laying of
hew railroad, the invention of labor-saving device
or the discovery of shortcut for production.
Each is a quondam achievement; each produces
hew wealth by the expenditure of real COST each pro-
Sides temporary labor for ever-increasng popula
ton; each step brings the wealth OF nations bit
Farther from destruction.
But what these stones that the horse con-
sistently is kicking up into the wagon-these stones
that make the wagon heavier and bring it faster upon
his heels? The stones simply represent the applica
tion of Newton's second law to economics-every
action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Each enterprise which man undertakes is tenn
porary advancement, but when it has been taken he
eventually is the loser, for each bridge each
railroad each labor-saving device, and each new
shortcut for production eliminates both the possi-
bty of that enterprise being undertaken in the
future, and the opportunity for more men to earn
their livings in the days to come.
So the new generation answers peSsimism with
pessimism.
1t sees the present generation, in the saddle
as one made up of baf1ed experts political leaders
who have failed to lead, big business shrinking
small-a world out of joint with those who are sup
posed to know how" cropping in the fog of their
puzzled indecison.
Youth in times that are normal has its heroes
This man stands as the statesman, that the
great business leader, and so But today they all
seem lame and halt and il-shapen.
SO Youth joins in the chorus of gloom and ex-
presses mingled contempt and hopelesSness for the
system that the elders have built up-bu joins only
temporarily
For, thank God, hopelessness and Youth can not
for long be synonymous If they could, the worlds
first depression never would have ended.
Despite the protestations of peSsmism which char
acerize Youth at stage, Youth nevertheless sym
bozes Hope, not Despair And fortunate it is that
the time has arrived when the new generation is get
ting on the job IT is entering the scene at the oppor
tune time.