In 1897, 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote the New York Sun and asked her famous question: "Is there a Santa Claus?" Many in her class, she said, were anti-Santa skeptics--and, chances are, they were unpersuaded by the Sun's reassuring answer.20
The children of the 1890s were America's most tough-minded ever, growing up fast amid gangs, drugs, saloons, big-city immigration, and an emotional climate raging with evangelical fervor and social reform. Few turn-of-the-century parents knew how to protect their nests. Often they were permissive to the point of near-neglect, following the "Don't drive them" advice of 1890s-era parent counselor Hannah Smith.21
George Burns recalled that at bedtime his mother "would stand there with the door open. When the house was full she'd close it. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I slept in the hall." The fiftyish Progressive Jacob Riis, stepping into a tenement, noted that "the hall is dark and you might stumble over children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else."22
Unsupervised by parents or governments, children surged into the labor market--girls as piece-rate "homeworkers," boys as "newsies" (hawking the headlines), bootblacks, scavengers, messengers, "cash boys," nonunion cigar-rollers, or ten-hours-a-day coal miners. Lost Generation children entered the cash labor market at a higher rate than any generation before or since. In 1910, nearly one child in five between ages 10 and 14 (three in five between 15 and 19) was gainfully employed. Many worked in "sweatshops" (a word first coined in 1892). In the cities, one Lost child in six worked at some point as a newsie--including Irving Berlin, Jack Dempsey, Al Jolson, William O. Douglas, Groucho Marx, and Earl Warren.23
What they earned (and their parents didn't take away), they spent. A few pennies in the hand became a ticket to a world of playful consumption. No other generation of children ever purchased such a large share of its total consumption with self-earned income. Lost Generation pocket cash sustained America's first child-only retailers (candy stores and nickelodeons) and nationally marketed sweets, including jelly beans, Tootsie Rolls, Hershey Bars, and bubble gum. From 1889 to 1922, the Lost sweet tooth propelled a doubling in per capita sugar consumption to about one hundred pounds annually (about where it remains today). In the 1920s, "sugar" became a term of endearment.24
With 9 million members born abroad, the Lost is (in absolute numbers) America's largest immigrant generation. An unmatched proportion came from Eastern and Southern Europe, many of them Jewish. Of all Americans today over age 90, one in six is a naturalized citizen (one in three in New York and New England)--a far higher share than of any other living generation.25
Although Dewey-style "progressive" educational reforms were already in full gear, Lost Generation kids found school irrelevant next to the grim realities of street life. "School was all wrong," complained Harpo Marx. "School simply didn't teach you how to be poor and live from day to day." (Harpo "dropped out" when classroom toughs threw him out the window when the teacher wasn't looking.)26
Lost Generation youths showed little improvement in rates of illiteracy, absenteeism, dropout, or college entry. From 1880 to 1900, the share of all white children in primary schools dropped from 62 to 54 percent; for black children, from 34 to 31 percent.27
When it suited them, Lost children mingled well with adults, but their hardened precocity sat badly with values-focused elders. Missionary Jane Addams decried the kids' jaunty consumerism, Missionary William Jennings Bryan their cynicism, Progressive Theodore Roosevelt the ruthlessness of their football (eighteen college players died on the field in 1905 alone). Roosevelt's Lost Generation daughter Alice--smoking, swearing, and sipping champagne in the White House--became a headline-grabbing symbol of a child generation growing up "bad."28
The Progressive G. Stanley Hall was the first to label these unrestrained young savages "adolescents"; he was also the first to ascribe their moral development to sex drives rather than to religion. "Never has youth been exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and day," he lamented. Thomas Wolfe soon wondered "what has happened to the spontaneous gaiety of youth"--children who are "without innocence, born old and stale and dull and empty . . . suckled on darkness, and weaned on violence and noise."29
"They tried to shut their eyes," recalled Mike Gold of the adults he met when he was a hustling street urchin. "We children did not shut our eyes. We saw and knew." Some did well, but a larger number did badly. Living and dying by their new credo "It's up to you," these "kids" were already paying the dues of independence.30