The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s.

The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s. By Kriste Lindenmeyer. American Childhoods. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005. Pp. xiv, 304. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 1-56663-730-9; cloth, $27.50, ISBN 1-56663-660-4.)

Kriste Lindenmeyer's lucid prose and lively narrative chronicles the history of childhood and children during the Great Depression in this handsomely printed volume with crisp photographic images and an original argument. The numerous sad stories that fill this finely textured synthesis of childhood during the 1930s demonstrate that hardship and heartache of everyday life played a part in a critical shift in the redefining of "modern American childhood" as a sheltered stage and protected period (p. 3). Lindenmeyer argues that in response to the plight of the nation's children who rode the rails and wrote to the first lady, child-welfare advocates and policy makers inaugurated legislation, implemented public policy, and established cultural priorities that reflected and reinforced the rising social value of children. In this work, Lindenmeyer reflects the upward-looking view of this distinctive generation of have-nots and had-somes who calculated their own predicament in terms of their neighbors' plight.

This seven-chapter, multicultural synthesis draws upon already printed letters, oral histories, and memoirs and is enhanced by a range of relevant primary sources from census records to comic books. Here Lindenmeyer traces the history of children at home and beyond it, with families, with friends, in school, and at play. Children and adolescents are also found everywhere at work--in factories and in fields, on farms and on streets, in sweatshops and on strike--from the Progressive era to the end of the Great Depression. That one can see the makings of a "modern childhood" ideal amid the absence of abundance is a testament to Lindenmeyer's overarching comprehension of the history of childhood--before the depression as well as after it.

However, this study does a better job of identifying the cornerstones of childhood than in examining the ideal and its components or in addressing how and why an ideal flourished amid the deprivations of the depression. Much of this has to do with the circumscribed nature of the study itself, which is admittedly synthetic rather than based on original research. In lieu of a closer accounting, though, Lindenmeyer relies more on colloquial understandings than scholarly delineations, especially when identifying key historical forces that brought about change for children. Moreover, instead of a fuller documentation of transformations, she occasionally relies on a single sentence to contrast the paucity of the 1930s with the plenty that bracketed the decade.

That approach is more dominant in chapters with a social-history bent, whereas the chapter on the rise of child-centered popular and commercial cultures that popularized notions of play as an essential building block of modern childhood is particularly persuasive, nuanced, thorough, and highly useful to instructors and students studying the history of childhood. The same praise can be said for the fascinating final chapter that adroitly examines work-relief programs of the nation's youngest New Dealers. Situated within the framework of children and youth, this study is a first-rate endeavor at decentering the history of an era that until now has been anxiously alert to breadwinners on breadlines and attentive to the social security of the aged. Lindenmeyer is to be commended for refocusing the lens that brings childhood and children back into the spotlight.

MIRIAM FORMAN-BRUNELL

University of Missouri-Kansas City