Word: 20s
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Born in Poland, Peres was taken to Palestine at eleven. While still in high school, he joined the Haganah, the famed underground Jewish self-defense organization. In his early 20s, he persuaded the Histadrut youth movement to support David Ben-Gurion. The statesman soon began to groom Peres for a political career. Wearying of desk jobs in the newly established Ministry of Defense, Peres took off for a brief vacation in the U.S. in 1950. He learned English in three months and took advanced courses in philosophy and economics at New York City's New School for Social Research...
...plenty to find. He grew up in the city that produced the fictional Studs Lonigan and Augie March and the real Al Capone. His mother owned a boardinghouse and later leased a hotel near the Loop. Its lobby was a stage set filled with bit players of the '20s: drifters, grifters, autodidacts, a few nuts and bolts from the political machine. Some of the guests, Terkel remembers, "favored me with little nickel blue books: writings of Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, Thomas Paine, Bob Ingersoll, Upton Sinclair, Voltaire." Young Terkel was ripe for this heady blend of populism...
...college's role in society has changed radically since the '20s, of course. Now, as Trilling points out, the educational system is perceived as a mechanism for "making restitution to the minorities for the deprivations and injustices they suffered in the evolution of the American middle class," rather than the stronghold of that upper class it served as in the '20s. As Aldrich pointed out in Harper's last Harvard overview, Harvard and Radcliffe now serve as steps to middle class status, rather than as the stomping grounds for those who already hold it. Nevertheless, Trilling argues convincingly that...
Just as she and her classmates found themselves incapable of fighting their socialization, she argues, so will most modern Radcliffe undergraduates wind up without careers; and like the graduates of the '20s, the graduates of the '70s will leave college "to quote Shelley and Keats at the kitchen sink...
...there is one more difference between the graduates of the '20s and those of the '70s that Trilling has forgotten to consider. While women could go on to careers in the '20s and '30s, that step meant they had little hope of having families at all. And many fields were closed to them entirely, so that even if they ventured beyond the home, they had little prospect of success...