Obedient Sons

FEMALE SPEAKER: The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us, and our case seems to be the only ones who notice and our parents would call “BS.” Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers nowadays, and saying that all we are is self involved and trend obsessed. And they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the youth of the nation, we are prepared to call “BS.”

JOANNE: With students across the country organizing walkouts and demanding stricter gun laws, we’re exploring the history of young people in American politics. We’ll talk about how young people in the revolution and the early republic looked to the glorious past to forge a new future. And how young people made it OK to be an independent voter in the 19th century. We’ll tell the story of another student walkout in Gary, Indiana against integration. And speak to a young Lakota woman who traveled to Standing Rock with her fellow activists.

ED: Young activists from Parkland and other communities affected by gun violence have made headlines for leading the movement for gun control. In speeches and interviews, they underlined the idea that their youth is part of what makes them effective advocates in a time when adults have become resigned to a broken system. And that’s not surprising to those of us in the 21st century. After all, many believe that protests and rebellion are part of what defines being young.

JOANNE: But our ideas about young adulthood is a time to push back, protest, or rebel. Well, that has not always been the case. Historian, Glenn Wallach, says that even during the American Revolution when young college students like Alexander Hamilton and Nathan Hale played an outsized role in the fight against the British, they rarely drew attention to their age. As a matter of fact, if they did, it was only to emphasize that they were adults.

GLENN WALLACH: Alexander Hamilton is a student at King’s College. And he jumps to the defense of one of his professors and writes pamphlets and does these various things. He’s not doing that speaking as a young person.

JOANNE: Kind of the opposite of speaking as a young person, right? He’s basically saying, “Look at me, I’m an adult and I’m stepping into the public sphere. And I’ve got something to say.”

GLENN WALLACH: Sure.

JOANNE: Yeah, interesting.

GLENN WALLACH: Right.

JOANNE: So many people when they speak about the revolution, they think about the fact that like Hamilton, so many of the people literally fighting it in the army or just engaged with it, there are people who are surprisingly young. But the main point, it sounds like what you’re saying here is they may have vim and verve as young people, but they’re putting themselves out in the public sphere and asserting themselves as adults. And that their identity as young people is not part of the conversation.

GLENN WALLACH: Right. And it gets complicated because, of course, the whole language of the revolution is caught up in all this talk about fathers and sons and the king as a bad father and England is a bad mother, which has led some people to see it as some kind of generational rebellion.

JOANNE: Right. OK, so that’s the Revolutionary Period. So let’s shift, sort of walk ahead in time into the 19th. Your work suggests that things begin to really change in the 19th century.

GLENN WALLACH: Partly because now, young people are increasingly more and more on their own. Many of them go into cities and they’ve left the country, or they’re growing up in the city, and they are increasingly freed from their parents. And then, young people themselves start to notice each other and start to form voluntary associations. The Young Mens’ Temperance Association, Young Men’s Anti-Slavery, Young Mens’ Democratic Society, Young Men’s Wigg Convention, built around the fact that their young.

JOANNE: Like clubs, basically.

GLENN WALLACH: Now some of those are going to be the sort of classic kind of benevolent association so that sober minded young folks can get together and not be–

JOANNE: Drunk. You know? Temperance. Benevolent associations, yeah.

GLENN WALLACH: Yeah, exactly. And it’s a place where they can get together and read. And a lot of these young men’s associations actually become the kind of building blocks for city libraries in a lot of towns. But then also, they start to get involved in reform, they start to get involved in politics, and a range of other kinds of things. And the language that they start using to talk about themselves of hearkening back to founders and fathers and how they are picking up that mantle and as young people they have a responsibility to move the ball forward.

JOANNE: So Glenn, talking about these young men in these various groups, what’s your sense of how they view their elders at that point?

GLENN WALLACH: Well, I think it’s interesting because they very much wrap themselves in the mantle of the revolution. And in the case of a couple of groups of African-American young men in New York City, they wrap themselves in the mantle of particular African-American founders. Early leaders in education in New York and other community leaders, and they say we are following in their footsteps to move our society forward.

The revolution and the passing of the founders– because of course, as you well know, by the 1830s all of the actual founders are gone. And that becomes a sort of important moment for these young mens’ organizations who say the founders are gone, now it’s up to us. And so they are sort of very much talking about themselves in that kind of way.

JOANNE: Modeling themselves after adults of the past.

GLENN WALLACH: Yeah. Or saying in that tradition, we are now doing something new, and different, and important. So it’s not we are simply repeating them, but they are the inspiration for us to move forward.

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JOANNE: Glenn Wallach is author of “Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630 to 1860.” Earlier in the show, we heard from Reverend Samuel Williams, and Joy Cabbarus Speaks.

ED: That interview came from an episode about the Moton strike, produced by “With Good Reason,” a radio show based here at Virginia Humanities. You can find that episode on our website, backstoryradio.org.

JOANNE: Special thanks to Lacey Ward Jr. and to Jolie Milner who played Barbara Johns.

ED: And you can visit the Moton Museum in Farmville.

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