On Growing Up Tough: An Irreverent Memoir

by Taylor Caldwell

  Progressive education had been tried in Russia, where it was believed that “environment is all.” But the Russian Communists are hard-nosed and realistic. They found this was not so. So they discarded progressive education, and those in schools who could not meet the grades established were promptly removed from the schoolrooms and taught good sound trades and farming—at the age of twelve. However, America continued to support progressive education and is still supporting it today in most of our schools. It produced our hippies/yippies.

  In the meantime, the “big checks” began to disappear, and the war production fell, and the grandparents of our hippies were outraged. It was all “society’s fault.” They taught their children envy and resentment, and hatred for the established law and order and authority. For, in their dull minds, they were convinced that their era of extravagance and easy money was not ended because of the end of the war but because “they,”—a mysterious “they”—were beginning to “oppress” them “again.”

  Their grandchildren, our hippie/yippies, call “they” the establishment, and they are in revolt against it. They want education without sweat and diligence; they want comforts without working for them; they want luxuries without any effort. They know their inferior minds will never serve them well, that they can never be truly educated, no matter how low the curriculum falls. They know they are misfits in the schoolroom. They know this subconsciously. But objectively they olame the “establishment.” They want society to be dragged down to their level of accomplishment and intelligence. If society will not agree—then “society” as we know it must be abolished. They have animal cunning, but no intellect.

  To digress a moment: I attended elementary and high schools in Buffalo. In the fifth grade we began to study ancient history, English literature and Shakespeare, Socrates and Homer, a foreign language and Algebra. We were expected, all of us in the fifth grade, to be able to write a decent and coherent essay on some advanced subject, and to be truly literate. By the eighth grade we had passed our Regents Tests in math, English, American and European history, civics and literature.

  Now my teacher friends tell me with despair that these subjects—but not all of them—are taught only in the junior and senior years of high school, and then watered down. The other subjects are not even approached in college until the sophomore year! No wonder then that teachers in high school and colleges write me from all over the country that “this generation can barely read and write.”

  They, most of them, can’t even write a simple declarative sentence! They are stupid and dull. The bright students are pushed aside in order to cater to the inferior and “advance” them. Intellect is suspect. The dull students are restive in class and disorderly and insolent and abusive. They can hardly be blamed. They are bored to death with subject matter they can never master. So, they think it is the fault of education, and that they, themselves, should choose what subjects they should learn! Worst of all, a prof recently wrote me from another city, that the young people don’t blame their parents for their heredity. They blame their inability to learn on “the system.” So, they fight all authority with frustrated rage and hatred.

  They are aided and abetted by profs of their own background and of what used to be called “constitutional mental inferiority.”

  Twenty-five years ago “child psychologists” and “experts” entered the scene, with their fantasy-books on childrearing. They denounced all discipline and all parental authority. A child was born “a blank page on which anything can be written,” a foolish falsehood which any study of genetics can refute. A child must not be disciplined; it would give him a trauma. He must be pampered, protected and indulged. His adolescence must be extended even to the “late teens”! He was a “child” until he was about thirty. He must be protected from the bitter and dangerous reality of all existence. He must never be taught the truth. It might upset him.

  He must be reared in a never-never land of “love” and softness and solicitude. He must be assured that the world was a “loving” place and not a natural arena of competition. Coddled and shielded, he came to believe that the world was just like mom’s kitchen, warm and cozy and filled with the fragrance of baking chocolate-chip cookies, with a refrigerator full of orange juice and coke and endless bottles of milk. Everybody in the whole world loved him, he was taught by mom and his teachers and the child psychologists. He believed it. It was a happy thing to believe.

  He never suspected that the world would “love” him only if he deserved love and worked for it, and that the world of men would judge him by his character and his industry and accomplishments. And that the world would reject him if he were slovenly, careless, insolent and uncontrolled.

  When he discovered the truth he was not shook up from the false dreamland in which he had been reared. He was outraged. Something was wrong. It was not he and his parents. It was the “establishment.” The “establishment” refused to “love” him for his indolence and his baby charm and the fact that he was “young,” though by this time he was a full man in his late teens and early twenties.

  Many of his grandparents and parents, when faced with the fact that the era of big, unearned checks was over, became convinced, in some muddled way, that socialism and communism would restore the delight and euphoria of the war years to them. And they taught their children socialistic communism in their homes. In this they were encouraged, and taught, by the internal enemies of America:

  The “liberal” profs and teachers and “leaders,” and leftwing organizations, and child psychologists, and other misfits who could never adjust to the world of reality and so hated it.

  Just recently I asked a pair of hippies, male and female—at least I think they were, but you can’t tell these days—if they would be rioting, protesting, marching for “peace,” and “dissenting,” if we were fighting Hitler now. They both shouted, “No, we’d be the first to enlist!” “So,” I said, “you don’t really want peace. You just don’t want Communists to be killed.” They glared at me and said sullenly, “Yeah. That’s it.”

  Indeed it is.

  Just recently, when I took a long tour of the Pacific area, government officials in various countries said to me, “Why is it that the United States has supported, financed and advanced communism all over the world for the last fifty years?” I knew that we had, but it was disconcerting to learn that other “free” nations were well aware of what we had done for several decades, especially since 1945, through foreign aid and the Marshall Plan. If our government has taxed its citizens endless billions of dollars to rebuild Communist Russia, to secure slave countries for Russia, to safeguard the advance of Russia throughout the world, then we must not blame the hippie/yippies too much for their own communism. After all, it came right out of Washington, itself! An official of the Ford Foundation said, in 1958, that it was his hope and the hope of his Foundation that we would draw so close to communism that “we will merge peaceably with Russia.” So, the hippies are not to be condemned alone. They are only repeating what they were taught.

  Good teachers were replaced by teachers who were well indoctrinated in communism. The vast media of public communications were invaded and then taken over by leftwingers. Treason, anarchy, revolution and subversion were artfully written in books, produced in plays and on radio and TV, and printed in national magazines. It is a wonder not that we have so many rioting hippies but that we have so many decent young folk industriously working at good trades or studying hard—when they are permitted to do so—in schools and colleges. How they escaped the national corruption is a miracle. But it is hard to understand why the good and law-abiding majority of American citizens did not protest, themselves, from this universal and insidious degradation which has gone on for so many decades unchallenged.

  At any rate, the cunning hippie is a misfit; he has no place in universities; he really has no place in orderly and industrious and good society. He will never make an adequate citizen or become responsible or reasonable. He will nev
er amount to anything. He knows this in his corrupted and inferior heart. Hence, his war on what he calls the “straight” society, the society of civilized and self-respecting men and women.

  What shall we do with this drug-wild and lawless creature? The trade unions could never teach him a trade, for trades today are sophisticated and require a good measure of intelligence and integrity. The hippie just does not possess the wit and skill to become an accomplished bricklayer, steel-worker, plasterer, plumber, machinist or mechanic. He hasn’t the interior character to become a good teacher. He would perish on a farm, for he was never taught to respect labor and the land. He can never master the professions; he has no logical mind. (Can you imagine a hippie surgeon or lawyer?) His only desperate career, then, is criminal—if permitted—treason and revolution against the society from which he is barred, by his training, from ever entering. Of course, Russia has a permanent way of handling hippies, but I fear we would think it “un-Christian.” We are faced with a terrible dilemma.

  One of the fallacies of hippiedom is that the working man is “oppressed.” So the hippie pretends, vociferously, that he is on the side of the working man—who loathes and ridicules him. He cries delicate tears over the “worker.” Yet, when construction workers in New York and in other cities attacked the hippies, the true nature of the hippie came out. One of them told me recently, “When we take over, we’ll put the … working man in his place, once and for all!” His face was full of hatred. Citizens—take notice!

  We can, of course, protect ourselves from the hippie/yippie. When he shows force, we should show superior force. We can compel state-supported colleges—which exist because of our tax money—to expel the hippie and his faculty-sympathizer. We can raise the level of the curriculum to the height it was twenty or more years ago, and so the hippie would be automatically excluded. We can throw out progressive education in our public schools and demand that teachers teach again, and not indoctrinate with socialism. School subjects, not “love” courses or “social sciences,” should be returned to the schools.

  Diplomas should be issued in elementary and high schools only after severe examinations. Very stiff board examinations at colleges would weed out the intellectually unfit. A boy or girl of superior intelligence found in elementary and high schools should be given full scholarship to college. It is a crime that many of the brightest and the most able are kept out of university educations because their parents cannot afford it financially, just as it is a crime for the children of inferior intellect to be sent to college just because their parents can afford it.

  We cannot afford the loss to society of the intelligent, just as we cannot afford the hippie. As the hippie usually has no morals or principles or character or self-discipline, he is usually a drug-user. To protect ourselves, we should make drug use and “pushing” one of the greatest crimes, on a par with murder—and pass laws to deal with them—even to capital punishment.

  We can support our police, and demand of our governments that they support the police also. We should offer a police-career to capable young men of which they can be proud, with rewards such as high public respect and good salaries and esteem and prestige. After all, a man who risks his life to protect the citizenry is a warrior in the highest sense of the word, and he should be rewarded adequately. A police career should be on a par with any of the professions, and only the most intelligent and patriotic recruited. (Today the average policeman has more character and more intelligence than the average university prof!)

  Once the police were deeply respected in this country. But our Communist-oriented society has degraded these brave men and has permitted them to be insulted by criminals, including the hippies, and even denounced by artful, sly and sentimental judges.

  We can grimly make certain that any man appointed to a judgeship or elected to it is a man of the strongest and most principled character, a man of law and justice and good judgment, a man of integrity and honor, a man of patriotism and pride. Our hippies would not survive a week, or even the majority of our most flagrant criminals, if the judges everywhere were gentlemen of character and principle and virtue and had respect for the law and their country, and understood that it is their function not to protect the criminal but the decent citizenry against the criminal.

  The criminal forfeits any “rights” when he attacks orderly society and duly appointed authority, but a lot of judges feel the victim of the criminal has no “rights”! Once the hippie-rioter and criminal understand that severe justice and punishment will fall on them swiftly when they transgress, the majority of them would fade away and torment us no more.

  We can inform our elected officials that we insist on orderly government and the protection of the people, and that any politician who becomes maudlin over the criminal/hippie, will lose his job come the next election. We can demand, before any election, to know just where the aspiring politician stands on patriotism, sobriety, order, law and justice—and take no mealy-mouthed answer as an intelligent reply.

  We can restore the love of God to our children, and teach them His ways and His ordinances and laws. When I surveyed the hippies on the University of Buffalo campus recently, my first anger was suddenly dissolved into pity for them. They are the Godless, the abandoned, by parents and teachers and the clergy. Their youth made them even more piteous. For their parents and grandparents took away their holy heritage, in this age of materialism and affluence, and too many of the clergy have led them astray into secularism.

  They made me think of Mary in the garden, after the crucifixion of Christ. She saw the empty tomb and wept, and when the unrecognized Risen spoke to her gently she said, in tears, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.”

  An intellectual gentleman of many famous attainments is the Dean of the University of Edinburgh—Malcolm Muggeridge—a former “liberal,” himself. But over these past few years he has become more than disenchanted with radical youth. He said, recently, that “they are not revolting against anything. They are just degenerate, really.”

  But the hippie did not spring from the ground by himself. He did not create himself. He is the product of lying and evil teachings, of envious and stupid grandparents and parents, of the national decline in patriotism and national pride and honor, of corrupt politicians, of lenient, sentimental judges, of national immorality and the toleration of wickedness, of the decay of character in the older generations, of his parents’ abandonment of God.

  Perhaps he deserves our compassion. Perhaps we made him what he is: Drug-obsessed, sexually degraded and perverted, suicidal, despairing, revolting without knowing why he revolts or against what he revolts. Perhaps we have put too much pressure on his mediocre mind so that he is wild with frustration. We expected more intelligence than he possesses.

  We, perhaps, have corrupted our children and our grandchildren by heedless affluence, by a lack of manliness, by giving the younger generation more money and liberty than their youth can handle, by indoctrinating them with sinister ideologies and false values, by permitting them, as young children, to indulge themselves in impudence to superiors and defiance of duly constituted authority, by lack of prudent, swift punishment when they transgressed, by coddling and pampering them when they were children and protecting them from a very dangerous world—which always was and always will be. We gave them no moral arms, no spiritual armor.

  We have taken away their Lord, and they do not know where we have laid Him. Until they find Him, they and our world stand under threat.

  A Biography of Taylor Caldwell

  Taylor Caldwell was one of the most prolific and widely read American authors of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned five decades, she wrote forty novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers.

  Caldwell captivated readers with emotionally charged historical novels and family sagas such as Captains and the Kings, which sold 4.5 million copies and was made into a television miniseries in 1976. Her novels based on the liv
es of religious figures, Dear and Glorious Physician, a portrayal of the life of St. Luke, and Great Lion of God, a panoramic novel about the life and times of St. Paul, are among the bestselling religious novels of all time.

  Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell in 1900 in Manchester, England, into a family of Scotch-Irish descent, she began attending an academically rigorous school at the age of four, studying Latin, French, history, and geography. At six, she won a national gold medal for her essay on novelist Charles Dickens. On weekends, she performed a long list of household chores and attended Sunday school and church twice a day. Caldwell often credited her Spartan childhood with making her a rugged individualist.

  In 1907, Caldwell, her parents, and her younger brother immigrated to the United States, settling in Buffalo, New York, where she would live for most of her life. She started writing stories when she was eight years old and completed her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, when she was twelve, although it was not published until 1975. Marriage at the age of eighteen to William Combs and the birth of her first child, Mary Margaret—Peggy—did not deter her from pursuing an education. While working as a stenographer and a court reporter to help support her family, she took college courses at night.

  Upon receiving a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buffalo in 1931, she divorced her husband and married Marcus Reback, her boss at the US Immigration Department office in Buffalo. Caldwell then dedicated herself to writing full time. Even as her family grew with the arrival of her second daughter, Judith, Caldwell’s unpublished manuscripts continued to pile up.