Doing Without.

The Depression hit youth aged sixteen to twenty terribly hard. Maxine Davis described the despair she saw when she traveled the country in 1936, talking to young people: "The depression years have left us with a generation robbed of time and opportunity just as the Great War left the world its heritage of a lost generation." More than 200,000 youth left home in the 1930s and took to the road, seeking better opportunities. For the rest, coming of age in the Depression meant doing without, lowering expectations, making do. A special issue of Life magazine in 1938 devoted to "The Youth Problem," explained, "by and large, U.S. youths today are a sober lot."

Idle Youth.

While families depended on the economic contributions of their children, pervasive unemployment made getting jobs hardest for young people. With prospects for employment so bleak, many youth...