Just as the Left tried to promote the Cold War as a contest between two morally matched contenders, it has now turned its energies inward, bringing the same handicapping techniques to the culture wars in order to level the field. And so, The Federalist Papers equals the Seneca Falls Declaration equals Ancient Greece equals Tolmec culture… . The rolls are, by now, as familiar as they are endless. In Teenagers: An American History, Grace Palladino trots out a brand-new model of equivalence thinking, where gulag Communism and Western capitalism, Chaucer, and Toni Morrison, customarily hang in the balance, Palladino —coeditor of the Samuel Gompers Papers at the University of Maryland—now weighs successive generations of American teenagers and, miracle of miracles, finds them fighting the same battle.

According to Teenagers, the essence of teen life hasn’t changed; rather, the changes in adolescent behavior over the past half-century have occurred because of ever-increasing “alternatives and opportunities.” “In a sense,” Palladino writes, “teenagers in the 1970s had won the battle for freedom that high-school students had been waging since the 1930s.”

This “battle for freedom” is the dubious subject of Teenagers, a continuous struggle waged across the decades by teen soldiers— who, apparently, never die, they just turn twenty. Nameless “critics” serve up such notions as “cultural decline” and “permissive parents” to explain the social disintegration that the book documents almost in spite of itself; but these occasional lumps of criticism go unassimilated by the author. And if, logically, Palladino’s theory of generational equivalence would at least seem to promise to puncture that self-haloed demographic bulge known as the Baby Boom, it doesn’t happen. In other words, no silver lining. Just the generations, pre-World War II and post-World War II, cast in the same cloudy light.

The purpose? To deny the lessons of the past. “The order and discipline we usually associate with the good old days,” writes Palladino, “had more to do with a lack of opportunities and alternatives than it did with a shared culture of ‘traditional’ family values or teenage respect for adult authority.” If Palladino dismisses the importance of such virtues of the more civil society of yore, it follows that she will dismiss them as remedies for today’s societal ills—which is exactly what she tries to do.

The way Palladino tells it, teenagers in the 1930s “battled their parents over curfews, cigarettes, and swing music; half a century [sic] later, the issues were sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” Apples or oranges, anyone? Certainly, “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” are fightin’ words, the familiar war whoop of the Sixties’ cultural revolution. As slogans of intergenerational strife go, “curfews, cigarettes, and swing music,” is somewhat less than rabble-rousing. Of course, whether Depression-era teens “battled” their parents en masse in the first place is one of the author’s ultimately unconvincing propositions.

Take Palladino’s comparison of rock ’n’ roll and swing music. Sensing a difference between the two cultural markers that fall to either side of World War II, the author is unable to grasp its meaning. “Rock ’n’ roll was a musical product specifically created with the teenage market in mind,” she writes. No argument there. Palladino’s excellent documentation of the market forces behind the rise of rhythm and blues, and, later, rock ’n’ roll, amply demonstrates the power of the teenage purse in shaping the popular culture of an entire nation.

“Swing, on the other hand,” she writes, “was a teenage discovery that set the market in motion.” The analysis following this glib assertion creates the impression of an adult vacuum in both the appreciation and consumption of swing, which was, after all, one style (among others) that fit compatibly into the prevailing popular culture. Big bands included in their varied repertoires numbers from the likes of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and George Gershwin, to name a few of the celebrated and, not incidentally, sophisticated theatrical composers of the day.

Palladino, however, fusses about teen enthusiasm for jive talk and jitterbugging in an effort to depict swing as a cultural wedge, but notes, albeit in passing, that while they might have been considered “annoying, or even a waste of time … they were rarely viewed as dangerous or a threat.” The fact is, swing did not tear the generations apart, young from old, as did rock ’n’ roll a decade or so later. Palladino does mention that big-band audiences included “a generational mix that had insured a certain civility on stage”—keeping Benny Goodman from smashing his clarinet, thank goodness—but she fails to make sense of the implications: before World War II, pop culture played primarily to adults.

Instead, Teenagers makes much ado about a 1941 incident in which four girls in their early teens skipped out on a club trip to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in order to take in a new movie featuring the Glenn Miller Orchestra. On returning to the museum, they found their bus had left and were directed to police headquarters. “Astounding the officers with their energy, their attitude, and their jive-talking, finger-snapping ways, these girls seemed to be a strange new species of teenage life with a language and a rhythm all its own.”

At least that’s how Palladino tells it. If the striking richness of her characterization sends a reader back to the actual news account, he will find a noticeably different story. The girls were directed to police headquarters all right, where they indeed “jitterbugged up and down the corridors as [a clerk] wired their parents for busfare. Police heaved a sigh of relief when the $5 came and peace descended over the Municipal Building.” End of story.

Palladino has to add that something extra—the “attitude,” the “new species of teenage life,” etc.—to pad her theory. She persists in seeing “Goodman’s bobbysoxers and the Beatles’ fans [as] part of the same cultural trend,” even as she senses that the unusual animosity between these generations indicates that something more than thirty years separates them. Could it not be that they differed on some fundamental level?

In light of Teenagers’s obsession with teens and swing, it’s worth mentioning that the movie in question, a bit of fluff called Sun Valley Serenade, portrays the Miller band performing In the Mood, an archetypal swing number, for a black-tie, adult crowd. And while the movie won’t make anyone’s top-ten list, it is by no means a “teen” movie: the imagery, the style, the context, all relate to an adult world. Following the war, that world began to disappear. Why? As far as it goes, Teenagers is quite illuminating on this count. The term “teenager,” Palladino tells us, didn’t even come into usage until 1941. Before 1930, most teenagers worked to assist the family; adolescence was a luxury of the upper classes. Indeed, the concept of teen life as a distinct stage developed only as families grew affluent enough to allow their teenagers to become consumers, namely in the period of expansion following World War II. Then, as one promoter vividly pointed out, “parents were willing and able to ‘play Santa Claus 365 days a year.’ ”

Teenagers introduces a little-known grandmother named Helen Valentine, who, in September, 1944, improbably rocked the world by launching Seventeen magazine. Convinced of the unexploited bounty of the youth market, Valentine persuaded retailers and manufacturers for the first time to target teens, particularly young girls. Success was instantaneous. Under Valentine, Seventeen may have “championed teenage desire for personal freedom … in the context of personal responsibility,” but, by the 1950s, a younger generation of businessmen was ready to ditch the personal-responsibility baggage in order to concentrate on teenage desire. Eureka. Fixing the lens of the market on adolescence transformed the perception of the teen age, exaggerating its importance, but not its profitability. For proof, consider the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, the ultimate expression of adolescent taste.

Teenagers describes the phenomenon in detail, from Chuck Berry to Elvis and on to the Beatles, including such kingmakers and pied pipers as Ed Sullivan and Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, men whose promotional efforts were catalysts to the rock explosion. More important, Teenagers documents the advent of a brand-new, heretofore unseen, emphasis on—indeed, domination of—the teen experience in mainstream popular culture. Never again would adolescence be seen as a way station to adulthood; instead it would become an end in and of itself, formative in a new and lasting way.

But where Palladino examines the record, she sees only the rise of the teenager; equally as important, however, is the death of the grown-up. One is not possible without the other. The fact is, as consumerism became the American pastime, and as consumption, particularly consumption of entertainment, became driven by the infantile yearnings of adolescents, the influence of the adult on taste and behavior rapidly diminished.

Even now—perhaps especially now—we feel the reverberations. In the context of Teenagers, one example is particularly striking. In 1947, the National Association of Broadcasters “agreed never to air shows or commercials that might undermine ‘juvenile respect for parents, the home or moral conduct.’ They also pledged never to air salacious material, a pledge NBC kept in 1949 when it refused to play the provocative song, ‘Six Times a Week and Twice on Sundays.’ ”

How quaint. How moral. How, as we know, short-lived. Was the about-face simply a matter of talk being cheap and rock ’n’ roll being lucrative? Interestingly enough, this and other cracks in the bulwarks were beginning to show long before the gathering wave of the Baby Boom crested. Contrary to popular wisdom, the demographic colossus that began to take shape after World War II actually had its trail blazed by youngsters born during the Depression; that is, the emphasis on teens actually began in the 1950s when their numbers were still relatively few. The Baby Boomers’ coming-of-age, of course, made the shift to an adolescently skewed society irreversible.

“Adults who welcomed teenagers as adult consumers in the marketplace could not expect them to remain children at home or at school,” writes Palladino. But they could try. Still fighting the good fight in 1965 was, amazingly enough, Esquire magazine, today one among a slew of glossies dedicated to the glorification of vapids and trendies. Palladino cites a magazine editorial addressed to teens that cuts to the crux of the matter: “Remember that no matter how many millions of dollars are spent catering to your taste in music, your taste in music remains very bad: Even more millions are devoted to the study and treatment of your pimples, but that doesn’t make pimples a good thing.”

Awfully nice salvo, but by 1965, the war was over. The grown-up was dead, and a brave new age of infantilism was upon us. Since then, we have seen the rise of adolescents—and adolescently influenced adults— who have scarcely any links to their predecessors, cut adrift as they are from the moral strictures and social conventions of the past. The results—the teen epidemics of premarital sex and illegitimacy, suicide and violence, drug and alcohol abuse—are not pretty. Even Palladino notices that Baby Boom-born parents, who, after all, did so much to eviscerate those strictures and conventions, are having second thoughts, going so far as to yearn for a few binding rules and bourgeois expectations of their own. (“A onetime rebel posed the question on many boomers’ minds: Is it hypocritical for a parent who engaged in premarital sex to advise her child not to?”) Such wavering has Palladino worried. “No matter what kind of spin adults now put on the good old days, the ‘rules’ they now long for were rules of inequality and social conformity,” she writes, trying to inoculate her readers against an attack of dread nostalgia. It doesn’t work.