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GENERATIO NS
GENERATIONS
The History of America's Future,
1584 to 2069

WILLIAM STRAUSS
and NEIL HOWE

HARPERe PERENNIAL

NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY

Copyright 1991 by William Strauss & Neil Howe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying , recording, or by any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Pub-
lisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions Department, William Morrow and
Company, Inc., 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and affiliates,
recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to print the books we
publish on acid-free paper , and we exert our best efforts to that end.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strauss, William.
Generations : the history of America's future, 1584 to 2069 I Willaim Strauss and
Neil Howe. - 1st. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-688-11912-3 (pbk.)
I. Unites States-History . 2. Generations-United States- History. I. Howe,
Neil. II. Title.
[E179.S89 1992]
973-dc20 92-8222
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

'l(I '10
 To our grandparents and grandchildren,
whose lives will touch parts of four centuries
 Preface

In a recent survey, new college graduates listed history as the academic subject
whose lessons they found of least use in their daily affairs. In part, this reflects
the show-me pragmatism of today 's rising generation . Yet as America embarks
on the 1990s, people of all ages feel a disconnection with history. Many have
difficulty placing their own thoughts and actions, even their own lives, in any
larger story. As commonly remembered, history is all about Presidents and wars,
depressions and scandals, patternless deeds done by people with power far beyond
what the typical reader can ever hope to wield. If history seems of little personal
relevance today, then what we do today seems of equal irrelevance to our own
lives (and the lives of others) tomorrow . Without a sense of trajectory, the future
becomes almost random. So why not live for today? What's to Jose?
During the 1970s and 1980s, this today fixation has rumbled throughout
American society, top to bottom . Our Presidents and Congresses have expressed
a broad-based preference for consumption over savings, debt over taxes, the
needs of elders over the needs of children . In our private lives, we have seen
the same attitude reflected in parents-come-first family choices, adults-only con-
dos, leveraged Wall Street buy-outs, and the Jive-fast, die-young world of inner-
city drug dealers. All these actions are more of a piece than many of us may
feel comfortable admitting.
We offer this book as an antidote . More fundamentally, we hope to give our
reader a perspective on human affairs unlike anything available in the usual
history and social science texts. Once you have read this book, we expect you
8 PREFACE

will reflect differently on much that you see in yourself, your family, your
community, and the nation. You may understand better how the great events of
American history, from wars to religious upheavals, have affected the lifecycles
of real people, famous and common, in high political offices and in ordinary
families. You may also gain a better sense of how you and your peers fit into
the ongoing story of American civilization-a long and twisting human drama
that offers each generation a special role. Appreciating the rhythm of this drama
will enable you to foresee much of what the future holds for your own lifecycle,
as well as what it holds for your children or grandchildren after your own time
has passed.
This book presents the "history of the future" by narrating a recurring dy-
namic of generational behavior that seems to determine how and when we
participate as individuals in social change-or social upheaval. We say, in effect,
that this dynamic repeats itself. This is reason enough to make history important:
For if the future replays the past, so too must the past anticipate the future.
We retell a favorite old tale in a brand-new way: the full story of America
from the Puritans forward, presented along what we call the "generational di-
agonal"-the lifecycle course, childhood through old age, lived by the discrete
birthyear groups we define as "generations." We identify eighteen such gen-
erations through four centuries of American history, dating back to the first New
World colonists. Among these generations, we find important recurring person-
ality patterns-specifically, four types of "peer personalities" that have (in all
but one case) followed each other in a fixed order. We call this repeating pattern
the "generational cycle." The cycle lies at the heart of our story and offers, we
believe, an important explanation for why the story of America unfolds as it
does. Read together, our eighteen generational biographies present a history of
the American lifecycle and a history of cross-generational relationships. These
relationships-between parents and children, between midlife leaders and youths
coming of age, between elders and their heirs-depict history as people actually
live it, from growing up in their teens to growing old in their seventies.
One of these eighteen American generations, of course, is yours. All but the
very oldest or very youngest of our contemporary readers belong to one of the
following four generations:

"G.I." elders, born 1901-1924, age 66 to 89 as 1991 begins;

"SILENT" midlifers, born 1925-1942, age 48 to 65;
"BOOMER" rising adults, born 1943-1960, age 30 to 47;
"13ER" youths, born 1961-1981, age 9 to 29.

In this book, we describe what we call the "peer personality" of your gen-
eration. You may share many of these attributes, some of them, or almost none
PREFACE 9

of them . Every generation includes all kinds of people . Yet, as we explain in

Part I, you and your peers share the same "age location" in history, and your
generation's collective mind-set cannot help but influence you-whether you
agree with it or spend a lifetime battling against it.
For the moment , let' s suppose you share your peers' mind-set. If so, here is
how you might respond to the message of this book.
If you are a G ./ ., your own collegial identity is so powerful-and has left
such a colossal lifelong imprint on America ' s political, social, and economic
institutions-that you tend to see older and younger generations as ineffectual
facsimiles of your own . You may therefore resist our contention that other living
generations are intrinsically different. But make no mistake: G .l.s have a distinct
character. Of all four of our basic peer personalities, your "Civic" type is
probably the most crisply defined, and the boundaries separating G .l.s from the
Lost and the Silent are among the most compelling in American history. As firm
believers in public harmony and cooperative social discipline, many of you might
read into this book's plural title a disturbing message of discord . Possessed of
a hubris born of youthful optimism fulfilled, perhaps you will puzzle over one
of our core premises : that generations, like people, can relate to one another in
ways which may not be mutually beneficial. Collectively, you G.l.s grew up so
accustomed to being looked upon (and rewarded) as good , constructive, and
deserving that you have had trouble , later in life , understanding how others might
be viewed and treated differently-and how others might view themselves dif-
ferently. All aging Civic generations have had this trouble, including the peers
of Cotton Mather and James Blair in the late 1720s and the peers of Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison in the early 1820s.
Yours is a rationalist generation . In the tradition of the eighteenth-century
patriot-scientist Benjamin Rush, Civics have always come of age believing that
history does (or should) move in orderly straight lines. For much of your lifecycle ,
this attitude brought you hope; in old age, it brings you mostly despair. Over
the last two decades, you have recognized that younger generations do not display
the friendliness, optimism, and community spirit you remember in your own
peers at like age. Your perceptions are correct. Younger generations do not share
your strengths . Instead, they are preparing to leave behind endowments of a less
visible and secular nature, endowments that G .l.s have difficulty appreciating.
As your generation loses energy , you may fear that not only your own unique
virtue but perhaps all virtue will fade with you . But there is cause for hope . Our
cycle suggests your special strengths will rekindle, thanks ultimately to a values-
laden nurturing style associated with much of what you dislike (and what the
elder Mather and Jefferson similarly disliked) in younger parents and leaders.
If you can resist measuring others against your own standard, you may find our
"generational diagonal" and nonlinear cycle to be comforting ideas . So too
might the cycle revive your interest in the nurture of today's preschoolers . Their
IO PREFACE

early childhood is beginning to resemble what you may remember of your own,
seventy or eighty years ago .
If you are a SILENT , you are part of an other-directed generation that comes
more easily to an appreciation of the mind- sets , virtue s , and flaws of those born
before or behind you. You need less persuasion than others to accept a typology
of generations, a theory of historic oscillation , and the need for balance and
diversity in any story of progress . Then again , since generations of your '' Adap-
tive" type tend to respond ambivalently to anything they confront, you may
well quarrel with our general conclusions and inquire into detail. Like the fiftyish
managers of Teddy Roosevelt's "melting pot " America, you may dislike the
majoritarian elements of our theory--doubting whether any diverse group num-
bering in the tens of millions can possibly fit into a single peer personality or a
single generation. As Henry Clay once did with slave emancipation, you might
try patching our new theory together in your mind with other competing theories
to yield a consensus or "compromise " perspective. In the manner of Woodrow
Wilson at Versailles, you might remain undecided until you hear what the experts
have to say . And in the spirit of the aging William Ellery Channing or John
Dewey, you might search for evidence to support your intuition that civilized
man can, in the end, produce happy endings-as long as everyone remains open
to new ideas and allows a little give and take .
We can picture you puzzling over what it means to be "Adaptive" as we
define it-and debating over where we set our generational boundaries. You
may at times sound or feel like a G .I. or a Boomer, but you are reaching the
cusp of elderhood having shared neither the outer triumph of your next-elders
nor the inner rootedness of your next-juniors . Sixty-five years after your first
birth year, no member of your generation has yet been elected President. That
bothers you-though you would be the first to admit that an instinct for leadership
may not be your generation's strong suit. Like the midlife peers of William
Byrd II and Alexander Spotswood in their rococo Williamsburg drawing rooms,
your generation has a highly refined taste for process and expertise that ties other
people in knots . Yet in your very humility, your sense of irony, even the creative
tension of your elusive hunt for catharsis , your generation has done more than
any since Louis Brandeis' to bring a sense of nonjudgmental fairness and open-
mindedness to American society. Your pluralist antennae, so generously directed
everywhere else, have yet to focus on your own offspring, who have so far been
mostly a source of disappointment and worry, much as Trumanesque children
were to Wilsonesque parents . You had hoped your 13er children would grow
up kind and socially sensitive ; instead their generation is turning out too hardened
for your taste . You suspect maybe your peers did something wrong as parents-
but you're not about to give up searching for ways to make amends.
If you are a BOOMER, you know yours is, beyond doubt, an authentic
generation . You will recognize the generational boundaries separating you from
PREFACE 11

others (and, if born from 1943 through 1945, you are probably delighted that
someone finally put you where you always knew you belonged) . Unlike the
G .l.s, you have no trouble recognizing how other generations have personalities
very different from your own. Unlike the Silent , you have never imagined being
anything other than what you are . But the great comfort you derive from your
own identity is precisely what makes your generation troubling in the eyes of
others . Like the peers of John Winthrop or Ralph Waldo Emerson, you perceive
that within your circle lies a unique vision, a transcendent principle, a moral
acuity more wondrous and extensive than anything ever sensed in the history of
mankind . True, like a Herman Melville or an H . L. Mencken , you often loathe
the narcissism and self-satisfaction of your peers . But that too is an important
trait of your "Idealist" generational type . Possessing unyielding opinions about
all issues, you judge your own peers no less harshly than you judge your elders
and juniors . Either way, you may well appreciate that the time has come to
move the Boomer discussion beyond the hippie-turned-yuppie, Boomer-as-
hypocrite theme . Stripped to its fundamentals, your generation of rising adults
is no more hypocritical than Thoreau at Walden Pond, or Jefferson Davis during
his seven-year retreat into the Mississippi woods .
You may feel some disappointment in the Dan Quayles and Donald Trumps
who have been among your first agemates to climb life's pyramid, along with
some danger in the prospect of Boomer Presidents and Boomer-led Congresses
farther down the road . Watching Franklin Pierce and Stephen Douglas, the peers
of Lincoln and Lee felt much the same trepidation about their own generation-
with reason, as history soon demonstrated . You may see in your peers a capac ity
for great wisdom , terrible tragedy, or perhaps just an insufferable pomposity .
Over the centuries, Idealist generations like yours have produced more than their
share of all three. Having lived just half a lifecycle , you probably find it hard
to imagine that your generation may someday produce strong-willed leaders on
a par with a Sam Adams or a Benjamin Franklin, a Douglas MacArthur or a
Franklin Roosevelt. That ' s not surprising . Idealist generations-quite the reverse
of Civic generations-typically exert their most decisive influence on history
late in life. To understand how this happens, you need to step outside your inner-
absorption, take a look at like-minded ancestors , and understand the fateful
connection between the Idealist lifecycle and the larger flow of events . Perhaps
you already sense that your Boomer peers, for all their narcissism and parallel
play , will someday leave a decisive mark on civilization quite unlike anything
they have done up to now . Your intuition is correct . History suggests they will.

If you are a /3er , we can imagine a cautious reception . Here we are, two
writers from a generation you don't especially like, laying bare your generation's
problems and affixing a label with an ominous ring. Back in the 1920s, Gertrude
Stein, then in her mid-forties, did much the same to her thirtyish juniors, and
the name she chose (the "Lost Generation") was just perverse enough to catch
12 PREFACE

on with the rising cultural elite. You may not like being lumped in with mall
rats, drug gangs, and collegians who can't find Chicago on a map-but you will
grudgingly admit that's how others often see you. No doubt you have already
noticed the recent barrage of books and articles declaring that people your age
are dumb, greedy, and soulless. You may find solace in learning that several
earlier American generations have also been perceived negatively almost from
birth-for example , the peers of George Washington , John Hancock , and Patrick
Henry. Along with Ulysses Grant or George Patton, you might not mind striking
others as "bad ," knowing full well that low expectations is a game you can
play to your advantage. You know the odds. Maybe , like John D. Rockefeller ,
you will hit the jackpot-or else, like a Gold Rush 49er, you will go bust trying .
Win or lose, you're not looking for testimonials-or, for that matter, any grand
collective mission. When you notice that we've made your generation an equal
partner to all the others in our saga, you might be half pleased , half alarmed:
To be an equal partner means history might be counting on you, and you're not
quite ready for that.
Our 13er reader knows perfectly well what your elders seldom admit: Yours
is an ill-timed lifecycle. You experienced the "Consciousness Revolution" of
the late 1960s and 1970s from a child ' s perspective-and, like Louisa May
Alcott, you had to grow up fast to survive in a world of parental self-immersion
or even neglect. You're tired of gauzy talk about Woodstock, born-again ex-
hippies, and TV shows full of Boomers too busy whining about problems to
solve them . Your generational consciousness is on the rise. You may already
sense that it is just a matter of time before you and your peers snap into cultural
focus and, as Sinclair Lewis did with snooty 'Babbitts," start trimming the sails
of your smug next-elders. You take justifiable pride in your pragmatism, but
watch out: It has its limits. A popular 13er putdown is "That's history," trans-
lated to mean "That's irrelevant ." Wrong . We urge you to look eyeball to
eyeball with other "Reactive " types-especially at those generations (like Cap-
tain Kidd's, Benedict Arnold's, William Quantrill's , and Al Capone's) whose
entire lifecycle was spent dodging the criticism and mistrust of others. They
produced many of America's toughest leaders, most effective warriors, most
scathingly perceptive artists, and (of course) most successful entrepreneurs. But
so too did many of their members bum out young, tum traitor, endure heaps of
blame, and suffer a difficult old age.

Regardless of your generation or current phase of life, chances are you share
the commonly held view that your own peers' recent lifecycle experiences are
the norm. In each case, you may believe that other generations could or should
think and behave like you at whatever phase of life you have recently completed .
If a G.I., you probably regard retirement as a natural opportunity to stay active
within your own community and reap the economic rewards of a lifetime of
purposeful labor. If a Silent, you may believe that reaching the age of forty or
PREFACE 13

fifty inevitably triggers a midlife ''passage,'' an abrupt and liberating personality

shift. If a Boomer, you may see spiritual self-discovery as the very essence of
being a 25-year-old . If a 13er, you may find it hard to imagine how any teenager
would not instinctively reduce such issues as courtship, schooling, and career
choice to their practical, matter-of-fact essentials. Whatever your peer group,
you feel that something is out of joint when your next-juniors tum out differently.
Let us reassure you: Americans have felt much the same sense of generational
warp for centuries. By nature, we all want to believe in an unvarying lifecycle;
this makes life more predictable and hence more manageable. That is not, how-
ever, how generations work. It isn't true in the early 1990s, it wasn't true during
the circa-1970 "generation gap," nor was it true in 1950 or l 93~nor, for that
matter, in 1830, 1730, or 1630.
Much of the stress in cross-generational relationships arises when people of
different ages expect others to behave in ways their peer personalities won't
allow. Plainly, this happened between G.I.s and Boomers in the late 1960s. It
has recently started happening again, albeit with less noise and fanfare, this time
between Boomers and 13ers. Poll today's collegians and ask them which gen-
eration they like the least; then ask fortyish professionals which generation they
think has the least to offer. The answer, in each case, will be the other. Boomers
and 13ers are coming to recognize how unlike each other they are; as yet, neither
side realizes that this personality clash will endure, and almost certainly sltarpen,
over the next decade. This is nothing new. For centuries, "Idealist" generations
have invariably come of age mounting a highly symbolic attack against their
aging ''Civic'' elders-and have later entered midlife engaging in a bitter conflict
with their "Reactive" next-juniors. No other generational type shares this
lifecycle pattern of conflict. "Civics," for instance, have typically found late-
in-life battles with their twentyish children so difficult because they could recall
nothing like it from their own youth, while "Adaptives" have been spared from
overt generational conflict throughout their lives--often to their inner frustration.
One of our purposes in writing this book is to dispel the illusion of generational
sameness. In doing so, we hope to promote more reciprocal understanding and
more mutual respect among the very unalike generations alive today.
The timing and authorship of this book may indeed reflect the workings of
the cycle we describe. Many have told us this book could only have been written
by Boomers, which indeed your authors are (from the 1947 and 1951 cohorts).
True, some of the finest generational biographies ever published-including
Passages and Private Lives-have been written by Silent authors. Yet Boomers
remain the twentieth century's most generation-conscious peer group, one that
has overwhelmed all thinking about the subject over the past few decades. As
Boomers come to dominate the media, the word "generation" is today being
heard more often in news, entertainment, and advertising than at any time since
the late 1960s.
We attribute this, in part, to renewed stirrings of Boomer spiritualism in
14 PREFACE

public life-and to the present location of Boomers at the center of multigener-

ational family trees. Your authors know that feeling quite well. At one end of
our own families, we see surviving parents and stepparents, all G.l.s, all faring
very well in comparison with what we remember of the (Lost) elders of our
youth-and all looking upon the current drift of America with a mixture of public
concern and private detachment. At the other end are our Millennial Generation
children, born in the mid-1980s, about whose future adult Americans of all ages
are beginning to worry. Between us, we have four children: two l3ers, two
Millennials, perhaps more to come. Like many of our peers, we recognize that
an instinct for teamwork and cooperation-something G.l.s have always had
and Boomers came of age rejecting-may well make sense for the new Millen-
nials just now coming onstage .
Both of us have separately written on generational topics for many years. In
quite different ways, we each came across what we call the "generational di-
agonal." Our earlier books focused mainly on Boomers and G.l.s-Strauss' on
the Vietnam War, Howe's on federal entitlements programs. We wondered why
these two generations developed such entirely different ways of looking at the
world: G.I.s seeing themselves (even in old age) as uniquely productive, Boomers
seeing themselves (even in youth) as uniquely sagacious. We were fascinated
by the curious 1970s-era resolution of the generation gap between them-an
implicit deal in which G.l.s achieved economic independence (and spent the
post-Vietnam fiscal "peace dividend" almost entirely on themselves) while
Boomers asserted their social independence. In each case, this came at a cost:
Aging G. I. s gave up cultural and spiritual authority, and Boomers abandoned
any realistic prospect of matching their elders' late-in-life economic rewards.
We wondered what it was about the very different growing-up experiences
of G.l.s and Boomers that prompted such behavior, and whether any earlier
American generations had ever acted along the same lines. We discovered
that they had.
As we stretched our search for analogues back through the centuries, the
panoramic outline of our generational saga began emerging. Again and again,
this lifecycle approach to history revealed a similar and recurring pattern, one
that coincided with many of the well-known rhythms pulsing through American
history. We found ourselves with new answers to old riddles that have puzzled
historians: why, for example, great public emergencies in America seem to arrive
every eighty or ninety years-and why great spiritual upheavals arrive roughly
halfway in between.
If we had in fact discovered a cycle, we knew the proof had to lie in its
predictive possibilities. We decided then and there to write a last chapter on the
future. Not many academicians take well to crystal-ball theories of history, but
without predictions (what Karl Popper once called "falsifiability") any road
map of history ends just where the reader begins to find it interesting. In advancing
his own cycle theory about alternating eras of liberal activity and conservative
PREFACE 15

quiescence, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has made some very date-specific predic-
tions-for example, that America is now poised for a sharp pivot back toward
l 960s-style activism. While we harbor doubts about that prognosis (for reasons
we explain in Chapter 6), we credit Schlesinger for pioneering the cycle approach
to American history and for giving his reader the measure by which his theory
can be tested. The same is true for our forecasts: Time will surely telL The
events of the next few years will not explain much. Ten years will reveal
something, twenty years quite a bit, and forty years will close the case, one way
or the other.
Anyone who claims to possess a vision of the future must present it with due
modesty, since no mortal can possibly foresee how fate may twist and turn.
Readers who encounter this book fifty years from now will no doubt find Chapter
13 odd in much of its detail. But it is not our purpose to predict specific events;
rather, our purpose is to explain how the underlying dynamic of generational
change will determine which sorts of events are most likely. No one, for example,
can foretell the specific emergency that will confront America during what we
call the "Crisis of 2020"-nor, of course, the exact year in which this crisis
will find its epicenter. What we do claim our cycle can predict is that, during
the late 2010s and early 2020s, American generations will pass deep into a
"Crisis Era" constellation and mood-and that, as a consequence, the nation's
public life will undergo a swift and possibly revolutionary transformation .
The sum total of our predictions does not present an idealized portrait of
America's future, but rather an honest depiction of where the generational cycle
says the nation is headed. When reading Chapter 13, most readers will feel mixed
emotions about what we foresee happening over the next several decades. What-
ever your values or politics, you will surely find some things that please you
and others that do not. You may also be surprised to find only passing mention
of many subjects-from space-age technology to the shifting fortunes of political
parties-that weigh so large in most speculations about the future . In our view,
the timeless dynamic of human relationships comes first and matters most. While
others may describe the technology with which America will send a manned
spacecraft to the planet Mars, for example, we tell you something else: When
America's leaders and voters will want this flight to happen; why; which gen-
eration will fly it; and how the nation will feel about it at the time and afterward.
We acknowledge this to be an ambitious book, with wholly new interpretations
of important moments in American history-from the persecution of Salem
witches to the rise of Wall Street yuppies. We admit, of course, that the gen-
erational cycle cannot explain everything. Were history so easily compartment-
alized, it would lose not just its mystery, but also much of its hope, passion,
and triumph. What we do insist is that generations offer an important perspective
on human events, from the great deeds of public leaders to the day-to-day lives
of ordinary people. We urge those who believe in other theories of history (or
in no theory at all) to consider how ours can at times help explain the otherwise
16 PREFACE

unexplainable . Many readers may well remain unpersuaded about the cycle, at
least until more time passes. To skeptical historians in particular, we suggest
you suspend your disbelief long enough to take a hard look at the generational
diagonal. Historians seldom write biographies-and, all too often, recount events
without the lifecycle perspective of what we call ''people moving through time .''
Generations and history share an important two-way relationship--not just in
America, and not just in the modern era .
In Part II, where we describe the peer personalities of America's eighteen
generations , we could not always feature a totally representative sample of the
population . Sometimes, for example, we had to limit the attention given to
women and minorities-either because not as much is known about them or
because we wanted to refer to actors and events that most readers would rec-
ognize. Yet while the generation is, almost by definition, a majoritarian social
unit , the concept has much to say both about sex roles and about issues of class
or race. No comparison of G.l.s with Boomers (or the Glorious with Awakeners)
can overlook the stunning contrasts in their respective attitudes toward femininity
and masculinity. Likewise, no comparison of the Silent with l3ers (or Progres-
sives with the Lost) can make sense without mentioning their contrasting opinions
about ethnic and racial pluralism .
The generational cycle indeed raises important questions about when and how
certain racial, ethnic, and women' s issues arise. Every major period of racial
unrest-from the Stano Uprising of 1739 to Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831,
from W .E.B. DuBois' black consciousness movement of the early twentieth
century to the long hot summers of the late l 960s-has started during what we
call an "Awakening" constellation of generational types. Similarly, the widest
gaps between acceptable male and female sex roles have taken place during an
"Outer-Driven" constellation. Where we consider these issues especially im-
portant to our story, we discuss them . But this book is mainly about generations
as units , not subgroups within them . We encourage specialists among our readers, .
-whatever their backgrounds , to shed more light on the component pieces of the
generational puzzle . We would be delighted to see others write on the generational
history of any ethnic group, for example-or about the generational dynamic
behind changes in technology, the arts, or family life. In fact, the biography of
any single generation could easily be expanded to book length . Apart from our
own capsule summary of the G .I.s, no one has ever written even a short biography
of that generation . Is there a G.I . somewhere who will?
Much work remains to be done in this barely tapped field. We invite debate
about our interpretation of social moments, our generational boundaries , and our
peer personality descriptions . This book may be the first word on many of these
subjects; we hope it will not be the last. In particular, we encourage experts
familiar with other nationalities-from China to Eastern Europe, the Middle East
to Latin America-to examine the dynamic of generational change in societies
PREFACE 17

other than our own. Such inquiry might identify deviations in the generational
cycle (like America s Civil War anomaly) and suggest how our theory of gen-
erations might be refined to account for the full range of human experience.
We hope to persuade specialists among our readers that the study of gener-
ational (and lifecycle) behavior is of major importance . Those who assemble
data can help by sorting them around birth cohorts as well as around fixed age
brackets, and by repeating old polls taken one or more generations earlier , to
update cohort and age-bracket responses. Historians can similarly help the study
of generations by offering cohort-specifi c information whenever possible . To aid
the research of others, we are providing extensive bibliographic notes and (in
Appendix B) a summary of new data we have compiled on each generation ' s
numerical representation in Congress and state governorships .
Each of the eighteen generational biographies required substantial research
into not just the history, but also the historiography of each era-not just what
happened, but how and why historians have interpreted events as they did .
Accordingly, this book posed unique research problems. There were no shortcuts .
Our efforts to piece together separate generational lifecycles were impeded by
the way many historians tend to blur cohort experiences . The typical chapter on
the history of childhood, for instance, focuses mainly on linear change , blending
together experiences over time spans as long as a century . To discover what
happened to specific cohort groups required laborious detective work-some-
times poring through many articles or books just to confirm an observation
covered here in less than a sentence . Whatever our challenge, we were aided
immeasurably by the many fine social histories published over the past two
decades-especially the phase-of-life histories about childhood, adolescence, or
old age. We have also been blessed by the recent research findings of a small
but growing number of historians and social scientists who concentrate specif-
ically on cohort analysis. Had we or anyone else written this book as recently
as 1970, it would have been far poorer in texture and detail.
We ask our reader to approach this book in the same manner we came to the
subject-inductivel y, as a gradual discovery of something very new . Yes, we
sometimes use terms you may find unfamiliar at first, like "cohorts" and "spir-
itual awakenings ." When necessary , we even invent our own terms, including
typologies of generations and of "constellational" eras . Our glossary defines all
these terms, for easy reference. We urge our reader to enliven these concepts
with your own experience and imagination. Whether or not you agree with our
vision of America's future, we hope you will find our approach useful in clar-
ifying your own view of the next decade and century .
Whatever your generation--G .l., Silent, Boom, 13th-you will learn, as we
have, how every generation has its own strengths and weaknesses, its own
opportunities for triumph and tragedy. Yes, there are implicit messages here-
for example, about how each generation should apply its unique gifts for the
18 PREFACE

benefit of its heirs. But our object here is less to judge than to understand. In
the words of the great German scholar Leopold von Ranke, who weighed so
many Old World generations on the scales of history, "before God all the
generations of humanity appear equally justified." In "any generation," he
concluded, "real moral greatness is the same as in any other .... "
 Acknowledgments

"H istorical generations are not born," Robert Wohl once said. "They
are made." Surely the "making" of Generations involved far more than just
the work of two coauthors . We consider this book to be an interpretive gathering
of many disciplines, each reflecting the important achievements of a number of
scholars, journalists, pollsters, and friends-several of whom deserve mention.
On the concept of the generation itself, we were aided immeasurably by the
writings of Julian Marfas, himself a disciple of Jose Ortega y Gasset. We also
must credit Anthony Esler, who has kept the "generations approach" alive in
American academic circles over the last two decades. On cycles, we acknowledge
the pioneering work of the two Arthur Schlesingers, who have demonstrated
that an oscillating political and social mood can coincide with American-style
progress. We have William McLoughlin to thank for his discovery of important
parallels between periodic "awakenings" and Samuel Huntington for being the
first to see the relationship between awakenings and what we call secular crises.
In our depiction of historical cycles through the nineteenth century, we are
indebted to those modem social historians who have uncovered so many im-
portant clues about cohort and age-bracket behavior. On matters of childhood,
we especially thank Oscar Handlin, Mary Cable, Ray Hiner, Joseph Hawes,
Peter Gregg Slater, Robert Bremner, and David Nasaw; for education, Bernard
Bailyn, Frederick Rudolph, Carl Kaestle, and Lawrence Cremin; for adolescence,
the work of Joseph Kett stands out; and for old age, David Hackett Fischer,
]Q
20 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Stannard, and Andrew Achenbaum. In identifying generational shifts in

family life, we should mention John Demos, Barbara Welter, Edmund Morgan,
Daniel Blake Smith, Jan Lewis, Nancy Cott, and Carl Degler; in community
life, Philip Greven, Christine Heyrman , Richard Bushman, Michael Zuckerman,
Robert Gross, and Mary Ryan; in spiritual life, Perry Miller, Sydney Ahlstrom,
Alan Heimert, Ernest Lee Tuveson, Cushing Strout, and Nathan Hatch; and in
the new perspectives of what we might call ' 'psychohistorical themes of gen-
erational conflict," Emory Elliott, Jay Fliegelman , Peter Shaw, Pauline Maier,
Michael Kammen, Michael Paul Rogin, and George Forgie . We commend Peter
Charles Hoffer for his expert and pathbreaking application of a formal lifecycle
model (Erik Erikson's) to a historical generation (Republican).
We also credit those historians (especially J. C. Furnas, William Manchester,
Daniel Boorstin , Carl Bridenbaugh , Wade Smith, Robert Remini, Richard Hof-
stadter, Henry Steele Commager, Franklin Frazier , and Frederick Lewis Allen)
who gave as much attention to private as to public lives-and, in doing so,
revealed important phase-of-life information . We should give special praise to
historian Ann Douglas , who in The Feminization of the American Culture pro-
vides exactly the kind of birthyear and cohort-focused information that gener-
ational analysis requires . And , of course, anyone writing a book like this needs
a standard historical reference, and for that we thank the incomparable Samuel
Eliot Morison .
For modem generations, we thank Paula Fass, William Manchester, William
O'Neill, Todd Gitlin, and Landon Jones for their histories; Malcolm Cowley,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benita Eisler, Annie Gottlieb, Cheryl Merser, and Wanda
Urbanska for their generational biographies; Gail Sheehy, Daniel Levinson, and
Betty Friedan for their lifecycle observations; Robert and Alice Lynd for their
keen-eyed observations on American town life in the early twentieth century;
and Harold Steams and Huston Smith for compiling the best single written records
of the national mood and generational relationships of the 1930s and 1950s,
respectively. For the separate phases of life, we have Marie Winn, Vivian Zelizer,
and Neil Postman to credit for their inquiries into modem childhood; Kenneth
Keniston, Lewis Feuer , and Kett again for adolescence; and Bernice Neugarten,
William Graebner, Samuel Preston , Alan Pifer, and Fischer again for old age.
We are grateful to Atlantic and Esquire magazines for their penetrating essays
on generational mind-sets ; to Leonard Cain, whose cohort analysis is the best
defense of a generational boundary ever written; and to Nancy Smith, Shann
Nix, and Patrick Welsh for the most probing accounts to date of the 13er mood.
For our modem data, we owe a great debt to two fine l 980s-era magazines,
Public Opinion and American Demographics (and, especially, to Karlyn Keene
and Cheryl Russell for their helpful familiarity with opinion polls); to the Gallup,
Harris, Roper, and Yankelovich polling organizations; to the quarter-century of
work at UCLA (Alexander Astin) and the University of Michigan (Jerald Bach-
man) for their ongoing youth surveys; to Warner Schaie of Pennsylvania State
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 21

University and his one-of-a-kind Seattle Longitudinal Study; to John Keane, Bill
Butz, and their many colleagues at the U.S. Census Bureau; and to the many
other helpful individuals in the Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Center for
Health Statistics, Public Health Service, Social Security Administration, National
Taxpayers Union , and Children's Defense Fund.
This book has been aided by innumerable conversations, probably reaching
into the thousands, with members of each of the four major living generations.
We extend our thanks to Doug Lea of American University, who has been our
principal link with 13er students from dozens of colleges around the nation . We
particularly thank our own 13er-on-the-job, Kelly Stewart, for tabulating some
15,000 Congressmen, governors, and justices by birthyear and thereby reducing
mountains of data into usable form . We are likewise grateful to the well-equipped
libraries of Georgetown University and of Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia.
We owe special credit to our editor, Adrian Zackheim, for his patience
throughout a long and difficult project; our agent and partner-in-planning, Rafe
Sagalyn, whose confidence in our task kept us hard at it; Pete Peterson and Jim
Sebenius, for introducing us to each other; the Honorable Albert Gore, Charles
Percy, and John Porter, for their encouragement and advice; Jim Davidson, Paul
Hewitt, David Keating, and Phil Longman, for their counsel in the early stages
of this project; Tipper Gore and Marilyn Ferguson, for their counsel in its late
stages; and the helpful readers of raw manuscript-Alan Crawford, Peter d'Epiro,
Robert Hom, Richard Jackson, Jeremy Kaplan, William Lane, Doug Lea,
Robert Quartel, David Werner , Richard Willard, and Ernest Wilson. We are
also grateful to Elaina Newport, Jim Aidala, and other good friends and col-
leagues with the Capitol Steps for the kind of social commentary you can get
nowhere else.
Finally, we thank our special G .I. consultants enfamille (Suzy Strauss, Margot
Howe, Mary Kamps); our Canadian repository of insights on European gener-
ations (Carla Massobrio); our wives, Janie and Simona, for their tireless critiques
of endless drafts; and our children , Melanie, Victoria, Eric, and Rebecca-who,
along with the rest of our families, have cheerfully accepted a years-long invasion
of tall stacks of books and photocopies, the clickety-clack of word processors,
constant chatter about Transcendental this and Silent that, and the many other
perils of living with the sort of people who would write this sort of book.
We also thank our reader, for taking the time.

Bill Strauss
Neil Howe
October 1990
 Contents

Preface. ........ . .......... ................................. 7

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Chapter l People Moving Through Time.............................. 27

PART I: THE CYCLE

Chapter 2 Life Along the Generational Diagonal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Chapter 3 Belonging to a "Generation" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Chapter 4 The Four-Part Cycle........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Chapter 5 The Cycle in America . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Chapter 6 From Puritans to Millennials and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

PART II: THE GENERATIONS

Chapter 7 The Colonial Cycle ............. . ........................... 113
Puritans . ................................................. 121
Cavaliers .............. ........... ... ................... 129
Glorious ................................................. 137
Enlighteners ............................................. 144
Chapter 8 The Revolutionary Cycle .. . . ...... .. ....................... 151
Awakeners .............................................. . 156
 24 CONTENTS

Liberty ................................................... 164

Republicans ..................... . ........................ 172
Compromisers ..... . .......... . ......................... . 181
Chapter 9 The Civil War Cycle ....................................... 190
Transcendentals .. ..... . . . ... . ............................ 195
Gilded ............................................. ...... 206
Progressives ............................................. 217
Chapter 10 The Great Power Cycle .. .. ................................. 228
Missionaries ............................................. 233
Lost ... .. ..... . . .. ....................................... . 247
G.l.s ................................. .. .......... . .. . .... 261
Silent ................. . .................................. 279
Chapter 11 The Millennial Cycle ....................................... 295
Boomers ................................................. 299
JJers ..................................................... 317
Millennials ....... ........................................ 335

PART Ill: THE FUTURE

Chapter 12 The Past as Prologue ....................................... 347
Chapter 13 Completing the Millennial Cycle ........................... 374
Chapter 14 The Beginning of History ................................. .425

Table: The Generational Cycle in America ........................................ 428

Glossary..... .................. .... ... .................................................. ... 429
Appendix A: A Theory of Generations......................................... ..... 433
Appendix B: American Political Leadership by Generation ......... .. ...... .... 455
Notes on Sources ....................................................................... 465
Index ...................................................................................... 521
There is a mysterious cycle in human events . To some
generations much is given . Of other generations much
is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with
destiny.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt , 1936

 Chapter t

PEOPLEMOVING
THROUGH TIME

Lenty-eight years had passed, but the message to other generations remained
the same. George Bush's inaugural parade, like John Kennedy's in 1961, featured
a full-scale model of his vehicle of valor: in Bush's case a Grumman Avenger
fighter plane, in Kennedy's a PT-class torpedo boat. When Bush bailed out over
ChiChi Jima, Michael Dukakis was a fifth-grader in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Dukakis later served in Korea, but when he sat atop a tank in his Presidential
campaign, people laughed. It just wasn't the same . Back in 1944, Illinois Gov-
ernor Jim Thompson had been in the second grade, three years behind Dukakis.
"You don't need to be shot down from the sky to know the world is a dangerous
place," Thompson remarked about Bush, "but my guess is it sure helps ."
Marching alongside these two parade floats, both times, were saluting vet-
erans-with one important difference . At Kennedy's inaugural, the float-bearers
were men of "vigor" in their late thirties and forties, celebrating their arrival
into national leadership . At Bush's, the vets were in their late sixties and sev-
enties, evoking more remembrance than hope. Time marches on . The aging
paraders had to realize that 1989 would be the last time America would salute
the triumphant Presidential arrival of a World War II combat hero . At age 20,
George Bush had been among the Navy's youngest fighter pilots when he was
shot down over the Pacific. Almost certainly, the next American President will
walk down Pennsylvania Avenue having known that war through a child's eyes-
or, perhaps, through nothing more than history books and film clips . When that
28 GENERATIONS

happens, Americans of all ages will feel something missing.

In the thirty years from 1961 through 1990 (and counting), the American
Presidency has been the exclusive preserve of men who ranged in age from 17
to 34 on Pearl Harbor Sunday, men belonging to what we call the G.l. Generation.
Never before in the nation's history has one generation held the White House
so long. Few others have exercised such massive power over public events in
each phase of life. From youth to old age, the G.l.s have been the confident
and rational problem-solvers of twentieth-century America, the ones who knew
how to get things done-first as victorious soldiers and Rosie the Riveters, later
as builders of rockets and highways, lastly as aging Presidents in the era of
democracy's economic triumph over communism.
The G.I. lifecycle bears the imprint of the threshold moments that catapulted
America into its modem superpower era. The first G.l. babies were born in
1901, and the last will tum 75 in the year 1999-a span exactly coinciding with
the "American Century" of economic growth, technological progress, and
(mostly) military triumph. Following a debauched and dispirited "Lost Gener-
ation," they brought cheerfulness, public spirit, and collective muscle to every
problem they encountered. Older generations once looked upon them as good
scouts with a mission of civic virtue . Decades later, younger generations came
to see them as powerful and friendly, if also culturally complacent and overly
"macho." From childhood on, G.l.s have defined what contemporary America
means by citizenship, that two-way symbiosis between man and government. In
the person of George Bush, America clings to one last dose of that old war-hero
"right stuff," uncertain about what the future will be like without G.I.s at the
helm.
Contemplating this generation's inevitable passing from power, we have been
waving it goodbye much as we would a beloved family member whose train is
pulling out of a station-a station we could call midlife. But let's walk down
the track a bit. For some time now, this same train has been pulling into another
station : elderhood.
The expression "senior citizen" is so much a part of our modem vocabulary
that we forget how new it is-and how it did not come into wide use until the
first peers of these seven G .I. Presidents started to reach old age. As with every
other life phase, G.l.s have infused old age with uncommon collective energy.
In the early 1960s, the elderly were America's unhappiest, loneliest, and poorest
age bracket. Politically, they tended to be unorganized, Republican-leaning, and
hostile to government. Yet over the last quarter century, all these attributes have
reversed direction. Polls now show most people over age 65 to be happy and
socially assertive, members of an exploding list of senior clubs, condo associ-
ations, and lobbying groups. They are no longer fixed-income, thanks to inflation-
indexed government benefits. Meanwhile, the elderly poverty rate has fallen
from the highest of any age bracket (in the mid-1960s) to well below the rate
for children and young adults (today) . Of all circa-1990 age groups, these elders
PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME 29

are the heaviest-voting and by far the most Democratic-leaning, with polls show-
ing them overwhelmingly supportive of big government. Yes , we can still find
an elder age bracket whose members are substantially lonely , poor, and Repub-
lican. But they are not G .I.s . These very old people , mostly in their nineties,
are the dwindling survivors of the Lost Generation.
How do we explain this dramatic change in what it means to be old in America,
this sudden transformation both in the behavior of people past their middle sixties
and in the treatment they receive from their juniors? We could, on the one hand ,
attribute it to a variety of complex , apparently unrelated factors: public policy,
demographics, social and economic trends, changing family attitudes, and so
on. Alternatively, we could attribute it to the gradual replacement of one gen-
eration by another in the elder age bracket. Let's put it schematically: Is it easier
to explain why 75-year-olds transformed from Type X in 1965 to Type Y in
1990, or to explain how the Y-like 50-year-olds we remember from 1965 aged
into the Y-like 75-year-olds of 1990? The latter is by far the better explanation.
Separate generations are aging in place .
Over the last quarter century, G .I.s have moved up the age ladder a notch,
transforming elderhood the way they once did every other phase of life . Seldom
do we draw any connection among Americ a's first Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts,
Charles Lindbergh, CCC tree-planters and TV A dam-builders, D-Day troops,
Levittowners, Stan " the Man" Musial, Jim and Betty Anderson of Father Knows
Best, Kennedy's "best and brightest ," General Westmoreland, Reagan-Shultz-
Weinberger , and the American Association of Retired Persons. We greet the
G .I. train (and, later, bid it farewell) at each station , but not many of us recognize
it as the same train .
ls this an isolated case? To consider this question, let's extend our railroad
analogy. Picture one long lifecycle track, with birth the place of origin and death
the destination. Imagine phase-of-life stations along the way, from childhood to
elderhood . Now picture a series of generational trains, all heading down the
track at the same speed . While the G.I. train is moving from one station to the
next, other trains are also rolling down the track . If we picture ourselves sitting
at any given station watching one train go and another arrive, we notice how
different each train looks from the next.
Replacing the G .I.s at the midlife station. and overdue for a tum at Presidential
leadership , is the Silent Generation train-carrying men and women who came
of age too late for World War II combat and too early to feel the heat of the
Vietnam draft. These were the unobtrusive children of depression and war, the
conformist "Lonely Crowd , " Grace Kelly and Elvis Presley, young newlyweds
with bulging nurseries, Peace Corps volunteers , the "outside agitators" of the
Mississippi Summer, the middle managers of an expanding public sector, di-
vorced parents of multichild households, makers of R-rated movies, Hugh Hefner
and Gloria Steinem, space-shuttle technocrat s and supply-side economists, Gary
Hart and Mike Dukakis , litigator s and arbitrator s, Jim Henson , the MacNeil-
30 GENERATIONS

Lehrer NewsHour, and the less colorful cabinet officials in the Bush adminis-
tration . Back in the 1960s, we used to think of 55-year-olds as homogeneous
and self-confident-clingers to worn marriages and brittle proponents of a bland
culture under siege from the young . In 1990, 55-year-olds dance to rock music
and wink at unmarried kids who bring a date home for the night. They are
sentimental pluralists , easy touches for charity, inclined to see two sides to every
issue- and not especially surefooted . Today's midlifers dominate the helping
professions and have provided late-twentieth-century America with its most com-
mitted civil rights advocates and public interest lawyers-and most of its best-
known sexual swingers, feminists , and out-of-the-closet gays. A quarter century
ago, we would never have associated a crowd like this with the peak years of
adult power. Now we do.
At the rising-adult station, behind the Silent, comes the best-known of all
American generations: the Boomers, who came to college after Eisenhower and
before the Carter malaise of 1979. These were the babies of optimism and hubris,
Beaver Cleaver and Mouseketeers, the post-Sputnik high school kids whose SAT
scores declined for seventeen straight years, student strikers, flower-child hippies
and draft resisters, Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, yuppie singles avoiding
attachment, Gilda Radner and Oprah Winfrey, grass-roots evangelicals, Lamaze
parents, Oliver North and William Bennett, oat-bran eaters and Perrier drinkers,
Earth Firsters, and antidrug crusaders . This Boom Generation has totally trans-
formed its current phase of life. Reflect back on a typical man-woman couple
approaching age 40 around 1970. They had been married for almost two decades,
with children nearing college age . Their family income was rising swiftly. They
emulated their elders , envied their juniors , and disliked the suggestion that any
one set of values was superior to another . Contrast that picture with the typical
"thirtysomething " couple of today . The woman has worked since college . Pos-
sibly they are married, and just as possibly they are not. Possibly their income
is rising, and just as possibly it is stagnating or falling behind inflation . At most,
they have two children, none beyond elementary school. They firmly believe in
values. Intensely self-immersed, they neither emulate nor envy people older or
younger than themselves . A quarter century ago, such a couple would have stood
out as hard-luck misfits . But don 't tell Boomers that. Polls show their level of
self-satisfaction is quite high and remarkably unrelated to their income or family
status .
The next generational train rolls into the coming-of-age station wearing
shades, averting the critical glare of the adult world . We have seen this generation
before . These were the first babies American women took pills not to have ,
Rosemary's Baby, the children of sharply rising divorce and poverty rates, pupils
in experimental classrooms without walls , latchkey kids, precocious Gary Cole-
man and Tatum O'Neal, pubescents of the sex-obsessed 1970s, Valley girls ,
college students criticized by one blue-ribbon commission after another, young
PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME 31

singles of the post-AIDS social scene, inner-city drug entrepreneurs, "boom-

erang'' children living at home after college, the best-qualified recruits in military
history, the hard-nosed invaders of Panama, and the defenders of Persian Gulf
oil. In the late 1960s, 21-year-olds were considered radicals , the conscience of
America, and they drew the respect of the adult world they were attacking.
Today, kids in their early twenties comprise America's most Republican-leaning
age bracket . They associate smoothly and compliantly with elders-who, for
their part, express disappointment in how they are turning out. To date, this
generation has no consensus name. We label it the 13th Generation-partly for
the gauntlet its members see in its "bad" reputation, also in recognition that it
is the thirteenth to know the American nation and flag. ,
Last comes a train still taking on passengers, with adult America heralding
its departure . These tots are entering a childhood today's collegians would hardly
recognize. Check out their brief lifecycle, and you will find the first test-tube
babies, "Everybody's Baby" Jessica McClure rescued from a Midland well,
Superbabies, the diapered stars of Raising Arizona and Three Men and a Baby,
KinderCare Kids, "Baby M" and Hilary Morgan at the center of custody dis-
putes, inner-city kindergartners in uniform, little " Dooney" saved from the
crack house, George Bush's Hispanic grandchildren, and the high school Class
of 2000 whom President Bush, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and
numerous others have already targeted as a smarter, better-behaving, and more
civic-spirited wave of American youth . Any community trying to treat its children
this way in the late 1960s would have been condemned as culturally totalitarian .
But in the early 1980s, adults began to look upon childhood quite differently-
spawning a new Millennial Generation, the first of whom will indeed come of
age around the year 2000 .
As Millennials keep climbing aboard, adding close to four million new pas-
sengers every year, two trains are reaching the end of the line: the very old Lost ,
peers of Eisenhower, Truman, and F . Scott Fitzgerald; and a smattering of
supercentenarians from Franklin Roosevelt's Missionary Generation . One other
train we would have seen in the 1960s, Woodrow Wilson ' s Progressive Gen-
eration, has disappeared entirely .
In Figure 1-1, we list the schedule of generational trains, in 1969 and now .
Over this twenty-two-year period, seven have been alive at any one time.
Leaving aside the very old and very young, America today has four generations
that form what we call a generational "constellation," the lineup of living
generations ordered by phase of life. The constellation is always aging, always
shifting, moving up one lifecycle notch roughly every twenty-two years . Youths
come of age, rising adults reach midlife, midlifers reach elderhood, elders pass
on (or reach advanced old age)-and a new set of babies enters youth . Whenever
the constellation shifts up by one notch, the behavior and attitudes of each phase
of life change character entirely. Unmistakably, this happened between the late
32 GENERATIONS

FIGURE 1-1
Living American Generations
GENERATION BIRTH YEARS AGE IN 1969 AGE IN 1991

Progressive 1843-1859 109+ (not alive)

Missionary 1860-1882 86-108 108+

Lost 1883- 1900 68-85 90-107

G.I. 1901-1924 44-67 66-89

Silent 1925-1942 26-43 48-65

Boom 1943-1960 8-25 30-47

Thirteenth 1961- 1981 0-7 9-29

Millennial 1982- ? (not alive) 0-8

1960s and now. It also happened between World War II and Vietnam, between
World War I and II, between the Gay Nineties and World War I-and, indeed,
through all of American history .
The generational constellation establishes our snapshot impression of the
American lifecycle of the moment, from the seventeenth century through the
present day. If, in any one year or decade, we were to picture what it was then
like to be a child, a young adult, middle-aged, or old, our composite impression
would be a hodgepodge of segments from very different generational lifecycles.
Piece together these constellational snapshots in a decade-by-decade newsreel
of an evolving American lifecycle, and the picture becomes hopelessly confusing.
In this book, we suggest looking at the American lifecycle as it has actually
been lived by each generation, from childhood through old age. Using our earlier
analogy, we suggest looking at the lifecycle from the perspective of trains rather
than stations. At any given moment, we can see as many different lifecycle
stories, as many different trains, as the number of generations then alive.
We treat generations as people moving through time, each group or generation
of people possessing a distinctive sense of self . We look at history just as an
individual looks at his own life. We explain how a generation is shaped by its
"age location" -that is, by its age-determined participation in epochal events
that occur during its lifecycle. During childhood and, especially, during the
coming-of-age experiences separating youth from adulthood, this age location
produces what we call a "peer personality" -a set of collective behavioral traits
and attitudes that later expresses itself throughout a generation's lifecycle tra-
jectory.
Because the peer personality of each generational type shows new manifes-
tations in each phase of life, and because it is determined by the constellation
PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME 33

into which it is born (a pattern that is forever shifting), the ongoing interplay of
peer personalities gives history a dynamic quality. How children are raised affects
how they later parent. How students are taught affects how they later teach.
How youths come of age shapes their later exercise of leadership-which, in
tum, substantially defines the coming-of-age experiences of others . This push
and pull between generations moves synchronously with other alternating patterns
in American history : for example, between periods of public action and private
introspection, secularism and spiritualism, cultural suffocation and liberation,
fragmentation and consensus, overprotective and underprotective nurture of chil-
dren .
As we examine these pendular movements , a startling pattern emerges: a
recurring cycle of four distinct types of peer personalines , arriving in the same
repeating sequence . From the sixteenth century forward, this cycle has been
constantly turning. It has shown only one aberration, following the Civil War,
when it skipped a beat and omitted the hubristic G.l. type. Each generation has
its own unique story , of course, but when we strip away gradual secular trends
(rising living standards, improving technology, expanding population, shifting
geography), we see similar human dramas, repeating again and again .
If generations come in cycles, moreover, so do constellations . Each constel-
lational era, each of the four possible layerings of peer personalities, possesses
its own recognizable mood . As generations layer themselves and age in place,
one after the other-Lost, G.l., Silent, Boom, 13th, and so on-the mood of
a constellation itself shifts over time . A constellation with outer-focused doers
in midlife and inner-focused moralists in youth, for instance, will set a national
mood quite different from one with inner- and outer-focused generations in the
opposite positions. Some constellations produce a national mood of staleness,
others of rejuvenation . Some fight wars well , others badly. Some defer crisis,
others congeal it.
Looking back over American history, we find a correspondence between
recurring patterns in generational constellations and recurring types of historical
events. Consider, first, the four great periods of crisis in American history: the
colonial emergencies culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1689; the Amer-
ican Revolution; the Civil War; and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression
and World War II. All but one began at almost exactly the same constellational
moment, just as the first Boom-type midlifers were entering elderhood and the
first G.1.-type youths were coming of age. (The Civil War occurred nearly on
schedule , but roughly a half generation early.) Now reflect on America's five
great spiritual awakenings, from the Puritans ' "City on a Hill" in the 1630s to
the Boomers' "Consciousness Revolution" that began in the late 1960s. Without
exception, all five began at the same constellational moment, just as the first
G. 1.-type midlifers were entering elderhood and the first Boom-type children
were coming of age.
This recurring cycle of generational types and moods helps us not only to
34 GENERA TIO NS

understand the past, but also to forecast how the future of America may well
unfold over the next century. The cycle delivers no specific timetable about wars,
stock-market crashes, or scientific discoveries. It does offer an approximate
calendar and itinerary of major changes that America can expect in the next
decade and century-and important predictions about how today' s children will
grow up, today's adults will grow old, and today's elders will be remembered.
Our theory of generations is, in effect , two related theories , the merging of
two separate traditions of scholarship. First, building on the "generations ap-
proach" (a mostly European school of sociology pioneered by Karl Mannheim,
Jose Ortega y Gasset, and others), we propose what we call an "age-location"
perspective on history . Most historical narratives treat each separate age group,
especially the midlife or leadership age group , as a continuous, living entity
over time . The reader rarely learns how earlier events, experienced at younger
ages, influence later behavior at older ages. Examining history by age location,
however, we can see how events shape the personalities of different age groups
differently according to their phase of life, and how people retain those person-
ality differences as they grow older. Since we stress the link between age and
events, the concept of a "cohort-group" (a group of all persons born within a
limited span of years) is central to our theory. We define a generation as a
special cohort-group whose length approximately matches that of a basic phase
of life, or about twenty-two years over the last three centuries.
Intuitively , everyone recognizes the importance of age location . A genera-
tion's place in history affects everything from the nurture it receives from elders
to the nurture it later gives its young. Today's fiftyish and sixtyish Silent can
recall the smothering style of their own upbringing in the 1930s and 1940s, in
sharp contrast to the "hurried" children they raised in the 1960s and 1970s.
Everyone also recognizes how the same event can have a very different meaning
for generations in different phases of life . Consider the Great Depression and
its Pearl Harbor sequel. For children (Silent), it meant tight protection; for rising
adults (G.l.s) , teamwork and challenge; for midlifers (Lost), a new sense of
responsibility; for elders (Missionaries), an opportunity to champion long-held
visions. But the pattern is not the same for every event. Compare the depression
1930s, for example, with the counterculture 1970s. This latter time, we saw
children (l3ers) grow up quickly and on their own; rising adults (Boomers)
fragment and tum inward; midlifers (Silent) speed up to a new sense of adventure;
and elders (G.l.s) defend institutions under siege from the young .
The lesson? There is no such thing as one universal lifecycle . To the contrary,
neighboring generations can and do live very different lifecycles depending on
their respective age locations in history . While observing (or trying to predict)
phase-of-life behavior, we must remember that the age of each generation is
rising while time moves forward . Thus, we can visualize age location along
what we call the "generational diagonal. " Tracing this diagonal allows us to
PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME 35

connect the event, the age, and the behavior of the same generation over time.
Yet this approach alone tells us little about how generations shape history.
So we tum now to our second proposition, related to the first: Generations come
in cycles. Just as history produces generations, so too do generations produce
history . Central to this interaction are critical events that we call "social mo-
ments'' -which alternate between ''secular crises'' and ' 'spiritual awakenings .''
Because a social moment hits people in different phases of life, it helps shape
and define generations. And because generations in different phases of life can
together trigger a social moment, they help shape and define history-and hence,
new generations. Throughout American history, social moments have arrived at
dates separated by approximately two phases of life, or roughly forty to forty-
five years. Most historians look upon this rhythm as, at most, a curious coin-
cidence . We look upon it as key evidence that a generational cycle is at work,
ensuring a rather tight correspondence between constellations and events. The
correspondence is not exact-but the average deviation from what the cycle
would predict is only three or four years. That, we think, is a small margin of
error for a theory applied over four centuries.
We label the four generational types Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive.
With one exception , they have always recurred in a fixed order. During a spiritual
awakening, Idealists are moving into rising adulthood while Reactives are ap-
pearing as children; during a secular crisis, Civics are moving into rising adult-
hood 'while Adaptives are appearing as children . Later in life, these generations
trigger another social moment and thus keep the cycle turning . Among today's
living generations, the centenarian Missionaries and rising-adult Boomers are
Idealists; the very old Lost and coming-of-age l3ers are Reactives; the senior-
citizen G .I.s and baby Millennials are Civics; and the midlife Silent are Adap-
tives. The first and third types are what we call "dominant" in public life-
Idealists through redefining the inner world of values and culture, and Civics
through rebuilding the outer world of technology and institutions. The other two
types are "recessive" in public life, checking the excesses of their more powerful
neighbors-Reactives as pragmatists, Adaptives as ameliorators.
The passage of four generations, Idealist through Adaptive, completes one
full generational cycle over the course of four twenty-two-year phases of life (a
total duration of roughly ninety years). From the 1584 Puritan birthyear forward,
we can trace five such cycles through American history-of which three (Co-
lonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War) are fully ancestral, a waning fourth (Great
Power) comprises the eldest 28 percent of the American population at the be-
ginning of 1991, and an emerging fifth (Millennial) includes the youngest 72
percent. Within these cycles, we identify eighteen generations, from John Winth-
rop's Puritans to Jessica McClure 's Millennials-and a recurring pattern of
awakenings and crises. While each era has produced its special variations, the
basic pattern has persisted unchanged since the late sixteenth century, when the
36 GENERATIONS

peers of Sir Philip Sydney, Francis Bacon, and William Shakespeare-men

the age of the Puritans' fathers-triumphed in war, glorified science, and
praised the order of the universe.
We leave our cycle prophecies for later. At this point, we focus on one
demographic fact we can project for certain . Twenty-two years from now, the
generational constellation of 1991-the one we listed in Figure I- I-will have
moved up a notch, as shown in Figure 1-2. (We assume the Millennial Generation
will be of average length .)
This projection reminds us not just of our own personal mortality, but also
of the mortality of our generation. Like a person, a generation is allotted a limited
time in each phase of life. Ultimately, most of what we associate with our
generation-styles, habits, and artifacts-will disappear. We leave behind no
more than what we persuade or oblige younger generations to take from us.
Thus will all of us someday join the heritage of American civilization.
America offers what may be mankind's longest and best case study of gen-
erational evolution . Since the eighteenth century, observers the world over have
found this country unique for the freedom enjoyed by each successive generation
to develop, and act upon, its own personality. When Alexis de Tocqueville
visited America in the 1830s, he observed how generations mattered far more
here than in Europe, how in America "each generation is a new people ."
Tocqueville may have overstated the case . As we shall see, generational change
in the Old World played a key role in triggering the Colonial cycle in the New
World-back when most settlers still believed themselves, culturally and so-
cially, part of Europe . Since then, generations in America have often shared a
similar mind-set, a sort of sympathetic vibration, with their transatlantic peers .
Like America, W estem Europe also had its romantic radicals in the 1840s; its

FIGURE 1-2
Future Generational Constellation

GENERATION BIRTH YEARS AGE IN 1991 AGE IN 2013

Missionary 1860-1882 108+ (not alive)

Lost 1883-1900 90-107 112+

G.I. 1901-1924 66-89 88-111
Silent 1925-1942 48-65 70-87
Boom 1943-1960 30-47 52-69
Thirteenth 1961-1981 9-29 31-51
Millennial 1982-2003 0-8 9-30
Unnamed 2004-? (not alive) 0-8
PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME 37

Blut und Eisen realists in the 1860s; its disillusioned generation dufeu of World
War I soldiers; and its nouvelle resistance student movements in 1968. Toc-
queville's main point, however, remains sound . Far more than the Old World-
with its tradition-shaped culture, hereditary elites, hierarchical religion, and
habits of class deference-America has always been unusually susceptible to
generational flux, to the fresh influence of each new set of youth come of age.
In recent decades, as other societies have grown more open and mobile, this
distinction between America and other societies may be disappearing. Were
Tocqueville to travel through today's world, he might find many countries with
generations born ''new.'' Shifts in peer personality have recently coursed through
modem societies in all continents . From Eastern Europe to the Pacific Rim, from
the Middle East to Latin America, new generational waves are breaking. In
Poland, Lech Walesa was born too late to remember the World War II atrocities
committed there by German and Soviet armies . Today's emerging "Thaw Gen-
eration" of Soviet leaders can recall the 20th Soviet Congress in 1956, when
Khrushchev first challenged the memory of Joseph Stalin. They often cite this
event as a critical coming-of-age experience. To place them in our own cultural
artifacts, we could point to the opening and closing scenes in the movie Doctor
Zhivago, where the old revolutionary (Alec Guinness) asks a twentyish hydroe-
lectric worker (Rita Tushingham) to remember the turmoil and sacrifice of 1917.
He draws blank stares from the obliging young woman, who then would have
been roughly the same age as Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev. In Beijing, the
ruling octogenarians of Deng Xiaoping's "Long March" generation offer a
powerful if chilling example of how history can shape a generation in ways that
cause it, decades later, to force a new set of youths to come of age through a
bloody gauntlet. In Bucharest, meanwhile , this shaping process backfired on
Nicolae Ceausescu, who launched a nationalist campaign in 1967 to raise a large
and patriotic generation of Romanians. These late-l 960s babies matured into the
implacable student revolutionaries who, in 1989, sparked the very uprising that
sealed Ceausescu's demise .
These may be isolated phenomena-or they may reflect generational cycles
in these other societies . If the latter, our theory would not reflect anything
uniquely American, just human nature working itself out in a world relatively
unbound by tradition .
So what's going on in America, and where are we today?
Reflect on the national life of the late 1830s, just after Tocqueville had written
Democracy in America. The last of the great civic heroes of 1776-the Patriots
of Bunker Hill, the Constitution framers in Philadelphia, the Caesarlike creators
of E Pluribus Unum-were passing away. Thomas Jefferson and Eli Whitney
had both died a decade earlier, James Monroe and John Marshall within the last
five years. James Madison was in his mid-eighties, Noah Webster and Aaron
Burr in their late seventies . Their passing was already being lamented by the
38 GENERA TIO NS

likes of the fiftyish Daniel Webster, who wondered how America could cope
without these men of "massive solidity" whom the "iron harvest of the martial
field" had united "happily and gloriously " in a "great and common cause ."
Others in their fifties and sixties-Andrew Jackson's Democrats and Henry
Clay's Whigs-complained about a gridlocked Congress and gestured nervously
over mechanistic compromises and issues of character. On the great unresolved
issues of the day-from slavery to western settlement-America drifted without
direction .
Meanwhile , a rising younger generation of evangelicals, utopian reformers,
and transcendentalists (the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson , William Lloyd Gar-
rison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Brigham Young, Frederick Douglass, and John
Brown) were redefining American culture according to fresh, self-discovered
values . Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, both reaching age 30, were show-
ing signs of stem principle . Farther down the age ladder, hardscrabble children-
Ulysses Grant, Stonewall Jackson , Andrew Carnegie, and Mark Twain-showed
far less interest in philosophy than in action. Their peers were beginning to come
of age amid criticism from older adults, who found them shallow and reckless.
Does this all sound familiar? It should. In the late 1830s, generational types
were lining up in just about the same constellation (from elderly Civics to teenage
Reactives) that we see in present-day America .
We find much the same pattern back in the late 1740s, as memories of the
young patriots of the Glorious Revolution-by then dead or quite old-gave
way to confusion about the future . Midlife leaders and parents lacked their elders'
sense of collective purpose . Gripped by a refined, highly analytical mind-set,
they saw life as complicated , political choices as burdensome. Colonial society
wobbled along , no one knowing exactly where. At that same moment , an in-
trospective cadre of preachers and moralists ranging in age from their late twenties
to mid-forties (including Jonathan Edwards, John Woolman, Benjamin Franklin ,
and Samuel Adams) were drawing spiritual zeal from their peers' recent "Great
Awakening ." And a pugnacious, liberty-loving troop of kids was just setting
out to explore, fight, and strike it rich. Daniel Boone, Patrick Henry, Ethan
Allen, and Benedict Arnold were on the edge of puberty. John Adams and
George Washington, both teenagers, were burning with personal ambition . Sound
familiar? Here again, it should. Here again , the constellation was turning to a
position much like today' s.
Americans alive in those two past eras , just like Americans today, felt them-
selves living off the achievements of the past. They saw their present world as
comfortable but lacking direction, perhaps crumbling in its foundations . They
looked forward to their own future and the future of their children with a mixture
of guilt and anxiety . In the late I 980s, an American could pick up a journal and
read a serious-minded essay entitled " The End of History" and tune to a pop
radio station chanting lyrics like "no new tales to tell," the lyrics of boredom .
When history loses urgency, people tend to live at the expense of the future
PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME 39

despite their better judgment. What we find, today, are splintered families,
downwardly mobile 20-year-olds, razor-thin savings rates, threats to the global
environment, an eroding sense of national mission, and pyramiding entitlements
for older generations crowding out investments needed by their heirs. As was
true around 1750 and 1840, Americans in the early 1990s have only the vaguest
sense of what the future holds-for their society as a whole, and for each living
generation .
Here is where the cycle can help. The story of civilization seldom moves in
a straight line, but is rich with curves , oscillations, and mood shifts. The ebb
and flow of history often reflect the ebb and flow of generations, each with a
different age location, peer personality, and lifecycle story. By viewing history
along the generational diagonal , by searching the cycle for behavioral clues, we
can apply the mirror of recurring human experience to gaze around the comer
of current trends and say something instructive about the decades to come .
The lifecycle experience of ancestral generations tells us, in particular, that
the peer personality of each generational type expresses itself very differently
from one phase of life to the next. For example, Idealist generations (like Samuel
Adams') typically come of age attacking elder-built institutions before retreating
into self-absorbed remission, but later mature into uncompromising ' 'Gray Cham-
pion" moralists . Reactive generations (like George Washington's) bubble over
with alienated risk-taking in their twenties, but age into mellow pragmatists by
their sixties . Civic generations (like Cotton Mather' s) are aggressive institution-
founders when young, but stolid institution-defenders when old. Adaptive gen-
erations (like Theodore Roosevelt's) are elder-focused conformists early in life,
but junior-focused pluralists later on. With fourteen generational lifecycles al-
ready completed, we can draw on a rich source of analogues to help us understand
how the peer personalities of today's four youngest generations-Silent, Boom,
13th, Millennial-are likely to express themselves as they age in place . And
looking back over four full generational cycles, we can also project how the
national mood will evolve over the next half century as the generational con-
stellation clicks up one, two, and three notches.
History does not guarantee good endings . The American saga is replete with
good and bad acts committed by generations no less than by individuals. Our
national liturgy reminds us how ancestral generations provided helpful endow-
ments that made progress possible, from the clearing of land to the building of
infrastructure, from the waging of wars against tyrants to the writing of great
literature. Yet ancestral generations have also, at times, inflicted terrible harms
on their heirs-from instituting slavery to exterminating Indian tribes, from
exploiting child labor to accumulating massive public debts . A lesson of the
cycle is that each generational type specializes in its own unique brand of positive
and negative endowments . Each of today's adult generations-G.I., Silent,
Boom, and 13th-has its own special way of helping or hurting the future. Each,
collectively, has choices to make that will determine what sort of world its heirs
40 GENERATIONS

will someday inherit, and how those heirs will remember its legacy. We shall
return, at our story's end, to what history suggests those choices will be.
We opened with an account of inaugural parades celebrating the heroism of
aging G.l.s. Today's babies are being nurtured under conditions that could
someday make them, like the G.l.s, a dominant generation of can-doers, victors
in great struggles, and builders of great things. Around the year 2050, when the
first Millennial Generation President is inaugurated, his or her peers may indeed
have as many heroic memories to celebrate as the peers of John Kennedy and
George Bush had in 1961 and 1989.
With four centuries of history as a guide, we can see how today's small
children lie not at the end, but near the beginning of a new generational cycle.
And they will have many new tales to tell .
 Part I
THE CYCLE
 Chapter 2

LIFE ALONG THE

GENERATIONAL
DIAGONAL

"A
J-\t last, this is your story. You'll recognize yourself, your friends, and your
lives," reads the book jacket of Passages. In her best-selling book about "the
predictable crises of adulthood," Gail Sheehy describes a human lifecycle with
common mileposts . We "do what we should" through our twenties, marrying
around age 21 , making babies, baking brownies. We often suffer our first divorce
between the ages of 28 and 30-and, upon reaching our mid-thirties, watch our
last child head off to kindergarten. Around ages 38 to 42, we experience an all-
out midlife crisis . After making fundamental life changes, often including a
switch in spouse and career, we feel "a mellowing and a new warmth" through
our forties-after which her book trails off. Sheehy published Passages in 1976,
when she was 39 years old. Her Silent Generation peers then ranged in age from
34 to 51.
In the year Passages first hit the shelves, a 25-year-old publishing assistant
bought Sheehy's book, looking for guideposts to her own life. "The problem
was , " Cheryl Merser later recalled, "I couldn't find my life anywhere in Pas-
sages.'' Eleven years went by. Upon reaching age 36, Merser published her
autobiography, "Grown-ups," in which she described how she and her Boomer
friends were embarking on a lifecycle which kept them curiously on hold through
their mid-thirties . Almost none of her friends was doing what they "should."
Few had gotten married by the age Sheehy said they should already be divorced.
No one she knew had experienced a midlife crisis . "Finally, after umpteen
44 GENERATIONS

readings, Passages began to make sense to me," Merser wrote in 1987. "I
realized in amazement that what I was reading, down to the details of the deadline-
decade divorce and the subsequent rebirth, was the story of my parents' lives ."
To understand her same-age male friends, Merser might have paged through
The Seasons of a Man's Life, a 1978 lifecycle road map by Daniel Levinson .
In it, he sorted the post-adolescent male lifespan into six segments, three of
them "transitional" in the manner of Sheehy's various passage points. Decade
after decade, adult crises of self-definition dominated the lifecycle of the forty
men Levinson studied-all roughly Sheehy's age, born from the mid-1920s
through the mid-1930s . Yet the two major impulses Levinson found in young
men, the twin search for a "Loved One" (a woman to marry) and for a "Stronger
One" (an older mentor), would have been wholly foreign to men in Merser's
circle. Male or female, her peers were remaining socially and professionally
noncommittal-entirely unlike Levinson's early-marrying careerists .
So where could Merser tum for a guide to her own Boomer peers? She could
have studied Erik Erikson's "Eight Ages of Man" in his 1950 book Childhood
and Society. Working from what he described as his "clinical experience"
(mostly observations of his own G.I. peers) , Erikson emphasized how people
reject maternal authority and forge permanent ties with the community soon after
a major coming-of-age trial. By the time a person reaches Merser's age, according
to Erikson, the social, economic, and family direction of life is fixed in concrete.
For thirtysomething Boomers-still experimenting with life-this model works
no better than Sheehy's. Moving back further, Merser could have read Malcolm
Cowley's 1934 Lost Generation autobiography, Exile's Return, and seen a young-
adult world of alienation, unromantic toughness, and pleasure-seeking binges.
No Boomer connection there, either. But going back a fourth notch to Jane
Addams' peers, well captured in Ellen Lagemann's A Generation of Women,
Merser might well have recognized a lifecycle resembling her own : the late- or
never-marrying women of the Missionary Generation, comfortable with them-
selves and firm in their values, but uncertain where the world might someday
lead (or leave) them .
Something seems out of joint here . Why should Merser and her Boomer peers
have to go back almost a century to find a lifecycle they recognize?
To understand, we have to start with the building-block of generations: the
"cohort." Derived from the Latin word for an ordered rank of soldiers, "cohort"
is used by modem social scientists to refer to any set of persons born in the
same year; "cohort-group" means any wider set of persons born in a limited
span of consecutive years . The answer to Cheryl Merser's confusion is that
Sheehy, Erikson, and Cowley (but not Jane Addams) each belong to a cohort-
group whose phase-of-life experiences were very different from her own.
LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL 45

The Cohort-Group Biography

Plainly, Gail Sheehy did something important when she wrote Passages. Her
book has remained enormously popular with readers and critics because it offers
a rare and compelling example of a cohort-group biography-a persuasive ren-
dering, in Sheehy's case, of the coI!ective personality of American men and
women now in their fifties. Sheehy tells human history, history from the inside
out, life as her peers have known and lived it, in stages . The same could be
said for all good cohort-group biographies. They make us understand ourselves
as groups of like-aged friends with a distinctive collective story, as fraternities
or sororities that have grown up and matured in ways that are , in some sense,
special.
This is not always how we are taught to look at people . Picture the classic
image that greets children when they first open a history book: a series of portraits
of America's forty-one Presidents, constituting (upon first election) a twenty-
eight-year age bracket ranging from their early forties to their late sixties. Adjust
the hairstyles and clothing, and they would all look like midlife members of the
same club, gazing at life with identical emotions . From this collage, we find no
inkling that when Grover Cleveland became a 47-year-old mutton-chopped Pres-
ident, Harry Truman was a baby, Herbert Hoover an adolescent, Woodrow
Wilson a book-writing young professor-and the retired Ulysses Grant was dying
of cancer. Each had a fundamentally different relationship with the world around
him . Most history books are filled with fiftyish leaders and parents depicted over
time as an endless continuum-an entity with its own memory, its own habits,
its own inertia, its own self-perpetuation . At historic moments, such as the
signing of the Declaration of Independence, we get occasional glimpses of gen-
erational layering. Even then, we seldom learn about the different lifecycle prisms
through which the peers of the 33-year-old Jefferson, of the 44-year-old Wash-
ington, or of the 70-year-old Franklin understood such moments .
Likewise, read any of the histories about individual phases of life-about
childhood, adolescence, courtship, or old age. You'll see mostly the same thing:
one age bracket reified, fixed across time as a story unto itself . A 10-year-old
Boy Scout in the 1920s somehow grows out of a 10-year-old "newsie" from
the 1890s, or a 70-year-old senior activist in the 1980s out of a 70-year-old
doughboy widow from the 1960s. Since no one actually grows this way, we call
this perspective the ''age-bracket fallacy,'' the mistake of endowing a life phase
with an anthropomorphic identity over time. You could indeed create a genuine
cohort-group biography from pieces of such histories . But it would be arduous
work. To learn about the lifecycle Abraham Lincoln's peers actually experienced,
to give one example, you would have to read the 1800s-to-1810s chapter in a
childhood book , the 1820s chapter in a coming-of-age book, the 1830s-to-1840s
46 GENERATIONS

chapter in a book about family life, the I 850s-to- I 860s chapter in a regular
history book, and the 1870s chapter in a book about old age. You would have
to puzzle your way through a maze of disconnected clues and fragments.
Another way to look at life is through direct observation. To learn how people
grow older, your first impulse might be to observe how people in different age
groups think and behave . In one day, you could interview people at age JO, 30,
50, and 70, and then patch together your findings into one lifecycle snapshot.
The trouble is, people don't travel from infancy to old age in just one day.
Imagine what you would have found around the year 1970: hurried children,
adolescent mystics, playboys in their mid-thirties, "square" 55-year-olds, and
reclusive elders. Such life phases could never fit together into a single and
integrated human experience. Then check your findings for 1990: adored babies,
cynical college kids, self-immersed yuppies, ambivalent midlifers, and busy
senior citizens. Again, try to imagine people actually traveling through such a
lifecycle. You can't. And for good reason: No one ever lived it. Sociologist
Matilda White Riley calls this the ''life-course fallacy,'' the mistake of describing
a lifecycle simply by tacking together all the different age brackets alive at the
same time.
Because Sheehy and Levinson approach human experience from the per-
spective of people moving through time, they successfully dodge both the phase-
of-life and the lifecycle fallacies-and therefore say something important. But
they do not guard against a third fallacy, what Riley calls the "fallacy of cohort-
centrism," the assumption that the lifecycle experience of one's own cohort-
group offers a single paradigm for all others. Sheehy calls the crises in Passages
"predictable," its lifecycle (quoting Jorge Luis Borges) a "web" of "what will
be, is, and was." Similarly, based on interviews with men who all came of age
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Levinson declares his "seasons" to have
existed "in all societies, throughout the human species .. . for the past five or
ten thousand years." Yet a lifecycle alleged to have lasted since the days of
ancient Babylon somehow became unrecognizable to Cheryl Merser's peers just
one decade later.
You can search further back into American history for an invariant and uni-
versal lifecycle. You won't find it. To the contrary, every American life phase
has encountered frequent and major shifts over the last four centuries. New
Englanders born when Boston was founded in 1630 emerged as teenagers with
a collective personality their patriarchal elders found utterly alien. The youths
of the 1680s preferred teamwork over spiritual conversion; their sons in the
1730s preferred the reverse . The twentyish soldiers of the French and Indian
War grew up distrusting authority, while the twentyish patriots of 1776 came
of age infatuated with public order. In the mid- I 830s, young adults tried to fire
the passions of the old; three decades later, young adults doused old men's fires.
Following America's two world wars, midlifers extended very different we!-
LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL 47

comes to homecoming young soldiers : after World War I, cracking down on

their wildness and drinking; after World War II, showering them with tax-
supported benefits . Take any phase of life, move forward or backward a quarter
century, and you will invariably discover profound changes in what it meant to
be that age in America .
To be sure, the human lifecycle has many timeless denominators. The bio-
logical phases of aging-growth, puberty, menopause, senescence-always af-
fect roughly the same age brackets in a similar and highly visible manner. Basic
social roles also follow a relatively fixed age schedule: infancy, childhood,
coming of age, marriage, midlife leadership, and elderly withdrawal. But within
this general and slowly changing matrix, human behavior can be anything but
invariant from one era to the next. Indeed, to fall into the trap of cohort-centrism
is to commit, implicitly, both the other two fallacies at once. If the lifecycle
were in fact universal, then fifty-fiveish people truly would be a seamless pan-
orama, and we could tape together same-day phase-of-life snapshots into a
coherent montage. American life would then be essentially premodern, and
parents could expect their children to behave little differently from how they
themselves (or their grandparents) once behaved .
Taken together, these three fallacies lead to a world that most Americans
would hardly recognize : a society having little connection to our history and no
connection at all with the complicated phase-of-life changes we notice over time
in friends, family, and neighbors .
A lifecycle must be lived to be genuine, and to understand the behavior of
any phase of life we must look at the special story of the flesh-and-blood people
traveling through it. This is the important insight of Passages and other cohort-
group biographies . However, no law of nature decrees that all cohort-groups
must live the same lifecycle . The most cursory glance at history confirms that
they do not. Because they do not, we must look at each cohort-group's unique
age location in history to uncover the inner logic of its own story. This is the
important insight of the generational diagonal.

The Generational Diagonal

When reflecting on our own lives, especially on our college years, many of
us can recall unusual cohort-groups coming of age as young adults-perhaps a
few years younger, perhaps a few years older than ourselves. In the memory of
the living, this has happened four times. In the early 1920s, an upbeat, collectivist
batch replaced the cynics and individualists . In the late 1940s, a risk-averse
batch replaced the can-do war heroes . In the mid-1960s, a fiery batch replaced
the adult emulators . And around 1980, a smooth batch replaced the complainers.
Whichever side of the line they were on, college alumni commonly remember
48 GENERATIONS

these breakpoints. Others can recall less dramatic shifts: the rising drug use
among successive college freshmen cohorts in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
for example, or the growing popularity of military and entrepreneurial careers
among those who came to campus in the early 1980s. As each of us grows older,
we look at people of other ages and wonder whether we are changing or they
are changing . The answer, quite often, is neither: We were both different to
begin with. We were born at different times. We belong to different cohort-
groups.
What exactly does it mean to belong to a cohort-group? Unlike many group
definitions (like neighborhood or career), cohort-group membership is involun-
tary. Then again, so is age . But unlike age, cohort-group membership is per-
manent. And unlike sex or race (also involuntary and permanent), it applies to
a finite number of identifiable individuals. After its last birthyear, a cohort-group
can only shrink in size. Fixed in history, it must eventually disappear. What
makes the cohort-group truly unique is that all its members-from birth on-
always encounter the same national events, moods, and trends at similar ages.
They retain, in other words, a common age location in history throughout their
lives. Since history affects people very differently according to their age, common
age location is what gives each cohort-group a distinct biography and a distinct
lifecycle .
We have no trouble appreciating age location when thinking of momentous
historical events like war, depression, revolution, and spiritual prophecy . How
these events affect people depends on their age at the time . The same cataclysm
that a IO-year-old finds terrifying a 30-year-old may find empowering, a 50-
year-old calming, a 70-year-old inspiring . Once received , such impressions con-
tinue to shape the personality people take with them as they grow older. Today's
seventy-fiveish G.l.s, for instance, came of age with the New Deal, World War
II, and collective heroism. They retain their taste for teamwork-and often
wonder why self-obsessed yuppies never had it. Thirty-fiveish Boomers, on the
other hand, came of age with Vietnam, Watergate hearings, and "Conscious-
ness III'' euphoria. :rhey retain their taste for introspection, and often wonder
why bustling senior citizens never had it. The 75-year-old had no Woodstock,
the 35-year-old no D-Day-nothing even close. This coming-of-age contrast
will continue to influence both groups' attitudes toward the world-and toward
each other-for as long as they live. Likewise, a very different contrast will
always separate those who were children at the time of D-Day and Woodstock .
If D-Day empowered young-adult G.l.s, it intimidated Silent children . And if
Woodstock brought inner rapture to 25-year-old Boomers, it made 5-year-old
13ers feel that the adult world was turning hysterical.
Age location also shapes cohort-groups through historical shifts in society-
wide attitudes toward families, schooling, sex roles, religion, crime, careers,
and personal risk . At various moments in history, Americans have chosen to be
LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL 49

more protective of children, or more generous to old people , or more tolerant

of unconventional young adults . Then, after a while, the mood has swung the
other way . Each time this happened, the social environment changed differently
for each cohort-group . Take "open classrooms" in the early 1970s; or A-bomb
drills for elementary students in the mid- I 950s; or the huge rise in Social Security
benefits in the mid- I 970s . All were passing fads, but fads that forever changed
the lives of the specific cohort-groups affected by them . The first permanently
if subtly altered how today ' s twenty-fiveish adults feel about parental authority;
the second, how today's fortyish adults feel about nuclear deterrence ; the third,
how today ' s seventy-fiveish adults feel about their social status relative to people
of other ages. Trees planted in the same year contain rings that indicate when
they all met with a cold winter , wet spring, or dry summer. Cohort-groups are
like trees in this respect. They carry within them a unique signature of history's
bygone moments.
Almost by design, America's present-day social institutions accentuate the
power of age location . The more tightly age-bracketed the social experience,
the more pronounced the ultimate cohort identity . From kindergarten through
high school, almost all pupils in any one classroom belong to the same birthyear.
In nonschool activities like Little League and scouting, children participate within
two- or three-year cohort-groups . College-age students date, study, and compete
athletically within cohort-groups seldom exceeding five years in length. As mod-
em adults age into midlife , their friendships typically widen into longer birthyear
zones. But their cohort bonds remain strong. Most retain contact with "Big
Chill" circles of like-aged friends, with (or against) whom they measure progress
at each phase of life . High school and college reunions remind alumni of their
cohort bonds-how each class remains, in important respects, different from
those a few years younger or older. Over the last few decades, cohorts have
even been retiring together in their early to mid-sixties . Like all status desig-
nations (including sex , race, and profession) , cohort-group membership forges
a sense of collective identity and reinforces a common personality .
Quantitative research on cohorts is still a young science. The very term "birth
cohort" was not coined until 1863 (by the French sociologist Emile Littre), and
the concept attracted little attention over the next hundred years . Since the early
1960s, the interest has grown more serious-especially in America . Intrigued
by lifecycle shifts, a few historians have begun to pore over town archives,
gravestones, and census records to study cohort-groups in small communities.
Social scientists have also begun to look more carefully at modem behavioral
data from a birthyear perspective . All this could not happen at once. The number-
crunchers first had to wait until they could obtain age-bracketed data for the
American population at large. Then they had to wait still longer until time could
sort out the independent effect of cohort membership from other behavior-shaping
variables such as phase of life (the "age effect") and historical change (the
50 GENERATIONS

"period effect") . But as the widespread collection of age-bracketed data enters

its third decade, the results are finally arriving . More often than not, they show
that cohorts matter a great deal .
Survey analysis of voting behavior is a classic case in point. In the early
1960s, researcher s discovered that Americans age 65 to 80 voted heavily Re-
publican, while younger Americans voted Democratic . At that time, three ex-
planations seemed equally plausible: People always tend to vote Republican
when they get old (the age effect) ; elders were the leading wave of a national
trend toward Republicanism (the period effect) ; or the 1890s cohort-group leans
Republican (the cohort effect) . Most experts opted for the first answer-the age
effect. " Aging seems to produce a shift toward Republicanism," concluded one
study in 1962. "The pattern appears to be linear. " Wrong . Two decades passed,
enabling survey researchers to isolate and measure the influence of each effect.
Cohorts won, hands down . The post-1970 arrival of a new and increasingly
Democratic batch of 65-to-80-year-olds made cohorts the only possible expla-
nation. So, a decade later, did the arrival of a new and increasingly Republican
batch of young voters .
Further confirmation of the power of cohorts comes from longitudinal tests
of intelligence and educational aptitude . For the last third of a century, psy-
chologist K. Warner Schaie has measured the "psychometric intelligence" of a
long series of seven-year cohort-groups-born from 1886 through 1962-living
in Seattle, Washington. Schaie's original purpose was to trace universal Jifecycle
trends (the age effect) in aptitude scores . In this, he has been successful. His
surveys show that measured intelligence rises most steeply in the twenties, begins
to level off during the thirties, and enters a gradual decline around the middle
fifties. What Schaie was not looking for-but found-was a powerful correlation
between his aptitude scores and his specific cohort-groups. In each case, the
cohort effect remained strong even after Schaie isolated it both from the influence
of age and from the influence of historical changes such as better schooling .
Among subjects under age 70 , in fact , most measures of aptitude vary far more
across cohort lines than across age brackets . For example :
The 1886-1892 cohort-group scored the highest of all groups in "word
fluency" (vocabulary), but the lowest in everything else .
The 1907-1927 cohort-groups have done very well in overall "intellectual
ability" and have clearly outperformed all other groups in "numbers skills ."
The last of these three groups ( 1921-1927) appears, on balance, to be the
highest-scoring group thus far tested .
The 1935-1941 cohort-group has scored highest of all groups in "space"
(geometry) reasoning , second in "reasoning " (logic), but last in "word
fluency.' '
LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL 51

The 1942-1948 cohort-group has beaten all the others in "verbal meaning,"
but has done little better than average in "numbers skills" and "space"
reasoning.
More recent cohort-groups (born 1949-1962) have shown progressively de-
clining scores across the board .

Such marked contrasts between cohort-groups prompt us to ask searching

questions about the age location and collective biography of each group. As yet,
however, research on cohort effects remains in its infancy, and seldom are such
questions ever addressed . Even when birthyear information is available, most
experts do not bother to isolate it from data presented under other labels. A
typical table shows age on the vertical axis, calendar year on the horizontal.
Thus , by implication (though not by label), the cohort lies along the generational
diagonal. Unless you are looking diagonally for the cohort effect, you will not
see it. And unless you are willing to wait many years, you cannot rule out that
what you see is simply due to aging or to historical trends affecting all age
brackets.
To see how this diagonal can work where other approaches fail, consider the
I 970s-era debate over declining Standard Aptitude Test (SAT) scores among
U.S. high school seniors . For seventeen straight years, from 1964 through 1980,
the average SAT score declined. In 1976, the federal Wirtz Commission attrib-
uted roughly half the fall to the growing share of all high school seniors who
chose to take the test and the rest to such vague period effects as permissiveness
and Jess homework . But in 1988, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) looked
again at the SAT numbers and compared them with the standardized test scores
of younger students . CBO researchers discovered a very close diagonal match-
at all grades-between scores and birth cohorts . In other words, the SAT trend
could have been predicted, in each year, by looking at the lower-grade test
scores in earlier years for each cohort. Even as the Wirtz Commission agonized
in 1976 over the SAT decline, 12-year-olds were already scoring higher than
their next-elders-which (had anyone been looking) could have foretold an SAT
reversal five years in the future. Test scores in the third grade showed improve-
ment by the early 1970s; in the sixth grade by the mid- I 970s; and in junior high
school by the late 1970s. Once these same kids (the 1964 and 1965 cohorts)
reached twelfth grade in the early 1980s, SAT scores did indeed begin rising
again.
Are these aptitude scores linked to any other important cohort shifts? Let's
hunt down the "generational diagonal" among a handful of age-bracketed in-
dicators for violent crime , substance abuse, and drunk driving. These indicators,
of course, always show a marked lifecycle pattern-rising sharply through ad-
olescence, peaking in the early twenties, and falling at higher ages. If we tabulate
52 GENERA TIO NS

these rates by age, however, we can control for the age effect and focus on how
the rate changes, year by year, at any given age. In Figure 2-1, we summarize
data on average grade-school test scores (from ages 8 to 17); per capita con-
sumption of alcohol (17- and 18-year-old students only) and marijuana (17-year-
old students only); per capita arrest rates for arson, robbery, and assault (from
ages IS to 24); and per capita arrest rates for drunk driving (from ages 18 to
24). In a format we use throughout this book, we show age on the vertical axis,
calendar year on the horizontal. For each age, we mark the calendar year at
which the indicator reached its negative extreme (the lowest test score or the
highest rate of crime or substance abuse) since such statistics have been compiled.
No one will have any trouble identifying the diagonal.
The portrait that emerges of the 1961-1964 cohort-group is vivid and un-
flattering. Over the postwar period, at each age through 24, this group has
generated all of America's lowest aptitude-test scores; the highest high school
senior drug and alcohol abuse; all but one of America's highest drunk-driving
rates; and most of America's highest rates for three violent crimes. Very likely
(though detailed age-bracketed data remain unavailable), it has also generated
record rates for many other social pathologies, including suicide. Since most of
the high-crime years cluster around the late 1970s and early I 980~, we might
at first glance suspect that part of the story is a historical trend affecting all age
groups . Yet the behavior of older age brackets rules this out. From the mid-
1970s to the mid- l 980s, while the rates for drunk driving, suicide, and most
violent crimes were accelerating swiftly for 15-to-24-year-olds, they were sta-
bilizing or falling for all age brackets over age 35.
By 1991 , the men and women born from 1961 through 1964 have reached
their late twenties. They are no longer taking aptitude tests and have left their
high-crime and high-drinking ages behind them. We would be naive, however,
to assume that the collective personality of these individuals will simply disappear
as they grow older. Plainly, America is dealing with a troubled cohort-group.
To know why, we must again ponder age location. Individuals born in 1962,
for example, were year-old infants when Jack Kennedy was assassinated; age S
during the ''long hot summer'' of urban rioting; age 7 at the time of anti-Vietnam
marches, the moon landing, Chappaquiddick, and a sudden leap in divorce rates;
age 13 when the Watergate trials ended and the poverty rate for youths rose
steeply Gust when it was plummeting for the elderly); and age 17 when Americans
parked in gas lines and saw angry Iranian mobs cursing America every evening
on TV. We might reflect on what these youngsters saw in their elder brothers
and sisters, heard from their teachers, or sensed from their parents.
LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL 53

FIGURE 2-1
Aptitude Tests, Substance Abuse, Violent Crimes,
and Drunk Driving: The Cohort Diagonal

YEAR
1970 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

AGE
24-
23-
22-
21-
20-
19-
18-
Rapidly falling SAT scores
17-
16-
15-
14-
13-
12-
11-

10-
9- rrl
8- /rrl

FOR A GIVEN AGE: A = highest per capita alcohol consumption

B = highest per capita robbery conviction rate
D = highest per capita drunk-driving arrest rate
M = highest per capita marijuana consumption
R = highest per capita arson conviction rate
S = highest per capita assault conviction rate
T = lowest average aptitude test score
54 GENERATIONS

From Cohorts to Generations

Reading along the generational diagonal shows us that history does not always
move in a straight line . It also prompts us to ask why. What differences in
parental nurture, schooling , adult expectations, economic trends, or cultural tone
might explain why the early- l 960s cohorts scored so low on aptitude tests? Or
why the early-l 920s cohorts (if Seattleites are any guide) grew up scoring so
high? The closer we look , the more interesting such questions become. Why,
for example, did the schoolchildren of the I 930s develop such strong number
skills , and then raise their own children (the ''Jack and Jill'' readers of the I 950s)
to have such a commanding grasp of verbal meaning? What was it about the
nurture of the 1886- I 899 cohort-groups that produced such precocious talent at
word play-culminating in memorable slang, brilliant mystery fiction, the in-
vention of crossword puzzles , five of America ' s nine Nobel Prizes for literature,
and the greatest elder elocutionists (from Adlai Stevenson to Sam Ervin) of the
twentieth century?
Countless such questions lie unanswered among the myriad cohort-groups of
the past four centuries. How and at what age did history shape them? And how
and at what age did they in tum shape history? A few other examples:
During the fifteen years from 1633 to 1647 were born the most berated and
abused children in colonial history, the most notorious seventeenth-century
American pirates and rebels, and about half of all women ever tried and
executed for witchcraft in New England.
During the three years from 172 I to I 723 were born all Americans age I 8 at
the height of the colonial " Great Awakening," the most energetic evan-
gelicals and antislavery activists of the entire eighteenth century-and half
of all delegates over age 50 who attended the First Continental Congress
in 1774.
During the nine years from 1767 to 1775 were born all Americans who watched
the Revolutionary War only as children; all 44 of the methodical and well-
behaved members of the Lewis and Clark expedition; and all three members
of the antebellum " Great Triumvirate" (Clay, Webster, and Calhoun),
known in midlife for hair-splitting oratory, procedural compromises over
the issue of slavery, and twelve failed attempts to run for the Presidency.
During the thirteen years from 1809 to 1821 were born the vast majority of
the best-known reformers, abolitionists, feminists, self-proclaimed proph-
ets, and commune founders of the nineteenth century-and nearly two-
thirds of the Congress in session (plus the President and Vice President) at
the outbreak of the Civil War.
LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL 55

During the eight years from 1822 to 1829 were born most of the Gold Rush
'49ers, the most colorful and effective Civil War generals, the leading
postwar ''scalawag'' southern governors, the most notorious machine bosses
of the Gilded Age, and every American age 64 to 71 during the Crash of
'93-the first recession that forced a categorical retirement of elder workers
to what was then known as the "industrial scrap heap."
During the eleven years from 1869 to 1880 were born nearly all the fiery young
journalists whom Theodore Roosevelt called ''muckrakers,'' nearly half the
Congress that approved Prohibition in 1919, and the leading public figures
(Herbert Hoover, Douglas MacArthur , George Marshall, Bernard Baruch,
and Herbert Lehman) who established, by midcentury, America's global
reputation as a crusading defender of civilized morality .
During the eleven years from 1911 to 1921 were born nearly all the Depression-
era high school graduates whose first job was in a New Deal relief program,
all but one of President Kennedy's leading "best and brightest" advisers,
two-thirds of all Americans ever awarded the Nobel Prize for economics-
and the most aggressive (and effective) elderly lobbyists for public retire-
ment benefits in American history .
During the eight years from 1925 to 1932 were born most of the "Li') Rascals,"
the kids of the Great Depression, the core "beatniks" of the 1950s, and
the vast majority of the most popular social and political satirists during
the entire postwar era, from the 1950s to the present day.
During the two years of 1941 and 1942 were born the children of the Brown
v. Board of Education school desegregation case in 1954, the majority of
the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-in protesters in 1961, the best-known
"black power" advocates of the late 1960s and 1970s, and Jesse Jackson.
During the single year of 1943 were born World War H's home-leave '' goodbye
babies" -and a vastly disproportionate number of the most inner-driven
and judgmental figures of the last several decades, including: Bob Wood-
ward, Gracie Slick, Jim Morrison, Bobby Fischer, Robert Crumb, Randy
Newman, Mitch Snyder, Oliver North, Newt Gingrich, William Bennett,
Richard Darman, and Geraldo Rivera.
During the four years of 1967 to 1970 were born all the children conceived
during the flower-child summers of "love" and antiwar protest, nearly
everyone who first heard about the space shuttle Challenger disaster while
sitting in a high school classroom, and two-thirds of all U.S. soldiers killed
during the American invasion of Panama in December of 1989.

So far we have only focused on narrow birthyear spans. What we need is a

way to simplify age location for all cohorts, to aggregate all Americans into a
larger pattern of distinct biographies.
56 GENERA TIO NS

FIGURE 2-2
The History of the American Lifecycle
in the Twentieth Century

1920 1942 1964 1986

ELDER
Age 66-87 sensitive visionary reclusive busy

MIDLIFE
Age 44-65 moralistic pragmatic powerful indecisive

RISING
Age 22-43 alienated heroic conformist narcissistic

YOUTH
Age 0-21 protected suffocated indulged criticized

To begin, let's build a simple lifecycle framework out of four life phases of
equal twenty-two-year lengths. Accordingly, we define "youth" as lasting from
ages O to 21, " rising adulthood" from ages 22 to 43; "midlife" from ages 44
to 65; and "elderhood" from ages 66 to 87. Now picture a chart with this
Iifecycle on the vertical axis and calendar years on the horizontal axis. We mark
the calendar years at twenty-two-year intervals, so that Americans located in
any one life phase (such as ''youth'') in one marked year will be in the next
life phase ("rising adulthood") in the next marked year. At each intersecting
point, we place an adjective that reflects how contemporaries regarded the per-
sonality of Americans in that phase of life and in that year. We describe midlife
adults in 1920 as "moralistic," for example, since that is how their juniors and
elders perceived them; they were in fact the major proponents of Prohibition.
Filling in all these adjectives, we get the mosaic shown in Figure 2-2.
Reading history horizontally along any single row is to commit the age-bracket
fallacy. No entry seems to have any intrinsic connection to whatever comes
before or after it. If we read along the midlife row, for example, we see life as
political historians usually portray it-as a seamless ribbon of eternal 55-year-
olds. Reading vertically up any single column is to commit the life-course fallacy.
Pick any column, and try to imagine how someone could grow older that way.
You can 't. Yet if we ignore rows and columns and just look at all the adjectives
one by one, the history of the modem American Iifecycle becomes hopelessly
complicated. Everything seems to be changing all the time.
LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL 57

FIGURE 2-3
The Generational Diagonal in the Twentieth Century

1920 1942 1964 1986

ELDER
Age 66-87 sensitive visionary reclusive busy

MIDLIFE
Age 44-65
///
moraJ;s/gmat/'"
RISING
Age 22-43 alienated heroic conformist narcissistic

YOUTH
Age 0-21
///
protected suffocated indulged criticized

There's a third approach: to read history along the generational diagonal,

just as we did with SAT scores. Consider Figure 2-3 .
Let's start at the bottom of the 1942 column and move diagonally up and to
the right, following the same cohort-group: from "suffocated" youths to "con-
fonnist" rising adults to "indecisive" midlifers. This is the story told by Gail
Sheehy in Passages. Switching to the next diagonal to the right, we see Cheryl
Merser 's path. Switching in the other direction, we see the "protected" then
"heroic" then "powerful" then "busy" diagonal of the peers of Erik Erikson
(and John Kennedy). Tracing along these diagonals in sequence, we can avoid
the fallacy of cohort-centrism and monitor how each set of peers has traveled a
separate path through life, from youth to elderhood. With a little imagination,
we can appreciate how each era looked and felt to the people who lived these
different lifecycles.
Each of the diagonals depicted in Figure 2-3, of course, represents more than
just a randomly selected cohort group. Each diagonal represents a generation
possessing its own distinct age location and peer personality . Although smaller
cohort-groups often reveal telling links over time between experience and be-
havior , only generational cohort-groups encompass all individual cohorts and
organize them by peer personality into basic building blocks of social change.
By inquiring into generations-what creates them, how long they are, how their
boundaries can be identified, and how they align in constellations-we can begin
to understand their powerful relationship with history over the centuries.
 Chapter 3

BELONGING TO
A "GENERATION"

"Y ou belong to it, too. You came along at the same time. You can't get
away from it. You're a part of it whether you want to be or not." What is this
"it" in Thomas Wolfe' s dialogue in You Can't Go Home Again? His own "Lost
Generation." To Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cowley, and other like-aged
writers of the 1920s, membership in this generation reflected a variety of emotions
and mannerisms: weary cynicism at a young age, risk-taking, bingelike behavior,
disdain for a pompous "older generation." Wolfe's peers stood across a wide
divide from moralistic midlifers and across another divide from straight-arrow
teenagers who had never known the lethal futility of trench warfare. To belong,
yo,u had to be combat-eligible during World War I and a rising adult when
Prohibition started. No one formally defined it that way. You just knew.
A half century later, demographers tried to define a later generation-Boom-
ers-as all cohorts born during the high-fertility years of 1946 through 1964,
But this statistical definition fails Wolfe's " you belong to it" test. Does a 1944
baby "belong to it"? Absolutely. What about a 1964 baby? Not a chance. Just
ask a few of today's 46-year-olds or 26-year-olds. Clearly, Wolfe understood
something that demographers didn't.
To be sure, people are born all the time-an argument often used to dismiss
the "generation" as a meaningful concept. How can we draw any distinctions
between babies born a day, a year, even a decade apart? Likewise, feet, yards,
and miles are everywhere. But sometimes a foot crosses a national boundary or
1::0
BELONGING TO A "GENERATION " 59

a continental divide . The Spanish sociologist Julian Marfas, wntmg in 1967,

used this analogy to liken generational mapping to " social cartography ." Ex-
amining consecutive cohorts is like tracing land across wide river basins occa-
sionally "creased" by ridges . "In this analogy ," Marfas suggested, "each
generation would be the area between two mountain chains, and in order to
determine whether a certain point belonged to one or the other, it would be
necessary to know the relief. Two widely separated points could belong to the
same generation, or two close points , on the other hand, might belong to different
generations . It would depend on whether the points were on the same slope or
on different sides of a slope .' ' Sometimes Marias' ''creases'' would be a jagged
peak, other times a low rise. Water flows down a low rise less swiftly than down
a jagged peak , but it flows down just as surely in opposite directions .
Like most other social categories-religion, political party, income, occu-
pation, race- generations can be imprecise at the boundaries. We define gen-
erational boundaries (Marfas' "creases") by calendar year-and , of course,
some people born just on one side may really belong on the other. But a little
ambiguity does not keep us from distinguishing Catholics from Protestants,
Democrats from Republicans , or the middle class from the poor. Nor should it
keep us from distinguishing Silent from Boom. "Specifying generations," notes
historian Alan Spitzer, "is no more arbitrary than specifying social classes, or
ideologies, or political movements where there is inevitably a shading off or
ambiguity at the boundaries of categories ."
Then again, even small amounts of time can be decisive in binding-and
separating-generations. In today's era of age gradations, a one-minute delay
in birth (most often at the stroke of the New Year) can mean the difference
between kindergarten and first grade six years later. That decision, in tum, can
mean the difference between wartime draft and schoolroom comfort twelve or
thirteen years farther down the road . (A Ph.D . candidate born on December 31,
1942, had an excellent chance of gliding through graduate school on student
deferments ; one born the next day found it much harder to avoid Vietnam.) In
this respect, a generational boundary is like the federal definition of poverty. A
family whose income is $1 below the income limit for child support will think,
behave, be perceived, and be treated differently from another family whose
income is $1 above the limit. As years pass, the $I-under and $!-over families
will probably grow less alike, thanks to what was at first an arbitrary distinction.
Likewise with generations .
For centuries , the power of the generation has not escaped the eye of phi-
losophers and poets, historians and sociologists. Writing in the early twentieth
century, Jose Ortega y Gasset called the generation " the most important con-
ception in history.'' Many others have shared that view. Since the days of the
Old Testament and ancient Greece, the word "generation " and its various roots
have connoted the essence of life-birth and death, the maturing of youth and
the letting-go of old age, the rise and fall of dynasties and nations . In Appendix
60 GENERATIONS

A, we summarize briefly what has been written over the millennia about what
Karl Mannheim once called the "generations problem." We explain how the
dynamics of generational definition and cyclical change can be inferred from
sources ranging from the Iliad and the Book of Exodus to the writings of several
nineteenth-century Europeans. We attempt to go beyond our predecessors by not
just talking about "generations" in the abstract, but by defining the term precisely
enough to batch real-life cohort-groups into generations-and fix them in history.
Once we do this, we can understand the relationships among them-and, es-
pecially, how and why they occur in cycles.
We begin with the following definition:
A GENERATION is a cohort-group whose length approximates the span of a
phase of life and whose boundaries are fixed by peer personality.

This definition includes two important elements: first, the length of a gen-
erational cohort-group, and second, its peer personality .

The Length of a Generation

Let's begin with the question of length . Although social philosophers over
the last two centuries have often (like ourselves) defined a generation as a cohort-
group, they have had difficulty explaining how long it should be. Many have
wrongly suggested that the length be based on the average age of parenthood-
that is, the average span of years that pass between being born and giving birth.
This rhythm of genealogy makes sense when applied to an individual family
over a few decades, but not to an entire society, nor even to many families over
a longer period. The reason is simple: Parents give birth to children at widely
differing ages (typically from their mid-teens to early forties), and children
intermarry with other families with equally wide birth distributions. Each chain
of parent-to-child lineage produces a single thread of family time, but combining
millions of such threads produces no single rope of social time.
We choose instead to base the length of a generational cohort-group on the
length of a phase of life. We define life phases in terms of central social roles.
Returning to the twenty-two-year phases we used in Chapter 2, let's outline what
these roles might include:
ELDERHOOD (age 66-87). Central role: stewardship (supervising, mentor-
ing, channeling endowments, passing on values).
MIDLIFE (age 44-65) . Central role: leadership (parenting, teaching, directing
institutions, using values).
RISING ADULTHOOD (age 22-43). Central role: activity (working, starting
families and livelihoods, serving institutions, testing values).
BELONGING TO A ''GENERATION' ' 61

YOUTH (age 0-21 ). Central role: dependence (growing, learning, accepting

protection and nurture, avoiding harm, acquiring values) .

These central role descriptions are only suggestive . All we require is that
each role be different and that the age borders for each role be well defined.
Practically every society recognizes a discrete coming-of-age moment (or "rite
of passage") separating the dependence of youth from the independence of
adulthood . This moment is critical in creating generations; any sharp contrast
between the experiences of youths and rising adults may fix important differences
in peer personality that last a lifetime . Most societies also recognize a midlife
transition when an adult is deemed qualified for society's highest leadership
posts, and an age of declining physiological potential when adults are expected
or forced to retire from strenuous social and economic life. In America over the
last two centuries, our twenty-two-year intervals reflect these divisions. Ages
21-22 have approximated the age of legal majority , the end of apprenticeship,
the first year after college, the release of noncollege men from the armed forces,
and (from around 1820 until 1971) first suffrage; ages 43-44, the youngest age
of any successful Presidential candidate ; and ages 65-66 , a typical age (and,
since the 1940s, often an official age) for retirement.
Now suppose a decisive event-say , a major war or revolution-suddenly
hits this society . Clearly, the event will affect each age group differently ac-
cording to its central role . In the case of a major war , we can easily imagine
youths encouraged and willing to keep out of the way (dependence) , rising adults
to arm and meet the enemy (activity) , midlifers to organize the troops and manage
the home front (leadership), and elders to offer wisdom and perspective (stew-
ardship). We can also imagine how most people will emerge from the trauma
with their personalities permanently reshaped in conformance with the role they
played (or were expected to play but didn 't). The decisive event, therefore,
creates four distinct cohort-groups-each about twenty-two years in length and
each possessing a special collective personality that will later distinguish it from
its age-bracket neighbors as it ages in place. If future decisive events arrive when
all of these cohort-groups are well positioned in older life phases, then those
events will reinforce the separate identities of older cohort-groups and create
new and distinct twenty-two-year cohort-groups among the children born since
the last event.
The result over time is a series of distinct cohort-groups that includes everyone
ever born. Each of these we call a "generation, " and each of these possesses
what we call a "peer personality ."
We cannot, of course, expect that the length of every generation must always
be twenty-two years-or any other precise number. The world is far too com-
plicated to follow our simple model like clockwork. The effective length of each
phase of life is always shifting a bit from one era to the next. Throughout
American history, we can find some eras when youths became scrappy adven-
62 GENERA TIO NS

turers or valiant soldiers in their late teens, and others in which they waited well
into their twenties before leaving home. During the 1960s and 1970s, for ex-
ample, the coming-of-age division between youth and rising adulthood drifted
upward in age and the division between midlife leadership and elder stewardship
drifted downward. During the 1930s and 1940s, with very different peer per-
sonalities occupying each phase of life, these two divisions drifted in the reverse
directions . Large and sudden changes, however, are quite rare . When have most
Americans come of age? Not always at age 22, but not often many years sooner
or later.
Even though generational membership does not depend at all on family lineage
(brothers and sisters or husbands and wives may fall anywhere with respect to
cohort-group boundaries), the special bonds-emotional, biological, social, eco-
nomic-connecting parents to their own children clearly matter. In fact, family
relationships follow a pattern that offers three important corollaries to our cohort-
based definition of a "generation":
A generation's parents (or children) are distributed over the two preceding
(or two succeeding) generations;
A generation's early or 'first-wave'' cohorts are likely to have an earlier
parent generation than late or "last-wave" cohorts; and
Each generation has an especially strong nurturing influence on the second
succeeding generation.

The first rule reflects the link between the age distribution of childbearing
(with the average age of mothers and fathers typically ranging from 20 to 45)
and the average length of successive generations (twenty-two years). Consider
parents belonging to the Silent Generation, the 1925-to- l 942 cohort-group. With
a few stray exceptions, their earliest children appeared in the mid-l 940s, born
to young parents themselves born in 1925; their latest children appeared in the
early 1980s, born to midlife parents themselves born in 1942. The total birthyear
span from the eldest to the youngest children of Silent parents thus approximates
the combined 1943-to- l 98 l birthyear span of the Boom and 13th Generations .
The distribution, moreover, is bell-shaped-meaning that most of these children
were Boomers born in the 1950s and J 3ers born in the 1960s. Continuing down
the family tree, we would find that each generation spreads its grandchildren
roughly over three later generations-the second, third, and fourth successors.
The second rule, the distinction between what we call a generation's "first
wave" and "last wave," helps us understand differences in the nurture received
by early as opposed to late cohorts in any single generation. Boomers are a good
example: Their first wave (born in the mid- J940s) includes mostly children of
confident G.l.s, their last wave (born in the late 1950s) mostly children of the
more ambivalent Silent. This distinction, in turn, can produce differences in the
BELONGING TO A "GENERATION" 63

behavior later expressed by a generation's two waves. Among Boomers, for

instance, the last wave came of age showing more pathologies (crime, drug use,
suicide, low aptitude scores) than the first wave.
Finally, the crucial nurturing relationships between generations two apart
reflect the greater social influence of older over younger parents. By 1960 (the
last Boom birthyear), G.I. and Silent parents were raising Boomer children in
roughly equal numbers. But the fortyish and fiftyish G.I.s-from Dr. Spock and
Walt Disney to school principals and scout leaders-had much greater influence
in 1960 over the childhood environment than did the twentyish and thirtyish
Silent. Similarly, the 1970s were a decade in which Silent and Boom parents
together raised 13er children, but the fortyish Silent set the tone-from Sesame
Street and open classrooms to rising divorce rates and the decline of G-rated
movies. Now, as the 1990s dawn, Boomers (not 13ers) are asserting control of
the world of Millennial children. Between any two parenting generations, the
one in midlife naturally exercises a greater cultural and institutional influence
than the one in rising adulthood .

Peer Personality

So far we have established, in the abstract, something about how generations

are created, how long they are, and how they relate to family genealogy. But
how do we actually identify one? For that, we have to focus our attention on
''peer personality'' -the element in our definition that distinguishes a generation
as a cohesive cohort-group with its own unique biography. The peer personality
of a generation is essentially a caricature of its prototypical member. It is, in its
sum of attributes, a distinctly personlike creation . A generation has collective
attitudes about family life, sex roles, institutions, politics, religion, lifestyle,
and the future. It can be safe or reckless, calm or aggressive, self-absorbed or
outer-driven, generous or selfish, spiritual or secular, interested in culture or
interested in politics. In short, it can think, feel, or do anything an individual
might think, feel, or do. Between any two generations, as between any two
neighbors , such personalities can mesh, clash, be attracted to or repelled by one
another.
As a social category, a generation probably offers a safer basis for personality
generalization than such other social categories as sex, race, region, or age. We
can more easily fix a consensus personality for the Lost (or for Boomers) than
we ever could for women, or Hispanics, or Californians, or all the 30-year-olds
of a given century. The reason, in the words of Italian historian Giuseppe Ferrari,
is that a generation "is born, lives, and dies . " Like any individual-and unlike
other social groups-a generation collectively feels historical urgency and fi-
nality, conscious of the unrepeatable opportunities offered by whatever phase
64 GENERA TIO NS

of life it occupies. It understands that work left undone at each phase of life
may never be done by others-or at least not in a way an aging generation might
wish it done. In contrast, a sex, an age bracket, and (probably) a race will endure
as long as the human species survives.
Like any group, a generation includes all kinds of people. Yet individual
divergences from peer personality, and how those divergences are perceived,
can explain much about a generation. In some respects, a peer personality gives
heavy focus to the attitudes and experiences of the generational elite-what
Ferrari called i capi della societa, i re def pensiero, i signori della generazione
("the heads of society, the kings of thought, the lords of the generation"). But
while they commonly express the tone of a generation's peer personality, the
personality itself is often established by non-elites. In particular, the attitudes
of women and mothers toward their own sex roles and family roles are central
to a generation's peer personality . Likewise, groups which are (or feel) at the
social periphery-immigrants, blacks, fundamentalists-often play a major role
in fixing or revealing their generation's peer personality.
We can use peer personality to identify a generation and find the boundaries
separating it from its neighbors . To do so, we need a working definition-one
that will tell us what evidence we need and how to evaluate it. We offer the
following three-part test:

A PEER PERSONALITY is a generational persona recognized and determined

by (1) common age location; (2) common beliefs and behavior; and (3)
perceived membership in a common generation.

To assess the peer personality of any cohort-group, we look first at its chro-
nology: its common age location, where its lifecycle is positioned against the
background chronology of historic trends and events. Second, we look at its
attributes: objective measures of its common beliefs and behavior, identifying
which cohorts share common personality traits. Third, we look at awareness:
how society perceives membership in a common generation-that is, who is
generally considered a member and who is not.

Chronology: Common Age Location in History

Practically all generations writers have agreed that members of a generation

feel the ebb and flow of history from basically the same age or phase-of-life
perspective. To find a generation, we look for a cohort-group whose members
"came along at the same time" (as Wolfe put it)-who are nurtured as children,
enter adulthood, and pass through subsequent life phases during eras that show
no sudden discontinuities. Studying his tempestuous (Hitlerian) peers from
abroad, the German sociologist Karl Mannheim invented the term Generations-
BELONGING TO A "GENERATION" 65

lagerung ("generational setting") to refer to the sense of common historical

location shared by a well-defined cohort-group. He described it as "a community
of date and space'' and a common location in the historical dimension of .the
social process" in which a generation encounters "the same concrete historical
problems." Mannheim's Spanish peer Jose Ortega y Gasset similarly defined a
generation as a set of "coetaneous" cohorts, born within "zones of dates"
which make them "the same age vitally and historically."
Within each generation, a sense of social community-reinforced by the
expectations of elders-can create something akin to gravity and pull outlying
cohorts into a common peer personality. At any one time, a generation of average
length can stretch from newborn babies to graduate students or, alternatively,
from 19- to 40-year-olds. Any major event will touch its youngest and oldest
members in dissimilar ways, even when they belong to the same phase of life.
But the experiences of a few important cohorts can strongly influence the lifelong
reflections of a much larger cohort-group. Austrian historian Wilhelm Pinder
wrote of ''decisive clusters of births'' which develop a ''generational entelechy, ''
a social and emotional center of gravity pulling at a larger group of slightly older
or younger peers.
Consider, as a modem example, the World War II combat cohorts born
between 1915 and 1924. They pulled on older (but not younger) cohorts, who
saw themselves participating in the same collective struggle-taking the same
risks and earning the same rewards. Or consider the draft-influenced Vietnam-
era cohorts born between 1943 and 1949. They pulled on younger (but not older)
cohorts who identified with their experiences. Cheryl Merser recalls that, for
many Boomers born in the 1950s, their "sixties took place in the seventies."
Merser uses the word "sixties" to identify not a date-fixed era, but a sense of
generational setting. Her classmates came of age with something everyone would
recognize as a "sixties" experience, albeit dislocated and not quite authentic.
No one had his "sixties" in the fifties or eighties. Likewise, it would be mean-
ingless to speak of anyone having his ''.seventies" in the eighties. People born
in 1944 and 1954 are, by this definition, part of the same Generationslagerung.
Those born in 1964 are not.
To find boundaries between generations, we look closely at the history sur-
rounding two moments: birth and coming of age. Some boundaries arise in years
when older generations, especially parents, change their nurturing attitudes to-
ward children. As we shall see, such shifts in child nurture typically occur during
or just after eras of exceptional spiritual fervor (for example, the 1741-1742,
1842-1843, or 1981-1982 shifts) or during or just after major crises in public
life (the 1859-1860 or 1942-1943 shifts). Generational boundaries can also result
from sudden differences in how war hits members of adjacent cohorts (1842-
1843, 1900-1901, or 1924-1925) or in how the ebbing of spiritual enthusiasm
closes a door of communication between coming-of-age youngsters of successive
cohorts (1723-1724, 1882-1883, or 1960-1961) . There is no single rule for
66 GENERATIONS

locating a decisive shift in age location that divides adjacent generations . Usually,
many historical trends are at work, most of them pointing to the same boundary.

Attributes: Common Beliefs and Behavior

As a generation ages, its inner beliefs retain a certain consistency over its
lifecycle, much like the personality of an individual growing older. Writing in
the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte noted how each generation develops a
"unanimous adherence to certain fundamental notions." Wilhelm Dilthey spoke
of a generational Weltanschauung, a web of beliefs and attitudes about ultimate
questions that each generation carries with it from rising adulthood through old
age. Certain important behavioral traits also offer important clues about gener-
ational boundaries. Sometimes we notice a boundary when we observe social
pathologies peaking and then receding in frequency-as, for example, across
the troubled cohorts of the early 1960s that we examined earlier. Almost any
kind of data can offer evidence about peer personalities: data on marriage, crime,
fertility, suicide, education, aptitude, accidents, divorce, drug consumption,
alcoholism, voting, work habits, and ambition. Telling contrasts often appear
in famous personages born across adjacent cohorts (for example, across the 1723-
1724, 1821-1822, 1859-1860, and 1924-1925 cohort pairs).
The beliefs and behavior of a generation never show up uniformly across all
of its members. As Ortega observed, the generational experience is a "dynamic
compromise between the mass and the individual." But even those who differ
from the peer norm are generally aware of their noncomformity. Within each
generation, we find examples of what the German sociologist Julius Peterson
called "directive," "directed," and "suppressed" individual personalities. The
"directive" individual helps set the overall tone, the "directed" follows and
legitimizes his peers' mind-set, and the "suppressed" either withdraws from his
peers or spends a lifetime struggling against them. A "directive" in one gen-
eration might have been a "suppressed" in another, or vice versa-but any
individual is well aware of the difference between reality and might-have-beens.
Among G.l.s, for example, Walt Disney was a "directive" tone-setter, Walter
Cronkite a "directed" tone-follower, and Jack Kerouac a "suppressed" rebel
who struggled against his generation. Among G.l. Presidents, we might describe
Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan as "directive"; Nixon, Ford, and Bush as "di-
rected"; and Carter as "suppressed ." (Carter's fixation on fair process, "ma-
laise," and "small earth" rhetoric aligned him with his juniors, in clear
opposition to his own hubristic G.l. peers.)
Consider one present-day example of "directive" and "suppressed" types:
the findings of the annual UCLA survey of college freshmen. From the late
1960s to the late 1980s, the share of all students giving high priority to "de-
veloping a philosophy of life" has fallen, roughly, from 80 percent to 40 per-
BELONGING TO A " GENERATION" 67

cent-while the share that prefers "being very well off financially " has risen
commensurately. In both eras, clearly, plenty of young people have been in both
camps. But, also in both eras, people in the minority have been acutely aware
that they are running against the tide of their peer consensus. In 1970, any college
senior who interviewed for a job with Dow Chemical (maker of napalm) had
heavy explaining to do when he came back to his dorm room. In 1990, by
contrast, any youngster who picketed a Dow recruiter was looked upon as a
throwback by peers who generally agreed that "Dow Lets You Do Great
Things." A one-third-to-two-thirds electoral victory is usually considered a co-
lossal landslide that lets both winners and losers know exactly where they stand.
The same holds for peer personality . As Thomas Wolfe warned, "You can ' t get
away from it.''
We can apply no reductive rules for comparing the beliefs and behavior of
one cohort-group with those of its neighbors. Social science data, though vital,
must be interpreted in the proper historical context . We always have to ask what
each statistic tells us about the total person-about the balance between inner
and outer life, or risk-taking , or individual self-esteem, or collective self-
confidence. Trends in alcohol and drug consumption data generally do reflect
the same personality traits over the centuries: High rates of substance abuse have
always indicated an attraction to risk , a passion for self-discovery, and defiance
of institutional norms . The rise in drug and alcohol consumption during the
1890s says much the same about generations alive in 1910 as the rise during the
1960s and 1970s says about generations alive today . Average marriage age, on
the other hand, must be interpreted differently from decade to decade depending
on social conventions . In the early 1700s, coming-of-age men who wanted to
conform to elders ' expectations and reduce lifetime risks tended to delay marriage
and stay with their parents. In the 1950s, by contrast, young men and women
pursued the same goals by accelerating marriage and moving out early.

Awareness: Perceived Membership

in a Common Generation

''Each of us moves with the men of our generation ,' ' Julian Marfas observed
two decades ago . " To ask ourselves to which generation we belong is, in large
measure, to ask who we are ." Most people know their own generation. And
they usually have a good intuitive feeling for the generational membership of
their next-elders and next-jun iors .
Awareness of generational membership helps us most with boundary cohorts
possessed of Pinder's ' 'entelechy. '' Even when these cohorts reveal few objective
clues about where they belong, they often cry out with unambiguous subjective
perceptions . The hardboiled Lost novelists born in 1898-1899 (like Fitzgerald
and Hemingway) made it clear that they felt hugely different from what Fitzgerald
68 GENERA TIO NS

called the "bright and alien" youngsters (like Lindbergh and Disney) born in
1901-1902. The lifelong media ripple that has accompanied the 1943 cohort
offers an even better example of how awareness can nail down a generational
boundary. These Americans were the first toddlers to be labeled "Dr. Spock"
children; the first high school debaters to include self-described "extremists";
the first college class (1965) to be called "radical"; the first Vietnam-era draft-
card burners; the eldest among the "Americans Under 25'' whom Time magazine
named its "1967 Man of the Year"; and among the last 29-year-olds (in 1972)
who still heard the phrase "under-30 generation" before its sudden disappear-
ance. Today, find a person born in 1943. Ask him whether he identifies with
those a bit older or younger than himself. Probably, he will say the latter. Find
someone born in 1942, and the answer will just as probably be the opposite.
Generational awareness applies not only to where a cohort-group finds itself
today, but also to where it is expected to go tomorrow. Ortega likens a fully
come-of-age generation to "a species of biological missile hurled into space at
a given instant, with a certain velocity and direction," on a "preestablished vital
trajectory." Mannheim calls this a generation's "essential destiny." For some
generations, this sense of destiny is very strong; for others it is nonexistent. The
cohesion of postwar G.l.s reflected a keen generational consensus about the
world they wanted and expected to build-adding to the sense of collective
triumph when John Kennedy brought his peers to power in 1961. Two earlier
American generations also shared a strong sense of Mannheim's "essential des-
tiny" in reconstructing the outer world: the peers of Thomas Jefferson and the
peers of Cotton Mather. In all three cases, elders and juniors alive at the time
reinforced this expectation: They too expected greatness from these generations.
A generation, like an individual, merges many different qualities, no one of
which is definitive standing alone. But once all the evidence is assembled, we
can build a persuasive case for identifying (by birthyear) eighteen generations
over the course of American history. All Americans born over the past four
centuries have belonged to one or another of these generations. To paraphrase
Wolfe, they belonged whether they wanted to or not.
Our next and deeper challenge is to identify recurring elements in these peer
personalities, suggestive of a relationship between the sequence of generations
and the larger pattern of history. We now turn to the cycle.
 Chapter4
THE FOUR-PART
CYCLE

Vnually every American in his fifties or older in 1991 remembers where

he was, what he was doing, and how old he was when the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor Sunday was unquestionably a
generation-shaping event. To mobilize America for total war, each generation
suddenly defined (or redefined) itself according to its phase-of-life role: aging
Missionaries as stewards of national purpose, midlife Lost as on-the-scene man-
agers, rising-adult G.l.s as soldiers and workers, and Silent children as stay-
out-of-the-way dependents. Move forward a half century and picture how the
principal generations alive today look back on (and remain associated with)
World War II. The G .l.s fought it, the Silent saw it through a child's awestruck
eyes, Boomers were nurtured in its exuberant aftermath, and 13ers know it only
as ''history.''
Now repeat this exercise with the headline events that marked the month
between July 18 and August 18, 1969: the first Apollo moon landing, Chap-
paquiddick, and Woodstock . Much like Pearl Harbor Sunday, the midsummer
of 1969 anchored a pivotal era of generational definition . Once again, Americans
of all ages played out their respective phase-of-life roles-though this time, of
course, the collective result was maximum convulsion rather than maximum
cooperation. Speaking for the aging G.I.s, now the all-powerful stewards of
national direction, Richard Nixon announced after the moon landing: "This is
the greatest week in the history of mankind since the Creation. " By now feeling
,CCI
70 GENERATIONS

frustrated, the Silent began to break away from their rising-adult conformism
and to find fault with G.I. constructions. Anthony Lewis complained that the
Apollo mission gave him "a guilty conscience" -and Ted Kennedy's ill-fated
adventure signaled the traumatic, divorce-plagued future awaiting Silent-led fam-
ilies. Meanwhile, at Woodstock, coming-of-age Boomers established a gener-
ational community that was as defiantly anti-G.I. as anything they could possibly
have concocted. And in the newly self-absorbed culture of the late 1960s, child
l 3ers found themselves emotionally uninvited in a world that expected kids to
grow up fast. Over the next decade of social upheaval, each generation would
again define (or redefine) itself, and in so doing would entirely recast the phase
of life it was entering: G.l.s (elderhood), Silent (midlife), Boomers (rising adult-
hood), and 13ers (youth).
These two events-and the eras surrounding them-clearly made a strong
impression on the generations participating in them. And by reading along their
separate diagonals, we can imagine how each of these generations constitutes
an active, living bridge between the mood of D-Day and the mood of the moon
landing, divorce epidemic, and Woodstock several decades later. World War II
empowered G.l.s as America's greatest twentieth-century collection of civic
doers and rationalists. So too did it encourage them to overreach as they ap-
proached elderhood-a hubris that appeared arrogant and soulless to their juniors .
The Silent, painfully aware of their own lack of catharsis, came of age emulating
their war-hero next-elders-and then, on the edge of midlife, began to com-
pensate by engaging in high-risk personal behavior. Among Boomers, the post-
war G.I. dogma of science and optimism planted the seeds of spiritual rebellion
and defiance. A still-younger generation of 13ers, disconnected from the focal
event that had influenced all three of their generational elders, passed through
childhood without an adult-perceived mission.
Since 1969, the span of roughly one more generation has passed. Everyone
has moved up one lifecycle notch, and Millennials are now replacing Bers in
youth. Yet memories of World War II and the late 1960s still define generational
mind-sets. In January 1989, in his last speech to the nation as President, G .I.
Ronald Reagan regretted the fading memory of World War II heroism and urged
Americans to teach what he termed "civic ritual" to Millennial schoolchildren .
A baby born on the day Reagan gave that speech had more personal distance
from Pearl Harbor Sunday-a span of just over forty-seven years-than the
forty-six-year distance Reagan himself had, as a newborn, from Lee's final Civil
War surrender to Grant at Appomattox . Similarly, the echoes of the 1960s live
on in countless ways in our public and private lives-for example, in the cam-
paigns of Boomer William Bennett (first as Education Secretary and next as
''Drug Czar'') to protect children from the lingering detritus of his peers' coming-
of-age years, and of Senator Albert Gore to challenge the global environmental
harms wrought by G.I. science. Just as 5-year-old Boomers grew up amid the
THE FOUR-PART CYCLE 71

giddy optimism of secular achievement, 5-year-old Millennials are being nurtured

in the sober aftermath of spiritual discovery .
What we see in this unfolding tale is part of a generational cycle-and the
importance of what we call "social moments" in directing its evolution . Were
we to back up to the years around 1910, we would find ourselves at a similar
position in a prior cycle. And we would sense the influence of a comparable
pair of prior social moments (the Civil War and the tumultuous 1890s) in defining
the American generations alive at that time and reinforcing similar differences
in their peer personalities at each phase of life.

A SOCIAL MOMENT is an era, typically lasting about a decade, when people

perceive that historic events are radically altering their social environment.
How do we know a social moment when we see it? The best way is to live
through one, or to listen to someone who has . It is an era when everyone senses-
at the time and afterward-that history is moving swiftly, that the familiar world
is disappearing and a new world is emerging. One such moment arrived with
Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 and stretched through VJ-Day in 1945.
Those thirteen years visibly rearranged nearly every feature of the American
social landscape, from the function of government and the organization of the
economy to man's relationship with technology and the U.S. role in world affairs.
The next such moment arrived in the late 1960s and lasted through the 1970s.
During that ''Consciousness Revolution ,'' Americans again experienced a re-
shuffling of national life, an amalgam of radical changes in attitudes toward
family, language, dress, duty , community, sex, and art. Pick any cultural artifact
created in this century-from novels to slang to clothing-and even if you could
say nothing else about it, you could probably tell whether it came along before,
during, or after this "revolution ." As these two examples suggest, social mo-
ments can be very different from one another. In fact:

There are two types of social moments : SECULAR CRISES, when society
focuses on reordering the outer world of institutions and public behavior;
and SPIRITUAL AWAKENINGS, when society focuses on changing the
inner world of values and private behavior .
Social moments do not arrive at random . For example, a secular crisis and
a spiritual awakening never occur back to back . Nor does half a century ever
pass without a social moment of either type . Instead, social moments arrive on
a rather regular schedule .

Social moments normally arrive in time intervals roughly separated by two

phases of life (approximately forty to forty-five years), and they alternate
in type between secular crises and spiritual awakenings.
72 GENERATIONS

In Appendix A, we explain in some detail how and why this timing of social
moments tends to occur in nontraditional societies like America, and how it is
linked to a cyclical creation of generations and generational types. At the heart
of our explanation lies the premise that each generation tries to redefine the
social role of older phases of life as it matures through them. After a social
moment has reinforced a "dependent" social role in children, for example, that
cohort-group will later try to redefine rising adulthood in terms of that depend-
ence. (Picture the Silent peers of Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart, the passive
children of depression and war who came of age during the culturally quiescent
1950s.) Likewise, rising adults in whom an "active" role was reinforced will
try to retain that role as they move into midlife . (Picture the G. I. peers of John
Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who reached adulthood in World War II, then
chafed impatiently until they surged to power around 1960.)
Such redefinitions sustain themselves through one phase-of-life transition .
They cannot, however, work through two such transitions. A dependent role
cannot be transferred into midlife, nor an active role into elderhood. At that
point-roughly two phases removed from the earlier social moment-the grow-
ing incongruity between peer personality and age must induce a new social
moment and realign social roles back into their original life phases. The midlife
Silent, for instance, could not retain their dependency role-prompting the sud-
den emphasis on personal redefinition (and risk-taking) that Gail Sheehy labeled
"passages." The new social moment represents a reaction against the ossifying
and dysfunctional roles forged by each generation during the earlier social mo-
ment. As a result, the new social moment will be opposite in type from the one
that came before. Fueling the secular changes of the Depression and World War
II, for example, were rising-adult G.l.s who helped steer America away from
what they considered to be futile moralisms left over from tum-of-the-century
reform movements. Likewise, fueling the spiritual changes of the late 1960s and
1970s were rising-adult Boomers who prodded America away from postwar
secularism and back toward a fresh commitment to moral passion.
This two-life-phase pattern means that the age location of successive gener-
ations, relative to any social moment, falls into an alternating rhythm. If the
first generation (say, the G. I. s) is entering rising adulthood during one social
moment, then the second generation (Silent) is entering y,outh during the same
moment, the third (Boom) entering rising adulthood during the second moment,
the fourth (13th) entering youth during the second moment, and so on. We label
generations with the first and third age location (Boom and G.l.) as "dominant"
generations; those with the second and fourth (Silent and 13th) as "recessive ."
In other words:

During social moments, DOMINANT generations are entering rising adult-

hood and elderhood.
THE FOUR-PART CYCLE 73

During social moments , RECESSIVE generations are entering youth and

midlife .
We display the pattern schematically in Figure 4-1, again with phases of life
on the vertical and calendar years on the horizontal. (Since social moments
normally arise as each generation is entering a phase of life, with each moment
typically culminating when the generation has fully entered it, we show them
appearing somewhat before each twenty-two-year interval.) Read along the gen-
erational diagonal, and notice how dominant and recessive generations pass
through social moments at alternating life phases .
FIGURE 4-1
The Generational Diagonal:
Dominant and Recessive Generations
SOCIAL MOMENT
Secular Spiritual
Crisis Awakening

YEAR Year 0 Year 22 Year 44 Year 66

ELDER
Age 66-87 Recessive Dominant Recessive Dominant

MIDLIFE
Age 44-65 D ~ - ~ - /..
ommant /Decess1ve /Rommant /ess1ve
RISING R
Age 22-43 ecess1ve - ommant ecess1ve - Dominant

YOUTH
Age 0-21 Dominant~cessive ~inant~essive

Each generation shown in Figure 4- I has a unique age location relative to

each type of social moment. Of the two dominant generations, one enters rising
adulthood during a crisis and enters elderhood during an awakening, the other
the opposite . Of the two recessive generations, one enters youth during a crisis
and enters midlife during an awakening, the other the opposite. Thus, every
generation has a unique phase-of-life position before and after each type of social
moment, a unique set of generational neighbors, and (recalling our genealogical
discussion in Chapter 3) a unique combination of parents and children. Conse-
quently , each of the four generations develops its own unique type of peer
personality.
These four generational types recur in a fixed order . Moving up vertically
from the youths in year 44 of Figure 4-1, their lifecycles can be described as
follows:
74 GENERA TIO NS

I. A dominant, inner-fixated IDEALIST GENERATION grows up as increas-

ingly indulged youths after a secular crisis ; comes of age inspiring a spiritual
awakening; fragments into narcissistic rising adults; cultivates principle as
moralistic midlifers; and emerges as visionary elders guiding the next secular
crisis .

2. A recessive REACTIVE GENERATION grows up as underprotected and

criticized youths during a spiritual awakening; matures into risk-taking,
alienated rising adults ; mellows into pragmatic midlife leaders during a secular
crisis; and maintains respect (but less influence) as reclusive elders .

3. A dominant , outer-fixated CIVIC GENERATION grows up as increasingly

protected youths after a spiritual awakening ; comes of age overcoming a
secular crisis; unites into a heroic and achieving cadre of rising adults; sustains
that image while building institutions as powerful midlifers; and emerges as
busy elders attacked by the next spiritua l awakening.

4 . A recessive ADAPTIVE GENERATION grows up as overprotected and suf-

focated youths during a secular crisis; matures into risk-averse, conformist
rising adults; produces indecisive midlife arbitrator-leaders during a spiritual
awakening; and maintains influence (but less respect) as sensitive elders.

The dominant generational types encounter their first social moment entering
rising adulthood-for (Boomer) Idealists, an awakening ; for (G.I.) Civics, a
crisis. Taking their social roles with them into midlife, they tend to monopolize
the style of adulthood in the public world-the Idealists dominating rhetoric and
culture, the Civics technology and institutions. The recessive types-(13er)
Reactives and (Silent) Adaptives-encounter their first social moment as chil-
dren. They compensate for their diminished public role by exercising a com-
mensurately greater influence on the private world of human relationships.
Raising their own children, for example , Reactives have a tendency to restore
protectiveness, Adaptives to allow greater freedom. Recessive generations also
play critical midlife roles in social moments-Adaptives as flexible mediators
in spiritual awakenings , Reactives as pragmatic managers of secular crises .
In sum, Idealist generations tend to live what we might label a prophetic life-
cycle of vision and values; Reactives a picaresque lifecycle of survival and ad-
venture; Civics a heroic lifecycle of secular achievement and reward; and
Adaptives a genteel lifecycle of expertise and amelioration . When we reach Chap-
ter I 2, we will return to these lifecycle paradigms in much greater detail. For now,
Jet's take Figure 4-1 one step further , by labeling each of these four types.
In Figure 4-2, .we see the generational cycle. These four generational types
recur in fixed order, given one important condition: that society resolves with
reasonable success each secular crisis that it encounters . When this condition
does not hold, the cycle experiences an interruption-in effect , skipping a beat.
THE FOUR-PART CYCLE 75

FIGURE 4-2
From the Diagonal to the Cycle: Four Generational Types
SOCIAL MOMENT

Secular Spiritual
Crisis Awakening

YEAR Year 22 Year 44 Year 66

ELDER
Age 66-87

MIDLIFE
Adapti/de,ii/
"""/'"'/''"/''"'"
Age 44-65

RISING
Age 22-43

YOUTH
Age 0-21
R""/''''/'''/'"'"
Civic Adaptive Idealist - Reactive

If a secular crisis weakens instead of strengthens the confidence of rising

adults, then a Reactive generation can be followed by an Adaptive rather
than a Civic . This has happened once in American history, in the nineteenth
century. We cannot say for sure whether other beats could be skipped. We
can only say that in America, so far, they have not been .
If this four-type cycle revolves in a fixed sequence, so too must the shifting
age location of all four types as they layer themselves from one era to the next.
Each time one type is entering rising adulthood , for instance, the other types
entering other phases of life will all line up in a predictable pattern. We call
each of these four recurring patterns a generational "constellation," . each with
its own " era " and "mood." The two-apart eras when Idealists and Civics come
of age have moods reflecting the social moments (spiritual awakenings or secular
crises) that occur largely within those eras. The intervening eras when Reactives
or Adaptives come of age have moods reflecting a period of transition from one
social moment to the next.
Picture the cycle of shifting constellations as you might imagine the seasonal
transformation of nature: alternating between the heat of summer and the cold
of winter, the germination of spring and the harvest of autumn . Through the
generational seasons of social history, beginning with a spiritual awakening, we
see the following four constellational eras and moods:
76 GENERATIONS

An AWAKENING ERA (Idealists coming of age) triggers cultural creativity

and the emergence of new ideals, as institutions built around old values are
challenged by the emergence of a spiritual awakening.
In an INNER-DRIVEN ERA (Reactives coming of age), individualism flour-
ishes, new ideals are cultivated in separate camps, confidence in institutions
declines, and secular problems are deferred.
A CRISIS ERA (Civics coming of age) opens with growing collective unity
in the face of perceived social peril and culminates in a secular crisis in
which danger is overcome and one set of new ideals triumphs.
In an OUTER-DRIVEN ERA (Adaptives coming of age), society turns toward
conformity and stability, triumphant ideals are secularized, and spiritual
discontent is deferred.

We define the chronological end of each era by locating the specific year of
what we call an "aligned" constellation: the moment at which the last cohort
of a new generation is born and each older generation has fully moved into a
new phase of life (years 0, 22, 44, and 66 in Figure 4-2). Aligned constellations
arrive as often as new generations arrive-about once every twenty-two years.
An Awakening era ends, for example, in the year when the last cohort of a new
Reactive generation is born; this will roughly coincide with the year when the
last cohort of an Idealist generation has entered rising adulthood, and similarly
when older Adaptive and Civic generations have fully moved into midlife and
elderhood. (The most recent such year would be 1981; before that, 1900.) At
this point, the cycle reaches an aligned Awakening constellation. The following
Inner-Driven era will then last until an aligned Inner-Driven constellation, and
so on.
While all four generational types contribute to the nature of each constella-
tional era, the two dominant types-Idealist and Civic-are key. Coming of
age into rising adulthood, these two types recast society's new "active" agenda,
either from secular to spiritual or vice versa. The G. I. s did this in the years
between 1932 and 1945, Boomers during the late 1960s and 1970s. Entering
midlife, with recessive generations behind them, they continue to set the social
agenda until the next social moment, whether a crisis or an awakening.
Thus, during both types of social moments, history shapes generations; yet
at the same time, by congealing crises and sparking awakenings, generations
shape history.
How can this cycle exist in a complicated world? To be sure, history has its
good and bad surprises and accidents, its good and bad actors: the rise of
perestroika or the killing of the Austrian archduke; the emergence of a Churchill
or a Saddam Hussein. Some would say instinctively that history is too cluttered
to allow for our kind of cycle. But such a prejudice focuses too closely on events
THE FOUR-PART CYCLE 77

without sufficient attention to the response those events generate. It is the re-
sponse that determines the social moment. Compare, for example, the American
response to World War I and World War II. Both wars were preceded by
aggressive foreign acts (the sinking of the Lusitania, the air attack on Pearl
Harbor). In one case, Congress waited two years before declaring war; in the
other case, it declared war the next day. In one case, the war helped propel
divisive movements like Prohibition; in the other, the nation mobilized as a
single organism. Both wars ended in total victory-but in one case, soldiers
came home to moral nagging and vice squads; in the other, they came home to
ticker-tape parades. Both wars strengthened America's influence overseas-but
in one case, that influence was quickly squandered; in the other, it was consol-
idated over the next two decades .
Why? When a society is in the midst of a Crisis era, as America was in 1941,
generational forces tend to congeal a secular crisis from whatever exogenous
events arise. Had the world not drifted into global depression and war, the cycle
suggests that some other historic emergency would have gripped the nation,
given the age location of the respective peer personalities: inner-fixated Mis-
sionary prophets in their sixties, plucky Lost pragmatists in their forties, outer-
fixated G.I. doers in their twenties, and the undemanding Silent in childhood.
America was poised for decisive and effective action. Compare 1941 with 1967-
the year of the Tonkin Gulf incident. At that point, America was entering an
Awakening era . The doers were reaching elderhood, and a new set of prophets
reaching combat age. Both generations filled their war-waging roles awkwardly,
and each displeased the other with its behavior. Indeed, the generational cycle
has significantly influenced how Americans have acted during and after every
major war in their history. Which wars occurred in comparable constellational
moods? The Revolution and World War II (Crisis eras). The War of 1812 and
Korea (Outer-Driven eras). The French and Indian War and World War I (Inner-
Driven eras). What many historians consider the nation's most misguided wars-
the Spanish-American and Vietnam-were waged during the social turmoil of
Awakening eras. These parallels are instructive. They suggest how fortunate
America may have been that the world's hour of fascist peril came when it did,
and not a quarter century earlier or later.
Wars and other secular crises are triggered from without, spiritual awakenings
from within. Less dependent on outside events, spiritual awakenings are almost
entirely endogenous to the generational cycle. The specific year of their emer-
gence may hinge on political events (as in 1621), economic conditions (1886),
a war (1967), or simply an overdose of heroic fathers (1734 and 1822). The
examples of the Awakeners in the 1730s and Transcendentals in the 1820s show
how, sooner or later, these awakenings will arise even in the absence of specific
historical sparks. We can reasonably conclude that the Puritans would eventually
have erupted without their ostracism (though not necessarily by sending offshoots
to America), Transcendentals without abolitionism, Missionaries without Hay-
78 GENERA TIO NS

market and agrarian revolt, and Boomers without Vietnam and urban riots. Put
simply, Idealist generations are nurtured to burst forth spiritually upon coming
of age. When they do, they awaken other generations along with them.
The generational cycle is deterministic only in its broadest outlines; it does
not guarantee good or bad outcomes . Each generation has flaws, and each con-
stellational mood comes with dangers. The Missionary generation could have
produced a zealot President (Mitchell Palmer, for instance) who, in tum, might
have touched off a socialist insurrection. Instead, it produced the principled if
inflexible Herbert Hoover and later-for the darkest hour-Franklin Roosevelt.
And notwithstanding all the deserved admiration Americans bestow on the mem-
ory of Lincoln, his generation triggered the one major crisis in American history
for which it is easy to imagine a better outcome for everyone-Union, Confed-
erate, and slave . In its tragedy , the Civil War offers an important normative
lesson for all generations alive today . The cycle provides each generation with
a location in history, a peer personality , and a set of possible scripts to follow.
But it leaves each generation free to express either its better or its worse instincts,
to choose a script that posterity may later read with gratitude or sorrow .
Recall our discussion in Chapter 2 where we first discovered the generational
diagonal. In Figures 2-2 and 2-3 , the eras between the first two and last two
columns (1920-1942 and 1964-1986) roughly encompass America's most recent
moments of secular crisis (1932-1945) and spiritual awakening (1967-1980).
Note that the adjectives match those in our four-part typology of generations.
When we combine all the generational names, types, and adjectives, we see the
diagonals shown in Figure 4-3. Note also that the "aligned" dates shown here,
each exactly twenty-two years from the next , do not coincide perfectly with
actual generational boundaries . As we shall see in the next chapter, the actual
aligned dates (when the last cohort of each new generation is born) are 1924,
1942, 1960, and 1981. Remember, neither a generation nor a constellational era
is always precisely twenty-two years long .
This is the generational cycle as it has unfolded during the first eight decades
of the twentieth century . In the second and fourth columns, we see the Crisis
and Awakening constellations with which we began the chapter. Reading along
the diagonal, lower left to upper right , we can identify the connections between
social moments and peer personality.
What would we see if we extended this chart to the left, through four centuries?
The dynamics of the generational cycle suggest we should find much the same
pattern-of constellational eras and generational types both . Let's now take a
look at what actually has happened in American history-with eighteen gen-
erations in five cycles . We shall find that, in all but the Civil War Cycle, the
pattern has held.
THE FOUR-PART CYCLE 79

FIGURE 4-3
The Generational Diagonal in the Twentieth Century

SOCIAL MOMENT

Secular Spiritual
Crisis Awa~ning

Inner- Outer-
Constel- Driven Crisis driven Awakening
lational Era Era Era Era
Era 1901-24 1925-42 1943-60 1961-81

ALIGNED YEAR : 1924 1942 1960 1981

ELDERHOOD PROGRESSIVE-MISSIONARY LOST G .I.

(Adaptive) (Idealist) : (Reactive) (Civic)
sensitive _ visionary : reclusive _ busy

MIDLIFE MISSIONAR
Y: <I.
= /ST =~ENT
(Idealist)
moralistic h- (R~~tive)/
pragmatick:
(~~ic)
powerful~=
/: (!~:~tive)
indecisive

RISING
ADULTHOOD
LOST
(Reactive)
I. .
- (Civic)
SILENT
;(Adaptive)
BOOM
- (Idealist)
alienated heroic : conformist - narc1ss1st1c

YOUTH G.I.
(Civic)
protected
7= ~NT
(!~~!rive)/
suffocated
)~M ~EENTH
(~d~hst ) /!~~~!cuve)
: indulged - criticized
 Chapter 5

THE CYCLE
IN AMERICA

0 ne afternoon in April 1689-as the American colonies boiled with rumors

that King James II was about to shackle them into slavery-the King's hand-
picked governor of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, marched his troops
menacingly through Boston to let the locals know their place. The future of
America looked grim. Yet just at that moment, seemingly from nowhere, there
emerged on the streets "the figure of an ancient man," a "Gray Champion"
with "the eye, the face, the attitude of command." The old man planted himself
directly in front of the approaching British soldiers and demanded they stop. His
dress , "combining the leader and the saint," and "the solemn, yet warlike peal
of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in
prayer, were irresistible. At the old man's word and outstretched arm, the roll
of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still." Inspired
by that single act, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within
the day, Andros was deposed and jailed, and the liberty of colonial America
was saved.
"Who was this Gray Champion?" asks Nathaniel Hawthorne at the end of
this story in Twice-Told Tales . No one knew, except that he was once one of
the fire-hearted young Puritans who first settled New England a half century
earlier. Later that very evening, just before he disappeared, he was seen em-
bracing the 85-year-old Simon Bradstreet, a kindred spirit and one of the very
few original Puritans still alive . "I have heard," adds Hawthorne, "that when-
THE CYCLE IN AMERICA 81

ever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old
man appears again."
One such moment arrived, of course, during the revolutionary summer of
1775-when elder Americans once again appealed to God, called the young to
war, and dared the hated enemy to fire. And indeed, notes Hawthorne, "when
eighty years had passed," the Gray Champion walked once more. "When our
fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker 's Hill, all through that night
the old warrior walked his rounds . Long, long may it be ere he comes again!
His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny
oppress us, or the invaders' step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion
come . . .. ''
Hawthorne did not say who the next Gray Champion would be or when he
would return-though perhaps he should have been able to tell. Hawthorne
wrote this stirring legend in 1837 as a young man of 33. Had he counted _another
eight or nine decades forward from Bunker Hill, he might have guessed that the
next Gray Champions would come from among his own peers-a generation
seared young by God and destined late in life to face an hour of "darkness, and
adversity, and peril.'' Hawthorne would someday learn their names: John Brown,
damning the unrighteous from his scaffold and condemning them to rivers of
blood; General William Tecumseh Sherman, scorching the earth of Georgia with
"the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword" while "His truth is marching
on"; or Robert E. Lee, thrusting out his authoritative baton and sending thousands
of young men to die before Cemetery Ridge.
Moving ahead yet another eight or nine decades, America once again saw
the Gray Champion return-an aging, principled generation pursuing its "Ren-
dezvous with Destiny .'' Many Americans alive today can recall the unflinching
demeanor of Douglas MacArthur, Henry Kaiser, George Marshall-and, above
all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In each of America's decisive moments of secular crisis-the Glorious Rev-
olution of 1689, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emer-
gencies of the Great Depression and World War II-this society has witnessed
the cyclical return of a special breed of elder, a very different type from the
outer-focused, bustling "senior citizens" of the 1970s and 1980s. At each of
these four history-turning moments, America turned for guidance to aging Ide-
alists , spiritual warriors possessed of strong inner vision, patriarchs commanding
the respect and obedience of their juniors. All four of these generations of
patriarchs had previously been young adults during an era of spiritual awakening;
none of them had come of age facing a secular crisis even remotely similar to
the one they faced as grandparents.
In Chapter 4, we demonstrated how Idealist elders arrive once every gener-
ational cycle, in what we call a "Crisis constellation." We also described how
the three other constellations produce very different moods and events. In this
chapter, we trace this cycle through four centuries of American history, from
82 GENERA TIO NS

the 1580s through the 1980s. The model fits: From the first New World colonies
to the present day, with only one interruption, American history has pulsed to
the rhythm of the generational cycle.

Eighteen American Generations

All things have a beginning, and so must the story of American generations.
We start with the European cohort-group of 1584 through 1614. We call it
the "Puritan Generation ." This group amounts to about 25,000 persons (almost
all of them English, plus a few Dutch settlers) and includes the vast majority of
the first Old World immigrants to the Atlantic seaboard, the edge of what would
someday become the United States.
To be sure, a scattering of earlier-born immigrants came to this territory.
But their number was small-certainly fewer than a thousand-and the major-
ity were fishermen, explorers, and adventurers who had no intention of stay-
ing. Of'the earlier-born immigrants who did plan to settle permanently, most
were soon massacred (at Roanoke), forced by hardship to flee back home
(from Kennebec, Maine), or killed in a few months by disease (in early
Jamestown). The scant evidence suggests that no more than one hundred per-
sons born before 1584 came, settled, and survived more than five years-of
whom perhaps only two or three dozen were lucky enough to find spouses and
bear children. The 25,000 members of the Puritan Generation, on the other
hand, consisted almost entirely of permanent settlers-of whom between
7,500 and 10,000 survived and bore children in the New World, often in large
families. Quite simply, the numerical contrast between all pre-1584 cohorts
and the Puritan Generation is overwhelming .
Demographic importance is not the only reason we fix our first birthyears
around these dates . The Puritan Generation also possesses all the striking attri-
butes of an Idealist-type generation. As an English-born cohort-group, it came
into the world just after a secular crisis (a great war with Spain), grew up as
children under the midlife tutelage of Civic-like Elizabethans, came of age
triggering one of the most awesome spiritual awakenings known to Europe or
the New World, and, after several decades in America, aged into the elder
persona of the "Gray Champion."
Raised in the Old World, the Puritan Generation assumed much of its distinct
personality through self-selecting emigration to America. Yet even their peers
who stayed in Europe displayed a stunning concentration of radical, inner-fixated
hilosophers-the likes of Thomas Hobbes (born in 1588, the same year as John
Winthrop) and Rene Descartes (born eight years later). Entirely apart from any
consideration of America , the Spanish generations writer Jose Ortega y Gasset
identifies precisely these two birthyears as the center of what he considers a
THE CYCLE IN AMERICA 83

"decisive generation," the very first generation of "the Modem Age" in western
civilization.
Starting with the Puritans and applying the methods discussed in Chapter 3
to all later cohorts in American history, we locate a total of eighteen generations,
their birthyear periods stretching in an unbroken series from 1584 to the present
day . We group them into five generational cycles-each beginning with an
Idealist-type generation and concluding with an Adaptive type. The first four
American generations, comprising the Colonial Cycle, remained literally "co-
lonial" throughout their lifecycles . All four included large proportions of im-
migrants and were significantly influenced by the shifting personalities of their
Old World contemporaries. Only when we reach number five-the "Awak-
eners," the Idealist trigger of the new Revolutionary Cycle-do we encounter
the first truly American generation whose parents were mostly native-born and
whose personality took shape without much assistance from social or cultural
forces from abroad. This Awakening Generation was also the first to include a
significant number who, late in life, became citizens of the United States.
Next come the remaining generations of the Revolutionary Cycle and Civil
War Cycle, all fully ancestral. Then, in the Great Power Cycle, we find our first
present-day survivors, including all Americans who reached age 48 by the dawn
of 1991. Lastly, we arrive at the Millennial Cycle, whose members are still
arriving by birth and immigration . Altogether, some 440 million American na-
tionals (or colonists) have ever lived, four-sevenths of whom are alive today.
The population of each cycle is as follows:

Colonial Cycle: 600,000 people

Revolutionary Cycle: 8,000,000 people
Civil War Cycle: 50,000,000 people
Great Power Cycle: 200,000,000 people
Millennial Cycle: 180,000,000 people (340,000,000 projected by 2025)

Figure 5-1 lists the eighteen American generations by cycle, type, and birth-
year cohorts, along with the name of one of the generation's best-known public
figures.
Looking carefully at Figure 5-1, we can recognize the patterns we identified
in Chapters 3 and 4:
Generational boundaries. The first cohort of each of the five Idealist gener-
ations was born during or immediately after a secular crisis. For the Puritans,
the birthyears start four years prior to the culminating English victory over
the Spanish Armada; for the Awakeners, twelve years after the Glorious
Revolution; for the Transcendentals, three years after the ratification of the
U.S. Constitution; for the Missionaries, one year before the start of the
Civil War; and for the Boomers, just after the turning point of World War
84 GENERATIONS

FIGURE 5-1
Eighteen American Generations

CYCLE GENERATION TYPE BIRTHYEARS SAMPLE MEMBER

Colonial: Puritan Idealist 1584-1614 John Winthrop

Cavalier Reactive 1615-1647 Nathaniel Bacon
Glorious Civic 1648-1673 Cotton Mather
Enlightenment Adapt ive 1674-1700 William Shirley

Revolutionary: Awakenin g Idealist 1701-1723 Benjamin Franklin

Liberty Reactive 1724-1741 George Washington
Republican Civic 1742-1766 Thomas Jefferson
Compromise Adaptive 1767-1791 Andrew Jackson

Civil War: Transcendental Idealist 1792-1821 Abraham Lincoln

Gilded Reactive 1822-1842 Ulysses Grant
Progressive Adaptive 1843-1859 Theodore Roosevelt

Great Power: Missionary Idealist 1860-1882 Franklin Roosevelt

Lost Reactive 1883-1900 Dwight Eisenhower
G .l. Civic 1901-1924 John Kennedy
Silent Adaptive 1925-1942 Walter Mondale

Millennial: Boom Idealist 1943-1960 Newt Gingrich

Thirteenth Reactive 1961-1981 Tom Cruise
Millennial Civic(?) 1982- Jessica McClure

II. Similarly, we can link the first birthyear of each Civic generation with
the completion (or afterglow) of historic eras of spiritual awakening: 1648,
1742, 1901, and 1982.
length of generations. The cohort lengths of all seventeen completed American
generations range from 17 to 33 years and average 23.4 years. The first
two Colonial Cycle generations were 31 and 33 years long, respectively,
and were shaped mostly by irregular bursts of immigration to small and
isolated American settlements . Afterward, only one generation is longer
than 26 years, and the average length drops to 22 .3 years. This average
roughly matches the 22-year span we postulated (in Chapter 3) between
birth and the typical coming-of-age moment.
The two-stroke rhythm. All generations appear in an alternating sequence of
dominant (Idealist or Civic) and recessive (Reactive or Adaptive) lifecycles
with only one exception: the two back-to-back recessives (Gilded and Pro-
gressive) during the Civil War Cycle .
THE CYCLE IN AMERICA 85

The four-type cycle. The four generational types appear in a fixed sequence :
from Idealist to Reactive to Civic to Adaptive-again with the single ex-
ception of the Civil War Cycle , where a Civic type is missing .
Cycles and history . Timed to the alternating rhythm of awakenings and crises,
each cycle roughly matches a discrete historical epoch in American history,
with a crisis era at its approximate midpoint. When we move from the dawn
of one awakening to the dawn of the next (a period roughly extending from
the coming-of-age of first-wave Idealists through the coming-of-age of last-
wave Adaptives), we traverse a well-defined period. Four of these periods
have already been completed : Colonial (1621-1733), Revolutionary (1734-
1821), Civil War (1822-1885), and Great Power (1886-1966) . The fifth-
Millennial-cycle began in 1967 and is still underway . The first four cycles
have averaged eighty-nine years in length . The three-generation Civil War
Cycle, only sixty-four years long, is considerably shorter than the average .

To our knowledge, we are the first to define, locate , and name the entire
sequence of American generations . Beginning with the Lost , the reader may
recognize several generations whose consensus names we have adopted . Except
for one well-known case, no generation has ever been given precise cohort
boundaries. That one exception, of course, is the so-called "Baby Boom" gen-
eration, which demographers often define as a cohort-group spanning the high-
fertility years of 1946 through 1964. We fix its boundaries a few years earlier-
to fit our criteria for peer personality, not the fecundity of the Boomers' parents .
Also, we toss out the "Baby " and leave the "Boom," a more appropriate name
for a generation now entering midlife .
We are not the first to claim that a generational sequence is an effective means
of interpreting American history. Working separately, four scholars have sug-
gested loose generational divisions that closely approximate the boundary lines
we set. In 1925, historian Arthur Schlesinger described eight generations, from
Liberty to Missionary, where we find seven . In 1976, Daniel Elazar , a political
scientist at Temple University, found eleven generations over the Awakener-to-
13er span, where we identify thirteen . In 1978, Harvard government professor
Samuel Huntington listed eight generations that roughly match our eight from
Republicans through G.l.s . And in a superb capsule summary of American
political generations written in 1976, Brandeis historian Morton Keller identified
eleven generations where we see eleven, stretching from the Liberty through the
Boom.
Despite this close fit, there remains an important difference between our
approach and what others have written about American generations. Most schol-
ars have defined generations largely in terms of public activity during rising
adulthood and midlife . Instead, we look at their entire lifecycles, examine their
peer personality during each phase of life, and evaluate their private as well as
public behavior.
86 GENERA TIO NS

In Chapter 4, we explained how social moments-secular crises and spiritual

awakenings-lie at the core of the generational cycle. Now that we have iden-
tified five cycles of American generations, let's see how they line up with the
sequence of crises and awakenings that have in fact occurred . Figure 5-2 shows
this rhythm for the past five centuries . The first two social moments (the Ref-
ormation Awakening and the Armada Crisis) shaped the peer personalities of
the immediate English-born ancestors of the Puritan Generation. The next nine
(beginning with the Puritan Awakening) have all occurred during the lifecycles
of the eighteen American generations .
As Figure 5-2 indicates, social moments can run from about one to two decades
in length. Toward the end of each , there typically occurs a climactic event , a
specific episode when the social moment reaches maximum emotional impact .
During secular crises, this may be an event that energizes (Pearl Harbor Sunday
in 1941, or the colonial Glorious Revolution in 1689), turns the tide (Gettysburg
in 1863), or culminates an epoch of institution-building (the ratification of the
U.S. Constitution in 1789). During spiritual awakenings , this climax is typically
an event that marks a decisive reaction against a euphoric tide of truth-seeking
and values experimentation : the sudden end of the radical Great Migration to
New England in 1640; the orthodox counterattack against the Great Awakening
in 1743; the economic Panic of 1837; or the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
When such peak events occur, a social moment can suddenly shape cohort-
groups into well-defined generations according to their respective phases of life.
Alternatively , since the entire duration of a social moment can make a deep
impression on youths in their late teens and mid-twenties, it can shape the entire
generation as it comes of age.
Figure 5-2 shows the intervals between the end of one social moment to the
end of the next. The intervals are not identical , partly because the generational
bonding process can widen or narrow the exact length of the intervals between
social moments. For example, the powerful influence of last-wave G.l.s (on
earlier-born peers) and first-wave Boomers (on later-born peers) helped to narrow
the interval between the World-War-II-era crisis and the Boom Awakening . The
average interval is forty-four years , matching the forty-four-year span for two
phases of life. The somewhat longer intervals come early, where we notice
somewhat longer generations . The single and telling exception is the twenty-
eight-year interval before the Civil War Crisis , precisely where we observe a
truncated , three-generation cycle.
Now let' s take a closer look at these two kinds of social moments.

Secular Crises

An important coincidence lies at the heart of American history, a coincidence

familiar to most historians . The timespans separating the four pivotal events of
THE CYCLE IN AMERICA 87
FIGURE 5-2
Social Moments in American History

Years from Years from

End of Crisis End of Awakening
to End of SPIRITUAL to End of SECULAR
Awakening AWAKENING Crisis CRISIS

(1517-1539) 49 years (1580-1588)

Pre-Colonial Period
Reformation Defeat of
Awakening Spanish Armada

52 years (1621-1640) 52 years (1675-1692)

Calonlal~
Puritan Glorious
Awakening Revolution

51 years (1734-1743) 46 years (1773-1789)

~
Great American
Awakening Revolution

48 years (1822-1837) 28 years (1857-1865)

'WarC de
Transcendental Civil
Awakening War

38 years (1886-1903) 42 years (1932-1945)

Gnat Powerc~
Missionary Great Depression
Awakening & World War II

35 years (1967-1980)

Mlleanilll
Boom
Awakening
88 GENERATIONS

American history almost exactly match. Exactly eighty-five years passed between
the first Confederate shot on Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor Day. Back up the
story, and note that eighty-five years also passed between Fort Sumter and the
Declaration of Independence. (Or, as President Lincoln noted, "Four score and
seven years" separate the first Fourth of July from the Battle of Gettysburg.)
Back up still further, and note that another eighty-seven years passed between
the Anglo-American "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 and Independence Day.
Preceding the Glorious Revolution by a slightly longer period-ninety-nine
years-was the epochal victory of the English navy over the Spanish Armada.
All five events marked the culmination of swift and sweeping change in the
secular world. Each surrounding era witnessed widespread fear for personal and
social survival, collective unity in the face of peril, and sudden institutional
change or innovation. Apprehension about the future reached a climax-and
was followed (in all but the fourth case) by a sense of victory and the dawning
of a bright new era. We list these five secular crises as follows:

The Armada Crisis (1850-1588), in England, extended from the first overt
hostilities between England and Spain through Drake's epic voyage in
the Golden Hind, and ended with the EnglishdestructionoftheSpanish
invasion Armada . Sample rising-adult leaders: Sir Walter Raleigh,
Francis Bacon, Sir Philip Sydney.
The Glorious Revolution Crisis (1675-1692), in the American colonies, ex-
tended from King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion through the American
rebellions against James II, and ended about the time of the Salem witch
trials. Sample rising-adult leaders: Cotton Mather, John Wise, Peter Schuyler.

The American Revolution Crisis (1773-1789), in the American colonies and

states, extended from the Boston Tea Party through the Declaration of
Independence and ended with the ratification of the United States Consti-
tution and the inauguration of President Washington. Sample rising-adult
leaders: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall.

The Civil War Crisis (1857-1865), in the United States, extended from the
Dred Scott decision, the great Kansas debates, and the fragmentation of the
Democratic Party, and ended with Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassi-
nation. Sample rising-adult leaders: Ulysses Grant, Stonewall Jackson, An-
drew Carnegie.
The Great Depression-World War II Crisis ( 1932-1945), in the United States,
extended from the bleakest depression year and Franklin Roosevelt's elec-
tion and ended with VJ-Day. Sample rising-adult leaders: John Kennedy,
Robert Oppenheimer, Walt Disney.
 o-3
::c:
tTl
FIGURE 5-3 n
Crisis Constellations -<
n
r
tTl

PHASE GLORIOUS AMERICAN

SECULAR CRISES
CIVIL GREAT DEPRESSION
z
>-
OF LIFE REVOLUTION REVOLUTION WAR WORLD WAR II ~
(1675-1692) ( 1773-1789) (1857-1865) (1932-1945) tTl
;,::,
ELDER: PURITAN AWAKENING COMPROMISE MISSIONARY n
(Idealist) (Idealist) (Adaptive) (Idealist)
>-
Simon Bradstreet Samuel Adams James Buchanan Franklin Roosevelt

MIDLIFE: CAVALIER LIBERTY TRANSCENDENTAL LOST

(Reactive) (Reactive) (Idealist) (Reactive)
Increase Mather George Washington Abraham Lincoln Dwight Eisenhow er

RISING: GLORIOUS REPUBLICAN GILDED G.I.

(Civic) (Civic) (Reactive) (Civic)
Cotton Mather Thomas Jefferson Ulysses Grant John Kennedy

YOUTH: ENLIGHTENMENT COMPROMISE PROGRESSIVE SILENT

(Adaptive) (Adaptive) (Adaptive) (Adaptive)
Elisha Cooke, Jr. Dolley Madison Booker T. Washington Sandra Day O'Connor

CYCLE: Colonial Revolutionary Civil War Great Power

00

'
90 GENERATIONS

In each of these periods of secular crisis, public institutions suddenly strength-

ened-sometimes with the help of emergency powers-as people of all ages
banded together and gave absolute priority to the protection and survival of their
larger community. During and shortly after these periods, leaders reshaped public
institutions beyond earlier recognition . History turned, decisively.
Figure 5-3 identifies the generational constellations of each Crisis era, ex-
cluding the precolonial Armada Crisis .
The constellational pattern is unmistakable. In every secular crisis except the
Civil War, America had old Idealists, midlife Reactives, rising-adult Civics, and
child Adaptives. Picture the peer personalities of each generational type, at its
respective phase of life:

Idealist elders providing principle and vision;

Reactive midlifers understanding how the real world functions, and leading
accordingly;
Civic rising adults, smart and organized, doing their duty; and
Adaptive youths emulating adults and making relatively few demands.

This is the optimal generational lineup for overcoming social emergencies,

attacking unsolved problems, waging whatever war may be deemed necessary,
and achieving a brighter future for the soon-to-be-born (Idealist) children of the
next cycle. Elders bring wisdom, midlifers savvy, rising adults cooperation, and
children silence . The resolute order-givers are old, the dutiful order-takers young.
This is a constellation of action, not reflection. People become pragmatic,
community-oriented, and more risk-averse in public and private life. The dis-
tinctions between sex roles widen, and the protection of children grows to max-
imum intensity. The crisis leaves a heavy footprint on the remaining lifecycle
of every generation then living-especially the Civic, who thereafter assume a
hubris born oftriumph, a belief in community over self, and a collective con-
fidence in their own achievements that their elders and juniors can never match .
To propel the generational cycle in this manner, a secular crisis must end
with triumph . This happened in every cycle but one: the Civil War. By no means
does this anomaly contradict the cycle; instead, it offers important lessons about
how generational history can turn out well-or badly.

The Civil War Anomaly

We have already observed that the Civil War Cycle lacks a Civic-type gen-
eration . At sixty-four years, this cycle is fully seventeen years shorter than any
other. A mere twenty-eight years separate the end of the Civil War Crisis from
THE CYCLE IN AMERICA 91

the end of the preceding (Transcendental) awakening. What happened ?

First, the crisis came early . The initial year of the crisis came fifty-one years
after the middle birth cohort of the Transcendental (Idealist) generation. The
other crisis periods began seventy-six, sixty-two, and sixty-one years after the
middle Idealist birthyear . This ten-to-fifteen-year difference (the equivalent,
roundly, of half a phase of life) is quite significant. Consider the 1920s, when
Franklin Roosevelt's midlife Missionary Generation was still crusading for its
great Prohibition "experiment" and the rising-adult Lost had yet to emerge from
alienation and pleasure-seeking. Suppose a combination of depression and global
fascism had hit then . Very likely, the national mood would have been more
fragmented, public action less decisive . Likewise , imagine what form the Amer-
ican Revolution might have taken had it occurred before the Stamp Act riots of
1765-and what sort of Constitution might have been written by midlife Awak-
ener zealots or hard-luck Liberty young adults, rather than by confident and
public-minded Republicans . In effect, these odd hypotheticals point to what
happened in the Civil War, when a still-zealous Transcendental generation con-
gealed a crisis in midlife . Picture some facsimile of the Civil War waged fifteen
years later-with Transcendentals more self-controlled as elder stewards, the
Gilded less daring as midlife leaders, and Progressives more effective as rising-
adult order-takers . The generational cycle suggests that the crisis would have
been resolved with far less tragedy .
Second , the three adult generations allowed their more dangerous peer in-
stincts to prevail . Following the failed efforts of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster,
and John Calhoun to avert war, the elderly Compromisers of the Buchanan era
were unable to rise above empty process and moral confusion . The Transcen-
dental Generation split not just into two competing factions, but into two self-
contained, mutually exclusive societies . Transcendental leaders-the likes of
Abraham Lincoln, William Sherman, Thaddeus Stevens, Jefferson Davis, and
Julia Ward Howe-were, as a generation, unable to resist waging war (and
peace) with ruthless, apocalyptic finality. The younger Gilded never outgrew an
adventurer's lust for battle or an easily bruised sense of personal honor-never ,
that is, until the war was over. These three adult generations steered a very
dangerous constellation, and together produced the nearest approximation of
holocaust America has ever experienced . Place the Civil War Cycle alongside
the generational calendar of its two neighboring cycles-Revolutionary and Great
Power-and notice how the Civil War occurred roughly a decade before the
Revolution and World War II, a decade after the French and Indian War and
World War I. It combined the worst features of both: the colossal scale of the
former two with the lasting bitterness of the latter two.
Third, the crisis came to an untriumphant end. Was the Civil War a failure?
We need not answer the question yes or no, but simply observe that for each of
the other secular crises on our list, we find it difficult to imagine a more uplifting
finale than that which actually occurred. For the Civil War, we can easily imagine
92 GENERATIONS

a better outcome. Yes, the Union was preserved, the slaves emancipated, and
the industrial revolution fully unleashed . But consider the enormous cost: deep-
rooted sectional hatred, the impoverishment and political exile of the South, the
collapse of Reconstruction into the era of lynchings and Jim Crow, and the long
delay that postwar exhaustion later imposed on most other social agendas, every-
thing from antitrust policy and labor grievances to temperance and women's
rights .
The political reaction of those alive at the time, moreover, indicates that many
Americans did indeed attribute the painful finale (at least in part) to calamitous
miscommunication between young and old . The Civil War was followed by the
largest generational landslide in American history, in 1868, when voters tossed
out aging Transcendental zealots for the fortyish Gilded. Afterward, no rising
generation emerged to fulfill the usual Civic role of building public institutions
to realize the Transcendentals' visions. Instead, the Gilded aged into a unique
Reactive-Civic hybrid-and, in midlife, presided over a period of unusual cul-
tural and spiritual staleness. Likewise, although the Progressives had been raised
with a protective prewar nurture that prepared them to come of age as a Civic
generation, they emerged from the Civil War scarred rather than ennobled .
Acquiring little collective confidence as young adults, they left their future in
the hands of the Gilded and developed a distinctly Adaptive peer personality.

Spiritual Awakenings

Having seen that America encounters a secular crisis roughly every ninety
years, we now turn to the other kind of social moment that arrives roughly
halfway in between: the spiritual awakening. Stepping ahead forty-two years
from the Armada victory of 1588 brings us to 1630-a year of peaking religious
enthusiasm in England when John Winthrop and his fellow zealots set sail to
found a New Jerusalem in America. Moving forty-five years past the colonial
Glorious Revolution of 1689 takes us to 1734-the year Jonathan Edwards
touched off the Great Awakening in the Connecticut Valley. Similar intervals
separate each of the remaining three secular crises from later episodes of wide-
spread and tumultuous spiritual fervor.
Over the past two decades, several social and religious historians have ex-
plored the importance of these episodes. In his 1978 book Revivals, Awakenings,
and Reform, William Mcloughlin identifies five American "awakenings"
roughly conforming to the intervals our cycle would suggest. Mcloughlin defines
awakenings as ''periods of culture revitalization that begin in a general crisis of
beliefs and values and extend over a period of a generation or so, during which
time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place." Building from
anthropologist Anthony Wallace's theory of "revitalization movements,"
Mcloughlin describes how, in a modern society, a spiritual awakening can ''alter
THE CYCLE IN AMERICA 93

the world view of a whole people or culture ." Over the intervening span of six
to eleven decades, " times change; the world changes ; people change ; and there-
fore institutions, world views , and cultural systems must change ." He also notes
that each awakening episode was, in its own time, an update of the "individ-
ualistic, pietistic, perfectionist, millennarian ideology " which "has from time
to time been variously defined and explained to meet changing experience and
contingencies in our history.''
Unlike an episode of secular crisis, when a real-world threat triggers disci-
plined collective action and sudden institutional change, an awakening is driven
by sudden value changes and a society-wide effort to recapture a feeling of
spiritual authenticity . The focus is not on institutions, but on the spirit. And the
moment is not essentially public or collective (though it may spark crowds,
hysteria, and violence) , but personal and individual. An awakening brings to
rising-adult Idealists what Robert Bellah has called "a common set of moral
understandings about good and bad , right and wrong, in the realm of individual
and social action ." During the Reformation and Puritan Awakenings, these new
" understandings" arose almost entirely in terms of religious dogma. Ever since,
the focus has shifted by degrees toward the radical "isms" of the modem age.
The underlying psychology of the awakening conversion , however, has remained
much the same through subsequent centuries.
Like a crisis, an awakening leaves a permanent impression on the remaining
lifecycle of every generation then alive and shapes the rising-adult generation
with special force . Whereas a crisis empowers the rising-adult generation, an
awakening endows it with a spiritual or ideological mission that stays with its
members for life . Among the vanguard of an awakening, we always notice
isolated or ambivalent midlife Adaptives (Desiderius Erasmus , William Brews-
ter, Thomas Foxcroft , William Ellery Channing, John Dewey, and Charles
Reich) who are quite aware that the movement's center of gravity is located in
a younger generation . Yet the best-known leaders are typically first-wave Ide-
alists, preaching to younger Idealists just coming of age-peer leaders like Martin
Luther, John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William
Jennings Bryan, and Angela Davis.
McLoughlin's five American "awakenings" correspond closely to the five
"spiritual awakenings" as we define them . Other historians have located and
named eras of historic spiritual upheaval at similar dates . Starting with the first
surge of Reformation enthusiasm in the precolonial period , we list them as
follows, naming each after the Idealist Generation whose coming-of-age youths
were largely responsible for pushing it forward .
The Reformation Awakening ( 1517-1539) in Europe, universally known as the
"Reformation" and no doubt the best known of all awakenings in western
history . Sample rising-adult leaders : Martin Luther , John Calvin, John
Knox.
94 GENERA TIO NS

The Puritan A wakening ( 1621-1640) in England, Scotland , and America, often

called the "Puritan Awakening, " also known as the era of "Puritan En-
thusiasm" or "Revolutionary Puritanism." Sample rising-adult leaders who
came to America: John Winthrop , John Cotton, Anne Hutchinson.
The Great Awakening (1734-1743) in the American colonies, known at the
time as "the Great and General Awakening" and referred to ever since as
the "Great Awakening ." Sample rising-adult leaders : Jonathan Edwards,
George Whitefield, William Tennent.
The Transcendental Awakening (1822-1837) in the United States, a loosely
dated period known to most historians (and McLoughlin) as the "Second
Great Awakening," also called the era of "Romantic Evangelicalism" and
"Transcendental Idealism." Sample rising-adult leaders: Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nat Turner, Charles Finney .
The Missionary Awakening (1886-1903) in the United States, called the ''Third
Great Awakening" by McLoughlin and a few others, also known as the
age of "Reform," " Revivalism," and "Labor Radicalism." Sample rising-
adult leaders : William Jennings Bryan, Jane Addams, W.E .B. DuBois .
The Boom Awakening (1967-1980) in the United States, called the "Fourth
Great Awakening" by McLoughlin, at times termed the "new transcen-
dentalism, " now generally referred to as the recent "Sixties , " "Counter-
culture,'' or (especially) ' 'Consciousness Revolution.'' Sample rising-adult
leaders : Ario Guthrie, Mark Rudd , Rap Brown .

Figure 5-4 identifies the generational constellations of each Awakening era,

excluding the precolonial Reformation Awakening.
Once again, we see a repeating constellational pattern in all but the Great
Power Cycle (which followed the Civic-less Civil War Cycle)-a pattern con-
sisting of old Civics, midlife Adaptives, rising-adult Idealists, and young Re-
actives. Picture the peer personalities of each generational type, at its respective
phase of life:
Civic elders confidently running or overseeing institutions they once built
around an earlier set of values ;
Adaptive midlifers feeling pulled in competing directions by more powerful
generations on either side;
Idealist rising adults experiencing spiritual conversion near the coming-of-age
moment and cultivating implacable moral conviction; and
Reactive youths too young to participate , left alone , urged to grow up quickly,
and criticized as "bad."
 ...,
::c:
m
FIGURE 5-4 n
><:
Awakening Constellations n
r
m
SPIRITUAL AWAKENINGS -
z
::x>
PURITAN GREAT TRANSCENDENTAL MISSIONARY BOOM 3::
PHASE AWAKENING AWAKENING AWAKENING AWAKENING AWAKENING m
::0
OF LIFE (1621-1640) (1734- 1743) ( 1822-1837) (1886-1903) (1967-1980) n::x>
ELDER: Peers of GLORIOUS REPUBLICAN GILDED G.I.
William Shakespeare (Civic) (Civic) (Reactive) (Civic)
James Blair James Monroe John D. Rockefeller Richard Nixon

MIDLIFE: Peers of ENLIGHTENMENT COMPROMISE PROGRESSIVE SILENT

John Donne (Adaptive) (Adaptive) (Adaptive) (Adaptive)
Cadwallader Colden William Ellery Channing Theodore Roosevelt Gloria Steinem

RISING: PURITAN AWAKENING TRANSCENDENTAL MISSIONARY BOOM

(Idealist) (Idealist) (Idealist) (Idealist) (Idealist)
John Winthrop Jonathan Edwards Ralph Waldo Emerson William Jennings Bryan Jim Morrison

YOUTH: CAVALIER LIBERTY GILDED LOST THIRTEENTH

(Reactive) (Reactive) (Reactive) (Reactive) (Reactive)
Increase Mather George Washington Louisa May Alco/I Harry Truman Tom Cruise

CYCLE : Colonial Revolutionary Civil War Great Power Millennial

-0
Ul
96 GENERATIONS

This lineup of elder doers and rising-adult thinkers-very different from the
Crisis constellation-rarely does well at large public undertakings. The trained
order-takers are old, while the instinctive order-givers are young. Any collective
effort (such as a major war) faces strong social obstacles. On the other hand,
this constellation can generate great spiritual energy and unusual creativity in
religion, letters, and the arts . During each Awakening era, we witness mounting
frustration with public institutions, fragmenting families and communities, rising
alcohol and drug abuse, and a growing tendency to take risks in most spheres
of life. Sex-role distinctions decline, and the protection accorded children reaches
a low ebb . Afterward , maturing Idealists retain the inner convictions borne of
their awakening experience and (after a period of political dormancy) attempt
to project and enforce their principles on the world around them. Where post-
crisis rising-adult Civics exude confident optimism and rationality as they move
into midlife, post-awakening Idealists steer the national mood toward pessimistic
and portentous spiritualism .
To comprehend the generational cycle is to foresee where the cycle will turn
as the future unfolds. It is to anticipate who the next ' 'Gray Champion'' will
be-and when his next "hour of darkness , and adversity, and peril" will arrive .
" Long, long may it be ere he comes again!" wrote Hawthorne . One purpose
of this book is to help the reader foresee how long-and understand why.
 Chapter 6

FROMPURITANS
TO MILLENNIALS
AND BEYOND

Le year 1968 was not exactly the Year of the Baby . But amid the assassi-
nations , riots, student strikes, Vietnam buildup , and rise of Richard Nixon, one
of the highest-grossing movies of the year featured a baby: Rosemary's Baby.
Watching Daddy sell a soon-to-be-born child to a witch's coven, many in the
audience had to be thinking, "Please don't have this baby , abort it!" Over the
next ten years, child demons proliferated across American movie screens: The
Exorcist, Exorcist II, Damien, Omen, Omen II, Omen Ill , It 's Alive!, It Lives
Again, Demon Seed. Even when the film children of the 1970s were not slashing
and hexing parents, they were pictured as hucksters (Paper Moon), prostitutes
(Taxi Driver), molls and racketeers (Bugsy Malone), arsonists (Carrie), spoiled
brats (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), or abandoned articles (Kramer
vs. Kramer) . Never in the age of cinema have producers and audiences obsessed
over such a thoroughly distressing image of childhood. Compare this with the
children featured in the Disney Shaggy Dog films of the 1950s: bright, well-
meaning kids whom adults respected, kids any filmgoer knew would grow up
to be interesting people . Or compare those 1970s-era child images with the
cuddly-baby antidotes that began to appear in the mid-1980s-Raising Arizona,
Three Men and a Baby, Baby Boom, and Parenthood-all featuring tots audi-
ences felt like bundling in their arms and protecting .
Who occupied the early-childhood age bracket when these films were being
made and viewed? Boomers during the smart-kid movie era of the 1950s; 13ers
rv,
98 GENERATIONS

during the witch-kid movie era of the 1970s; and Millennials during the precious-
baby movie era that began in the mid- l 980s. This was no coincidence. The 13er
childhood years, roughly from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, defined
an era of unremitting hostility toward children . One of every four rental apart-
ments banned children, a 50 percent increase over the Boomer child era. The
homicide rate against children under age four more than doubled. Adults of
fertile age doubled their rate of surgical sterilization. The number of legal abor-
tions per year rose tenfold. Birth-control technology became a hot topic-as did
the cost and bother of raising a child, seldom an issue when Boomers were
small. Net tax rates for childless households remained steady, while rates for
families with children rose sharply. The child poverty rate grew, while the poverty
rate for those in midlife and elderhood fell. Tax revolts cut school funding
substantially in California and other states, which made public-school teachers
suffer seven consecutive years of reduced purchasing power. The proportion of
G-rated films fell from 41 to 13 percent, and Walt Disney Studios laid off
cartoonists . The nation financed a growing share of its consumption by piling
up federal debt and other unfunded liabilities whose greatest burdens, adults
realized, would someday fall on small children . Then, during the 1980s, many
of these trends began stabilizing-and, in some cases, turning around.
The English language has no single word to describe what happened to the
child's world in America through the Consciousness Revolution of the late 1960s
and 1970s. The Germans do. They call it Kinderfeindlichkeit-a society-wide
hostility toward children.
Has Kinderfeindlichkeit ever happened before in America? Yes, several
times-though not in precisely the same ways, of course. These other "bad-
child" eras came before movies, birth-control pills, and weekly U.S. Treasury
auctions . But earlier generations of adults had ainple ways of declaring a child
generation unwanted. In the 1640s, Cavalier children were routinely "kid-
napped'' off the streets of London and sold in the Chesapeake colonies as quasi-
slaves. In the late 1730s, most American colonists left Liberty kids to their own
"wildness" and generally agreed with Jonathan Edwards that they were "infi-
nitely worse than young vipers." During the Age of Jackson, Gilded youth were
commonly regarded as self-seeking and savage, and were packed off to America's
first ''reform schools .' ' In circa-1900 America, Lost children struggled to make
their own way as streethawking vagabonds while elders expressed horror over
their "juvenile delinquency." All these were, like the 13th, Reactive generations.
In each case, adults considered the children who came before (Idealists) smarter
and more worthy of freedom, and those who came after (Civics) better-behaved
and more worthy of protection.
Over the past four centuries, Reactive generations have always been children
at the worst possible times. Why? They have had the bad luck to be born during
Awakening eras, years of young-adult rapture, self-immersion, and attacks on
elder-built culture . Home and hearth are assaulted, not exalted. The generational
FROM PURITANS TO MILLENNIALS AND BEYOND 99

constellations of these Awakening eras feature angry two-way dramas between

Civic elders and Idealist rising adults, with Adaptives mediating between them .
None of these older generations offers much comfort to society's Reactive new-
comers .
Conversely, during the Crisis eras at the other end of the cycle, the constel-
lation produces the opposite form of nurture : the suffocating overprotection of
Adaptive children . Older generations exalt family and community over self,
sternly guard the home, and deny children independence or adventure coming
of age. The most recent such era occurred during the war years of the 1940s,
when the last-wave Silent were kids . Back in the 1690s, 1780s, and 1860s, three
earlier generations of Adaptive children were told to behave, be quiet, and be
thankful to their elders for sacrifices made on their behalf .
The two dominant generational types spend their childhood years midway
between these extremes of underprotection and overprotection . Civics grow up
during eras when adult control is increasing, Idealists when it is decreasing .
Figure 6-1 illustrates how, over time, childhood nurture oscillates with the rhythm
of the generational cycle. The trends are not always as gradual as this sine wave
might suggest. From time to time, abrupt shifts occur from one era to the next,
often marking a generational division between one cohort-group and the next.
As America moved into an Inner-Driven era in the early 1750s, for example,
colonial towns suddenly moved to protect small Republican children from the
violent , even deadly Halloween mischief practiced by Liberty kids in the 1740s.

FIGURE 6-1
Tendency in Child Nurture,
by Generational Type and Constellational Era

INNER- OUTER-
TYPE OF AWAKENING DRIVEN CRISIS DRIVEN
NURTURE ERA ERA ERA ERA

Overprotection

Underprotection
!
CHILDHOOD
ERA OF: REACTIVE CIVIC ADAPTIVE IDEALIST
100 GENERA TIO NS

Around 1900, speeding wagons and streetcars were a leading cause of death
among Lost city kids. Few adults tried to do much about it. But starting around
1905, as America again entered an Inner-Driven era , angry urban crowds began
threatening to lynch drivers who ran over child G.l.s-and reformers began
pulling children off the dangerous streets and into households and supervised
playgrounds.
In Chapter 4, we described the pattern by which society's second-elder (mid-
life) parental generation sets the nurturing style for any given generation of
youth. Since the passage from youth to midlife takes a generation through two
phases of life (half a cycle), midlife generations tend to raise the current gen-
eration of youth in a manner opposite to that in which they themselves were
raised. Figure 6-2 clarifies this _compensatory dynamic . Listing the two-apart
parental and child generations in capital letters, we show how underprotected
Reactive~ (say, the Lost) produce overprotected Adaptives (Silent), who then in
tum raise underprotected Reactives (l3ers). Civics (G.l.s), themselves raised
under a tightening parental grip, relax the grip for Idealists (Boomers), who later
retighten it around their own Civic (Millennial) children . Much the same pattern
can be found in prior centuries-as, for example, in the tendency of Compro-
misers, themselves suffocated as children, to widen parental boundaries with
their own later-born children, ultimately spawning the wild Gilded .

FIGURE6-2
The Four Generational Types:
Child Nurture Relationships

IDEALIST REACTIVE CIVIC ADAPTIVE

Phase of Life
during Awakening: rising youth elder midlife

Phase of Life
during Crisis: elder midlife rising youth

TYPE OF CIVIC ADAPTIVE IDEALIST REACTIVE

PARENTS: & Adaptive & Idealist & Reactive & Civic

TYPE OF Reactive & Civic & Adaptive & Idealist &

CHILDREN: CIVIC ADAPTIVE IDEALIST REACTIVE

How It Is under- over-

Nurtured: relaxing protective tightening protective

How It over- under-

Nurtures: tightening protective relaxing protective
FROM PURITANS TO MILLENNIALS AND BEYOND IOI

It would be misleading to attribute this compensating pattern of nurturing

styles to deliberate parental intent. Instead, the pattern reflects the entire peer
personality of the midlife parental generation-as well as the shifting mood of
the constellational era . Reactives may well have their own laissez-faire upbring-
ing in mind when they try to overprotect their Adaptive young . But they are
also influenced in midlife by their exhausted and risk-averse outlook toward life
in general and by the high priority that Crisis-era society places upon protecting
the family at all cost. Opposite motives govern Adaptive parents. In part , their
nurturing style reflects intended compen sation for memories of their own dark-
closet childhood, but midlife Adaptives are also enmeshed in a quest for personal
liberation and are constantly reminded (by other Awakening-era generations)
that everyone needs more social autonomy-small children included .
Childhood nurture plays a major role in shaping a generation 's peer person-
ality . Even as children , peer groups begin to create attitudes and expectations
(within themselves and among elders) that determine how they will later fulfill
social roles . By tracing any set of children forward along the generational di-
agonal, we can often observe how these attitudes and expectations later manifest
themselves in adulthood. Recall the contrast between the castaway IO-year-olds
of the 1740s and the precious IO-year-olds of the 1750s. Following these two
groups forward to the 1780s, we can discern an equally stark contrast later on:
between an independent and sometimes cynical or untrustworthy cadre of fiftyish
Liberty leaders (from George Washington and John Adams to Ethan Allen and
Benedict Arnold) and a cooperative, cheerful, and rational cadre of fortyish
Republicans (from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to Benjamin Rush and
John Jay) . Likewise , put the 4-year-olds of 1900 and 1915 on fast forward until
the late 1960s. Among eminent leaders in the first group, we find shrewd sev-
entyish Lost curmudgeons like Everett Dirksen and Sam Ervin; among the sec-
ond , we recognize confident mid-fiftyish G.I. optimists like Hubert Humphrey
and Ronald Reagan .
Childhood nurture alone does not stamp a generation for life. To define its
peer personality and fix its cohort boundaries, a generation needs further contact
with history, especially as it comes of age into rising adulthood . Other behavioral
and attitudinal patterns-in youth and later phases of life-match the timing of
our generational cycle . Like the different brands of child nurture received in
youth and dispensed in midlife, these patterns all oscillate between extremes at
opposite (two-apart) eras in the generational cycle .
Youths of the two dominant types (Idealist and Civic), for example, reveal
the widest contrast in their symbolic affinity to mothers versus fathers . Young
Idealists typically show the strongest attachment to mothers and the most conflict
with fathers . Scholars have long illustrated the dynamics of oedipal behavior by
drawing most of their examples from notable Idealists-Martin Luther and Oliver
Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, even the " young radicals"
studied by Kenneth . Keniston and Lewis Feuer in the late 1960s. Again and
102 GENERA TIO NS

again, from Puritans to Boomers, rising Idealists have given spiritual awakenings
an anti-masculine flavor. Later in life, Idealist leaders commonly ascribe greater
influence to their mothers. By contrast, the sharpest attacks on elder mother
figures have come from rising Civics-from the anti-witch diatribes of James I
and Cotton Mather to Philip Wylie's tirade against "momism" and "she-
popery." Later in life, Civic leaders typically ascribe greater influence to their
fathers.
Moving beyond youth, we see other striking patterns coincident with the
generational cycle. For each of them we could draw a sine curve like the wave
in Figure 6-1. For example:
COMING OF AGE, Idealists are the most attracted to spiritual self-discovery
and the least attracted to teamwork; Civics, the reverse. Reactives display
the strongest desire for early independence and adventure; Adaptives, the
weakest.
In RISING ADULTHOOD, Idealists narrow the distinction between acceptable
sex roles; Civics widen them. Reactives are the most risk-prone; Adaptives,
the most risk-averse.
In MIDLIFE, Idealists feel a growing pessimism about worldly affairs; Civics
a growing optimism. Reactives tire from earlier bingeing and slow down;
Adaptives break free from earlier conformity and speed up.
In ELDERHOOD, Idealists are preoccupied with moral principle; Civics with
secular achievement. Reactives typically live least comfortably relative to
younger generations; Adaptives, most comfortably.

We spell out these phase-of-life oscillations in greater detail in Chapter 12,

where we connect them with constellational eras and moods. Our point here is
simply to demonstrate the breadth of life experience encompassed by the gen-
erational cycle. It is not just about the "history" of elections and wars. The
cycle has at least as much to do with children and parents as it does with Presidents
and generals.

Cycle Theories of American History

We are by no means the first to observe cycles in American history. Over

the years, many scholars have been struck by the recurrent timing of certain
kinds of trends or events . A few have explicitly connected these cycles with the
concept of generational change; most have at least remarked that they coincide
with a generational rhythm. Perhaps the two best-known modern American cycle
theories are those advanced by Frank Klingberg and by the two Arthur Schles-
ingers, father and son. Both the Klingberg and the Schlesinger theories describe
FROM PURITANS TO MILLENNIALS AND BEYOND 103

a two-stroke pendular movement between periods of activity and calm in public

life.
In 1951, Klingberg suggested that American foreign policy since 1776 has
alternated between "extroversion" (interventionism) and "introversion" (iso-
lationism) . Each period, he observes, lasts about twenty-three years-which
makes the timing of his foreign policy cycle closely match the timing of our
own cycle of generations and social moments. But where his two-part cycle
registers two oscillations, our four-part cycle registers only one. For example,
Klingberg takes the period of American interventionism extending from the
Spanish-American War (1898) through World War I (1918) and equates it with
the interventionism of the 1940-1965 "Pax Americana ." Because Klingberg
sees both spiritual awakenings and secular crises as periods of activity, his cycle
does not differentiate between them . We, on the other hand, interpret these two
periods in terms of very different generational constellations. The first, beginning
at the end of an Awakening era, was a moralistic crusade urged by rising-adult
Idealists and managed by equivocating Adaptives. The second, beginning at the
end of a Crisis era, was an institutional framework for peace and prosperity
urged by rising-adult Civics and managed by pragmatic Reactives. The purpose
of interventionism, the nature of national leadership, and indeed the entire public
mood differed substantially on each occasion .
The Schlesinger cycle is much like Klingberg's. In Paths to the Present,
published in 1949, the elder Schlesinger suggested that American history follows
a pendular movement between two public or political moods, later defined by
Arthur, Jr., as a period of "public activity" and a period of "private interest"
(or "conservative retrenchment"). Each period lasts about sixteen years, on
average (with wide variations before 1900). In certain respects, the Schlesinger
cycle has successfully predicted how popular attitudes toward government did
in fact twist and tum over the postwar era: the mid- I 940s surge toward con-
servatism, the late-l 950s tilt toward liberalism, and the reemergence of Reagan-
style conservatism in the mid-l 970s . More recently, however, their cycle has
stumbled . In the spring of 1988, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published an article
entitled "Wake Up, Liberals, Your Time Has Come," predicting a resurgence
of sixties-style liberalism over the next few years. To date, Schlesinger's pre-
diction seems wide of the mark. One problem, in our view, is that a sixteen-
year pendulum is too exact-and (unlike Klingberg's twenty-three-year
pendulum) speeds the clock too fast.
A more basic limitation of the Schlesingers' approach is that, like Klingberg's,
it focuses on a bipolar index of the national mood: the presence or absence of
public activism . But what kind of activism? According to Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., the New Deal and the Great Society initiated two equivalent eras of hope
and energy . According to our four-part generational cycle, we see two constel-
lational eras that were in many ways the opposite of each other. The New Deal
era invited outer-fixated rising adults (Civic G.l.s) to propel America to build a
104 GENERATIONS

better world . That is just what they did-obediently and with great collective
enthusiasm. The Great Society era, by contrast , invited inner-fixated rising adults
(Idealist Boomers) to move the nation toward introspection and spiritual rebirth-
certainly not toward building anything or obeying anybody . Consider what hap-
pened to the names themselves . "New Deal" became a symbol of elder vision
and youthful achievement that G .l.s later spoke of with pride. "Great Society"
became a symbol of elder hubris and youthful revolt that Boomers today recall
with irony or even ridicule. After the fact, 25-year-old Boomers never came
away from LBJ's "guns and butter" with anything like the community-spirited
energy that 25-year-old G .l.s brought away from FDR's fireside chats. These
are fundamental differences, the kind that cast a long shadow on history.
In The Cycles of American History, published in 1986, Arthur Schles-
inger, Jr., agrees that "it is the generational experience that serves as the main-
spring of the political cycle.'' But the formative experiences of politically active
Americans around 1965 in no way resemble those when Roosevelt was first
elected in 1932. Nor do the constellations during the two most recent conservative
periods identified by Schlesinger. The first (the late 1940s and 1950s) was a time
of conformist immersion in community, the second (the late 1970s and 1980s)
of nonconformist immersion in self. If generations are indeed the "mainspring"
for his cycle, Schlesinger is saying, in effect , that the rising generation of the
1980s (the Boomer ''yuppies'') were the political and social equivalent of Schles-
inger's own generation of postwar G.I . heroes . Two more dissimilar sets of
rising adults can scarcely be imagined.
The logical problem faced by two-stroke cycles, whether thirty-two or forty-
six years in length, is that they imply that generations two apart will engage in
very similar public behavior. That defies human nature. You can look through
all of American history for an example of matching midlife-youth peer person-
alities, but you will not find any. This certainly did not happen between Mis-
sionaries and G .l.s , or between G.l.s and Boomers . Nor between the Lost and
the Silent, or the Silent and the 13ers. Klingberg and the Schlesingers limit
themselves to a two-stroke cycle (of dominant and recessive generations) perhaps
because they focus exclusively on what are known as "political generations."
Like Thomas Jefferson and so many others who have examined cycles and
generations , they do not incorporate the entire lifespan into their theories.
There is nothing unprecedented about a historical cycle based, like our own,
on the total lifecycle experience of cohort-group generations. As we explain in
Appendix A, many have been there before us-with origins of our theory dating
as far back as Homer and lbn Khaldun . Over the last two centuries , eminent
social philosophers from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill to Jose Ortega y
Gasset and Karl Mannheim have endorsed a generational perspective on history
that transcends politics alone. Nor are we the first to postulate a cycle revolving
around four generational types . Two nineteenth-century writers, Emile Littre
FROM PURITANS TO MILLENNIALS AND BEYOND 105

and Giuseppe Ferrari , identified such a cycle in modem European history . In

the twentieth century, a Spanish sociologist and an American historian, Julian
Marfas and Samuel Huntington, have also identified elements of a four-part
cycle.
Huntington's theory, designed specifically to explain the American experi-
ence, is an especially important antecedent to our own. What he calls his "lvl"
("Institutions versus Ideals") cycle lines up social moments exactly as we do-
between eras of " creedal passion" in which new ideals emerge and periods of
secular action in which ideals are institutionalized in public life. Within this
sixty-to-ninety-year cycle , Huntington sees a sequence of "idealistic," "cyni-
cal," "complacent, " and "hypocritical" attitudes-social moods that roughly
describe our four constellational eras and reflect the coming-of-age personalities
of our four generational types.
While these four writers reach what we consider to be essentially correct
definitions of the cycle, none (including Huntington) has much to say about why
it occurs, beyond general references to the rejuvenative nature of social change.
Like Klingberg and the Schlesingers, they limit their discussion to political
generations and focus on just two generations at a time (those occupying what
we term the rising adulthood and midlife phases of life) . They give little or no
attention to the importance of a generation's nurturing and coming-of-age ex-
periences, or to its behavior in old age . Accordingly, these writers have succeeded
more in describing what the cycle is than in explaining its connection with the
larger currents of social history .

The Predictive Record of the Generational Cycle

According to an ancient Chinese legend, two astronomers named Hi and Ho

once failed to predict an eclipse of the sun-and were thereupon beheaded by
the emperor. In 1989, the California earthquake caught Joan Quigley, Nancy
Reagan's astrologer, completely by surprise in her San Francisco apartment-
an oversight for which she was pummeled by sarcastic columnists. Fair enough .
The acid test of any theory is its ability to forecast.
Unlike other cycle theorists, we make no claim that our generational cycle
can predict which party will win what election, or whether a stock crash or war
will occur in this or that year. Cycles that aim at such accuracy never work over
time. Sooner or later, they don't even come close , because the historical observer
who obsesses over accuracy typically refuses to examine the underlying (though
imprecise) dynamics of social causation . The person who tries to predict when
each ocean wave will break on the shore gets nowhere, but the person who
thinks about high and low tides-well , he just might come up with a theory of
considerable predictive power. We liken our theory more to the tide analogy.
 0
'

FIGURE 6-3
The Timing of Social Moments and Cohorts

FIRST FIRST FIRST FIRST

REACTIVE SPIRITUAL CIVIC ADAPTIVE SECULAR IDEALIST
CYCLE COHORT AWAKENING COHORT COHORT CRISIS COHORT

1580-1588 1584

Colonial 1615 1621-1640 1648 1674 1675-1692 1701

Revolutionary 1724 1734-1743 1742 1767 1773-1789 1792

Civil War 1822 1822-1837 (no Civic) 1843 1857-1865 1860

Great Power 1883 1886-1903 1901 1925 1932- 1945 1943

Millennial 1961 1967-1980 1982

C)
[Tl
z[Tl
:,;:,
;:i:,.

-z
--3
0
Cl)
FROM PURITANS TO MILLENNIALS AND BEYOND 107

That is why we phrase our conclusions about the past (and visions of the future)
not in terms of specific years, but in terms of constellational eras and generational
phases of life.
Although we resist calibrating our conclusions to the exact year, our cycle
does reveal a four-century record of strikingly consistent timing . In Figure 6-3,
we show that every social moment has begun shortly after the first birthyear of
a recessive-type generation-that is, shortly after the beginning of the matching
(awakening or crisis) constellational era. We also show that every social moment
has ended near the first birthyear of a dominant-type generation.
Each of the nine social moments has started between O and 14 years after the
first recessive (Reactive or Adaptive) birth . On average, they have started
6 years afterward, with an average margin of error of 3 .0 years. At the other
end, each social moment has ended between 9 years before and 5 years after
the first dominant (Idealist or Civic) birth. On average, they have ended 1 year
afterward, with an average margin of error of 4.1 years . This is remarkable
timing , considering that each type of social moment (and the first birthyear of
each generational type) occurs only once every 89 years .
Just as the timing of social moments is linked with the arrival of the first
recessive birth cohort, so too is it linked with the aging of the dominant gen-
erations that propel and preside over them . Plotting the midpoint of Idealist and
Civic generation birthyears against the arrival of social moments, Figure 6-4
reveals another consistent pattern .
Here we see the two-stroke dynamic underlying the rhythms Klingberg and
the Schlesingers have seen in American history . Both types of dominant gen-
erations occupy roughly the same lifecycle stage when social moments begin.
One is partway into rising adulthood, still straddling its coming-of-age " rite of
passage .'' The other is partway into elderhood, still exercising its final leadership
role before the ebb of old age . On average , social moments begin 18 years (and
end 33 years) after the mid-cohort births of the younger dominant generation ,
with an average margin of error of 2.8 years . They begin 64 years (and end
77 years) after the mid-cohort births of the elder dominant generation , with an
average margin of error of 7. 7 years. As we would expect, the two types of
dominant generations (Idealist and Civic) have exactly opposite phase-of-life
relationships with the two types of social moments .
We can foresee future historians someday filling in the Millennial Cycle blanks
in Figure 6-4 with numbers roughly comparable to those above it. Such proph-
ecies are an important part of the message of this book . Again, projecting the
future range of such numbers does not allow us to predict social moments with
to-the-year accuracy . Since generational boundaries remain imprecise while a
cohort-group is still young (especially when a social moment has yet to shape
its peer personality) , we cannot make calculations about the future as precisely
as about the past. Still , the generational cycle shows a powerful recurring
rhythm-and, with it, a powerful two-way relationship with history.
108 GENERA TIO NS

FIGURE 6-4
Age of Dominant Generations
at Start of Social Moments

Mid-Idealist Mid-Idealist
Births to Mid-Civic Births Mid-Civic Births to
CYCLE: Awakening to Awakening* Births to Crisis Crisis

Colonial 22 years 74 years 15 years 76 years

Revolutionary 22 years 68 years 19 years 62 years

Civil War 16 years (no Civic) (no Civic) 51 years

Great Power 15 years 55 years 20 years 61 years

Millennial 16 years

Average 18 years 65 years 18 years 66 years**

*Awakening of the next cycle _

**Not including the Civil War Cycle

Looking for Analogues

Analogues are familiar to anyone who has ever talked about generations. We
recall that the rise of John Kennedy in the early 1960s was heralded, by his
admirers, as the dawn of a new "Augustan Age." In the late 1960s, college-
age utopians were sometimes labeled "New Transcendentals" -and nowadays,
values-obsessed 40-year-olds are often called "New Puritans." We hear some
of today's fiftyish liberals labeling themselves "Progressives." Thirteeners are
sometimes described as a "Lost" (or "New Lost") generation. Eras have an-
alogues as well. Some of the most common decade pairings coincide with our
matching constellations-the 1960s with the 1890s or 1830s, to mention one
example .
Searching for analogues-recogn izing which ones apply and understanding
why-is precisely what makes history enjoyable and important. Its reader often
wants to ask: How does that character or situation compare to any that I have
FROM PURITANS TO MILLENNIALS AND BEYOND 109

come across? Over the next five chapters, where we present capsule biographies
for America's eighteen generations, we expect the reader will want to ask such
questions and to ponder how these collective life stories compare with his or
her own life story and the life story of older or younger acquaintances. We urge
our reader, when immersed in an ancestral generation, to recall its modern
analogue (Puritan-Boomer or Lost- I 3th, for example) and, when reading about
a modern generation, to reflect on its ancestral analogues.
Part II is organized by generational cycle, one chapter per cycle. We begin
each chapter by showing how the social moments of a given cycle helped define
the generational drama. We illustrate the age location of each generation with
a diagram of "diagonals," whose geometry brings to mind how French soci-
ologist Frarn;ois Mentre once likened generations to "tiles on a roof." These
diagrams remind us that generational history is essentially three-dimensional-
and that a chronological date is not a point, but rather a line that intersects
evolving peer personalities at different phases of life. A single event in time,
writes historian Wilhelm Pinder, is like "a depth sounding that we drop vertically
through life developments" -a sounding that registers vast differences between
how the world appears at a "depth" of age 10, 30, 50, or 70 .
Within each chapter, we offer capsule biographies of the generations them-
selves. In describing Iifecycles, we give equal weight to each phase of life (plus
the critical coming-of-age experience between youth and rising adulthood). These
biographies are suggestive sketches, not histories. We offer them to clarify the
cohort boundaries, peer personality, age location, and lifecycle trajectory of each
generation.
After traversing eighteen generations, we shall return in Part III to the patterns
of the cycle. By then, we expect, the reader will have gained a deeper, more
intuitive feel for what it means to belong to an "Adaptive" or "Idealist" gen-
eration or to live in an "Outer-Driven" or "Crisis" era. In Chapter 12, we
construct analogues-for constellational moods, generational types, and endow-
ment behavior. Finally, in Chapter 13, we project these analogues into the future.
We explain what four centuries of generational history have to say about how
the national mood will evolve in the decades to come, how each of today's living
generations will mature through later phases of life, and what kinds of endow-
ments each can be expected to leave for its heirs.
To stimulate thinking about analogues, we sort generations by type in Fig-
ure 6-5.
These analogues identify historical examples of generational types that match
those alive today . They can help us answer questions like the following:
What do the legacies of the Glorious and Republicans tell G.l.s about how
they will ultimately be remembered-and tell all of us about what sense of
community today's Millennial infants are likely to feel upon coming of age?
IIO GENERA TIO NS

FIGURE 6-5
Generations, By Type

CYCLE IDEALIST REACTIVE CIVIC ADAPTIVE

Colonial Puritan Cavalier Glorious Enlightenment

Revolutionary Awakening Liberty Republican Compromise

Civil War Transcendental Gilded Progressive

Great Power Missionary Lost G.I . Silent

Millennial Boom Thirteenth Millennial

What do the old-age experiences of Enlighteners, Compromisers, and Pro-

gressives tell the Silent about the sense of connection with history they will
feel at the end of their lives?
What do the completed lifecycles of Puritans, Awakeners, Transcendentals,
and Missionaries tell "draft-dodging" Boomers about whether (and why)
they may someday send younger generations into battle? .
What do the stories of America's "bad child" Reactive generations-Cava-
liers, Liberty, Gilded, and Lost-tell l3ers about what they can expect
from a mistimed lifecycle?
How does the endowment behavior of other A wakening eras compare with the
narcissism associated with the recent Boom Awakening?
What can the constellational moods of other Inner-Driven eras tell us about
whether the consensus vision of the future will brighten or darken as America
approaches the year 2000?

Historian Anthony Esler has commented how "the generational approach may,
in fact, provide one of the royal roads to total history." Take a look at the table
on page 428. In it, you will find a complete road map of the journey we are about
to take-a journey through American history along the generational diagonal.
from Puritans to Millennials and beyond .
 PartII
THE
GENERATIONS
 Chapter 7

THE COLONIAL
CYCLE

11\VT
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in
faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like
an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!" So wrote William Shakespeare ,
whose creative life-from his first child in 1583 to his death in 1616-almost
perfectly matches the birth years of the Puritans, the first generation of Americans .
Along with Shakespeare, such titanic peers as Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh,
Robert Cecil, Philip Sydney, and Christopher Marlowe represented the pantheon
of midlife Elizabethans who raised the Puritans as children . They celebrated
order, rationality , optimism, and expansion . As young soldiers, the fathers had
triumphed over the most monstrous empire on earth, the Spanish Hapsburgs . In
trade, they had transformed England into a global entrepot of commerce . And
in culture, they had brought the glory of the Renaissance north to their '' Sceptred
Isle ."
The world of their fathers was not the only generational layer the young
Puritans inherited . Most of these children could also look up at the less stolid,
more picaresque world of their grandparents-peers of daring seadogs like Fran-
cis Drake and John Hawkins, and of the wily Queen Elizabeth and her master
sleuth, Francis Walsingham. In the children's eyes, their Shakespearean fathers
may have lost something by comparison. Looking farther up, many Puritans
recognized great-grandparents who had come of age alongside Martin Luther
and John Calvin and who had been burned at the stake as Protestant heretics.

113
114 GENERA TIO NS

Young Puritans heard these stories by word of mouth or read them in the gruesome
Book of Martyrs by John Foxe, a best-seller for children in the early seventeenth
century. Here we can be certain that the fathers suffered by comparison. Consider
how the Puritans saw their fathers: worldly burghers and optimistic clerics, sliding
comfortably into their fifties along with their witch-hating midlife peer King
James I. Then consider how they might idealize their earlier ancestors: hundreds
of world-rejecting prophets, piously refusing to recant as the smoke wafted up
into their eyes. As they matured, the Puritans were fated to live a lifecycle having
far more in common with such ancestors than with their own parents.
The style of nurture which produced the Puritans and the mood of the world
in which they came of age were substantially determined by the generational
constellation into which they were born. That constellation, in tum, was shaped
by the social moments that occurred during the lifecycles of the Puritans' parents,
grandparents, and great-grandparents. The first (a spiritual awakening) was the
initial floodtide of Reformation enthusiasm in Europe; the second (a secular
crisis) was a dramatic and epochal shift in the European balance of power,
hinging on the English sea victory over the Hapsburg Armada .
Participating in these events were individuals who, taken collectively, reflect
the four peer personalities of a precolonial "Reformation Cycle" of generations.

Preparing for the Puritans: The Reformation Cycle

The Reformation Cycle was triggered by an Idealist-like cast of rising adults,

what many historians call "the Reformation generation." Nearly all of them
were born between 1483 and 1509-including Martin Luther, John Calvin,
Ulrich Zwingli, Ignatius Loyola, John Rogers, Nicholas Ridley, Thomas Cran-
mer, and John Knox. Next came the Reactive-like generation of Drake and
Queens Elizabeth and Mary, born between 1510 and 1541, whose late wave
reached midlife during the Armada Crisis. That historic struggle arrived just as
Shakespeare's generation-confident, Civic-like youths born between 1542 and
1565-were coming of age. Describing the contrast between these second
and third English peer groups, historian Anthony Esler calls the peers of Drake
and Elizabeth "a burned-out generation" of risk-takers who "grew up in an age
of ideological ferment" and later aged into "cool, cautious, and politique eld-
ers." By contrast, the younger peers of Shakespeare and Raleigh were "born
at a uniquely favorable time," undertook "ambitious projects of breath-taking
scope and grandeur," and ultimately aged into a "generation of overreachers."
Esler has named them the "Generation of 1560"-which, in tum, was followed
by a fourth, Adaptive-like generation born between 1566 and 1583-the anxious,
sentimental (and upwardly mobile) peers of John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Sir
John Davies.
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 115

Aligned with these four very different generations were two social moments
representing the most significant turning points of English history during the
sixteenth century :

The Reformation Awakening (1517-1539), often regarded as the final curtain

on the European Middle Ages, began in 1517 when Martin Luther tacked
on the church door at Wittenberg his famous protest against Papal doctrine.
Thus began two decades of religious and social upheaval-peasant upris-
ings, fanatical Anabaptist heresies , the sack of Rome, and the Protestant
conversion of many German and Scandinavian princes. The uproar cul-
minated with the anarchist Munster Rebellion of 1535 and John Calvin's
arrival in Geneva the next year (after feeling what he called a "sudden
conversion" at age 24). In England, the enthusiasm peaked at about the
same time . King Henry VIII broke with the Papacy in 1534, and a "Ref-
ormation Parliament" confiscated vast Catholic estates through the late
1530s. The fervor ebbed after 1539, though dynastic wars and unrest con-
tinued throughout Europe. Many rising-adult leaders of the English Ref-
ormation, after maturing into midlife as dour and uncompromising prophets,
were later executed by Henry VIII in the 1540s and by Queen Mary in the
1550s.

The Armada Crisis (1580-1588) marked the climax of a long rivalry between
the Spanish Hapsburg emperor Philip II and the Protestant queen of England
Elizabeth. The crisis began in 1580, with England's alliance with the Neth-
erlands, Philip's acquisition of Portugal, and Drake's return from a daring
three-year voyage around the world-in a ship loaded with pirated Spanish
treasure. In 1588, led by the fiftyish Drake and Hawkins, the English fleet
destroyed Philip's invasion "Armada" and thereby established England as
a growing naval and colonial power. During the following era of security
and optimism , those who had celebrated heroic victory as coming-of-age
soldiers-the younger courtiers , poets , merchants, scientists , and explorers
serving their elder queen-ushered in the Elizabethan Renaissance, today
remembered as the" Age of Shakespeare. ' ' By midlife, they set a prosperous
stage for their ''chosen'' generation of disaffected children-some of whom
would seek spiritual exile in the New World .

The Puritan Awakening in England would begin eighty-seven years after the
Reformation's peak year of 1534-and forty-one years after Queen Elizabeth
decided to test Spain's naval power in 1580.
116 GENERA TIO NS

The Colonial Cycle

Atop Gallows Hill near Salem, Massachusetts , on the morning of September

22, 1692, eight middle-aged New Englanders , seven women and one man, stood
on a scaffold with nooses around their necks. Their crime: witchcraft. Near the
foot of the scaffold gathered a crowd of persons of all ages . They ranged from
89-year-old Simon Bradstreet (the recent governor), to 61-year-old William
Stoughton (the presiding judge at the witch trials), to 29-year-old Cotton Mather
(the brilliant and energetic clergyman), to the "possessed" children in their early
teens whose jerking and shrieking reminded everyone why the witches had to
die. No one in the crowd was surprised by the horrible spectacle . Over the prior
decade, New Englanders had lived through revolution , anarchy, war, and pes-
tilence-all signs that their chosen community had broken its sacred "Covenant
with God." Their ministers had warned them that witches would come next,
and now the four generations of the COLONIAL CYCLE could witness the
fulfillment of that prophecy .

For Bradstreet's patriarchal PURITAN GENERATION (Idealist, then age 78

and over), the scene on Gallows Hill represented God's culminating judg-
ment on His "Chosen Remnant " -and on the Puritans' own life mission.
Over a half century earlier, working alongside such "visible saints" as
John Winthrop and John Cotton, Bradstreet and his peers had forsaken their
Elizabethan fathers, left England , and founded a holy community of love
and reform in the New World . More recently, their utopia had been punished
for its wayward offspring . By purging the witches , the handful of Puritans
still alive hoped that God would finally put an end to these tribulations-
and raise up a younger generation to greatness and glory. So it happened.
The hangings that day turned out to be the last judicial executions for
witchcraft in America. By the end of the century, calm had returned to the
colonies, and the ancient tail of the Puritan Generation passed on in peace .
Simon Bradstreet died in 1697-after residing in America for sixty-seven
years, and after outliving his friend Winthrop by forty-eight years and his
poetess wife Anne by twenty-five years . With him expired a legend.

Stoughton's CAVALIER GENERATION (Reactive, age 45 to 77), having no

such memories or hopes, watched with resignation. The witches about to
die were their own age, as were the leading magistrates who condemned
them . In their hearts, Cavaliers knew they all shared the guilt. Since child-
hood, they had always been told they were a "lost generation," that their
spirit was "corrupt" and "unconverted." Their only escape was the stick
 ""3
:I:
FIGURE 7-t tTl
(')
Colonial Cycle: Age Location in History
0
t'"'
0

age 88
SECULAR
CRISIS
SPIRITUAL
AWAKENING
SECULAR
CRISIS
SPIRITUAL
AWAKENING -
z
:>
t'"'
(')
-<
(')
ELDERHOOD: t'"'
tTl
age 66
MIDLIFE
ADULT: !'.~
~
~'
age44 ~'\)

RISING
ADULT:

age 22

YOUTH:

age 0
1580 1600 1620 1640 1660 1680 1700 1720 1740 1760

Armada Puritan Glorious Great

Crisis Awakening Revolution Awakening
Crisis
-.J
118 GENERA TIO NS

of silver, piece of land, or ship passage that could separate them from
Puritan judgment. But when they were caught, this generation of traitors
and rebels, predators and prey, rarely protested the punishment. More their
style was the response of a Cavalier Virginian, William Drummond, when
Puritan Governor William Berkeley informed him he would be hanged in
half an hour: ''What your honor pleases.'' No excuses. No righteous denial.
Cavalier leaders like Stoughton, Increase Mather, and Joseph Dudley-
men of brutal realism-would later take America over the threshold of the
next century and into a new era of caution and stability. Chastened and
mellowed, most Cavaliers were about to enter old age unthanked, forgiving
their juniors as they had never been forgiven by their own elders.

Cotton Mather's GLORIOUS GENERATION (Civic, age 19 to 44) looked on

with impassive approval-a few of them, like young Cotton himself, sci-
entifically inspecting the witches for damning, last-minute evidence of
''maleficium . '' The Glorious were not suspected of sorcery and, unlike their
next-elders, never imagined suspecting themselves. They had always lived
up to the principles of their holy Puritan fathers, just as they had always
shared their community's doubts about the shifty Cavaliers. They looked
upon the aging (and mostly female) witches as irrational threats to their
future. The solution: Get rid of them . With the path thus cleared, many
Glorious who witnessed the hangings could later excel in their generational
mission to bring confidence, reason, and good works to the colonies. Over
the next quarter century , Thomas Brattle would write on celestial mechanics
while his brother William would help found a new church dedicated to a
''reasonable'' God; John Leverett , as president of Harvard, would encour-
age the "most useful discoveries"; and Cotton Mather, pitiless witch-baiter
in his youth, would help found Yale College and conquer "ignorant"
prejudice by introducing the smallpox vaccine to America.

The young ENLIGHTENMENT GENERATION (Adaptive, age 18 and under),

paralyzed by the pervasive dread, understood it was for their sake that the
Cavalier witches had to die-just as so many other adults had recently died
to protect them from the ravages of riot and war. Most of the "possessed"
children would later lose any recollection of the witches who had victimized
them. Remembered or not, the trauma shaped all these children. It was
their destiny to come of age as colonial America's most sensitive and
conformist generation . Almost certainly, one or two of the young Enlight-
eners present on Gallows Hill survived long enough to hear news of another
epochal event in their extreme old age: the signing of the Declaration of
Independence. The last witch hanging at Salem therefore became a unique
generational focal point in American history, one of the very few moments
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 119

when those who had raised John Winthrop's "City on a Hill" stood side
by side those who would someday become citizens of James Madison's
"United States."

The New England witch trials completed seventeen years of social emergency
that erupted just as the Colonial Cycle had turned roughly halfway through its
course. When the cycle began in the 1620s with the founding of Plymouth and
Salem and with the first sizable tobacco export from Jamestown, the New World
remained an untouched wilderness . When the cycle came to an end in the early
1730s, some 750,000 persons of European and African descent crowded the
bays and river shores of the Atlantic seaboard. In slightly more than a century ,
the holy visions of the coming-of-age Puritans had been transformed into a
prosperous , enterprising, and literate civilization , just then adding the last (Geor-
gia) of its thirteen colonies . The Puritans conceived it; the Cavaliers sacrificed
for it; the Glorious built it; and the Enlighteners improved it. America had become
the proudest and fastest-growing member of the English empire-a peaceful and
busy country, looking forward to a grand future. The colonists hardly imagined
that their complacency was about to be shattered by Idealist youths of the next
cycle .
The Colonial Cycle contained two social moments:
The Puritan Awakening (1621-1640), a dramatic resurgence of radical Prot-
estantism throughout Europe, triggered the Thirty Years War on the con-
tinent and boiled over in England in 1621 when the House of Commons
denounced the "unholy" war and tax policies of James I. The awakening
gained popular momentum with the succession of Charles I to the throne
in 1625 and reached a hysterical climax with demands for social, spiritual,
and religious "Reform" in 1629. Charles tried suppressing these demands
by refusing to convene any more Parliaments. The next year, John Winthrop
Jed a "saving remnant" of true believers to America. In Old England, the
rising-adult enthusiasm turned inward in the early 1630s, soon to explode
again during Cromwell's Puritan Revolution . In New England, the excite-
ment did not subside until the end of the 1630s, when immigration stopped,
families settled, and moral orthodoxy stiffened. AGE LOCATION: Puritans
in rising adulthood; Cavaliers in youth .
The Glorious Revolution Crisis (1675-1692) followed an era of growing anx-
iety about the future of colonial America . The crisis began in 1675 with
King Philip's War (a deadly struggle between New England settlers and
musket-armed Algonquin Indians) and Bacon's Rebellion (a brief civil war
in Virginia) . The mood of emergency peaked when England, led by King
William of Holland, mounted the Glorious Revolution in the fall of 1688
against its Catholic Stuart king, James II . Before learning the outcome,
120 GENERA TIO NS

American colonists staged their own "Glorious Revolution" in the spring

of 1689 by launching rebellions in New England, New York, Maryland,
and the Carolinas. While still in the grip of political turmoil, the New
England colonies staved off a determined French invasion from Canada.
The crisis ended in 1692, the year of the Salem witch trials. The accession
of William and Mary to the English throne put to rest the colonists' greatest
fears: social unrest, tyrannical governors, and annihilation by Indians. As
the fever subsided, the colonies began celebrating their membership in an
affluent and constitutional empire. AGE LOCATION: Puritans in elderhood;
Cavaliers in midlife ; Glorious in rising adulthood; Enlighteners in youth.
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 121

PURITAN GENERATION

Born: 1584-1614
Type : Idealist

Age Location:
Puritan A wakening in rising adulthood
Glorious Revolution Crisis in elderhood

"We shall be as a city upon a Hill," 42-year-old John Winthrop told his
assembled passengers aboard their flagship Arabella as it sailed for Massachusetts
in 1630. "We must love brotherly without dissimulation; we must love each
other with a pure heart fervently .... The end is to improve our lives to do more
service to the Lord ... that ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved
from the common corruptions of this evil world." Winthrop's message was
a generational clarion call. A quarter century earlier, he had been a moody
15-year-old at Cambridge University, trying his best to prepare for a squire's
life of comfort on his father's English manor. He had not yet heard of John
Endecott (age 14), Anne Hutchinson (age 12), Richard Mather (age 7), Oliver
Cromwell (age 4), or Roger Williams and Simon Bradstreet (both in infancy).
Young Winthrop would soon learn, through a soul-searing conversion experi-
ence, how God's grace was destined to push all of them to the forefront of
history . Together, they would lead the PURITAN GENERATION, transatlantic
vanguard of a European peer group that violently wrenched the West out of
Renaissance complacency, founded a religious utopia in the New World, and
comprised all but a handful of Europe's first colonists on the Atlantic seaboard
of North America.
The Puritans belonged to an English-born generation of boundless spiritual
ambition. As children, they encountered a culture grown overlarge and lifeless
in the hands of their Elizabethan fathers . Coming of age, they were (as many
Puritans put it) "ravished by the beauty of the Lamb." As rising adults, they
experimented with novel lifestyles: odd combinations of education and piety,
commerce and agitation, colony-founding and prophecy. Moving into midlife ,
they gravitated toward decisive action-laboring to reshape the world just as
God had earlier reshaped their souls. Of the vast majority who never left England,
many joined activists like Cromwell in launching the Puritan Revolution against
King Charles I, or preachers like the Fifth Monarchists in advocating a dicta-
torship of God on earth, or poets like John Milton in recreating a universe of
chaos in which each soul struggles personally toward grace.
But a few of these ''Puritans,'' led by Winthrop himself, chose to leave home
 PURITAN GENERATION (Born 1584 to 1614)

TYPE: Idealist FAMILY TREE

Total number: 25,000 Typical grandparents: born c. 1540
Percent immigrant: I 00% (e.g., Francis Drake)
Percent slave: I% Parents: born c . 1550-1585
(e.g., William Shakespeare)
Children: Cavalier and Glorious
Typical grandchildren: Enlightenment
SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death)
1584 John Cotton (1652)* PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1584 Myles Standish (1656)*
First and last year of colonial governorship
1585 John Rolfe (1622)*
1588 John Winthrop (1649)* and total duration of officeholding
(permanent immigrants only):
1589 John Endecott (1665)*
1590 William Bradford (1657)*
Massachusetts: 1629-1692, 53 years
1590 William Pynchon (1662)*
1591 Anne Hutchinson (1643)* Connecticut: 1639-1683, 44 years
Rhode Island: 1638-1686, 29 years
1592 Peter Stuyvesant (1672)*
Virginia: 1609-1677, 37 years
c. 1595 Pocahontas (1617)
1596 Richard Mather (1669)*
1597 John Davenport (1670)* PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1603 Roger Williams (1683)* 1588 Thomas Hobbes (1679)
1603 Simon Bradstreet (1697)* 1596 Rene Descartes (1650)
1604 John Eliot (1690)* 1599 Oliver Cromwell (1658)
1606 Sir William Berkeley (1677)* 1600 Charles I (1649)
1606 John Winthrop, Jr. (1676)* 1608 John Milton (1674)
1607 John Harvard (1638)*
1609 Henry Dunster (1659)*
c. 1612 Anne Bradstreet (1672)*
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0- 4 1588: England defeats Spanish Armada
0-19 1603: Death of Queen Elizabeth
6-36 1620: Pilgrim separatists land at Plymouth Rock
8-38 1622: First massacre of Jamestown by Indians
16-46 1630: "Great Migration" to New England begins
24-54 1638: Anne Hutchinson tried and banished for heresy
27-57 1641: "Great Migration" ends; Massachusetts separates from England
29-59 1643: John Davenport persuades Connecticut to adopt Mosaic Jaw
35-65 1649: Charles I executed; rise of Oliver Cromwell in England
46-76 1660: Restoration of Charles II; colonial persecution of Quakers peaks
61-91 1675: Start of King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion
75+ 1689: Glorious Revolution in America

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: The Sincere Convert (Thomas Shepard);

Bay Psalm Book ; The Bloody Tenent of Persecution (Roger Williams); The Sum of
Church Discipline (Thomas Hooker); The Tenth Muse (Anne Bradstreet); Of Plymouth
Plantation (William Bradford); An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the
Revelation (John Cotton); "Algonquin Bible" (John Eliot)
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 123

and found a religious experiment they called New Jerusalem. Although a mere
12,000 of Winthrop's peers emigrated to Massachusetts during the 1630s, after
just their first year they outnumbered all of the adult colonists who had yet settled
in New England (including the tiny band of Mayflower pilgrims who had migrated
ten years earlier). By the end of the decade, they outnumbered the combined
adult population of all other English colonies in America, including the 33-year-
old colony of Virginia.
When this entire English-born generation reached midlife, the Puritans knew
they had changed the course of history. But in the Old World, the changes were
mixed. The stay-at-home Puritans never budged England from the corrupting
influence of world affairs, and many of their hopes for revolution and reform
were ultimately disappointed by the Restoration of the Stuart throne in 1660.
Not so across the Atlantic. The New England Puritans stopped at nothing short
of perfection. Rather than be corrupted by the world, they pushed themselves
into spiteful isolation from outsiders. Rather than tolerate weakness, they riveted
every comer of their society to God's ideal template . By the Restoration, the
Puritans had become America's first generation of patriarchs, uncompromising
defenders of a perfect spiritual order. Maybe too perfect. In midlife, they closed
ranks around their theocracy by punishing everyone who threatened it-espe-
cially the younger Cavaliers, whom they regarded as shallow and wasted, in
every respect their moral inferiors. In elderhood, threatened by tyranny and war,
they prayed that a still younger generation of Glorious might save their holy
experiment after all.
The Puritan birthyears reflect the events that shaped their lifecycle. Their first
wave (John Cotton, Myles Standish) came of age just as Queen Elizabeth was
dying and a handful of elder reformers were raising new excitement about church
reform. Their last wave (Anne Bradstreet, Henry Dunster) came of age during
the late- l 630s tyranny of Charles I, when twentyish men and women could hone
a flinty idealism in years of suppressed expectation-not yet years of revolution.
Last-wave Puritans were the youngest adults to join in the Great Migration to
New England and experience the feverish enthusiasm of the Bay Colony in the
1630s. First wave or last, the Puritans' success at founding colonies grew with
advancing age. Such was their peer personality: immature and narcissistic through
a long adolescence, but implacably strong-willed and morally committed when
older. The 12,000 Puritan settlers who came to New England in the 1630s were
mostly married adults in their late twenties to early forties-at least three out
of four of whom thrived. At least as many Puritans came to colonies south of
New England, but most were single males in their late teens, and their survival
rate was as abysmal as their age was young. Only one in six survived Indians,
starvation, and malaria in time to bear children-not enough to shape the southern
colonies in the face of the Cavalier hordes who came soon after.
Even the few southern Puritans who survived to become leaders of lasting
importance, such as Governor William Berkeley in Virginia and Governor Leon-
124 GENERATIONS

ard Calvert in Maryland, followed their generation's formula for success. They
came to America past their mid-twenties, and they applied their leadership to a
lofty moral purpose. Berkeley wanted Virginia to preserve true-blue English
royalism. Calvert, steering his flagships Ark and Dove toward the northern shore
of Chesapeake Bay in 1634, saw "Maryland" as a holy refuge for Catholics.
Like Winthrop, both were men of tenacious and unyielding principle. The Pu-
ritans who made it in America did not include the helpless teenage servants
writing home in tears from Jamestown. Rather, they were those who chose with
mature and radical conviction to leave the world of their parents . They were
likely to call out (as did several Mayflower passengers) "Farewell, Babylon!
Farewell, Rome!" as their ship set sail from England. They were likely to pray
(as did John Cotton) that "when a man's calling and person are free and not
tied by parents, or magistrates, or other people that have an interest in him, God
opens a door there and sets him loose here, inclines his heart that way, and
outlooks all difficulties.''

Puritan Facts
Puritan emigrants to New England during the 1630s included roughly one
university alumnus (Cambridge or Oxford) for every forty families, an
educational level that towered above England's at the time and was not
again reached by any later American generation until the Missionaries,
nearly three centuries later.
Throughout their lives, the English-born Puritan elite earned a reputation for
radicalism. When they were students and teachers, Thomas Hobbes noted
scornfully that the English universities had become "the core of rebellion"
against the English throne. Later on, when the House of Commons ap-
proached the brink of war, they were far more likely than their next-juniors
to advocate revolution. In 1642, Roundheads outnumbered Royalists two-
to-one among all Members of Parliament in their fifties (Puritan cohorts),
while the opposite ratio prevailed among all M.P.s in their twenties (Cavalier
cohorts). By the 1650s, elder Puritans in London-some having returned
from America-dominated the most violent religious sects; several were
executed when the throne was restored to Charles II in 1660.
Wherever the radicals of this English-born generation set up their "reformed"
communities-in Amsterdam, Geneva, America, or London-women as-
sumed roles of conspicuous activism and leadership. In the 1630s, several
New England women became popular lay preachers, and the charismatic
Anne Hutchinson gathered such a powerful Boston constituency that she
nearly toppled Winthrop's leadership. Anne Bradstreet today remains the
most celebrated American authoress born before the Transcendentals .
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 125

Puritans held the governorship of Massachusett s for fifty-three years-the

longest single-generation control of a major political entity in American
history. The last Puritan governors stepped down from office in Virginia
(1677), Connecticut (1683) , Rhode Island (1686) , and Massachusetts (1692)
at an average age of 77.
Town records indicate that the New England Puritans lived on average into
their late sixties-making this (excluding the southern settlers) the longest-
lived American generation born before the twentieth century. Of all thirty-
five New England Puritan ministers whose birthdates are known, thirty-two
preached until their death at a median age of 68; only three retired, at a
median age of 73. Their longevity can be attributed to good nutrition;
scattered settlements, which retarded the spread of disease; little crime or
substance abuse; and a regular pattern of work and leisure, thanks to a
strictly enforced Sabbath.

The Puritan Lifecycle

YOUTH: Puritans grew up in the brightening aftermath of political triumph.

First-wavers had hardly been born by the Armada year of 1588 and were still
in their teens when James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth to the throne . England
was a confident , optimistic world-booming with trade and new colonies, teem-
ing with art and construction, and well protected by their fathers' mighty fleet.
It was also, their parents told them, an ordered world : Despite the rising bustle,
every person and planet "knew" his rank . Puritan children-indulged, secure,
and showered with new schools-should have settled happily into this friendly
future. But they didn't. Instead, as they grew into adolescence, a striking number
became introspective and morally demanding. Behind the new prosperity, these
children saw moral chaos and spiritual drift. At an early age , they likened London
to Sodom and Gomorrah. They were obsessed with the sinfulness of man apart
from God-not, like their midlife elders, with man ' s potential for godliness on
his own. In "Doomsday," young George Herbert prayed : "Come away, I Help
our Decay ./ Man is out of order hurled, / Parcell'd out to all the world . / Lord,
thy broken consort raise, I And the music shall be praise ." Elders ridiculed these
touchy young souls by popularizing the very word "Puritan" to describe them-
while also puzzling (in the words of one elder Elizabethan) over "whose child
he is . . . for willingly his faith allows no father. " Most leaders of this genera -
tion-including Cromwell and Winthrop, John Cotton and Thomas Shepard-
later recalled a far closer relationship with their mothers . According to historian
David Leverenz, the Puritan Generation expressed an extreme "ambivalence
about the father's role," reflecting a " mixture of relatively good mothering and
relatively anxious, distant, weak, or repressive fathers ."
126 GENERA TIO NS

COMING OF AGE: Near the end of adolescence there arrived-full of

pain, wonder, and joy-the threshold event of the Puritan lifecycle: the con-
version experience, the moment when God "ravished" them. Tentative prayers
became rushes of enthusiasm. Moral qualms became fervent principle. For years
after their conversion, Puritans struggled to master this inner ecstasy by inventing
regimes of personal piety, what historians call "precisionism": prayer, work,
reading, spiritual diaries, and sporadic bursts of abstinence and political activism.
Together, converted Puritans felt more kinship with peers than with parents, and
used generational code words to identify each other ("churches" for groups,
"saints" for individuals-as in "we have many saints among us in this town").
Alone, they often meditated on their faith with sublimated sexuality. "Spread
thy skirt over us, and cover our deformity,'' Winthrop wrote to God in his diary,
"make us sick with thy love: let us sleep in thine arms, and awake in thy
kingdom." To the chagrin of their fathers, young men insisted on "faith" over
"works" and celebrated a dependent and feminine relationship to God, as
"brides of Christ." By the 1620s, conversion had pushed many of them into
strident opposition to elder authority, and an apocalyptic strain began appearing
in their writings . Reviling the "prodigious lusts" and "impudent sinning" he
saw around him, Herbert wrote: "Religion stands on tiptoe in our Iand,/Ready
to pass to the American strand .'' Pointing to' 'these so evil and declining times,''
Winthrop called upon his peers to leave home and establish in America a gov-
ernment of Christ in exile . Thus began the Great Migration to New England.

RISING ADULTHOOD: During a single decade, the 1630s, the young

Puritan voyagers to New England founded nearly everything for which future
Americans would remember them: the port of Boston, church-centered towns
stretching from Connecticut to Maine, Harvard University, a printing press,
schools for Indians, representative assemblies, and their own liturgy. These rising
adults hardly heard the wolves still howling near their cabins as they labored-
with minds as much as bodies-to create an entirely God-focused civilization.
To account for their creative energy, Winthrop, Cotton, and Shepard spoke
incessantly of "love." Church members laid "loving hands" on ministers. New
towns held "loving conversations," agreed to unanimous covenants of "ever-
lasting love," and kept a "loving eye" on neighbors. There was nothing liberal
about their utopian communities . To Puritans, all society had to be a church and
all behavior had to reflect perfect fellow feeling . Of' 'toleration,'' declared Cotton
proudly, ''we are professed enemies.'' Thus, when two group leaders disagreed
over God's truth, compromise was unthinkable. Ego clashes typically ended in
banishment-the fate of Anne Hutchinson (who conversed personally with God),
Roger Williams (who deemed no one holy enough to take communion with him),
and Samuel Gorton (whose "Family of Love" worshiped him as Jesus Christ).
Group intolerance, not frontier spirit, propelled the wide geographic scattering
of Puritan towns during the 1630s. A single settlement just couldn't accommodate
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 127

so many infallible prophet s, each playing "spiritual chemist " (said John Wheel-
right) in search of the perfect life.

MIDLIFE: The outbreak of the English Civil War in 1641 put a sudden stop
to new voyages and thrust the American colonies into temporary isolation . It
also marked a midlife turning point in the Puritan lifecycle-from inward en-
thusiasm to outward righteousness. During the 1640s and 1650s, Puritans aban-
doned fanciful dreams of world reform and labored to achieve a more realistic
ideal : enforceable moral order at home . As geographic mobility declined and as
customs congealed around the seasonal rhythms of agriculture, Puritans steered
their institutions toward formalism . They replaced "loving " covenants with
written compacts, enacted draconian punishments for religious apostasy, and
insisted that all new church members offer public proof of their conversions .
Puritan parents and leaders raged over the apathy of younger Cavaliers who
seemed perversely reluctant to join their churches . " This was an alarming sit-
uation for a community which had been founded for religious purposes, " ob-
serves historian Edmund Morgan . " It was one thing to create a church of saints;
it was another to let those saints carry the church out of the world with them
entirely when they died." But like their radical peers back in England (and like
Berkeley in Virginia) , advancing age made the Puritans less compromising to-
ward any behavior that did not conform to the " pure heart." By 1645, Winthrop
insisted that his fellow colonists had "a liberty to that only which is good, just,
and honest" and urged them all to " submit unto that authority which is set over
you ... for your own good . " By the late 1650s, the humorless Governor John
Endecott (who hanged younger Cavalier Quakers who mocked the Puritan creed)
completed this generation's midlife transition from the law of love to the love
of law.

ELDERHOOD: They entered old age knowing their world was heading for
crisis . Half the New England Puritans lived to learn of the restoration of the
throne to Charles II in 1660, which shoved the colonies back under the heel of
Stuart ''tyranny.' ' A quarter lived to witness their grandchildren go off to fight
(many to die) in a gruesome war against King Philip ' s Indians in 1675. A handful,
like Bradstreet, still presided in high office as late as 1689, when the colonies
joined England in the Glorious Revolution against James II . Most of these
ancients, looking down on the troubled souls of their grown children, feared the
young would trade ideals for security and thereby destroy everything that mat-
tered . Their last act , accordingly , was to set an unyielding example . The diehards
included patriarchs like Massachusetts Governor Richard Bellingham, who (at
age 75) scornfully burned letters from the English crown ; John Davenport , who
(at age 70) left his Mosaic " Kingdom of God " in New Haven to fulminate in
Boston against youth who "polluted" the church; Indian apostle John Eliot, who
(at age 72) protested seeing his life ' s work tom apart by younger soldiers more
128 GENERA TIO NS

interested in killing Indians than in saving their souls; and Virginia Governor
Berkeley, who (at age 71) hanged twenty-three younger leaders of Bacon's
Rebellion. Confident that principle would triumph, most Puritans faced death
with what historian Perry Miller has described as "cosmic optimism." Said a
witness at John Eliot's deathbed: "His last breath smelt strong of Heaven." So
often had the Puritans expected Christ's return that when death finally arrived
they met it with composure-like travelers returning home after a pilgrimage.
* * *
Spiritual self-absorption was both the strength and the weakness of this gen-
eration . It gave the Puritans the confidence to plant the first successful colonies
in the American wilderness. Yet it did so by making them think they were
building the only perfect society since Adam's Fall. New Jerusalem was a project
the next generation would not understand-and would secretly resent. As the
Puritans grew older, they forgot that grace could be experienced only by the
moment. They tried to freeze their church of peer-love and isolate it from every
external corruption. Their punishment was to see, among the devils attacking
Eden, the faces of their firstborn, their own Cavalier children. Their expiation
was to pass away showing the later-born Glorious what it meant to believe in
an idea. Insensible to the Puritans' inner fire, the Glorious later revered them
as black-clothed statues of unfeeling rectitude. We can only guess how this
image would have struck the Puritans themselves-a generation that had once
forsaken all earthly dross to create the perfect society, a community of love.
"As 'tis with woman when the fullness of the husband's love is seen, it knits
the heart invincibly to him, and makes her do anything for him; so here." Thus
did Puritan Thomas Shepard as a young minister describe the faith that motivated
his coming-of-age peers. Later generations would rediscover this feeling. But
the Puritans' own offspring could not possibly understand . They had not been
there-at that moment of history and at that phase of life.
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 129

CA VALIER GENERATION

Born: 1615-1647
Type: Reactive

Age Location:
Puritan Awakening in youth
Glorious Revolution Crisis in midlife

"A wicked and perverse generation," the young Quaker Josiah Coale called
his peers as he toured the American colonies at midcentury. He might also have
called them the CAVALIER GENERATION, a peer group of pluck, materialism,
and self-doubt. The Cavaliers followed the Puritans the way flotsam scatters
after the crashing of a storm wave: skepticism following belief, egotism following
community, devils following saints. At their worst, the Cavaliers were an un-
lettered generation of little faith and crude ambition-so they were told all their
Jives, and so many of them believed and behaved. Their roster includes more
than the usual number of rogues: adventurers, witches, pirates, smugglers, In-
dian-haters, and traitors. Yet at their best, the Cavaliers were a generation whose
perverse defiance of moral authority gave America its first instinct for individual
autonomy, for the ''rights'' of property and liberty-concepts utterly foreign to
their Puritan elders . William Penn, apostle of religious toleration, was a Cavalier,
as were such unattractive and pugnacious defenders of colonial independence as
Nathaniel Bacon, Increase Mather, Elisha Cooke, and Jacob Leisler.
The typical life experience of the 100,000-member Cavalier generation varied
dramatically according to geography. Of the 40,000 in New England, nearly all
were either born in America or brought over as children by their parents. They
grew up in large families among towns and churches dominated by their long-
lived Puritan elders. Of the 60,000 or so farther south, especially in the Ches-
apeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, most were immigrants-perhaps
two-thirds coming over as young, parentless, and indentured servants. The Ches-
apeake Cavaliers rarely saw a complete family. Most arrived unattached and
perished before marrying. Throughout the seventeenth century, theirs was a
frontier society of extreme youth and routine violence- "a people," scowled
the old Puritan Governor Berkeley, "where six parts of seven at least are poor,
indebted, discontented, and armed ." Yet whatever the colony, Cavaliers every-
where met life on similar terms: discarded in a childhood without structure,
shamed while coming of age, and pushed into adulthood with few hopes other
than climbing fast and avoiding judgment. Later on, during years of war and
 CAVALIER GENERATION (Born 1615 to 1647)

TYPE: Reactive FAMILY TREE

Total number: 100,000 Typical grandparents: born c . 1560
Percent immigrant: 61% (e.g ., Shakespeare)
Percent slave: 4% Parents: first-wave Puritan
Children : Glorious and Enlightenment
SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) Typical grandchildren: Awakening
c. 1616 Mary Dyer (1660)*
PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1619 Arent Van Curler (1667)*
c . 1620 John Carter (1669)* First and last year of colonial governorship
c . 1620 Josias Fendall (1687)* and total duration of officeholding
1624 John Hull (1683)* (permanent immigrants only):
c. 1626 John Pynchon (1703)*
Massachusetts: 1672-1715, 27 years
1631 William Stoughton (1701)*
Connecticut: 1683-1707, 22 years
1631 Michael Wigglesworth (1705)*
Rhode Island: 1657-1698, 22 years
1637 Elisha Cooke (1715)
Virginia: 1655-1690, 12 years
1638 Fitz-John Winthrop (1707)
c. 1638 George Keith (1716)*
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1639 Increase Mather ( 1723)
1639 Benjamin Church (1718) 1618 Aurangzeb (1707)
1640 Jacob Leister (1691)* 1630 Charles II (1685)
c. 1640 Samuel Willard (1707) 1632 John Locke (1704)
c . 1642 Metacomet, "King Philip" (1676) 1638 Louis XIV (1715)
1643 Solomon Stoddard (1729) 1644 William Penn (1718)
c. 1645 William Kidd (1701)*
1647 Nathaniel Bacon (1676)*
1647 Joseph Dudley (1720)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-15 1630: Great Migration to New England begins
0-20 1635: Rapid growth in servant immigration to Chesapeake
0-29 1644: Second massacre of Jamestown by Indians
2-34 1649: Charles I executed; young royalists emigrate to the Chesapeake
8-40 1655: First permanent settlements in Carolinas
13-45 1660: Restoration of Charles II; theaters, brothels reopen in London
17-49 1664: Duke of York captures New Amsterdam in second Dutch War
29-61 1676: King Philip's War ends; Bacon rebels sentenced to death in Virginia
38-70 1685: James II inherits throne, creates "Dominion of New England"
42-74 1689: Glorious Revolution; Comte de Frontenac attacks from Canada
45-77 1692: Salem witch trials
66-98 1713: Queen Anne's War (1702-1713) ends with Treaty of Utrecht

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: The Day of Doom (Michael Wigglesworth);

A Character of the Province of Maryland (George Alsop); Pray for the Rising
Generation (Increase Mather); Mercy Magnified on a Penitent Prodigal (Samuel
Willard); Will and Doom (Gershom Bulkeley); The Danger of Speedy Degeneracy
(Solomon Stoddard); Entertaining Passages Relating to King Philip's War (Benjamin
Church)
 THE COLONIAL CYCLE 131

rebellion, midlife Cavaliers managed to salvage their reputation for posterity-

not by suddenly turning virtuous, but by fighting gamely according to their own
rules .
The Cavalier character first took shape in the Old World . There, around the
mid-seventeenth century, a new generation came of age-profoundly disillu-
sioned by the chaos left behind by saintly next-elders. On the continent, three
decades of holy war had succumbed to the realpolitik of hungry new superpowers:
France, Sweden, and Holland. In England, religious revolution had given way
to the brutality of Cromwell, the decadence of the Restoration, and the duplicity
of Cavalier-age kings Charles II and James II. For this new generation, it was
a time to repudiate failed dreams, to learn that self-interest is the secret of
happiness and that power is the source of glory. Tired of bookish principle,
Cavaliers avoided Puritan idealism, prompting English historian Lawrence Stone
to note that "the old were more radical than the young in the 1640s." They
grasped instead for what was tangible and grandiose-the fabled jewels of Au-
rangzeb, the Versailles splendor of Louis XIV, the sensuous curves of baroque
art. The initial Cavalier birthyear, 1615, marks the first English-born cohort
whose childhood environment began to disintegrate from the stable Elizabethan
order known by Puritans at like age. In America, that year also draws a rough
dividing line between the Great Migration to New England (ending in 1640 for
adults in their late 20s) and the huge influx of English immigrants to Virginia
(beginning about 1635 for servants in their late teens).
The English word "Cavalier" comes from a mixture of Romance words for
"horse," "hair," and "knight" (in French; cheval, cheveu.x, and chevalier)-
fitting images of the showy, arrogant, and predatory values this generation took
to heart. Many historians, most recently David Hackett Fischer, have called this
the "Cavalier wave" of American immigration. To be sure, only a few adorned
themselves like Prince Rupert and fully dressed the part . But what matters is
how many played the part-and not only in royalist Virginia. Fitz and Wait
Winthrop, concludes their biographer, "grew up a couple of Cavaliers in Israel" :
"half-ludicrous, uncertain of their values, and always chiefly absorbed with
fashion, status, and accumulation of real estate." "By the mid-I 650s," writes
historian Bernard Bailyn about New England, "the character of the rising gen-
eration was discernible, and to the entrenched oligarchy it seemed pitifully weak.
The children of the Founders ... knew nothing of the fire that had steeled the
hearts of their fathers . They seemed to their elders frivolous, given to excess in
dress and manners, lacking the necessary fierceness of belief ." What they did
not lack, these children would someday show their elders, was the necessary
fierceness of action.
132 GENERA TIO NS

Cavalier Facts
A young male servant coming to Maryland in the 1640s stood only a two-
thirds chance of surviving the voyage . If he made it ashore, he faced a 57
percent chance of living out his indenture term, a 29 percent chance of ever
owning enough land to support himself, a 6 percent chance of dying with
an estate worth more than 1,000 pounds, and less than a l percent chance
of ending up as a respected "planter-merchant."
While the Puritan voyagers to Massachusetts came mainly from the east of
England (Roundheads and short vowels) , the Cavalier voyagers to the Ches-
apeake came mainly from the southwest of England (Royalists and wide
vowels). These regional differences in England accentuated the contrast
between the two peer personalities-and gave rise to regional differences
in America that have persisted to this day .
Throughout the colonies, the Cavaliers probably represent the largest one-
generation decline in educational achievement from their next-elders in
American history. In Massachusetts , no Harvard-trained Cavalier minister
was ever regarded (or regarded himself) as the intellectual equal of the
leading Puritans . In the Chesapeake, 60 percent of the young immigrants
could not sign a name to their indenture contracts .
From the 1640s through the 1660s, a majority of the first graduates of Harvard
College left for England seeking escape or adventure-usually returning
again to their native New England by midlife.
A striking number of best-known Cavaliers died a violent death: Quaker Mary
Dyer (hanged in Boston, 1660); the twenty-three captured leaders of Bacon' s
Rebellion (hanged in Virginia, 1677); Metacomet (the Indian leader "King
Philip," shot in the back in rural New England, 1676); Jacob Leisler and
Jacob Milbourne (drawn and quartered in New York City, 1691); most of
the thirty-one convicted Salem witches (hanged in Salem, 1692); Thomas
Tew (blown in half by Muslim merchants, 1695); and William Kidd (hanged
in London, 1701).
Among the thousands of young, poor , and solitary Cavaliers who emigrated
from England to the Chesapeake , four-John Washington, Thomas Jeffer-
son, James Maddison, and Andrew Munro-were great-grandfathers to four
of the first five U.S. Presidents .
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 133

The Cavalier Lifecycle

YOUTH: During the 1630s through the 1650s, as adults grappled with mes-
sianic visions, children understood that no one cared much about their welfare.
In England, revolution and war sent tens of thousands of these afterthought
kids-orphaned and abandoned-scurrying toward cities like London and Bris-
tol. There they scrambled for a living until poverty, arrest, defeat in battle, or
"kidnapping" (a word first coined at midcentury) consigned them to disease-
ridden ships bound for Virginia and Maryland . Unschooled but worldly-wise,
youthful Cavalier servants fought bad odds and self-hatred to survive grueling
seven-year slavelike indentures in the tobacco fields. "To wickedness I quickly
was inclined," rhymed teenage convict James Revel in Virginia, "Thus soon
is tainted any youthful mind.'' Childhood among the isolated and fanatical towns
of Winthrop's "New Jerusalem" was safer, but hardly more conducive to self-
esteern. Puritan parents frequently castigated youngsters for their palpable un-
saintliness, and elder assemblies in Boston soon declared child misbehavior a
capital crime. Perhaps more often, self-obsessed Puritans left kids on their own-
to discover New England for themselves among the forests and Indians. "I have
no confidence in my doings, 0 wretched worm that I am,'' wrote young Michael
Wigglesworth in his Massachusetts diary. "What will become of this genera-
tion?" remarked Eleazar Mather several years later. "Are they not in danger to
sink and perish in the waters?"

COMING OF AGE: " Early in the 1640s," notes historian Perry Miller,
"ministers began to complain that sons and daughters were not exhibiting zeal."
By midcentury, midlife New Englanders spoke routinely of a "corrupt and
degenerate rising generation" -or, as Puritan Richard Mather put it, "the sad
face of the rising generation. " Unimpressed by these "heathenish" and "hard-
hearted" 20-year-olds, Puritans accused them of "cruelty" and "covetousness,"
of living by "external considerations only, by a kind of outward force without
any spiritual life or vigor or delight in them." In England, the mayor of Bristol
echoed similar disgust at the "felons, runaways, and beggars" flowing through
his port to the Chesapeake. And when they arrived in Virginia , Puritan Governor
Berkeley picked up where others left off. "The wild beast multitude," Berkeley
called them- "rude, dissolute, and tumultuous" youths who valued "pelts"
over their lives. Young Cavaliers offered few rebuttals. "We, poor we, alas
what are we!" lamented young William Stoughton . "It is a sad name to be
styled 'Children that are Corrupters.' " Yet beyond blaming themselves, Cav-
aliers grew to resent the lies they were inheriting. Their Puritan elders had
promised them a "New Jerusalem" (in Massachusetts) and a royalist "land of
134 GENERA TIO NS

plenty" (in Virginia), but all they saw around them were miserable exiles and
a howling wilderness. "In the eyes of the immigrants," concludes historian
Oscar Handlin, "the second generation seemed a ruder, less cultivated, and
wilder people." But in the eyes of the Cavaliers, what was ruder and wilder
was the New World to which their elders had taken them.

RISING ADULTHOOD: Alienated by elder criticism, thirtyish Cavaliers

struck out alone, trying (explained officer Fitz Winthrop, then a young expatriate
in London) to stay away from "a city or place where I am known, and where
every judgment will pass their verdict on me." They also hustled desperately
to win wealth and respect. In the Chesapeake world of isolated plantations and
contracted labor, rising planters like John Carter competed fiercely for what they
called ''the main chance,'' that one swift trade or promotion that would catapult
them to the top. In New England, apprentices like John Hull became silversmiths
and world traders, fur trappers like Benjamin Church wandered to the frontier,
and the aspiring elite sought attractive posts back in England. Of all ways to the
top, land became a Cavalier obsession. "Land! Land! hath been the Idol of
many in New England," thundered Increase Mather at his peers. The odds were
slim that an ex-servant could acquire enough land to merit a titled name(' 'mister''
or "esquire"), but Cavaliers took their chances willingly. Besides, by bending
a few rules-smuggling, bribing, faking "headright" documents-they could
always get an edge. The truly bold joined Thomas Tew and William Kidd in
the ultimate gamble and purest of Cavalier lifestyles: piracy and' 'buccaneering,''
a rising plague along the Atlantic coast from the 1650s forward. Why not go
for it? Everyone kept telling the Cavalier he was a loser anyway. A dead loser,
he would no longer have to listen. A rich loser, no one would dare tell him in
his presence.

MIDLIFE: The crisis year of 1675 marked the Cavaliers' passage into midlife
and inaugurated the darkest two decades in American history until nearly another
century afterward. In New England, the bloody Indian rebellion known as King
Philip's War killed more inhabitants per capita than any subsequent war in
American history. In Virginia, Bacon's Rebellion similarly began as a war against
Indians, but soon expanded into a vicious civil war between a Puritan governor
(Sir William Berkeley) and a Cavalier rebel (Nathaniel Bacon). More adversity
soon followed: epidemics, riots, the colonial Glorious Revolution, and global
war against France. All eyes turned to the Cavaliers for leadership. Could this
wild and pragmatic generation handle such adversity? Doubtful Puritan elders,
still retaining symbolic authority into extreme old age, shook their heads. But
Cavalier leadership prevailed, and did so thanks to talents their elders never
possessed-realistic diplomacy (Increase Mather), cunning generalship (Ben-
jamin Church), and reckless courage (Jacob Leisler). Outshining the Puritans in
elemental altruism, midlife Cavaliers staged suicidal rebellions and bore crushing
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 135

war-era taxation on behalf of their families without complaint or condescension.

They treated the younger Glorious , moreover, with a gentleness they had been
denied at like age. Exhausted and politically tainted once the crisis had passed,
they hardly protested the numerous vendettas (such as the Salem witchcraft frenzy
of 1692) that targeted their own peers.

ELDERHOOD: At the tum of the century, Cavaliers sank into old age
marveling that perhaps the worst was over. They had survived the Indians, the
Restoration, the Dutch, the rebellions, and (for the time being) the French. The
colonies were again growing rapidly , thanks mainly to the younger and more
industrious Glorious . Reminiscing over their lives, many Cavaliers no doubt
attributed their success to dumb luck, the only sort of grace that most of them
had ever prayed for. Even as elders, they never tried to hide their generation's
faults, especially their vulgarity and irreligion . " This exile race, the Age of
Iron," New Yorker Henricus Selyns described them in the 1690s, "living here
among so many wild beasts and bulls of Bashan.'' Nor did Cavaliers ever stop
blaming themselves for not measuring up to their elders. "If the body of the
present generation be compared with what was here forty years ago,'' boomed
Increase Mather , ' ' what a sad degeneracy is evident in the view of every man.''
As Benjamin Tompson looked back in verse: "These golden times (too fortunate
to hold), I Were quickly sin'd away for love of gold ." But Cavalier "gold" only
landed on a handful: the few former apprentices who now owned Boston mansions
or shares in a New York pirate ship, or the few former servants who now owned
Tidewater estates with private river docks . Others were not so lucky . Most
Cavaliers died before age 45; the rest entered old age without wealth or pretense-
crusty, used up, and unaware of what they had given. In his late seventies,
Boston merchant Joshua Scottow wrote a book entitled Old Men's Tears for
Their Own Declensions, and the eightyish Jonathan Burt agreed that "the Lord
is pleased with the Rod to visit me when Old."
* * *
Self-deprecating realism gave the Cavaliers special strengths: the ability to
outwit evil , to survive in an ugly, no-second-chance world and later joke about
their escapades in America ' s first adventure tales and travelogues . Unlike the
Puritans (who could just as well have emigrated to the moon), Cavaliers felt a
visceral affinity for the American wilderness-lonely and uncouth, like their
own generation . "Dear New England, Dearest land to me!" wrote Michael
Wigglesworth, painfully aware how many mountains and forests distanced him
from civilization. Yet if the Cavaliers excelled in outgaming Satan-perhaps
because they were "devils" themselves, as the elder Berkeley told Bacon and
the younger Cotton Mather told the Salem witches-they remained helpless
against the judgment of God and community . Early in the seventeenth century,
Cavaliers grew up in a world that faulted children and hardly bothered to punish
kidnappers (the official fine was one shilling) who "spirited" London waifs to
136 GENERATIO NS

the New World as quasi-slaves. Near the end of the century, they grew old in
a world that faulted the elderly, that sermonized on old age with what historian
John Demos calls ''a note of distaste ... almost of repulsion.'' The very sacrifices
they made as mature adults to protect their families helped, sadly, to keep
themselves a target of blame throughout their lifecycle .
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 137

GLORIOUS GENERATION

Born: 1648-1673
Type: Civic

Age Location:
Glorious Revolution Crisis in rising adulthood
Great Awakening in elderhood

"Be up and doing. Activity. Activity," preached Benjamin Colman in his

thirties. " This will be most likely followed and rewarded, with triumphant
satisfaction." Colman's message energized his young audience-and sums up
the life story of the GLORIOUS GENERATION, the band of American heroes
who came of age during the last quarter of the seventeenth century . Their dutiful
valor won the Indian wars and repelled the French . Their cooperative discipline
overthrew Stuart tyranny and quelled social disorder. Their rational minds
planned harbors, charted the planets, and organized African slaves. In 1689, the
colonial Glorious Revolution led them all, at ages 16 to 41, through a culminating
rite of passage-stamping them for life as public persons, institution-founders,
collective builders, and secular dreamers. Ever afterward, their diaries buzzed
with nonstop activity: families, elections , trade, profits, roads, cultivation-all
accomplished with only the rarest idle feeling. To Cotton Mather in Boston,
who wrote 450 volumes over three decades , "sloth" was inexcusable ; to Robert
Beverley in Virginia, "laziness" the only sin. Not just any activity would do .
It had to be " social," " useful," "s erve the public" or " enrich the common-
wealth."
Growing up in an increasingly protective adult world, coming of age at a
moment of triumph, and entering adulthood programmed for achievement, the
Glorious mapped out a lifecycle of enormous collective confidence. Tho.se born
before 1648 arrived too soon to experience what Cavalier Thomas Shepard, Jr.,
called the ''more thorough, conscientious, religious, effectual care for the rising
generation. ' ' Those born after 1673 came of age too late to participate in victory.
As the Puritans' favored heirs, the Glorious revered the moral vision of elder
patriarchs and never imagined improving it. Instead, from childhood on, they
understood that their group mission was to champion that vision against growing
worldly threats-to make it stable and orderly, to give it permanence and power
and grandeur. After helping to topple the Cavalier-age Stuart James II from the
throne of England, the Glorious effectively defended their "rightful" colonial
liberties from later crown-appointed governors. Yet they also came to admire
their like-minded peers in England and tried to bathe in the reflected glory of
 GLORIOUS GENERATION (Born 1648 to 1673)

TYPE: Civic FAMILY TREE :

Total number: 160,000 Typical grandparents: first-wave Puritan
Percent immigrant: 42% Parents : Puritan and Cavalier
Percent slave: 12% Children : Enlightenment and Awakening
Typical grandchildren: Liberty

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death ) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1649 Elihu Yale (1721) First and last year of colonial governorship
1651 Sir William Phips (1695) and total duration of officeholding
1651 William Randolph (1711 )* (permanent immigrants only):
1651 William Fitzhugh (1701)*
Massachusetts: 1692-1694, 2 years
1651 Francis Daniel Pastorius (c. 1720)*
Connecticut: 1707-1741 , 34 years
1652 John Wise (1725)
Rhode Island: 1683-1740 , 44 years
1652 William Byrd (1704)*
Virginia: 1705-1741, 11 years
1652 Samuel Sewall (1730)*
1655 James Blair (1743)*
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1657 Hannah Dustin (c. 1730)
1657 Peter Schuyler (1724) 1650 King William III (1702)
1658 Thomas Braille (1713) 1650 First Duke of Marlborough (1722)
1659 Samuel Cranston (1727) 1665 Queen Anne (1714)
1663 Cotton Mather (1728) 1672 Joseph Addison (1719)
1663 Robert ("King") Carter (1732) 1672 Peter the Great (1725)
1666 Gurdon Saltonstall (1724)
1669 Joseph Talcott (17 41 )
1671 Lewis Morris (1746)
1673 Robert Beverley (1722)
1673 Benjamin Colman (1747)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-12 1660: Restoration of Charles II

2-27 1675: Start of King Philip's War and Bacon ' s Rebellion
4-29 1677: Culpeper's Rebellion in the Carolinas
9-34 1682: Quakers begin large-scale settlement of Pennsylvania and Jerseys
12-37 1685: James II inherits throne , creates " Dominion of New England"
16-41 1689: Glorious Revolution in America
17-42 1690: King William's War (1690-1697) against French Canada begins
19-44 1692: Salem witch trials; acceleration of slave imports to South
32-57 1705: Omnibus slave code enacted in Virginia
40-65 1713: Queen Anne's War (1702-1713) ends with Treaty of Utrecht
47-72 1720: First paper money, insurance , stagecoaches ; rising household wealth
61-86 1734: Great Awakening begins in Connecticut Valley

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS : Good Order Established in Pennsylvania and New

Jersey (Thomas Budd); The Revolution in New England Justified (Samuel Sewall) ; Essays to
Do Good (Cotton Mather); The History and Present State of Virginia (Robert Beverley);
Rulers Feeding and Guiding Their People (Benjamin Wadsworth); Gods Deals with Us as
Rational Creatures (Benjamin Colman)
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 139

Marlborough's brilliant victories, London's booming prosperity, Addison's "Au-

gustan" odes, Purcell's martial trumpets, Van Brugh's Palladian facades-and,
especially, King William's "Glorious" arrival. It pleased them to feel part of
a worldwide effort to build a great empire .
The Glorious disliked spiritual heat-not because they felt unworthy (as did
many Cavaliers), but because they deemed the gloomy enthusiasm of their elders
antisocial and unproductive. Far better, they urged, to regard religion from a
more optimistic and rational perspective . Benjamin Wadsworth called the cov-
enant of grace "most reasonable." Colman affirmed that "a cheerful spirit is a
happy and lovely thing ." Worshipping Newton as "our perpetual dictator,"
Cotton Mather reminded his peers: ''Our faith itself will not be found to be good
and profitable if good works do not follow upon it." The Glorious infatuation
with "good works" and useful reason made them distrust the wildness and self-
doubt of their next-elders . It also shaped them into a decidedly male-focused
generation . Striving (like "King" Carter) to "preserve the character of the
father,'' Glorious authors like Beverley and Mather celebrated their male ances-
tors while admitting with Benjamin Wadsworth that "persons are often more
apt to despise a mother (the weaker vessel , and frequently most indulgent), than
a father." As the Salem trials demonstrated in 1692, the Cavalier and female
"witch" was a natural target for a young generation of soldiers, scientists, and
builders ready to remake the world.
The Glorious were America's first generation of secular optimists. As children,
they looked upon the passion and poverty of their parents as an embarrassment
to be transcended. As adults, they set out not to save themselves personally, but
to save their society collectively . They believed that social institutions could
improve the "welfare of mankind," that science could be "useful," that pros-
perity could ''advance ' ' over time. Could such an ambitious life trajectory betray
any disappointment? Not so long as the Glorious were still building and doing.
Yet later on, after the church bells had pealed in 1713 for the peace of Utrecht
and the Glorious had settled into midlife, many looked uneasily over the world
they had created. By then, they had cause to worry that an era celebrating
"Reason" might someday be despised as a cultural wasteland; that their spinning
wheels of "Commerce" were wearing down the civic spirit they held so dear;
and, most ominously, that chattel slavery-an institution this generation chiseled
into law-might cost their heirs far more in hatred (and blood) than it would
ever benefit them in wealth.

Glorious Facts
The Glorious were America's first mostly native-born generation of colonists.
From first cohort to last, immigrants declined steadily relative to natives,
especially after Parliament ceased transporting convicts in 1670 and enacted
140 GENERATIONS

the death penalty for "spiriting" children in 1671. The Glorious included
most of the young Quakers who laid out Philadelphia's boxy street plan in
the 1680s and were the first generation to include large numbers of non-
English (Gennan, French Huguenot, and African) members.
Over the span of the active adulthood of the Glorious-from their first wave
at age 30 (1677) to their last wave at age 60 (1733)-blacks rose from 4
to 15 percent of the total American population.
Except for the first Puritan immigrants, the Glorious were elected to town
offices at a younger age than members of any other generation during the
colonial era. In the two colonies having elective governorships, Connecticut
and Rhode Island, they also came to colonial office younger (at age 41 and
32) and served far longer (thirty-four and forty-two years).
In the Chesapeake, the rising Glorious elite replaced an unstable government
of immigrant adventurers with an enduring oligarchy of "native" planters .
In the decades preceding the American Revolution, 70 percent of the 110
leaders of the Virginia House of Burgesses were drawn from families res-
ident in Virginia before 1690.
As America's first generation of veterans, the Glorious received the first war-
service pensions-usually in the fonn of land grants issued after 1700 by
Glorious-dominated colonial assemblies .

The Glorious Lifecycle

YOUTH: On the eve of the first Glorious births, Puritans entering midlife
began changing their minds about how children should be raised. In 1647,
lamenting the "great neglect of many parents" that had turned out so many
jaundiced Cavaliers, the Massachusetts assembly ordered towns to provide pri-
mary schooling for children-a landmark statute soon copied elsewhere in New
England. Also in 1647, Virginia required counties to "take up and educate"
abandoned children and the next year opened its first "orphan's court." During
the 1650s and 1660s, the trend toward protective nurture strengthened. For the
first time, colonial parents came under attack for what Increase Mather labeled
"cruel usage of poor children ." "Do we not grievously neglect them? to instruct
them, to cherish and promote any good in them?" worried Harvard president
Urian Oakes in 1673. New England churches began teaching good works and
civic duty ("preparation of salvation") rather than passive conversion. While
sheltering young Glorious from material harm, Puritan and Cavalier elders also
urged them to be cooperative achievers able to save their colonies from impending
danger. Though telling young New Englanders they were "walled about with
the love of God," Oakes also reminded them that "every true believer is a
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 141

soldier, engaged in a warfare." Leaving instructions in 1669 for the care of his
six-year-old son Robert, the dying Virginian John Carter instructed his guardians
to "preserve him from harm" and educate him to be "useful for his estate ."
The double message worked. By the mid-1670s, a new sort of American began
graduating from Harvard and taking over Virginia plantations: confident ration-
alists with a steady eye on their future.

COMING OF AGE: Their rite of passage offered few moments of lone

introspection. Instead, it forced the coming-of-age Glorious to band together and
prove their public spirit in the heat of action. For the first wave (the eldest in
their late twenties), the trial began with the Indian wars of 1675-1676. For the
last wave (the youngest in their late teens), it culminated in the terrifying riots
and rebellions of 1689-1692 that expelled from America Europe's ''Great Scarlet
Whore," the alleged Catholic conspiracy of James II and Louis XIV. Cotton
Mather called it "a happy revolution ." And well might all of his peers, for the
crisis "released long-suppressed generational tensions" (according to historian
T. H. Breen) and triggered a seismic shift in political authority from old to
young. In New England, young Glorious ousted elder militia commanders, set
up Committees of Public Safety, voted themselves into public office, and sup-
ported the witchcraft frenzy against elders who victimized children. In the Ches-
apeake, the educated young elite who came to power from the 1670s to 1690s
created the famous "planter oligarchy" ofByrds, Randolphs, Fitzhughs, Carters,
Pages, Taneys, and Carrolls that would shun outsiders and rule the South for
generations to come. Throughout the colonies, energetic young men began el-
bowing aside their seniors. Rather than "dishonor yourselves," the 27-year-old
Mather boldly preached to aging Cavaliers in 1690, "look often into your cof-
fins" and "let your quietus gratify you. Be pleased with the retirement you are
dismissed into."

RISING ADULTHOOD: Once past the crisis, thirtyish Glorious labored to

build new institutions that would promote social order and productive activity.
Detesting the remnants of the anarchic Cavalier lifestyle, they helped the English
rid the New World of piracy and replaced the predatory violence of Chesapeake
planters with friendlier substitutes like gambling and horse racing. Unlike the
Cavaliers at like age, they did not wander. Planter-statesmen in the South, or
farmer-soldiers in the North, the Glorious stayed put, taking pride in their ethos
of loyal community-building. Where young voters could empower their own
governors (Samuel Cranston in Connecticut or Joseph Talcott in Rhode Island),
they made their colonies peaceful and prosperous. Elsewhere, they closed ranks
and enforced their will on crown-appointed governors through peer solidarity.
Rising Glorious men and women encouraged an unprecedented division between
sex roles. Men began wearing powdered periwigs, women the whalebone cor-
set-new symbols of what John Cotton .in 1699 celebrated as "the industry of
142 GENERA TIO NS

the man" and the "keep at home" woman . Religion underwent a complementary
transition from passion to "reason," from fanaticism to "cheer," from mysti-
cism to "clarity." By pushing spiritual emotion toward domesticated mothers,
Cotton Mather's "handmaidens of the Lord," the Glorious clergy left fathers
free to build. The duty of "Man," announced Thomas Budd in Philadelphia,
was "to bring creation into order."

MIDLIFE: In 1721, clergyman John Wise surveyed the busy coastal ports
of America and announced: "I say it is the merchandise of any country, wisely
and vigorously managed, this is the king of business for increasing the wealth,
the civil strength, and the temporal glory of a people." Throughout the colonies,
from "Bostonia" to the "idyllic gardens" of the Carolinas, midlife Glorious
took pride in their worldly accomplishments. They had reason. Throughout their
active adulthood, from the 1670s to the 1720s, they presided over colonial
America's most robust era of economic growth, a 50 to 100 percent advance in
living standards by most statistical measures : per capita imports from England,
number of rooms per home, amount of furniture per family, estate size at death.
The Glorious succeeded not with Cavalier risk-taking, but rather by establishing
"orderly" markets, pioneering paper money, and building what they liked to
call "public works." They also introduced new types of property rights, such
as private ownership of communal town land-and of black Africans. When the
Glorious came of age, a mere 6,000 blacks labored in America, primarily im-
migrants from other English colonies, many of whom exercised the same rights
as indentured servants. This generation changed all that. In the 1690s, young
planters began importing blacks directly from Africa by the thousands. By the
1700-1710 decade, Glorious-led assemblies were everywhere enacting statutes
that fixed slavery as a monolithic racial and legal institution. Those few Glorious
who objected found little support. Samuel Sewall, who wrote The Selling of
Joseph to keep slaves out of Boston, acknowledged that his opinions elicited
"frowns and harsh words" from his peers.

ELDERHOOD: Old age brought mixed blessings to a generation of builders

and doers. True, the aging Glorious could look back on a lifetime of achievement.
When they were children, the colonies had been a savage outpost of some 100,000
subjects, chained to a con-upt kingdom . Now they saw around them a wealthy
colonial "jewel," with a population pushing one million, attached to the most
prestigious empire on earth. They had earned and saved far more during their
lifetimes than had the Puritans or Cavaliers ("Our fathers," Colman admitted,
"were not quite enough men of the world for us"), and rising land prices gave
them commanding bargaining power over their own land-poor children. Yet in
their diaries, the elder Glorious complained of physical decline and regretted
that their secularized religion offered so little solace. Upon death, they staged
such gaudy last rites for old friends that in the 1720s Massachusetts led several
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 143

other colonies in enacting laws to ''restrain the extraordinary expense at fu-

nerals." Most of all, they wondered why the young did not show them the same
warmth they remembered feeling for their own fathers. Celebrating each other
with adjectives like "honored" and "ancient," they withdrew from the hostile
and increasingly value-laden culture of young Awakeners. In his mid-sixties,
Cotton Mather criticized the doctrine of spiritual rebirth gaining popularity among
younger ministers by insisting that "going to heaven in the way of repentance,
is much safer and surer than going in the way of ecstasy.'' But he also warned
his aging peers: "Our patience will be tried by the contempt ... among those
who see we are going out."
* * *
By the end of their lives, the Glorious had overcome every major challenge
they had faced coming of age. They had taken America, politically, from chaos
to stability; materially, from poverty to affluence; and culturally, from fanaticism
to science . From youth through old age, the Glorious knew they were gifted
achievers-and they let their elders and juniors know it as well. If their Whig-
and-wig legacy had a dark side, it lay not in deeds left undone, but in too many
deeds done too well. Their sheer energy often eclipsed all reflection. Right up
to his death, the tireless Cotton Mather, author of Essays to Do Good, never
stopped marking "GDs" (for "Good Deeds") in the margin of his diary . A
regimented instinct for social discipline limited them to the starkest of meta-
phors-the ant or bee colony-to describe their ideal society. '' All nature is
industrious and every creature about us diligent in their proper work,'' preached
the sixtyish Colman. "Diligence is the universal example. Look through the
whole creation, and every part it has a work and service assigned to it." By old
age, many Glorious hoped that the two new colleges they had founded-Yale
and William and Mary-might allow their children to aspire to something higher
than "diligence." "Pray God," sighed the aging "King" Carter, "send the
next generation that it may flourish under a set of better polished patriots." The
colonies did indeed get "polish" -and much else besides.
144 GENERA TIO NS

ENLIGHTENMENT GENERATION

Born: 1674-1700
Type: Adaptive

Age Location:
Glorious Revolution Crisis in youth
Great Awakening in midlife

" 'Tis no small matter for a stripling to appear in a throng of so many learned
and judicious seers," announced a William and Mary student to the Virginia
Assembly in 1699 on behalf of his fledgling college. The next young speaker
promised that every student would ''kindly submit himself to the maternal and
paternal yoke,'' and a third described his peers as the most ''docile and tutorable''
in the world. "O happy Virginia!" he concluded . "Your countenance is all we
crave.'' Careful to avoid a misstep, the ENLIGHTENMENT GENERATION
came of age eager to mature into the "better-polished generation" the Glorious
had hoped for. And so they became. Growing up during an era of crisis, they
witnessed the blood shed by elders on their behalf. Entering adulthood just as
peace and prosperity dawned, they appreciated their good fortune and did not
dare risk upsetting the status quo. Yet behind all the nice ornaments they added
to colonial life-the minuets, carriages, and libraries; the lawsuits, vote counting,
and purchased pews-lay an inner life of gnawing anxiety. The Enlighteners
never stopped worrying that their refinement and sensitivity betrayed an absence
of generational power and vision, that their nibbling reforms amounted to mere
gesture, and that their leaders tended to defer rather than solve problems.
Tying together this record of outer polish and inner tension is the Enlighteners'
lifecycle, best defined by the cataclysms they just missed coming of age: the
Glorious Revolution and the Great Awakening. First-wavers arrived too early
(at age 15-16) to take part in political triumph, while late-wavers arrived too
late (in their mid-30s) to take part in spiritual revival. Too early or too late.
Either way, the absence of coming-of-age catharsis robbed them of a visceral
peer bond. It made them better mediators for other generations than confident
leaders of their own-and it impelled them to hunker down early, a caution for
which they paid by missing (though often seeking) release later on . Reaching
midlife, when they had finally outgrown the shadow of their elders, Enlighteners
took more risks in a society bursting open with enterprise and fashion, art and
wit, social mobility and rising immigration . Yet hardly had they begun to enjoy
this freshness when they heard younger moralists condemn them for moving in
the wrong direction. Caught in a generational whipsaw, those who had once
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 145

defended their civic muscle to elders spent their later years defending their moral
purity to juniors. For the few Enlighteners who survived (in their eighties) until
the American Revolution, proving themselves to the young was a rearguard
battle they rarely won, but never gave up .
The Enlighteners produced the first American writers and aesthetes to compete
in erudition with their European peers; the first credentialed professionals in
science, medicine, religion, and law; the first printers and postal carriers; and
the first specialist-managers of towns, businesses, and plantations. Yet for all
their wit and learning, they had one common denominator: a fatal indecisiveness,
a fear of stepping too far in any direction . In civic life, the strength of the next-
elder Glorious, Enlighteners specialized in stalemating executive action through
legislative process. Voicing the consensus of historians, William Pencak notes
that "between Queen Anne's and King George's Wars"-precisely when En-
lighteners began to dominate colonial assemblies- " two styles of politics pre-
vailed in British North America: paralysis and procrastination ." Nor could they
wholly accept the inner-driven passion of spiritual life, the strength of younger
Awakeners. "Zeal" is "but an erratic fire, that will often lead to bogs and
precipices," warned Thomas Foxcroft, author of An Essay on Kindness. The
function of a minister, according to Nathaniel Appleton, was "pointing out those
middle and peaceable ways, wherein the truth generally lies, and guarding against
extremes on the right hand and on the left."
Individual Enlighteners are sometimes referred to as "inheritor" or "tran-
sitional" figures. Together, they might also be called America's first "silent"
generation . Without question, no other American peer group includes so few
leaders (James Logan? Cadwallader Colden? Elisha Cooke, Jr.? William Shirley ?
William Byrd II?) whose names Americans still recognize . The same goes for
their precious squabbles, resembling those of their peers in England-Walpole's
vote-jobbing , Pope's mock epics, Butler's clockwork universe-full of post-
heroic affectation, utterly forgotten today. Yet the very mood of anonymous
stasis the Enlighteners brought to their initial years of power, the 1720s and
1730s, transformed that era into the Williamsburg prototype of colonial life. No
other period fits. Earlier, we would have seen hogs instead of coaches on the
streets of Boston ; later, we would have heard fiery sermons about Antichrist
instead of fulsome odes to a golden age of politeness . During the century and
a half between Newton and Rousseau, this generation best reflects, at its adult
apogee, what historians call the Age of Enlightenment , that delicate equipoise
between certainty and doubt, order and emotion, gentility and candor. "Enlight-
enment" suggests perfect balance , the lifetime goal of a generation that always
felt off-balance . It is a name they themselves would have relished .
 ENLIGHTENMENT GENERATION (Born 1674 to 1700)

TYPE: Adaptive FAMILY TREE

Total number: 340,000 Typical grandparents: Puritan
Percent immigrant: 34% Parents: Cavalier and Glorious
Percent slave: 17% Children: Awakening and Liberty
Typical grandchildren: Republican

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1674 William Byrd II (1744) First and last year of colonial governorship
1674 James Logan (1751)* and total duration of officeholding
1676 Alexander Spotswood (1740)* (permanent immigrants only):
1678 Elisha Cooke, Jr. (1737)
1679 Zabdiel Boylston (1766) Massachusetts: 1715-1757, 28 years
1685 Daniel Dulany (1753)* Connecticut: 1741-1769, 28 years
1686 Andrew Bradford (1742) Rhode Island: 1740-1758, 16 years
1688 Cadwallader Colden (1776)* Virginia: 1710-1768, 58 years
1690 Thomas Lee (1750)
1690 Johann Conrad Beissel (1768)* PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1691 Mann Page (1730) 1676 Robert Walpole (1745)
1693 Nathaniel Appleton (1784) 1685 Bishop George Berkeley (1753)
1694 William Shirley (1771)* 1685 George Frederick Handel (1759)
1696 Samuel Johnson (1772) 1694 Voltaire (1778)
1696 Sir William Pepperrell (1759) 1696 James Edward Oglethorpe (1785)
1696 Ebenezer Gay (1787)
1697 Thomas Foxcroft (1769)
1697 James Franklin (1735)
1697 Peter Zenger (1746)*
1699 John Bartram (1777)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0- I 1675: Start of King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion
0-15 1689: Glorious Revolution and King William's War (1690-1697)
0-18 1692: Salem witch trials; acceleration of slave imports to South
1-27 1701: Yale College founded (after William and Mary in 1693)
13-39 1713: Queen Anne's War (1702-1713) ends with Treaty of Utrecht
21-47 1721: James Franklin begins printing New England Courant in Boston
28-54 1728: George Berkeley visits Rhode Island (1728-1731) to public acclaim
40-66 1740: Peak of Great Awakening; founding of separatist churches
45-71 1745: Shirley and Pepperrell capture Louisbourg from French
63-89 1763: French and Indian War (1754-1760) ends with Treaty of Paris
65-91 1765: Stamp Act riots; leading elders plead for conciliation
76+ 1776: Declaration of Independence signed

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: Secret Diary (William Byrd II); The

Reasonableness of Regular Singing (Thomas Symmes); Ministers Are Men of Like Passions
with Others (Ebenezer Gay); Cato's Moral Distiches Englished in Couplets (James Logan);
God Sometimes Answers (Eliphalet Adams); Flora Virginica (John Clayton); Journal of the
Siege of Louisbourg (William Shirley)
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 147

Enlightener Facts
The Enlighteners include the first large population (over 50,000) of African-
born Americans, about triple the total number of blacks in all previous
generations combined . Primarily young slaves purchased by elder Glorious
planters, these Enlighteners were the first of four large generations of Af-
rican-Americans-extending through the Republicans-transported to
America on slave ships .
The Enlighteners were the least geographically mobile generation in American
history . Among native-born New Englanders, only 23 percent died more
than sixteen miles from their birthplace, less than half the share for every
generation born before or after. In the southern colonies, they were the first
landed planters whose marriages and inheritances were dynastically arranged
by (mostly Glorious) parents .
The Enlighteners ran America 's first bar and clerical associations, managed
America's first electoral machines (in Boston and Philadelphia), included
the first significant number of doctors and scientists with European creden-
tials, and gained more memberships in the prestigious London Royal Society
than any other colonial generation .
Founders of many church- and town-based charities, the Enlighteners were the
most humanitarian of colonial generations . In the early 1730s, their English
peer James Oglethorpe colonized Georgia as a haven for imprisoned debtors.
He financed the venture entirely through private donations .
As Anglophile rising adults, Enlighteners brought to America the Queen Anne
style of dainty china, walnut cabinets , parquet floors, and what they termed
"comfortable " furniture . They also adopted the new English fad of tea
drinking, never imagining that their children and grandchildren would some-
day dump the stuff contemptuously into Boston harbor.

The Enlightener Lifecycle

YOUTH: Growing up in the midst of rebellion and war, Enlightener children

learned to split the universe into two halves . On one side, recalled Samuel
Johnson, lurked a gallery of "bogeymen" -dark forests filled with Indians,
armies, and infant-hungry devils. On the other side lay the safety of the family,
protected by the smothering embrace of midlife Cavaliers like Samuel Willard
("If others in a family suffer want, yet the children shall certainly be taken care
for'') and the confident energy of rising-adult Glorious like Cotton Mather(' 're-
148 GENERATIONS

strain your children from bad company .... You can't be too careful in these
matters"). In New England, towns appointed tithingmen "to attend to disorders
of every kind in the families under their charge" and sent children to "dame
schools" in nearby households rather than let them risk long walks outdoors.
In the South, the vast influx of bonded young Africans traumatized youths of
both races. With the first glimmers of peace at the end of the century, adults
encouraged children to emulate emerging sex-role divisions. Girls privileged to
become "virtuous mothers" were tutored in religion, music, and embroidery
and learned to wear towering "fontanelle" hairstyles. Boys attired in wigs were
sent to writing schools-or to the new colleges. Yale assured parents that the
souls of their children were in safekeeping, while the charter of William and
Mary promised that young gentlemen would be ''piously educated in good letters
and manners. ' '

COMING OF AGE: Haunted through youth by fears of "disorder," En-

lighteners matured into compliant, immobile, and parent-respecting young adults.
Seeking approval, their peer elite mastered structured and value-neutral subjects
like botany (John Bartram), mapmaking (Lewis Evans), medicine (Zabdiel Boyls-
ton), and especially law (Jeremiah Dummer, Daniel Dulany, and Thomas Lee).
Such achievements earned them respect more than admiration. By the late 1690s,
the Glorious began complaining about youthful behavior that failed to meet their
own super-straight standard at like age. Elders chafed at the snooty English
mannerisms of youth-from coffeehouse etiquette to ribald verse-and sus-
pected them of cowardice during Queen Anne's War (which ended in a stalemate
in 1711). They fretted over the young generation's cardplaying, swearing, tav-
erning, and premarital pregnancy-petty vices indicating post-adolescent tension
release. Yet if the Cavaliers and Glorious considered them effete, coming-of-
age Enlighteners felt perfectly justified in bringing a touch of wit and class to
the dull conformity of post-crisis America . Here a handful of them stood their
ground. In 1721 , James Franklin set up a Boston newspaper and lampooned the
fiftyish Cotton Mather (who, notes historian Perry Miller, "appeared, for the
first time, silly") . In 1723, Yale graduate Samuel Johnson shocked New England
by announcing his conversion to the Anglican Church. Such tepid, isolated
gestures amounted to the closest the Enlighteners ever came to generational
rebellion.

RISING ADULTHOOD: "The Golden Age succeeds the Iron," announced

the Rhode Island Gazette in 1732, celebrating the "erudition and politeness"
Enlighteners were bringing to colonial "civilization." Outwardly, these rising
adults were lucky, setting out in life in a new era of peace and prosperity.
Seemingly without effort, their well-groomed elite could inherit or marry into
upwardly mobile lifestyles-as town leaders (now versed in law), as genteel
planters (now building symmetrical, Williamsburg-style mansions), as colonial
THE COLONIAL CYCLE 149

agents (now riding in coaches), or as managers of trading empires (now familiar

with luxuries). Inwardly, they compensated for their denied catharsis by ob-
sessing guiltily over the rococo interior of their lives. ''The Grandeur (ah, empty
grandeur!) of New England," worried 26-year-old Thomas Paine. "Our apparel,
how fine and rich! Ourfumiture and tables, how costly, sumptuous, and dainty!"
William Byrd II studied the Complete Gentleman to improve on the manly virtue
of his Glorious father, while hiding his sexual and poetic fantasies in a secret
coded diary. Attracted to emotional privacy while inheriting a deep trust in
institutions, Enlighteners gathered in "philosophical" associations, "virtuoso"
societies, and humanitarian charities. They also embraced a new ethos of profes-
sionalism and dominated the explosive post-1720 growth in colonial law. Reach-
ing office in the 1720s and 1730s, they became what historian Jack Greene has
labeled "the new political professionals" -and their parliamentary bickering
marks the dullest pages in colonial history. Compared to the like-aged Glorious,
rising-adult Enlighteners were more apt to sue than vote, lobby than build, and
advocate private process rather than collective action.

MIDLIFE: Enlighteners took a subversive pleasure in the looser and freer

tone of colonial society in the 1730s. Past age 40, many took risks for the first
time: speculating in land, launching new businesses, womanizing, poetizing. A
few dabbled in skeptical philosophy (of Berkeley and Hume) or in mystical
religion (Zinzendorf's Moravian Church). All this nervous joviality came to a
sudden end around 1740, thanks to the youth-propelled Great Awakening. Mid-
life Enlighteners had sensed it coming; indeed, their clergymen had long urged
"refreshed" emotion in church. Yet face to face with unbridled passion, they
quickly realized how little regard the younger Awakeners showed for the En-
lighteners' own strengths-credentials, politeness, pluralism, and deference.
Condemned by Awakener Jonathan Edwards as "moral neuters," many sank
into guilt. "I have studied to preserve a due moderation," admitted Edward
Wigglesworth, "and if any expressions have happened to slip from me, that
may seem a little too warm or harsh, I shall be sorry for it." While Samuel
Niles feared "strife and contention" and Benjamin Doolittle warned of "too
much boldness," most Enlighteners responded to their next-juniors with a sym-
pathy, even an envy that revealed their own inner doubts . Nathaniel Appleton,
said one observer, became '' more close and affecting in preaching'' after hearing
the youthful enthusiasts. Admiring the passion of the younger George Whitefield,
clergyman Samuel Dexter confessed: "ten thousand worlds would I give . . . to
feel and experience what I believe that man does."

ELDERHOOD: "I don't think I know anything," said the aging Nathaniel
Chauncy in 1756 after reading a popular book on religion . "Forty years have I
been studying, and this book has told me more than I have ever known ." Most
Enlighteners entered old age with a remarkable capacity to rethink narrow child-
150 GENERA TIONS

hood prejudices, admit failure, and try again. "The greatest and worst sorts of
trouble and uneasiness," lamented Samuel Johnson shortly before his death in
1772, "are endless doubts, scruples, uncertainties, and perplexities of mind."
Superseded as leaders by moralistic midlife Awakeners, many old Enlighteners
tried, like Johnson, to be "yet further useful" as elders. When the stakes seemed
limited, they behaved with imitative swagger-like William Shirley and William
Pepperrell, gung-ho leaders of the colonial crusade against the French in the
1740s and 1750s. But later, as the stakes grew larger, they usually argued for
compromise. Daniel Dulany and Thomas Lee supported "polite" and "friendly
intercourse" with the English, and Ebenezer Gay (in the words of one admirer)
tried ''to point out that there was another side to every controversy.'' The handful
who lived to see the outbreak of revolution typically hoped, like Daniel Perkins,
for "that calmness, dispassionateness, and prudence that may prevent rage and
acts of violence." Ultimately, the 79-year-old Perkins was forced by his juniors
to sign a statement endorsing the American Revolution. Cadwallader Colden,
New York governor and philosophe, struggled in vain to arrange a compromise
in 1776. Watching every symbol of his beloved mother country smashed in fury,
he died that same year, at age 88, not knowing how the crisis would be resolved.
* * *
The Enlighteners were the most decent, accommodating, and pluralist-if
also the most colorless-of colonial generations . Their collective legacy can be
inferred from their eulogies, which typically reflect a painful struggle for equi-
librium. Clergyman Thomas Greaves was remembered as "exact, but unaffected
... grave, but not morose"; Nathaniel Appleton as "impartial yet pacific, firm
yet conciliatory"; William Byrd II as "eminently fitted for the service and
ornament of his country," yet "to all this were added a great elegance of taste
and life. " As mediators between the civic hubris of their elders and the inner
fire of their juniors, Enlighteners prevented the colonial world from twisting too
far in either direction. They pioneered ''freedom of the press,'' used their relative
affluence to adorn colonial culture, and cultivated a respect for "due process"
that their grandchildren later incorporated into a national Constitution. Yet for
all the balance they brought to public life, their own personal lives took them
on a zigzag path of overcompensation . As rising adults, they knuckled under
too easily to rulebook conformity. In midlife, dazzled by the younger Awakeners
and left with anxious memories of their own smothered youth, they veered so
far toward personal adventure and hands-off parenting that they failed to protect
an emerging crop of Liberty children. No one called the Enlighteners a great
generation, but then again they did not try to be. They sought approval from
others and tried to be helpful in great struggles that-often to their secret frus-
tration-never seemed to hit them full force.
 Chapter 8

THE REVOLUTIONARY
CYCLE

"O may our camp be free from every accursed thing! May our land be
purged from all its sins! May we be truly a holy people, and all our towns cities
of righteousness!" Thus did the gray-haired president of Harvard Samuel Lang-
don lead 1,200 soldiers in twilight prayer on the Cambridge Common. Early the
next morning, on June 17, 1775, William Prescott guided these Patriot troops
to a rise near Bunker Hill overlook ing the British army that occupied Boston.
Prescott, who would slay redcoats with his sword before the day was over, was
a gritty Indian-war veteran in his forties. He had little of Langdon's flair for
elevated words. "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," he advised
his men, before adding with a smile, "Then aim at their waistbands; and be
sure to pick off the commanders, known by their handsome coats.'' The twentyish
soldiers obediently did as they were told. Seeing the redcoats fall in piles before
them, they knew they had won not just a battle, but glory in the eyes of all
posterity. Meanwhile, a young mother led her 8-year-old child "Mr. Johnny"
(John Quincy Adams) to a nearby hill where he could watch the cannons thunder
at a safe distance . The stage was set. All four generations of the REVOLU-
TIONARY CYCLE were present at an epochal moment that signaled the birth
of a new nation.
For Langdon's AWAKENING GENERATION (Idealist, then age 52 to 74),
the Battle of Bunker Hill tested a vision that had first inspired them decades
152 GENERA TIO NS

ago as coming-of-age youngsters. Back then , an upwelling of godly euphoria

had incited them to rage against their fathers . "Many such instances there
were of children condemning their parents" and calling them "old hypo-
crites ," young Charles Chauncy had written of his twentyish peers in 1743.
Much later , by the time of the Revolution, that ideal had matured into stem
principles of civic virtue which leading Awakeners-from Sam Adams to
Benjamin Franklin-preached entirely to their juniors. It was time for the
old to think and the young to act. "Love itself is a consuming fire with
respect to sin," Joseph Bellamy told the Connecticut volunteers who came
to Boston . Joseph Hawley likewise inspired the Minutemen under Prescott
by reminding them of their Puritan ancestors: "You will show by your
future conduct whether you are worthy to be called offspring of such men."
The elder Awakeners had raised these " republican" youth for worldly
valor-and praised them warmly when they displayed it against General
Howe.
Prescott's LIBERTY GENERATION (Reactive, age 34 to 51) shrugged off
this dialogue between next-elders and next-juniors. The Awakeners' inner
fire was something they had learned to avoid, something that had scorched
them once as berated children and again , during the 1750s, as despised foot
soldiers in a murderous crusade against the French. Colonel Prescott was
not alone in his wry wit. From George Washington to Daniel Boone, from
Francis Marion to Benedict Arnold, the French and Indian War had left its
mark of devilry and cynicism on their entire generation . "Rifleman" Daniel
Morgan even had the scars of 499 British lashes on his back to prove it.
(His punishment called for 500, but when the quartermaster miscounted,
Morgan joked , "I got away with one.") As for the younger soldiers on
Bunker Hill, Prescott and his peers did what they could to teach them the
grim realities of life and war. The Liberty entered the Revolution without
counting on a good outcome for themselves. No matter which side they
chose or which side won, these hardbitten peers of John Adams-a gen-
eration whom historian Cecilia Kenyon has called "men of little faith" -
fully expected to be blamed. Most of them would indeed reach elderhood
getting just what they expected: little thanks and precious little reward.
For the eager soldiers of the REPUBLICAN GENERATION (Civic, age
9 to 33), waiting in their trenches for the redcoats to charge, Bunker Hill
began the most exhilarating rite of passage in American history . " 'Tis but
the morning of the world for us," Princeton student Hugh Henry Brack-
enridge had announced a year earlier. "Nations shall be taught lessons of
heroism and grow great by our example," exulted Israel Evans to his peers
six years later, after their epic victory at Yorktown . To most elder Liberty
(like John Adams) the war marked the end of Revolution. But to younger
 ...,
FIGURE 8-1 :I:
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Revolutionary Cycle: Location in History :;i::,
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SPIRITUAL SECULAR SPIRITUAL SECULAR 0
AWAKENING CRISIS AWAKENING CRISIS r
age 88 ...,
C:

6
z
ELDERHOOD: >
:;i::,
-<
age 66 n
MIDLIFE n-<
r
ADULT: tT1

age 44
RISING
ADULT:

age 22

YOUTH:

age 0
1700 1720 1740 1760 1780 1800 1820 1840 1860

Great American Transcendental Civil

Awakening Revolution Awakening War
Crisis Crisis
Vl
(.,.)
154 GENERATIONS

Republicans (like Benjamin Rush) it ''was nothing but the first act of a
great drama"-a drama that would not end until this mighty generation
had built a new Constitution, acquired vast new territories, and seen (as
Timothy Dwight once predicted) "Round thy broad fields more glorious
Romes arise/ With pomp and splendor bright'ning all the skies." Where
the elder Awakeners who loved and praised these youngsters had been a
more godly generation than most, so would the Republicans become more
worldly than most. Historian Edmund Morgan sums up the contrast: "In
the 1740s America's leading intellectuals were clergymen and thought about
theology; in 1790 they were statesmen and thought about politics."
To John Quincy Adams' COMPROMISE GENERATION (Adaptive, age
8 and under) came the frustration of watching the war without fighting it-
and then growing up realizing that their gigantic next-elders had completed
all the great deeds just ahead of them. Their own role, they soon discovered,
was simply to be good and dutiful-and to avoid mistakes. John Quincy
himself, careful not to disappoint his fussy mother Abigail, graduated from
college feeling a "useless and disgraceful insignificancy." The like-aged
Andrew Jackson later declared that his fellow soldiers must not forget "the
blessings which the blood of so many thousands of heroes has purchased
for them." As a Dartmouth student, Daniel Webster declaimed: "For us
they fought! For us they bled! For us they conquered!" Webster, only an
infant when the war ended, would consecrate a Bunker Hill monument
forty-three years later by acknowledging his generation's "gratitude" to
Republican "heroes." Only as these "heroes" began passing away in the
1820s would the Compromisers, now reaching midlife, emerge from their
elders' intimidating shadow. By then, Webster's peers would have to tum
their attention in a new direction-this time toward a loud younger gen-
eration just coming of age.

Bunker Hill was the first full-scale battle in a crisis whose origins stretch
back decades, to the very beginning of the Revolutionary Cycle. The cycle began
with the soul-shattering conversions that greeted Jonathan Edwards' Northampton
sermons in 1734, the first genuine thunder of the eighteenth-century "Great
Awakening." It reached forward through the French and Indian War, the Rev-
olutionary War, the Constitutional Convention, and the War of 1812, and closed
with James Monroe's outwardly calm but inwardly turbulent "Era of Good
Feeling" in the mid-1820s. This cycle left behind a shining legacy of nation-
building that Americans will always cherish. But having solved so many prob-
lems, these four generations could hardly help allowing others to fester. Most
notably, they failed to act on the issue of southern slavery, an omission which
would figure fatefully in the next awakening-and in the next crisis.
The Revolutionary Cycle contained two social moments:
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 155

The Great Awakening (1734-1743) began as a series of isolated spiritual re-

vivals in the Connecticut Valley . It spread quickly, especially in the northern
and middle colonies, and reached a peak in 1741 during the rousing Amer-
ican tour of the English-born evangelist George Whitefield . After mass
gatherings and ''concerts of prayer'' in the early 1740s, the fervor receded
in most areas-but not without reshaping the temperament of most rising
adults who had lived through it. They would later reach midlife setting a
tone of spirituality and public principle utterly unknown during their fathers'
"Glacial Age of Religion." AGE LOCATION : Glorious in elderhood; En-
lighteners in midlife ; Awakeners in rising adulthood; Liberty in youth.
The American Revolution Crisis (l 773-1789), broadly defined, stretched from
the Boston Tea Party through the ratification of the Constitution and the
swearing-in of the first President and Congress in 1789. Amid all the brave
moments, especially that dark Valley Forge winter of 1778, lurked the very
real fear that these ''rebels'' might fail and that the leaders of the Continental
Congress would be hanged as traitors. The crisis ended with the ratification
of the new Constitution and the inauguration of President George Wash-
ington and Vice President John Adams. Over the next twelve years, Wash-
ington and Adams steered the infant nation with protective caution while
watching a younger, more optimistic cadre of veterans rise to power and
plan for the Republic's glorious future . AGE LOCATION: Awakeners in
elderhood; Liberty in midlife; Republicans in rising adulthood; Compro-
misers in youth.
156 GENERA TIO NS

AWAKENING GENERATION

Born: 1701-1723
Type: Idealist

Age Location:
Great Awakening in rising adulthood
American Revolution Crisis in elderhood

"You would be apt to think him a madman just broke from his chains, but
especially had you seen him ... with a large mob at his heels, singing all the
way through the streets, he with his hands extended, his head thrown back, and
his eyes staring up to heaven," reported the Boston Evening Post in 1741 of
James Davenport. During a tour of New England, this 25-year-old messiah was
"attended with so much disorder" that his followers "looked more like a com-
pany of Bacchanalians after a mad frolic, than sober Christians who had been
worshipping God." For colonial newspapers, the frenzy marked yet one more
riotous episode in America's "Great and General Awakening ." For hundreds
of radical preachers like Davenport-and for the young crowds smitten by their
prophetic thunder-it was a coming-of-age moment for the AWAKENING GEN-
ERATION. The moment brought truth, euphoria, and millennial vision to Amer-
ica. It also brought hysteria, shattered families, and split towns. What did it feel
like to be there? Writing in 1742, an elder Salem minister declared: "It is
impossible to relate the convulsions into which the country is thrown." Writing
in the 1970s, historian Richard Bushman likened the fervor to ''the civil rights
demonstrations, the campus disturbances, and the urban riots of the 1960s com-
bined ... a psychological earthquake that reshaped the human landscape."
The Awakener lifecycle reads like a prophecy: at first straining to see God
through a glass darkly and at last breaking through to a purifying fire. Born into
secure and slowly loosening families, Awakener children grew up seeking, but
not finding, spiritual comfort in the secular world of Glorious midlifers. Coming
of age, they discovered it-inside themselves. In a burst of passion, these
converts to a "religion of the heart" shattered the ossified social discipline of
their fathers. When the Great Awakening expired in mid-17 40s, rising Awakeners
drifted off into quieter avenues of self-perfection and paid little attention to the
worldly troubles enveloping the colonies. Only later, as they entered midlife
worrying about the dissolute younger Liberty, did Awakeners find a substitute
for the old order they had wrecked. Theirs was an entirely new vision-of an
America destined by Providence to play a millennial role in the salvation of the
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 157

world. It would be a land where all souls stood on an equal footing, where social
union depended on principle rather than convenience, where education aimed at
virtue rather than utility, where grace and union took precedence over laws and
rights. The Awakeners championed this spiritual agenda so persuasively that on
the threshold of old age, they presided over a society of patriots ready to die
for independence.
Any roster of famous Awakeners is top-heavy with moral prophets: "sons of
thunder" like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and William Tennent,
tearing down the "do-good" orthodoxy of their elders; flinty rationalists like
Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy, insisting from their pulpits that death
was preferable to the "slavery" and "corruption" of England; missionary ed-
ucators like Eleazar Wheelock, John Witherspoon, and Anthony Benezet (who,
according to one observer, "carried his love of humanity to the point of mad-
ness"); radical slavery-abolitionists like "Visions of Hell" Jacob Green and
John Woolman (clad in white as Jesus Christ). The same image fits the best-
known A wakener patriarchs who later stewarded the American Revolution: Sam-
uel Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Still radical, still cerebral. In Boston, the
austere Adams was said by one biographer to "preach hate to a degree without
rival" in quest of his "Christian Sparta." In Philadelphia, Franklin believed so
fervently in higher causes that he abandoned a prospering printing business in
his mid-forties to devote his life to reflection and moral uplift. Careless of
orthodox religion, Franklin left his soul to the evangelical prayers of his good
friend Whitefield. But years earlier, at age 16, Franklin wrote in his diary that
he "conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection" and
concluded it with the self-aimed injunction to "Imitate Jesus and Socrates."
The "Puritan" label has always come easily to this generation. Contempo-
raries called Samuel Adams "the last of the Puritans," Roger Sherman "an old
Puritan," Edwards a "Puritan" Calvinist. Even the arch-Tory Thomas Hutch-
inson has been described by his biographer as a "neo-Puritan ascetic." Like the
Puritans, the Awakeners refused to compromise over principle or separate politics
from religion. Mayhew said he had a duty to "preach politics." Patriot leader
Joseph Hawley announced himself an "enthusiast in politics." Hebrew scholar
and Patriot governor Jonathan Trumbull sprinkled his war correspondence with
the phrase "The Lord Reigneth ." In exile, Peter Oliver blamed the Revolution
on what he called America's "black regiment." By that he meant old Awakeners
preaching upheaval in their churches-ministers like 72-year-old Samuel Dun-
bar, who read the entire Declaration of Independence from his pulpit. Not all
elderly Awakeners, of course, became Patriots during the Revolution. Some
became Tories and sailed away to pass their twilight years in Canada or England.
But few Tory Awakeners ever felt much affinity with their generation, even
decades before the Revolution; virtually none had shared their peers' euphoria
during the Great Awakening. The Tory Awakener was a self-confessed outcast,
 AWAKENING GENERATION (Born 1701 to 1723)

TYPE : Idealist FAMILY TREE

Total number : 550,000 Typical grandparents: Cavalier
Percent immigrant: 19% Parents: Glorious and Enlightenment
Percent slave: 18% Children: Liberty and Republican
Typical grandchildren : Compromiser
SAMPLE MEMBERS , birth (death)
PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1703 Jonathan Edwards (1758)
1703 Gilbert Tennent (1764)* First and last year of colonial governorship
1706 Benjamin Franklin (1790) and total duration of officeholding
17 IO Jonathan Trumbull ( 1785) (permanent immigrants only):
1710 Richard Bland (1776)
Massachusetts: 1760-1774, 14 years
1711 Thomas Hutchinson (1780)
Connecticut: 1769-1776, 7 years
1711 Jupiter Hammon (c. 1800)
Rhode Island: 1755-1776, 17 years
1713 Anthony Beneze! (1784)*
Virginia: 1750-1776, 13 years
1714 George Whitefield (1770)*
1720 John Woolman (1772) Presidency of Continental Congress: 1774-
1720 Pontiac (1769) 1775, 1781-1782
1721 Peyton Randolph (1775)
1721 Roger Sherman (1793) PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1721 Samuel Hopkins (1803)
1703 John Wesley (1791)
c. 1722 Eliza Pinckney (1793)
1707 Henry Fielding (1754)
1722 Samuel Adams (1803)
1712 Jean Jacques Rousseau (1778)
1723 William Livingston (1790)
1712 Frederick the Great (1786)
1723 Crispus Attucks ( 1770)
1717 Maria Theresa (1780)
1723 Samson Occom (1792)
1723 John Witherspoon (1794 )*
* = immigrant
Age Date HISTORY ANO LIFECYCLE
0-12 1713: Treaty of Utrecht; longest peace in colonial era begins
0-19 1720 Appearance of grand Georgian buildings ; growing household opulence
11-33 1734: First outbreak of youth conversions in Connecticut River Valley
17-39 1740: Peak of Great Awakening; many slaves convert to Christianity
31-53 1754: Albany Congress adopts Franklin' s "Plan of Union"
42-64 1765: Stamp Act riots; leading midlifers preach civic revival
50-72 1773: Adams and Molineux organize Boston Tea Party
52-74 1775: Continental Congress proclaims Thanksgiving Day prayer and fasting
60-82 1783: Slave ownership abolished in most northern states
64-86 1787: Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston attend Constitutional Convention
67-89 1790: Franklin dies , huge funeral in Philadelphia , eulogies in France
70-92 1793: Samuel Hopkins publishes Doctrines Contained in Divine Revelation

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS : Autobiography, Poor Richard's Almanac

(Benjamin Franklin); Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Jonathan Edwards); Spiritual
Travels of Nathan Cole (Nathan Cole); Christian Sobriety (Jonathan Mayhew); The Danger of
an Unconverted Ministry (Gilbert Tennent); Christ Triumphing and Satan Raging (Samuel
Finley); Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (John Woolman); The Duty of Self
Examination (Roger Sherman)
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 159

bewildered by what the exiled Samuel Curwen termed the "imprudence . . . even
madness" of his peers. "I must own I was born among the saints and rebels,"
explained New York Tory Samuel Auchmuty just before his death in 1777, ''but
it was my misfortune .''

Awakener Facts

The Great Awakening has been credited with 250 new churches and 200,000
religious conversions, "chiefly" or "especially" (according to contem-
porary observers) the work of "young people." Among Presbyterians in
1740, "New Side" revivalists averaged 25 years of age; defenders of the
"Old Side" orthodoxy averaged 59 years of age. From 1730 to 1745, the
average age of joining a New England church plummeted from the late
thirties to the mid-twenties, and the share of new church members joining
before age thirty rose from one-fifth to two-thirds.
More American colonists graduated from Harvard in the 1730s (nearly all of
them twentyish Awakeners) than in any other decade until the 1760s. The
colonists published more books on the Antichrist and Last Judgment during
the 1750s (written mostly by Awakeners entering midlife) than in any other
decade before the Revolution. Awakeners Jupiter Hammon and Samson
Occom were the first black and Indian, respectively , to write for publication
in America .
A wakener women assumed positions of visibility unprecedented in colonial
society: religious leaders (like Sarah Osborn in Rhode Island), Indian mis-
sionaries (like the Moravian "single sisters" in Pennsylvania), and planters
(like Eliza Pinckney, who ran three plantations in South Carolina and be-
came the first American to cultivate indigo).
A wakeners entering elderhood were America's leaders of choice at the outset
of the American Revolution. From 1774 to 1776, the average age of of-
ficeholding in New England towns rose from the low forties to the low
fifties. In 1776, eleven of the thirteen new "states" were in effect led by
Awakeners. In five colonies, the Revolution threw out younger (Liberty)
Tories and replaced them with elder (Awakener) Patriots. Awakeners Peyton
Randolph and Henry Middleton were the first two presidents of the Con-
tinental Congress.
Awakener clergyman John Witherspoon, president of the recently founded
Princeton College for twenty-six years, was the beloved schoolmaster to an
entire generation of rational Republican statesmen (including Madison,
Burr, Marshall, ten future cabinet leaders, and sixty future members of
Congress).
160 GENERA TIO NS

The Awakener Lifecycle

YOUTH: Raised in secure communities and largely spared from war or

violence, Americans born after 1700 grew up as the best-fed, best-housed, and
best-educated generation of children their elders had ever seen. At home, these
kids listened to the happy discipline of A Family Well Ordered, in which Cotton
Mather taught that "our submission to the rules of reason is an obedience to
God ." In school, their standardized New England Primer drummed the same
message with the "Dutiful Child ' s Prayer." Yet soon these children began
turning away from their distant, busy fathers-and toward their mothers, whom
the Glorious had entrusted with piety and emotion . Many Awakeners later vowed
with George Whitefield "to make good my mother's expectations" or chose
with Samuel Adams to abandon worldly careers to please their mothers' "reli-
gious principles ." A striking number (including Benjamin Franklin, Richard
Bland, and Roger Sherman) became bookish loners. Others were hit by dreamlike
visions. Young Jonathan Edwards walked off to ''solitary places, for meditation''
where he could reflect on "the divine glory in almost everything." Young John
Woolman imagined "past ages" in which people "walked in uprightness before
God in a degree exceeding any that I knew, or heard of, now living." By the
1720s and 1730s, teenagers began crowding into colleges seeking spiritual call-
ings or sparking town riots against such perceived agents of immorality as
brothels, market houses, smallpox inoculators, and immigrants . The Boston press
in 1734 called them "a new sort of reformers, vulgarly called the mob." Ac-
cording to historian Gary Nash, these youths were "antirational, antiscientific
.. . and moralistic" -rejecting the secular world their Glorious fathers were
about to hand them.

COMING OF AGE: With the Great Awakening, the raging inner life of
these indulged young Americans exploded in a spiritual firestorm. In 1734, wrote
Edwards , the firestorm first stru_ck his own town like "a flash of lightning upon
the hearts of the young people." By the late 1730s and early 1740s, it had spread
through most of the colonies . In colleges, young Awakeners banded together in
clubs of "saints" ; from pulpits, they fulminated against the "spirit-dead"; in
open-air gatherings, they exhorted each other to leave their parents, if necessary,
to join Christ. Where the like-aged Glorious had once stressed cheerful teamwork,
young Awakeners preached spiritual perfection, demanding "New Light" faith
over "Old Light" works, mixing "kisses of charity" with what Charles Chauncy
called "a censuring and judging spirit." Denouncing elders who kept "driving,
driving to duty, duty!" Gilbert Tennent assaulted "those of another generation"
who "imagine happiness is to be had in wealth and riches ." As for the pliable
Enlighteners, Samuel Finley roared: "Away with your carnal prudence!" When
 THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 161

the enthusiasm faded in the mid-l 740s, the orthodoxy mounted a reaction that
expelled many students from college and punished with special vengeance Awak-
ener slaves who had staged rebellions during the frenzy. Inwardly, however, the
young knew their triumph was complete. Americans of all ages would never
again preach or pray or feel as they had before. And for most Awakeners
themselves, a special memory would linger-of that day or week or season when
they had created a spiritual community. Many, like Edwards, declared that
America in 1740 was inaugurating the reign of God on earth, a "New Jerusalem
... begun to come down from heaven." Decades later, Franklin would fondly
recall Philadelphia in that same year: "It was wonderful to see the change ....
It seemed as if all the world were growing religious ."

RISING ADULTHOOD: After their explosion of self-discovery, thirtyish

Awakeners entered adulthood with a mixture of outer detachment and inner
principle. In Boston, Samuel Adams drifted through menial jobs ("I glory in
being what the world calls a poor man") . In New York, William Livingston
dabbled in law and wrote best-selling poems like Philosophic Solitude . In Yir-
ginia, Landon Carter saw fit "to cultivate the inward man." Meanwhile, young
spiritual prophets hit the road-converting Indians, denouncing slavery, gath-
ering separatist churches, and founding communes. Rising Awakeners made
poor citizens. Most avoided voting or running for office, and many left home
at an early age to join newer, younger towns. In effect, they reversed their
parents' lifecycle: Values first, they insisted, then worldly things. "What can
all the world afford us," asked Ebenezer Pemberton, "beyond a competent
supply of our bodily wants?'' Young men understood that born-again innocence
(becoming "again like a child," to use Edwards' phrase) meant rejecting their
fathers' interest in prestige and power. Young women likewise understood that
they need not become one of Mather's "hidden ones." Although Awakeners
recognized America's growing military and economic problems, they were ob-
sessed primarily with moral dramas. Frontier preachers like Samuel Finley saw
the French and Indian War as a replay of Armageddon, Virginia reformers like
Bland attacked "the least flaw" in colonial rights, and rising Pennsylvania
Quakers resigned en masse from public office in the late 1750s rather than
. compromise their pacifism by fighting Indians. "If the potsherds of the earth
clash together," said Samuel Fothergill on behalf of his scrupulous peers, "let
them clash. "

MIDLIFE: "Let sin be slain!" boomed theologian Joseph Bellamy in 1762

as he addressed his late-fortyish peers in the Connecticut assembly while decrying
the "luxury, idleness, debauchery" of the rising generation. Entering midlife,
Awakeners at last began turning their principles toward the outer world. In the
early 1760s, far from delighting in the victorious end of the French and Indian
War, they expressed horror over America's growing moral decadence, especially
162 GENERA TIO NS

the "gangrene" and "vice" of the wild young Liberty. In 1765, they responded
to Britain's Stamp Act by organizing popular crusades of economic austerity
and breast-beating virtue. As assembly leaders, they founded Committees of
Correspondence to bind America into what Mayhew termed a "communion of
colonies." As town leaders and educators, they sparked what historian Michael
Kammen calls "an awakening of civic consciousness" -a new passion for
public-spirited clubs and colleges. As printers, they used Franklin's "Join or
Die" slogan to roar out the rhetoric of unity. As popular leaders, they led the
Boston Massacre (Crispus Attucks) and the Boston Tea Party (Samuel Adams,
William Molineux). Watching colonial resistance to Britain quicken toward the
point of no return, Awakeners never lost sight of the moral issue. John With-
erspoon, president of Princeton College, vowed ''to prefer war with all its
horrors, and even extermination, to slavery.'' Clergyman Jonathan Parsons prom-
ised that if the British did not relent, ''the spirit of Christian benevolence would
animate us to fill our streets with blood." In 1774, to the thunderous applause
of the First Continental Congress, Joseph Hawley proclaimed, "It is evil against
right."

ELDERHOOD: "We shall succeed if we are virtuous," Samuel Adams

insisted. "I am infinitely more apprehensive of the contagion of vice than the
power of all other enemies." As generals or administrators, aging Awakeners
had little talent. But as inner-driven chieftains of virtue and wisdom ("Let us
act like . .. wise men," said Adams in 1772), Americans of all ages preferred
them to younger men during the moment of trial. Their moralistic leadership
dominated the initial revolutionary movement. In the Continental Congress, old
Awakeners enacted blue laws to make "true religion and good morals" the
national credo. In local Patriot committees, they led the ideological radicals-
insisting on unanimous votes, requiring Tories to ''confess'' to their conversion,
or invoking (like the sixtyish Bellamy) the "Curse of Meroz" against cowardice.
During the war, they relinquished political power to make room for the much-
younger Republicans whom they trusted and loved. But even in the 1780s and
1790s, elderly Awakeners retained a voice of authority, a voice the young took
seriously. Many of their political leaders favored a new Constitution that would
empower the rising Republican elite, and many of their clergymen continued to
agitate against the "sin of slavery," forcing the legal or de facto emancipation
of northern slaves by the end of the century. Facing death, the Awakener instinct
was not to reach back for the world, but to transcend it-writing about the Last
Judgment (Sherman), philosophizing in salons (Franklin), or requesting no show
of mourning at their funerals (Samuel Mather, Cotton's son). Samuel Adams,
still penniless in his eighties, insisted that a man certain of his own virtue always
dies "with dignity." Claimed the elderly Landon Carter ("King" Carter's son)
just before his death, "In spite of my merits, I have only inward satisfaction."
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 163

* * *
The Awakeners may be America's least understood and most underestimated
generation . Historians agree that the spiritual fury of the Great Awakening fed
directly, decades later, into the political fury of the American Revolution. Ac-
cording to Nathan Hatch, "few would doubt that the piety of the Awakening
was the main source of the civil millennialism of the Revolutionary period ."
"What the colonists awakened to in 1740," agrees Alan Heimert, "was none
other than independence and rebellion.'' Yet no historian has left us with a clear
picture of the single peer group whose adult lives bridged both events. Above
all, this was a generation of crusaders: the first young zealots since the Puritans
to rebel against their fathers; and the last elder moralists until the Transcendentals
to urge political independence and demand freedom for slaves . Shortly before
his death in 1790, 84-year-old Benjamin Franklin signed a memorial to Congress
for the abolition of slavery . Three years earlier, he had been one of four Awak-
eners to sign the Constitution. Fourteen years earlier, he had been one of eleven
Awakeners to sign the Declaration of Independence. A half century earlier,
Jonathan Edwards (born only three years before Franklin) had predicted that the
millennium would begin in America and make the world "a kingdom of holiness,
purity, love, peace, and happiness to mankind.'' Although Edwards never lived
to see the Revolution, Franklin had their common generation in mind when he
was asked what image should adorn the national seal of the United States. With
little hesitation, he answered: the fatherly image of Moses, hands extended to
heaven, parting the waters for his people .
164 GENERA TIO NS

LIBERTY GENERATION

Born: 1724-1741
Type: Reactive

Age Location:
Great Awakening in youth
American Revolution Crisis in midlife

He became a daredevil colonel of the Virginia militia at age 22, and when
he first heard "bullets whistle," he found "something charming in the sound."
He read little, never prayed to God, and meted out brutal discipline to his own
like-aged soldiers. George Washington was not alone. In 1758, while this young
Virginian begged his superiors to rank him above ''the common run of provincial
officers,'' most of his LIBERTY GENERATION peers were coming of age with
similar pluck and ambition. Daniel Boone (age 24) was checking out land bar-
gains along the Alleghenies. John Adams (age 23) was studying hard in Boston
while daydreaming about ''fame, fortune, and personal pleasure.'' Isaac Sears
(age 28) was captaining an eighteen-gun privateer in search of French merchant
prey. Robert Morris (age 24) was angling to make a fortune selling war supplies.
The Liberty yearned to join the worthy causes led by their elders, holy reform
and the war for empire . But they soon learned that their elders did not like them.
Not the British officers: General James Wolfe blasted them as "the dirtiest, most
contemptible, cowardly dogs that you can conceive ." Nor the Awakeners: God
bless "the small number of saints that appear among us," prayed an older
chaplain who accompanied them into battle. So, instead, the Liberty punched
and tricked their way into adulthood-resenting their elders, hating themselves
for their own wickedness, and doing everything by extremes.
Their lifecycle drove many of them to the brink of madness . Raised in an
era of spiritual upheaval and economic dislocation, Liberty children hardly knew
the care and protection of close family life. First-wavers arrived too late to share
in their elders' inner euphoria, last-wavers too early to feel the sympathetic
nurture that welcomed a younger generation in the late 1750s. Still in their teens,
the Liberty rushed from their homes-just in time to bear the full brunt of the
French and Indian War, the colonies' last and largest imperial struggle. Here
they tasted bitterness and death, and learned a brutal coming-of-age lesson: Get
what you can grab, keep what's yours, and never trust authority. Until their
mid-forties, they cut an unparalleled swath of crime, riot, and violence through
American history. Whatever the mob-Vermont's "Green Mountain Boys" or
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 165

Pennsylvania's "Paxton Boys" or New York's "Liberty Boys"-the Liberty

"acted where others talked" (as one historian says of Sears). Whatever their
army-whether led by "Swamp Fox" Francis Marion or "Game Cock" Robert
Sumter or "Rifleman" Daniel Morgan-they always performed best as plucky
warrior bands. Hit by the Revolution just as they were entering midlife, the
Liberty responded with characteristic frenzy . They mixed heroism with treachery,
scrapped with each other, and ended up distrusted by everybody. No other
generation so eagerly risked their lives for the Declaration of Independence . Nor
did any other "tum Tory" in such massive numbers.
The Liberty knew they were a black sheep among generations. When young,
they felt the horrified dismay of elders who saw in them so few principles and
so much cynicism. "That such a monster should come from my loins!" declared
Landon Carter of his profligate gambler son Robert ("Wild Bob") Wormeley .
" Nothing has ever hurt me so much, " cried Benjamin Franklin of his Tory son
William, "a man of deep deceit and light vanity" whom he later disinherited.
Thereafter, a sense of inner worthlessness haunted them . "We are a crooked
and perverse generation," lamented Josiah Bartlett to the Continental Congress,
"longing for the fineries and follies of those Egyptian task masters from whom
we have so lately freed ourselves ." John Adams confessed on the eve of war:
"We have not men fit for the times . We are deficient in genius, in education,
in travel, in fortune-in everything . I feel unutterable anxiety." In midlife, most
Liberty deferred thanklessly to their gifted and confident juniors. General Wash-
ington trusted his youthful Republican aides far more than his own peers . "I
am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular," admitted John Adams to Thomas
Jefferson before agreeing to let this younger man draft the Declaration of In-
dependence because "you write ten times better than I do ." Still suffering the
early scars of alienation, the Liberty aged into pessimistic "fogies" and "cod-
gers" -epithets that gained their scornful meaning just when this generation
was entering elderhood . Later in life, Washington wondered if the republic would
outlive him; Adams suspected an American monarchy might better suit the "self-
seeking" darkness of the human heart.
"Give me liberty or give me death!" roared 39-year-old Patrick Henry in
1775, invoking the one word that always intoxicated his generation, from a
castaway childhood to a leave-me-alone old age. When Henry's peers sang, they
sang the name: The American Liberty Song by John Dickinson, The Massachu-
setts Song of Liberty by Mercy Warren, and My Days Have Been So Wondrous
Free by Francis Hopkinson. When they acted, they acted in the name, organizing
as "Sons of Liberty," planting Liberty trees, and parading around "Liberty"
poles. Where Awakener elders preached "Unite or Die!" this generation had a
more anarchic battle cry: "Don't Tread on Me!" or simply "Liberty or Die!"-
the motto emblazoned on the shirts of Morgan ' s riflemen. They came to be
known (and remembered) as "Yankees," a derisive nickname for young Amer-
 LIBERTY GENERATION (Born 1724 to 1741)

TYPE : Reactive FAMILY TREE

Total number : I, I 00 ,000 Typical grandparents: Glorious

Percent immigrant : 24% Parents: Enlightenment and Awakening
Percent slave: 19% Children : Republican and Compromiser
Typical grandchildren: Transcendental
SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death)
PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1725 James Otis (1783)
1725 George Mason ( 1792) Plurality in House: -
1727 Ezra Stiles (1795) Plurality in Senate: -
1728 Mercy Warren (1814) Majority of Supreme Court : -
1731 Robert Rogers (1795)
U.S . PRESIDENTS : 1789-1801
1731 Martha Washington (1802)
1732 Francis Marion (1795) 1732 George Washington (1799)
1732 John Dickinson (1808) 1735 John Adams (1826)
1734 Daniel Boone (1820)
Presidency of Continental Congress : 1775-
1734 Robert Morris (1806)*
1778, 1779-1781, 1782-1783, 1784-1788
1735 Paul Revere (1818)
1736 Patrick Henry (1799)
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1737 John Hancock (1793)
1737 Thomas Paine ( 1809)* 1727 John Wilkes (1797)
1737 Charles Carroll (1832) 1729 Edmund Burke (1797)
1737 Francis Hopkinson (1791) 1729 Catherine the Great (1796)
1738 Benjamin West (1820) 1735 Saint-Jean de Crevecoeur (1813)
1738 Ethan Allen (1789) 1738 George III ( 1820)
1739 George Clinton (1812)
1741 Benedict Arnold (1801)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-11 1735: Ten-year diphtheria epidemic begins in northern colonies
4-21 1745: Halloween violence worsens ; half of militia die at Louisbourg
6--23 1747: "Knowles Riot," wor st in Boston ' s history
15-32 1756: French and Indian War declared; "privateering madness" in ports
22-39 1763: Pontiac uprising; George III bans trans-Appalachian settlements
24-41 1765: England imposes Stamp Act; rising adults organize "Liberty" mobs
34-51 1775: Patrick Henry's speech; Paul Revere's ride; Battle of Bunker Hill
35-52 1776: Paine publishes Common Sense; Declaration of Independence signed
40-57 1781: Washington defeats Cornwallis at Yorktown; fighting stops
46--63 1787: Shays' Rebellion crushed; George Clinton opposes new Constitution
55-72 1796: Washington refuses to run for third term, gives "Farewell Address"
59-76 1800: Nation mourns Washington 's death; Adams fails to win reelection

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: Battle of the Kegs (Francis Hopkinson); Pontiac; or

the Savages of America (Robert Rogers) ; Death of Wolfe (painting, Benjamin West) ; The
Rights of the British Colonies (James Otis); Letters from a Farmer (John Dickinson);
Novanglus papers (John Adams); Common Sense, The Rights of Man (Thomas Paine); Fairfax
Resolves, Virginia Declaration of Rights (George Mason); Farewell Address (George
Washington)
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 167

icans that first became popular in the 1760s. A "Yankee" was a hick or fop,
and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" a scornful British song about idiotic provincials.
True to form, the Liberty adopted both the name and song as their own-sticking
"a feather in their caps" (or a twig or piece of cloth) to identify themselves in
battle and announce to the world that, yes, we are bastards and scoundrels. Leave
martyrdom for the A wakeners. For the Liberty, there was no transcendence. It
was victory or suicide . Either way, they heaped upon themselves the guilt of
rebellion and left their own children to start fresh.

Liberty Facts
During the late 1730s and early 1740s, while parents were preoccupied with
the Great A wakening, Liberty children were victimized by the deadliest
child-only epidemic in American history, the "great throat distemper"
(diphtheria), which killed an estimated one child in fifteen throughout most
of New York and New England.
The Liberty were by far the most war-ravaged generation of the colonial
era. Describing casualties during the French and Indian War, historian Gary
Nash estimates that by 1760, ''Boston had experienced the equivalent of two
twentieth-century world wars in one generation.'' One-third of all Liberty
men in Massachusetts enlisted for at least one season between 1754 and
1759. Stockade and ship records indicate that disease and bad nutrition
killed an estimated 5 to IO percent of all recruits during each year of service.
Having grown up during an era of falling rum prices and rising public disorder,
the Liberty matured into a notorious generation of drinkers, thieves, and
rioters-to the dismay of elder Awakener moralists. The Liberty consumed
more alcohol per capita than any other colonial generation. Between 1760
and 1775, they led more violent mobs than the cumulative total for all prior
generations . They coined both the words "regulator" (for vigilante) and
"lynch" (after the Liberty Virginian Colonel Charles Lynch).
The Liberty accounted for the largest wave of colonial immigration-most
notably the poor, fierce (and anti-English) Scots-Irish, who typically dis-
embarked in Philadelphia and then sped south, west, and north to the
frontier .
Though comprising only half of all members to the Continental Congress, the
Liberty accounted for all five delegates accused 0f complicity with the
British; the two most famous military traitors (Benedict Arnold and Ben-
jamin Church); the most famous near-traitors (including Ethan Allen, who
secretly considered selling Vermont to the British); and the most notorious
Tory writers (from Hugh Gaine to Samuel Seabury) .
168 GENERA TIO NS

The Liberty included nearly two-thirds (thirty-five of fifty-six) of the signers

of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Eleven years later, they in-
cluded only one-third of the signers of the U.S. Constitution. In fact, a list
of leading "Anti-Federalist" opponents of the Constitution in 1788 reads
like a Liberty Who's Who: Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry
Lee, George Clinton, Mercy Warren, John Lamb, David Rittenhouse, and
Herman Husbands (average age, 57) .
During the 1780s, midlife Liberty leaders were statistically more likely to be
what historian Jackson Turner Main defines as political "localists" (less
educated and more suspicious of ideas and large institutions) than either
their juniors or their elders.

The Liberty Lif ecycle

YOUTH: During the 1730s and 1740s, while William Hogarth drew pictures
of abused London waifs, the thawing trend in American child-rearing approached
wholesale neglect. Colonial newspapers noted the rising number of children
abandoned as "bastards," turned over to wetnurses, fed liquor to shut them up,
or just left free to run around on their own . For most first-wave Liberty kids,
the new nurturing style reflected the midlife Enlightener dash toward personal
autonomy. "We should think of little children to be persons," insisted the
pedagogue Samuel Johnson. For most last-wavers, watching young Awakener
parents grope for holiness and rage against authority, childhood was an awkward
by-product of the Great Awakening . The specter of adults crying out in church,
noted Awakener Charles Chauncy, "frequently frights the little children, and
sets them screaming .'' First wave or last, Liberty kids quickly learned that self-
immersed adults at best ignored them, and at worst reviled their streetwise
realism. Jonathan Edwards warned them that children "out of Christ" are "young
vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers." His Bostonian peer Andrew
Eliot condemned them as an "evil and adulterous generation." Franklin wrote
Poor Richard's Almanac to lecture them on prudence and thrift. But all in vain.
Reaching their teens at a time of economic bust, land pressure, and rising
immigration, the daunted Liberty set off on their own in quest of fame and
fortune. Soon young losers began turning up underfoot everywhere-gambling,
begging, stealing in the towns, "strolling" aimlessly on back roads, and sparking
America's first Halloween mayhem in Boston.

COMING OF AGE: The colonies fought both of their midcentury struggles

against France-King George's War (1744-1748) and the French and Indian
War ( 1754-1760)-primarily with Liberty muscle and guts . At first, nothing so
thrilled these plucky teenagers as news that armies were marching . War meant
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 169

freedom from moralizing elders and penny-pinching masters, boom wages in

the ports, and the glittering prospect of soldiers' bounties, pirate shares, and
enemy booty . But as the campaigns wore on, the dreams turned into nightmares.
Smitten by "privateering fever" ("almost a kind of madness," remarked New
York Awakener James Delancey), thousands enlisted onto French-hunting gun-
boats. Only a handful made fortunes; nearly half ended up killed, crippled, or
captured. Royal Navy impressment gangs dragged away many of the young port
workers, who responded with the most violent town riots in colonial history .
Young militiamen heard themselves called wild "dogs" and selfish "riffraff"
by British officers , who used martial-law punishment (including 500-lash whip-
pings) to cow them into compliance . The war brought horrible youth suffering.
While sixtyish Enlighteners sipped tea with the visiting officialdom and while
fortyish Awakeners preached and prayed, the twentyish Liberty paid the physical
price. They were "young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go," writes
historian William Pencak, and "war took care of them-in both the literal and
colloquial senses-during the forties and fifties."

RISING ADULTHOOD: From 1750 on, the colonies registered the onset
of Liberty adulthood with a seismic jump in every measure of social pathology-
from drinking, gambling , and crime to begging, poverty, and bankruptcy. After
the wars, during the wild and depressed 1760s, it only got worse . Debtor prisons
bulged with young spendthrifts . Veterans and immigrants raised havoc on the
frontier, especially against Indians (some of whom, under the elder Pontiac,
punished the white settlers with violent fury). Young planters partied far beyond
their means, doubling the colonial debt to Britain between 1760 and 1775. Elders
were aghast, and towns cut relief payments to the burgeoning numbers of young
poor. "The only principle of life propagated among the young people is to get
money,'' complained the old Enlightener Cadwallader Colden. ''They play away,
and play it all away,'' lamented Awakener Landon Carter of younger Virginians
who preferred " bewitching diversions" to "solid improvements of the mind."
With the Stamp Act riots of 1765, the Liberty's anti-British agitation increased-
but everyone knew their mob leaders mixed self-interest with patriotism. Many
of the leading Liberty Patriots were smugglers (John Hancock), hopeless debtors
(Thomas Nelson), renegade settlers (Ethan Allen), or disgruntled office-seekers
(Richard Henry Lee). Fiftyish Awakeners thundered against the thirtyish Liberty
for their greed and selfishness-for being a generation of "white savages," as
Benjamin Franklin called the Paxton boys. Samuel Adams' remarks, said a
contemporary, "were never favorable to the rising generation." But the Liberty
took a nihilistic pleasure in their elders' discomfort. "Virginians are of genuine
blood-they will dance or die," they laughed back. Reflecting his peers' im-
placable hostility to Awakener holiness, Daniel Boone declared his secret of
happiness to be "a good wife, a good gun , and a good horse."
170 GENERA TIO NS

MIDLIFE: When the Continental Congress crowded up to sign the Decla-

ration of Independence, the fiftyish (and very corpulent) Benjamin Harrison
elbowed a (thin) younger delegate. When the signers are all hanged, Harrison
quipped, "I shall have all the advantage over you. For me it will be all over in
a minute, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am gone!" For
the Liberty, now entering midlife, the Revolution was a moment of truth. Unlike
their elders, they expected no miracles ("I think the game is pretty near up,"
wrote Washington during his retreat across New Jersey). Unlike their juniors,
they had families and reputations at stake and less future to look forward to.
But they never lost their practical and defensive goal: to prevent "tyranny" and
to protect individual "liberties," as George Mason put it in his Virginia Bill of
Rights . Nor did they lose their cunning and ferocity. These 50-year-olds excelled
at the dirty work: privateering (Sears again , this time owning shares in fifteen
ships), requisitioning supplies ("Sumter's Law"), raising money (Morris, the
"Financier of the American Revolution"), and guerrilla tactics ("this damned
old fox" Francis Marion, whom the British charged "would not fight like a
Christian or a gentleman"). The Liberty also accounted for most of the war-era
treachery-confirming elder judgments that they were not to be trusted. When
the struggle was over, most of them fell into exhaustion, and a suspicious realism
replaced their once-wild ardor. In 1788 they provided the leading opponents to
the ambitious new Constitution concocted by younger Republicans. "All checks
founded on anything but self-love will not avail," warned 52ayear-old Patrick
Henry, now a self-confessed "old-fashioned fellow," skeptical of the work of
"young visionaries." But in the end, the fast-aging Liberty barked without biting.
They were not about to stand in the way of the energy of their juniors-or the
dreams of their elders. Their opposition relented, and by the fall of 1789 nearly
all the states had ratified the Constitution .

ELDERHOOD: "Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was pru-

dence," the younger Jefferson wrote of President Washington. With gruff words
and tender manner, Washington protected the infant nation during its first eight
years. He dealt mildly with the Indians and Tories who had once been his
enemies, and (perhaps recalling how his own peers had once been treated) resisted
younger calls for harsh action against the Whiskey Rebels. To avoid the risk of
war, he avoided alliances abroad and warned against "interweaving our destiny
with any part of Europe." His successor, President Adams, ruined his own
chances for reelection by steering a similar course of caution and vigilance.
Prudent , realistic, and self-effacing, the Liberty entered elderhood just when
Americans were shifting from the veneration of age toward the celebration of
youth. "The language of abuse for old men dates only to about 1800," writes
historian David Hackett Fischer, noting that this was "the generation whose
unhappy fate it was to be young in an era when age was respected, and old in
a time when youth took the palm." In the 1790s, for example, New England
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 171

churches eliminated age-ranked seating and a majority of states imposed man-

datory retirement ages for judges. Many Liberty elders met with sad fates. Robert
Rogers, their greatest war hero of the 1750s, was arrested for counterfeiting,
turned Tory during the Revolution, and died an alcoholic in England. Thomas
Paine died a lonely outcast on Long Island. Robert Morris died penniless, Daniel
Boone landless. When old, John Adams despaired that the only "great men"
were "aged men, who had been tossed and buffeted in the vicissitudes of life"
and taught ''by grief and disappointment . . . to command their passions and
prejudices." Few of the Liberty expected to be thanked-so certain were they,
like the eightyish Adams, that "mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be
erected to me. "
* * *
In the eyes of older and younger Americans who knew them, the Liberty
were a generation of kinetic physicality. They played hard, spent wildly, wagered
on cockfights and boat races, and danced the furious and competitive jig. They
chose peer leaders of legendary size (including Henry, Arnold, Allen, Morgan,
Boone, Harrison-and above all, George Washington, whose six-foot-three-inch
physical presence towered above his peers). Discarded in childhood and punished
coming of age, they chose lives of reckless abandon-not running toward hol-
iness like their next-elders, but running away from it; not praying for grace but
rather (like Allen and Harrison) swearing at the Bible. Ezra Stiles, their most
learned scholar, once puckishly described the Great Awakening as a time when
"multitudes were seriously, soberly, and solemnly out of their wits." No one
expected this generation to sacrifice itself in America's hour of crisis. But that
they did-with visceral (if corruptible) motives only they could understand: fury
at the British "lobsterbacks" who had once tortured them, and hope that they
might achieve some measure of security for their children. Afterward, they
mellowed into risk-averse elders who were able to congratulate Republican her-
oism while also checking the naive ambitions of young ''Hamiltonians.'' Having
gambled and suffered quite enough for one lifetime, the Liberty reached old age
with no illusions about human nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson later described a
portrait of the sixtyish President Washington: "The heavy, leaden eyes tum on
you, as the eyes of an ox in a pasture . . . as if this MAN had absorbed all the
serenity of America, and left none for his restless, rickety, hysterical country-
men."
172 GENERA TIO NS

REPUBLICAN GENERATION

Born: 1742-1766
Type: Civic

Age Location:
American Revolution Crisis in rising adulthood
Transcendental Awakening in elderhood

"All human greatness shall in us be found,/ For grandeur, wealth, and reason
far renown'd," announced 29-year-old David Humphreys to his peers after the
American triumph at Yorktown. These young victors all knew who they were-
and why they were special. In the 1760s, they were the precious boys and girls
whom elders sheltered from Liberty "vice" and British "corruption." In 1775,
they were the dutiful young Minutemen who stood their ground at Concord
bridge. In the winter of 1778, they were the cheerful soldiers who kept faith
with General Washington at Valley Forge. Seven years after Yorktown, in 1788,
they became the rising-adult achievers-so many of them already famous-who
celebrated the news of their new Constitution. Thus did the REPUBLICAN
GENERATION come of age, performing deeds of collective valor that gave
birth to a new nation. Thus too did worldly triumph forge them into lifelong
builders and rationalists-single-minded creators of what they called "energy
in government," "order and harmony" in society, "tranquillity" of mind,
"usefulness and reason" in science, "abundance" in commerce. Like few other
generations, young Republicans expected glory . Sang New York patriot recruits
in 1776: "The rising world shall sing of us a thousand years to come/ And tell
our children's children the wonders we have done." From the very beginning,
notes historian Charles Royster, ''the revolutionary generation knew that they
would stand above all their descendants.''
As protected colonial children in the 1750s and 1760s, Republicans grew up
under the visionary tutelage of midlife Awakeners, who saw in them the future
of "republican" virtue. As rising adults during decades of crisis, they fulfilled
their special mission, winning independence and establishing political and social
order . As midlife parents and community leaders during the Jefferson Presidency,
they harnessed the growing nation to their enormous energy and collegial dis-
cipline. They never let their elders down . To list their leaders is to invoke a
palladium of nation-builders: patriotic war heroes like Nathanael Greene, Henry
Lee, Anthony Wayne, Molly Pitcher, and John Paul Jones; architects of "Co-
lumbia" like Benjamin Latrobe and Pierre Charles L' Enfant; organizers of
knowledge like Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster; inventors of steamships and
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 173

rational industry like Robert Fulton and Eli Whitney . Above all, the Republicans
proved to be a fabled generation of statesmen: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Albert Gallatin, Robert Liv-
ingston, John Marshall, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney , Timothy Pickering .
No generation since the Glorious attained public renown so early in life:
Hamilton, famous political pamphleteer at age 17; Henry Knox, commander of
the Continental Army's artillery at age 25; George Rogers Clark, wilderness
Napoleon at age 27; Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence at age
33. Through midlife and old age, they should have delighted in the gathering
political and economic might of their "Empire of Liberty ." But instead-em-
barrassed in the War of 1812, challenged by spiritual youth, unable to control
the Promethean energy they had unleashed-the aging Republican elite felt
frustration and ultimately despair. As busy and outwardly "venerated" elders
during President Monroe's ' ' Era of Good Feeling, '' they feared that their massive
worldly accomplishments might not survive the restive and emotional culture of
their children . Self-discipline they practiced by instinct, but self-immersion they
found incomprehensible . In all the volumes Jefferson wrote about politics and
science ("a more methodically industrious man never lived," observes historian
Edmund Morgan), he never kept a diary and hardly once mentioned his feelings .
"We must go home to be happy, and our home is not of this world," Jay told
a friend. " Here we have nothing to do but our duty."
Republicans saw themselves as tireless reasoners and builders, chosen by
history to wrest order from the chaos. Their most famous statesman (Jefferson)
won equal fame as a scientist and architect. Their most famous legislator (Mad-
ison) was hailed as "the master-builder of the Constitution. " Of their two
''geniuses' ' of public finance, one (Gallatin) likened himself to a ''laboring oar''
for American prosperity, while the other (Hamilton) deemed ' 'the habit of labor
in a people" to be " conducive to the welfare of the state." Their foremost jurist
(Marshall), said one admirer, argued his opinions "as certainly , as cogently, as
inevitably, as any demonstration of Euclid." In 1802, their leading poet (Joel
Barlow) proudly authored The Canal , subtitled "A Poem on the Application of
Physical Science to Political Economy,'' in which he predicted ' ' science'' would
"raise, improve, and harmonize mankind ." Projecting their personality into
religion, leading Republicans worshiped a "Creator " or " Supreme Being" -a
God of Reason deliberately expunged of spirituality . ' 'Throughout Jeffersonian
thought ," notes historian Daniel Boorstin , " recurs this vision of God as the
Supreme Maker. He was a Being of boundless energy and ingenuity who in six
days had transformed the universal wilderness into an orderly, replete and self-
governing cosmos . The Jeffersonian God was not the Omnipotent Sovereign of
the Puritans nor the Omnipresent Essence of the Transcendentalists, but was
essentially Architect and Builder. "
All their Jives, the word " republican " (from Latin res publica , literally "the
 REPUBLICAN GENERATION (Born 1742 to 1766)

TYPE : Civic FAMILY TREE

Total number : 2,100,000 Typical grandparents: Enlightenment
Percent immigrant: 17% Parents: Awakener and Liberty
Percent slave: 17% Children: Compromise and Transcendental
Typical grandchildren : Gilded
SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death)
PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1742 Nathanael Greene (1786)
1744 Abigail Adams (1818) Plurality in House: 1789-1813
1745 John Jay (1829) Plurality in Senate : 1789-1813
1745 Benjamin Rush (1813) Majority of Supreme Court: 1791-1826
1747 John Paul Jones (1792)
U.S. PRESIDENTS: 1801-1825
1750 Kunta Kinte (c. 1815)*
1752 Gouverneur Morris (1816) 1743 Thomas Jefferson (1826)
1752 Timothy Dwight (1817) 1751 James Madison (1836)
1754 Pierre L 'Enfant (1825)* 1758 James Monroe (1831)
1754 Joel Barlow (1812)
1754 "Molly Pitcher " (1832) Presidency of Continental Congress: I 778-
1755 Nathan Hale (1776) 1779, 1783-1784, 1788-1789
1755 John Marshall (1835)
1757 Alexander Hamilton (1804)* PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1758 Noah Webster (1843)
1755 Marie Antoinette ( 1793)
1761 Albert Gallatin (1849)*
1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1791)
1763 John Jacob Astor (1848)*
1757 Marquis de Lafayette (1834)
1765 Robert Fulton (1815)
1758 Maximilien Robespierre (1794)
1765 Eli Whitney (1825)
1758 Horatio Nelson (1805)
1766 "Uncle Sam " Wilson (1854)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-17 1759: Last campaign of French and Indian War
4-28 1770: Colonies outraged by death of youths in "Boston Massacre"
10-34 1776: Jefferson drafts Declaration of Independence
19-43 1785: Rising adults gain majority of seats in Continental Congress
23-47 1789: States ratify U.S. Constitution
27-51 1793: French Revolution widens "Federalist"-"Republican" rift
34-58 1800: Jefferson elected President, promises to heal party divisions
37-61 1803: Louisiana Purchase; Marshall Court decides Marbury v . Madison
48-72 1814: British troops burn White House before War of 1812 ends
54- 78 1820: "Era of Good Feeling"; Monroe wins 231 of 232 electoral votes
57-81 1823: Public hails Monroe Doctrine as anticolonial mood spreads abroad
60-84 1826: Jefferson and Adams die exactly fifty years after Independence Day

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: Declaration of Independence, plan for the Virginia

state capitol (Thomas Jefferson) ; United States Constitution (James Madison et al.); The
Federalist (Hamilton, Madison, Jay) ; American Dictionary of the English Language (Noah
Webster) ; Modern Chivalry (Hugh Henry Brackenridge); The Columbiad (Joel Barlow); plan
for the "Federal City" (Pierre L'Enfant); The Battle of Bunker Hill (painting, John
Trumbull); The Conquest of Canaan (Timothy Dwight)
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 175

public thing") was central to their collective self-image and life purpose . "Re-
publican'' did not just refer to a form of government, nor to their radical agemates
in France, nor even to the party label chosen by all three of their Virginia
Presidents . For this generation, "republican" meant a classical paradigm of
secular order-and an entire approach to social life-with which they so thor-
oughly reconstructed America that today we still live in their civic shadow.
Without these Res Publicans, our public buildings and banks would not look
like miniature Parthenons . We would not have cities named Rome, Ithaca, and
Cincinnati, nor roads named Euclid Avenue and Appian Way. Our currency
would not be metric, nor our money adorned with Roman images (eagles, fasces,
and arrows) and lapidary inscriptions (Novus Ordo Seclorum, "the new order
of the ages") . Our government would not sound as if it had been transplanted
from the age of Augustus (with states, capitols, Presidents, and senators).
Most of all, this generation's unflagging devotion to the public good remains
a standard to which all later generations must compare their behavior . ''We want
great men who, when fortune frowns, will not be discouraged," said Knox in
his mid-twenties. "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,"
declared the youthful Yale graduate Nathan Hale to his British executioners-
in a voice so firm it brought tears to the eyes of the redcoats who heard it. Many
years later Jefferson wrote, ''When a man assumes a public trust, he should
consider himself public property." The Republicans believed that the "happi-
ness" and "order" and "security" of society took precedence over any private
desire. They also believed in "equality" -as a working hypothesis about the
uniformity of Nature, not as a moral imperative . While many in the Republican
elite disapproved of slavery (and succeeded in ending the African slave trade),
what they disliked worse was an angry debate about it. They feared any divi-
siveness that might imperil the great republic they had created. For this gener-
ation, some evils had to be accommodated for what they believed to be the
greater good . They acted accordingly-and, late in life, often wondered why
their children could not.

Republican Facts
The vast majority of Republican political leaders (from Jefferson, Madison,
and Monroe to Marshall, Webster, and Rush) were both native-born and
college-educated in America-in contrast to the helter-skelter Liberty,
whose leaders were more likely immigrant (Paine), native but educated
abroad (Dickinson), or entirely without formal schooling (Washington).
Between native cohorts born in 1730 and 1760, better child nutrition caused
the average height of adult Americans to rise by more than half an inch-
the most rapid one-generation climb recorded in America until the G .l.s.
176 GENERA TIO NS

In 1780, the typical Republican soldier was at least two inches taller than
the typical English redcoat he was fighting.
During the 1760s, when first-wave Republicans began graduating from college,
the share of American graduates entering clerical careers fell from four-
fifths to one-half. Many young men turned instead to radical Masonry, a
male "brotherhood" dedicated to teamwork, good works, and secular prog-
ress. Masonic symbolism (the compass, plumbline, and carpenter's square)
celebrated the builder; Masonic praise (to be "on the square") directness
and utility; the Masonic icon (sunlight) the divinity of practical reason.
Republicans assumed political power early in life. In the 1780s, they were
elected to New England town offices at a younger age than members of
any generation since the Glorious. From 1774 to 1787, their delegate share
of the Continental Congress soared from 7 to 75 percent. During the three
Liberty Presidencies ( 1789-180 I), Republicans claimed over three-quarters
of all members of Congress, two-thirds of all Supreme Court justices, one
of the two Vice-Presidencies, nearly all the diplomatic posts, and all fourteen
cabinet appointments-from Secretary of State to Postmaster General.
The leading Federalist advocates of the Constitution were on average ten to
twelve years younger than their Anti-Federalist opponents. At the Phila-
delphia Convention in 1787, thirtyish Republicans (Madison, Pinckney,
Hamilton, Wilson, Martin, King, and Strong) were the most influential
drafters and debaters.
No other generation has ever matched the forty-seven-year tenure spanning
the Republicans' first and last years of national leadership-from John Jay
(in 1778 elected president of the Continental Congress at age 33) to James
Monroe (whose second term as U.S. President expired in 1825 at age 67).
Not until the G.l.s has any other generation of leaders been so aggressively
secular in outlook. Most of the Republican candidates for President-es-
pecially Jefferson, Madison, Burr, Pinckney, and King-avoided any dis-
play of Christian piety and were widely regarded as atheists by their
contemporaries. When asked by an elder clergyman why the Constitution
did not mention God, the young Hamilton pertly replied: "I declare, we
forgot."
The political eclipse of the Republicans coincided with their humiliation in the
War of 1812. On the eve of Jefferson's embargo of 1806, Republicans still
constituted 71 percent of all congressmen and governors. By the first postwar
election of 1815, their share had plunged to 37 percent.
In the 1820s, Congress repeatedly raised pension benefits to elderly Revolu-
tionary War veterans; by the end of the decade, nearly half of all federal
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 177

spending consisted of interest and pension payments . In 1828, 70-year-old

Noah Webster introduced the word "veneration" into the American vo-
cabulary . In the 1830s and 1840s, Americans began to " venerate" the
image of " Uncle Sam" in the person of the seventyish veteran Samuel
Wilson, one of the last survivors of his generation.

The Republican Lif ecycle

YOUTH: Around 1745, routine brutality among and against colonial teen-
agers aroused little adult sympathy . By 1770, the year of the ''Boston Massacre,''
the violent death of one child was enough to spark vehement public outrage.
Over the course of just twenty-five years , American attitudes toward the young
reversed direction entirely-from neglect to protection, from blame to comfort.
Despairing the wayward Liberty, midlife Awakeners wanted to ensure that this
new crop of kids would grow up to be smart and cooperative servants to a
dawning vision, a republic of virtue . During the war-tom 1750s, towns shielded
children from the rowdiness of twentyish Liberty by tightening up on begging,
gambling, and theaters. "By 1750," observes historian Jay Fliegelman, "irre-
sponsible parents became the nation 's scapegoat. " The number of tutors per
capita doubled as popular books reinforced the holy and protective role of the
parent. In the 1760s, parents began avoiding "corrupt " English schools and sent
their kids instead to Awakener-founded academies in the colonies. Here Repub-
lican teenagers could imbibe the new fever of "civic revival" and a new Scottish
school of practical and optimistic curricula-now purged of skeptics like Hume
and Berkeley (who, noted Awakener Witherspoon, "take away the distinction
between truth and falsehood"). Between parents, Republican kids showed a
marked preference for fathers over mothers . Marshall later confessed that "my
father was a greater man than any of his sons"; many others, like Jefferson,
cultivated a lifelong preference for male company. Historian Kenneth Lynn
concludes that "certainly in no other period of our past can we find the top
leaders of American society speaking as gratefully as these patriots did about
the fathering they received."

COMING OF AGE: "Columbia, Columbia , to Glory Arise!" urged Tim-

othy Dwight to his peers on the eve of revolution . In 1774, the oldest (age 32)
were just young enough to have no childhood memories before the new rage of
parental protection and civic fervor. The youngest (age 8) were just old enough
to join the fight before it was over and reach full adulthood by the time of
Washington's inauguration . Elder Americans had never before seen such com-
petent, cheerful, and selfless youngsters . "All gaming, tricking, swearing,
lying,/ Is grown quite out of fashion," intoned a popular ballad in 1779, "For
modem youth's so self-denying, / It flies all lawless passion ." In war, young
178 GENERA TIO NS

soldiers fought as a team, seldom asking why but always asking how. To elder
eyes, they could do no wrong . Victimized by foul play (like the scalped Jane
McCrea), they were lionized as "butchered innocents." Caught for treason (like
Major John Andre), they attracted sympathy, even while the older Benedict
Arnold was burning in effigy across the colonies . Unlike Liberty marauders and
pirates, the more homogeneous Republicans-Greene , Wayne, Lee, Clark, and
Jones-soon proved to be the ablest leaders of the conventional war effort. When
aging Awakeners stepped down from their posts during the war, many Repub-
licans leapfrogged their Liberty next-elders to fill the vacancies. Riding a dazzling
reputation for genius and optimism, they swept into town offices and the Con-
tinental Congress, drafted state constitutions and policy treatises, and grabbed
most of the new state and national offices. Assuming power just when (as Rush
put it) "everything is new and yielding, " their youthful confidence soon collided
with the exhaustion and localism of their next-elders. Here these young heroes
won their culminating victory: drafting a stronger Constitution and ratifying it
over churlish Liberty opposition. In Virginia, the ringing words of 35-year-old
Edmund Randolph ("Mr. Chairman, I am a child of the Revolution ... ") over-
whelmed the fiftyish Patrick Henry. In New York, the genius of The Federalist-
rapidly penned by Hamilton, Jay, and Madison (average age, 36)-outclassed
the fiftyish Henry Clinton .

RISING ADULTHOOD: Elevated by their coming-of-age triumphs, they

likened themselves to history ' ~ greatest empire-builders, from "Caesar" (Ham-
ilton) to "Lycurgus" (Madison) . In the 1790s, young Republicans lived and
breathed worldly accomplishment. Their first priority was to secure public order
by eradicating riotous Liberty atavisms. They crushed the Shaysites, Whiskey
Rebels, and Ohio Indians; organized as "orderly" Federalists and "rational"
Republicans; and ostracized wayward peers who refused to outgrow their coming-
of-age sympathy with the French Revolution. Proud of the "mechanical courage"
they had learned as soldiers, they behaved collegially and placed public interest
over private gain. "Every engine should be employed to render the people of
this country national," declared Noah Webster. Energetic builders, they founded
"Societies for Advancement of Industry," designed a "Columbia" of colon-
naded grandeur (L'Enfant), invented the cotton gin (Whitney), and launched
steamboats (Fulton) . They also began leading America toward much wider sex-
role distinctions. Having proved themselves "men" to their beloved fathers,
rising Republicans associated "effeminacy" (and "that old hag" Britain) with
corruption and disruptive passion, ''.manliness" with reason and disinterested
virtue . Federalists taunted Jefferson for his "womanish" attachments to France,
while Jefferson contemptuously called the Adams Presidency "a reign of
witches" and (notes one historian) "would have totally banished women from
the public sphere." Republicans widely believed that sexual and political order
were directly linked . "Society is composed of individuals," Enos Hitchcock
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 179

remarked. "They are parts of a whole,-and when each one moves in his own
orb, and fills his own station, the system will be complete." Their men would
thereafter specialize as producers and rulers, their women as moral guardians of
the family.

MIDLIFE: They all arrived together: a new century, a new capital, a new
President, and a new generation . Taking office in Washington, D.C., on March
4, 1801, Jefferson asked his "fellow citizens" to "unite in common efforts for
the common good" and to contemplate "a rising nation ... advancing rapidly
to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye." Confident (versed Joel Barlow)
in the "fair science of celestial birth" that "leads mankind to reason and to
God,'' midlife Republicans deemed nothing to be beyond their collective power.
So it often seemed . From Jefferson's Northwest Ordinance (1787) to Monroe's
acquisition of Florida (1819), the Republicans quintupled the effective size of
America's domain. "The United States take their place among powers of the
first rank," exulted Robert Livingston in 1803 after the 500-million-acre Lou-
isiana Purchase . Meanwhile, Livingston's peers presided over rapid material
growth, awesome by any measure-dollars of exports, miles of turnpikes and
canals, bushels of cotton, and numbers of banks, post offices, ships, patents,
and corporate charters. Yet these very successes prompted growing uneasiness.
As their once-compact "Republic of Virtue" expanded into a mighty "Empire
of Liberty,'' midlife Republicans worried that something was dissolving the
innocence and optimism they recalled from their youth. Perhaps it was the
multiplying slave plantations, or the decimation of Indians; perhaps the vast and
impersonal markets, or the westward rush of disorderly pioneers. Their frustration
came to a head in the War of 1812-a conflict that disgraced six Republican
major generals, nearly triggered the secession of New England, and humiliated
Madison when the British effortlessly torched the White House. Their invincible
self-image shattered, most Republicans thereafter retreated from public life-
leaving only their Presidents in power.

ELDERHOOD: In the fall of 1823, the public watched in awe as three

white-haired and magisterial Virginians (Monroe, Madison, and Jefferson-
average age, 72) conferred over a declaration today known as the Monroe Doc-
trine. With this grand twilight moment of Republican statecraft, Americans of
all ages sensed that a magnificent generation was passing. As living testimonials
to the great institutions they had wrought, aging Republicans still exuded outward
energy and confidence. "We must never forget that it is the Constitution we are
expounding," urged Marshall proudly to younger justices. From stately Mont-
pelier, Madison called America "the workshop of liberty to the civilized world";
from sunny Monticello, Jefferson saw "the great march of progress passing over
us like a cloud of light,'' and his last public testament hailed ''the general spread
of the light of science." Inwardly, however, many despaired. No matter how
180 GENERATIONS

hard they kept busy in their retirement ("It is wonderful how much may be
done, if we are always doing," wrote Jefferson to his daughter), the prospect
of death came hard to a secular-minded generation dedicated more to progress
than to God. Having hoped for so much, elderly Republicans expressed frustra-
tion over their waning influence on public life. "How feeble are the strongest
hands. How weak all human efforts prove," complained the aging Freneau, his
upbeat poetry now unread. More often, they turned the blame around: they had
not betrayed history; history had betrayed them. By history they meant their
children-who were feminizing their once-manly "virtue," spuming their ra-
tional Masonic brotherhood, fragmenting into political faction, and celebrating
feeling rather than teamwork. Many onlooking Republicans sensed a mocking
repudiation of everything they had built. "We will leave this scene not for a
tittering generation who wish to push us from it," fulminated David Humphreys.
Beware "your worst passions," Gallatin presciently warned the young. After
hearing the angry slavery debates of 1820, the 78-year-old Jefferson shocked
two younger generations when he declared: "I regret that I am now to die in
the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to
acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away
by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons."
* * *
Government is "instituted," observed Hamilton as a young man, "because
the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without
constraint." All their lives, "passion" was the Republicans' most hated word.
The young Pickering boasted that his Federalist peers "gave the reins not to . . .
passions, but to reason.'' The young Jefferson hoped rational Deism might soon
become the national religion. Yet, late in life, passion did indeed become their
nemesis . For a few Republicans (including Webster, who decades earlier had
proclaimed America "an empire of reason" and had tried to popularize the verb
"happify"), born-again religion offered solace from despair in their extreme old
age. For most, the passion of their children loomed as a threat they could neither
accept nor understand. Ironically, this generation of "Founding Fathers" had
far closer, more affectionate relationships as children with their own fathers than
they ever had later on as fathers with their own children. In the 1760s, Repub-
licans were handed a worldly mission by unworldly elders and as young adults
achieved immortal greatness fulfilling it. A half century later, they tried to make
their own young into replicas of themselves-to make them (as Rush described
the purpose of education) into "Republican machines" able "to perform their
parts properly in the great machine of government of state." It seemed a simple
enough task for such powerful and heroic builders-the only "generation" of
Americans praised throughout their lives (and ever afterward) for unequaled
glory. But it was the single task at which they failed utterly.
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 181

COMPROMISE GENERATION

Born : 1767-1791
Type : Adaptive

Age Location:
American Revolution Crisis in youth
Transcendental Awakening in midlife
Civil War Crisis in elderhood

"We can win no laurels in a war for independence," insisted Daniel Webster
as a young man . "Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all . " Henry
Clay, John C . Calhoun, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark would have
agreed . Along with Webster, they had all been protected and thankful children
during the glorious years of nation-founding . Also with Webster, and with many
other notables among their COMPROMISE GENERATION, they were all fated
to careers of secret turmoil and hidden frustration. In 1804, Lewis and Clark set
out with forty-four young civil servants to inventory the vast territories acquired
by their next-elders . They obeyed President Jefferson's request to observe "with
great pains and accuracy" and to "err on the side of safety." (Only one man
died en route.) But soon after returning, Lewis suffered from emotional depres-
sion and in 1809 died mysteriously-probably a suicide . Clark, for thirty years
a kindly Indian Commissioner for the western territories, later regretted his
complicity in the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal that led to the 1838
Cherokee "Trail of Tears." As for the learned and eloquent "Great Triumvirate"
of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, few Americans have ever groomed themselves
so carefully for national leadership. Yet at critical moments they invariably
stumbled; collectively , the Triumvirs were zero for twelve in runs for the Pres-
idency. The members of what historians sometimes call America's ''post-heroic''
or "second" generation searched in vain for an authentic sense of collective
accomplishment. "We may boast of our civil and religious liberties," Lyman
Beecher modestly observed, "but they are the fruits of other men's labors ."
They lived an awkward lifecycle . Outwardly, fortune blessed them: Com-
promisers were coddled in childhood, suffered little in war, came of age with
quiet obedience, enjoyed a lifetime of rising prosperity, and managed to defer
national crisis until most of them had died. But behind these outer blessings lay
inner curses. Their birthyear boundaries reflect nonparticipation in the major
events of their era. Born in 1767, the eldest (Andrew Jackson, John Quincy
Adams) watched the Revolution as children and came of age when the military
and political triumphs of the Republicans were already complete . Born in 1791,
 COMPROMISE GENERATION (Born 1767 to 1791)

TYPE: Adaptive FAMILY TREE

Total number: 4,200 ,000 Typical grandparents: Awakening
Percent immigrant: I 0% Parents: Liberty and Republican
Percent slave: 15% Children: Transcendental and Gilded
Typical grandchildren: Progressive

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1767 Denmark Vesey (1822) Plurality in House: 1813-1835
c. 1768 Tecumseh (1813) Plurality in Senate: 1813-1841
1768 Dolley Madison (1849) Majority of Supreme Court: 1829-1860
1769 DeWitt Clinton (1828)
1773 John Randolph of Roanoke (1833) U.S. PRESIDENTS: 1825-1845, 1849-
1774 Meriwether Lewis (1809) 1850, 1857-1861
1775 Francis Cabot Lowell (1817)
1767 Andrew Jackson (1845)
1777 Roger Taney (1864)
1767 John Quincy Adams ( 1848)
1777 Henry Clay (1852)
1773 William Henry Harrison (1841)
1780 William Ellery Channing (1842)
1782 Martin Van Buren (1862)
1782 Daniel Webster (1852)
1784 Zachary Taylor (1850)
1782 John C. Calhoun (1850)
1790 John Tyler (1862)
1783 Washington Irving (1859)
1791 James Buchanan (1868)
1785 John Audubon (1851)*
1786 Davy Crockett (1836)
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1786 Winfield Scott (1866)
1787 Emma Willard (1870) 1769 Napoleon Bonaparte (1821)
1788 Sarah Hale (1879) 1769 Duke of Wellington (1852)
1789 James Fenimore Cooper (1851) 1770 Ludwig van Beethoven (1827)
1791 Samuel F. B. Morse (1872) 1771 Sir Walter Scott (1832)
* = immigrant 1783 Sim6n Bolivar (1830)

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-14 1781: English Army surrenders at Yorktown; Revolutionary War ends
0-20 1787: U.S. Constitution framed in Philadelphia
2-26 1793: Fugitive Slave Act enacted; first use of cotton gin
13-37 1804 Lewis and Clark explore newly purchased Louisiana Territory
21-45 1812: War of 1812 begins; ends in 1814 with Battle of New Orleans
29-53 1820: Clay's Missouri Compromise; Channing organizes Unitarian Church
42-66 1833: Compromise Tariff; Jackson begins second term
45-69 1836: Crockett dies at Alamo; Congress gridlocked over " gag rule"
56-80 1847: Generals Taylor and Scott invade Mexico
59-83 1850: Compromise of 1850; Webster embraces new Fugitive Slave Law
61-85 1852: Webster , Clay die; Whig Party disintegrates after electoral loss
66-90 1857: Buchanan starts term; Taney Court issues Dred Scott decision

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving);

The American Democrat, The Last of the Mahicans (James Fenimore Cooper); The Star-
Spangled Banner (song, Francis Scott Key); Married or Single ? (Catherine Sedgwick); A Visit
from St. Nicholas (Clement Clarke Moore); The Old Oaken Bucket (Samuel Woodworth); The
First Forty Years of Washington Society (Margaret Bayard Smith); The Value and Importance
of Legal Studies (Joseph Story)
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 183

the youngest (James Buchanan, Samuel F. B. Morse) reached adulthood just

ahead of new youth movements in religion and literature. The Transcendental
Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s hit most of them at an unsettling time-
squarely in midlife . Having spent their early years emulating their celebrated
next-elders, Compromisers spent their later years trying to please or calm their
next-juniors . History records little that is distinctly theirs . The stunning victories
of Jackson, Oliver Perry , and Stephen Decatur late in the War of 1812 culminated
a pointless and blundering conflict declared by elder Republicans . Two decades
later, the social upheaval of their "Age of Jackson" was fueled mainly by
younger Transcendentals .
Compromisers were content to split the difference . They sought what President
Jackson called " the middle course" -between two regions (North and South),
two parties (Whig and Democrat), and two neighboring peer personalities
(confident manliness and moral passion). Their confusion spilled over into self-
conscious cruelty toward slaves and Indians, chronic ambivalence about eco-
nomic and territorial expansion, and-late in life-paralyzing irresolution over
the approaching collision between abolitionism and King Cotton . At the same
time, they humanized and stabilized the new institutions wrought by Promethean
elders . Their political leaders (historian Matthew Crenson calls them the "ad-
ministrative founding fathers") defended pluralism , due process, and two-party
politics. Their professionals (Francis Cabot Lowell) methodized industry. Their
artists (John Audubon) catalogued nature . Their writers (James Fenimore Cooper
and Washington Irving) leavened American culture with "romantic" sensitivity .
Their clerical elite, prodded by William Ellery Channing ' s Unitarian Church,
was the first to suggest that "society itself " may be responsible for the ills of
modem life .
All these efforts earned mixed reviews from other generations . Republican
elders appreciated the Compromisers' earnest sense of professionalism, but re-
sisted any attempt to substitute what historian John Ward calls the Jacksonian
''power of the heart '' for the Jeffersonian ''power of the head .'' John Randolph,
a young House leader at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, blamed America's
obsession with new territory on leaders whom he emotionally denounced as
"energy men ." Randolph's elders considered him deranged-as indeed he even-
tually became . Two decades later, young Transcendentals looked to Compro-
misers for flashes of a crusading virtue they sensed was fading from the world .
"Jackson's life," observes historian Michael Rogin, "gratified a softer gener-
ation living prosaic lives ." But the young often found Compromiser eloquence
more enervating than inspiring . " There are seasons ," announced the fiftyish
Channing , "when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants
are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for." Once
Channing died, the thirtyish firebrand William Garrison noted scornfully that
"his nerves were delicately strung . The sound of a ram ' s horn was painfully
distressing to him ."
184 GENERA TIO NS

''Life itself is but a compromise, ' ' observed the 73-year-old Henry Clay, the
''Great Compromiser'' himself, as he proposed the last of his famous balancing
acts. "All legislation, all government, all society is formed upon the principle
of mutual concession, politeness, comity, and courtesy." Clay's generation
presided over America during the three decades that span the Missouri Com-
promise of 1820, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and the Great Compromise
of 1850. Every step of the way, an odd mixture of outer calm and emotional
turmoil plagued them . Sensitized young to the feelings of others, they matured
into parents and leaders who sought to preserve their "reputation" and the
approval of "public opinion ." At worst, their other-directedness blinded them
to simple choices. "The world is nothing but a contradance," worried Webster
to a friend, "and everything volens, nolens, has a part in it." Yet at best, their
irrepressible instinct for openness and honesty ennobled even their failures. No
generation of southerners ever felt so ill at ease with their ''peculiar institution''
of slavery; no generation of northerners ever agonized so earnestly over the plight
of the "noble savage . " Entering the White House in March of 1849, Zachary
Taylor promised "to adopt such measures of conciliation as would harmonize
conflicting interests .. .. " On his deathbed a year later, he confessed, "God
knows I have tried to do my honest duty. But I have made mistakes."

Compromiser Facts
The Compromisers came of age and married amid a floodtide of romantic
literature. Between the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the
number of' 'romance novels'' rose tenfold-as did the number of magazine
articles stressing the "glorification of personal emotions" and the "ideal-
ization of the loved one.''
During the War of 1812, the average age of U.S. major generals fell from 60
to 36 . Nearly all the military leaders disgraced early in the war were midlife
Republicans; nearly all the leaders victorious late in the war were rising-
adult Cdmpromisers. Yet the war ended in a stalemate-and, ironically,
the greatest Compromiser-led victory (Andrew Jackson's at New Orleans)
occurred two weeks after John Quincy Adams (then across the Atlantic)
had concluded the treaty which ended the war. Twenty years later, Con-
gressman Henry Wise explained why a Compromiser-led Congress refused
to include a scene from Jackson's victory in the Capitol rotunda: "I would
be content to confine the subjects to a date prior to 1783."
From first cohort to last, Compromiser women enjoyed rising access to
advanced education-beginning with the Philadelphia Academy, founded
in 1787 by Republicans in order to produce "sensible, virtuous, sweet-
tempered" wives and mothers . Among all biographical entries in Notable
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 185

American Women, less than one-quarter of those born before 1770 had an
advanced education , versus nearly two-third s of all entrie s born by the
1780s.
The Compromisers were the first generation to invent a specialized vocabulary
for politics, coining such words as "lobby ," "logrolling," "spoils,"
"bunk," "filibuster ," and "noncommittal" (first coined to describe Martin
Van Buren).
During the Compromisers ' "log cabin " rising adulthood , the share of the
American population living west of the Appalachian s grew from 3 percent
in 1790 to 28 percent in 1830. But while many sought fresh western soil,
many also chose professional and commercial callings . The big losers were
the New England farm and the Virginia plantation. During this generation's
three prosperous midlife decades (1820 to 1850), the share of the American
workforce engaged in agriculture fell from 79 to 55 percent-the most rapid
decline in American history .
By the 1810s, Compromiser parents in their thirties and forties began to avoid
having children , initiating a long-term decline in U .S . fertility that would
later accelerate with the Transcendentals . After liberalizing marriage and
child-custody laws in the late 1820s and 1830s, Compromisers entering
midlife became the first American generation to divorce in significant num-
bers.
The Compromisers attained their peak share of Congressional seats and gov-
ernorships in 1825, four years before the "Age of Jackson " began . In 1839,
two years after Andrew Jackson had left the White House at age 69 (the
oldest exiting President until Eisenhower), their share had fallen beneath
that of the younger Transcendentals .
Household tax data from 1850 suggest that Compromisers , in their sixties and
seventies, were wealthier relative to young adults than any other elder
generation over four centuries of American history .

The Compromiser Lifecycle

YOUTH: "Rocked in the cradle of the Revolution" was how Clay later
described his childhood-a phrase that fits most of his young peers . First-wavers
witnessed the worst of the mob and wartime violence . At age 12, Andrew Jackson
(whose mother and two older brothers died during the war) was himself beaten
and jailed by the British . At age 8, William Henry Harrison watched Benedict
Arnold's redcoats use his father's cattle for target practice. Last-wavers grew
up seeing less violence , but sensing comparable adult anxiety during the turmoil
186 GENERA TIO NS

of the 1780s and the hysteria over the French Revolution during the early 1790s.
Surrounded by political and economic crisis, Compromiser children toed the
line, while protective midlife Liberty and buoyant rising-adult Republicans pulled
in the boundaries of family life to maximum tightness. Parents urged boys and
girls to emulate widening sex-role divisions . Hastily rewritten textbooks taught
them to revere the mythic grandeur of their elder ''Founding Fathers .'' Teachers
strictly monitored their classrooms (and America's first Sunday schools) to pre-
vent unruly behavior-and passed out black crepe for teenagers to wear when
Washington died in 1799. Republican educators insisted that this first generation
of "national children" be "molded" into serviceable and obedient patriots. It
was not a good time for the young to draw attention to themselves . Attending
disciplined colleges , the aspiring elite studied hard, worried about their "sober
deportment ,'' and looked forward to brighter times ahead.

COMINGOF AGE: Their passage into adulthood was smooth and seamless.
"We were indeed in the full tide of successful experiment," recalled John
Randolph of the rising optimism-and conformism-of the Jefferson and Mad-
ison Presidencies. Shunning risk, the young Adams wrote of '' our duty to remain
the peaceable and the silent" in an essay that won him an appointment as
ambassador. Webster observed his college chums "balancing," easing unob-
served into the adult world. Single women worried about being dismissed as
"old maids" at age 25, yet understood (like Eliza Southgate) that "reputation
undoubtedly is of great importance to all, but to a female 'tis everything-once
lost 'tis forever lost.'' Single men obeyed the law. After 1790, the youth-driven
mob violence that had coursed through so much of colonial history since the
1730s suddenly abated. Even when defying authority, young Compromisers
chose their rebellions with care. Fledgling authors (both men and women) in-
dulged in syrupy romanticism, teasing stolid midlife Republicans with deep
feeling. College teachers like Lyman Beecher challenged secularism with ear-
nestly respectful religious movements. Backwoods lawyers like Clay and Jackson
crossed the Appalachians in search of rowdy adventure , yet felt less like con-
querors than mischievous "settlers" on Republican-designed land grids . Court-
ships were awkwardly sentimental. Webster's biographer describes him as
''better at writing poetry than making love' ' -but unlike their elders at like age,
Compromisers expected emotion to resemble poetry. Men compensated for their
absence of catharsis by flamboyant gestures of dominance over women, slaves,
and Indians-and by dueling. A few months after Clay and Randolph missed
each other at a chivalric ten paces, Clay gushed (upon hearing of a friend's duel):
"We live in an age of romance!"

RISING ADULTHOOD: "Let our age be the age of improvement," urged

Webster, exulting in America's surging prosperity . In the 1790s, twentyish first-
wavers embarked on prosperous careers during America's first export boom.
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 187

Around 1820, thirtyish late-wavers joined the rage of canal-building and cloth
manufacture in the north , or migrated to the southwestern frontier, where they
could make fortunes growing cotton . Yet behind the easy affluence lurked per-
sonal unease. Like William Wirt, rising Compromisers tried "to assume the
exterior of composure and self-collectedness, whatever riot and confusion may
be within .'' They knew their destiny lay in dutiful expertise, not heroism . Despite
rousing victories (at New Orleans) and stirring words (The Star-Spangled Banner)
during the War of 1812, these young men realized that this " Second War for
Independence" hardly compared with the first. Where their elders had founded
an "Empire of Liberty " and "stood" for office as citizen-statesmen, Com-
promisers talked of an "American System" and "ran" for office as political
professionals . Nor could thirtyish women replay the young heroine role of their
mothers ; instead, they embraced the new romantic "cult of true womanhood"-
emphasizing innocence, femininity, and domestic virtue . As they matured, both
men and women felt a growing tension between duty and feeling, between the
proper division of social labor and a subversive desire for personal fulfillment.
They felt an ambivalence that they knew had never bothered their parents.

MIDLIFE: During the 1820s, as aging Republican executives passed out of

power and the Transcendental Awakening erupted, midlife Compromisers turned
their adaptive antennae from elders to juniors. Still believing (with Washington
Irving) that "ours is a government of compromise," yet swayed by what Tocque-
ville termed a "faith in public opinion, " they tried to overcome their youthful
caution by taking greater risks . Their first three Presidents-the effete Adams,
the swaggering Jackson , and the calculating Van Buren-accurately reflect the
fragmenting jigsaw of their "post-heroic" midlife personality . By the late 1830s,
Compromiser leaders vied to outposture each other with youth-oriented rhetoric
of populism and reform. Even the Whigs, hyping "log cabin and cider" and
their Alamo martyr Davy Crockett , learned to spar with the Democrats at their
own game. Public debate fixated on process and gesture , what the despairing
Cooper called "petty personal wranglings" and "intellectual duellos ." During
the 1820s, southern Compromisers founded dozens of antislavery societies, but
their hopes for gradual emancipation were soon dashed by the polarizing rhetoric
of rising Transcendentals. (By the late 1830s, all of these southern societies had
been disbanded.) The younger Emerson began assailing "the timid, imitative,
and tame'' Compromiser leadership ; Thaddeus Stevens came to scorn their' 'mer-
cenary, driveling" congressmen , eager "to conciliate Southern treason." As
America entered the 1850s, remarks historian Samuel Eliot Morison, "there
seemed nobody left to lead the nation but weak, two-faced trimmers and angry
young men ." Meanwhile, as society raced toward urbanization and westward
expansion, the American family drifted toward trouble, with rising divorce rates ,
budding feminism, and a disturbingly wild new batch of (Gilded) children. Sarah
Hale, who had written "Mary Had a Little Lamb" as a young widow , joined
188 GENERA TIO NS

midlife peers like Lydia Sigourney and Emma Willard in denouncing men's
"cruelty" to women, "to which every female heart must revolt."

ELDERHOOD: Torn between the congealing fanaticism of the young and

guilty memories of Republican discipline, Compromisers entered elderhood
watching America drift toward painful outcomes: Indian removal, anti-immigrant
riots, lawless frontiers, slave chases, and sectional hatred. As they struggled to
remain accommodating, their leaders shied away from the venerable titles once
accorded to old Republicans. They preferred chummier nicknames: "Old Hick-
ory" (Jackson), "Old Fuss and Feathers" (Scott), "Old Rough and Ready"
(Taylor), "Old Prince" (Clay), and "Old Man Eloquent" (Adams). Sensing
tragedy approach, they feared the final judgment of history. Clay had earlier
despaired how his generation might "ignobly die" with "the scorn and contempt
of mankind; unpitied, unwept, and unmourned.'' Their last chance to mediate
rising Transcendental passions-culminating in their Compromise of 1850-
earned them (Webster especially) precisely what Clay feared, the "scorn and
contempt" of their next-juniors . Later on, seventyish "Old Buck" Buchanan,
John Crittenden, and Roger Taney persisted in fruitless efforts to defer or ignore
the rush to war. ''Say to the seceded states: 'Wayward sisters, depart in peace,' ''
wrote the white-haired General Winfield Scott to younger leaders who no longer
cared for the advice of 1812 war heroes. Dying on the eve of crisis, Philip Hone
voiced his "anxious thoughts" about how "time unhallowed, unimproved ...
presents a fearful void." A few years later, the dying Buchanan blamed the
Civil War on both "the fanatics of the North" and "the fanatics of the South."
Like Hone and Buchanan, most Compromisers died lamenting both sides, just
as they had lived trying to accommodate both sides.
* * *
Compromiser eulogies were full of mixed phrasing. One scholar said of
Webster: "With all the greatness and smallness, with all the praise and
blame . . . '' Ever since, historians have been unable to decide whether Jackson
was a force for pettiness or progress, or whether the Clay-Webster-Calhoun
"Great Triumvirate" moderated or worsened the ultimate ferocity of the Civil
War. Behind so many of this generation's favorite schemes-transporting In-
dians, recolonizing Africa, granting sovereignty to territories-was a faith in
fair play and pluralism . Unlike their next-elders, Compromisers realized that the
bond of social discipline could no longer hold the pieces together; unlike their
next-juniors, they refrained from forcing their own judgments on others . From
the perspective of subsequent events, their choices can easily be criticized. But
we often forget how few alternatives were open to them-given their own
instinctive caution as well as the zeal and lawlessness of younger Americans.
Some choices may have averted worse outcomes: Had Compromiser leaders not
compelled the eastern Indians to migrate west, even their humanitarian peers
conceded that the tribes would soon have been wiped out by land-hungry whites.
THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE 189

Other choices may have come closer to success than we realize: Until youth
anger and rabid sectionalism broke out in the 1830s, Compromiser plans for the
gradual abolition of slavery seemed perfectly feasible. (Similar plans had worked
earlier in several northern states and were then being seriously discussed in
Virginia.) Such is the painful, might-have-been legacy of a kind but confused
generation sandwiched between two others of extraordinary power. The Com-
promisers inherited grandeur and tried to perfect it by adding humor, sensitivity,
expertise, and fairness. They passed away fearing they had failed to preserve,
much less perfect, the achievements of their forefathers. No American generation
ever had a sadder departure .
 Chapter 9

THE CIVIL WAR

CYCLE

"T
1 here is nothing like it on this side of the infernal region,'' recalled one
war veteran of the youthful "rebel yells" that screeched over the hills above
Bull Run Creek near Manassas, Virginia (today a suburb of Washington, D.C.),
on a sultry July afternoon in 1861. Among some 18,000 Union soldiers mostly
in their twenties, the "peculiar corkscrew sensation" of this sound triggered
panic and retreat. But it delighted another I 8,000 Confederate soldiers-in-
cluding a plucky 37-year-old brigadier general, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.
For them, the yell seemed to herald a quick victory. The attention of all America
was riveted on a battle that many believed would decide the war in a single day.
From Richmond, 53-year-old Jefferson Davis sped toward the scene to witness
the triumph of his new "Nation under God." In Washington, 52-year-old Abra-
ham Lincoln warned the Union not to despair over this "Black Monday" and
hurriedly signed a bill enlisting 500,000 more soldiers. Fiftyish congressmen
who had journeyed to Manassas as spectators climbed out of their carriages and
commanded the fleeing young bluecoats to return to the battle. "We called them
cowards, denounced them in the most offensive terms, put out our heavy re-
volvers, and threatened to shoot them, but all in vain," explained Ohio Con-
gressman Albert Riddle . "No man ever saw such a mass of ghastly wretches."
That night, in Augusta, Georgia, 4-year-old Woodrow Wilson joined his parents
in praying for the Confederacy-while in a house on West 20th Street, New
York City, 2-year-old Theodore Roosevelt did likewise for the other side.
lQO
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 191

In the aftermath of Bull Run, the 75-year-old Winfield Scott would retire as
commander of Union forces, his Anaconda Plan now in total disrepute, along
with the Crittenden Compromise and all the other conciliatory measures sug-
gested by Scott's aging generation. In the summer of 1861, the Compromisers
had no senators, one governor, and only two congressmen in office-a historic
nadir for the political influence of Americans in their seventies. The epic climax
of the CIVIL WAR CYCLE would be a drama not of four generations, but three:
Lincoln's TRANSCENDENTAL GENERATION (Idealist, then age 40 to 69)
had, in their twenties, provided the original core of the l 830s-era evangelical
and abolitionist movements. Ever since, the extremism of William Lloyd
Garrison, the stridency of young plantation owners, and the memory of Nat
Turner's violent slave rebellion had worked to snuff out any Compromiser
hope of peacefully weaning the South from slavery. Now in their fifties,
this generation of Massachusetts "Black Republicans" and South Carolina
"Fire Eaters" was fully prepared to shed younger blood to attain what they
knew was right. Preaching from pulpits and railing from Congress, the peers
of John Brown, Harriet "Moses" Tubman, Julia Ward Howe, Alexander
Stephens, and Robert E. Lee looked to war for what New Englanders
heralded as "the glory of the coming of the Lord" and Virginians "the
baptism of blood'' for their newborn confederacy. The hand of God was
felt in Richmond no less than in Washington-and, over the next four years,
these two capitals of "His Truth" would be bisected by a hundred-mile
scar of mud and blood. All their lives , Transcendentals were a generation
others feared but followed-until their apocalypse ended. In their old age,
as they watched Reconstruction disintegrate and other principled causes fall
into scorn, many of them would look back on Bull Run as the moment their
ideals began self-destructing .
Stonewall Jackson's GILDED GENERATION (Reactive, age 19 to 39) com-
prised the "ghastly wretches" Congressman Riddle saw scrambling away
across Bull Run Creek. They had signed up for what they had expected to
be a quick adventure, with maybe a little glory and profit mixed in-not
much different from the California gold fields to which many had rushed
as teenagers . Most expected that their sheer energy and derring-do (''Always
mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy," advised Jackson) would end
the war quickly and let them get on with life's practical challenges. For
Gilded whites, any resolution at all to the thundering hatred between elder
abolitionists and elder "Southrons" would at last allow them to settle the
western frontier. For Gilded blacks, including the slaves who began fleeing
northward on the "underground railroad," Bull Run marked a necessary
first step (albeit a tactical setback) toward flesh-and-blood freedom. But as
the war settled into its meaner, later years, the jaunty opinion of this gen-
eration would sour. The scrappy adventurers whom Oliver Wendell Holmes,
192 GENERATIONS

Jr., saw as "touched with fire" in their youth would later turn bitterly
cynical about passionate crusades . The same 25-year-olds who had shrieked
(or heard) the rebel yell would, much later in their sixties, remember Bun
Run-and Antietam, Gettysburg, and Atlanta-and warn the young against
the horrors of war. Few would listen.
For Wilson's PROGRESSIVE GENERATION (Adaptive, age 2 to 18), the
news of Bull Run signaled the beginning of a family trauma that was destined
to pass over their childhood like a dark and cruel cloud. They would not
see daylight again until 1865, when Abraham Lincoln's funeral train jour-
neyed from Washington through New York to Illinois. The black-creped
cortege would be seen by an astonishing seven million Americans, nearly
one-fifth the population of the reunited nation. Witnessing the last act, the
youngest in this most fatherless of American generations would sit hoisted
on a mother's shoulder and hear elders talk of the sufferings they had endured
to provide children with a better future. The eldest would help out in the
war effort: teenage Thomas Edison stringing telegraph wires, Sergeant Wil-
liam McKinley serving hot meals to troops at Antietam. Later, they would
pass from a smothered youth to a conformist young adulthood, concentrating
on smallish tasks in a society where great things were built (or said) by
others. Emancipated young, black Progressives like Booker T . Washington
would reach midlife disinclined to provoke a white society that, over the
four bloody years commencing with Bull Run, had shown its capacity for
organized butchery.
In the Civil War, the midlife Transcendentals wrote the script and dominated
the credits; the rising-adult Gilded did the thankless dirty work; and the child
Progressives watched and worried . All three suffered the wreckage and became
cohabitants of America's only three-part cycle-the one whose crisis came too
soon, too hard , and with too much ghastly devastation. This cycle is no aber-
ration. Rather, it demonstrates how events can turn out badly-and, from a
generational perspective, what happens when they do.
The Civil War Cycle had its origin when the failed Presidential bid of Andrew
Jackson in 1824 fired a fresh mood of radicalism among coming-of-age Tran-
scendentals-an accelerating enthusiasm over spiritual conversion, social re-
form, "Manifest Destiny," abolitionism, and utopian communalism. The cycle
extended through the pitched battles of the Civil War and came to an inglorious
end with the conformism and spiritual decline of the ''Gilded Age'' of the 1870s
and 1880s. Climaxing in tragedy, the cycle failed to produce a Civic-type gen-
eration . After swiftly elbowing aside Transcendental leadership in the years
following the war, the Reactive Gilded transformed in midlife from a recessive
to a dominant generation , assuming some of the traits (secularism, conformism,
lengthy political tenure, and an indulgent style of child nurture) associated with
FIGURE 9-1
Civil War Cycle: Age Location in History

SPIRITUAL SECULAR SPIRITUAL SECULAR

AWAKENING CRISIS AWAKENING CRISIS
age88--------------- ----r---------,------,-~

ELDERHOOD:

MIDLIFE
ADULT:

age 44 -------~-__,
RISING
ADULT:

age 22 ------,
YOUTH:

1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940

Transcendental Civil Missionary Depression,
Awakening War Awakening World War II
Crisis Crisis ......
'
\;)
194 GENERA TIO NS

the Civic type at that phase of life-but without the hubris of crisis-era success.
Though first-wave Progressives began life with a nurture similar to that of a
Civic childhood, the trauma of war caused this generation to come of age smoth-
ered instead of empowered. Thereafter, its awkward connection with history and
its other-directed peer personality would follow the pattern of an Adaptive type .
The Civil War Cycle contained two social moments:

The Transcendental Awakening (1822-1837) was triggered by the evangelical

preaching of Charles Finney and by widespread excitement over religious
conversion, social reform, and radical idealism. Often merging with the
popular "Jacksonian" movement, it peaked around 1831 with Nat Turner's
rebellion, the founding of abolitionist societies, and the rise of labor parties
and new religious sects. After giving birth to the "transcendentalist" school
of philosophy and literature, the fervor subsided along with the collapse of
Jacksonian prosperity in 1837. "The great years of the new revivalism were
1825 to 1837," notes historian Edward Pessen. Steeped in the awakening's
radical call for Christian perfection, rising adults afterward took this agenda
with them as they aged into the midlife leaders of the Civil War. LOCATION
IN HISTORY: Republicans in elderhood; Compromisers in midlife; Tran-
scendentals in rising adulthood ; Gilded in youth.
The Civil War Crisis (1857-1865)-"the Second American Revolution" ac-
cording to Charles and Mary Beard-began in 1857, the year of Buchanan's
inauguration , the "Bleeding Kansas" debates , and the Dred Scott decision .
The crisis extended through the war itself and ended with General Robert
E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox (on Palm Sunday) and the assassination
of President Lincoln (five days later, on Good Friday). Graying preachers
gloried in the religious symbolism. But unlike other crisis eras, the de-
nouement of the Civil War produced less optimism than a sense of tragedy
having run its course. At the end of the 1860s, a disillusioned "bloody
shirt" generation of generals, officers, and older soldiers surged into po-
litical office-a position of power they would hold (but exercise cautiously)
for a very long time . Meanwhile, the coming-of-age generation-trauma-
tized, not energized, by the most destructive military conflagration yet
witnessed in world history-meekly avoided asserting itself in public life.
LOCATION IN HISTORY: Compromisers in elderhood; Transcendentals in
midlife; Gilded in rising adulthood ; Progressives in youth.
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 195

TRANSCENDENT AL GENERATION

Born: 1792-1821
Type: Idealist

Age Location:
Transcendental Awakening in rising adulthood
Civil War Crisis in midlife

"The young men were born with knives in their brain,'' recalled Ralph Waldo
Emerson of his youthful peers in the 1830s. He once described them as an
assortment of "madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggleton-
ians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists" -Utopians and
sectarians of all stripe, whom the like-aged southerner Edgar Allan Poe mock-
ingly labeled "frogpondium." They looked the part, too: their "anti-corset"
women wearing mannish "Bloomers" and their young men at Brook Farm (to
quote a fellow communard) wearing "their hair parted in the middle and falling
upon their shoulders, and clad in garments such as no human being ever wore
before." Nathaniel Hawthorne nostalgically looked back on Brook Farm as "our
exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew" and on Emerson's
Concord crowd as "a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals,
most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world's
destiny." Early in life, they deemed themselves agents of the world's inner
destiny. Only later did the men and women of this TRANSCENDENTAL GEN-
ERATION project their zeal onto the outer world and lead America toward the
Last Judgment. In his thirties, Emerson wrote, "Beware when the great God
lets loose a thinker on this planet." In his fifties, he greeted the bombardment
of Fort Sumter by confessing in his journal that he found purification in ''war'' -
which "shatters everything flimsy and shifty, sets aside all false issues .. . . Let
it search, let it grind, let it overturn."
As post-crisis babies, Transcendentals took first breath in a welcoming new
era of peace and optimism. As indulged children, they were assured by midlife
Republican hero-leaders that every conflict had been won, every obstacle sur-
mounted . But coming of age, these youngsters erupted in fury against the cultural
sterility of a father-built world able to produce (charged Emerson in 1820) "not
a book, not a speech, a conversation, or a thought worth noticing." They
preached feeling over reason, community over society, inner perfection over
outer conformity, moral transcendence over material improvement. The outburst
defined the Transcendentals as a generation. First-wavers were just learning to
 TRANSCENDENT AL GENERATION (Bom 1792 to 1821)

TYPE: Idealist FAMILY TREE

Total number : 11,000,000 Typical grandparents: Liberty
Percent immigrant: 20% Parents: Republican and Compromise
Percent slave: 13% Children: Gilded and Progressive
Typical grandchildren : Missionary

SAMPLE MEMBERS , birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1792 Thaddeus Stevens (1868) Plurality in House: 1835-1869
1795 Dred Scott (1858) Plurality in Senate: 1841-1873
1797 Sojourner Truth (1883) Majority of Supreme Court: 1861-1889
1800 John Brown (1859)
1800 Nat Turner (1831) U.S. PRESIDENTS: 1845-1849, 1850-
1801 Brigham Young (1877) 1857, 1861-1869
1803 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882)
1795 James Polk (1849)
1805 William Lloyd Garrison (1879)
1800 Millard Fillmore (1874)
1807 Robert E. Lee (1870)
1804 Franklin Pierce (1869)
1807 Henry W . Longfellow (1882)
1808 Andrew Johnson (1875)
1808 Jefferson Davis (1889)
1809 Abraham Lincoln ( 1865)
1809 Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
1813 John Fremont (1890)
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1815 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1902)
1817 Frederick Douglass (1895) 1795 Thomas Carlyle (1881)
1817 Henry David Thoreau (1862) 1805 Alexis de Tocqueville ( 1859)
c. 1820 Harriet Tubman {1913) 1813 Richard Wagner (1883)
1820 William Tecumseh Sherman ( 1891) 1818 Karl Marx (1883)
1820 Susan B. Anthony (1906) 1819 Queen Victoria (1901)
1821 Mary Baker Eddy (1910)

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0- 8 1800: Jefferson elected to first term

0-20 1812: War of 1812; elder generals disgraced
4-33 1825: New Harmony community launches utopian movement
10-39 1831: Nat Turner's slave rebellion; Garrison launches abolitionism
27-56 1848: " Manifest Destiny" defeats Mexico; Women's Rights Convention
31-60 1852: Uncle Tom's Cabin fuels abolitionism in North
38-67 1859: John Brown's raid on U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry
42- 71 1863: Emancipation Proclamation; Union victorious at Gettysburg
44-73 1865: Lee surrenders at Appomattox; Lincoln assassinated
47-76 1868: Radical Republicans fail to impeach President Johnson
56-85 1877: Reconstruction ends; U.S . troops leave South
61-90 1882: Longfellow , Emerson die one month apart, eulogized for wisdom

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS : The Liberator (William L. Garrison) ; Walden,

" Civil Disobedience" (Henry D. Thoreau) ; Gettysburg Address (Abraham Lincoln);
Encyclopedia Americana (Francis Lieber); Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman); "The
Transcendentalist" (Ralph W . Emerson) ; " The Raven" (Edgar Allan Poe); Battle Hymn of
the Republic (song , Julia Ward Howe); The Book of Mormon (Joseph Smith); The Scarlet
Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne); The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (Jefferson
Davis)
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 197

talk when their dutiful Republican fathers were crushing the Whiskey Rebels,
age 9 at Jefferson's first inauguration, and barely 30 when the initial clamor over
revival and reform broke out during the twilight Monroe years. Last-wavers
came of age just in time to join the furor before it receded in the late 1830s.
First wave and last, they afterward embarked on self-immersed voyages-starting
families and careers while founding communes, joining sects, dabbling in odd
lifestyles; probing the soul with art. In the 1850s, the Transcendentals emerged
again into public life, this time as midlife champions on both sides of what
William Seward called their "irrepressible conflict." Summoning juniors to
battle, they presided as leaders over four years of total war, which only ended
when William Tecumseh Sherman vowed to punish the Confederacy to its "in-
nermost recesses" and sixtyish Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens demanded a
postwar "reconstruction" of the southern soul.
From Stevens to Lincoln, Whitman to Poe, Garrison to the Blackwell sisters,
Transcendentals grew up notoriously estranged from their fathers. Many warned,
like Garrison, of ''the terrible judgments of an incensed God'' that ''will complete
the catastrophe of Republican America''; or proclaimed, like Emerson, that ''men
are what their mothers made them"; or condemned, like Thoreau (whose mother
brought home-cooked meals to his Walden retreat), "the mouldering relics of
our ancestors." " 'Our fathers did so,' says someone. 'What of that?' say we,''
wrote Theodore Parker, described by a friend as "a man of Nature who abom-
inates the steam-engine and the factory.'' But if young Transcendentals often
joined Compromisers in sniping attacks on Republican social discipline, they
reached midlife without their next-elders' instinctive caution. "Compromise-
Compromise!" wrote William Herndon on the eve of war. "Why I am sick at
the very idea."
Whether Abolitionists, "Southrons,'' Mormons, or Anti-Masons, they agreed
that each person must act on an inner truth that transcends the sensory world-
a credo immortalized by Emerson in 1842 as "Transcendentalism" and praised
by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "our intellectual Declaration of Independence."
Unlike their elders, Southern "fire-eaters" like Robert Barnwell Rhett and Wil-
liam Yancey refused to apologize for slavery, but instead found virtue in an
aggressive empire of chivalry and bondage . Meanwhile, northerners like Seward
declared the abolition of slavery to be "a higher law" than their father-drafted
Constitution, and Garrison condemned the half-slave Union as "a covenant with
death, an agreement with hell ." Neither side questioned that God was on its
side. While ax-wielding visionaries like John Brown and Nat Turner sanctified
what Herman Melville heralded as their '' meteor of war,'' Harriet Beecher Stowe
demanded that the "wrath of Almighty God" descend on America, a day that
"shall bum like an oven ."
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, all Americans ridiculed, re-
spected, or feared whatever age bracket the Transcendentals occupied as a moving
repository of inner-driven passion and unbreakable principle. In the 1820s, the
198 GENERA TIO NS

age bracket was youth: fledgling preachers like Charles Finney and their ado-
lescent followers who made up the elder-attacking ccre of what historians call
the Second Great Awakening. In the 1840s, it was rising adulthood: thirtyish
men and women, oblivious to any peer group but their own, who filled the ranks
of America's abolitionists, southern expansionists, feminists, labor agitators,
utopians, and reformers. In the 1860s, it was midlife: bearded fiftyish crusaders
who despised both the caution of their elders and the opportunism of their juniors.
In the 1880s, it was elderhood: craggy patriarchs and matriarchs-some starting
new causes (Wendell Phillips' socialism), others persisting in old movements
(Elizabeth Cady Stanton's feminism), and all warning the young not to back
down from truth and justice . At every age, Transcendentals mingled images of
nature, mother, love, redemption, and apocalypse. few became great scientists;
Isaac Singer and Cyrus McCormick were their only celebrated inventors . But
as moral prophets, no generation ever paraded so many visions of godliness-
whether Lincoln's Union, Davis' Confederacy, Brigham Young's "Kingdom of
Zion," John O'Sullivan's "Manifest Destiny," John Humphrey Noyes' "per-
fectionism," Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, Albert Brisbane's utopian
communes, Orestes Brownson's Catholic socialism, or Dorothea Dix's severe
but redemptive penology.
From youth to old age, the Transcendentals celebrated the subjective like no
other generation before or since. While Garrison chastised his peers for their
"thralldom of self," Emerson preached "whoso would be a man must be a
nonconformist," Thoreau insisted on the "majority of one," and Whitman (in
his "Song of Myself") rhapsodized that "I dote on myself, there is that lot of
me and all so luscious." "All that we see or seem/ Is but a dream within a
dream," wrote Poe. French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, encountering "a
fanatical and almost wild spiritualism that hardly exists in Europe," concluded :
"Religious insanity is very common in the United States." British visitor Frances
Trollope called them the 'Tm-as-good-as-you-are population" and added, "I
do not like them." No matter. Transcendentals cared only for what they thought
of themselves. They valued inner serenity: "having a strong sphere" (Stowe);
being a person who "is what he is from Nature and who never reminds us of
others" (Emerson); or possessing a "perfect mental prism" (as a friend described
Lincoln). Only later in life did their narcissism mutate into an irreconcilable
schism between northern and southern peers, each side yearning for perfection
no matter how the violence might blast the young. Like a generation of Captain
Ahabs, Transcendentals from Boston to Charleston turned personal truth into
collective redemption. Crowding into churches while younger men died at Get-
tysburg, they sang the third verse of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the
Republic with utter conviction: "I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished
rows of steel:/ As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;/
Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,/ Since God is
marching on.''
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 199

In his last public address, Lincoln declared : "Important principles may and
must be inflexible .' ' Yet after he died, many of his aging peers came to regret ,
like Dr. Holmes, the ravages of "moral bullies " who "with grim logic prove,
beyond debate ,/ That all we love is worthiest of hate ." "One trembles to think
of that mysterious thing in the soul," wrote Melville, pondering "the vindic-
tiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that
follow in their train." The Transcendentals may have been America ' s most high-
minded generation-but they also became, by any measure, its most destructive.
Recalling Robert E. Lee , the younger Henry Adams bitterly remarked after the
Civil War was over , "It's always the good men who do the most harm in the
world."

Transcendental Facts
Thanks to Republican science , Transcendentals were the first American babies
to be yanked into the world by forceps-wielding male doctors rather than
by midwives . Thereafter, mothers insisted that these infants be regarded as
unique individuals : They were the first whose names were chosen primarily
by mothers instead of fathers; the first whose names were actually used in
family conversation (no longer " it" or "baby"); and the first not commonly
named after parents . From the 1780s to the 18lOs, the share of New England
babies named after parents dropped from 60 to 12 percent . (It rose again
for later generations .)
The worst riots (then known as "breaking-ups " ) in the history of American
universities occurred from 1810 through the mid- l 830s. At Harvard in 1823,
two-thirds of the senior class were expelled shortly before commencement.
At Oberlin , abolitionist clubs held "revivals" in which students recounted
the "sins" of their slaveholding fathers .
From the 1810s to 1830s, rising Transcendentals fueled the most rapid ex-
pansion of evangelical religion in American history . In the West, youthful
settlers flocked to new Baptist and Methodist churches. In the South, young
preachers buried forever the cool rationalism of the Republican planter-
statesmen . "By 1830," notes historian Russel Nye, "had Jefferson been
still alive, he would undoubtedly have found his religious principles highly
unpopular in his native Virginia .' '
Coining the words "spiritualism ," "medium ," "rapping," "seance," "clair-
voyance," and "holy roller ," rising Transcendentals delighted in altered
states of consciousness . From the 1840s on, a large share of this generation
believed in psychic phenomena (seances with the dead, prophetic dreams)-
including Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, reformers William Lloyd Gar-
rison and Horace Greeley, and even many Transcendental feminists , from
200 GENERA TIO NS

Lucy Stone to Elizabeth Blackwell. "Consistently ," claims historian Ann

Braude, "those who assumed the most radical positions on woman ' s rights
became Spiritualists."
The Transcendentals were the first coming-of-age Americans to experiment
with opium. By the time they ranged from their teens through their thirties
(the early 1830s), U .S. alcohol consumption had climbed to its highest level
ever-the equivalent of a quart of whiskey per week for every American
over age 15. Entering midlife, however, this generation led a thundering
campaign against "Demon Rum" which successfully reduced alcohol con-
sumption to one-fourth its former level by 1850.
In his History of American Socialisms , published in 1870, the aging Tran-
scendental John Humphrey Noyes deemed seventy-four utopian commu-
nities worth mentioning and dating. Fifty-five were founded between 1825
and 1845. "All died young," Noyes observed, " and most of them before
they were two years old."
Over one six-year span, fortyish Transcendental authors published the best-
remembered literature of the nineteenth century-including The Scarlet
letter (Hawthorne, 1850); Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe, 1852); Walden (Tho-
reau, 1854); The Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow, 1855); Moby Dick (Mel-
ville, 1855); and leaves of Grass (Whitman, 1855). Formerly regarded by
Europeans as literary primitives, American authors suddenly acquired a vast
European following. By the late 1850s, Longfellow outsold Tennyson in
England.
When Transcendentals came of age, all America cherished the look and sagacity
of youth; when they grew old, Americans respected the look and sagacity
of age . The full beard-an enduring symbol of Transcendental wisdom-
came into vogue among midlife men in the late 1850s (just about the time
of John Brown's raid) . Though the beard remained popular among elderly
men in the 1880s, the next generation of midlifers began adding a mustache
or rejecting it altogether in favor of bushy "sideburns" (named after the
Gilded Union general Ambrose Burnside).
Of the sixteen leading "Radical Republicans" in Congress who took the hardest
line against the defeated Confederacy in 1867, fifteen were Transcendentals
(average age, 57)-although Congress as a whole (average age , 49) was
by now one-third Gilded .
The Civil War years began with Transcendentals enjoying the greatest one-
generation political hegemony in American history (a 90 percent share of
governors and Congress in 1860) and ended with the largest generational
rout in the election of 1868 (when the Transcendental share plunged from
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 201

63 to 44 percent). The period from 1865 to 1869 marked the steepest-ever

decline in one generation's share of national leadership.

The Transcendental Lifecycle

YOUTH: ''Our schools, our streets, and our houses are filled with straight,
well-formed children," exulted David Ramsay in 1802, praising the offspring
of midlife Republican nurture. Transcendentals missed the atmosphere of crisis
that had smothered young Compromisers. They grew up instead in the orderly
yet brightening climate of Jeffersonian America . ''The elements added after
1790" to childhood, notes historian Joseph Kett, "were increasingly on the side
of freedom." Many parents used their rising affluence to give their children
expensive toys (including pastel-painted children's furniture) and to seat them
in individualized family portraits. Pestalozzian tutors encouraged positive emo-
tion, and schoolbooks like Alphabet Without Tears made learning more friendly.
In 1818, a British visitor noted "the prominent boldness and forwardness of
American children" who are "rarely forbidden or punished for wrong doing"
and "only kindly solicited to do right." Transcendentals later felt nostalgia for
their childhood, a friendly and preindustrial "Age of Homespun," as Horace
Bushnell came to label it. Nevertheless, most recoiled at an early age from
fathers whom they perceived as reserved and soldierly. While parents urged
duty, activity, and society, these children preferred meditation, reading, and
"solitude" (a word they would cherish throughout their lives). Cerebral and
self-immersed, they avoided joining the adult world and turned their teenage
years, notes Kett, into "a period of prolonged indecision." At work, they felt
themselves "minds among the spindles" (as one visitor described the first Lowell
factory girls). Attending college, they mixed a passion for God and nature with
angry attacks on rotelike curricula. While Lyman Beecher, the Compromiser
educator, reported effusively that the most radical youths had "the finest class
of minds he ever knew," Emerson's description of his young peers struck an
ominous note: "They are lonely; the spirit of their writing is lonely; they repel
influence; they shun general society .... They make us feel the strange disap-
pointment which overcasts every youth."

COMING OF AGE: The revolt against fathers warmed up during the out-
wardly placid late 18!Os, when coming-of-age Transcendentals began rejecting
what 22-year-old James Polk described as "a tedious enumeration of noble
ancestors ." Fashions celebrating age (powder and queues, waistcoats, knee
breeches) swiftly gave way to those celebrating youth (short hair, shouldered
jackets, pantaloons). Youngsters drawn to upstate New York to help build the
Erie Canal, a region soon known as the "Burnt-Over District," launched an
202 GENERA TIO NS

evangelical surge led by the young Charles Finney. Teenagers of both sexes
(including Joseph Smith, the future Mormon prophet) experienced radical con-
versions and attacked elders as "sinners" and "hypocrites ." By the late 1820s,
as social and geographical mobility quickened with the first surge of industrial-
ization, youths joined religion to a radical social agenda . Screaming "to wake
up a nation slumbering in the lap of moral death,' ' young William Lloyd Garrison
proclaimed, "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice ."
He launched the riotous abolitionist movement in 1831-the same year 28-year-
old Nat Turner Jed his bloody insurrection against slave masters. By the mid-
1830s, young radicals were sparking labor and "Locofoco" activism in the
cities, joining the Anti-Masonic Party in the countryside , and rallying to new
cultural and religious standards in the college towns-from Emerson's "Ideal-
ism" to John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery lyrics to Mary Lyon's bold new
college (Mount Holyoke Seminary) for women. "The Seventy" -an entourage
of young lecturers who traveled the nation chastising their elders-featured
women as well as men. "There is no purely masculine man, no purely feminine
woman," observed Margaret Fuller. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, deemed by
Emerson "the universal poet of women and young people," urged his peers to
''shake the vast pillars of this Commonweal, / Till the vast Temple of our liberties/
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies."

RISING ADULTHOOD: Whitman called it "simmering," Emerson "meta-

morphosis,'' Thoreau the moment ''when we have lost the world ... and begin
to find ourselves." For twentyish and thirtyish adults, it meant the transition
from radical awakening to a mellower era that promised (declared Fuller's Dial
magazine) "the unfolding of the individual man, into every form of perfection,
without let or hindrance, according to the inward nature of each." This era of
Transcendental remission was triggered by the Panic of 1837, an event that
historian Sidney Ahlstrom says "darkened the dream" for young reformers and
led them into ''the Fabulous Forties .'' Institutionally, Republican-built (and now
Compromiser-managed) America stood intact-but, culturally, rising adults
were substituting an entirely new agenda. Pursuing separate paths, they mixed
outward pessimism with inward confidence by secluding themselves (Thoreau
at Walden, Davis on a Mississippi plantation) , founding utopian communities
(Brook Farm, Nauvoo, Fruitlands), establishing colleges as reform enclaves
(Oberlin, Antioch), launching "spiritualist " fads (homeopathy, phrenology),
and asserting women's rights (Seneca Falls). They turned the tide against sub-
stance abuse by advocating alcoholic temperance and natural-food diets like
Sylvester Graham ' s fermented crackers . They challenged neoclassical architec-
ture with a "Gothic revival" -asymmetrical houses with churchish gables and
earth-tone colors. Their first political leaders displayed surprisingly sharp edges.
President James Polk, an austere "born-again" Methodist , led a moralistic cru-
sade against Mexico that shocked elders-and a 32-year-old congressman pro-
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 203

posed a '' Wilmot Proviso '' that challenged the life work of the aging
Compromiser Triumvirate. Down South, Transcendental preachers found god-
liness in slavery as fortyish ' ' ultimatumists'' began demanding secession. Foreign
visitors in the early 1840s remarked on the "seriousness " and "absence of
reverence for authority " of the "busy generation of the present hour ." "All
that we do we overdo ," agreed Theodore Parker. "We are so intent on our
purpose that we have no time for amusement.''

MIDLIFE: ''The age is dull and mean. Men creep, not walk,'' complained
Whittier of the 1850s, a decade of stale Compromiser leadership that Stowe
described as " an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed ."
The mood turned sour with the failure of European revolutions , the unpopular
Compromise of 1850, frontier violence, and spectacular fugitive slave chases .
In the mid-l 850s, with lawless mayhem breaking out in " Bleeding Kansas,"
midlife Americans feared that the rapacious younger Gilded were about to shatter
their visions and rip America to pieces. Fiftyish preachers warned of Apocalypse
from their pulpits. Like-aged legislators began shouting at each other over prin-
ciple-one brutally caning another on the Senate floor. In 1859, the "martyr-
dom" of John Brown after his raid on Harpers Ferry catalyzed the mood on
both sides . "How vast the change in men's hearts!" cried Phillips . "The North
is suddenly all Transcendentalist," exulted Thoreau. "Unborn deeds, things
soon to be, project their shapes around me," mused Whitman of "this incredible
rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams." Once Lincoln' s election
answered Whitman' s plea for a " Redeemer President," his peers grimly prepared
for a Civil War that Lincoln insisted "no mortal could stay." As the young
marched off to bloody battle, midlife Transcendentals urged them on with appeals
to justice and righteousness. Garrison spoke of the "trump of God," while
Phillips warned that the Union was " dependent for success entirely on the
religious sentiment of the people ." Around the time Atlanta was in flames, the
words "In God We Trust" first appeared on U.S. coinage . Late in the war,
though the devastation grew catastrophic , both sets of Transcendental Presidents
and Congresses refused to back down . "Instruments of war are not selected on
account of their harmlessness ," insisted Thaddeus Stevens , beckoning Union
armies to " lay waste to the whole South." And so the North did- finding
redemption at Gettysburg, in Sherman's march, and in Emancipation . Afterward,
Transcendentals felt spiritual fulfillment: a huge human price had been exacted
from the young, but a new era was indeed dawning . Observed Melville, "The
Generations pouring ... I Fulfilled the end designed; / By a wondrous way and
glorious / A passage Thou dost find. . . . "

ELDERHOOD: ''Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of

ending ," wrote Longfellow, adding (in " Morituri Salutamus") how, "as the
evening twilight fades away, I The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.''
204 GENERA TIONS

One contemporary remarked how Longfellow "grew more beautiful every year
of his advancing old age-with his flowing white hair and beard and his grand
face.'' Late in the nineteenth century , a generation that had once detested eld-
erhood now found new powers in it. The young father-hater Theodore Parker
grew old watching his peers mature into "a noble, manly life, full of piety which
makes old age beautiful"; Sidney Fisher felt "a profound sense of the dignity
and worth of our souls.'' The Gilded had their doubts. After blunting the postwar
vengeance of aging Radicals, 30- and 40-year-olds moved swiftly in the late
1860s to purge the nation of Transcendental leaders-in Congress, governors'
mansions, and the White House. In three straight Presidential elections (1868,
1872, and 1876), older Transcendental candidates fell to Jess reform-minded
juniors. Meanwhile, old Confederates remained unrepentant (like Jefferson
Davis), Jed younger white "Redeemers" (like Nathan Forrest, "Grand Wizard"
of the postwar Ku Klux Klan), or aged into chivalric symbols of the "Lost
Cause" (like Wade Hampton) . In scientific circles, the amoral Darwinism that
so enamored the Gilded drew heated criticism from old Asa Gray. Thus did
Transcendentals transform into elders much like those in the novels of Hawthorne
and Melville-stern-valued patriarchs , revered but feared (like Thaddeus Ste-
vens) for "something supernatural" that "inhabits his weary frame." While the
aging minister Albert Barnes assured his friends they would die The Peaceful
Death of the Righteous , agi.ng spiritualists likewise heralded the end with stoic
confidence . For Lydia Child, "The more the world diminished and grew dark,
the Jess I felt the Joss of it; for the dawn of the next world grew even clearer
and clearer ." Versed Holmes to Whittier "On His Eightieth Birthday": "Look
Forward! Brighter than earth's morning ray/ ... The unclouded dawn of life's
immortal day!"
* * *
With their passing, the Transcendentals left behind an enduring projection of
their peer personality. Exalting inner truth, they brought spirit to America-
lofty imperatives of heartfelt religion and moral justice unknown to the Jeffer-
sonian world of their childhood . Contemptuous of earthly reality, so too did
they wreak vast material devastation . They emancipated the slaves, wrote in-
spiring verse, and preserved the Union their fathers had created. But they also
slaughtered the younger Gilded, thereby triggering a massive reaction that
vaunted pragmatism over principle. For decades after the Civil War, the old
Transcendental causes lay dormant (temperance), repudiated (feminism), even
reversed (Jim Crow) by juniors who reached midlife despising the fruits of
righteousness. Worse, the still younger generation of child Progressives, whom
these elders might have empowered to lock in their grand visions, instead came
of age in a wrecked world of spent dreams . The memory of Transcendentals
would eventually grow warmer among a new generation of postwar babies who
went to school staring up at portraits of what Booth Tarkington remembered as
"great and good" old men-the likes of Longfellow, Holmes , Whittier, and
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 205

Emerson. In 1881, a fresh crop of young college men heard the seventyish
Phillips warn them to "sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, ever looking
backward." In 1892, a fresh crop of young college women heard the 77-year-
old Elizabeth Cady Stanton remind them of ''The Solitude of Self.'' A quarter
century later, these inner-driven Missionaries would build a national monument
to Lincoln, worship Susan B. Anthony, and celebrate the Transcendentals as a
generation beloved for its principle and vision.
Yet among the most important Transcendental endowments is a terrible lesson.
The generation of Lincoln was also that of John Brown, a man who summoned
"a whole generation" to "die a violent death" and was elevated to sainthood
by his most eminent peers. It was also the generation of Mary Baker Eddy, who
insisted that "God is Mind, and God is infinite; hence all is mind," and of
William Lloyd Garrison, who urged war in order to bring mankind "under the
dominion of God, the control of an inward spirit, the government of the law of
love." The peers of Lincoln, Brown, Eddy, and Garrison-born to heroic par-
ents, indulged as children, fiery as youths, narcissistic as rising adults, and
values-fixated entering midlife-ultimately chose to join technology and passion
to achieve the maximum apocalypse then conceivable.
 206 GENERA TIO NS

GILDED GENERATION

Born: 1822-1842
Type: Reactive

Age Location:
Transcendental Awakening in youth
Civil War Crisis in rising adulthood
Missionary A wakening in elderhood

''The only population of the kind that the world has ever seen,'' Mark Twain
wrote of the Gold Rush 49ers, ''two hundred thousand young men-not sim-
pering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young
braves, brimful of push and energy,'' all having caught what Twain called the
"California sudden-riches disease." Eight in ten were between age 10 and 30,
making circa-1850 San Francisco the most monogenerational city ever seen in
America-and among the most anarchic, with no families or laws, just vigilante
justice enforced by hangings. The wildness of the western territories prompted
the fortyish Horace Mann to ask disparagingly, "Why were they not colonized
by men like the pilgrim fathers?" Back in eastern cities, meanwhile, unsupervised
youths shocked elders-poor kids by roaming wild in the streets and organizing
America's first urban gangs with names like Roach Guards; the better-off kids
(whom Van Wyck Brooks later called Lajeunesse doree of the 1840s) by throwing
books through college windows and striking cynical poses in fashionable cloth-
ing. Trying to make the best of a dangerous world and then getting damned for
it-that was the life story of the GILDED GENERATION. Twain himself later
memorialized the Gilded childhood in his adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn-pranks and pluck in a world of Aunt Beckyish elders . It
didn't change much with age.
The Gilded lived perhaps the most luckless lifecycle in American history.
First-wavers grew up too late to share the euphoria of the Transcendental Awak-
ening-but in time to feel its damage as children. Two decades later, last-wavers
grew up just in time to maximize their risk of death and maiming in the Civil
War. They all came of age in an era of economic swings, floodtide immigration,
and a darkening national mood . In rising adulthood, they bore the human burden
of Transcendental conscience, becoming what Henry Adams described as a
"generation .. . stirred up from its lowest layers ." Those who survived became
what historian Daniel Boorstin calls "the Go-Getters" of the late 1860s, thirtyish
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 207

buccaneers who had seen Union armies camp on Brook Farm and cannons
annihilate the most decent of their peers . After Appomattox, writes Brooks, ''the
young men were scattering in all directions. Their imagination was caught by
the West, and scores who might have been writers in the days of The Dial were
seeking their fortunes in railroads, mines, and oil wells ." Principle seemed
pointless next to the confession of the "Plumed Knight," James Blaine: "When
I want something, I want it dreadfully." Blaine's remark, notes historian Richard
Hofstadter, "might have been the motto of a whole generation of Americans
who wanted things dreadfully, and took them."
Inheriting the physical and emotional wreckage left behind by their elders,
the Gilded entered midlife and reassembled the pieces-their own way. They
muscled into political power, repudiated their elders' high-flown dreams, rolled
up their sleeves, and launched a dynamo of no-holds-barred economic progress
to match their pragmatic mood. They reached the cusp of old age during the
1890s, again an unlucky moment for their phase of life, when a rapidly growing
share of all elderly landed in what Americans began calling an "industrial scrap
heap.'' With few means of public or private support, that is where many of them
eked out their twilight years . "Let the chips fall where they may," said Roscoe
Conkling. By most indicators-wealth, higher education, lifespan-the Gilded
fared worse at each phase oflife than their next-elders or next-juniors, a sacrificial
one-generation backstep in the chain of progress. No wonder they behaved, all
their lives, like survivalists . Taking a cue from their laissez-faire guru William
Graham Sumner, they learned to "root, hog, or die."
Throughout their lifecycle, and indeed ever since, the Gilded have been
inundated by torrents of critical abuse . Before the Civil War, midlife Transcen-
dentals like Horace Mann charged that "more than eleven-twelfths" of them
could not read, and George Templeton Strong saw in them "so much gross
dissipation redeemed by so little culture." Later on, Walt Whitman complained
of their "highly deceptive superficial intellectuality," and Longfellow accused
their generation of taking America "back to the common level, with a hoarse
death-rattle in its throat ." A younger Progressive, Henry James, accosted "that
bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right
and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong." By the 1890s, the righteous
reformers of a still younger (Missionary) generation rediscovered the old Tran-
scendental theme of Gilded soullessness. Historians Charles Beard despised their
"cash nexus," Ralph Adams Cram their "mammonism," Vernon Parrington
their ''triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its like in our history.'' Closer
to our own time, Samuel Eliot Morison has written: "When the gilt wore off,
one found only base brass." The Gilded seldom answered such charges; in fact,
their leading writers mostly agreed. In 1873, with rumpled heroes like Ulysses
Grant and John D. Rockefeller riding high, Twain and his 35-year-old coauthor
Charles Dudley ("Deadly Warning") Warner published a popular satirical book,
 GILDED GENERATION (Born 1822 to 1842)

TYPE: Reactive FAMILY TREE

Total number : 17,000,000 Typical grandparents: Republican
Percent immigrant : 28% Parents: Compromise and Transcendental
Percent slave: 10% Children: Progressive and Missionary
Typical grandchildren: Lost

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1823 "Boss" Tweed (1878) Plurality in House: 1869-1893
1824 "Stonewall" Jackson (1863) Plurality in Senate : 1873-1903
1829 Roscoe Conkling (1888) Majority of Supreme Court: 1890-1910
1829 Levi Strauss (1902)
1830 James G . Blaine (1893) U.S. PRESIDENTS: 1869-1897
1830 Emily Dickinson (1886)
1822 Ulysses S. Grant (1885)
1830 "Mother Jones" (1930)*
1822 Rutherford B. Hayes (1893)
c. 1831 Sitting Bull (1890)
1830 Chester A. Arthur (1886)
1832 Louisa May Alcott (1888)
1831 James A. Garfield (1881)
1832 Horatio Alger (1899)
1833 Benjamin Harrison (1901)
1835 Andrew Carnegie (1919)*
1837 Grover Cleveland (1908)
1835 Mark Twain (1910)
1837 J. Pierpont Morgan (1913)
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1837 "Wild Bill" Hickok (1876)
1838 John Wilkes Booth (1865) 1828 Henrik Ibsen (1906)
1839 John D . Rockefeller (1937) 1832 Maximilian (1867)
1839 George Custer (1876) 1832 Lewis Carroll (1898)
1840 Thomas Nast (1902)* 1833 Alfred Nobel (1896)
1841 Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. (1935) 1839 Paul Cezanne (1906)
1842 William James (1910)
* = immigrant
Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE
0-15 1837: Economic Panic of 1837; spiritual fervor recedes
3-23 1845: Travel volume peaks along Oregon and Santa Fe trails
6-26 1848: U.S. wins Mexican War; Irish immigration; California Gold Rush
13-33 1855: Unofficial war in Kansas; Know-Nothing movement peaks
18-38 1860: Pony Express riders hired; Lincoln elected; South Carolina secedes
21-41 1863: 51,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing at Battle of Gettysburg
27-47 1869: Grant takes office; golden spike laid in Utah
29-49 1871: Peak year for cattle drives along Chisholm Trail
34-54 1876: Custer massacred at Little Big Hom; Centennial Exposition
35-55 1877: Hayes wins "stolen" election; South throws out carpetbaggers
51-71 1893: Panic of 1893; Columbian Exposition
69-89 1911: Supreme Court breaks up Standard Oil; Carnegie starts foundation

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS : Li11le Women (Louisa May Alcott); The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); political cartoons (Thomas Nast); The Rise of Silas
Lapham (William Dean Howells); "The Checkered Game of Life" (Milton Bradley); "The
Outcasts of Poker Flat" (Bret Harte); The Gospel of Wealth (Andrew Carnegie); Luck and
Pluck (Horatio Alger); The Oregon Trail (Francis Parkman); The Gilded Age (Mark Twain
and Charles Dudley Warner); Home Insurance Building skyscraper (Le Baron Jenney)
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 209

The Gilded Age , whose title perfectly described this generation of metal and
muscle .
Hit by pain and hard luck that seemed to justify all the critics , the Gilded
suffered from low collective self-esteem . ' Tm Nobody! Who are you?/Are
you-Nobody-too?" But Emily Dickinson's peers were nobody's fools . In
their eyes, the central lesson of history was the devastation that inner passion
can inflict on the outer world . They became skeptics, trusting principle Jess than
instinct and experience. "As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which
we have no use, " wrote William James, who popularized "pragmatism" as a
philosophy based on "truth ' s cash value ." The Gilded played for keeps and
asked for no favors. Their motto , as General Grant put it, was to strike "as hard
as you can and as often as you can , and keep moving on ." When young, devilish
raiders like Jeb Stuart delighted in cavalier foppery (black plumes and gold-
threaded boots). When old, " robber barons" like Andrew Carnegie unabashedly
proclaimed "the Law of Competition" as "the soil in which society so far has
produced the best fruit." Midlife apostles of Darwin's "survival of the fittest,"
the Gilded did not mind becoming a generation of spectacular winners and losers .
Their ranks included those who struck gold and those who died trying; fugitive
slaves and the posses chasing them; war profiteers and war widows; Pullman
millionaires and sweating "coolies"; Irish immigrants and nativist mobs; General
Custer and Sitting Bull .
Twenty years after the young 49ers first reached San Francisco , Twain asked:
"And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth-or prematurely
aged and decrepit-or shot and stabbed in street affrays-or dead of disappointed
hopes and broken hearts-all gone, or nearly all-victims devoted upon the
altar of the golden calf-the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its incense
heavenward . It is pitiful to think upon ." Yet Twain 's "golden calf" peers dug
the first oil, laid the golden spike, built the first business trusts, designed the
first "skyscrapers" -and, most important, targeted most of their throat-cutting
competition against their own peers . In so doing, the men and women of this
self-demeaning generation gave chestiness to a modernizing nation and a much
better life to their children.

Gilded Facts
From youth to elderhood, the Gilded were more likely to die or fall into
destitution than their parents at like age. They were also more likely to
make a fortune starting out from nothing . According to C. Wright Mills,
a larger share of their business elite came from lower- or lower-middle-
class backgrounds than was the case in any earlier or later generation-
including Andrew Carnegie, John D . Rockefeller , Jay Gould , James J . Hill ,
Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker.
210 GENERA TIO NS

With traditional apprenticeships dwindling in an era of rapid industrialization

and cheap immigrant labor, many Gilded youth took to the streets and
became the first generation of urban criminal gangs. By the 1840s, their
violence prompted elders to organize the first big-city police forces and
establish the first "reform" schools. "If the reform school differed at all
from adult prisons," observes historian Joseph Kett, "it was because chil-
dren could be shipped off to the former not just for crimes but for general
vagrancy and stubbornness."
The Gilded include a larger share of immigrants (28 percent) than any other
American generation since colonial times. To the East Coast came the first
large influx of Irish Catholics, triggered by the Irish potato famine of the
late 1840s; to the West Coast came the Chinese, hired on as laborers for
the Union Pacific Railroad.
Suffering worsening nutrition as children, the adult height of the Gilded de-
clined from first cohort to last. Later in life, the quest for protein became
a generational obsession . The Gilded include America's best-known can-
nibals (Al Packer and the Donner Party survivors); the founder of the King
Ranch ; the first Texas-to-Abilene cattle drivers; the first large-scale meat-
packers (Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour); and, by the 1880s, the midlife
beneficiaries of plunging beef prices . Shunning the lithe (Transcendental)
physique, the aging Gilded celebrated the rotund body and the Delmonico
steak dinner as a mark of success. In 1907, when the youngest Gilded had
entered elderhood, U.S. life expectancy at age 65 declined to the shortest
span ever measured (under I I .5 years).
Throughout their lifecycle, the Gilded defined today's image of the western
adventurer: from the youthful 49er and Pony Express rider before the Civil
War, to the midlife rancher, cowboy, "bad man," and Indian fighter of
1870s, to the grizzled old mountaineer of 1900.
Gilded blacks include the first large population of American mulattoes (many,
presumably, the children of white Compromiser fathers); the slave gener-
ation that suffered most at the hands of white owners increasingly fearful
of rebellion; the most celebrated l 850s-era slave fugitives; and, during the
Civil War, the soldiers and officers of the first black regiments in North
America. In the Reconstruction years, fifteen Gilded blacks were elected
to Congress, a greater number than from any later generation until the Silent.
War hit the Gilded harder than any other American generation . They were the
first American youths to be subject to conscription-and led the bloodiest
anti draft riots in American history . Of the seven million Gilded men who
reached combat age, roughly IO percent died in the Civil War; one in fifteen
in the Union states, nearly one in four in the Confederate states. Another
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 211

5 percent ended the war in disease-ridden prisoner-of-war camps. Alto-

gether , the number killed in more than six thousand Civil War battles
exceeded the cumulative total for all other American wars-a per capita
casualty rate equal to eight World War Ils combined . Nearly half the Gilded
war dead were buried in unmarked graves .
In the generational landslide election of 1868, the median age of governors in
the nine core Confederate states fell from 62 to 37. The Gilded include
most of the postwar carpetbaggers and scalawags.
As "Victorian" stewards of the late-nineteenth-century American economy,
the Gilded set an unmatched record for prudence and thrift. From the late
1850s to the late 1890s, gross capital formation more than doubled as a
share of GNP and the wholesale price index declined by one-third . From
1866 to I 893, Gilded leaders and taxpayers sustained twenty-eight consec-
utive federal surpluses-reducing the national debt by one-third and making
theirs the only generation in American history to leave behind a smaller
federal debt than it inherited .

The Gilded Lifecycle

YOUTH: "Children are commercial before they get out of their petticoats,"
remarked visitor David MacRae of America 's Jacksonian-era children. "You
will see a little girl of six show a toy to her companion , and say, gravely, 'Will
you trade?' " William Dean Howells later recalled how he and his friends grew
up fast at a time when "the lowest-down boy in town could make himself master
if he was bold and strong enough ." The young Gilded had little choice. Some
were the casual offspring of experimental communities; others were hungry
arrivals by boat. Nearly all of them, looking up at uncertain midlifers and self-
absorbed rising adults, understood at an early age that they had better take care
of themselves-if necessary , by scavenging in the cities or moving away to the
frontier . Parents complained of their toughness, lawmakers decried the new flood
of "street orphans " who mixed huckstering with crime , and in 1849 the New
York police chief condemned "the constantly increasing number of vagrants,
idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares . "
One writer described them as The Dangerous Classes of New York, "friendless
and homeless ... . No one cares for them, and they care for no one." Hearing
elders moralize, Gilded youths steered clear of adults and practiced what many
parents referred to (favorably) as " self-dependence . " Louisa May Alcott, lik-
ening her impractical father (a utopian reformer in Emerson's circle) to "a man
up on a balloon ," secretly resolved as a girl "to take Fate by the throat and
shake a living out of her.'' Gilded students showed little of their next-elders'
interest in the cerebral. In the 1830s, farmers' sons were grabbing get-rich
212 GENERA TIO NS

manuals and bolting from their homes and schools at ever-earlier ages. By the
1840s and 1850s, college attendance sank-and those who did arrive on campus
made sure to keep fortyish reformers at bay. When Garrison and Longfellow
came to speak, these collegians jeered and hissed. When teachers ordered them
to pray, writes historian Frederick Rudolph, they responded with "deliberate
absenteeism, indifference, disrespect, by ogling female visitors, the writing
of obscene doggerel on the flyleaves of hymnals, by expectorating in the chap-
el aisle." Boasted one student at Brown: "We live in a perfectly indepen-
dent way.''

COMING OF AGE: "Of all the multitude of young men engaged in various
employments of this city," reported a Cincinnati newspaper in 1860, "there is
not one who does not desire, and even confidently expect to become rich." In
the 1840s and 1850s, the Gilded came of age pursuing what the aging Com-
promiser Washington Irving sarcastically called "the almighty dollar, that great
object of universal devotion throughout our land.'' These were frenetic years
for 20-year-olds. Many stayed in the East, where they mingled with crowds of
new immigrants, found jobs in new factories, and rode a roller-coaster economy.
Others, alienated by rising land prices and intolerant next-elders, followed the
"Go West, Young Man" maxim of Horace Greeley-perhaps the only Tran-
scendental advice they considered sensible. During the Mexican War, they
proved eager to fight for new territory (and to learn how to handle the new Colt
"six-shooter"). While Emerson chastised "young men" who "think that the
manly character requires that they should go to California, or to India, or into
the army," twentyish Gilded adventurers were crying "Eureka!" and chasing
the newfound mother lodes. The lucky got rich panning for metal, the cunning
(like 21-year-old Levi Strauss) by feeding and outfitting their desperado peers.
Back across the still empty Great Plains, the Gilded added leather lungs to the
polarizing debate over union-first as the core of the nativist ''You ng America''
movement, next as "Know~Nothings" shouting their defiantly anti-Transcen-
dental slogan "Deeds Not Words ," and finally as unpropertied "Lincoln shout-
ers" and "hurrah boy" Republicans. In the North, they agreed with Lincoln's
argument that slavery posed a threat to free men everywhere-and were coaxed
by the new party's promises to enact a homestead law and build railroads. In
the South, cries for battle rose from those whom Sherman darkly referred to as
"young bloods" and "sons of planters" - "brave, fine riders, bold to rashness,
and dangerous subjects in every sense" who "must be killed or employed by
us before we can hope for peace." Ranging in age from 19 to 39 in 1861 , the
Gilded were ready, in Twain's words, ''to make choice of a life-course & move
with a rush." Many volunteered for war, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
''because we want to realize our spontaneity and prove our power for the joy
of it."
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 213

RISING ADULTHOOD: For the young Gilded, the first years of the Civil
War were more dashing than bloody. Thirtyish commanders George McClellan
and Stonewall Jackson enjoyed great popularity with their "Billy Yank" and
"Johnny Reb" troops. Following the deadly battles of 1862-1863 and the first
draft calls , however, the Gilded began to think twice about their prophetic next-
elders . Ultimately , a bulldog Gilded general (Ulysses Grant) toughed out a
reputation for slow wits and hard liquor by throttling "Gentleman Lee"-who
surrendered just days before a self-loathing Gilded assassin (John Wilkes Booth)
put an end to "Father Abraham." Afterward, while 55-year-olds declaimed over
principle, 35-year-olds saw mostly ruined farms, starving widows, diseased
prisoners, dead bodies, and amputated limbs (carried away from Gettysburg by
the wagonload) . In the South, poet Henry Timrod described the postwar land-
scape as "beggary, starvation, death , bitter grief, utter want of hope ." No
southerner of Timrod's generation would later emerge to prominence in any
sphere of national life-business, science, letters, or politics . In the North, the
Gilded went to work disarming the Transcendental leadership. After a 42-year-
old senator, Edmund Ross, blocked the Radicals' plot to impeach President
Johnson , Gilded leaders di'smantled Reconstruction and left their southern black
peers to fend for themselves. The feisty women of this male-short generation
focused their postwar energy on family solidarity and matured into the durable
Scarlett O'Hara matrons of the Victorian era . The men found it harder to adjust.
Some became rootless "bums" and "hobos," wandering along newly built
railways and evading postwar "tramp laws ." Others burst forth with bingelike
rapacity-notorious "bad guys" (Wild Bill Hickok, William Quantrill), Indian
fighters (Phil Sheridan, George Custer), and "robber barons" (Jim Fisk, Jay
Gould). After the war, the Gilded purged their memory of elder zealots by
turning their regional focus away from New England and by looking instead
toward the busier, less talkative Midwest-especially Ohio, home to four of the
six Gilded Presidents . Rutherford Hayes wrote from Cincinnati: "Push, labor,
shove-these words are of great power in a city like this ."

MIDLIFE: In 1876, the Gilded celebrated their midlife dominion with the
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Hall of Machines stood for bigness,
strength, and worldliness-and not a hint of the Transcendental inner life that
most Gilded still associated with meanness and tragedy . During the 1870s, Gilded
survivalism turned conservative . Seeking an ethos suitable for a generation of
scoundrels, they found it first in Charles Darwin's "law of natural selection,"
next in Herbert Spencer's "social statics ," and most fully in the "pragmatism"
of Charles Peirce and William James. Amid what was known as the "Victorian
crisis of faith,'' the Gilded played the game of life according to worldly measures
of success . The first Wall Street financiers like John Pierpont Morgan and An-
thony Drexel counted dollars; the first trust-builders like John D. Rockefeller
214 GENERATIONS

and Andrew Carnegie counted sales; the first rail tycoons like Leland Stanford
and James J . Hill counted miles of steel and tons of freight. The new wealth
fortified a fiftyish up-from-nowhere elite that came to dominate both culture and
politics, to the despair of their "Mugwump" critics . These new philistines
eclipsed a succession of weak Presidents and tilted political power toward state
and local governments . They crushed most dissenters, from genteel cosmopol-
itans like Henry Adams to rural populists like "Sockless Socrates" Simpson .
And by the 1880s, they reconciled themselves to a prudish morality promulgated
by Frances Willard's "Temperance" and " Social Purity" movements . The new
standard stressed modesty, self-control, and a shameless reputation-requiring
many of these fiftyish parents to hide (or at least leave unmentioned) their
checkered personal histories. The Gilded midlife era ended in 1893 as it began-
with a world's fair, this time in Chicago. But a few months before it opened,
the worst panic in living memory plunged the nation into sudden depression .
When the fair's opulence drew angry fire from the young, Charles Eliot Norton
found a "decline of manners" and Mark Twain a "soul full of meanness" in
an America now gripped by the Missionary Awakening .

ELDERHOOD: '' A new America,' ' complained Norton on the eve of the
Spanish-American War, "is entering on the false course which has so often led
to calamity.'' In 1898, as young zealots pressed for an invasion of Cuba, virtually
all of America's aging Gilded luminaries (Twain, Cleveland, Carnegie, Sumner,
James, Howells) urged peace and caution . But by now a new crop of Progressive
leaders were listening to the zeal of youth, not the exhaustion of old-timers-
and chose to "Remember the Maine," not Gettysburg. As the century ticked
to a close, Gilded conservatism gave way to the attacks of younger reformers.
Old Sumner lamented that the bonds of close family loyalty, a source of strength
and comfort to his peers after the Civil War, now attracted ridicule from fash-
ionable social critics. College students romanticized a bucolic preindustrial
past-a past the old Gilded knew had been wild and dangerous . Meanwhile,
according to historian Andrew Achenbaum , the new century unleashed an ''un-
precedented devaluation" of the elderly: "Instead of extolling the aged's moral
wisdom'' -as they had in the twilight years of Emerson and Longfellow-
" commentators increasingly concluded that old people had nothing to contribute
to society." In a widely reprinted 1905 lecture, the Progressive William Osler
wrote of "the uselessness of men above sixty years of age" and stressed "the
incalculable benefits" of "a peaceful departure by chloroform ." Old Henry
Adams complained that "young men have a passion for regarding their elders
as senile." Many Gilded elders heard themselves reviled as "old geezers" and
"old fogies"-their elite as "old guard" senators, "standpatter" House mem-
bers, and reform-blocking Supreme Court justices. Where prior generations of
elders had typically worked until death (or were cared for by younger relatives
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 215

on farms), many now faced an involuntary, pensionless "retirement" in a rapidly

urbanizing economy that substantially favored young adults. As inept "soldier-
ing" became a new insult in the workplace, inflation began eroding the real
value of federal pensions to "Grand Army" veterans. "There is now no place
in our working order for old men," observed Edward Everett Hale in his sev-
enties. Never asking for special favors, the old Gilded kept to themselves and
rarely complained about their treatment. '' I am seventy,'' confessed the otherwise
acid-penned Mark Twain in 1905, "seventy and would nestle in the chimney
comer ... wishing you well in all affection."
* * *
The enduring images of this generation conjure up rapacity, nihilism, and
ugliness: Know-Nothings and Ku Klux Klanners; Union "bummers" and Quan-
trill's raiders; Credit Mobilier and the Salary Grab Act; gold spittoons and penny
novels; carpetbaggers and scalawags; Boss Tweed's machine and Morgan's trust;
"Half-Breed" James Blaine and "His Fraudulency" President Hayes . But low
expectations and a negative self-image were all part of the Gilded game plan:
to live according to their own pragmatic rules-and if that meant making massive
lifecycle sacrifices, so be it. After all, their merciless competition favored fast-
paced innovation; their city machines fed poor children; their business trusts and
government surpluses favored huge investment in infrastructure and long-lived
capital goods; their elder industrialists became fabled philanthropists; and their
chromo culture protected the family-all benefits that would accrue not to them-
selves (aside from a handful of flashy winners), but to their children. Neglected
and brutalized early in life, this "bad" generation reached midlife power with
every opportunity to indulge itself and let its children waste among the postwar
ruins. Instead, the Gilded rebuilt America while mainly wasting each other. They
became loud proponents of Social Darwinism just as they reached the threshold
of elderhood-precisely the phase of life when "survival of the fittest" would
plainly work to their own disadvantage.
Few ever sought credit for lofty motives. Late in life, Justice Holmes admitted
that he was a "Philistine" and "egotist." Likewise, at age 64, even William
James excoriated his peers for their "exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess
SUCCESS." Rather than be judged for how they felt, the Gilded preferred to
be judged for what they built. Arriving in New York City in 1907, the elder
James looked around at the commercial bustle and marveled : "in the center of
the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and ...
found it simply magnificent." By refusing to look beyond the material world,
the Gilded sacrificed themselves bodily for their "machines" -mechanical,
commercial, and political. This self-deprecation resulted in a very real kindness:
to ensure that younger Progressives and Missionaries would enjoy far more
affluence than the Gilded had themselves ever known. Their greatest failure late
in life was not to realize that the high tide of laissez-faire growth would hurt all
216 GENERA TIO NS

of society's dependents, not only themselves as elders, but also a still younger
(Lost) generation of children . The tots of the 1890s were about to embark on a
lifecycle much like their own-a fact that would have pained the old Twains
and Camegies had they known it. The Gilded lifecycle thus deserves the same
warning that Twain's "Notice to the Reader" offered for Huckleberry Finn:
"Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished."
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 217

PROGRESSIVE GENERATION

Born 1843-1 859

Type : Adaptive

Age Location :
Civil War Crisis in youth
Missionary A wakening in midlife

In the late 1860s, while Gilded railroad barons were building powerful lo-
comotives and designing luxurious Pullman cars, 22-year-old George Westing-
house invented an air brake to make trains safe . A few years later, at the 1876
Philadelphia Centennial, the delicate inventions of 29-year-old Thomas Edison
and 27-year-old Alexander Graham Bell drew more international acclaim than
the huge Gilded steam turbines . Where the midlife Gilded liked to build things
that rewarded society's strongest and richest, these young tinkerers targeted their
efforts toward the disadvantaged. Edison designed his arc light to assist the
visually impaired, Bell his crude telephone to audibilize voices for the deaf.
Westinghouse, Edison, and Bell lay at the vanguard of the PROGRESSIVE
GENERATION, a cadre of fledgling experts and social meliorators as attuned
to the small as their next-elders were to the big . Their leading figures, the fortyish
Theodore Roosevelt and the sixtyish Woodrow Wilson , liked to describe them-
selves as "temperate," their designs as "moderate. " In politics as in family
life , their inclination was to make life gentler and more manageable; their global
credo (in Wilson's memorable words) was to make the world "safe for democ-
racy." Like their inventor peers, Progressives believed that calibration and com-
munication would eventually make America a nicer country.
For a generation to assume such an other-directed mission required unusual
sensitivity-and a collective identity of unusual malleability . Progressives ac-
quired both, thanks to a lifecycle that located them in an odd warp of history .
They were born at the wrong time for authentic catharsis-too late for free-
wheeling adventure, too soon for the youth-fired movements of the late nineteenth
century . First-wavers were the keep-your-head-down teenagers of the Civil War;
last-wavers came of age during the thickening social consensus of the 1870s.
Through the 1880s, they became rising-adult partners to the Gilded in a fast-
growing nation still gripped in a survivalist mentality. Their social role soon
became clear : to apply their credentialed expertise toward improving what their
next-elders had pioneered . They added "organization" to new corporations,
"efficiency" to new assembly lines, "method" to new public agencies . Such
 PROGRESSIVE GENERATION (Born 1843 to 1859)

TYPE: Adaptive FAMILY TREE

Total number: 22,000,000 Typical grandparents: Compromise

Percent immigrant: 27% Parents: Transcendental and Gilded
Percent slave: 9% Children : Missionary and Lost
Typical grandchildren: G.I.
SAMPLE MEMBERS , birth (death)
PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1843 Henry James (1916)
1843 Montgomery Ward (1913) Plurality in House : 1893-1909
1844 Henry Heinz (1919) Plurality in Senate : 1903-1917
1845 Mary Cassatt (1926) Majority of Supreme Court : 1911-1923
1846 George Westinghouse (1914)
1846 Carry Nation (1911) U.S. PRESIDENTS: 1897-1921
1847 Thomas Edison (1931) 1843 William McKinley (1901)
1847 "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman (1918) 1856 Woodrow Wilson (1924)
1849 Alexander Graham Bell (1922)* 1857 William Howard Taft (1930)
1849 Crazy Horse (1877) 1858 Theodore Roosevelt ( 1919)
1850 Samuel Gompers (1924)*
1854 John Philip Sousa (1932) PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1855 Robert La Follette (1925)
1855 Andrew Mellon (1937) 1853 Vincent van Gogh (1890)
1856 Booker T . Washington (1915) 1854 Oscar Wilde (1900)
1856 Louis Brandeis (1941) 1856 Sigmund Freud (1939)
1856 Frederick Winslow Taylor (1915) 1859 Kaiser Wilhelm II (1941)
1857 Ida Tarbell (1944) 1859 Henri Bergson (1941)
1857 Clarence Darrow (1938)
1859 John Dewey (1952)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0- 6 1849: Horace Mann completes " Massachusetts model " for public education
4-20 1863: Battle of Gettysburg; slaves emancipated
17-33 1876: Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins, "case method" law at Harvard
20-36 1879: "Big Business" economy surges; Edison invents light bulb
29-45 1888: Granger populism spreads ; Frank Sprague invents electric trolley
37-53 1896: McKinley overwhelms Bryan on high-tariff, " sound-money" platform
39-55 1898: Sinking of Maine triggers Spanish-American War
42-58 1901: McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes President
47-63 1906: Pure Food and Drug Act; Congress tightens regulation of railroads
53-69 1912: Roosevelt founds "Progressive" (Bull Moose) Party, loses to Wilson
60-76 1919: Treaty of Versailles; Wilson advocates the League of Nations
66-82 1925: Andrew Mellon proposes tax cuts; Darrow defends John Scopes

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James); Babes in

Toy/and (Victor Herbert) ; "The Man with the Hoe" (Edwin Markham); The Reign of Law
(James Lane Allen) ; "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" (Eugene Field); Uncle Remus (Joel
Chandler Harris); Up from Slavery (Booker T . Washington) ; The School and Society (John
Dewey); History of the Standard Oil Company (Ida Tarbell); The Theory of the Leisure Class
(Thorstein Veblen); The Rough Riders (Theodore Roosevelt)
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 219

value-free ideations would always define their life mission. John Dewey never
ceased to delight in the "educative process," William Howard Taft in "inter-
preting" the law, Woodrow Wilson in "consulting the experts," and Booker
T. Washington in "constructive compromise ." Starting families at the height
of the social and sexual conformism of the mid-Victorian era, they tried hard to
take part in what they called "the progress of civilization" -progress that now
required method over personality. ''In the past the man has been first,'' declared
Frederick Winslow Taylor in his world-famous Principles of Scientific Manage-
ment; "in the future the system must be first."
Their lifecycle had a decisive turning point: the turbulent 1890s and 1900s,
when they embarked on anxious midlife passages and shifted their attention from
age to youth. Stifled by the narrowed purpose of their younger years, they envied
the passion of younger Missionaries while expressing relief in a newfound "lib-
erty" that Wilson defined as "a process of release, emancipation, and inspiration,
full of a breath of life ... sweet and wholesome .'' Past age 40, many Progressives
embraced new causes with joyful vigor, from political reform (Robert La Follette)
and organized feminism (Harriot Blatch) to world peace (David Starr Jordan),
temperance (the WCTU), and health foods (John Harvey Kellogg) . Thanks to
their efforts, lonely dissenters found genteel protectors like Clarence Darrow
and Governor John Altgeld; "The Social Question" (even socialism itself) be-
came a subject of polite dinner conversation; anticorporate populism gave birth
to officious "regulations" and "commissions"; and anti-Gilded students dis-
covered charismatic leaders willing to join their attack on Rockefeller ("the
greatest criminal of the age," cried La Follette) and Standard Oil ("bad capi-
talism,'' agreed Teddy Roosevelt) . Reaching the age of leadership, Progressives
often fretted over their next-juniors' passion for reforms at home and crusades
abroad. Overwhelmed by events and pushed out of power during World War I,
Progressives entered elderhood trying to stay involved while nudging America
back toward tolerance and conciliation.
By the standards of their next-elders, the Progressives lived a lifecycle in
reverse. They set out as sober young parents in the shadow of Reconstruction-
attired in handlebar mustaches and tight corsets-and ended up as juvenating
midlifers in an era of Rough Riders and gunboats, evangelism and trust-busting,
Model Ts and hootchie-kootchie girls, Freud's "talking cure" and Bergson's
elan vital. Taught young the importance of emotional self-control, they reached
the new century probing desperately for ways to defy taboos, tell secrets, and
take chances. In social life, the peers of Woodrow Wilson sought to expose
scandal and "open up" the system by insisting that "there ought to be no place
where anything can be done that everybody does not know about.'' In economic
life, the peers of Thorstein Veblen satirized the Gilded obsession with self-denial
and savings, turning their attention toward leisure and consumption instead. In
personal life, most of all, these uneasy midlifers spawned what historian Jackson
Lears calls the "therapeutic world view" -a fear of "overcivilization," a long-
220 GENERA TIO NS

ing for the primitive, an obsession with releasing inner energies. While "TR"
hunted elephants , Brooks Adams praised ' 'barbarian blood,'' and Populist leaders
like Tom Watson goaded younger mobs to racial violence, psychologist G.
Stanley Hall spoke of his peers' "universal hunger for more life." It was,
admittedly, awkward to discover life at 50. "Faculties and impulses which are
denied legitimate expression during their nascent period,'' Hall explained,
''break out well into adult life-falsetto notes mingling with manly bass as
strange puerilities.''
Mediators between two pushy generations, Progressives won respect for their
intelligence and refinement. Yet so too did they make easy targets for their
prissiness and indecision. Their academics were teased as '' Professor Tweetzers''
and " Doctors of Dullness," their frontier settlers as "tenderfeet" and "green-
horns," their good-government types as "goo-goos" and "Miss Nancys," and
their guilty liberals (like Joseph Fels, who promised to spend his "damnable
money to wipe out the system by which I made it") as "millionaire reformers"
and "the mink brigade ." Younger Missionaries scorned their caution, William
Randolph Hearst belittling President Wilson as ' ' a perfect jackrabbit of politics,
perched upon his little hillock of expedience ... ready to run and double in any
direction." The older Gilded chided their midlife anxiety . During the 1880s,
the Gilded Howells tweaked people who ''now call a spade an agricultural
implement " and wondered why "everyone is afraid to let himself go, to offend
conventions , or to raise a sneer.'' Watching 40-year-olds take up youthful sports
during the next decade, the sixtyish Henry Adams likened the Progressive to
"the bicycle-rider, mechanically balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior
personalities , and sure to fall into the subconscious chaos below, if one of his
inferior personalities got on top."
Progressives spent midlife seeking such a "mechanical balance" -patching
together Gilded realism with Missionary principle, blending the rugged West
with the effete East. While Theodore Roosevelt demanded (in his late forties)
an overcompensating manliness he labeled the "strenuous life," his soft-life
peers defined what came to be known as ''genteel'' fin de siecle American culture .
The result was a self-conscious mixture of primness and toughness. At the close
of the century, Charles Sheldon warned his peers to "be free from fanaticism
on the one hand and from too much caution on the other."
"Neutral in fact as well as in name . .. impartial in thought as well as action."
Spoken before the country was prodded into World War I by a younger Congress,
Wilson's famous remark could be deemed the motto of this generation in public
life. Exclude the young Missionary zealots, and circa-1900 "Progressivism"
stood for what historian Samuel Eliot Morison describes as an "adaptation ...
to the changes already wrought and being wrought in American society," or
what Robert Wiebe calls ' ' the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its
destiny through bureaucratic means." Most Progressive leaders liked calling
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 221

themselves "middle-class," just as they dreaded extremism and violence from

either unions or corporations, Wobblies or Pinkertons . Far better, they thought,
to push society forward through incremental consensus . " I do not believe you
can do any good on an issue of this kind by getting too far in advance,'' Roosevelt
said of Prohibition, explaining how the public " will ultimately come to the
national suppression of the liquor traffic and I am heartily with them when they
do." Even Wilson's "high ideals" had less to do with moral outcomes than
with the fair process by which competing ideals are reconciled . "If my convic-
tions have any validity ," he declared , "opinion ultimately governs the world."
So the Progressives behaved, spending a lifetime listening to-and adjusting
to-others. "Tell me what's right," Wilson told his younger aides en route to
Versailles, "and I' II fight for it."

Progressive Facts
Emulating the new vogue of Gilded rotundity in the early 1880s, young Pro-
gressives read best-sellers like How to Be Plump and worshiped the chubby
"Lillian Russell" female . Entering midlife , many slimmed down to look
more youthful; others tried dieting but failed-including the 300-pound
William Howard Taft, the fattest President in U.S. history.
The Progressives include the first sizable number of Americans to attend black
colleges, women's colleges, and land-grant colleges . They were also the
first to earn graduate degrees in America and provided the Ph.D.-creden-
tialed faculties that elevated American universities to their circa-1900 era
of maximum prestige-culminating in the election of America's only Ph.D.
President, Woodrow Wilson .
Between 1883 and 1893, four 34-to-37-year-olds produced several of Amer-
ica's most stirring paeans to patriotism: the Pledge of Allegiance (Francis
Bellamy); America the Beautiful (Katherine Lee Bates); Semper Fide/is
(John Philip Sousa), and the inscription on the Statue of Liberty (Emma
Lazarus). As Bates wrote "confirm thy soul in self-control" and Lazarus
about "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," their rising peers cau-
tiously steered clear of electoral politics. In 1893, fifty years after their first
birthyear, Progressives held only 39 percent of all national leadership posts
(versus, at like age, 64 percent for Transcendentals, 60 percent for Gilded,
and 48 percent for Missionaries).
What historian Joseph Kett calls ''the burgeoning of certification requirements
after 1880" made this the first generation of industrial leaders who rose
"not from the workbench but through successive layers of management."
The Progressives also accounted for the largest nineteenth-century expansion
222 GENERA TIO NS

in lawyers, notably corporate legal experts who could advise Gilded tycoons.
In 1860, America contained only nine law schools requiring more than one
year of training; by 1880, fifty-six required three years of training.

Progressives provided the initial memberships for an extraordinary number of

enduring fraternal, labor, academic, and (to use a word they popularized)
"professional" associations, including the Elks Club, Knights of Columbus,
Daughters of the American Revolution, Modem Language Association,
American Historical Association, American Economics Association, Amer-
ican Federation of Labor-and the first "professional" sports league, the
National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.
Obsessive organizers, the Progressives invented the cash register, adding ma-
chine, carbon paper, mimeograph, and first workable typewriter. They were
the first generation to use time clocks at work and to carry timepieces on
their person ("pocket" watches after 1870; "band" or "wrist" watches
after 1900). In 1883, their young civil servants designed the federal system
of four U.S. time zones. Later in life, Progressive Presidents founded the
Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the first permanent
Census office-and led the "Crusade for Standardization" during World
War I. In 1928, an elderly Progressive founded the (Robert) Brookings
Institute. Its purpose was "to collect, interpret, and lay before the country
in clear and intelligent form the fundamental economic facts concerning
which opinions need to be formed."
Progressives included the large influx of Nordic immigrants who settled the
upper Midwest and Great Plains late in the century. These states witnessed
many of the Progressives' midlife experiments in "populist" government
and "liberal" Republicanism.
A Progressive (John Gates) invented barbed wire in the 1880s. The subsequent
"battle of the barbed wire" between cattle ranchers and wheat farmers was
typically a dispute between tough-as-nails midlife Gilded and Jaw-abiding
("Let's elect a sheriff") rising-adult Progressives.

At the tum of the century, the term "middle age" began to indicate a phase
of life (roughly, age 40 to 60) and soon appeared frequently in popular
periodicals. Much of the interest focused on feelings of disorientation, in
such articles as "On Some Difficulties Incidental to Middle Age" (1900),
"On Being Middle-Aged" (1908), and "The Real Awkward Age" (1911).
In their forties and fifties, many of the best-known Progressives experienced
what would now be described as "midlife crises" or "nervous depres-
sions" -including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Josiah Royce,
G. Stanley Hall, Brooks Adams, and Frederick Winslow Taylor.
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 223

According to historian Nathan Hale , Jr., the Victorian ethos of continence and
sexual purity weighed most heavily on Americans ''born from the 1840s
to the early 1860s"-making this a generation for whom the prim Anthony
Comstocks set the early tone. The psychic cost of this smothering childhood
first appeared in the late 1880s and l 890s-which, for fortyish Progressives,
was an era of sharply rising divorce rates , and an epidemic of "neuras-
thenia" and female "hysteria" (often "treated " by uterectomies and hys-
terectomies) . After the Spanish-American War , concern over " overstress"
and "mental cancer" (what the Atlantic Monthly described as " our now
universal disorder, nervous prostration " ) sparked a growing interest in
mind-cure fads, from hypnotism and psychotherapy to dream analysis and
rest cures. In 1909, the sixtyish psychologist G . Stanley Hall invited an
eminent European peer to lecture in America . Sigmund Freud's tour was a
media sensation.

The Progressive Lifecycle

YOUTH: "A hundred wills move at once simultaneously" with "an ac-
curacy that was really amazing,'' observed one visitor to Civil War-era American
schools. As the national mood veered toward war , youths understood that risky
behavior could trigger adult rebuke-which , in tum , could bring lifelong pen-
alties. Instead of describing American children as precocious or ill-mannered,
as they had two decades before , foreigners began remarking how "the most
absolute obedience and the most rigid discipline prevail in all American schools.''
Midlife Transcendentals demanded compulsory attendance laws (first enacted by
Massachusetts in 1853 for all children under age 10), led the "high school
movement" in the late 1850s , and generally insisted on more orderly child
behavior than earlier teachers had demanded of the Gilded . They also popularized
the custom of issuing report cards in order to bring parental authority to bear on
child discipline. The leading parenting guide, written by Transcendental Horace
Bushnell, described children as " formless lumps" equally capable of good and
evil, requiring careful guidance within the "organic unity of the family." The
child environment-already becoming more planned and protected-was
abruptly pushed to suffocation by the Civil War. This implosion in family life
reflected what historian Joseph Kett calls the midcentury ' ' desire of middle-class
Americans to seal their lives off from the howling storm outside ." The storm
raged worst for Confederate children, many of whom lived with the fear of
marauding armies-or who, as teenagers , became the homesick and traumatized
kid soldiers of bloody campaigns late in the war. The extended wartime absence
(or death) of fathers gave mothers a stronger role in the child's world. As the
Transcendental Catharine Beecher warned against turning over children to
224 GENERA TIO NS

"coarse, hard, unfeeling men," many a war-era ballad idealized "Mother" as

the embodiment of social order.

COMING OF AGE: The shell-shocked children of the Civil War reached

their twenties eager to please adults, who advised them (in the words of one
Sunday-school spokesman) to show "neither excesses nor defects in your char-
acter, but a harmonious blending, a delightful symmetry, formed of fitting pro-
portions of every high quality.'' Progressives passed from youth to adulthood
between the late 1860s and the early 1880s, a time of mounting social consensus
in favor of Victorian rectitude in personal (and sexual) behavior. "Within my
own remembrance," recalled an older YMCA official, boys had to "go through
fermentation before they could afford to be good.'' But now, he observed, ''they
are to carry from the cradle to the grave an unblemished name, with unblemished
morals." Kett notes how "the old idea that youth was a time for sowing wild
oats, that an excess of prohibitions in youth merely produced an erratic adult,
had no place in the thought of midcentury moralists." As colleges regained the
popularity and discipline they had lost during the antebellum decades, Progres-
sives became the nineteenth century's most docile students-preoccupied with
grades, prizes, school spirit, and newly practical coursework. Arming themselves
with impressive credentials, they hoped to make up in expertise what they
obviously lacked in ruggedness. Whether as clerks in growing corporations or
as dry-land farmers along a disappearing frontier, young Progressives generally
failed to find authentic adventure-like Theodore Roosevelt, who arrived in the
Dakota Territory ''but little over half a dozen years since these lands were won
from the Indians." Even the best-known Progressive outlaws, from Jesse James
to Billy the Kid, were less loathed (and certainly less feared) than the original
Gilded marauders . After the late 1860s, most indices of crime and disorder began
falling well below their prewar levels. Few young Progressive men could bear
a sullied conscience. After marrying at age 22, Theodore Roosevelt thanked
heaven he was "absolutely pure. I can tell Alice everything I have ever done."

RISING ADULTHOOD: Through the 1870s and 1880s, the growing size
and complexity of the industrial economy sparked a rising demand for the tech-
nical skills in which Progressives had been trained to excel. America was overrun
with young lawyers, academics, teacher trainers, agronomists, and the first-ever
cadre of "career" civil servants and Congressional staffers. Where the Gilded
had gambled fortunes as rowdy miners, financiers, and self-made industrialists,
the Progressives arrived as metallurgists, accountants, and "time and motion
men" in the manner of Frederick Winslow Taylor. What Gilded young adults
had achieved two decades earlier in capital goods, thirtyish Progressives achieved
in retailing: H. J. Heinz' "57 varieties" of food, F. W. Woolworth's five-and-
ten-cent stores, James Duke's dainty machine-rolled cigarettes, and Montgomery
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 225

Ward's 240-page catalogue for farmers (plus his new "money-back guarantee").
More alert to the risk of failure than the like-aged Gilded had been, Progressives
became America's late-nineteenth-century bet-hedgers, definers of social con-
science, and organizers of risk-spreading associations. "Grangers" founded the
first rural co-ops. Samuel Gompers, after taking part in a failed strike, "began
to realize the futility of opposing progress" and founded the modern trade union
movement. Writers like Henry Demarest Lloyd (Wealth Against Common-
wealth), Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), and George Cable (The Silent
South) exposed the costs of untamed economic growth and urged a weepy ethos
of social cooperation-' 'a humane movement,'' wrote Edward Bellamy in Look-
ing Backward, '' a melting and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one another.''
In return, while proper young ladies suffered under stultifying sex-role defini-
tions, dandified young men were accused of being what historian Geoffrey
Blodgett calls the "Gelded Men" of the Gilded Age. Only when economic
depression struck did the core of this fortyish and fiftyish generation directly
challenge their war-veteran elders. They staged the realigning elections of 1894
and 1896, sweeping the McKinley Republicans-and his Progressive peers-
into power.

MIDLIFE: Having spent half their lifecycle adapting to a Gilded-built world,

Progressives entered midlife taking their cues from the young. In the mid-1890s,
McKinley resolved to follow "the best aspirations of the people" by siding with
young "jingoes" in a war against Spain. He and his three White House successors
entangled themselves in position shifts by alternately urging and then hedging
on subsequent Missionary causes, from child labor and woman's suffrage to
Prohibition and immigration. Preoccupied with public opinion, they backed the
genial procedural reforms of the "Progressive Era": initiatives and referenda,
direct election of senators, the "open playing field" of antitrust, and expert-run
regulatory commissions. Many Progressives, emerging as effete caricatures of
late-Victorian manhood, continued to pursue what scientist Albert Michelson
termed ''the sixth place of the decimal'' -or, like Melvil Dewey, precise systems
for cataloguing knowledge . Others veered toward the other extreme . After lead-
ing younger "rough riders" up San Juan Hill, Theodore Roosevelt attacked the
''men of soft life.'' Just after the turn of the century, he appointed a Commission
on Country Life, led a youth-envying "cult of strenuosity," and encouraged
Missionary zealots he labeled "muckrakers." Meanwhile, many midlife women
broke free from convention and threw their support behind a budding feminist
movement. Kate Chopin, widow and mother of six, wrote The Awakening, whose
heroine protests the duality of the "outward existence which conforms, the
inward life which questions ." The last Progressive President, Woodrow Wilson,
managed World War I in the complex manner of his generation-surrounded
by diplomats, lawyers, journalists, statisticians, and public-private associations.
226 GENERA TIO NS

Afterward, Wilson tried to secure a "peace without victory" in which multilateral

process would forever replace violent conflicts of principle. Younger voters
showed little interest in his League of Nations proposal, and a 79 percent Mis-
sionary Congress buried it for good.

ELDERHOOD: The 1920s did little roaring for those who, like writer Sarah
Orne Jewett, were "wracked on the lee shore of age." Poverty remained high
among the elderly, but their overall income distribution was more even than
among the Gilded, and the younger public grew more willing to discuss their
hardships sympathetically, especially the question of what to do with elderly
"in-laws." As always, Progressives approached their economic status with fore-
sight and planning (in lieu of the Gilded winner-take-all ethos). Around 1910
they began a vast expansion in private pension plans, and by the time they retired
they became the first nonveteran generation to receive significant pension income.
Many elder Progressives-like Hall, who admired the young flappers and cul-
tivated "zests" like walking barefoot-continued to watch and emulate the
young. "Reversing age-old custom," notes Mark Sullivan, the chronicler of
Wilson-era America, "elders strove earnestly to act like their children, in many
cases their grandchildren.'' Their main message to juniors was to stay calm,
keep faith in the democratic process, and listen to expertise. The eightyish Elihu
Root kept lecturing the young on the importance of a "World Court," while
Frank Kellogg promoted an arcane disarmament process (what one senator called
"an international kiss") that would later impair America's ability to respond to
Hitler. Their senior statesmen issued calls to humanity and fairness that were
not always observed-for example, Franz Boas' defense of cultural pluralism
against eugenics-minded Missionaries. "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in
insidious encroachment by men of zeal," warned Louis Brandeis, defending
"the process of trial and error." Meanwhile, old Florence Kelley called herself
"the most unwearied hoper," and old John Dewey unflaggingly pursued "lib-
eralism" as "committed to an end that is at once enduring and flexible." In
their final years, the greatest Progressive thinkers lacked final answers about
life-and had the humility to admit it.
* * *
''The muddled state is one of the very sharpest of the realities,'' Henry James
once observed. Indeed, his own generation remains saddled with a "muddled"
image, often blurred together with the burly Gilded or zealous Missionaries.
Combining a belief in fairness, openness, and what Ella Wheeler Wilcox called
''just the art of being kind,'' Progressives gave the Gilded Age its human face
and helped make the Missionary Awakening an age of reform and not revolution.
Their fascination with process and detail provided a mediating link between their
"build big" next-elders and their "think big" next-juniors. Much of their con-
tribution hinged on their ability to see "out of the confusion of life'' what James
described as "the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE 227

the things that hurt ." Yet they also waffled in the face of rapid social change.
Vacillating on foreign policy and unwilling to forgo "cheap labor" immigrants,
they invited the floodtide of jingoism and racism that swept over America at the
tum of the century. Their accommodation of "separate but equal" Jim Crow
laws sealed the fate of southern blacks . And their uncertain parental hand left
Lost children vulnerable to cruel economic abuse. But their irrepressible belief
in human perfectibility gave a powerful boost to the liberal side of the modem
American character. Collectively, Progressives shared a quality once affixed to
Uncle Remus author Joel Chandler Harris: "the seal of good humor ... and a
pleasant outlook on the world."
The Progressives never saw themselves as heroes or prophets. Rather, they
saw themselves as a modem cadre of value-free meliorators who could link
progress to expertise, improvement to precision. "The science of statistics is
the chief instrumentality through which the progress of civilization is now mea-
sured," declared Census chief Simon Newton Dexter North in 1902, "and by
which its development hereafter will be largely controlled." Late in life, as the
world lurched toward chaos, old Progressives sometimes questioned such cer-
tainty . In 1914, the 71-year-old Henry James wrote to a friend, "You and I,
the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared the wreck of our belief
that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become
impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as
its grand Niagara." Yet what few Progressives ever lost-no matter how old-
was their urge to stay involved and thereby overcome a feeling that they had
missed something early in life. "I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive
youth," added James. "I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and
possibilities I didn't embrace."
 Chapter 10

THE GREAT
POWER CYCLE

"'"r
1 he Atomic Age began at exactly 5:30 A .M. Mountain War Time on the
morning of July 15th, 1945, on a stretch of semidesert land about 50 airline
miles from Alamogordo , New Mexico, " wrote New York Times reporter William
Laurence (age 57) of the first moment ''the earth had opened and the skies had
split." Another man of blunt and staccato expression, President Harry Truman
(age 61), took the news impassively and prepared to order the two remaining
bombs dropped on Japan . When 77-year-old Secretary of War Henry Stimson
was informed, he dispatched a coded message to Winston Churchill at Potsdam:
"Babies satisfactorily born"-to which the like-aged British Prime Minister
replied: "This is the Second Coming, in wrath." Standing nearby at the New
Mexico test site, meanwhile, was the scientist whose organized mind had or-
chestrated the first atomic fireball, 41-year-old J . Robert Oppenheimer. Asked
for his thoughts, Oppenheimer recalled a Hindu description of deity: "If the
radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be the splendor
of the Mighty One.'' Added another young physicist, ''The sun doesn't hold a
candle to it!" Several weeks later, 19-year-old Russell Baker was training for
a massive and bloody invasion of Japan when he heard of the Nagasaki blast
and Japan's sudden capitulation . He wrote to his mother in a mixture of open
relief and secret vexation: "It seems like I'm pulling some monstrous joke on
myself when I say the war is over, because I really can 't believe it." These
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 229
whirlwind weeks marked the dawn of "Superpower America," the climactic
moment of the GREAT POWER CYCLE:

Henry Stimson's visionary MISSIONARY GENERATION (Idealist, then age

63 to 85) had originally ordered the A-bomb's development. These were
the patriarchs of the national struggle, the dark figures in newsreel footages,
the stem elder leaders who provided guidance for what seemed to be the
very defense of Christian civilization . If the use of atomic weapons raised
any moral questions, Americans of all ages trusted this generation to answer
them . A couple of years earlier, President Franklin Roosevelt had asked
several grayheads-most notably, James Byrnes, George Marshall, and
Stimson himself (average age, 70)-to examine the A-bomb "in terms of
a new relationship with the universe ." While the bombs were being built,
only Albert Einstein (age 66) could worry out loud about what the atom
might unleash; anyone younger would have been instantly suspected of
disloyalty. Afterward, the craggy Douglas MacArthur saw redemptive
power in this new and terrible "crucible of war," capable of forcing man-
kind to face a dilemma that "is theological and involves a spiritual recru-
descence." Weeks later, in Tokyo, he administered what he termed history's
"first Christian occupation" of an Asian land, bringing to "our vanquished
foe the solace and hope and faith of Christian morals.''
Harry Truman's get-it-done LOST GENERATION (Reactive, age 45 to 62)
provided the war effort's pragmatic midlife generals, including the gruff
careerist Leslie Groves, who managed the Manhattan Project. "The war's
over ," said Groves after a glance at the test blast. "One or two of those
things and Japan will be finished." Truman delighted that America had
"spent two billion dollars on the biggest scientific gamble in history-and
won." Groves, Truman, and their midlife peers understood that America
looked to them less for Roosevelt-like vision than for Patton-like action.
''To err is Truman,'' chided many editorials two months earlier after this
relative unknown had become Commander in Chief and had first learned
of the A-bomb project (a secret none of FDR's seventyish cabinet had
bothered to share with him) . Yet unlike his elders, President Truman knew
from personal experience what human slaughter might accompany a yard-
by-yard conquest of the Japanese mainland . So he "let the buck stop" with
him-and ordered Hiroshima bombed . Soon enough, Truman and his peers
would cope with further thankless tasks: cleaning up after the debris left
by FDR's visionary Yalta plan, eyeballing the Soviets with a gaming' 'brinks-
manship" that younger leaders would deride as irrational, and keeping
America on a steady, cautious course while hearing the expressions "old,"
"tired," and "reactionary" hurled at them . No big deal: The Lost had
grown used to such negative judgments .
230 GENERATIONS

Robert Oppenheimer's smart and dutiful G.I. GENERATION (Civic, age 21

to 44) provided the team of scientists responsible for this "Mighty One."
Here stood the greatest power man had ever possessed-and they had
created it. Without their heroism , the use of the bomb and the subsequent
elevation of America to superpower status would not have been possible .
Over the past three years, swarms of uniformed young men (average age,
26) had conquered the entire Pacific. Rosie the Riveter women had assem-
bled bombers and battleships to arm them . Seabees had built bases out of
jungles and barren reefs, including Tinian , where the Enola Gay took off
for Hiroshima. The pilot of the first A-bomb-laden bomber, Paul Tibbets ,
was himself a ribbon-laced 30-year-old. Several years after their "gadget"
had humiliated the Tokyo warlords, G.l.s would take it a step further by
designing the H-bomb. They would call it "the Super" and the G.I. trio
who designed it (Edward Teller, Luis Alvarez, and Oppenheimer) "Super-
men'' -a fitting image for a generation whose reason and teamwork had
unleashed the ultimate energy of pure matter. Later in life, the G.l.s would
harness their collective might and labor to fulfill their elders' vision by
building a gleaming "Great Society" of peace, prosperity, and friendli-
ness-only to hear their own children attack its spiritual emptiness.
The eldest among Russell Baker's aspiring SILENT GENERATION (Adaptive,
age 3 to 20) knew the A-bomb blasts had spared them from harm-and
equally from any chance to match their next-elders in glory and heroism . Al-
though they hadn't invented this monster, henceforth what William Styron
called "the almost unimaginable presence of the bomb" would symbolize
their coming-of-age sense of powerlessness, irony, and nonjudgmental rel-
ativism . Two decades later, while thirtyish Pentagon technicians designed
"fail-safe delivery systems" to prevent nuclear weapons from atomizing the
very people they were supposed to protect, thirtyish artists would try to re-
lease their collective tension in sentimental lyrics and ironic humor. Peter,
Paul, and Mary would wistfully sing Where Have All the Flowers Gone?;
Barry McGuire Eve of Destruction ; and Tom Lehrer So long Mom(' Tm off
to drop the bomb") . In another song, Lehrer quipped of an eminent G.I . sci-
entist: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? I That's
not my department,' says Wernher von Braun." It would become the Si-
lent's own "department" to worry about what happens when powerful
things "come down" on people-from Carl Sagan warning against "nu-
clear winter" to Michael Harrington and Martin Luther King, Jr ., arguing
that money spent on bombs should be spent instead on the poor.

The start of the nuclear age marked the culmination of a generational drama
that was by then nearly six decades old . It opened in the late 1880s, when a
generation of indulgently raised post-Civil War youths triggered revivalism,
FIGURE 10-1
Great Power Cycle: Age Location in History

SECULAR SPIRITUAL SECULAR SPIRITUAL

CRISIS AWAKENING CRISIS AWAKENING
age 88 -------,

ELDERHOOD:

age 66 ------
MIDLIFE
ADULT:

age44-----

~
RISING
ADULT:
age 22 ------,,;:,~----,,,

YOUTH:

1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Civil Missionary Depression, Boom

War Awakening World War II Awakening
Crisis Crisis
N
w
232 GENERA TIO NS

labor unrest, and the "Cross of Gold" paroxysm of William Jennings Bryan.
What Roosevelt described as "a mysterious cycle" of generational "destiny"
extended into the unrivaled "Pax Americana" of the mid-1960s, right up to
LBJ's escalation of the Vietnam War. At the beginning of this ninety-year epoch,
the Old World still regarded the United States as a frontier society, at best a
minor player in world affairs. By its end, the United States had emerged as a
great global power, fueled by the world's most productive economy and armed
with the world's most formidable defense establishment.
The Great Power Cycle contained two social moments:

The Missionary Awakening (1886-1903) or "Third Great Awakening" began

in 1886 with the Haymarket Riot and the launching of the global student
missionary movement. By 1893, a combination of agrarian protests and
urban labor violence sparked the tumultuous 1890s, a decade historian Henry
Steele Commager considers a "cultural watershed" in American history
and historian Richard Hofstadter calls a "searing experience" to those who
lived through it. Following Bryan's revivalist run for President in 1896, the
awakening pushed a young, excited cadre of "muckraking" writers and
reformers into the public eye just after the tum of the century. During
Theodore Roosevelt's first term, these youth movements crested, and the
awakening ended. As the rising generation lost interest in "progressive"
reforms, and especially after the financial panic of 1907, the national mood
sobered. Meanwhile, the awakening had given birth to the Bible Belt, to
Christian socialism, to Greenwich Village, to Wobblies, and to renascent
labor, temperance, and women's suffrage movements. LOCATION IN HIS-
TORY; Gilded in elderhood; Progressives in midlife; Missionaries in rising
adulthood; Lost in youth.
The Great Depression-World War II Crisis (1932-1945) reached from the
economic trough of 1932 through the triumph of VJ-Day in 1945, roughly
spanning the thirteen-year Presidential reign of Franklin Roosevelt. It began
in a mood of despair and pessimism about the future, stretched through the
New Deal (' 'the Third American Revolution,'' according to historian Carl
Degler), climaxed in a total war against totalitarianism, and ended at the
dawn of a new era of power, affluence, and global leadership. One of every
eight Americans now alive came of age during this era. Most of them recall
how the mid-1940s ushered in an exhilarating sense of collective triumph,
feelings those younger than themselves have never known. From the moment
the crisis peaked, the rising peer elite began assuming leadership positions,
leading ultimately to a "new generation" taking the White House in 1961-
a post they still hold three decades later. LOCATION IN HISTORY: Mis-
sionaries in elderhood; Lost in midlife; G .l.s in rising adulthood; Silent in
youth.
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 233

MISSIONARY GENERATION

Born 1860-1882
Type: Idealist

Age Location:
Missionary Awakening in rising adulthood
Great Depression-World War II Crisis in elderhood

In 1896-as the aging Gilded elite reeled from labor violence, student evan-
gelism , and agrarian revivals-36-year-old William Jennings Bryan swept to
the Democratic Presidential nomination with an exhortation that was as gener-
ational as it was partisan: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor
this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." The
"Boy Orator of the Platte" then added, in a slap at McKinley's Progressives,
''We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more . We defy them ."
With these words, Bryan 's coming-of-age MISSIONARY GENERATION
pushed to a climax its passionate attack on the soulless Darwinism of Gilded
elders. George Herron, the 27-year-old "Prophet of Iowa College," challenged
"the wicked moral blindness of our industrialism." The thirtyish Jane Addams,
"Our Mother Emancipator from Illinois," launched social reforms from Hull
House. In The Octopus, The Jungle, and Shame of the Cities, Frank Norris,
Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens lashed out with a literary venom not seen
since the early writings of Whitman and Thoreau . Meanwhile, thousands of their
young peers were forming what essayist John Jay Chapman termed a "galaxy
and salvation army of militant benevolence" with "an inner life and social
atmosphere peculiar to itself, its tone and mission ." As some youths summoned
forth a "Kingdom of God ," others shouted anarchist slogans, threw bombs,
lynched blacks , and called for the conquering of heathen lands. The aspiring
youth elite simply absorbed the mood, enjoying "the bright college days" of a
noisy decade they would afterward remember as the "Gay Nineties"-at Stan-
ford (Herbert Hoover), West Point (Douglas MacArthur), and Harvard (Franklin
Roosevelt).
Missionaries first appeared as the welcomed postwar youngsters of the late
1860s and 1870s. Indulgently raised and educated by the midlife Gilded in a
world of orderly families and accelerating prosperity, they came of age horrified
by what George Cabot Lodge called "a world of machine-guns and machine-
everything-else" and what Stephen Crane, gazing at a coal mine, called "this
huge and hideous monster . . . grinding its mammoth jaws with unearthly and
 MISSIONARY GENERATION (Born 1860 to 1882)

TYPE : Idealist FAMILY TREE

Total number: 45,000,000 Typical grandparents : Transcendental
Now alive in U.S.: 1,000 Parents: Gilded and Progressive
Percent immigrant: 23% Children : Lost and G.I.
Percent slave: 1% Typical grandchildren : Silent
SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1860 William Jennings Bryan (1925) Plurality in House: 1909-1937
1860 Jane Addams (1935) Plurality in Senate: 1917-1943
1863 Billy Sunday (1935) Majority of Supreme Court: 1925-1943
1863 William Randolph Hearst (1951)
1863 Henry Ford (1947) U.S . PRESIDENTS: 1921-1945
1868 W .E.B . DuBois (1963)
1865 Warren G . Harding (1923)
1869 Frank Lloyd Wright (1959)
1872 Calvin Coolidge (1933)
1869 Emma Goldman (1940)*
1874 Herbert Hoover (1964)
1871 Theodore Dreiser (1945)
1882 Franklin D. Roosevelt (1945)
1871 Orville Wright (1948)
1875 Mary McLeod Bethune (1955)
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1878 Isadora Duncan (1927)
1878 Upton Sinclair (1968) 1869 Mahatma Gandhi (1948)
1879 Albert Einstein (1955)* 1870 VJ. Lenin (1924)
1879 Margaret Sanger (1966) 1874 Winston Churchill (1965)
1880 Douglas MacArthur (1964) 1875 Albert Schweitzer (1965)
1880 John Llewellyn Lewis ( 1969) 1881 Pablo Picasso (1973)
1880 H.L. Mencken (1956)
1880 Helen Keller (1968)
1880 George C. Marshall (1959)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0- 2 1862: Battle of Antietam; Morrill Act grants land for state colleges
0-16 1876: Hall of Machines featured at Philadelphia Exposition
4-26 1886: Haymarket Riot; student missionaries organize; Little Lord Fauntleroy
10-32 1892: Homestead Massacre; agrarian populism expands; 161 blacks lynched
14-36 1896: Bryan wins Democratic nomination; revivalist campaign loses election
16-38 1898: Spanish-American War; Hearst papers push "jingo " fever
23-45 1905: Haywood founds IWW; DuBois founds Niagara Movement
38-60 1920: Palmer raids; women's suffrage ; Prohibition begins
51-73 1933: Roosevelt launches New Deal, scraps antitrust; Prohibition ends
59-81 1941: Lend-Lease Act; attack on Pearl Harbor; U.S. enters World War II
63-85 1945: Roosevelt dies; Axis powers surrender ; Baruch announces "Cold War"
69-91 1951: Peak foreign aid under Marshall Plan; MacArthur fired by Truman

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS : Intolerance (film, D. W. Griffith); "Into My

Own" (Robert Frost); Prejudices (H. L. Mencken); Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser);
syndicated column (Will Rogers); The Shame of the Cities (Lincoln Steffens); Living My Life
(Emma Goldman); "What I Believe" (Albert Einstein); Women and the New Race (Margaret
Sanger); Beale Street Blues (W . C. Handy); The Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. DuBois); "I
Am the People, the Mob" (Carl Sandburg) ; The Last Puritan (George Santayana)
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 235

monotonous uproar." This inner rebellion of "moral" sons against "laborious"

fathers, recalled best-selling American novelist Winston Churchill in 1908, trig-
gered '' the springing of a generation of ideals from a generation of commerce.''
Missionary first-wavers, leavened by the first large influx of non-Anglo Saxon
white immigrants, entered their twenties as preachy student leaders, rebellious
career women, and Haymarket rioters. Last-wavers reached adulthood while the
fires of Chautauqua revivalism, muckraking, and labor radicalism still raged.
Their tumultuous awakening defined the Missionaries for life as a generation of
moral pathfinders, men and women to whom any opinion was a religion once
they decided it was right. William Allen White recalls that Bryan's campaign
"was a fanaticism like the Crusades. Indeed the delusion that was working on
the people took the form of religious frenzy .'' Unlike their Progressive next-
elders, Missionaries were attracted by the specter of purifying confrontation.
"People who love soft words and hate iniquity forget this," Chapman wrote in
1898, ''that reform consists in taking a bone away from a dog .'' A fellow student
had earlier attributed Chapman's popularity to sheer zeal: "He is glowing and
beautiful like fire .. . destructive like fire, seeking heaven like fire."
Missionary anger remitted into self-discovery during Theodore Roosevelt's
second term. When the economy slumped after the Panic of 1907, they hardly
noticed. Instead, reveling in the personal independence of their new automobile
age, they shifted their attention from messianic upheaval to the serious task of
reshaping self and community. Their lofty-worded movements spread the spec-
trum from the holy (Billy Sunday's fundamentalism, "White Angel" Booth's
Salvation Army) to the domestic (Elmer McCollum's fruit faddism, Frank Lloyd
Wright's "Prairie Style" architecture); from the utopian (Bill Haywood's Wob-
blies, Emma Goldman's anarchists) to the mean-spirited (William Simmons'
reborn Ku Klux Klan, Henry Goddard's eugenics movement); from the uplifting
(Jane Addams' settlement houses, Walter Rauschenbusch's "Social Gospel")
to the sober (Andrew Volstead's crusade against liquor, Francis Harrison's
against narcotics). Not least, for rising adults who loudly hailed "the New
Woman," was the unprecedented strength of their feminist cadre-including
Isadora Duncan (celebrating sexual emancipation by dance), Charlotte Perkins
Gilman (assailing This Man-Made World), Margaret Sanger (broadcasting birth-
control advice in Woman Rebel), and countless others in what came to be annual
suffrage marches up New York's Fifth Avenue. Whatever their causes, the
Missionary mental approach remained a generational constant: a fierce desire to
make the world perfect according to standards that welled up from within.
Entering midlife around World War I, this generation often found itself split
into opposite camps, rural evangelicals versus urban Social Gospelers (or "mod-
ernists"). Yet growing pessimism about America's future in the hands of their
nihilistic Lost juniors brought them together behind a common generational
mission: the vindication of social good over social evil. Thus did fiftyish M~s-
sionaries transform into enthusiastic circa-1917 ''Crusaders for Democracy,''
236 GENERATIONS

and later into the "Decency" enforcers of the 1920s. They pushed through
Prohibition, women's suffrage, immigration restriction, Smoot-Hawley, Red
deportation, "vice squads," and punitive criminal laws-all in an effort to
rekindle higher principles of national community. With the Great Depression
and global totalitarianism of the 1930s, this effort matured into a sense of
historical imperative. And when the era of crisis culminated in war, a still younger
generation (of G.l.s) looked to aging Missionaries for wise leadership, for a
fresh definition of national purpose they could dutifully champion against all
enemies. "That is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives,"
President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed after the attack on Pearl Harbor, "No
compromise can end that conflict. There has never been-there never can be-
successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward
the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith." In old age,
this generation of moralists-the likes of Roosevelt, MacArthur, Henry Kaiser,
and George Marshall-established America as a global beacon of revitalized
civilization.
Throughout their lives, Missionaries startled older and younger generations
by their fixation on mind and spirit, by their odd detachment from the material
realities of life. They championed the inner life, from Jane Addams' "higher
conscience" in immigrant neighborhoods, to W.E.B. DuBois' "black con-
sciousness'' in race relations, to the '' stream of consciousness'' novels of Stephen
Crane-even to the "primitive consciousness" of Jack London's Call of the
Wild and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes. By the time America was
rallying behind this generation's leadership at a moment of national emergency,
incoming President Franklin Roosevelt remarked of "our common difficulties"
that "they concern, thank God, only material things." Several years later, Roo-
sevelt repeated "the belief I have already affirmed many times that there is not
a problem, social, political, or economic, that would not find full solution in
the fire of a religious awakening .... '' In Confessions of a Reformer, Frederic
Howe explained that "early assumptions as to virtue and vice, goodness and
evil remained in my mind long after I had tried to discard them. This is, I think,
the most characteristic influence of my generation. It explains the nature of our
reforms, ... our belief in men rather than institutions and our messages to other
people. Missionaries and battleships, anti-saloon leagues and Ku Klux Klan ...
are all a part of that evangelistic psychology ... that seeks a moralistic expla-
nation of social problems and a religious solution to most of them.'' George
Santayana was surely thinking of his fiftyish peers when he observed in 1920:
"Americans are eminently prophets. They apply morals to public affairs ....
They are men of principles, and fond of stating them."
The word "missionary" symbolized this generation's lifelong quest for global
reform. The effort began with what Ivy League students proclaimed to be the
"missionary crusade" of the 1880s, sealed by an 1886 assembly at Mount
Hermon, Massachusetts, at which students proclaimed "the kingdom of God on
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 237

earth" and adopted the motto many would apply into old age: "The Evangeli-
zation of the World in This Generation." In vast numbers, these young zealots
built Christian encampments all over Asia. They loved calling themselves "mis-
sionaries," the Latin plural derivative of the Greek "apostle," or "one sent."
When hundreds of them were massacred during the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of
1900 (some decapitated torsos found with their hands still locked in prayer),
thirtyish peers back home took to heart their role as global martyrs, "ones sent"
to bring new values to the "Brotherhood of Man" by force of their example.
Thirty-three years later, Franklin Roosevelt became the leader whom "young
men followed'' -notes historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. - ' ' as they had followed
no American since Lincoln." And forty-five years later, FDR became the only
President whose death was universally likened to the martyrdom of Lincoln .
"He was just like a daddy to me always," confessed the young G .I. Lyndon
Johnson . ''He was the one person I ever knew, anywhere, who was never afraid .
God, God-how he could take it for us all." What they achieved themselves
early in life hardly compared to what others saw in them late in life. Sherwood
Eddy recalled of Robert Speer, his crusading classmate of the 1880s and author
of Missionary Principles and Practice: "What he was, was more important than
what he did."
This is the first generation to which many living Americans feel a personal
connection . Today's elders recall Missionaries as history saw them last, as the
visionary leaders who guided America through the Great Depression and World
War II. Today' s 50-year-old probably remembers at least one Missionary grand-
parent; today's 75-year-old , a Missionary parent or two. Chances are, those
memories are of stem old Victorian patriarchs and matriarchs, devoted to what
we would now describe as traditional religion. In one respect, Missionaries were
literally the last "Victorians": They were the last Americans to come of age
before the grand queen died in 1901. Yet the full story of their lifecycle cannot
possibly be told by invoking the Victorian stereotype, nor indeed by recalling
the steel-willed leaders of the mid- l 940s-a cadre of elders now sometimes
remembered as "the World War II Wise Men." Instead, the full story must
include very different images-of youthful indulgence, coming-of-age fury,
rising-adult introspection, and midlife pomposity and intolerance. What finally
emerged late in life, the austere and resolute persona, was largely self-created
by a generation determined (in Edith Wharton's words) "to build up, little by
little, bit by bit, the precious thing we'd smashed to atoms without knowing it."

Missionary Facts

Today's idyllic image of the traditional American Yuletide-Christmas trees,

jingle bells, sleighrides, chromo cards, and a jolly, present-toting Santa
(first sketched by Thomas Nast in 1863)-was created mainly by the midlife
Gilded for the benefit of Missionary children .
238 GENERA TIO NS

The early Missionary childhood witnessed an unprecedented growth in Amer-

ican primary schooling. During the 1870s alone, the number of high schools
more than doubled, and the year 1880 marks the nineteenth century's high-
water mark for the share of all Americans under age 20 attending school.
During the next couple of decades, secondary education expanded rapidly.
From 1884 to 190 I, the number of women attending coed colleges rose
sevenfold. From 1884 to 1907, the number of college and postgraduate
degrees tripled.
Attending college, Missionaries sparked the greatest wave of campus rebellions
since the 1830s. The "settlement movement" (also known as the "New
Franciscanism") belongs almost entirely to this generation. Between 1886
and 1911, 17,500 students and recent graduates, mostly from affluent fam-
ilies, joined Jane Addams on her urban crusade-a far higher percentage
of the national student body than the circa-1965 Peace Corps.
Missionaries came of age during a boom era for youthful outdoor sports: golf,
tennis, and roller-skating in the 1880s, and amusement parks and the "bi-
cycle craze" of the 1890s. Young women actively participated in looser
clothing and reinvented ''bloomers'' (called ''rationals'' in 1895) for bicycle
riding.
During the 1890s, Missionaries produced the largest-ever surge of famous
authors in their twenties-including Jack London, Frank Norris, Stephen
Crane, and Booth Tarkington. Joined a decade later by the like-aged Upton
Sinclair, Ray Stannard Baker, William Allen White, and Lincoln Steffens,
young Missionaries dominated the ranks of tum-of-the-century "muckrak-
ers.'' According to historian Louis Filler's composite biography , the typical
muckraker-"bom in the Eighteen Sixties" and "raised in the shadow of
momentous events"-became "radical in his college days," "bloomed"
with the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and "invariably" supported America's
entry into World War I.
After steadily rising from 1880 on, per capita alcohol and drug consumption
peaked around 1905-just as last-wave Missionaries were reaching their
twenties . Moving into midlife, Missionaries launched their memorable drive
to eradicate all forms of substance abuse (as well as crime and pornography),
and by the mid- l 920s they succeeded in pushing alcohol consumption to
its lowest level in American history.
Having been born the first generation never to know slavery, Missionary blacks
came of age just as southern Jim Crow laws were stripping them of their
rights as citizens-an era historian Rayford Logan calls "the Nadir" of
black history . At least 60 blacks were reported lynched each year between
1885 and 1904 (peaking at 161 in 1892). This generation of American
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 239

blacks-women especially-became legendary for its principled racial lead-

ership. Journalist Ida Wells chaired the Anti-Lynching League; educator
Mary McLeod Bethune organized the black women's movement; and in
1909, W .E. B. DuBois, founderof The Crisis, joined James Weldon Johnson
in issuing "the call" for a National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

''The decades that straddle the tum of the century,'' writes historian Harvey
Levenstein, "constituted a veritable Golden Age of food faddism." As
lifelong advocates of "New Nutrition," Missionaries pioneered vegetarian
diets, introduced salads and cole slaw, counted calories, and discovered
vitamins . After Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, public disgust
at the sight and smell of Gilded meatpacking triggered an immediate fall
in beef prices-and a long-term decline in protein's role in the American
diet. During World War I, while Missionary food crusaders urged "meat-
less" and "wheatless" Sundays, the verb "to Hooverize" (coined after the
43-year-old director of Wilson's Food Administration) became synonymous
with "to do without."

Missionary women married at a higher average age than women of any other
American generation until the Boom. As late as 1915, two of every five
1880s-era women's college graduates remained single. Nine percent of all
Missionary women had never married by age 60-the largest share ever
recorded for that age. "The 1890s were a boom time for being single,"
write historians Ruth Freeman and Patricia Klaus of "the first generation
of bachelor women" who took pride in calling themselves "spinsters."
Through their lifecycle, Missionaries entirely redefined the role of women in
American public life. Around the tum of the century, Missionary women
surged into previously all-male professions (law, theology, medicine, den-
tistry, journalism), became the first female "secretaries," and began to
monopolize primary school teaching . According to historian James Mc-
Govern, "the great leap forward in women's participation in economic life
came between 1900 and 1910." In politics, moreover, Missionary women
stood at the head of their generation's two successful constitutional amend-
ments (women's suffrage and Prohibition). Nineteen Missionary women
won election to Congress-versus two women from all prior generations
combined.

When they were combat-age, Missionary men faced a lower risk of dying in
war than any other American generation-yet none can match the Mis-
sionaries for crusading zeal abroad . In all three wars of their Iifecycle-
the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II-they led the
call for intervention, often over resistance from their elders or juniors.
240 GENERA TIO NS

Elder Missionaries (especially women) achieved unprecedented gains in Amer-

ican longevity. From the 1930s on, mortality rates fell by 20 to 30 percent
in all age brackets between 65 and 85 as Missionaries aged through them.
This became the first generation in which women outlived men .
Missionaries also retained elective national office until very late in life . They
kept a majority share of Congress and governorships until fifty-five years
after their last birthyear ( 1937) and a 25 percent share until sixty-three years
afterward ( 1945)-both figures unmatched by any other generation before
or since. From 1925 to 1945, the age of congressmen, governors, and cabinet
members climbed to its highest level in American history .
Although Missionary political leaders founded Social Security in 1935, fewer
than one in twenty of their generation ever received retirement-related ben-
efits from the program. And those who did got an average of $23 per month
(about $125 in 1990 dollars), which remained unadjusted for inflation
throughout the 1940s. By today's poverty standard, 60 percent of Missionary
elders (age 67 to 89) were poor in 1949-versus 34 percent of all Americans
between age 15 and 64 .

The Missionary Lifecycle

YOUTH: ''Children are not generally indulged enough,'' insisted Jacob Ab-
bott in Gentle Measures in the Management of the Young, the leading parental
manual of the 1870s. In Home Treatment for Children, Mattie Trippe urged
parents to Jet kids "revel in an absolute sense of freedom, feeling only the
restraints of affection." Missionaries were the indulged children of the Gilded
Age-an age of big constructions, rapid economic expansion, and an adult belief
in science and experience over faith. Older generations felt themselves living in
a rapidly modernizing era whose main shortcomings were ethical and could
someday be remedied by the young. Likening the nurture tone of the 1870s and
1880s to that of the Dr. Spock 1950s, historian Mary Cable described this ''Jong
children's picnic" as "a controlled but pleasantly free atmosphere." W.E .B.
DuBois remembered his childhood as " a boy's paradise," Jane Addams how
her girlfriends had been "sickened with advantages," Henry Canby how families
had "more cheerfulness" and "more give and take between parents and chil-
dren" than the "previous generation" had enjoyed. The Missionaries also ben-
efited from a huge expansion in education, Jed by rising-adult Progressive
teacher-experts and funded by midlife Gilded taxpayers (and, later, by elder
Gilded philanthropists). In northern cities, Missionaries included the first Amer-
ican "kindergarten" students-in the South, the first generation of black young-
sters to grow up mostly literate.
THE OREA T POWER CYCLE 241

While Gilded-era science elevated "Mama" in a child's eye, it pushed

"Papa " into a world of adult competition outside the home , a world many
children would later condemn as spiritually hollow . Inspired by Little Lord
Fauntleroy and best-selling piano songs like "Always Take Mother's Advice,"
magazine fiction put unprecedented stress on Mama 's central child-rearing role.
The link between Missionaries and mothers would last a lifetime . Billy "Rose-
bud" Hearst was a notorious "mama's boy ." Al Smith lived alone with his
mother until he married at age 27. Frank Lloyd Wright benefited from a mother
who purposely meditated on " fine architecture" while he was still unborn . When
the teenage Douglas MacArthur entered West Point, his mother came right along
with him and found lodgings outside the gates . Many eminent Missionaries would
later credit Mama for their success-or, in the case of Sara Delano Roosevelt ,
author of My Boy Franklin , Mama would make the claim on her own. In this
Darwinian age, the most popular children 's books (Black Beauty, Heidi , and
Horatio Alger's Bound to Rise) joined Gilded mamas in assuring children that
the good-hearted always get rewarded . Churches deemphasized death and dam-
nation, and Sundays became a day for family outings . "The parents left religion
to the Church, and the Church left it to the service and the Bible," recalled
Canby. ''There was a tacit understanding between generations that hellfire had
been overdone .'' Coming of age, however, many Missionaries chose to renege
on their side of this "tacit understanding. "

COMING OF AGE: In The Evolution of a College Student , educator Wil-

liam Hyde described the typical l 890s-era freshman as homesick , the sophomore
as arrogant, the junior as socialist, and the senior as religious-with an "ascetic ,
egotistical" fiancee intent on becoming a settlement house worker. During the
decade and a half between 1886 and 1903, in college or out , these youths raised
on Santa Claus and Horatio Alger came of age as stem reformers, bellowing
prophets , and spiritual explorers. Students accused anxious Progressive teachers
of sharing what Ray Stannard Baker called the "enlightened selfishness " of the
Gilded era. "As for questions ," remembered Lincoln Steffens, " the professors
asked them , not the students; and the students, not the teachers, answered them . "
Young writers flayed the Gilded-built world for " soulless money-getting, " "im-
mense banking, roaring industries," and " hugeness and disorder." In the early
1890s, George Herron drew huge crowds to hear his "Message of Jesus to Men
of Wealth." While "there may have to be some dying done before our social
wrongs are thoroughly righted," Herron exhorted his listeners : " A simple gen-
eration of Christians , yea, a single generation of preachers and teachers ... could
regenerate the world." Reflecting back on his twenties, Frederic Howe wrote :
"That was the thing that interested me-finding myself; and I wanted to be
surrounded by people who were interested in finding themselves, who wanted
to understand life and its meanings."
242 GENERA TIO NS

Not content with mere words, many young Missionaries turned to symbolic
acts of violence . They founded anarchist communes (including the radical Mas-
sachusetts enclave of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman), where they
contemplated their rage against "bosses" -and then vented it at the Haymarket
Riot, Homestead Massacre, and Pullman Strike . They often succeeded in mar-
tyring themselves for the workers' revolution. One convicted ai:iarchist, Louis
Lingg, blew himself up with a dynamite cap in his mouth rather than go to the
gallows. "Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's,"
0. Henry later observed in one of his short stories. Fledgling writers like Stephen
Crane strained to mix holiness with gore ("The clang of swords is Thy wisdom/
The wounded make gestures like Thy Son's"), while the headlines of the young
"New Journalism" publisher young William Randolph Hearst shrieked of
wrecks, fires, and foreign atrocities. "If bad institutions and bad men can be
got rid of only by killing them, then the killing must be done." So read an
unsigned Hearst editorial not long before 28-year-old anarchist Leon Czolgosz
shot and killed President McKinley. Four years later, the public began to hear
the singing voice of young Wobblies : "Onward Christian soldiers, rip and tear
and smite/ Let the gentle Jesus bless your dynamite." "We shall bear down the
opposition,'' screamed Upton Sinclair at the close of The Jungle. ''Chicago will
be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"

RISING ADULTHOOD: The bombs and riots triggered by twentyish hot-

heads during the 1890s later embarrassed this generation as its members moved
into their thirties and forties. During the Presidencies of Roosevelt and Taft,
late-starting Missionaries shrugged off a souring economy and tried to catch up
with their personal lives and careers. Richard Hovey, who had earlier accused
the Gilded of being "like an oyster, all stomach," now admitted that he had
"no real objection to a bathtub and clean linen." But if their fire turned inward
and fragmented into separate channels, it did not extinguish. By degrees, these
young men and women entirely reshaped American values and culture. While
Christian socialists preached the Social Gospel to urban immigrants, Billy Sunday
preached ''fundamentalism'' to an emerging rural Bible Belt. While poet-guitarist
Carl Sandburg, "Ragtime" Scott Joplin, and "Father of the Blues" W. C.
Handy enlivened Greenwich Village, new martyrs like Joe Hill ("the man who
never died") kept the radical Wobbly fringe alive . Cheering Roosevelt's "Great
White Fleet,'' many young adults asserted a holy creed of white world suprem-
acy-spearheaded by D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and by young Senator
Albert Beveridge's "Almighty Plan" to rid the world of "savage and senile
peoples." Meanwhile, W.E.B. DuBois began rallying his black peers to defy
Booker T. Washington's "Tuskegee Machine" and quit apologizing to whites.
Insisting that "younger men believed that the Negro problem could not remain
a matter of philanthropy,'' DuBois launched the Niagara Movement, the first
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 243

national black platform that refused to accept second-class social and political
status.
As their spiritual energy split into separate streams , two Missionary -propelled
inventions-the Wright brothers' airplane and the automobile of Henry Ford,
Alfred Sloan, and Walter Chrysler-joined technology to the individuating of
inner aspirations . Migrating and commuting far more than their Progressive elders
at like age , Missionary rising adults embraced new social inventions like the
" vacation, " "motel ," " suburb, " and "country club. " A number of rural-born
authors fled eastward (theirs having been the first large generation of western
frontier babies) , where they criticized what Sherwood Anderson labeled "lives
of quiet desperation" in rural small towns . "I loathed you, Spoon River," wrote
Edgar Lee Masters, "I tried to rise above you. " Avoiding marriage , many
thirtyish women ignored popular warnings that "the home is in peril" and
wondered along with novelist Ellen Glasgow why they must "sit at home and
grow shapeless and have babies galore . " Those who did start families rejected
the stodgy Victorianism of their parents and sought simpler lives (the "servantless
kitchen") and smaller houses (what historian Gwendolyn Wright calls the new
"minimalist house " ) . Self-assured, righteous, and generally intolerant as they
approached midlife positions of power, the Missionaries reflected a sublimated
sexuality among a generation whose men and women, Canby later admitted,
"tacitly agreed to look upon one another as sexless ." While the tall, mannish
"Gibson Girl" became the symbol of young women invading the male profes-
sional world, muckraking and ministerial young men laid claim to a moral
pedestal that the Gilded had left to the lady .

MIDLIFE: " There is but one side in a moral question. Which do you take?"
prodded William Jennings Bryan, helping to transform what had been the Pro-
gressive "temperance" movement into Missionary-style "Prohibition." At last
taking over the very institutions they had attacked in their youth, Missionaries
now wanted to run them with zeal. In 1917, after pushing yet another Progressive
President into war, they used their growing political clout to harness the brief
emergency for "moral" purposes : not just the constitutional agendas of rural
drys and feminists (both of which quickly triumphed), but more sweeping means
of controlling the younger Lost whose hedonism they despised and whose wild-
ness they feared might taint a new generation of G .I. children. General "Black
Jack" Pershing took brutal action against doughboy war deserters. Judge Ken-
esaw Mountain Landis sentenced hundreds of younger (and no longer inspira-
tional) Wobblies to hard time, and then turned his cudgel to cleaning up baseball.
Attorney General Mitchell Palmer (the ' ' Fighting Quaker, ' ' famous for address-
ing enemies as "thee " ) rounded up 4,000 supposed Bolsheviks on a single night
and deported a shipful. James Truslow Adams admitted that his peers had found
a "scapegoat" and that "the name on its collar is 'The Younger Generation.' "
244 GENERATIONS

While President Wilson complained that the war unleashed a "spirit of rising
brutality" that made Americans " forget there ever was such a thing as toler-
ance," many Missionary reformers welcomed how the war effort brought to
America "union and communion" (Mary Follett) , a "wider and wiser control
of the common interests " (Robert Park), and "true national collectivism" (Rob-
ert Woods) . When Senator Borah and his fellow "irreconcilables" denied Wilson
his postwar League of Nations , Americans could sense that the Progressives
were at last yielding to a more passionate and less genteel generation of leaders.
As the 1920s wore on , thanks to a well-timed bull market, the midlife urban
elite rose at the expense of their rural and evangelical peers. But still the caustic
moral tone deepened . Henry Ford offered a "just share" to workers who passed
his exam " on the clean and wholesome life." Calvin Coolidge insisted "true
business" would bring "moral and spiritual advancement" -making this "Pu-
ritan in Babylon" (according to the like-aged William Allen White) a man "wise
according to his day and generation." Congress virtually halted immigration;
"Czar of the Movies" Will Harrison Hays pushed a "Code of Decency" against
sex on camera; Ku Klux Klan leaders tried to ''Americanize'' the heartland; and
the nation's first "vice squads " began to hunt down bootleggers. While even
DuBois expressed alarm at the growth in youth crime, a new generation of
Missionary judges meted out more executions and longer prison terms, and state
health officials began authorizing "eugenical" sterilizations . By now, Mission-
aries began hearing the younger Lost revile them as "Babbitts" or as "Tired
Radicals .'' An occasional Missionary joined in. Self-proclaimed ''debunker''
H . L. Mencken gleefully roasted his "homo booboisie" peers . But as the 1920s
drew to a close, most of this high-toned generation agreed with Paul Elmer More
and Irving Babbitt that America needed a " New Humanism," an austere new
ethic of social order and self-discipline. With the rise of Herbert Hoover, re-
nowned as a brilliant humanitarian of global vision, Missionaries hoped that
their best man was in position to propel the "Gospel of Business" overseas-
to eliminate poverty, promote Christianity , and raise moral standards worldwide.

ELDERHOOD: ' 'This generation has a rendezvous with destiny,'' an-

nounced Franklin Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression when his own
"generation" ranged in age from its mid-fifties to its late seventies. As crisis
approached, the aging and authoritarian Missionaries moved comfortably into
place as stewards of social and economic regimentation . With the demise of
Prohibition and the rise of the "New Deal coalition," the urban-rural schism
expired-partly through cooperation in the face of peril, and partly through the
leadership of urban modernists like Al Smith . As the midlife Lost mellowed,
they joined Missionary leaders in staking America's future on a rising generation
of good-scout G .l.s . "The interest of Roosevelt was with the younger man,"
recalled his adviser Barbara Armstrong . Most elder Missionaries-including
pension activists like Francis Townsend and John McGroarty (dubbed the "Poet
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 245

Laureate of California")-ultimately accepted the intergenerational quid pro

quo of Roosevelt's Social Security legislation. The young were promised new
jobs, a "family wage," and (in the words of Senator Wagner) "new places
available for the strong and eager.'' The old got a meager and much-delayed
pension upon "retiring," but, far more important to them, they retained the
moral authority to set national priorities in an era of economic and wartime
emergency.
It would have been a cruel "New Deal" for any other generation. Econom-
ically, the Missionaries had sacrificed their own interests by directing most
available public resources toward youth . But these elders had few complaints.
They took too much pride in directing the sacrifices of others . During a decade
and a half of crisis, they consolidated their social authority-over ineffective
opposition from the Lost and often with the encouragement of G .I.s. In religion,
old Missionaries continued to dominate American churches. In politics, they
remained the undisputed leaders of now-graying Presidential cabinets, Congres-
sional committees, and state assemblies. In social legislation, they became "the
social-work progressive crowd" and academic "Elders" -those whom historian
Otis Graham, Jr., describes as "a small ascetic fraternity, the visible saints of
twentieth-century reform" (and whom Mencken less respectfully labeled "the
New Deal Isaiahs"). In war, they became guiding patriarchs (Secretaries Henry
Stimson and Cordell Hull; Admirals "Bull" Halsey and Ernest King; Generals
MacArthur and Marshall; industrialists Henry Kaiser and Bernard Baruch; phy-
sicist Albert Einstein). Today's older Americans remember the serene self-
assurance and unquestioned authority commanded by these elders-and not just
in America. During the war, the entire Free World knew Roosevelt as simply
"the President" or "Dr. Win-the-War"; after the war, it knew George Marshall
as "Europe's Savior." When MacArthur left the Philippines proclaiming "I
shall return," his righteous self-esteem energized people of all ages; when he
came home from Korea, awestruck younger congressmen likened him to ''God
Himself." After World War II, though the Lost finally assumed command,
eightyish visionaries continued to symbolize what all Americans called their
"Great Crusade." They retreated into old age like the global missionary and
1946 Nobel Peace Prize laureate John Mott, who (in the words of a younger
admirer) had "something of the mountains and sea" in him and "went away
with that calm, unhasty step, with that manner that seemed never ruffled, never
excited, ... very simple and a bit sublime . "
* * *
Where the angry spiritualism of Transcendental youth culminated in the apoc-
alypse of the Ci vii War , the Missionaries demonstrated how a youthful generation
of muckrakers, evangelicals, and bomb-throwers could mature into revered and
principled elders-wise old men and women capable of leading the young
through grave peril to a better world beyond . From the 1880s through the 1940s,
the Missionary hand can be seen pushing American ideals and history forward .
246 GENERATIONS

Just as we today honor the reforms of the Progressive Era as a testament to fair
process, we remember Prohibition, the New Deal, World War II, and the Mar-
shall Plan as a testament to the imperative that "good" must triumph over "bad."
Some of what they did in pursuit of morality, of course, they overdid. And when
excesses were committed, it was usually the younger, more pragmatic Lost who
had to bear the punishment and clean up the mess left behind: from the Palmer
Raids to Prohibition, from Hoovervilles to Yalta. By the late 1940s, as younger
Americans began yearning for some national purpose less lofty than rectitude,
the Missionary star faded at last. Perhaps it was time. "Do not be deceived-
we are today in the midst of a cold war,'' announced 77-year-old Bernard Baruch
only two years after VJ-day. These were ominous words from a man and a
generation that had always been able to find extra moral stature in every new
war and every new crusade.
Without question, Americans today have the Missionaries to thank for lifting
America to its present-day status as a great global power. America still lives by
the visions they glimpsed. In foreign policy, the very term "foreign aid" was
invented by elder Missionaries (Herbert Hoover and Herbert Lehman), perhaps
recalling those classmates on Mount Hermon who first set their sights on ''The
Evangelization of the World in This Generation." At home, the term "Great
Society'' was similarly popularized by elder Missionaries (James Truslow Adams
and Fiorello La Guardia), perhaps recalling that youthful image of Bryan-' 'the
bard and prophet of them all," wrote Vachel Lindsay-who claimed that "a
nation can be born in a day if the ideals of the people can be changed.'' In 1948
at age 83, art critic Bernard Berenson defined "culture" as "the effort to build
a House of Life .. . that humanistic society which under the name of Paradise,
Elysium, Heaven, City of God, Millennium, has been the craving of all good
men these last four thousand years or more.'' Franklin Roosevelt had something
similar in mind when he described his "Four Freedoms" just nine months before
leading America to war. "That is no vision of a distant millennium," he ex-
plained . "It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time
and generation."
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 247

LOST GENERATION

Born: 1883-1900
Type: Reactive

Age Location:
Missionary Awakening in youth
Great Depression-World War II Crisis in midlife

''There died a myriad . . . I For an old bitch gone in the teeth, I For a botched
civilization .'' That is how the thirtyish Ezra Pound described what Missionaries
liked to call America's "Crusade for Democracy ." World War I was cruel
enough to soldiers in the trenches, but the homecoming was humiliating. In 1919
and 1920, their next-elders meted out the Volstead Act to purge them of liquor,
''Red Scare'' Palmer Raids to purge them of radicals, and John Sumner's Society
for the Suppression of Vice to purge them of pornography. ''The season 'tis,
my lovely lambs, / of Sumner Volstead Christ and Co .," lampooned 26-year-
old e.e. cummings . "Down with the middle-aged!" joined in John Dos Passos,
age 24. These literati would soon know themselves as the LOST GENERATION,
scrambling survivors in a world of pomposity and danger. As the 1920s dawned,
some were already getting into trouble-like John Reed, dying an unrepentant
"Red" in Moscow, or Harry Truman, whose clothing store was going bust. But
amid this sea of alienation, the post-Armistice years dealt lucky draws to a few
who were ''Puttin' on the Ritz'': Babe Ruth (blasting home runs for the Yankees);
"Scarface" Al Capone (setting up "business" in Chicago); Irving Berlin (scav-
enging in Tin Pan Alley); and young writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair
Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill (striking it rich with blockbuster hits). Embittered
30-year-olds fought ideology with pleasure, Babbittry with binges, moral cru-
sades with bathtub gin and opulent sex. "America was going on the greatest,
gaudiest spree in history," bubbled Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, setting
the tone for the "Roaring Twenties."
Fitzgerald described his generation as at once "prewar and postwar." With
a rowdy childhood and a tired old age as bookends , the Lost lifecycle was divided
roughly in thirds by two world wars. ("In the meantime, in between time, Ain't
We Got Fun?") The story began with streetwise kids who grew up fast-too
late to join in the spiritual high of their next-elders, but fast enough to stay one
step ahead of Missionary efforts to clean them up later on. They were, wrote
Fitzgerald, '' a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty
and the worship of success; grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all
 LOST GENERATION (Born 1883 to 1900)

TYPE: Reactive FAMILY TREE

Total number: 45,000,000 Typical grandparents: Gilded

Now alive in U.S.: 1,100,000 Parents: Progressive and Missionary
Percent immigrant: 21 % Children: G.I. and Silent
Typical grandchildren: Boom

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1885 Sinclair Lewis (1951) Plurality in House: 1937- I 953

1885 George Patton ( 1945) Plurality in Senate: 1943-1959
1888 Irving Berlin ( 1989)* Majority of Supreme Court : 1941-1967
1889 Walter Lippmann (1974)
1891 Earl Warren (1974) U.S. PRESIDENTS: 1945-1961
1891 Nicola Sacco (1927)*
1884 Harry S. Truman (1972)
1892 Reinhold Niebuhr (1971)
1890 Dwight D. Eisenhower (1969)
1892 Mae West (1980)
1893 Dorothy Parker ( 1967)
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1894 Norman Rockwell (1978)
1895 J. Edgar Hoover (1972) 1883 Benito Mussolini (1945)
1895 Babe Ruth (1948) 1889 Adolf Hitler (1945)
1896 George Bums 1889 Charles Chaplin (I 977)
1896 F. Scott Fitzgerald (1940) 1890 Charles de Gaulle (I 970)
1898 Paul Robeson (1976) 1893 Mao Zedong (1976)
1899 Humphrey Bogart ( 1957)
1899 Al Capone (1947)*
1899 Ernest Hemingway (1961)
1900 Louis Armstrong (197 1)
1900 Adlai Stevenson (1965)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-9 1892: Ellis Island quarantine begins for new Hood of poor immigrants
5-22 1905: First "nickelodeons" and "jelly beans"; word "adolescent" coined
12-29 1912: Child labor peaks; sinking of Titanic
18-35 1918: Doughboys come home to crackdown on drinking , drugs , crime
29-46 1929: Valentine's Day gangland massacre; Black Thursday stock crash
32-49 1932: Bonus Army riot; soup lines and Hoovervilles multiply
35-52 1935: "Okies" flee dust bowl; Huey Long murdered; anti-FDR Liberty League
41-58 1941: Vandenberg, Nye abandon isolationism; Congress follows FDR to war
45-62 1945: Truman becomes President. orders atomic bombs dropped
50-67 1950: Kefauver Committee grills Lucky Luciano and other mobsters
60-77 1960: Ike opposes moon shot, warns against "military-industrial complex"
64-81 1964: Dirksen ends opposition to civil rights Jaws

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald); The Waste
Land (T . S. Eliot); Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis); The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner);
Monkey Business (film, Marx Brothers); Creed of an Advertising Man (Bruce Barton); An
American in Paris (George Gershwin); Ain't Misbehavin' (Duke Ellington); The Maltese
Falcon (Dashiell Hammett); The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler); The Old Man and the Sea
(Ernest Hemingway) ; The View from Eighty (Malcolm Cowley)
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 249

faiths in man shaken." So they lashed back at "the lies of old men" and the
finger-wagging of grim dowagers . They led America through a dazzling decade,
waiting for Hemingway 's bell to toll for them . When it did-with the stock
crash and depression-they fell back exhausted at first, and then stepped forward
as clear-eyed managers for their elders and as selfless protectors of their juniors.
The Great Depression dealt them its cruelest blow, robbing them of what should
have been their peak income years and ushering in public action that ran against
their grain. But lacking confidence in their own moral judgments, the Lost joined
the national effort, lending what they liked to call "brains" -and what was, in
effect, a keen realism about human nature . After providing outstanding gener-
alship in World War II, gaining top command by the war's end, the Lost mel-
lowed into a cautious old age. Their elder survivors presided as social anchors
over an era of strengthening families, warm nurture of the young, and sharply
improving economic fortunes for the generations behind them.
''Mama, I have been a bad boy. All my life I have been a bad boy ,'' murmured
author Thomas Wolfe just before his death, a burned-out wreck at age 38 after
a lifetime of wildness. "I was a bad kid ," echoed Babe Ruth , the carousing
and hard-drinking Bambino. "I had a rotten start." Such confessions were, in
effect, the credo of a demeaned generation. When they were children, the media
were obsessed with the problem of "bad boys." Popular magazines featured
stories like "Bad Boy of the Streets" and "Making Good Citizens out of Bad
Boys ." From the decade before to the decade after 1900, while city-dwellers
fretted over a rising tide of street crime, the number of published articles on
"juvenile delinquency" rose tenfold . By World War I, Missionaries shifted
public attention to the vices of young adults-their lust, drunkenness, violence,
and "Black Sox" corruptibility. The taint followed them through what Frederick
Lewis Allen would later call ''the Decade of Bad Manners, '' an era of gangsters,
flappers, expatriates, and real-estate swindlers . By the late 1920s, elders looked
upon the Lost as a social time bomb threatening to blow America to pieces . In
1932, Missionary General MacArthur ran his cavalry over their unemployed
veterans' march on Washington to public applause-as if their joblessness (and
the crash) had somehow been their fault. When a new Missionary President
promised a few months later to purge "a generation of self-seekers" from "the
temple of our civilization," Americans of all ages knew who those "money
changers" were.
"My candle bums at both ends; / It will not last the night ," Edna St. Vincent
Millay had earlier predicted . She was right. By Pearl Harbor, virtually every
one of their zany cultural heroes of the 1920s and 1930s had hit "The Crack-
up," as Fitzgerald named one of his last essays. The glittery Lost veneer evap-
orated, but the "bad boy" survivalism lingered on-with "Blood and Guts"
Patton and "Give ' Em Hell" Truman. Yet so too did the stigma of selfishness
and unreason. Scarred by their youthful encounters with next-elder moralists,
many midlife Lost became anti-New Dealers and isolationists. ("The war fever
250 GENERATIO NS

is on. New uniforms for soldiers are designed,'' warned radio star Father Charles
Coughlin. "Once more, we must begin hating the 'Hun' and bleeding for Great
Britain and France.") Roosevelt, in tum, called them "Copperheads" and in
1944 got his most rousing campaign response by asking entire crowds to join a
chant against three Lost isolationists: "MARTIN, BARTON-AND FISH!"
Condemning defeatist "Tories" like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Archibald
MacLeish called his peers The Irresponsibles, while soon after D-Day the elder
Henry Stimson pointedly reminded America that "cynicism is the only mortal
sin." Daunted once again, the Lost entered postwar elderhood without fanfare,
making way gracefully for an aggressive new batch of scoutlike G.l.s. Still
accepting blame in old age, the Lost preserved their pride by refusing to ask for
favors. They repeatedly pulled the lever for Republicans who promised not to
help them in the 1950s and 1960s, feeling inferior to richer and smarter juniors
who lacked their fatalism about life.
Gertrude Stein, a sympathetic Missionary, told Hemingway that his was a
''lost'' generation. He adopted her name at the beginning of The Sun Also Rises,
a 1926 novel that popularized the European wanderings of Americans his age
and persuaded readers that "the Great War" had wasted those whom Fitzgerald
called All the Sad Young Men. True, the horrors of mustard gas and trenchfoot
catalyzed their generational identity. But years before Eddie Rickenbacker' 'barn-
stormed'' the Siegfried Line, Missionary elders were already finding plenty they
didn't like in these smooth, undereducated, daredevil kids. In 1911, Cornelia
Comer spoke for many of her prim fortyish peers when she wrote an Atlantic
Monthly "Letter to the Rising Generation" accusing them of "mental rickets
and curvature of the soul," of a "culte du moi," and of growing up "painfully
commercialized even in their school days." While admitting that "you are
innocent victims of a good many haphazard educational experiments'' that ''have
run amuck for the last twenty-five years," Comer asked: "What excuse have
you, anyhow, for turning out flimsy, shallow, amusement-seeking crea-
tures ... ?'' And already the young Lost were taking the message to heart-
while groping for a voice of their own. Responding to Comer, 25-year-old
Randolph Bourne explained simply that his generation was the logical ''reaction''
to universal parental neglect. ''The modem child from the age of ten is almost
his own 'boss,' " he observed, and while "it is true that we do not fuss and
fume about our souls ... we have retained from childhood the propensity to see
through things, and to tell the truth with startling frankness."
To the Lost, the greatest human need was a clear head. Existence before
essence. Coming of age as America's first existential generation, they often
returned to those stark nihilisms which seemed to make sense out of the chaotic
world of their childhood: surrealism, Dadaism, expressionism, futurism, Freud-
ian relativism-all overshadowed by pessimistic theories of social entropy and
decline. They couldn't fathom their next-elder Missionaries, so busy trying to
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 251

find meaning in life. They thought they knew better-that behind those loudly
trumpeted principles, there was no meaning . "What is moral is what you feel
good after," declared Hemingway, "and what is immoral is what you feel bad
after." Few of the Lost made effective reformers or preachers . Instead, they
became the most stunningly original generation of artists and writers in American
history. They never stopped using what they called their "revolution of the
word" to pour ice-water realism on their generational neighbors and to express
their incorrigible aversion to grandiosity. To "Kingdom of God" Missionaries,
the young Hemingway mockingly announced in 1933, "Our nada who art in
nada, nada be thy name." To "Great Society" G .l.s, the eightyish Henry Miller
quipped in 1974: "It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all
brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals,
assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons."
From Ernest Hemingway to F . Scott Fitzgerald, Mae West to Jimmy Cagney,
Paul Tillich to Reinhold Niebuhr, the Lost never expected that anyone would
look to them for greatness or goodness. All they asked was the chance to remind
their elders and juniors how life really worked, and the opportunity to do what
needed doing-quickly, effectively-when nobody else would stoop to the task.
Meanwhile, they were content to bear the blame so Jong as public-spirited
crusaders kept their distance. They would make their own amends for their own
shortcomings . Most of today's 60-year-olds recall as children the presence of at
least one Lost parent, probably the one who embraced them fondly if too fre-
quently during the dark years of the Great Depression. Most of today's 40-year-
olds recall as children at least one reclusive Lost grandparent, or maybe just that
foreign-born "granny" down the street who scowled (with a twinkle in her eye)
whenever a baseball rolled across her yard . You couldn't pull the wool over
their eyes. Nor could you make them forget a lifetime brimming with adventure:
Ellis Island and sweatshops, sleek Pierce-Arrows and the Battle of the Mame,
speakeasies and hangovers, a giddy bull market and a global crash, soup lines
and dust-bowl caravans. They hid their early years from those nice-looking,
TV-age youngsters they got to know in their old age-most assuredly because
they didn't want any kid to try reliving them .

Lost Facts

Lost children entered the cash labor market at a higher rate than any generation
of American children before or since. In 1910, nearly one child in five
between age 10 and 14 (three in five between 15 and 19) was gainfully
employed . Many worked in "sweatshops" (a word first coined in 1892).
In the cities, one Lost child in six worked at some point as a "newsie"
hawking the headlines-including Irving Berlin, Jack Dempsey, Al Jolson,
252 GENERATIONS

William 0. Douglas, Groucho Marx, and Earl Warren . Later on, as rising
adults, this generation of grown-up entrepreneurs resisted collective action.
Despite a tight labor market, union memberships declined from nearly 5
million in 1921 to under 3.5 million in 1929.
No other generation of children ever purchased such a large share of its total
consumption with self-earned income. Lost pocket cash sustained America's
first child-only retailers (candy stores and nickelodeons) and nationally
marketed sweets, including jelly beans, Tootsie Rolls, Hershey Bars, and
bubble gum. From 1889 to 1922, the Lost sweet tooth propelled a doubling
in per capita sugar consumption to about one hundred pounds annually
(about where it remains today). In the 1920s, "sugar" became a term of
endearment.
From first cohort to last, Lost youths showed little improvement in rates of
illiteracy, absenteeism , dropout, or college entry . From 1880 to 1900, the
share of all white children in primary schools dropped from 62 to 54 percent;
for black children, from 34 to 31 percent. When Lost young men took the
first "I.Q ." tests during World War I, the results showed that half the
draftees had a "mental age" of under 12. During the 1920s, the so-called
"threat of the feeble-minded " turned many midlife voters against immi-
gration and prompted the Missionary psychologist Henry Goddard to invent
technical terms ("moron," "idiot," and "imbecile " ) to identify every
gradation of stupidity . After 1950, when the Lost began to reach their mid-
sixties, the learning gap between the elderly and nonelderly rapidly widened .
In 1970, the educational disparity between all adults over 25 (who averaged
12.2 years of schooling) and adults over 65 (who averaged 8.7 years) was
the largest ever measured in this century .
The Lost were America's first generation to grow up amid widespread adult-
approved narcotics use. In 1900, while opium and chloral hydrate con-
sumption was still rising, many other newly synthesized and unregulated
drugs were entering the marketplace, including paraldehyde, sulphonal,
veronal , and heroin . Cocaine or coca-a wondrous midlife discovery to
Sigmund Freud, " Sherlock Holmes," and many like-aged Progressives in
America-was routinely sold in cough syrup, lozenges, and (until 1904)
Coca-Cola . Yet when the Missionaries rose to power on the eve of World
War I, the Lost took most of the blame for drug-related violence and crime .
From 1900 to 1920, while the Lost came of age, America's homicide rate rose
by 700 percent. Just before it peaked in the early 1930s, Lost street hoodlums
had matured into America's biggest-ever crime kingpins: Al Capone , Frank
Costello , Lucky Luciano , Dutch Schultz, and Legs Diamond . The Lost
coined the word "underworld, " as well as "gangster," "mobster," "rack -
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 253

eteer," "moll," and " getaway car. " Equally inventive with the lexicon
of music and sex, they coined "get hep, " "j ive," "cat," "cathouse,"
''floozy,'' ''party girl,'' "trick,'' ''fast'' or ' ' loose'' woman, ''sugar
daddy," "boy-crazy," and "hot pants."
The great influenza of 1918, the deadliest epidemic in American history (and
fatal mostly to young adults), killed about 250,000 Lost-five times the
number who died in combat during World War I. Decades later, the Lost's
unusually high rate of Parkinson's disease in old age has often been attributed
to this flu (or, some think, to their early contact with toxic industrial chem-
icals). From the early 1950s through the 1960s, as Lost replaced Mission-
aries as elders, old-age mortality rates stopped falling. Last-wave Lost males
showed no gain over last-wave Missionary males in life expectancy at
age 65.
At age 20 (in 1910), the Lost were 50 percent more suicide-prone than last-
wave Missionaries had been at age 20 (in 1900). From childhood on,
moreover , the Lost have thus far been more suicide-prone than the next
three generations-G.l.s , Silent, and Boom-at every phase of life. In
longitudinal surveys taken in the 1960s and 1970s, the Lost scored higher
in "suspicion" and lower in "self-sentiment" than later-born G .I.s at the
same age.
The Lost accounted for the first black ''Great Migration'' out of the rural South
and into the urban North. After growing up during the rise of Jim Crow
and coming of age during the Wilson-era job boom, about 1.5 million black
Americans emigrated out of the South from 1910 to 1930-nearly three
times the prior number of black emigrants since the Civil War.
With nine million members born abroad, the Lost is (in absolute numbers)
America's largest immigrant generation. An unmatched proportion came
from Eastern and Southern Europe, many of them Jewish. Of all Americans
today over age 85, one in six is a naturalized citizen (one in three in New
York and New England)-a far higher share than of any other living gen-
eration.
The Lost attained a majority share of Congressional seats and governorships
later in their lifecycle (fifty-eight years after their first birthyear) than any
other American generation. On a per-cohort basis, no other generation has
been as weakly represented in national leadership posts over its lifetime .
Throughout their adult lives, the Lost have been the most Republican-leaning
of generations. As elected congressmen, they were more likely than elder
Missionaries to oppose the New Deal in the late 1930s. As voters, they
chose Willkie in 1940, split roughly 50-50 for Goldwater in 1964, and gave
254 GENERA TIO NS

Reagan his biggest generational proportions in 1980 and 1984 . As Presi-

dential contenders, they were mostly Republican: Alfred Landon, Wendell
Willkie, Dwight Eisenhower, and "Mr. Republican" Robert Taft. Two
others were third-party socialists: Norman Thomas and Henry Wallace .
Their one incumbent Democrat, Harry Truman, won (barely) once; and
their one other Democratic contender, Adlai Stevenson, lost (badly) twice .

Hit by the Great Depression during their midlife earning years, the Lost oc-
cupied the one age bracket never targeted by a New Deal relief program.
After the war, as G. I. s built and inhabited sparkling suburbs, the Lost mostly
stayed put. Nearly half never lived in a house or apartment with two or
more bedrooms and bathroom . In 1985, compared to a typical G. I. retiree
in his late sixties, a surviving Lost elder (who was at least twenty years
older) had one-third less total income , received one-fifth less in Social
Security, was far less likely to have a private pension or own his own home,
and was roughly twice as likely to live in poverty.

The Lost Lif ecycle

YOUTH: In 1897, 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote the New York Sun
and asked her famous question: "Is there a Santa Claus? " Many in her class,
she said, were anti-Santa skeptics-and , chances are, they were unpersuaded
by the Sun's reassuring answer. The children of the 1890s were America's most
tough-minded ever, growing up fast amid gangs, drugs, saloons, big-city im-
migration, and an emotional climate raging with evangelical fervor and social
reform . Few tum-of-the-century parents knew how to protect their nests. Often
they were permissive to the point of near-neglect, following the "Don't drive
them " advice of 1890s-era parent counselor Hannah Smith. George Bums re-
called that at bedtime his mother " would stand there with the door open. When
the house was full she'd close it. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I slept in the
hall." The fiftyish Progressive Jacob Riis , stepping into a tenement, noted that
"the hall is dark and you might stumble over children pitching pennies back
there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They
have little else ." Unsupervised by parents or governments , children surged into
the labor market-girls as piece-rate "homeworkers," boys as newsies, boot-
blacks, scavengers , messengers , "cash boys ," nonunion cigar-rollers, or ten-
hours-a-day coal miners. What they earned (and their parents didn't take away),
they spent. A few pennies in the hand became a ticket to a world of playful
consumption.
Although Dewey-style "progressive" educational reforms were already in
full gear , Lost kids found school irrelevant next to the grim realities of street
life. "School was all wrong ," complained Harpo Marx . "School simply didn't
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 255

teach you how to be poor and live from day to day ." (Harpo "dropped out"
when classroom toughs threw him out the window when the teacher wasn't
looking.) When it suited them, Lost children mingled well with adults, but their
hardened precocity sat badly with values-focused elders. Addams decried the
kids' jaunty consumerism, Bryan their cynicism , Theodore Roosevelt the ruth-
lessness of their football (eighteen college players died on the field in 1905
alone) . Roosevelt 's daughter Alice-smoking, swearing, and sipping champagne
in the White House-became a headline-grabbing symbol of a child generation
growing up "bad ." The Progressive G. Stanley Hall was the first to label these
unrestrained young savages "adolescents "; he was also the first to ascribe their
moral development to sex drives rather than to religion. "Never has youth been
exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and
day ," he lamented . Thomas Wolfe soon wondered "what has happened to the
spontaneous gaiety of youth"--children who are " without innocence, born old
and stale and dull and empty . . . suckled on darkness, and weaned on violence
and noise." "They tried to shut their eyes, " recalled Mike Gold of the adults
he met when he was a hustling street urchin . "We children did not shut our
eyes. We saw and knew ." Some did well, but a larger number did badly. Living
and dying by their new credo "It ' s up to you, " these " kids " were already
paying the dues of independence .

COMING OF AGE: "We have in our unregenerate youth ... been forced
to become realists," declared 23-year-old John Carter shortly after the
Armistice . '' At 17 we were disillusioned and weary, ' ' recalled Malcolm Cowley.
The Lost came of age hearing sixtyish Progressives describe how civilization
must inexorably climb to higher levels of Edwardian refinement and control, but
a series of disasters that no one could explain (including the San Francisco
earthquake and the sinking of the Titanic) made them wonder . They watched
Missionaries rise to power pontificating about a society whose seamy and ra-
pacious underside-from sweatshop children and young prostitutes to widespread
drug abuse and gang violence-only teenagers could see with clarity. Most 20-
year-olds turned a deaf ear toward older, campus-touring radicals like Jack
London and Upton Sinclair. "College students are more conservative than their
professors because they too often regard college as a back door to big business ,''
observed one disappointed student organizer. Well before World War I, the first
signs of alienation surfaced . In 1908, the youthful Van Wyck Brooks wrote
Wine of the Puritans, his title popularizing a word that fresh Ivy League graduates
(in Seven Arts) would soon paste on their next-elders. In 1913, magazines pro-
claimed "Sex O'Clock in America," announcing what soon became known as
a "revolution in morals." Then came the "Flapper of 1915," who (reported
Mencken) ''has forgotten how to simper; she seldom blushes; and it is impossible
to shock her."
These youth crosscurrents came together in World War I-a war they would
256 GENERA TIO NS

call "the sausage machine," the ultimate evidence of their elders' colossal
blindness. Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cowley, and cummings; all volunteered as
ambulance drivers, immediate eyewitnesses to the worst carnage . "Abstract
words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete
names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of
regiments and dates, " wrote Hemingway . After the war, while many young
intellectuals lingered in Paris ("I prefer to starve where the food is good,"
chided Virgil Thompson) , most doughboys returned home to a nation firmly in
Missionary control. There, wrote Fitzgerald, " men of fifty had the gall" to tell
veterans of 30 how to behave . The Lost " Flaming Youth" instinctively bucked
and turned toward pleasure-seeking. Already in 1915, Bruce Barton penned A
Young Man's Jesus, almost a parody of Missionary evangelism, urging "those
of us who are this side of thirty-five to unite and take back our Jesus, .. . a
young man glowing with physical strength and the joy of living'' and possessing
"our bounding pulses, our hot desires ." Soon after the war, Sinclair Lewis
scored two more salvos in Main Street and Elmer Gantry. Triggering the "roar"
of the Twenties, the Lost prompted Missionarie s to roar back about the ''Problem
of the Younger Generation ." The Lost knew they were bad, yet refused to take
all the heat. In his 1920 Atlantic Monthly article entitled" 'These Wild Young
People' By One of Them," Carter observed that "magazines have been crowded
with pessimistic descriptions of the younger generation'' -but added, ''the old-
er generation has certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on
to us ."

RISING ADULTHOOD: "The shows were broader, the buildings were

higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper,'' Fitzgerald wrote
from New York City in 1926, at the height of the fun, ''but all these did not
really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early-they were hard
and languid .. .. The city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cakes and circuses,
and a new expression, 'O yeah?' summed up all the enthusiasm . . .. " Uptown,
Lost blacks streaming in from the South touched off a cultural explosion. While
"Garveyism" held out new hopes of racial independence and Claude McKay
wrote Home to Harlem , Alain Locke proclaimed the birth of " the New Negro,"
free of "cautious moralisms" and "the trammels of Puritanism ." DuBois and
other older Missionaries did not always approve. ''The leaders of the NAACP,''
explains literary historian Sterling Brown , "felt that the characterization of Har-
lem sweet-backs and hot mammas did injustice to their propaganda and pur-
poses." But music named after a black idiom for sex-"jazz"-drew crowds
of white urbanites and put its stamp on an era of youthful hedonism and what-
you-see-is-what-you-get cynicism . As male bootleggers built entrepreneurial em-
pires in defiance of Prohibition, blase garronnes like Dorothy Parker and Zelda
Fitzgerald disappointed older suffragettes . " The Jazz Age . . . had no interest at
all in politics ,'' recalled Fitzgerald. But if their ideas were languid, Lost dancing
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 257

was "jitterbug" kinetic. These 30-year-olds cherished money, leisure, and

style-from chromy Art Deco and Metropolis futurism to Arabian luxury. Lost-
directed movies scorched audiences with what one producer called "neckers,
petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving
mothers."
By their early forties, Lost entrepreneurs were inventing supermarkets and
shopping centers, soda fountains and cafeterias, frozen foods and automats-
all for their faster pace of living. ''Self-help'' experts Dale Carnegie and Norman
Vincent Peale knew how to counsel a generation that cared far more about success
than expressing any feeling of self-worth . (' 'Win, win, win ... but always avoid
the pronoun 'I. ' ") As Fitzgerald declared that "living well is the best revenge"
and the Great Gatsby pined after Daisy-"her voice is full ofmoney"-"King-
fish" Huey Long made points with the luckless in Louisiana by declaring "every
man a king" and then picking every man's pockets. Like Ty Cobb, sliding spikes
high into home plate, the Lost directed their most savage competitive instincts
against their own peers. The mood began darkening in 1927 with the execution
of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, pathetic victims of Missionary zeal.
Wrote Vanzetti bitterly just before his death: "Our words-our lives-our pain:
nothing!'' '' For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late,'' wrote Eugene
O'Neill in The Emperor Jones . "For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor
and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks ." Come 1929, the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre shocked public opinion ("lousy public relations,"
admitted Capone). Sinclair Lewis ridiculed the "chilly enthusiasms" of elder
New Humanists, but in A Preface to Morals Walter Lippmann reflected omi-
nously on his generation's mental and ethical chaos. Fitzgerald kept his room
full of calendars and clocks, ticking away toward the collective "crash" his
peers could sense was coming. A few (like Joseph Kennedy) sold out just in
time, but the typical youngish investor had the bad luck to buy into the market
relatively late, making the bust all the more painful.

MIDLIFE: Malcolm Cowley called 1930 a year of "doubt and even defeat"
for his generation-a year of broken friendships, sudden poverty, and suicide.
It was the start of their collective midlife hangover, the Great Depression. Their
party over and their style suddenly repudiated, the Lost faced the future armed
only with the courage of despair. "Now once more the belt is tight and we
summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth,''
observed Fitzgerald, though he suspected that his was "a generation with no
second acts." The alienation of l 920s-era intellectuals now reached the poor
and the rural. Sullen "Hoovervilles" filled with unemployed men approaching
the prime of life without hope. Since jobs were scarce, priority went to household
heads-narrowing women's horizons and recasting many unemployed husbands
as "breadwinner" failures . Assuming the social responsibilities of midlife, the
Lost gave the 1930s their gritty quality. ''Everything depends on the use to
258 GENERA TIO NS

which it is put,'' explained Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society,
warning against ''poles of foolishness'' and setting the moral tone for a generation
now bent on doing the right thing with or without faith.
As the 1930s unfolded, midlife veterans watched the German soldier gen-
eration they had already met in battle tum into on-the-march fascists. A few
joined the call for national preparedness, including the tortoises who began
overtaking hares among the Lost elite-from Raymond Moley and his FDR
"brain trust" to a new cadre of Jewish and immigrant intellectuals. Knowing
firsthand the horror of war, however, most Lost were uninspired by another
call to global altruism. Opinion leaders like Senator Gerald Nye feared that a
Roosevelt-led crusade might enslave America under what Moley (by now anti-
Roosevelt) called the "iron hand of the Government." Still less did they admire
the New Deal. Edmund Wilson called it "the warning of a dictatorship." But
Missionary leaders knew how to hit back where it hurt. While Harold Ickes
ridiculed Huey Long for "halitosis of the intellect," FDR quipped that "Amer-
icans are going through a bad case of Huey Long and Father Coughlin influenza.''
In 1941, when the Lost at la~t attained a congressional majority, Wendell Willkie
and Arthur Vandenberg quashed their peers' truculence in the face of obvious
danger. In World War II, the Lost were the charismatic "G.l.s' generals" whose
daring (George Patton), warmth (Omar Bradley), and patience (Dwight Eisen-
hower) energized younger troops. Fiftyish civilians administered the home front
with the homely and unpretentious composure suggested in the paintings of the
like-aged Norman Rockwell . By war's end, Truman asserted a pragmatism borne
of a lifetime of' 'hard knocks.'' Doing lonely battle like Hemingway's bullfighter,
Truman took "the heat" and ultimately succeeded in showing the door to two
pompous old Missionaries : General MacArthur and John L. Lewis.

ELDERHOOD: Hemingway once described ''the wisdom of old men'' as

a great fallacy: "They do not grow wise. They grow careful." Like so many
of the Lost literary elite, Hemingway never reached old age himself-but his
description was prescient for those who did in the 1950s and 1960s. Recalling
a lifetime spent scrambling away from grand public crusades, the old Lost balked
at expressions of lofty ideals and hesitated to approve of anything they considered
too bold, too daring, too dangerous. Their leaders' grandest national vision was,
as Eisenhower described it, to project a "respectable image of American life
before the world." Golf-playing "Ike" took few chances abroad, enacted few
new programs, and opposed any newfangled "moon rocket." America's last
President to resist deficit financing, he also set a stable economic foundation for
the Go-Go Sixties (for which G.l. Presidents would later take credit). Midway
through only their third elected Presidential term, the Lost learned they had
already overstayed their welcome. In the off-year election of 1958, they were
annihilated at the voting booth by younger G .l.s (nearly all Democrats), and
two years later Eisenhower heard himself attacked by both of the younger Pres-
THE OREA T POWER CYCLE 259

idential candidates. In return , after musing over the new cult of bigness and
energy, he offered a farewell warning against what he labeled the "military-
industrial complex .' '
Their exit from the public eye was sudden and complete. By the time Kennedy
was taking "longer strides" in 1961, the Lost already seemed an antediluvian
memory : "old whale" mayors and tobacco-chewing "Dixiecrats," fading bureau
chiefs like J. Edgar Hoover and Lewis Hershey, grimy mobsters like Lucky
Luciano and Truman's Pendergast hacks (squinting under the spotlight glare of
G.I. inquisitors) . A decade later, a few Lost survivors saw their image revive.
Sam Ervin emerged as a national dispenser of country justice, Claude Pepper
as a protector of younger G. I. s then on the brink of retirement. The Pepper-
advocated expansion of elder benefits came too late for his own peers, most of
whom never saw a "COLA" or a Medicare card. Then again, few Lost had
ever asked for them. In 1959, when Ethel Andrus founded the American As-
sociation of Retired Persons (now a powerful G.I . lobby), she refused "to bewail
the hardships of old age . .. nor to stress the potential political strength of older
folk, nor to urge governmental subsidy.'' In 1964, after Barry Goldwater broadly
hinted that he would weaken Social Security, he ran far stronger with the Lost
than with any other generation. That's how the Lost preferred it: no favors for
a generation that always knew, deep down, they were "bad boys ." Having
grown up in an age of horsecarts and Russian czars, they grew old feeling like
aliens in their juniors ' space-age world. During the 1950s, while younger G.I.
"gerontologists" defined retirement as " permission to disengage," a younger
G.I . playwright (Arthur Miller) let the worn-out salesman Willie Loman "fall
into his grave like an old dog ." Younger audiences winced, but not the Lost.
As Dorothy Parker proved- "poor son of a bitch," she said when she saw
Fitzgerald 's body-this generation never cared much for mincing words.
* * *
Virgil Thompson once described his writings as "sassy but classy" -three
words that epitomize our memory of his generation . As America ' s first (and,
many say, best) film stars, the Lost left behind a celluloid image of their versatile
personality: from physicality (Mae West , Jimmy Cagney), mischief (the Marx
Brothers), and evil (Edward G . Robinson, Boris Karloff) to savoir-faire (Rudolph
Valentino , Mary Pickford), adventure (Douglas Fairbanks), and keen survivalism
(Humphrey Bogart). As the last generation to come of age without electronic
media, the Lost stand as America 's most gifted cadre of wordsmiths: They won
five of America's nine Nobel Prizes for Literature and produced our culture's
most memorable song lyrics (Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein). Louis Armstrong
and Duke Ellington introduced improvisational jazz, America's first naughty-
sounding music. These are lasting gifts from a generation for whom, in Dorothy
Parker's words, " art is a form of catharsis, " an instinctive response to a whirl-
wind existence . In their entertainment was a no-nonsense lesson about how the
individual can maintain his sanity in a harsh and unjust world . "Living is
260 GENERA TIO NS

struggle," wrote Thornton Wilder in The Skin of Our Teeth. "Every good and
excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of
danger and must be fought for-whether it's a field, a home, or a country."
Paul Tillich explained in his old age: "Our generation has seen the horrors latent
in man's being rise to the surface and erupt."
With little philosophizing, the Lost did history's dirty work: attacking Belleau
Wood, mapping D-Day, dropping A-bombs, and containing Stalinism. Whatever
they did, they half expected history to someday blame them. In some cases,
history has: for Earl Warren's internment of Japanese-Americans, for example,
or "Dixiecrat" foot-dragging on civil rights. Yet, mostly, the Lost showed
unthanked kindness to other generations. After fighting in two world wars and
bearing the brunt of the Great Depression, the peers of Truman and Eisenhower
accepted, without complaint, 91 percent marginal tax rates to balance the budget,
liquidate war debt, finance the Marshall Plan, and pay out generous G.I. benefits.
They demonstrated (as Bruce Barton put it) that "a man may be down but he
is never out.'' When it was up to them, they did indeed ''play the sap'' for their
elders and juniors. Such sacrifices made possible an era their children and grand-
children now nostalgically recall as the "American High." Yet the Lost taught
us more than self-effacing goodwill . From George Patton leading G.l.s in the
Battle of the Bulge to George Bums tutoring 13ers in 18 Again!, they showed
us something about what they liked to call "guts ." So too did they remind us
how to have a good time by being just a little "bad." As Malcolm Cowley put
it: "Did other generations ever laugh so hard together, drink and dance so hard,
or do crazier things just for the hell of it?"
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 261

G.I. GENERATION

Born: 1901-1924
Type: Civic

Age Location:
Great Depression-World War II Crisis in rising adulthood
Boom Awakening in elderhood

With his triumphant transatlantic flight in 1927, 25-year-old Charles Lind-

bergh heralded the arrival of a new and very special crop of young adults.
Landing in Paris, the adopted home of exiled Lost intellectuals, "Lucky Lindy"
didn't seem one bit alienated or debauched. President Coolidge dispatched
a navy cruiser to bring home the young pilot-to 18,000 tons of confetti,
the Congressional Medal of Honor, and the first-ever designation as an "all-
American hero." Dutifully modest about his exploits, he startled (and pleased)
elders by turning down lucrative movie offers. A decade later, Lindy's depres-
sion-era peers were busy planting trees and building dams and bridges-and, a
few years after that, Missionary General George Marshall praised the G.I. GEN-
ERATION as "the best damned kids in the world." When these "kids" became
America's first astronauts, younger generations hailed their "right stuff," U.S.
News and World Report their "fearless but not reckless" manner. John Kennedy
declared his generation's commitment to land a man on the moon by the end of
the 1960s. And they did, in what Eric Hoffer proclaimed "the triumph of the
squares." Throughout their lives, these G.I.s have been America's confident
and rational problem-solvers: victorious soldiers and Rosie the Riveters; Nobel
laureates; makers of Minuteman missiles, interstate highways, Apollo rockets,
battleships, and miracle vaccines; the creators of Disney's Tomorrowland;
"men's men" who have known how to get things done. Whatever they accom-
plished-whether organizing "big bands," swarming ashore in Normandy, or
making "Bible Epic" movies, they always seemed to do it big, to do it together.
Among G.l.s, says the inscription on their lwo Jima shrine, "uncommon valor
was a common virtue."
In his inaugural address, President Kennedy crisply defined his peers as "born
in this century" -and, among this history-absorbed generation, many do per-
ceive the twentieth as "their" century. The G.I. first wave (Walt Disney, Arthur
Godfrey, Ronald Reagan) had more of the jaunty optimists, the last wave (Lee
lacocca, George Bush, Lloyd Bentsen) more of the clean-cut rationalists. Several
scholars have suggested that the 1900 birthyear represents what Leonard Cain
 G.I. GENERATION (Born 1901 to 1924)

TYPE: Civic FAMILY TREE

Total number: 63,000,000 Typical grandparents: Progressive
Now alive in U.S.: 29,000,000 Parents: Missionary and Lost
Percent immigrant: 9% Children: Silent and Boom
Typical grandchildren: Thirteenth

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1901 Walt Disney (1966) Plurality in House: 1953-1975
1902 Charles Lindbergh (1974) Plurality in Senate: 1959-1979
1902 John Steinbeck (1968) Majority in Supreme Court: 1967-
1903 Bob Hope
1904 Robert Oppenheimer ( 1967) U.S. PRESIDENTS: 1961-
1907 John Wayne (1979)
1908 Lyndon B. Johnson (1973)
1907 Katharine Hepburn
1911 Ronald Reagan
1907 William Levitt
1913 Richard Nixon
1908 John Kenneth Galbraith
1913 Gerald Ford
1908 Jimmy Stewart
1917 John F. Kennedy (1963)
1912 Tip O'Neill
1924 Jimmy Carter
1914 Joe DiMaggio
1924 George Bush
1914 William Westmoreland
1916 Robert McNamara
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1916 Walter Cronkite
1918 Billy Graham 1903 George Orwell (1950)
1918 Ann Landers 1906 Leonid Brezhnev (1982)
1922 Judy Garland (1969) 1913 Willy Brandt
1924 Sidney Poitier 1917 Ferdinand Marcos (1989)
1924 Lee Iacocca 1919 Shah Riza Pahlavi (1980)

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

().....9 1910: Boy Scouts founded, followed by Girl Scouts (1912)
0-22 1923: Rose Bowl opens; university enrollments rise sharply
3-26 1927: Charles Lindbergh completes first transatlantic Hight
8-31 1932: Roosevelt elected with 85 percent support from voters under age 30
17-40 1941: Pearl Harbor Sunday; all men age 20-44 subject to conscription
21-44 1945: VE- and VJ-Day; G.I. Bill begins paying out benefits
30-53 1954: McCarthy hearings; anticommunist witchhunt
37-60 1961: Kennedy brings "best and brightest" into White House
41-64 1965: LBJ plans "Great Society"; 89th Congress enacts Medicare
45-68 1969: Apollo 11 puts man on the moon; Vietnam protests peak
50-73 1974: Watergate scandal; stagflation; Social Security benefit levels surge
65-88 1989: Bush, Reagan hail spread of democracy in Eastern Europe and USSR

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS : The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck); Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs (film, Walt Disney); In the Mood (Glenn Miller); The Honeymooners
(TV show, Jackie Gleason); The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt); West Side Story
(Leonard Bernstein); The Making of the President: 1960 (Theodore White); Modern Economic
Growth (Simon Kuznets); Roots (Alex Haley); Profiles in Courage (John Kennedy); The
Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan); War and Remembrance (Herman Wouk)
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 263

calls a "generational watershed." Cain documents how the children born just
after 1900 were much more " favored" than those born just before-in families,
schools. and jobs-and how that favored treatment led to important personality
differences that have lasted a lifetime. First-wave G.I.s were truly "special"
kids who grew up in the most carefully shaped of twentieth-century childhoods,
thanks to Missionary parents determined to produce kids as good as the Lost
had been bad . From youth to old age, the babies of the century's first decade
commanded the admiration (and generosity) of older and younger generations.
They became America 's first Boy and Girl Scouts-and, a half-century later,
America's first "senior citizens ." At the other boundary, the babies of 1923
and 1924 were just old enough to be drafted, trained, and shipped to Omaha
Beach and lwo Jima in time to join in the heaviest fighting; those born a year
or two later were in line to fight battles that never came . That too produced
personality differences that have lasted a lifetime . World War II provided last-
wave G.l.s with a coming-of-age slingshot, a catharsis more heroic and em-
powering than any since the American Revolution. Where World War I had
cheated the optimism of youth, this war rewarded it- and implanted an enduring
sense of civic virtue and entitlement. The combination of "good-kid" first-
wavers and heroic last-wavers produced a generation of enormous economic and
political power , what Henry Malcolm describes as a generation of "Prometheus
and Adam " -a generation, as one admirer said of James Reston , that has always
shared an " implicit belief in progress and in the central role of great men."
The unstoppable energy of G.I.s is well characterized in their most enduring
comic strip character: Superman. Conceived by two thirtyish cartoonists, Super-
man became famous just before their G.I. peers entered World War II and
themselves began showing ''powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men.''
Everything about the Superman story reads like a parable ofG.I.s on the move-
the special child , the corrupt older (Lost) Lex Luthor, the rocklike manliness
and Formica-like blandness , the unvarying success of Supermannish strength
used for community good . Can poverty be eradicated, Model Cities built, busi-
ness cycles tamed, Nazis and Communists beaten ? Step aside, this is a job for
Superpower America-and a generation willing, in Kennedy's words, to "bear
any burden , pay any price" to accomplish whatever goal it sets. No other
generation this century has felt (or been) so Promethean, so godlike in its col-
lective, world-bending power. Nor has any been so adept in its aptitude for
science and engineering . G .I.s invented, perfected, and stockpiled the atomic
bomb, a weapon so muscular it changed history forever. This intensely left-
brained generation looked upon their Apollo 11 moon landing as (in Ayn Rand's
words) ''the embodied concretization of a single faculty of man : his rationality.''
Rand's peers became the consummate mid-twentieth-century "technocrats" (a
word then connoting unrivaled American competence) . So too did they become
the nation's greatest-ever economists, social engineers, and community planners,
producing what Seymour Martin Lipset in 1960 termed "the shift away from
264 GENERA TIO NS

ideology toward sociology ." "What we need is a technology of behavior ,"

urged B. F. Skinner, whose fictive utopia, Walden Two, epitomized his peers'
lifelong (and entirely unThoreaulike) confidence that they could design and build
their way to social bliss. Such a generation has had little thirst for spiritual
conversion, no need for transcending to a new consciousness . Their most influ-
ential new religion has been L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology. Their most popular
definition of God has been the Deity of Isaac Singer who "speaks in deeds, in
events." And their most enduring images of prophecy have featured Billy Gra-
ham, America's first televangelist, or Charlton Heston throwing bolts of lightning
before a cast of thousands. ''We do not need American philosophers,'' remarked
Daniel Boorstin in the late 1960s; to G .l.s like Boorstin, the ideology of America
is "implicit in the American way of life."
Valuing outer life over inner, G .l.s came of age preferring crisp sex-role
definitions. Raised under the influence of the strongly pro-feminist Missionaries,
G .l.s matured into a father-worshiping and heavily male-fixated generation . As
rising adults, they came to disdain womanish influences on public life. "Gentle-
men, mom is a jerk," wrote Philip Wylie in his best-selling Generation of Vipers,
a book published in the same year ( 1942) that Army psychiatrists were themselves
complaining how badly Army recruits had been overmothered in the years before
the war. "It was suddenly discovered that the mother could be blamed for
everything," Betty Friedan later recalled . After the war, G. !.-authored books
like Modern Woman: The Lost Sex and Educating Our Daughters launched what
historian Carl Degler terms "a frontal assault on all feminist assumptions . "
Before Friedan defrocked the (mostly G .I.) "Feminine Mystique" in 1963, her
male peers had succeeded in creating a Father Knows Best culture and a political
vocabulary whose greatest "witchhunt" insults ("simpering," "cringing,"
"slobbering") were challenges against virility . The G. I. s' rift with their own
children arose, in substantial part, from the refusal of Boomer youths to accept
the exaggerated masculinity of G.l. fathers. Even through the social calm of the
1980s, G.I. maleness has rankled younger women, provoking a political "gender
gap" that has been more generational than partisan. Like Ronald Reagan, the
classic G .I. man feels little guilt-and like John Kennedy, he believes that "a
man does what he must .' ' Consider their Hollywood honor roll: Bob Hope, John
Wayne, Bing Crosby, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Sidney
Poitier, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck . Tum on the camera, let a G.I. be a G.I.,
and-like Robert Mitchum's "Pug Henry" in Herman Wouk's War and Re-
membrance-he'll get the job done.
The initials "G.I." can stand for two things- "general issue" and "gov-
ernment issue"-and this generation's lifecycle has stood squarely for both. All
their lives, G.l.s have placed a high priority on being "general" or "regular"
(as in "he's a regular guy"), since regularity is a prerequisite for being effective
"team players ." They developed this instinct young, building in high school
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 265

and college what historian Paula Fass labels a "peer society" -a harmonious
community of group-enforced virtue. As children, they were nurtured to believe
that anything standardized and prepackaged was more likely to be wholesome.
When they came of age, President Roosevelt remarked with delight how ''the
very objectives of young people have changed": away from "the dream of the
golden ladder-each individual for himself" and toward the dream of "a broad
highway on which thousands of your fellow men and women are advancing with
you." Later, G.I. collegialism energized America's V-for-victory wartime mood.
Highways that had once teemed with frivolous auto traffic now channeled mile-
long convoys of powerful, identical-looking military vehicles. After the war,
the peer society reached its pinnacle in the postwar suburban society, with its
"Wonder Bread" blandness, its "Spic and Span" kitchens, and its borrow-a-
mower neighborliness. While the Ozzies and Harriets were busy constructing
the most conformist culture of the twentieth century, Richard Nixon and Joe
McCarthy launched a purge of Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, and other G.l.s
who had earlier espoused a conformist ideology of the wrong (Soviet) variety.
"Anticommunism" thus became a post-World War II bugaboo among a gen-
eration that, within itself, has always had a strong collectivist reflex. Even during
the McCarthy hearings , G.I.s on both sides of the table dressed in the same gray
suits-and after each day's adjournment, no doubt went home to watch the same
TV shows in houses Malvina Reynolds memorialized as "little boxes ... made
out of ticky-tacky / And they all look just the same."
Likewise, their personality has carried a strong "government issue" flavor.
The G.I. lifecycle has shown an extraordinary association with the growth of
modern government activity, much of it directed toward whatever phase of life
they occupied . When G .I.s were young, government protected them from people
and things that could hurt them. When they were coming of age, government
gave them jobs . When they were rising adults, government provided them with
numerous preferential advantages in education , employment, and family for-
mation. When they were in midlife, they benefited from tax cuts and an economy
run full throttle. When they reached elderhood, they received newly generous
pensions and subsidized medical care-and gained more than others from deficit-
laden financing schemes that pushed costs far into the future . Not surprisingly,
G.l.s have always regarded government as their benefactor, almost like a buddy
who has grown up right alongside them. They have been what historian Joseph
Goulden describes as "a generation content to put its trust in government and
authority,'' a generation that instinctively abides by the will of the "community,''
what President Bush describes as "a beautiful word with big meaning." People
of other ages have always seen civic virtue in this generation-and, as a con-
sequence, G.I.s have been the beneficiary of an unmatched flow of payments
and other kindnesses from people older and younger than they.
G.I.s have regarded their own civic-mindedness as proof of American ex-
266 GENERATIONS

ceptionalism, a belief (in the words of Daniel Bell) that "having been born free,
America would in the trials of history get off scot free." Even in old age, this
great generation of "doers" believes (like 73-year-old Ronald Reagan in 1985)
that America always stands "on the threshold of a great ability to produce more,
do more, be more." Whatever G .I.s together accomplish in the exercise of
citizenship, they think, must by definition be good for all generations. In this
hubris has come more than a little miscalculation and disappointment, in both
public and family lives. But G.I.s have never stopped trying to make things
work. From "Lucky Lindy" to "Joi tin' Joe," "Happy Hubert" to "the Teflon
President,'' this generation has spent a lifetime personifying the irrepressibility
of modem America. "Despair comes hard to us," says Eda LeShan, "for it
was unfamiliar in our growing." None can match G.I.s for knowing how to Ac-
Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive-for better or worse. In 1988, when 80-year-old
physicist Edward Teller testified in support of the Strategic Defense Initiative,
younger congressmen asked him whether "Star Wars" would in fact work as
intended. This G.I. father of the H-bomb testily answered the nitpickers: "Let
me plead guilty to the great crime of optimism."

G.I. Facts

From first wave to last, the G.I.s have been a generation of trends-always
in directions most people (certainly their Missionary elders) thought for the
better: lower rates of suicide and crime, higher aptitudes, greater educational
attainment, increased voter participation, and rising confidence in govern-
ment.
Throughout the G.I. lifecycle, the federal government has directed its attention
to whatever age bracket the G.I.s have occupied. The childhood years of
first-wave G .I.s were marked by the first White House Conference on
Children (1909), the creation of the U.S. Children's Bureau (1912), and
the first federal child labor law (1916) . The elder years of first-wave G.l.s
were marked by the first White House Conference on Aging (1961), the
first federal age-discrimination law (1967), and the creation of the National
Institute on Aging (1974). The entire modem growth in government spend-
ing has coincided with the duration of their adult lifecycle. When a G.I.
born in 1910 turned 19, the federal government consumed less than 3 percent
of the nation's economic product; when he reached age 70, it consumed
over 22 percent.
The rate of child labor fell by half during the G.I. youth era-the largest one-
generation decline ever. These were the first boys and girls whose pin money
came from "allowances" for good behavior, not from earnings. They put
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 267

three-fourths of their allowance money into school supplies, church boxes,

or savings. From the mid-l 920s to the early 1930s, the proportion of youths
doing the family dishes rose from 32 to 52 percent, even as more adults
remained at home.
In most measures of health, the G.l.s have shown a swifter improvement over
their next-elders than any other American generation . From the 1900 to
1924 cohorts, infant and child mortality fell by 50 percent, adult height
rose by over one inch, and life expectancy at age 65 rose by 20 percent.
Raised on pasteurized milk, safely packaged foods, and "vitamins," com-
ing-of-age G.l.s did indeed appear to Missionary and Lost elders as the
brawny, world-moving youths shown in WPA murals.
G.l.s produced by far the largest one-generation jump in educational achieve-
ment in American history. From Lost to G.I., the average length of schooling
rose from the ninth-grade leyel to the twelfth, the share of 20-year-olds
attending college tripled, and math and science aptitudes rose sharply.
Meanwhile, the proportion of high school students taking foreign languages
fell from a pre-World War I peak of 83 percent to a World War II-era low
of 21 percent. On campus , religious or "missionary" organizations expe-
rienced a sharp decline in memberships during the I 920s-and practically
disappeared during the 1930s.
Nearly the entire array of modem scouting organizations were founded by
midlife Missionaries just when first-wave G.l.s were reaching puberty: Boy
Scouts (1910), Camp Fire Girls (1910), Girl Scouts (1912), and 4-H Clubs
(1914). From their scouting days forward, G.l.s have been the most uni-
formed generation in American history. As young adults, 2.5 million wore
the CCC forest green. Nearly half of all G.I. men wore a military uniform
in wartime-the highest proportion for any American generation .
While the best-known Lost heroes were individuals (Eddie Rickenbacker,
Jimmy Doolittle), the enduring G.I. heroes have been collective (the flag-
raisers at lwo Jima, the Boys of D-Day, the Seabees). Knute Rockne and
George Gipp were Lost, the "Four Horsemen" G.l.s .
From the 1930s forward, the G. I. s have been the only generation to support
the winning candidate in every election. In all three close elections (1948,
1960, and 1968), G.l.s tipped the outcome to their preferred candidate.
Surveys show that 80 percent of all first-wave G .I. voters opted for Franklin
Roosevelt in 1932 and 85 percent in 1936, the largest single-generation
mandates ever recorded. Last-wave G.l.s congealed into the core of the
postwar New Deal coalition; by midlife and elderhood, 65 percent of them
confirmed an allegiance to the Democratic Party (though they often voted
for Republican G.l. Presidents) . G.l.s also included the first generation of
268 GENERA TIO NS

blacks to abandon the Party of Lincoln : In 1944, 82 percent of Harlem

blacks under age 44 voted for FDR , versus only 59 percent over that age.

G.I.s have held the White House for thirty years , won nine Presidential elec-
tions, and run on major-party tickets twelve straight times (spanning the
forty-four years between 1944 and 1988). No other generation except the
Republicans comes close to any of these numbers.

G.l.s have won ninety-nine Nobel Prizes, roughly two-thirds of all the Nobels
ever awarded to Americans. They have thoroughly dominated the prizes in
physics, chemistry, and medicine, and (through 1989) have won all of
America ' s fourteen economics Nobels. However , other generations have
eclipsed G.I. s in literature and peace prizes .

G.I.s have experienced the " American Dream" of upward mobility and rising
homeownership more than any other generation this century, and perhaps
ever. Six in seven G.l.s report having fared better financially than their
parents, the highest proportion ever recorded . In 1940, 46 percent of Amer-
ican houses were owner-occupied ; by 1960, the proportion had risen to 64
percent-roughly where it has remained ever since . New houses were never
more affordable than in the early 1950s, when the typical 35-year-old's
income was $3,000 per year , mortgage rates were 4 percent , and a new
Levittown home sold for $7,000 ($350 down and $30 per month) .

Relative to younger generations , G .l. s have been by far the most affluent elders
of the twentieth century . Where Lost elders (in 1960) had the highest poverty
rate of any age bracket , G .I.s (today) have the lowest, when all public
benefits are included as income. G.I. elders tower over younger adults in
rates of homeownership and health-insurance coverage , and in average
dollars of discretionary income and household net worth. In 1988, 47 percent
of G .l.s "almost never" worry about finances, making theirs the least
worrying of living generations.

G.I. first-wavers sparked the modem "senior citizen" movement, and G .I.
last-wavers have benefited the most from it. America's first (and now largest)
retirement community, Sun City , was founded in 1960. The Social Security
retirement age was lowered to age 62 for men in 1962. Medicare was
founded in 1965. The largest rise in Social Security benefit levels occurred
between 1972 and 1981. The membership of elder organizations (and the
circulation of "senior" newspapers) grew sixtyfold between the early 1960s
and the late 1970s. By 1990, the American Association of Retired Persons
had become the largest and wealthiest advocacy organization in the nation's
history.
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 269

Through the 1950s and early 1960s-when the Lost were reaching age 65-
federal benefits per elderly person rose less rapidly than the average wage.
From 1965 to 1989-as G.I.s have reached age 65-federal benefits per
elderly person have risen fifteen times more rapidly than wages (300 percent
versus less than 20 percent, in inflation-adjusted dollars). In 1989, total
federal benefits averaged over $14,000 per elderly household. Social Se-
curity and Medicare benefits have paid back most G.I.s for the entire value
of their prior payroll tax contributions (including employer contributions
and interest) within four years after retiring. The 1990 deficit reduction law
imposed a 1991 maximum of $41 in extra Medicare charges per G .I. ben-
eficiary, and up to $2,137 in extra Medicare taxes per younger worker.
Entering old age, G.I.s have remained the most upbeat (or, as they would put
it, "copacetic") generation of their time. Between 1957 and 1976, the share
of elderly scoring "very high" on a psychological scale of anxiety fell from
22 to 15 percent (while the corresponding share for younger age brackets
rose sharply). Recent polls show people over age 65 comprising America's
"happiest" age bracket. In a 1990 poll taken of the surviving Harvard Class
of 1940-whose median net worth is $865,000-88 percent insisted that
they were "fairly or very happy." Their happiness was of this world, not
the next: 41 percent reported that they were "not religious at all."

The G.J. Lifecycle

YOUTH: In 1904, muckraker John Spargo's The Bitter Cry of the Children
augured the determination of Missionaries in their thirties and forties to do better
for a new generation, to join forces and seal off the child's world from urban
danger and adult vice. In government and family life, Missionaries began building
what Emmett Holt called "antiseptic" child environments. New vitamin-rich
diets and anti-hookworm campaigns promoted the cause of child health. A "milk
station" movement culminated in widespread pasteurization, while Little Moth-
ers' Leagues advised parents, "Don't give the baby beer to drink ." (Indeed, a
major purpose of Prohibition itself was to push alcohol away from the presence
of children.) Thanks to the "protective food" movement, capital investment in
food processing grew faster than that of any other industry between 1914 and
1929. Businesses that had once exploited children with impunity now found
themselves facing public outcry and legal punishment. Missionaries were de-
termined to see their offspring grow up as "clean-cut" as the world being created
for them. From Pollyanna to Little Orphan Annie, popular literature idealized
children who were modest, cheerful, and deferential to adults. As the Literary
Digest demanded '' a reassertion of parental authority,'' Missionary parents pro-
270 GENERA TIO NS

claimed the first Mother's Day (in 1908) and Father's Day (in 1910), and founded
new scouting organizations to redirect the "gang instinct" to useful purpose.
Armies of young scouts learned to help others, do things in teams, develop group
pride, and show respect to adults-in short, to show virtues seldom seen in the
circa-1900 Lost street urchins . Public education showed a parallel interest in
instilling the skills of productive citizenship. Most of the "progressive" Lost-
era experiments were replaced by a new emphasis on ''vocational'' education
("home economics" for girls, "industrial education" for boys). For the first
time ever, more teens were in class than out, making school an important so-
cializing force. Thus arose the golden era of the high school, well captured in
the teen-movie musicals of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The ethos: Work
hard, play by the rules, and everybody gets a reward.
Upon reaching adolescence, the new youths began building the peer society
they would retain through life. Adults encouraged kids to police themselves,
though always under a resolute grip of adult authority that grew tighter with
each advancing decade . According to historian Daniel Rodgers, parents' 'injected
a new, explicit insistence on conformity into child life.' ' Starting at a very young
age, kids learned to be sharers and helpers . (Two-year-old George Bush acquired
the nickname "Have-Half" because he liked to give half his presents to his
elder brother.) In an increasingly standardized youth culture, teens watched the
same movies, listened to the same radio songs, and packed the Rose Bowl and
other new 100,000-seat stadia to cheer the same sporting events. Having "fine
friends" and a busy extracurricular life became more important than getting
higher grades than other students. Fraternities and sororities imposed rigid pres-
sures on youths to stay within the bounds of the normal, and administered a
ritual of "rating and dating" (understood lists of "dos and don'ts") to control
the libido . Those who were too forward or too shy faced peer disapproval, as
did those who did not engage in "fair play" (a notion the Lost, at like age,
would have found bizarre). Youths began taking pride in their ability to achieve
as a group, to fulfill the 4-H Club motto and "make the best better." By the
mid-1920s, the word "kid" shifted in meaning from a word of elder criticism
to one of praise. The Lost Joseph Krutch described his juniors as "not rebellious,
or cynical, or even melancholy . They do what they are told, believe what they
are told, and hope for the best." The Lost Malcolm Cowley remarked how the
"brilliant college graduates" of the 1920s "pictured a future in which everyone
would be made secure by collective planning and social discipline ."

COMING OF AGE: ''Ours was the best generation,'' Gene Shuford said
of the late 1920s, contrasting his circle with Cowley's . "Underneath we really
thought we were all right; that man in general was all right.'' Within a few
years, Shuford's "best" found themselves part of what Harper 's magazine
described as the ''Locked-Out Generation" of the Great Depression, ''all dressed
up with no place to go." Even so, the youth spirit stayed high. With its emphasis
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 271

on planning, optimism, and collective action, Roosevelt's New Deal perfectly

suited the mind-set of twentyish men and women. The National Youth Admin-
istration and Civilian Conservation Corps kept them busy: marching in formation,
never complaining, getting things done, building things that worked, things that
have lasted to this day. When President Roosevelt reshuffled the economic deck
in favor of the aggressive young over the positioned old, polls showed God
running behind FDR in popularity among youths. "I promise as a good American
citizen to do my part for the NRA," chanted 100,000 young people on Boston
Common in 1933 (at the urging of James Curley, the city's Missionary mayor).
"I will help President Roosevelt bring back good times." But the sluggish
economy deferred many a career and marriage, prompting rising student interest
in an "apple-pie radicalism" more economic than cultural or moral. Even the
most committed ideologues agreed with their FDR-backing peers that the main
argument was over what system "worked" best. One young communist bulletin
defended its members as "no different from other people except that we believe
in dialectical materialism.''
Collective action flourished, especially among unionizing young workers in
assembly-line industries. In the winter and spring of 1936-1937, nearly half a
million engaged in sit-down strikes, prodded by the new G.1.-dominated Con-
gress of Industrial Organizations. From Charles Lindbergh's autobiographical
We to Mary McCarthy's The Group, the 1930s became, for budding writers and
artists, what historian Warren Susman labeled "the decade of participation and
belonging.'' Young novelists like John Steinbeck (in Grapes of Wrath) shunned
the Lost cynicism and instead looked forward to solving problems, especially
with the aid of big government. In 1938, 37-year-old Walt Disney released a
smash box-office hit, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that featured innocent
maidenhood and cheerful male teamwork ("whistle while you work") defeating
the designs of a brooding witch . Lost critic Westbrook Pegler praised the film
as "the happiest thing that has happened in this world since the Armistice."
But another Lost writer, Sinclair Lewis, suggested in It Can't Happen Here how
fascism could indeed "happen here" if this new youth mood ever burst from
its harness .
Enter World War II. The movie From Here to Eternity portrays prewar soldiers
evolving into the selfish "lone wolves" despised by most 20-year-olds. Then
Japan attacks-and, instantly, the soldiers forget their personal feuds and rally
together into machinelike action. That is indeed what Pearl Harbor did for this
generation, galvanizing "good kid" ingot into G.I. steel. While G.I. scientists
in their late thirties designed the atomic bomb, marines in their twenties swarmed
ashore, soon followed by the bulldozers of the Seabees. (Their motto: "The
difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a bit longer.") Like-aged Rosie the
Riveters comprised the only mostly female industrial workforce in the nation's
history. The young generation repeatedly expressed admiration for the elders
who were leading them to victory . Roosevelt was ''the man we had grown up
272 GENERA TIO NS

under,'' said Yank magazine of the Missionary ' 'Commander in Chief, not only
of the armed forces, but of our generation." While Mary Martin sang My Heart
Belongs to Daddy, Bing Crosby marched with his combat buddies to the tune
of "We'll follow the old man wherever he wants to go." In the public eye,
these kids in khaki could do no wrong. The Lost General Patton's famous slap
of a younger soldier caused a huge fuss back home largely because of disbelief
that a G.I. might have had it coming . World War II killed 1.5 percent of G.I.
men; among the 97 percent who emerged from the war years without serious
injury, the experience gave men the chance (as Margaret Mead later put it) to
"experience dangers that would test their mettle ... among their peers." Many
would never again know such responsibility, excitement, or triumph . Emerging
as world conquerors, they laid claim to a heroism that, later in life, would
blossom into a sense of entitlement.

RISING ADULTHOOD: "A good job, a mild future, and a little house big
enough for me and my wife." That was the ambition of a homecoming G .I. in
The Best Years of Our Lives. Not since the Revolution had war veterans enjoyed
such praise and tangible reward from appreciative elders. Thanks to the "G.I.
Bill," two of every five 1950-era dollars of outstanding housing debt were
covered by taxpayers, many of them older and living in housing worse than
what young veterans could buy. Capital spending and real wages for young men
boomed-while payroll deductions to support Social Security retirees remained
miniscule. Returning war heroes brought a mature, no-nonsense attitude wherever
they went-to campuses, to workplaces, to politics. Polls showed young adults
more stem-minded than elders on such topics as the Japanese occupation, the
use of poison gas, and corporal punishment. Those who entered politics in the
late 1930s and 1940s felt a scout leader's sense of duty (like Jimmy Stewart in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) to clean up a greasy Lost world and energize
the nation. By 1950, one G.I. (Dewey) had twice run for President, two others
(Clark Clifford, George Kennan) had become President Truman's top advisers,
and several more (John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford)
had launched promising political careers. In business, their peers brought their
wartime confidence and "high hopes" into the nation's economic life. Everything
they made seemed to be the best (and biggest) in the world . Stephen Bechtel's
company erected Hoover Dam and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge,
Robert Moses built massive public housing projects, and William Levitt laid
down one gleaming suburban tract after another. Bell & Howell's dynamic young
president, Charles Percy, symbolized the new breed of smart, get-things-done
industrialists, while two brilliant fortyish executives (Bob McNamara, Lee Ia-
cocca) prodded the American auto industry to produce more functional autos.
From Fortune writers to the Committee on Economic Development, 40-year-
olds of both political parties agreed that big government and big business could
both "pitch in" and work together just fine.
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 273

In The Organization Man, William Whyte catalogued the suburban G .I.

"social ethic " that produced neighborhoods noteworthy mainly for their "friend-
liness. " Like Sloan Wilson 's hero in Man in the Gray Flannel Suit , the ideal
male was at once hard-striving and selfless, the ideal female the devoted mother
of a flock of Boom kids. Soon no suburban house was complete without tele-
vision , a new technology that perfectly expressed the G .I. culture : science tamed
for man 's benefit, unremittingly upbeat , nurturing children , helping adults keep
abreast of collegial tastes. A memorable collection of fortyish entertainers-
Lucille Ball, Phil Silvers , Jack Paar, Jackie Gleason, Art Linkletter-showed
an unrehearsed, on-air comfort that other TV generations have never quite
matched. From Hollywood to Levittown , G .I.s were hard at work institution-
alizing the most wholesome American culture of the twentieth century . "We do
not engage in loose talk about the 'ideals' of the situation and all the other stuff ,"
observed C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite . "We get right down to the
problem." Declaring the End to Ideology (a phrase coined by G .I.s in 1955),
Daniel Bell noted how his peers wanted to overcome real-world challenges, not
explore differences in fundamental values . George Gallup defined the "average
man" in a society more eager to celebrate sameness than differences among
people. The rising black intelligentsia (Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright) lent a
cool rationalism to race relations; blacks began arguing (and whites agreeing)
that "segregation " was economically inefficient. Whatever his color, a G.I.
generally considered the "what to dos" well-settled; only the "how to dos"
were open to discussion . In I 958, as John Kenneth Galbraith bemoaned "public
squalor" amid "private opulence," his generation began its surge to power in
a Democratic landslide. As the 1960s approached, G .I.s waited impatiently for
their chance to bring the same friendliness, energy, and competence to public
life that they had already brought to the economy and family . Their only worry,
admitted Lipset in 1960, was "the problem of conformity which troubles so
many Americans today"-a G.I. trait already drawing barbs from the younger
Silent.

MIDLIFE: The G .I. rise to national leadership was shaped by the mission
they recalled from their childhood : to clean up the squalor and decay left behind
by the Lost. Maxwell Taylor criticized The Uncertain Trumpet of Lost Presi-
dencies, Eric Sevareid accused the "last generation" of "corruptibility" and a
''lack of controlled plans,'' and John Kennedy complained that ''what our young
men saved, our diplomats and President have frittered away ." When the wa-
tershed all-G . I. Presidential election of 1960 arrived, a mannish generation in
its forties and fifties was determined to apply its "common political faith" to
rebuild American "prestige ," to make the nation (in Bell's words) "a world
power, a paramount power, a hegemonic power." A few surviving Missionaries ,
like Robert Frost at Kennedy 's inaugural , heralded the coming of a new "Au-
gustan Age ." Having campaigned with the slogan "Let's Get This Country
274 GENERA TIO NS

Moving Again," the new President declared that "the torch has been passed to
a new generation ... tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace."
In office, he brought " vigor " to governance and assembled like-aged advisers
whom the younger David Halberstam described as "a new breed of thinker-
doers" -men like Bob McNamara (" the can-do man in the can-do society, in
the can-do era") and McGeorge Bundy (possessing "a great and almost relentless
instinct for power") . Meanwhile, the G .l. literary and media elite joined in as
team players (Walter Cronkite , Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Joseph and
Stewart Alsop , Joseph Kraft, William Manchester , Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Theo-
dore White) . In 1962, Richard Rovere christened a new expression, "the estab-
lishment," to describe the new power of midlife G.I.s. John Kennedy's
assassination hardly caused them to break pace. The ebullient Lyndon Johnson
promptly declared: "This nation, this generation, in this hour has man's first
chance to build a Great Society ." In the ensuing 1964 landslide, his G.l. peers
reached their pinnacle of power. The "Great 89th" Congress (74 percent G .I.)
became what Theodore White termed ''the Grandfather Congress of Programs
and Entitlements ." G .I. confidence-and hubris-was at an all-time high.
"Americans today bear themselves like victory-addicted champions," said
Look magazine in 1965. ' 'They've won their wars and survived their depressions.
They are accustomed to meeting, and beating, tests . " With America now led
by a generation intent on meeting and beating new tests, the word "crisis" (what
Richard Nixon termed " exquisite agony " ) repeatedly energized the task of gov-
ernment. Two years earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis had climaxed when, in
Dean Rusk's words, we were " eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow
just blinked ." Next came Vietnam. Robert McNamara's new " controlled re-
sponse" strategy replaced what had been known as the (Lost-era) "spasm"
response . But Vietnam helped trigger an angry "generation gap" between G.l.
parents and coming-of-age Boomers, along with urban riots, a crime wave,
substance abuse, eroticism, and ideological passion-in short, everything hateful
to the G .I. life mission. By the late 1960s, whatever G .I. s tried (whether ' ' Model
Cities" or "guns and butter" economics) began to sputter. From Johnson and
Nixon in the White House to bosses on the job and fathers in families, G .I. men
came under constant attack from juniors and, increasingly , women. If the times
were euphoric for youth, they were anything but for G.l.s: "Everything seemed
to come unhinged" (James MacGregor Bums); "Something has gone sour, in
teaching and in learning" (George Wald); "I use the phrase soberly: The nation
disintegrates" (John Gardner) . In words that revealed his peers' frustration,
Richard Nixon despaired that America had become "a pitiful, helpless giant."
Many (Rusk, William Westmoreland, Walt Rostow) refused to admit error.
Others (McNamara, Bundy) came to share Milton Mayer's view that "we were
wrong, and the new generation is right " -although, Mayer added, "the young
terrify me."
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 275

ELDERHOOD: Ask today ' s seniors what movie touched them most as
youths, and many will answer Lost Horizon, a depression-era film with a dis-
turbing message about aging : that it is hideous and ugly , something that shouldn't
happen in a civic-minded community. In a 1946 poll, G. I. s showed the highest
generational support for human euthanasia. Through the 1950s, G .l.s often
looked upon the old Lost as tired , defeatist , and anti-progress . They vowed not
to grow old the same way . Later on , when they entered elderhood themselves,
they attacked what they termed the "myths" of a lonely, Lost-like old age-
and worked hard to be ever-optimistic, ever-energetic "senior citizens ." Today,
G.I.s rankle at younger people who assume they are unhappy; indeed, a majority
insist that their present phase of life is the best. Where Missionaries are remem -
bered for dressing dark (as though in church), G.l.s make a point of dressing
bright (as though at play) . As they listen to old " swing" music on "Music of
Your Life" radio, they dwell in what they freely admit is a "square ," even
"corny" culture-a culture that admits neither to loneliness nor to suffering.
Modern Maturity magazine will not accept ads that mention ' ' pain, inflammation,
suffer, hurt, ache, and flare-up" because , says a publishing director, "it's pretty
hard to present " these things "in an upbeat way . "
Under prodding from younger generations , G.I.s have separated into an elder
version of the same peer society they first built in their youth . After leaving the
labor force at a younger age than any earlier generation, they entered an active
and publicly subsidized retirement. Part of the implicit terms under which the
G .1.-Boom generation gap eased in the early 1970s was through an understanding
by which the post-Vietnam fiscal "peace dividend " was spent almost entirely
on G.I. retirees. In 1972, the first election in which gray-lobby activism became
critical, candidates Wilbur Mills and Richard Nixon abandoned their prior op-
position to COLA inflation indexing. Congress added an extra 20 percent benefit
hike, producing a two-year jump in intergenerational transfer payments that
dwarfed the total size of Great Society poverty programs . Over the last two
decades , while G.I.s have noted the Boomers' weaker commitment to the spirit
of community, these seniors have themselves surrendered to much of the self-
orientation they see around them . Only a few (like Maggie Kuhn's Gray Panthers)
have adopted the confrontational " me first" Boomer tone . Instead, the "we
first" senior citizen movement has applied the same patience, organizational
know-how, and teamwork that G. I. s have always carried through life- though
now with a new agenda and with bottom-line results that few other generations
could ever hope for. "You've already paid most of your dues. Now start col-
lecting the benefits, " reads a 1988 AARP membership appeal. So they have:
Half of all federal spending is now consumed by pensions, other elderly enti-
tlements, and interest on the national debt-the last representing the burden of
today ' s unfunded consumption on tomorrow's taxpayers . During the 1980s,
retiree benefits remained the one area of government which no G.l. President
276 GENERATIONS

or Silent Congress dared to touch. Likewise, deficit spending has become the
one fiscal device which finds few visceral critics among the generation that came
of age during the New Deal. Where Lost elders once preferred to attack public
spending and leave taxes alone, G.I. elders Jean the other way and have provided
the core of the modem tax revolt, from Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis (of
California's Proposition 13) to the rank-and-file memberships of national antitax
lobbies.
Their rising affluence has enabled them to separate socially into America's
first "seniors only" communities, often far away from their grown-up children.
There G.I.s show a vigor and cheerfulness that bring to mind the best of their
1950s-era culture. In Sun City, observes Boomer gerontologist Ken Dychtwald,
"it's hard to find time to talk to people; they're too active and busy." "Sun
City is secure," he concludes. "A resident may stroll the streets without fear
of surprise, of unpleasantness, or unsightliness. The streets are uncommonly
clean." And, adds one resident, "I don't know where I could go that I could
get so involved with the community." Similarly, the G.I.s' material well-being
has enabled them to continue in their accustomed roles as trustees of wealth,
givers of gifts, accepters of collect phone calls-and providers (or backstops)
for their extended families. No elder generation has ever been so relied upon to
foot the bill for family indulgences. In 1987 and 1988, grandparents accounted
for 25 percent of all toy purchases-and a rapidly growing share of their grand-
children's educational expenses . Nor has any elder generation made more down
payments to enable its grown children to buy houses which, back in the 1950s,
G.I.s could easily afford without parental help. (For today's young adults, reports
Time magazine, the "G.I. benefit" has now come to mean "Good In-laws.")
Among elder G.I.s whose children have divorced, 30 percent report that the
newly single son or daughter soon arrives on their doorstep. But if Silent and
Boom children frequently ask for G .I. assistance with economic problems, they
do not seek elder help nearly so often on questions of values or basic life direction.
The G.I. role as powerful stewards of American material life has left them
feeling more friendly than wise-more comfortable keeping active themselves
than inspiring the young to action . "In our time as children, grandparents were
the teachers, advisors, counselors," Eda LeShan remembers of a social function
from which her own peers "have been robbed completely." As anthropologist
Dorian Apple has found in cultures throughout the world, "indulgent grand-
parents are associated with societies.' . . where grandparents are dissociated with
authority." Erik Erikson's wife and collaborator, Joan, recently observed how
"when we looked at the lifecycle in our forties, we looked to old people for
wisdom." Now, she laments, "lots of old people don't get wise." Whatever
wisdom G.I.s do have to offer, they lack the pulpit to proclaim it, owing to their
early retirement and the recent Boom takeover of positions in the media. A 1989
survey found not a single prominent journalist over age 65 at work in an American
newsroom.
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 277

In public life, the last prominent G.I.s assert power more than principle-
"better with deeds than with plans or words," to use (the Silent) Senator Lau-
tenberg ' s description of George Bush, then busy ordering ships and planes and
tanks to the Persian Gulf. In family life, their worldly style of grandparenting
leaves them troubled by what Dychtwald describes as a "lack of respect and
appreciation ." From the Oval Office to the family dinner table, elder G .l.s often
feel they don't get enough personal deference from young people-certainly not
what they remember offering their own elder Missionary parents.
* * *
"We've done the work of democracy, day by day," George Bush proudly
declared of his generation in 1989. Whatever G.I.s touched, they made bigger-
and, in their eyes, better. Their accomplishments have been colossal. G.l.s
patiently endured an economic despair that might have driven another generation
to revolution . They ably soldiered the one war America could not afford to lose.
Thanks to their powerful work ethic and willingness to invest , they produced a
postwar economic miracle that ultimately outperformed their communist rivals.
Their massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons preserved an enduring if expensive
and unnerving peace. They have been a truly great generation of scientists,
landing men on the moon and cracking the riddles of human longevity . Their
women may have been the most dedicated teachers and most skillful mothers in
American history . In countless ways, from transistors and satellites to spacious
family homes and a buoyant "GNP" (a term they invented) , G.l.s gave insti-
tutional firmament to the "Brotherhood of Man" envisioned by their beloved
Missionary fathers. In recent years, news of the retirement or death of G.I.
notables has often prompted remarks from Americans of all ages that no one
will be able to replace their competence.
Yet their final ledger will also include colossal debits: unprecedented public
and private liabilities , exported assets, depleted resources, harms to the global
environment. The generation that inherited so much excess economic capacity
and harnessed it to so many public purposes is bequeathing to its successors a
fiscally starved economy unable to afford a new national agenda . The offspring
of the soldiers the G.I.s conquered-Japanese and German-are today outcom-
peting their own children and eclipsing American economic might. The powerful
G.I. sense of exceptionalism makes them think their constructions can last for-
ever, that Reaganomics-style optimism can produce its own reward . But those
early-in-life virtues-selflessness, investment, and community-have given way
to the repetition of old habits without the old purposes and without the old focus
on the future . To G.l.s , Tomorrowland once meant monorails and moonwalks;
now it means space-age medicine in the intensive-care unit. With their time
coming to a close, G .l.s have difficulty articulating what Bush calls "the vision
thing" -setting directions for a new century many will not live to see. From
George Kennan to Lillian Hellman, Eric Sevareid to Theodore White, Ann
Landers to Ronald Reagan, elder G.l.s voice distress over the steady loss in the
278 GENERATIONS

American sense of community in the hands of the young. Back when they ran
the "general issue" culture, everything in America seemed to fit together con-
structively. Now, to their eyes, it doesn't. And they worry about how they will
be remembered.
In It's a Wonderful Life, a Lost-directed testimonial to G.l.s, Jimmy Stewart
despairs at the worthlessness of his deeds until an older man shows him
how, had he never lived, his town would have sunk to "Pottersville"-a cor-
rupt, pleasure-seeking, Lost-style abyss. Returning home, Stewart saves his
government-subsidized savings and loan business thanks to gifts from young and
old, repaying him for all the wonderful things he has done over his life. Contrast
this with the G.I. image in the Boom-directed Cocoon: senior citizens draining
the strength of unborn aliens, and then flying off to immortality while leaving
their own children behind. Yet Cocoon presents G.l.s in such a warm light that
this ghastly behavior seems perfectly natural, as though such friendly people
deserve special treatment no matter what it costs the young. No one likes to
think of today's senior citizens as selfish, least of all themselves. They would
rather just stand firm in the "collective positiveness" suggested by Hubert Pryor
of Modern Maturity in his 1989 essay "Goodbye to Our Century."
On May 5, 1990, Bob Gilbert and other seventyish veterans rode a motorcade
down the streets of Plzen past thousands of Czechs waving American flags under
a huge banner reading THANK YOU BOYS. As Gilbert's peers leave us one by
one, many G.l.s probably wish they didn't have to go that way, but would prefer
to go together in some heroic D-Day redux-one last civic ritual to remind
everyone what they once did, as a team, for posterity.
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 279

SILENT GENERATION

Born: 1925-1942
Type : Adaptive

Age Location:
Great Depression-World War II Crisis in youth
Boom Awakening in midlife

"Forty-nine is taking no chances," Fortune magazine ' s editors wrote of the

"gray flannel mentality" of that year's class of college graduates, the first to
consist mainly of Americans born after 1924. "They are interested in the system
rather than individual enterprise." Only 2 percent wished to be self-employed.
Most of the rest wanted to work in big corporations offering job security. ''Never
had American youth been so withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent,
unadventurous-and silent," G. I. historian William Manchester later quipped.
The SILENT GENERATION was a name these young people didn't especially
like, but they knew it fit. "We had no leaders, no program, no sense of our
own power, and no culture exclusively our own," admitted Frank Conroy . "Our
clothing, manners and lifestyle were unoriginal-scaled-down versions of what
we saw in the adults ." Like Robert Morse in How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying, these young grads put on their "sincere" ties, looked in the
mirror-and didn't see G .I.s. Instead, they saw the date-and-mate romantics of
Peggy Sue Got Married. sober young adults chided by one older professor as
"a generation with strongly middle-aged values ." G .l.s David Riesman and
Nathan Glazer labeled them the "Lonely Crowd," possessing an "outer-
directed" personality and taking cues from others.
Older generations first knew them as Shirley Temple and Jerry Lewis, Roy
Cohn and Charles Van Doren, Ralph Nader and Bobby Kennedy-and younger
generations met them as Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and Gloria
Steinem, Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Seven. In the decades since, they
have aged into America 's late-twentieth-century facilitators and technocrats, the
Walter Mondales and Geraldine Ferraros-a consummate helpmate generation
which has so far produced three decades of top Presidential aides-Pierre Sal-
inger (for Kennedy) , Bill Moyers (Johnson), John Ehrlichman (Nixon), Dick
Cheney (Ford), Stuart Eizenstat (Carter), James Baker III (Reagan), and John
Sununu (Bush). And three First Ladies (Jackie Kennedy, Rosalynn Carter, and
Barbara Bush) . But no Presidents.
Jeane Kirkpatrick describes hers as a generation "born twenty years too
 SILENT GENERATION (Born 1925 to 1942)

TYPE: Adaptive FAMILY TREE

Total number: 49,000 ,000 Typical grandparents: Missionary

Now alive in U.S.: 40,000.000 Parents: Lost and G. I.
Percent immigrant: 9% Children: Boom and Thirteenth
Typical grandchildren: Millennial

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) PERIOD OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

1925 William F. Buckley, Jr. Plurality in House: 1975-

1925 Gore Vidal Plurality in Senate: 1979-
1926 Marilyn Monroe ( 1962) Majority of Supreme Court: -
1927 Andy Warhol ( 1987)
1928 T. Boone Pickens. Jr. U.S. PRESIDENTS: None
1929 Martin Luther King, Jr. ( 1968)
1930 James A. Baker Ill PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDA TES
1930 Sandra Day O'Connor
1928 Walter Mondale
1930 Clint Eastwood
1933 Michael Dukakis
1931 James Dean (1955)
1935 Jack Kemp
1932 Andrew Young
1936 Gary Hart
1935 Elvis Presley (1977)
1941 Jesse Jackson
1935 Geraldine Ferraro
1935 Woody Allen
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1935 Phil Donahue
1936 Abbie Hoffman ( 1989) 1926 Fidel Castro
1937 Jack Nicholson 1930 Helmut Kohl
1940 Ted Koppel* 1931 Mikhail Gorbachev
1940 Pat Schroeder 1936 Vaclav Havel
1942 Barbra Streisand 1940 John Lennon ( 1980)
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-13 1938: Snow White sets box-office records as Great Depression lingers
3-20 1945: VE-Day, VJ-Day; atomic bombs dropped; older veterans return
8-25 1950: Korean War (1950-1953) starts; anti-Communist fear surges
12-29 1954: McCarthyism prompts student anxiety over "permanent records"
15-32 1957: Sputnik in orbit; rock and roll popular; "beat" movement peaks
19-36 1961: John Kennedy inaugurated, founds Peace Corps
21-38 1963: John Kennedy assassinated; The Feminine Mystique published
26-43 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy assassinated
27-44 1969: Armstrong lands on moon; Chappaquiddick; divorce epidemic begins
32-49 1974: Watergate scandal; "Watergate babies" elected to Congress
37-54 1979: Peak of Carter "malaise"; energy crisis; hostages taken in Iran
46-63 1988: "Seven Dwarf" candidates; Michael Dukakis loses to George Bush

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: The Other America (Michael Harrington);

Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth) ; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey); Unsafe at
Any Speed (Ralph Nader); Cosmos (TV series, Carl Sagan); Heartburn (Nora Ephron); Ms.
magazine (Gloria Steinem) ; Playboy magazine (Hugh Hefner) ; Future Shock (Alvin Toffler);
Megatrends (John Naisbitt); Fatherhood (Bill Cosby); Sesame Street (educational TV, Joan
Ganz Cooney)
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 281

soon." Or rwenty years too late . Admiral William Crowe calls his peers a
"transitional generation," Rose Franzblau a "Middle Generation," the one she
says is forever "betwixt and between." The Silent boundaries are fixed less by
what they did than by what those older and younger did-and what the Silent
themselves just missed . The first wave came of age just too late for war-era
heroism, but in time to encounter a powerful national consensus-against which
young rebels, like James Dean, found themselves "without a cause." The last
wave graduated from college just ahead of what Benita Eisler termed the "great
divide" before the fiery Boomer Class of 1965. Unlike the first Boomers, the
last of the Silent can remember World War II from their childhood, and many
of them look upon the Peace Corps as a generational bond in a way Boomers
never have. Sixteen percent of Harvard's Class of '64 joined the Peace Corps,
Harvard's top postgraduate destination for that year-whereas the next year's
graduates began criticizing the Peace Corps amid the early stirrings of the Boom' s
antiestablishment rebellion.
The Silent widely realize they are the generational stuffings of a sandwich
between the get-it-done G.I. and the self-absorbed Boom. Well into their rising
adulthood, they looked to G.I.s for role models-and pursued what then looked
to be a lifetime mission of refining and humanizing the G .1.-built world . Come
the mid- I 960s, the Silent found themselves "grown up just as the world's gone
teen-age'' (as Howard Junker put it at the time) and fell under the trance of their
free-spirited next-juniors , the Boomers . As songwriters, graduate students, and
young attorneys, they mentored the Boom Awakening, founding several of the
organizations of political dissent their next-juniors would radicalize. "During
the ferment of the 1960s, a period of the famous 'generation gap,' we occupied,
unnoticed as usual, the gap itself ," Wade Greene later recounted . "When nobody
over thirty was to be trusted , our age was thirty-something ." During the 1970s,
the sexual revolution hit the Silent when most of them \yere passing forty, decades
after their natural adolescence. Such awkward timing caused immense problems
in their family lives and transformed them, said Franzblau in 1971, into "a
generation of jealousies and role reversals.'' Through the 1970s, the Silent
completed the shift from an elder-focused rising adulthood to a youth-focused
midlife-feeling, as in the Dylan lyric, "Ah, but I was so much older then/I'm
younger than that now ." As women turned to feminism, men assembled a mix-
and-match masculinity out of fragments from G.I. and Boom.
The Silent lifecycle has been an outer blessing but inner curse. In Birth and
Fortune, demographer Richard Easterlin labeled his own peer group "the for-
tunate ones" whose relatively small size (per cohort) has supposedly given them
an edge on life. Yes, the Silent have enjoyed a lifetime of steadily rising affluence,
have suffered relatively few war casualties, and have shown the twentieth cen-
tury's lowest rates for almost every social pathology of youth (crime, suicide,
illegitimate births, and teen unemployment). Apart from a significant number
of divorced women who never remarried, the Silent lifecycle has been an escalator
282 GENERA TIO NS

of prosperity, offering the maximum reward for the minimum initiative. No other
living generation could half-believe in what Ellen Goodman terms "the Woody
Allen school of philosophy: 80 percent of life is showing up." But the outward
good fortune of their lifecycle has denied them a clear personal connection to
the banner headlines that they see, at times enviously, so well connected to
others. However much they try, the Silent have never succeeded in experiencing
the snap of catharsis felt by G.I.s or Roomers. Where the G.I.s did great things
and felt one with history, where Roomers found ravishment within themselves,
the Silent have taken great things for granted and looked beyond themselves-
while worrying that, somehow, the larger challenges of life are passing them
by. And so they have been keen on manufacturing points of lifecycle reference
around personal (rather than historical) markers . Whatever phase of life they
occupy is fraught with what various Silent authors have labeled "passages,"
"seasons," "turning points," or other transitions bearing little or no relation to
the larger flow of public events .
Well aware of their own deficiencies, the Silent have spent a lifetime plumbing
inner wellsprings older G.l.s seldom felt while maintaining a sense of social
obligation Roomers haven't shared. Their solutions-fairness, openness, due
process, expertise-reflect a lack of surefootedness, but also a keen sense of
how and why humans fall short of grand civic plans or ideal moral standards.
Silent appeals for change have seldom arisen from power or fury, but rather
through a self-conscious humanity and tender social conscience ("Deep in my
heart, I do believe I We shall overcome someday"). Lacking an independent
voice, they have adopted the moral relativism of the skilled arbitrator, mediating
arguments between others-and reaching out to people of all cultures, races,
ages, and handicaps. "We don't arrive with ready-made answers so much as a
honed capacity to ask and to listen," says Greene, touting his generation's ability
"to continue to bridge gaps, at a time of immense, extraordinarily complicated
and potentially divisive changes." The tensions the Silent have felt in adapting
to a G.1.-and-Boom-dominated society while preserving their own sensitivity
have helped them appreciate the crazy twists of life-and become America's
greatest generation of comedians, psychiatrists, and songwriters. Yet this very
malleability has left the Silent with badly checkered family lives. "If anything
has changed in the last generation," admits Ellen Goodman, "it is the erosion
of confidence" among parents "openly uncertain about how we are doing."
In Private Lives, Benita Eisler labels hers the generation with "a corpse in
the trunk'' -and the biggest of those corpses is the R-rated decade of the 1970s.
That era in which so much seemed to go wrong in America coincided precisely
with the Silent surge to influence over national life. In Future Shock, the book
that keynoted that decade, Alvin Toffler foresaw a forthcoming "historic crisis
of adaptation'' -and called for ''the moderation and regulation of change'' with
''exact scientific knowledge, expertly applied to the crucial, most sensitive points
of social control." But as Toffler's peers began applying this cult of expertise,
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 283

they encountered their turbulent passage to midlife-and what Toffler labeled

the "transience index" began exploding upward. As the Silent broke and remade
relationships, families splintered, substance abuse moved past euphoria to social
damage, and American society lost its G.1.-era sense of cohesion. As a generation
of Daniel Ellsbergs pushed to get secrets out (and take clothes off), their Phil
Donahues and Ted Koppels aimed microphones everywhere, hoping more dia-
logue would somehow build a better society. Meanwhile, productivity stagnated,
the economy sputtered, and the nation endured a series of global humiliations.
In Zero-Sum Society, Lester Thurow suggested that, increasingly, improvement
in the condition of any one group came at the expense of another. What Jerry
Brown called "the age of limits" became (in William Schneider's words) "the
Zeitgeist theme of his generation." By the time the 1970s ended, an elder G.I.
won the Presidency in part by ridiculing this midlife mind-set.
Even with Reagan at the helm, the America of the 1980s did in many ways
become a Silent-style Tofflerian "ad hocracy" stressing expertise over simplic-
ity, participation over authority, process over result. Corporations began directing
more attention to organization and financing than to the products they made.
Public over- and under-regulation became hot political issues, prompting Time
magazine to play off memories of G.I. muscle by making "The Can't Do
Government" the subject of a 1989 cover story. Where the word "liberal" had
once referred to a G.I.-style energizer with a constructive national agenda, its
meaning transformed into a Silent-style enervator attuned to multitudinous special
interests. (' 'Beware of liberals who came of age politically in the 1950s,'' warns
George Will.) Likewise, the definition of "conservative" evolved from a Lost-
style cautious stewardship to the faintly hip, high-rolling optimism of the Silent's
new supply-side school-which calls upon the nation to undergo the economic
equivalent of a liberating midlife passage, full of zest and swagger and dare. As
Mike Dukakis and Jack Kemp define these two new Silent credos in politics,
Alan Alda and Clint Eastwood (the latter dubbed by one reviewer the "supply-
side star") define them in popular culture . Neoliberal to Neoconservative, racial
quotas to Laffer curves, this generation lacks a cohesive core-and fears it may
be presiding over (in William Raspberry's words) "the unraveling of America."
In 1949, Fortune closed its report on the new crop of college graduates by
asking whether they will be "so tractable and harmonious as to be incapable,
twenty or thirty years hence, of making provocative decisions?" Today, forty
years have passed, and many have since rephrased that question in the present
tense . The nation still looks to what Greene terms '' fiftysomethings'' to comment
and mediate, but not to lead. Americans of all ages, Silent included , have
repeatedly turned back to G.I.s for a steady hand, and forward to Boomers for
new values. And so the Silent have arrived on the brink of elderhood-still
feeling "out of it," observes Benita Eisler, "sitting ducks for having our bluff
called.'' Although they continue to wait for a tum at the top, they notice how
younger leaders have appropriated their call to "conscience" and older leaders
284 GENERA TIO NS

their "kinder and gentler" rhetoric. Having given so much to others, the Silent
are beginning to wonder whether their own generation may yet have something
new to offer. Or whether instead their greatest contributions have already been
made.

Silent Facts

Born mostly during an era of depression and war, the Silent were the product
of a birthrate trough. They later became the only American generation to
have fewer members per cohort than both the generations born just before
it (G.I.) and just after it (Boom). During the 1930s, the U.S. population
grew by only 7 percent, the lowest decennial growth rate in American
history.
In economic terms, the Silent lifecycle has been a straight line from a cashless
childhood to the cusp of affluent elderhood-the smoothest and fastest-
rising path of any generation for which income data are available. In the
immediate postwar years, barely l percent of youths between 10 and 15
were in the labor force-the lowest child labor force participation rate of
the twentieth century. From age 20 to 40, Silent households showed this
century's steepest rise in real per capita income and per-household wealth.
The Silent were the earliest-marrying and earliest-babying generation in Amer-
ican history. Men married at an average age of 23, women at 20. The 1931-
1935 female cohorts were the most fertile of the twentieth century; 94 percent
of them became mothers, who bore an average of 3.3 children (versus 81
percent of G.I.s born a quarter century earlier, who bore an average of 2.3
children) . This was the only American generation whose college-educated
women were more fertile than those who did not complete secondary school.
While Silent men outpaced G.I.s in educational achievement, Silent women
showed no gain. Through the 1950s, new women entrants virtually dis-
appeared from fields like engineering and architecture, where G.I. women
had made important war-era advances at like age. Two decades later, Silent
women accounted for nearly all the nation's prominent feminists.
The late-twentieth-century "sexual revolution" and "divorce epidemic" have
affected the Silent more than any other generation. From the 1950s to the
1970s, they reported a larger age-bracket increase in their frequency of
sexual intercourse than any other generation . Similarly, Silent men and
women born between the mid- l 930s and early 1940s showed the biggest
age-bracket jump in the divorce rate. From 1969 through 1975, as the Silent
surged into state legislatures, the number of states with "no fault" divorce
laws jumped from zero to forty-five.
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 285

Silent professionals account for the 1960s surge in the " helping professions"
(teaching, medicine, ministry, government) and the 1970s explosion in
"public interest" advocacy groups. From 1969 to 1979, the number of
public interest law centers in America grew from 23 to 111; during the
1980s, only nine new centers were established . The era of Silent-dominated
juries ( 1972 through 1989) roughly coincided with the rise of huge damage
awards in personal injury cases.
The Silent Generation has produced virtually every major figure in the modem
civil rights movement-from the Little Rock children to the youths at the
Greensboro lunch counter, from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X,
from Cesar Chavez's farmworkers' union to Russell Means' American In-
dian Movement . By 1989, nineteen black Silent had been elected to Con-
gress, five more than among the three prior generations (Missionary, Lost,
G.I.) put together. Nine Silent Hispanics have so far become congressmen,
more than the combined number of all prior American generations.

In politics and business, the Silent have been a proven generation of bureau-
cratizers . Compared with the G.1.-dominated Congresses of the early 1960s,
Silent Congresses in the mid-l980s convened twice as many hearings,
debated for twice as many hours , hired four times as many staff, mailed
six times as many letters to constituents-and enacted one-third as many
laws. Eighty-four committees had oversight responsibility for HUD in the
years just prior to its scandal.

Opinion rules in Silent-led America. In the 1990 election, voters confronted

the largest number of citizen-initiated ballot measures since the Progressive-
Era election of 1914. (The California ballot alone had 28 initiatives, ac-
companied by a two-volume, 230-page voter ' s guide .) But if opinion rules,
the Silent hate to admit that any rule is final. From judicial appeals to NFL
instant replays, the 1980s marked an all-time high in institutionalized
second-guessing.
The Silent are virtually guaranteed of reaching 1993-sixty-eight years after
their first birthyear-without producing a President. That's twelve years
later than the average and seven years later than any other generation from
the Republicans on . This "I Go Pogo" generation has shown a lifelong
bipartisan attraction to Presidential underdogs. It gave Adlai Stevenson his
strongest generational percentage and supported the losing candidate in
every close modem election : Nixon over Kennedy, Humphrey over Nixon,
Ford over Carter.

The Silent are the only living generation whose members would rather be in
some age bracket other than the one they now occupy . A 1985 study found
the fiftyish Silent preferring "the twenties " over any other decade of life-
286 GENERATIONS

an age many feel they never really enjoyed the first time around . From the
early 1970s on, Silent entering midlife have fueled a booming market in
dietary aids, exercise classes, cosmetic surgery, hair replacements, relax-
ation therapies, and psychiatric treatments .

The Silent Lif ecycle

YOUTH: "Overprotective was a word first used to describe our parents,"

Benita Eisler recalls of her depression-era youth. The first American generation
to be born mainly in hospitals, Eisler' s peers grew up hearing stem warnings
not to "do that" or "eat this" or "go there" from midlife Lost adults who
regulated the child's world with the heaviest hand of the twentieth century. While
a child's fatal pony fall in Gone With the Wind reminded parents to keep a close
watch over their charges , Norman Rockwell depicted the enduring image of
Roosevelt's fourth freedom, " Freedom from Fear," by showing a sleeping child
lovingly guarded by mother and father. The leading parenting books suggested
"total situation" child care and other no-nonsense approaches, including Herman
Bundesen's strict feeding regimen and John 8 . Watson's behavioral rules that
critics likened to the housebreaking of puppies . Kids read stories about "Tootle"
(a little train that always stayed on the track) and Paddle to the Sea (a little boat
that reached its destination by floating safely with the current). At the movies,
they watched Spanky, Alfalfa , and the " Little Rascals" scrupulously mind their
manners whenever they encountered elders . As threats against the national com-
munity deepened, children were bluntly told that older generations were making
enormous sacrifices so they could grow up enjoying peace and prosperity . Family
survival took first priority and gave many kids a home life of limited cultural
experience, plus the fear that any day could bring devastating news-a layoff,
a foreclosed home, the combat death of a father. "As a young child," Frank
Conroy remembers asking "what was in the newspapers when there wasn't a
war going on."
In the years after VJ-Day, the Silent ''became teenagers when to be a teenager
was nothing, the lowest of the low," as Conroy put it. " Most of us kept quiet,
attempting not to call attention to ourselves ." Watching from the sidelines, they
saw the nation celebrate thirtyish war heroes and an indulged new generation of
postwar babies-and reaffirm a social order at once comfortable and imperme-
able. America offered young people peace and jobs, but put them in a social
and cultural no-man's-land . Their worst school discipline problems ranged from
gum chewing to cutting in line. In 1942, adolescent graffiti in New York City
was just about the tamest on record (" Nuts to all the boys on Second Avenue-
except between 68th and 69th Streets!"). The pressure to conform came more
from adults than from peers. Emulating older G.I.s, most teens became strictly
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 287

monogamous "steadies" -who then exchanged pins, got engaged, scheduled

"June bride" postgraduation weddings, and "tied the knot." ("It's too late
now, there's no turnin' back,/You fell in love, you're part of The Tender Trap.")
In an age when '' getting in trouble'' meant dropping out of high school to get
married, Silent "juvenile delinquents" were less kids who did something bad
than kids who did nothing, refusing to accept the confident promise of the postwar
era. Like Dion DiMucci's "Why must I be A Teenager in Love," popular teen
songs bespoke a self-pity, a yearning for "someone to tell my troubles to," a
fear of ''heartbreak.'' Amid this sentimentality, kids built human relations
skills-and felt useful enough to expect a nice personal harvest from the world
their elders had created .

COMING OF AGE: ''I hated the war ending,' ' Russell Baker later admitted,
acknowledging that the A-bomb may have saved his skin. "I wanted desperately
to become a death-dealing hero. I wanted the war to go on and on." While a
number of first-wave Silent served in World War II, few saw any action before
VJ-Day sent them home as might-have-beens rather than as heroes. Just as
Herbert T. Gillis lorded it over young Dobie (and Maynard G. Krebs, who ran
when he heard the word "work"), G.l.s and Silent knew who had fought "the
big one" and who hadn't. After Hiroshima, they also knew who had built "the
big one" and who hadn't. Several years later, the Silent had their own war to
fight in Korea, but their most memorable troop movements were retreats rather
than advances . Where George Bush's peers had conquered large portions of
Europe, Africa, and the Pacific, Mike Dukakis' fought to a tie on one small
peninsula. Through the late 1940s, meanwhile, young college freshmen found
G.l. veterans everywhere, running the clubs, getting more financial aid (and,
by most accounts, better grades), and the pick among marriageable women . The
first Silent TV stars were goofballs (Jerry Lewis) or daffy sweethearts (Debbie
Reynolds) cast alongside confident G.I . "straight men ." As young women
watched Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Bouvier abandon their careers for life with
an older prince, their male peers watched the reputations and careers of prewar
G.I . leftists getting chewed to pieces by Nixon and McCarthy. Youths of both
sexes avoided the unorthodox and safeguarded their "permanent records" by
applying the motto "Don't say, don't write, don't join ."
Postwar Silent youths came of age feeling an inner-world tension amid the
outer-world calm-not growing up angry (explained the older Paul Goodman),
just Growing up Absurd. Older generations didn't expect them to achieve any-
thing great, just to calibrate, to become expert at what G.I. economist Walter
Heller called "fine tuning" of the hydraulic G .I. wealth machine. Young adults
in the 1950s, recalls Manchester , were "content to tinker with techniques and
technicalities" and believed that "progress lay in something called problem-
solving meetings." The aspiring youth elite compensated for their lack of ag-
288 GENERA TIO NS

gressiveness with a budding intellectualism. In 1951, William Buckley's God

and Man at Yale sounded the first erudite challenge against G.l. secularism . In
1955, the "Beat Generation" drew first notice , wrote Bruce Cook, at "that
famous reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco when Allen Ginsberg first
proclaimed 'Howl' to an astonished, wine-bibbing multitude." As self-pro-
claimed "nonconformists" led a " bohemian " coffeehouse cult, goateed 20-
year-olds sampled foreign cuisines, listened to "offbeat" music, read "hip"
poetry, told "sick" jokes, and lampooned the G.l. " Squaresville." In 1958,
the G.l. Herb Caen tagged them "beatniks." If the Silent couldn't match Caen's
peers in power and virility, then they 'd be William Gaines' Alfred E. Neuman.
"What, me worry?" You bet they worried-and came of age, like Elvis, All
Shook Up ("Well, bless my soul, what's wrong with me,/ I'm itchin' like a
man on a fuzzy tree"). As they danced to their new rock and roll, Silent youths
put up false fronts and used early marriage as a fortress against adult doubts
about their maturity . Making babies quickly and frequently, millions of young
householders merged unnoticeably into suburban G.l. culture.

RISING ADULTHOOD: In Passages, Gail Sheehy refers to the 20-to-30

age bracket as the Silent lifecycle 's "transient decade " -a time when her peers
felt a need to build the firm, safe "merger self" while exploring a more ad-
venturesome "seeker self ." Thirtyish adults sensed that although G .Ls had the
power, they brought compassion and refinement to an age short on both . Starting
with the Soviets' 1957 Sputnik space shot, they started questioning American
exceptionalism . "Hip" ways of thinking moved beyond coffeehouses into the
suburbs with a new style John Updike called "half Door Store, half Design
Research .' ' Rising theologians challenged the Catholic orthodoxy in Daniel Cal-
lahan's " Generation of the Third Eye" (which "looks constantly into itself,"
and from which "nothing, or almost nothing, is safe from scrutiny"). As Updike
and Philip Roth wrote risque novels with self-doubting heroes, Tom Lehrer and
Stan Freberg brought sophistication to satire, and Andy Warhol found "art" in
the G.I . soup-can culture. New musical strains slyly shocked elders (Ray Charles '
What'd I Say?) while reflecting an appetite for "crossover" pluralism.
This other-directedness gradually asserted itself in the modern civil rights
movement. Led by the young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Silent "agi-
tators" adhered to a rule of nonviolence and appealed to the G.l.s' sense of
fairness . In I 962, when Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby, and other Silent founded
the Students for a Democratic Society-a vehicle for campus dissent yet to be
radicalized by Boomers-they affirmed that "in social change, or interchange,
we find violence to be abhorrent.' ' From Michael Harrington's The Other Amer-
ica to Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom, rising authors probed flaws
in the G .1.-built order. At the "right wing" of the spectrum, "Young Americans
for Freedom" challenged the big-government centrism personified by the G.I.
Nelson Rockefeller. Whatever their politics, the rising Silent differed from
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 289

Boomers in their implicit acceptance of the permanence of G. I. institutions

(booing Rockefeller from inside the arena-not outside, as at Chicago). So too
did the Silent acknowledge the greater strength of those next-elders. Peter, Paul,
and Mary sang "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer out justice," as if to admit the
G.l.s had the hammers-and were busy hammering out interstate highways and
ballistic missiles. And cars, those G.l.-friendly machines that Ralph Nader de-
clared Unsafe at Any Speed, having brought "death, injury, and the most ines-
timable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people."
Among the rising elite, young specialists lent their compliant expertise to the
institutional order. With Pierre Salinger and Bill Moyers advising G.l. Presidents,
legions of jobs opened up in public service. A budding intelligentsia lingered in
universities, shepherding creative young Boomers. Silent athletes manned the
last clean-cut sports dynasties (Yankees, Packers, Celtics) and provided the
lonely precursors of athletes' rights (Curt Flood, John Mackey). In business, a
wave of smart, trainable entry-level workers helped set records for growth and
productivity. What Silent workers put in, they got back. Whatever their profes-
sional field-management, law, civil service, or teaching-Silent men could
count on acquiring a house and car, and on raising a family comfortably. Silent
women, however, began to resent being trapped at home, and Silent men prepared
to break free of a claustrophobia they knew their elders had never felt. Noted
William Styron as early as 1968: ''I think that the best of my generation-those
in their late thirties or early forties-have reversed the customary rules of the
game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older-a disconcerting
but healthy sign."

MIDLIFE: It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty. So read the cover of 37-year-
old Judith Viorst's 1968 poetry volume-and, in fact, the phrase "never trust
anyone over thirty" was coined by a Berkeley postgraduate, Jack Weinberg,
himself approaching that age at a time when the Silent came to notice, envy,
emulate, and occasionally steer the passions of coming-of-age Boomers. While
still craving respect from G. I. elders for their manliness and seriousness of
purpose, the Silent were eager to convince Boomers that they understood them,
were with them, and could maybe help them channel their anger. Stokely Car-
michael and the memory of the assassinated Malcolm X radicalized the black
Silent message to suit young Boomers with more of an instinct for violence.
From the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon to the psychedelic art of Peter
Max and the Motown sound of Berry Gordy, Silent performers and artists gave
expression to youth. A young attorney, Sam Yasgur, first coaxed his dad to
allow use of his pasture and then handled the details of what Sam expected
would be a mannerly festival at Woodstock. As last-wavers like Abbie Hoffman
and Jerry Rubin became the pied pipers of revolt ("We knew we couldn't get
Archie Bunker, so we went for Archie Bunker's kids," Hoffman said later),
first-wavers began lamenting their own missed opportunities in youth, rethinking
290 GENERATIO NS

their capitulation to G.I. culture, and becoming the prototype of what G.I. Spiro
Agnew derided as "vicars of vacillation" and "nattering nabobs of negativism."
Over a two-month span in 1968, the Silent grieved over the killings of two men
whom many Silent today still consider their most gifted leaders-Robert Ken-
nedy (then 43) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (39). A year later, the other Silent
heir to the Kennedy mystique fell prey to a deadly extramarital entanglement on
Chappaquiddick Island-a symptom of his peers' turbulent passage to midlife.
Having trouble meeting the power standard of next-elders or the ethical stan-
dard of next-juniors, Silent men built a composite definition of masculinity . Self-
styled "liberated" males put their families at risk by pursuing what John Updike
called the "Post-Pill Paradise" and by succumbing to what Barbara Gordon
called "Jennifer Fever" (a fascination for free-spirited younger women). Midlife
impresarios flaunted Boom erotica in Playboy clubs, R-rated movies, and 0
Calcutta stage productions. At one end of the Silent male spectrum lay those
who combined the softer features of their generational neighbors: a confident
and gentle Merlin Olsen offering floral bouquets, or a rational and sensitive Carl
Sagan trying to communicate with extraterrestrials . At the other end lay the
reverse mix: Chuck Norris or Clint Eastwood combining G.I. machismo with
"Make my day" Boom judgmentalism . Staring at the two ends from a muddled
in-between sat the Woody Allens, torn between the available choices-like one
of Gail Sheehy's peers who wished "somebody would let me be what I am,
tender sometimes, and a dependent, too, but also vain and greedy and jealous
and competitive.'' Others became outspoken, out-of-the-closet gays (Harvey
Milk, Barney Frank), even transvestites (Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards).
A female generation nearly all of whom had married young now insisted on
being called Gloria Steinem's status-cloaking "Ms .," as their vanguard attacked
"man the oppressor" (Kate Millett) for being a "natural predator" (Susan
Brownmiller) driven by "metaphysical cannibalism" (Ti-Grace Atkinson). For-
tyish women and men asked what Eisler termed ''the question that signals the
end of every marriage: 'Is this all there is?' " While all generations joined
the divorce epidemic, the Silent were by far the most likely to have children in
the household-leaving them with the greatest residue of guilt.

APPROACHINGELDERHOOD: In his 1980 book The Changing of the

Guard, David Broder confidently proclaimed that "America is changing hands"
and predicted that what he has more recently called the "Fit Fifties Generation"
would soon break out from under the G. I. shadow and attain national leadership.
That didn't happen. By the late 1980s, people of all ages still looked to aging
G .l.s for leadership and, increasingly, to Boomers for cultural direction. One
Silent candidate after another fell prey to a combination of dullness, a media-
coined "stature gap," and that generational bugaboo, the "character issue."
Two decades earlier, young Silent reporters were neither willing nor able to
torpedo G.I. candidates the way the mostly Boom press did the midlife Silent
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 291

over issues like adultery (Gary Hart), plagiarism (Joe Biden), issue flipflops
(Richard Gephardt), misbehavior of family members (Geraldine Ferraro), or
technobabble (Michael Dukakis) . In 1988, Gary Hart proudly termed his like-
aged candidates a "generational revolution." Reagan referred to them as "kids,"
the press as "the seven dwarfs" -and, yet again, the Silent nominee fell to a
G .I. who warned against "the technocrat who makes the gears mesh but doesn't
understand the magic of the machine.'' ''If you understand the Silent Generation,
you understand Mike Dukakis, ' ' quipped one biographer of the governor whose
very nickname-"Duke"-reminded voters how unWaynelike (and un-G .I.-
like) he was.
As rising adults, the Silent once gazed up at midlife G.I.s they then called
''the establishment.' Through the 1980s they have come to recognize that
they are the establishment, at least on their resumes-but, somehow, the faces
they see in the mirror or meet at lunch don't exude the powerful confidence they
remember of G.I.s . Peering down the age ladder has only added to their feelings
of power inadequacy. What especially "chills the blood" of professed liberals
like Senator Moynihan is the recollection that in their youth, "the old bastards
were the conservatives. Now the young people are becoming the conservatives
and we are the old bastards .'' Liberal or not, the grown-up Lonely Crowd persists
in its plasticity-at times yielding to Boomer passions, other times heartily
endorsing whatever the system chums out-be it affirmative action, the free
market, an incentive tax rate, a UN resolution, or the compromise verdict of
some expert panel. On both sides of the political spectrum, the Silent would
much prefer to discuss processes than outcomes .
In their hands, America has grown more accustomed to deferring or learning
to live with problems than to taking aggressive steps to solve them. Thanks to
the size and complexity of the U.S . economy, tenured professors foresee at worst
a slow parabola of national descent while Brookings' Henry Aaron remains
confident that " the nation can muddle through without absolute decline."
Congressional leaders set priorities through decision-avoidance mechanisms like
the Gramm-Rudman Act (or its sequel, "Gramm-Rudman III"). The foreign
policy trend-setters lean toward James Baker-style multilateralism and a defer-
ence to international law, what Joseph Nye has called "soft power, the complex
machinery of interdependence .'' Industrialists have been replaced by technocrats
who manage "M-Form" corporations , financial holding companies long on
flexibility and short on product identity. Businesses run "cultural audits" of
their employees, Ben Wattenberg's "Gross National Spirit" index charts the
nation's feelings, and John Naisbitt heralds such "Megatrends" as an "Infor-
mation Age" of "high-tech / high-touch." Endowed foundations tum their at-
tention to every new personal injustice. Oil companies portray themselves as
nice guys, eager to placate their most hostile critics. A Silent-dominated Judiciary
Committee rejects a like-aged Supreme Court nominee (Bork) for being too
abrasive, while embracing another (Souter) for promising that personal opinions
292 GENERA TIO NS

would "play absolutely no role" in his rulings on abortion. The Census Bureau
checks bridges and sewers to see that every American is counted, while leaders
of industry put up little resistance to a costly new Jaw requiring them to retrofit
for the handicapped. Under the Silent elite, America has become a kinder, more
communicative place. It has also become culturally fragmented and less globally
competitive.
Today's 50- and 60-year-olds have been Jess successful in forging a sense of
national or personal direction than any generation in living memory. Like Robert
Bellah in Habits of the Heart, many Silent feel disquieted by the lack of con-
nectedness they see in American life. While Kevin Phillips describes an America
shadowed by an "End of Empire frustration" and Barbara Ehrenreich a white-
collar workforce haunted by a "fear of falling," Jack Kemp foresees exhilarating
prosperity and George Gilder "a global community of commerce .. . a global
ganglion of electronic and photonic media that leaves all history in its wake.''
What mostly emerges is fuss and detail, a world view of such enormous com-
plexity that their own contributions often tum out (as one technician described
the Hubble telescope mirror) "perfect but wrong." Sensing this, they feel-
deep down-a wounded collective ego. Having grown up playing the child's
game of Sorry, the Silent cannot abandon what Sheehy calls their ''resignation,''
a vague dissatisfaction with jobs, families, their children, themselves. Ap-
proaching their own old age, many still find themselves emotionally obliged to
surviving parents and financially obliged to struggling children in what Robert
Grossman terms "Parenthood II." Many are opting for early-retirement pension
bonanzas that the nation can currently afford simply because (as Easterlin ac-
curately predicted) their generation is relatively small in numbers . Most aging
Silent find themselves wealthier, but more confused as to purpose, than they
ever imagined they would be at this phase of life. As Toffler suggests in
PowerShift-and Tom Peters in Thriving on Chaos-they sense that the pace of
social and economic change has accelerated beyond anyone's ability to control
it. The best Americans can do, suggests Toffler, is to run faster themselves. The
peers of Gail Sheehy are thus encountering a new mid-fifties "passage" that
Daniel Levinson describes as "a silent despair, a pressing fear of becoming
irrelevant." Many also feel that endearing if paralyzing quality Ellen Goodman
saw in Pat Schroeder's brief run for the Presidency: "a desire to make it to the
top" with "a deep concern about how you make it."
Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grandmother, observes the title of Lois Wyse's
1990 book, targeted at Silent first-wavers who are beginning to transform eld-
erhood around a decidedly un-G.I.-like other-directedness . Travel agents report
a new boom business in "grandtravel" (grandparent-grandchild trips) and new
interest in "Elderhostels" reminiscent of the way the Silent toured Europe as
youths. Self-styled "kids over 60" have formed a "SeniorNet" computer net-
work. In 1989, affluent mid-sixtyish Social Security beneficiaries formed a "21st
Century Club" whose members will assign their checks to a philanthropic trust
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE 293

fund. The Silent-led Virginia state legislature recently raised revenues by limiting
tax breaks for Silent (but not G.I.) retirees. And Ralph Nader is mobilizing
"Princeton Project '55" around the "suppressed crusades among the class-
mates," many of whom have become financially successful beyond their col-
legiate imaginings, but who share an eagerness to join Nader in attacking
"systemic social problems." Their agenda remains large. In 1986, the Union
of International Associations catalogued I0,000 world problems awaiting solu-
tion-and the Silent Generation is running out of time.
* * *
Nearly four decades after the Korean War, no national memorial exists for
its veterans, prompting one fund-raiser to complain how they were being treated
"as if they have never lived, never ennobled their time and place, never con-
tributed to destiny .'' Though their own generation is an easy touch for other
people's charities, Silent veterans have been slow to assemble funds to build
this one commemoration to themselves. Their memorial, if it is built, will have
no Iwo Jima giants doing great deeds, nor will it make any moral statement like
the dark walls of the Vietnam Memorial. Instead, it will depict thirty-eight life-
size soldiers in two slightly crooked columns, walking through a forest to nowhere
in particular.
''The Silent Generation Is Clearing Its Throat,'' proclaimed Florida newspaper
editor Tom Kelly as the I 990s dawned. "All together now, let's hear it (softly,
please, but with feeling) for the Silent Generation , those overridiculed and un-
derappreciated people.'' This modesty is disarming in a generation two of whose
members (Neil Armstrong and Martin Luther King, Jr .) will likely remain, in
some distant epoch, among the most celebrated Americans. The peers of Arm-
strong and King may someday be credited as the generation that opened up the
dusty closets of contemporary history, diversified the culture, made democracy
work for the disadvantaged, and-as one friend eulogized of Jim Henson-
struck a Muppet-like balance "between the sacred and the silly." Above all,
the generation that took America from grinding bulldozers to user-friendly com-
puters, from the circa-1960 "Nuclear Age" into the circa-1990 "Information
Age,'' has excelled at personal communication. The Silent have constantly tried,
and often succeeded, in defusing conflict by encouraging people to talk to each
other-from therapeutic T-groups on family problems to Nightline-style "global
town meetings" on issues of major importance . They have thus lent flexibility
to a G .1.-built world that otherwise might have split to pieces under Boom
attack-and have helped mollify, and ultimately cool, the Boom's coming-of-
age passions . Indeed , the Silent have been pathbreakers for much of the I 960s-
era "consciousness" (from music to film, civil rights to Vietnam resistance) for
which Boomers too often claim credit. From youth forward, this most considerate
of living generations has specialized not in grand constructions or lofty ideals,
but rather in people, life-size people like the statues planned for the Korean War
Memorial. Barbra Streisand's agemates would like to believe that "people who
294 GENERA TIO NS

need people are the luckiest people in the world." But, true to form, they have
their doubts .
Much of this doubt might be resolved if America can someday inaugurate
just one President who wore that 1950s-era ducktail or ponytail, who served in
the Peace Corps, who maybe spent a summer with SNCC in Mississippi, and
who cried as only 30-year-olds did when Martin and Bobby died . In 1990, when
the mostly Silent U.S. Congress wildly cheered the Czech playwright-dissident-
President Vaclav Havel, many were no doubt recalling those old coffeehouse
days and thinking: Here is exactly the sort of avant-garde President we thought
we'd someday give the world. Until they do, the story of their own generation
will read, to them, like the middle pages of a book written mainly about somebody
else.
 Chapter 11
THE MILLENNIAL
CYCLE

"S uddenly the Woodstock generation was not wonderfully young, but won-
derfully old, somehow, full of wisdom, a kind of Druidic savvy signaled by
long hair, walking staffs and face paint accompanied by the thousand-yard squint
they'd get after smoking marijuana." So wrote the Washington Post's Henry
Allen, in one of the many 1989 retrospectives marking the twentieth anniversary
of the Woodstock Arts and Music Fair at Bethel, New York. Back in mid-August
of 1969, Woodstock had been the largest civilian generational gathering in
American history. As a smattering of celebrants returned to the historic marker
(dubbed "The Tomb of the Unknown Hippie") on Max Yasgur's field, the
Boomer-dominated media published scores of commemoratives to take stock of
the prior two decades. Twenty years had passed since the late-1960s days of
"generational consciousness" -roughly the span of another generation. Jour-
nalists fixa~edon aging radicals like 45-year-old Grace Slick (whose old Jefferson
Airplane slogan "Feed your head" she now reinterpreted to mean "Go home
and read a book") and 42-year-old Ario Guthrie (" Everybody wears suits more
than I thought they would, but that's cosmetic"). But with the passing of two
decades, Woodstock had already left a legacy for the first three of what history
suggests will be a four-generation MILLENNIAL Cycle:

Grace Slick's self-absorbed BOOM GENERATION (Idealist, then age 29 to

46) included the overwhelming majority of the 400,000 youths in their late
296 GENERATIONS

teens and twenties who had attended the original event, plus uncounted
millions of others who had partaken in the festivals, be-ins, teach-ins,
strikes, and assorted other youth gatherings of the Woodstock era. Other
notable events of the Boomer coming-of-age years-the Chicago convention
riot, People's Park, Altamont, Kent State-had been deadlier and were
remembered more soberly, if at all. By now, Boomers were busy trying to
keep their own children from replaying their own youthful exuberances.
Where the original (Silent) production of Hair had stripped a Boomer cast
of clothes, a twentieth-anniversary (Boom) reissue stripped the musical of
offensive lyrics, turning a song entitled "Sodomy" into a saxophone solo.
Boomers remained just as ethics-absorbed as always, but Woodstock's
"New Age" heirs now had to share the generational spotlight with their
slightly younger evangelical peers, who had glimpsed the original rock
concert as grade school or high school students.
Wherever Boomers rented old Woodstock videos to celebrate the occasion,
the punkish part-timers behind the checkout counter probably belonged to
the THIRTEENTH GENERATION (Reactive, age 8 to 28). For the most
part, these $6-an-hour youths kept their mouths shut while overhearing 40-
year-olds revel in their culture and exude an air of having defined forever
what every person should be around age 20. To these kids, rehashing
Woodstock was a waste of time: Just look at the mess it left behind-for
example, the drug-related deaths of seven festival performers (and who
knows how many thousands of participants) over the ensuing two decades.
But, never having known anything remotely like Woodstock themselves,
they were also aware of the possible Boomer comeback: Okay, so what did
you guys ever do together-invade Grenada? Go wilding? Watch the Chal-
lenger explosion? And they wondered themselves. A few 13ers revealed a
rising alienation in their letter-to-the-editor reactions to Boomer commem-
oratives: like John Cunningham, whose attitude was "Woodstock-blech,"
and Jeffrey Hoogeveen, who pointedly told Boomers "the Sixties are his-
tory-history that the rest of us don't need repeated and crammed down
our throats." Hoogeveen's peers had been the forgotten toddlers of the
Woodstock era, kids who by now were old enough to check out such hippie-
ish videos as Easy Rider and Hair-and who, like The Wonder Years'
Olivia D' Abo, knew how to imitate or avoid Boomerisms, whichever came
in handy.
Back in 1969, Boomer festivals had celebrated themselves; twenty years later,
their midsummer outings invariably featured the budding-MILLENNIAL
GENERATION (Civic, age 7 and under). Where many a Boomer had
hitchhiked to Woodstock, taking rides from goodness knows whom and
ingesting goodness knows what when they got there (no doubt feeding a
few l 3er babies some mind-expanding leftovers), their tots traveled there
 >-1
::I:
FIGURE 11-1 m
~
Millennial Cycle: Age Location in History
F
r
SECULAR SPIRITUAL m
z
CRISIS AWAKENING z
age 88 s;:
r
(")
ELDERHOOD: -<
(")
r
age66 m
MIDLIFE
ADULT:

age44
RISING
ADULT:

age 22

YOUTH:

age 0
1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100

Depression, Boom
World Awakening
War II
298 GENERATIONS

in 1989 strapped into super-safe infant car seats and munching the most
wholesome snacks their parents could buy. Already, parents deemed these
children special, worth protecting . The eldest had just finished first grade,
exposed at home and school to a values-laced list of dos and don 'ts unlike
anything most l 3ers had ever heard . Parents and teachers were carefully
recrafting the child's world so this next generation would never go near the
dangerous drugs-and-sex environment of the 1970s. Watching those hard-
bitten kids behind the video checkout counter, Boom parents redoubled their
conviction that their younger tots must never be allowed to grow up like
that. No, when these children became old enough to hold summer jobs,
they would work in libraries, plant trees, or do something else useful for
the community.

Boomers, l 3ers, and Millennials are just now beginning to build a generational
drama that will continue to unwind for decades to come. To date, this has been
a cycle of relative peace and affluence, mixed with growing individualism,
cultural fragmentation, moral zealotry , and a sense of political drift and insti-
tutional failure . That is to be expected. A sense that the public world is spinning
slowly "out of control" is normal for a society moving from an Awakening to
an Inner-Driven era .
The Millennial Cycle has completed one exuberant and occasionally violent
spiritual awakening , but has yet to encounter a secular crisis. It thus contains
just one social moment to date:

The Boom Awakening (1967-1980) , best known as the modem "Consciousness

Revolution," is what William McLaughlin calls America's "Fourth Awak-
ening." It began in earnest in 1967 with the "Vietnam Summer," inner-
city riots, the San Francisco "Summer of Love," and counterculture
euphoria . It peaked in 1970, with the Kent State and Jackson State violence,
the first "Earth Day," and the "Days of Rage" on university campuses.
Throughout the 1970s, it spread under the rubric of the human potential
movement, the "Aquarian Conspiracy," a "New Age" transformation of
manners, families, lifestyles, and values, and the rise of "Jesus people"
and resurgent evangelism. The awakening ebbed sharply in the late 1970s
with the growing social and economic pessimism that Boomer Patrick Cad-
dell labeled "malaise," and it ended altogether in 1980-as rates of crime
and substance abuse among coming-of-age Americans were reaching their
postwar peak. Reagan's election (and his endorsement by the Boom) marked
the acceptance of rising-adult social roles by a no-longer-youthful cadre of
1960s kids . AGE LOCATION: G.l .s in elderhood; Silent in midlife; Boomers
in rising adulthood; 13ers in youth .
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 299

BOOM GENERATION

Born: 1943-1960
Type: Idealist

Age Location:
Boom Awakening in rising adulthood

"Anarchist heaven on earth." "Redemption worth fighting for." That's

how Todd Gitlin described People's Park-an oblong three-acre patch that Cal-
Berkeley's G .I. regents cleared in 1969 so they could put up a new student
facility. The kids wanted to keep it a mixture of garden and hangout, a shrine
to their budding consciousness. In the ensuing melee, the regents won the battle,
but the young rioters won the war. Nothing was built. A year earlier, Columbia
students had rebelled against a similar plan to erect a big gymnasium. There
too, nothing was built. "You build it up, mother, we gonna tear it down," was
Jacob Brackman's motto for his BOOM GENERATION, then triggering Amer-
ica's most furious and violent youth upheaval of the twentieth century. After
noticing the powerful inner life underlying the youth anger at Harvard, Erik
Erikson remarked that he saw ''more of a search for resacralization in the younger
than in the older generation." Afterward, to the surprise of many, the Boomer
rage cooled. By the mid-l980s, People's Park had become infested with crime
and social debris-while a nearby bakery sold $15 tarts iced with the message
''Victory to the Sandinistas.'' The generation that came of age, like Brackman,
deriding ' 'banality, irrelevance, and all the uglinesses which conspire to dwarf
or extinguish the human personality,'' seemingly lay exposed (in Gitlin 'swords)
as having gone '' from J' accuse to Jacuzzi .'' In 1989, Berkeley's fortyish home-
owners began forming neighborhood associations for the purpose of pushing
"alcoholics, drug dealers, and wing nuts" out of their parks and out of their
lives. Now, it appears, this generation is going from Jacuzzi to cold shower.
As Boomers have charted their life's voyage, they have metamorphosed from
Beaver Cleaver to hippie to braneater to yuppie to what some are calling "Neo-
Puritan" in a manner quite unlike what anyone, themselves included, ever ex-
pected. As The Who and countless others have been unceasingly (and, to some
ears, annoyingly) "talkin' 'bout my generation," the Boom has outlived any
number of temporary labels: the "Dr. Spock," "Pepsi," "Rock," "Now,"
"Sixties," "Love," "Protest," "Woodstock," "Vietnam," "Me," "Big
Chill," "Yuppie," and "Post-Yuppie" Generation . Boomers were blessed from
the beginning with what their chronicler Landon Jones described as ''Great
Expectations." Their G.I. parents fully expected them to grow up (in William
 BOOM GENERATION (Born 1943 to 1960)

TYPE: Idealist FAMILY TREE

Total number: 79,000,000 Typical grandparents: Lost
Now alive in U.S .: 69,000,000 Parents: G.I. and Silent
Percent immigrant: 10% Children: Thirteenth and Millennial
Typical grandchildren: (new Adaptive)

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) FUTURE PERIOD OF

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1943 Oliver North
1943 Janis Joplin (1970) Plurality in Congress: 1995-2015 (proj.)
1943 Joe Namath Term in White House: 2000-2020 (proj.)
1944 Angela Davis Majority of Supreme Court: 2010-2030
1945 Steve Martin (proj.)
1946 David Stockman
1946 Donald Trump U.S. PRESIDENTS: None
1946 Gilda Radner (1989)
1947 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar POLITICAL LEADERS
1947 Mark Rudd
1943 Bill Bradley
1947 David Letterman
1943 William Bennett
1948 Jerry Mathers ( "the Beaver")
1943 Newt Gingrich
1950 Jane Pauley
1947 Dan Quayle
1951 Lee Atwater
1948 Albert Gore, Jr.
1954 Oprah Winfrey
1954 Patty Hearst
PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1955 Steven Jobs
1955 William Gates 1943 Lech Walesa
1957 Spike Lee 1943 Mick Jagger
1959 John McEnroe 1945 Daniel Ortega
1948 Prince Charles
1953 Benazir Bhutto

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0- 3 1946: Spock publishes baby-care book; start of postwar "baby boom"
0- 6 1949: TV age begins; I million sets in U.S .
0-11 1954: Polio vaccine discovered; Brown school desegregation decision
0-14 1957: Sputnik in orbit; science education becomes a national priority
4-21 1964: Free Speech Movement at Berkeley ; Vietnam War (1964-1973) starts
7-24 1967: Vietnam Summer; Summer of Love; race riots in over one hundred cities
9-26 1969: Student strikes; Apollo moon landing; Woodstock festival
10-27 1970: Kent State and Jackson State massacres; "Days of Rage"; Earth Day
12-29 1972: McGovern tries to rally youth vote and loses badly; draft ends
14-31 1974: Woodward and Bernstein help topple Nixon in Watergate scandal
21-38 1981: Start of Reagan era; first use of word "yuppie"
28-45 1988: Al Gore runs for President; Dan Quayle elected Vice President

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS: Doonesbury (comic, Garry Trudeau); All the

President's Men (Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein); The Fate of the Earth (Jonathan Schell);
The Color Purple (Alice Walker); Cathy (comic, Cathy Guisewite); American Pie (song, Don
McLean); Saturday Night Live (TV show); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film, Steven
Spielberg); Strawberry Statement (James Kunen); Green Rage (Christopher Manes); Vietnam
Veterans Memorial (Maya Lin); Do the Right Thing (film, Spike Lee)
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 301

Manchester's words) '' adorable as babies, cute as grade school pupils and striking
as they entered their teens," after which "their parents would be very, very
proud of them.'' In 1965, Time magazine declared teenagers to be ''on the fringe
of a golden era"-and two years later described collegians as cheerful builders
who would "lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped
world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war." Hardly. As those sunny
prophecies collapsed, one by one, Boomers next heard themselves collectively
touted as a surly political powerhouse, easily capable of sweeping candidates of
their choice to the White House. Not so. Starting with George McGovern in
1972, the Boom has played the role of political siren-first tempting candidates,
then luring them to their demise . Meanwhile, the Silent demographer Richard
Easterlin predicted that the Boom would feel a lifelong "inadequacy" because
of a numbers-fueled peer-on-peer competition. Wrong again. Even if many
Boomers have felt pinched by the real estate and job markets, no twentieth-
century generation has looked within and seen less "inadequacy" than the smug
Boom.
In Do You Believe in Magic?, Annie Gottlieb declared the Boom "a tribe
with its roots in a time, rather than place or race." First wave or last, Boomers
recall that "time" as the 1960s, a decade they remember more fondly than other
generations. Their eighteen years of birth began (in 1943) with the first real
evidence that G.I. optimism would be rewarded with victory and ended (in 1960)
with the first election of a G.I. President. Unlike the Silent, Boomers lack any
childhood recollection of World War II. Unlike 13ers, they were all reaching
adolescence or lingering in "post-adolescence" (a term coined for them) before
the Vietnam War drew to a close. Their first cohort, the 1943 "victory babies,"
have thus far ranked among the most self-absorbed in American history; their
last cohorts are remembered by college faculties as the last (pre-Reagan-era)
students to show Boomish streaks of intellectual arrogance and social immaturity.
The Boom birthyears precede the demographic "baby boom" by three years at
the front edge, four at the back. "I think you could take the baby boom back a
few years," agrees Boom pollster Patrick Caddell, noting how those born in the
early 1960s "have had different experiences, and their attitudes don't really fit
in with those of the baby boomers."
From VJ-Day forward, whatever age bracket Boomers have occupied has
been the cultural and spiritual focal point for American society as a whole.
Through their childhood, America was child-obsessed; in their youth, youth-
obsessed; in their "yuppie" phase, yuppie-obsessed. Always, the Boom has
been not just a new generation, but what Brackman has termed "a new notion
of generation with new notions of its imperatives." Arriving as the inheritors
of G.I. triumph, Boomers have always seen their mission not as constructing a
society, but of justifying, purifying, even sanctifying it. Where the Missionaries
had made G.l.s learn the basics, the G.l.s taught Boomers critical thinking.
Kenneth Keniston noted how, even in early childhood, Boomers showed an
302 GENERA TIO NS

"orientation to principle." Coming of age, they applied their critical thinking-

and new principles-back against the very scientism under which they had been
raised. ("We are Bomb Babies," declared 23-year-old Ronald Allison in 1967.
"We grew up with fallout in our milk.") Launching the modem "Consciousness
Revolution," Boomers found their parents' world in need of a major spiritual
overhaul, even of creative destruction . In 1968, a Radcliffe senior declared in
her class's commencement prayer: "We do not feel like a cool, swinging gen-
eration-we are eaten up by an intensity that we cannot name.'' In 1980, a
dramatic twelve-point October shift among Boom voters turned a slim Reagan
lead into a landslide. During the intervening years, Boomers led America through
an era of inner fervor unlike any seen since the 1890s.
This Consciousness Revolution was waged across a generation gap between
Boomers and G .I.s. It began within families, as a revolt against fathers. Most
older Americans who studied young radicals in the late 1960s were struck by
their attachment to mothers and their "ambivalence" (Keniston), "oedipal re-
bellion" (Malcolm), or attitude of "parricide" (Feuer) toward male authority.
Youth fury over Vietnam helped spread this patriphobia beyond the family .
Many of the most memorable youth symbols of that era were direct affronts
against the constructions of G.I. men-from the fury over napalm (whose fore-
runner, the flamethrower, had enabled G.l.s to overrun enemy pillboxes) and
the two-fingered peace taunt (adapted from the old G.I. V-for-victory) to the
defiant wearing of khaki (the G.I. color of uniformed teamwork) and the des-
ecration of that very symbol of civic loyalty, the American flag. Several of the
most celebrated youth uproars of 1969-197 l had a decided anti-G. I. ring: the
hippie invasion of Disneyland, the burning of the Isla Vista Bank of America,
the Earth Day burial of an automobile . Even as the society-wide generation gap
receded in the 1970s, the Boom ethos remained a deliberate antithesis to every-
thing G.l.: spiritualism over science, gratification over patience , negativism over
positivism, fractiousness over conformity, rage over friendliness, self over com-
munity .
This quest for "self" -what Gitlin has termed "the voyage to the interior"
and Christopher Lasch (more critically) the "culture of narcissism" -was a
central theme of the Boom lifecycle through rising adulthood. Outwardly, it
manifested itself in that distinctly Boom sense of suspended animation, of re-
sisting permanent linkages to mates, children, corporations, and professions.
Like Katharine Ross in The Graduate, Boomers approached the altar (or nursery,
or corporate ladder) and heard something inside scream "STOP!" Having
jammed the gears of the Silent-era coming-of-age treadmill, Boomers found
themselves in a social no-man's-land, unable to satisfy their perfectionist im-
pulses. Many simply grazed, lending no more than casual interest and wry
comment to the world around them, applying what sounded to others like a pick-
and-choose idealism and showing an apparent lack of interest in building com-
munity life . They developed a unique brand of perfectionism in consumption,
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 303

a desire for the best within a very personal (and often financially austere) defi-
nition of taste . If a Boomer couldn' t afford a house or family, he could at least
afford the very best brand of mustard or ice cream-a "zen luxuriousness" with
which Katy Butler watched her peers squeeze ''the maximum possible enjoyment
out of the minimum possible consumption ." This mixture of high self-esteem
and selective self-indulgence has at once repelled and fascinated other genera-
tions, giving Boomers a reputation for grating arrogance-and for transcendent
cultural wisdom.
The Boom' s fixation on self has forged an instinct to make plans or judgments
according to wholly internalized standards, based on immutable principles of
right and wrong. This gift for deductive logic over inductive experimentation
has made Boomers better philosophers than scientists, better preachers than
builders. The highest-testing Boom cohorts, those born in the mid- I 940s, have
reached the age where scientific achievement ordinarily peaks-yet their rise
has coincided with an era of declining American preeminence in engineering
and math-and-science fields. Boomers were very late to win a Nobel Prize,
Thomas Cech winning their first in 1989. (At the same life phase, the Lost,
G.I., and Silent had won two, four, and six, respectively .) Instead, Boomers
have excelled in occupations calling for creative independence-the media,
especially. Exalting individual conscience over duty to community, Boomers
have had difficulty achieving consensus and mobilizing as a unit-making them
far weaker than the G.I.s at getting big jobs done. Their sense of generational
identity is more a Beatlean "Pepperland" -a zone of parallel play-than a peer
society in the G.I. sense. They try to be "together" people not collectively but
individually, consistent with what David Pielke defines as "the notion that infinite
worth resides in each and every one of us." Like Donald Trump, a prototype
Boomer sees himself capable of becoming a titan of whatever world he chooses
fully to inhabit-providing cover for personal disappointments or (as a Boomer
might put it) "deferred" ambitions .
Having come of age with mainly an inner catharsis, Boomers sustain a com-
pelling urge for the perfection of man' s religious impulses, and for reducing any
dependence on the physical self. In the adolescent years of Boom radicals,
Keniston noted the "great intensification of largely self-generated religious feel-
ings, often despite a relatively nonreligious childhood and background ." This
began, in part, with drugs-what The Aquarian Conspiracy's Marilyn Ferguson
described as "a pass to Xanadu" for "spontaneous, imaginative, right-brained"
youths. The Boom's drug phase passed after bringing transcendence to the first
wave, crime to the last-and, by 1990, has been stripped of its spiritual trappings
by Boomers (office-seekers, especially) who now say they didn't enjoy what
they repeatedly ingested. In their subsequent search for spiritual euphoria, Boom-
ers flocked from drugs to religion , to "Jesus" movements, evangelicalism, New
Age utopianism, and millennialist visions of all sorts. As they did, they spawned
the most active era of church formation of the twentieth century.
304 GENERA TIONS

The Boomers' self-absorption has also lent their generation-male and fe-
male-a hermaphroditic, pistil-and-stamen quality . In The Singular Generation,
Wanda Urbanska exalted their "self-sexuality," their "ability to give pleasure
to oneself .'' Having grown up when sex-role distinctions had reached their l 950s-
era zenith, Boomers of both sexes have spent a lifetime narrowing them. Men
are intruding into the domain of values nurturance that, in their youth, mainly
belonged to G.I . mothers and teachers, while Boomer women are invading the
secular roles once reserved for can-do G .I. males. These trends have made
Boomers more independent of social bonds, yet also more open to emotional
isolation and economic insecurity. Concerned that their male peers may be
unreliable providers, Boomer women are the first since the peers of Jane Addams
to fear that early marriage and family may actually worsen their future household
standard of living.
As Boomers begin entering midlife, a schism has emerged between mostly
fortyish modernists and New Agers at one edge, and mostly thirtyish tradition-
alists and evangelicals at the other. Each side refuses to compromise on matters
of principle-believing, like anti-abortionist Bill Tickel , that " it's just easier to
have blanket absolutes." This values clash reflects an important bipolarity be-
tween the generation's first and last waves, whose differences have been widely
noted by pollsters and marketers. At one end, the "victory" and "hello" babies
of the middle to late 1940s were born almost entirely to G.I .s, not long after
the peak years of parental protectiveness. At the other, the babies of the con-
formist late 1950s were parented mostly by Silent just as that protectiveness was
giving way, and came of age at the point of maximum freedom (some would
say chaos) in adolescent life. To date, last-wave Boomers have fared worse than
first-wavers in educational aptitude, financial security, and self-destructive be-
havior; first-wave Boomers have fared worse in marital stability-partly because
they married earlier. (G.I. cohorts showed precisely the opposite trends, from
first wave to last.) But measured by inner-life standards, the two ends of the
Boom feel equally serene.
This generation has a fuse-lit explosiveness well suggested by its name. In
1946, Fortune magazine declared the start of "the Great American Boom," a
"boom" not just in fertility, but also in economics, education, housing, and
science. The robust achievements and optimism of that era left a lasting mark
on children . If G.l.s measure their worth objectively, by the works they leave
to history, Boomers measure themselves subjectively, by the spiritual strength
they see within. Many are having difficulty matching their parents' like-aged
achievements in economic and family life. Yet they invariably consider their
"consciousness" to be higher-and, by that yardstick, they are doing very well.
From urban lofts to rural communes, downwardly mobile Boomers "face the
truth about the way they live now with some dignity and grace,'' Katy Butler
reports. "If it's by choice and it's not overwhelming, having no money can be
a way of entering more deeply into your life." Many of them are "choosing"
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 305

not to achieve by any worldly standard. But the American Dream does indeed
live on for this generation-in the form of a well-ravished soul.

Boomer Facts

Demographers attribute roughly half of the postwar "baby boom " to unusual
fecundity, the other half to an unusual bunching of family formation . The
main bulge, from 1946 to 1957, resulted from the coincident babymaking
of late-nesting G .I. s and early-nesting Silent. After 1957 , most last-wave
Boomers (and first-wave 13ers) were the younger children of large Silent-
headed families .

In training , confidence, and sheer time spent changing bed sheets, no generation
of American women can match the G.I.s for the intensity of the nurture
they provided their mostly Boom children . Among Boomer preschoolers
who had working mothers , four in five were cared for in their own homes,
usually by relatives . Only 2 percent attended institutional child care .

During the Boomer youth, G .I. science made sweeping advances against child-
hood illness-conquering such once-terrible diseases as diphtheria and po-
lio, and fluoridating the water to protect teeth. Pediatrics reached its height
of physical aggressiveness: No generation of kids ever got more shots or
had more operations, including millions of circumcisions and tonsillecto-
mies that would not now be performed .

In his interviews with undergraduate male activists in the late 1960s , Keniston
encountered "an unusually strong tie between these young men and their
mothers in the first years of life ." In 1970, one poll found 32 percent of
white Boomers (44 percent of blacks) mentioning their mothers alone as
''the one person who cares about me . '' Only 8 percent of whites (2 percent
of blacks) gave the same response about their fathers . A year later, G.I.
author Philip Wylie labeled the Boom The Sons and Daughters of Mom.

By almost any standard of social pathology, the Boom is a generation of

worsening trends. From first-wave to last-wave teenagers , death rates for
every form of accidental death rose sharply-and the rates of drunk driving,
suicide, illegitimate births, and teen unemployment all doubled or tripled.
Crime rates also mounted with each successive cohort , giving rise after the
mid- l 960s to "crime waves" that seemed to worsen with each passing year.
During the 1970s, the incidence of serious youth crime grew twice as fast
as the number of youths . Criminals born in 1958 , moreover, were 80 percent
more likely than criminals born in 1945 to commit multiple crimes-and
80 percent more likely to send their victims to the hospital or morgue .
306 GENERATIONS

The seventeen-year SAT slide spanned nearly the entire Boom , from the 1946
cohort to the 1963 ( l3er) cohort-yet the worst years of that slide coincided
with the greatest grade inflation ever measured . In 1969, 4 percent of college
freshmen claimed to have had a straight-A high school grade average; by
1978, that proportion had nearly tripled, to 11 percent. From 1969 to 1975,
the average collegiate grade rose from a C + to a B. By 1971, three-fourths
of all colleges offered alternatives to traditional marking systems.

Within the Boom, the "sexual revolution" was more a women's than a men's
movement. Comparing the 1970s with the 1950s, one survey showed
Boomer men with only a 3 percent increase in sexual activity over what
the Silent did at like age-the smallest increase for any age bracket over
that span . Similarly, the proportion of male youths experiencing premarital
sex rose only slightly from the Silent to Boom eras . By contrast, Boomer
women doubled the rate of premarital sex over the Silent (from 41 percent
to 81 percent) and tripled their relative propensity to commit adultery (from
one-fourth to three-fourths of the rate for men).

The effort to avoid service in Vietnam was a more pervasive generational bond
than service in the war itself. Only one Boomer man in sixteen ever saw
combat. Among all the rest, two-thirds attributed their avoidance to some
deliberate dodge. One Boomer in six accelerated marriage or fatherhood
(and one in ten juggled jobs) to win a deferment, while one in twenty-five
abused his body to flunk a physical. One percent of Boomer men committed
draft-law felonies-ten times the percentage killed in combat. Less than
one of every hundred offenders was ever jailed . The 1943-1947 cohorts
provided the bulk of the draft avoiders, the 1947-1953 cohorts most of the
combat troops . The median soldier age during the Vietnam War (19) was
the lowest in American history .

The Boom's only consensus "lesson" about Vietnam was that it was badly
handled by G.I. leaders. Before 1970, Boomer opinion split roughly in half
over the basic issue of U.S . presence in Southeast Asia. Only after the Kent
State shootings and the '' Days of Rage'' did most college-attending Boomers
oppose the war-although non-college Boomers remained more prowar than
any elder group (college-educated or not) . Today, one Boomer in four
considers Vietnam to have been a "noble cause" (the highest proportion
for any generation), and the generation splits roughly 50-50 between those
who think the United States should have stayed out and those who would
have fought to win. Following Iraq' s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Boomers
were more inclined than any other generation to believe that sending Amer-
ican troops to the Gulf was "the right thing" to do.
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 307

During the 1980s, rising-adult Boomers migrated out of mainline' 'established"

churches, but surged into New Age and evangelical sects. Through the
decade, overall Boom church attendance rose by nearly 30 percent. Amer-
ica's fastest-growing church is the Assembly of God (whose membership
quadrupled in the 1980s), its largest branch of Protestantism is the funda-
mentalist Southern Baptist church, and the number of "charismatic " or
"pentecostal" Catholics has quintupled . America now has more Muslims
than Episcopalians. Seven Boomers in ten believe in psychic phenomena
(versus five in ten among older generations). Within the generation, polls
show first-wave Boomers believing more in meditation and reincarnation ,
last-wavers more in "born-again " conversion , mealtime grace, and the
inherent conflict between religion and science.
In the 1988 Presidential primaries, Boomers gave the greatest generational
support to the two reverends in the race: Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson.
(G. I. s gave them the least support.)
Were it not for employed women (and dual-income households), Boomer
family incomes would be well below what the Silent earned at like age .
Married Boomer couples are doing slightly better than their next-elders did,
single women much better. But the individual Boomer man is not. A 40-
year-old first-waver earns about 15 percent more than his G.I. father did at
like age, whereas a 30-year-old last-waver has fallen about IO percent behind
his Silent father. Between age 30 and 40, where the typical full-time G .I.
worker enjoyed a 63 percent inflation-adjusted rise in income, the first-
wave Boom worker suffered a net I percent decline .
Asked to compare themselves economically with their fathers at the same phase
of life, Boomers are ~venly split over whether they are doing better or
worse. Yet they overwhelmingly consider their careers better (by a five-to-
one ratio), their personal freedoms greater (by six to one), and their lives
more meaningful (by nine to one) .

The Boom Lifecycle

YOUTH: ' 'We wanted our children to be inner-directed,'' recalled G .I. Eda
LeShan . " It seemed logical to us that fascism and communism .. . could not
really succeed except in countries where children were raised in very authoritarian
homes." Boom children enjoyed a hothouse nurture in intensely child-focused
households and communities . As G.I. dads worked to pay the bills , G.I. moms
applied what LeShan termed " democratic discipline," dealing with children
"thoughtfully, reasonably, and kindly." Seeking advice , these moms turned to
308 GENERATIONS

a like-aged pediatrician, Benjamin Spock, who mixed science with friendliness

and instructed his G.I. peers that "we need idealistic children." Coaxing (rather
than pulling rank) in the nursery, Spock-guided moms apphed his "permissive"
feeding schedule to infants. Extending this logic to older kids, my-child-is-my-
career moms invested tremendous maternal time and energy in grade-school
Boomers. They hosted Cub Scout dens, typed book reports, cleaned children's
rooms, and applied what one California psychologist termed the "He'll-clean-
up-his-room-when-he 's-ready-to-have-a-clean-room'' philosophy . First-wave
Boomers passed through public schools in their Sputnik-era peak of institutional
confidence, thanks in part to a powerful mutual support network between G.I.
mothers and teachers. Many a child's life did indeed match the Happy Days
image preserved in vintage television sit-corns. To the eye of a Boomer kid, any
problem seemed fixable by adults, especially once those white-coated scientists
came on the scene. To youths like Cheryl Merser, " somebody was always
watching over them-God or a saint or a guardian angel or the stars or whatever,''
and the future looked to be "the way life was on The Jetsons-happy, easy,
uncomplicated, prosperous .'' To most middle-class youths, poverty, disease,
and crime were invisible-or were, at most, temporary nuisances that would
soon succumb to the inexorable advance of affluence. With the outer world
looking fine, the inner world became the point of youth focus.
As successive Boom cohorts passed through childhood, the adult nurturing
style leaned more toward tolerance than guidance, and parents began second-
guessing the sacrifices they were ma:king for the sake of their kids. Meanwhile,
the adolescent environment darkened . From sex to politics, circa-1970 campus
behavior swiftly filtered down to kids in high school, even junior high. By now
reflecting a Silent ethos , public schools began losing the old G.I. mom-to-teacher
peer support system . Reform-minded educators began insisting that adults had
as much to learn from youths as vice versa . The curricula stressed learning skills
over subject matter, social relevance over timeless facts . New student "rights"
were litigated, and old extracurricular activities atrophied . Adolescent boy-girl
coupling became increasingly tentative and individualized; where the Silent had
gone "steady," Boomers went "with" someone. Popular song lyrics gradually
shifted from Silentish styles (today remembered as "light" rock) to the more
Boom-driven pessimism and defiance associated with "hard" (or "acid") rock.
The Silent-era couples-only Saturday-night dance nearly vanished, eclipsed by
rock concerts at which dateless teenagers could dance the night away all by
themselves if they wanted. The first Boomer cohorts came of sexual age with
the Beatles' I Wanna Hold Your Hand, middle cohorts with the Rolling Stones'
Let's Spend the Night Together , late cohorts with Bruce Springsteen's Dancing
in the Dark . Yet, whether first-wavers asserting a creative role in an idealized
future or last-wavers attempting a more defiant withdrawal from the world,
adolescents looked within themselves to find solutions to life's problems.
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 309

COMING OF AGE: "I Am a Student! Do Not Fold, Spindle , or Mutilate!"

read the pickets outside Berkeley's Sproul Hall in 1964, mocking the computer-
punch-card treatment the faculty was supposedly giving them . Where student
movements had once been the work of a lonely (and polite) few , masses of
youths began swarming to angry rallies . Coffeehouse poets gave way to bullhorn-
toting radicals, in what Silent ex-activists Peter Collier and David Horowitz
recall as a generational shift. "Those of us who had come of age in the fifties"
and "were more comfortable thinking or talking about it" gave way to a later-
born "second wave of activists" more likely to heed the simple motto: "Do
It!" With the dawning of the Silent-led but Boom-energized "Free Speech
Movement, " these undergraduates served first notice of what would, by 1967,
become the most emotionally intense and culturally influential youth rebellion
in American history . The next four years brought a series of angry youth uprisings
in schools, military depots, and inner cities-joined by a mixture of students
and like-minded "nonstudents" who hung around campuses . Wealthy kids
dressed down, donned unisex styles, and became self-declared "freaks" -as if
to reject the affluence and ordered family lives of their parents . As James Kunen
put it in The Strawberry Statement , "I want everyone to see me and say 'There
goes an enemy of the state,' because that's where I'm at, as we say in the
revolution biz ." "STRIKE!" became the summons, the clenched fist the em-
blem, T-shirts and jeans the uniform, and "corporate liberalism" the enemy .
''Who are these people?' ' asked the Silent Daniel Moynihan, then on the Harvard
faculty. "I suggest to you they are Christians arrived on the scene of Second
Century Rome. "
Screaming radicals and freaked-out "hippies" represented just 10 to 15 per-
cent of their generation, but the righteous often prevailed in a youth culture
where purity of moral position counted most. In sharp contrast to the depression-
era days of G. I. student ''isms, ' ' organization counted for little. Keniston notes
how the "young radicals" of the late 1960s, having grown up with "feelings
of loneliness, solitude, and isolation ," were profoundly mature by measures of
ego strength and self-esteem, yet still childlike in their social skills. Collegians
could issue "nonnegotiable demands" with little fear of later consequences, in
part because of the amnesty they always demanded (and usually received), but
also because the supercharged G.1.-built economy offered good jobs to all com-
ers. The arguments of the New Left (led by "red diaper" babies who were
waging their own battle against Old Left G .I. fathers) tended to be moral and
cultural, with virtually no appeal off-campus . Yet a similar depth of rage welled
up among Boomers who showed no affinity with college strikers. Urban black
youths sparked deadly riots in American cities; non-college white Boomers were
twice as likely as their elders to vote for George Wallace in the 1968 election;
and the many town-versus-gown scuffles of that era were, in the main, Boom-
on-Boom affairs .
310 GENERA TIO NS

With the economy still purring, the youth frenzy congealed around the Viet-
nam War-a policy construction almost perfectly designed to create conflict
between rationalist elders and spiritualist juniors . Waging it as a limited, sci-
entifically managed form of international pest control, G .l. leaders supported a
morally questionable ally and avoided asking for any contribution from non-
combatants (LBJ's "guns and butter") . Though not pacifist by nature, Boomers
had been raised to question, argue , and ultimately disobey orders not comporting
with self-felt standards and ultimate sacrifices . As much as Boomers hated the
war, what they hated worse was the draft-its intrusion on privacy, its stated
policy of " channeling" their lives in government-approved directions. With help
from Silent counsel, Boomers did a good job of bollixing it. Yet the draft's
enormous class bias created festering divisions between Boomers who went to
Vietnam and those who didn 't. For those who came of age in Southeast Asia,
war offered little glory and few fond memories. The war's most celebrated heroes
were G .I. POWs like Jeremiah Denton (or, in film, the aging "Green Beret"
John Wayne), the most famous firefight was the My Lai atrocity, and the most
publicized Boom soldier was William Calley . Coming home, Boomer "vets"
had a defeat to haunt them , not a victory to empower them.
Vietnam casualties peaked in the same year ( 1969) that the Boomer rebellion
turned bloody , with an eighteen-month spate of radical bombings and shoot-
ings-and a surge in street crime . Youths then felt what Gitlin described as "a
tolerance, a fascination, even a taste" for violence. According to a Gallup Poll
in 1970, 44 percent of all college students (versus on!y 14 percent of the public
at large) believed that violence was justified to bring about social change . Rap
Brown called violence "as American as apple pie," Angela Davis used it to
great media effect, and the photo of Patty Hearst staging a bank holdup made
older generations fear the latent urges in the most normal-looking people her
age . From the Boom perspective, the most successful student strikes were those
in which force was either threatened by strikers (as at Cornell) or used against
them (by G .I. presidents Kerr , Kirk, and Pusey at Berkeley, Columbia, and
Harvard) . In the end, unwanted violence broke the youth fever. The killing of
six students at Kent State and Jackson State briefly mobilized the generation in
1970. Following the "Days of Rage," polls showed campus unrest leading the
nation's list of problems , and older generations showed a fixation on youth
opinion unlike anything since the days of the young Missionaries . Eighteen-
year-olds were awarded the vote, and national political conventions quadrupled
the number of under-30 delegates . In 1970, the Silent Charles Reich wrote a
rapturous best seller about how the Boom's "Consciousness III" would lead to
The Greening of America.
Then, as the war wound down and draft calls eased, Boomers began heeding
their Beatie mentors' "simple words of wisdom : Let It Be." When the economy
went sour in 1973, the youth mood turned to a grinding pessimism. The storm
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 311

having passed, last-wavers came of age amid a gray generational drizzle of sex,
drugs, unemployment, and what Lansing Lamont called a "lost civility" on
campus . In politics , the Boom settled in as more apathetic and just plain illiberal
than their G.I. parents could ever have imagined. As the Boom showed an air
of resignation about government and business, aging G.l.s began acquiescing
to the youth cult of self-and America's consumption binge was off and running .

RISING ADULTHOOD: "I have made no plans because I have found no

plans worth making,' ' declared the Dartmouth valedictorian in 197 l . '' All too
many people are just waiting for life rather than living,' ' observed the Berkeley
Daily Californian in that same year. In politics and family lives, Boomers in
their twenties remained detached-yet in the smaller strokes of their day-to-day
existence, they began testing what they found within on the world without. Many
began showing an emotional intensity older generations found strange, even
compulsive. As exercise faddists searched for the "runner's high," backpackers
with graduate degrees sparked a back-to-nature movement unlike anything seen
since the tum of the century, and meditative diet faddists triggered what historian
Harvey Levenstein terms ''the century's Second Golden Age of Food Quackery.''
Through the 1970s, people of all ages still looked to Boomers for values guidance,
and Boom trends soon blossomed into national attitudes-for example, as con-
sumer brand loyalties weakened and '' Made in the U.S.A.'' became passe among
the cognoscenti. But the biggest news came in the workplace. In athletics, the
first occupation over which they gained leverage, the likes of Andy Messersmith
and Joe Namath proclaimed "free agency," after which sporting life grew more
argumentative and less team-oriented. A few years later, a growing flood of late-
starting Boomers began to spread these same traits throughout the economy.
They insisted on having "meaningful" (read: un-G.1.-like) careers, and by the
mid-1970s America's postwar productivity surge came to an abrupt end . Not
drawn to industrial or service jobs, cutting-edge Boomers preferred smallish,
eclectic businesses . Their homes began bristling with offices, neighborhoods
with support services-an infrastructure around which, piece by piece, the econ-
omy was retooling to match the Boom' s personality.
Thirtyish first-wavers were also actively designing a new concept of self-
religion. The Boom heralded the "New Age" with the "Manifesto of the
Person," asserting "our sovereign right of self-discovery ." In this "Human
Potential Movement, " self-described as a "reaction to industrialized, mecha-
nized thinking,'' large numbers of Boomers began dabbling in psychic phenom-
ena and experiments in communal living. Whether immersed ,in Tai Chi, Zen,
beta waves, or other New Age mind states, Boomers built churches in the privacy
of their own heads . Urbanska termed this "Sheilaism," naming it after a friend
named Sheila who had "this little voice inside" saying "God is whatever I
feel." Conversions to "born-again" fundamentalism became more common than
312 GENERATIO NS

at any time in living memory. Boom religion returned the Calvinist notion of
"calling" to its original emphasis on the immediate and subjective. A rising
adult did not have to spend a lifetime preparing G.I. "works" for salvation.
Boomers viewed spiritual life the way Richard Darman later described their
consumption: They wanted it all-"NOWWWWW!"
Enter the "yuppie." Literally, the word means "young urban professionals,"
but that is misleading: Only some 5 percent of the Boom match the demographic
(urban, professional, affluent) definition of the word. A much larger proportion,
however, fit the subjective definition: self-immersion, an impatient desire for
personal satisfaction, and weak civic instincts. Everything a yuppie does-what
he eats, drinks, listens to, lives in, and invests for-sends a negative message
about G.1.-style culture and institutions, at a time when G.l.s are losing energy
to resist. The yuppie spurns organized philanthropies for causes he thinks he has
discovered himself. His busiest work occurs in the smallest units: the home, the
small business, the PTA, the day-care center, the town zoning board, the "pri-
vatized" governing body. His method of achieving social change-unassociated
individuals, each acting pursuant to his own compass-is the opposite of the
cohesive, peer-pressured G.I. approach at like age. The word "yuppie" first
appeared in 1981, just after most Boomers chose Reagan over Carter, and sig-
naled their acceptance of adult social roles. Having finished the task of reforming
the inner world, this generation gradually began taking on the outer.

APPROACHINGMIDLIFE: Where the Silent once prided themselves on

their ability to "grow young" with advancing age, Boomers look upon them-
selves as "growing up" to a new sense of responsibility and self-denial-what
P. J. O'Rourke calls the "new seriousness." One advertising agency labels
Boomers "the New Grown-ups" and claims they are launching an "era of less-
than-instant gratification." In her thirties, Cheryl Merser discovered that "a
grown-up is someone who can buy cookies and not eat the whole package at
once.'' The fastest-track yuppies are showing a growing taste for ascetic self-
denial-for example, preferring negative product names (nonfat, noncaffeine,
non-aerosol, non-nitrate, even "no-color" mascara) that flaunt what the con-
sumer is not consuming. Surveys show that today's Boomers are more apt to
believe that patience is necessary to appreciate value and are more likely to buy
products that are good than products that taste or feel good. Their aging has a
nonapologetic quality-as though now that they're older, they know better.
More in parallel than collectively, Boomers are asserting judgments that reflect
the perfect moral order of Pepperland. Although they have grown reasonably
comfortable with aging G .I. leaders who adopt their "values" terminology,
Boomers still see themselves as the embodiment of moral wisdom. It makes no
difference that they have entirely vacated the "youth" age bracket. On matters
of right and wrong, in fact, most Boomers now care as little for the opinions of
their 13er juniors as they ever cared for the opinions of their G.I. and Silent
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 313

elders . At the very moment Boomers patched up the rift with their parents, notes
journalist Henry Allen , "they saw they still had problems with materialistic
Republican reactionaries , except that the reactionaries were twenty years
younger." "A generation that when young trusted nobody over 30 today trusts
nobody under 30," agrees Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors, observing
how his peers seek to "cleanse the souls of the undergraduates of the political,
social, and moral sins" of their youthful upbringing.
A growing chorus of social critics is noticing a Boom-led (and often 13er-
targeted) "New Puritanism" in circa-1990 America. Fortyish Americans are
beginning to police "politically correct" behavior, pass "anti-ugly" zoning
ordinances, punish students for "inappropriately directed laughter," circulate
"Green Lifestyle" guides and attach "Green Seals" to products, ban obscene
music, promote "chastity," and even support novel forms of corporal punish-
ment and boot-camp incarceration that G .I.s would never have imagined-and
that Boomers, two decades ago, would have considered fascist. The abortion
debate rages in deadly earnest, mostly Boom-on-Boom, with shades of first-
wave pro-choicers against last-wave pro-lifers . Smoking or regular drinking,
observes New York Times writer Molly O' Neill, are becoming the " new Scarlet
Letters" among ex-flower children .. When G .I.s were reaching their forties,
"Buy you a drink?" and " Have a smoke?" were friendly icebreakers between
strangers; now M.A.D.D . 's Candy Lightner attacks social drinking (and Con-
gressman Dick Durbin airborne smoking) as dangerous, even immoral. As one
Boom activist puts it, " There is no such thing as being too rude to a smoker ."
Now gaining real power, Boomers do not inherently dislike government: The
idea of using the state to tell people what to do suits them just fine. Their task
is to redirect public institutions toward what they consider a socially redemptive
purpose. Casting aside the Silent preoccupation with process and expertise,
Boomers (when focused) zero in on the essentials , choose between right and
wrong, and act accordingly . Boomers of all ideological stripes, from Oliver
North and Fawn Hall to "Animal Rights" lab bombers , can be easily attracted
to lawlessness in pursuit of a higher purpose. In Washington, D.C., the memory
of Mitch Snyder beckons social activists to invite arrest "in the name of a just
and loving God ," while in California "Earth First" eco-saboteurs apply the
motto "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth ." New York Reverend Al
Sharpton summons blacks to ''burn the city down'' over alleged injustices , while
Shelby Steele calls upon blacks to examine "the content of our character" and
reject racial preferences as ''kindness that kills.'' When Boom-driven movements
produce legislative enactments-such as Oregon's refusal to spend Medicaid
funds on operations considered too expensive or unlikely of success-the budg-
etary result can be less important than the no-pain-no-gain message to society
at large. Addressing America's unmet social needs, from crime and homelessness
to health and education, Boomers are far more inclined than other generations
to share Karl Zinsmeister's view that "genuine compassion demands that we
314 GENERA TIO NS

forego the comfortable, and ever so easier, responses of softness ."

Vanguard Boomers show streaks of severity, the desire for not just an enemy's
defeat, but his destruction . Confronted with Saddam Hussein, Boomers at the
Wall Street Journal call on American forces to "take Baghdad and install a
MacArthur Regency" -and drop hints about war-crimes tribunals. Former Sec-
retary of the Navy James Webb proposes "ruthless and overpowering" retaliation
against foreign enemies and suggests constructing a "very large, very primitive
federal prison in a remote area of Alaska" for drug dealers . As William Bennett
unjokingly weighs the advantages of beheading underworld kingpins, his peers
show the strongest generational support for capital punishment. Boomers dom-
inate the national ranks of the "Fryers Club," young prosecutors who favor the
death penalty (and who confer over how to beat older ACLU defense lawyers).
For other generations, support for the death penalty declines if respondents are
told to ignore the issue of deterrence-but not for Boomers, who are more likely
to see execution as moral retribution.
Boomers are starting to show a fascination for apocalyptic solutions. Unlike
their G.I. fathers, who excelled at overcoming crisis, Boomers are attracted to
the possibility of fomenting crisis. Bennett sums up his own approach to gov-
ernance in two words: "Consequence and Confrontation." The 47-year-old
budget director, daring to close down essential federal services if the deficit is
not reduced, is dubbed "Apocalypse Darman" by the press. In Congress, Newt
Gingrich promises to use "values" as "a way of dividing America," while
Marty Russo refuses to go along with a budget process "that stinks and lies."
Silent Congressman Byron Dorgan, speaking for many of his House peers,
acknowledges how "confrontational" younger colleagues simply "don't respect
the old rules and courtesies.'' The gathering Boom vision of the future is at once
dark and bright-with new pronouncements about how denial, even pain, will
be necessary today to achieve righteousness tomorrow. The Sierra Club's Dan
Becker has openly rooted for "especially bad" weather so "a crisis mentality
can take over" about global warming, while Washington Post sportswriter Tom
Boswell has asked whether the "purification by fire" of a canceled season might
be needed to cleanse baseball of greed. James Fallows has declared that "the
world economy badly needs a few crises'' and that America would benefit from
a "7.0 magnitude diplo-economic shock." Whatever the problem, the Boom
prescription is not for a sugar-coated cure, but for a purgative tonic.
The '' sky will first need to fall'' before the world wakes up to its environmental
folly, insisted Boomer columnist Christopher Winner just before Earth Day 1990,
an event that had a far sterner, less euphoric tone than the original Earth Day
in 1970. "And when the dead are counted, when pan-global rules prevent further
murder of air and water and all that which sustains and encourages life, the first
real Earth Day will bear celebration.'' Winner's peers, say Collier and Horowitz,
are "a destructive generation whose work is not over yet." Peering into the
future of the Woodstock Generation , Anthony Casale and Philip Lerman see the
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 315

prospect of "howling cold, danger, and misery." Yet what some interpret as a
belligerent pessimism is, in its present chrysalis, a summons to rekindle a prin-
cipled vision of national (and global) community. In one jurisdiction after an-
other, Boomers who once voted for Reagan are now starting to push for a more
explicit exercise of public authority-more taxes, zoning, schools, or prisons-
so long as this authority moves America toward the lofty social standard that
Boomers themselves have sanctified. Until that standard is reached, they will
distrust any path that doesn't hurt-and they will care less than others about
how many feel the "howling cold" along the way.
* * *
When Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle, "You are no Jack Kennedy," and
Howard Metzenbaum said of William Bennett that "he believes words speak
louder than actions,'' those rockets landed on more than just individual targets .
In the G.I. mind's eye, you could replace Quayle or Bennett with any of today's
45-year-olds, and none of them could match a G.I. doer in his prime. Then
again, the hubristic Kennedy-the war-hero President of "prestige" and "long
strides" -was decidedly no Boomer. Nor did his "best and brightest" share
anything like the common thread of consciousness among Boomers (Jody Powell,
Hamilton Jordan, David Stockman, Peggy Noonan, Lee Atwater, and Richard
Darrnan) who have visited the White House inner circle during the last two
decades . As Quayle, Bennett, Al Gore, Bill Bradley, Bob Kerrey, and others
in their mid-forties threaten to push aside the Silent in the generational succession
to the Oval Office, their generation already holds one of every four seats in the
House of Representatives, fills nearly every important office in George Bush's
West Wing, and broadly dominates the media-from Hollywood to National
Public Radio to the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal . Whatever their
stripe, Boomers are far less interested in tangible constructions (what Metzen-
baum calls "actions") than in establishing a fresh moral regime.
Offering themselves as the magistrates of this new order, Boomers are stirring
to defend values (monogamy, thrift, abstention from drugs) other generations
do not associate with them. Their scorched-earth rhetoric seems misplaced in a
generation of onetime draft dodgers. Critics can and do call them smug, nar-
cissistic, self-righteous, intolerant, puritanical. But one commonly heard charge,
that of "hypocrite," ill fits a generation that came of age resacralizing and has
kept at it. Boomers are in no rush. Always the distracted perfectionists, they
first apply a light hand, then (once they start paying attention) a crushingly heavy
one. They "graze" on munchies until they figure it's time to diet, and then they
don ashes and sackcloth.
"Oh, how I miss the Revolution," wrote the (conservative) Boomer columnist
Benjamin Stein in 1988. "I want the Revolution back ." Seventeen years earlier,
Charles Reich had prophesied how new Boomer values would someday transform
civilization "beyond anything in modem history . Beside it," he bubbled, "a
mere revolution, such as the French or Russian, seems inconsequential." Reich
316 GENERATIONS

misperceived the Boom's readiness to assume power and pandered to its trap-
pings, but he understood its seriousness of purpose . From Jonathan Schell to
Jeremy Riflcin, Charles Murray to Alan Keyes, Steven Jobs to Steven Spielberg,
Boomers are still doing what they have done for decades: giving America its
leading visionaries and "wise men" -or just its preachy didactics- regardless
of the age bracket they occupy .
On December 2, 1989, Good Housekeeping magazine published a full-page
ad in the New York Times, welcoming America to the 1990s, "the Decency
Decade, the years when the good guys finally win . ... It will be a very good
decade for the Earth, as New Traditionalists lead an unstoppable environmental
juggernaut that will change and inspire corporate America, and let us all live
healthier , more decent lives" and "make people look for what is real, what is
honest, what is quality, what is valued, what is important.'' In ways other
generations partly applaud and partly loathe, Boomers today stand midgame in
a many-pronged reworking of American society . The righteous fires of People's
Park are still smoldering.
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 317

THIRTEENTH GENERATION

Born: 1961-1981
Type : Reactive

Age Location :
Boom Awakening in youth

In November of 1979, just after an Iranian mob had swarmed into the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran, a University of Georgia student center gave a special screen-
ing of the movie Patton. The students gave the film a standing ovation , hanged
an effigy of the Ayatollah, and then ran through the streets chanting anti-Iran
slogans . That year, a new breed of college freshman came to America's cam-
puses. Previously, faculty members had lined up to introduce themselves. Sud-
denly, as a Georgetown campus minister put it, "students began lining up to
introduce themselves to us." Meet the smooth opening wedge of the THIR-
TEENTH GENERATION-what Washington Post writer Nancy Smith point-
edly calls ''the generation after. Born after 1960, after you, after it all happened .''
These were the babies of 1961, 8-year-olds of Woodstock, 13-year-olds of
Watergate , 18-year-olds of energy crisis and hostage humiliation-and 29-year-
olds when a 1990 Time cover story defined this generation as post-Boom' 'twenty-
somethings ." In 1979, just as these kids were making life-pivoting decisions
about schools and careers, older generations sank into an eighteen-month abyss
of national pessimism . For Silent parents , Thinking Small was a midlife tonic.
But never having had their own chance to Think Big, the high school class of
1979 saw this grim mood very differently . From the Vietnam hysteria to Nixon's
"Christmas Without Lights" to Three Mile Island-at every turn, these kids
sensed that adults were simply not in control of themselves or the country .
Far more than other generations, 13ers feel that the real world is gearing up
to punish them down the road . Annual polls of high school seniors show that
those born just after 1960 came of age much more fearful of national catastrophe
than those born just before. These early 1960s babies (as we saw in Chapter 2)
grew up as the kids whose low test scores and high rates of crime, suicide, and
substance abuse marked a postwar extreme for American youth . The indicators
have not improved much for Americans born in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Altogether, writes Felicity Barringer in the New York Times, older Americans
are coming to perceive them as "a lost generation, an army of aging Bart
Simpsons, possibly armed and dangerous."
Unlike the Boomer kids-in-jeans of the 1960s, 13ers present, to elder eyes ,
a splintered image of brassy sights, caustic sounds, and cool manner. Moviegoers
 THIRTEENTH GENERATION (Born 1961 to 1981)

TYPE: Reactive FAMILY TREE

Total number : 93,000 ,000 Typical grandparents: G.I.
Now alive in U.S.: 79,000,000 Parents: Silent and Boom
Percent immigrant: l l % Children: Millennial (and new Adaptive)
Typical grandchildren: (new Idealist)

SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) FUTURE PERIOD OF

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1961 Michael J. Fox*
196 l Eddie Murphy Plurality in Congress: 2015-2035 (proj.)
1962 Jon Bon Jovi Term of Presidency: 2020-2040 (proj .)
1962 Roger Clemens Majority of Supreme Court : 2030-2050
1962 Tom Cruise (proj.)
1963 Tatum O'Neal
1963 Michael Jordan PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1963 Whitney Houston 1961 Princess Di
1963 Len Bias (1986) 1963 Julian Lennon
1964 Tracy Chapman 1967 Boris Becker
1965 Brooke Shields 1968 Wuer Kaixi
1966 Mike Tyson 1969 Steffi Graf
1967 Lisa Bonet
1967 Jim Abbott
1968 Mary Lou Retton
1968 Moon Unit Zappa
1968 Gary Coleman
1972 "Tiffany" Darwish
1972 Samantha Smith (1985)
1976 Jennifer Capriati
* = immigrant

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0- I 1962: U.S. government approves public sale of birth-control pill
0- 4 1965: "Baby boom " ends ; Supreme Court upholds right to contraceptives
0- 7 1968: Rosemary's Baby begins decade-long popularity of bad-child films
0-12 1973: Roe v. Wade abortion case; Christmas Without Lights
0-18 1979: U.S. hostages seized in Iran; long lines at gas pumps
0-19 1980: Military enlistments surge; youth vote supports Reagan
2-22 1983: A Nation at Risk sharply criticizes students; Grenada invasion
5-25 1986: Schoolchildren watch Challenger shuttle explode on takeoff
8-28 1989: Surge in gang killings, "wilding "; Berlin Wall dismantled
9-29 1990: Rock lyrics censored; U.S.troops go to Persian Gulf

SAMPLE CULTURAL ENDOWMENTS : Liar's Poker (Michael Lewis); sex, lies, and
videotape (film, Steven Soderbergh); Less Than Zero (Bret Easton Ellis); 20 Under 30 (Debra
Spark) ; The Dartmouth Review ; Slippery When Wet (album, Jon Bon Jovi); Short Sharp
Shocked (album, Michelle Shocked); Fast Car (song, Tracy Chapman); As Nasty as They
Wanna Be (album, 2 Live Crew); Think of One (album , Wynton Marsalis) ; Remote Control
(MTV); Hangin ' Tough (album , New Kids on the Block) ; "Too Much Fun" (graffiti art,
Brett Cook)
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 319

know them as Tom Cruise as Top Gun , breaking a few rules to win; as The
Breakfast Club, a film about how teachers try to punish a hopeless and incorrigible
"Brat Pack" of teenagers ; as Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape; and
as Rob Lowe playing the ultimate Bad Influence . In city life, they have become
America's kamikaze bicycle messengers, speeding Domino's and Federal Ex-
press drivers, murderous inner-city "crack" gangs, computer hackers, and
would-be novelists-guys who, as John Schwartz (author of Bicycle Days) puts
it, like to "live a little faster." In high schools, l3ers are Asian-American
valedictorians and Westinghouse science finalists, more than half of them im-
migrants or the children of immigrants. Fresh from college, they are the Yale
class of 1986, 40 percent of whom applied for investment banking jobs with
one company (First Boston)-the lucky ones becoming dealmakers who "age
like dogs" in Michael Lewis' game of Liar's Poker. ln athletics, they are young
Olympians leading chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!", or " Air Jordan" and "Neon
Deion" Sanders with their "in-your-face" slam dunks and end-zone spikes, or
one-armed Jim Abbott winning against impossible odds. In the army, l3ers are
the defenders of Saudi oilfields and the invaders of Panama, whose boom boxes
may have helped persuade Manuel Noriega to surrender-one of whom said,
on receiving a warm goodbye from the Panamanians, that "to them it's every-
thing, to us it' s just a battle."
Older generations see them as frenetic, physical , slippery. Like the music
many of them listen to, l3ers can appear shocking on the outside, unknowable
on the inside . Elders find it hard to suppress feelings of disappointment over
how they are turning out-dismissing them as a "lost," "ruined," even
"wasted" generation in an unrelenting (and mostly unanswered) flurry of what
Ellen Goodman has termed "youth-bashing ." Disparaging them as the "dumb"
and "numb generation," Russell Baker says "today's youth suffer from herky-
jerky brain." Boom evangelists like California's Larry Lea condemn their soul-
lessness and have declared ''spiritual warfare'' on youth ''worship of the devil.''
Under the headline "Hopes of a Gilded Age: Class of 1987 Bypasses Social
Activism to Aim for Million-Dollar Dreams of Life," a Washington Post article
complains how "the fiery concerns of many of their predecessors over peace
and social justice are mementos from a dimming past. " People magazine has
coined the phrase "Rettonization of America" to describe how young stars now
sell their names and reputations to the highest bidder . Boomers are shocked by
the l3er chemical of choice, steroids (which augment the body and dim the
mind, just the opposite of Boom-era psychedelics) . Sportswriter Bill Mandel
contemptuously dismisses baseball slugger Jose Canseco as "the perfect athlete"
for his era- "pumped up bigger than a steer and completely oblivious to the
vital subtext of his sport .' ' The Boomer media often portray l 3ers as driven
more by appetites than by ideas-as when Jay Leno tells teenage television
viewers why they eat Doritos : "We're not talkin' brain cells here . We're talkin'
taste buds." Soft-drink commercials do not show 13ers chanting and swaying
320 GENERA TIO NS

on some verdant hillside, but instead careening (like Michael J. Fox for Pepsi)
through some hellhouse and winding up on a pile of junk . "What he needs,"
said a recent Ad Council caption of a confused-looking teenager, "is a good
swift kick in the pants ." " This is the thought that wakes me up in the middle
of the night," says one Boomer teacher in The Breakfast Club, "that when I
get older , these kids are gonna take care of me." "Don't hold your breath,"
answers another.
Every year through the 1980s, new reports of their academic scores have
triggered harsh elder assessments of their schooling and intelligence. The barrage
began in 1983 when A Nation at Risk despaired of a "rising tide of mediocrity"
emerging from America's schools . Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American
Mind declared the 13ers' minds quite closed, and Diane Ravitch and Chester
Finn's What Do Seventeen-Year-Olds Know? answered their own question by
saying, in effect, not much. Grading 13ers collectively in twenty-nine subjects,
Ravitch and Finn dished out twenty F's-and no other grade higher than a C- .
The sympathy and indulgence once offered to low-scoring young Boomers has
evaporated. Columnist Richard Cohen recently called for ''humiliating, embar-
rassing, mocking-you name it-the dummies who have scored so low on these
tests." And "just when you think America's students can't get any dumber,"
reported Jack Anderson in 1989, out comes another book like Steve Allen's
Dumbth, or another blue-ribbon report from the Carnegie Foundation, calling
them "shallow" and chastising their "uncivil speaking" and "deteriorating"
campus culture (all this in an era of campus calm that would have been the envy
of any Boom-era dean). Right or wrong, the message sent to 13ers and their
would-be employers is clear: that these kids got an inferior education and are
equipped with inferior minds-that they ar~ (to quote one Boomer college pres-
ident) ' 'junky.''
Thirteeners find these criticisms overblown. They look upon themselves as
pragmatic, quick, sharp-eyed, able to step outside themselves to understand the
game of life as it really gets played. And whatever they are, l 3ers insist, they
have to be. Because of the way they were raised. Because of the world into
which they are coming of age. To begin with, 13ers see no welcome mat on
their economic future: Since the mid- l 970s, while the costs of setting out in life
(college tuitions and housing) have raced ahead of inflation, the rewards (salaries
and fringe benefits for young workers) have steadily fallen behind. They are
suffering what economist Robert Kuttner describes as a ''remarkable generational
economic disease ... a depression of the young" which makes 13ers feel
''uniquely thirsty in a sea of affluence.'' Money isn't everything-but l 3ers find
themselves both unprepared for and uninvited to most other avenues of social
approval. Money means survival, and for a generation whose earliest life ex-
periences have taught them not to trust others, survival must come first.
Older critics seldom acknowledge the odd twists that have so far plagued the
l 3er lifecycle. In the early 1970s, Norman Lear produced All in the Family-
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 321

style television shows that bred child cynicism about the competence of the adult
world-then, in the late 1980s, Lear's "People for the American Way" lobby
whipsawed the grown-up kids thus nurtured with a stinging report rebuking their
"apathy and disengagement from the political process." When 13ers were en-
tering school, they heard gurus (like Charles Rathbone) say there was "no single
indispensable body of knowledge that every child should know,'' so their schools
didn't teach it-then, upon finishing school, they heard new gurus (like E. D.
Hirsch, in Cultural Literacy) say yes, there was such knowledge, and they hadn't
learned it. Thirteeners were told, as Rathbone (and many others) had urged, to
be "self-reliant, independent, self-actualizing individuals." So they learned to
watch adults carefully and emulate how they behave-collectively resembling
Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon, the kind of kids adults have a hard time finding
adorable.
Imagine coming to a beach at the very end of a long summer of big crowds
and wild goings-on. The beach bunch is sunburned, the sand shopworn, hot,
and full of debris-no place for walking barefoot. You step on a bottle, and
some cop cites you for littering. That's how 13ers feel, following the Boom.
Much like River Phoenix in the film Running on Empty, first-wave 13ers have
had to cope and survive in whatever territory the Boom has left behind, at each
phase of life. Their early access to self-expression and independence stripped
them of much of the pleasure of discovery and rebellion-leaving them, in Bret
Easton Ellis' words, "looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the
sun." By the time Ellis' peers came of age, the symbolic meanings-of sex,
drugs, student rights, whatever-had all faded . What they found, instead, were
the harsh realities of social pathology. One by one, I 3ers have slowed or reversed
these trends-the SAT decline, the youth crime, the substance abuse, the early
sex-but 13ers have felt the full brunt of them and have borne the ensuing adult
criticism.
Thirteeners, not Boomers, were America's true "children of the 1960s."
And, especially, the 1970s. An awakening era that seemed euphoric to young
adults was, to them, a nightmare of self-immersed parents, disintegrating homes,
schools with conflicting missions, confused leaders, a culture shifting from G
to R ratings, new public-health dangers, and a "Me Decade" economy that
tipped toward the organized old and away from the voiceless young. "Grow up
fast" was the adult message. That they did, graduating early to "young adult"
realism in literature and film, and turning into what American Demographics
magazine has termed "proto-adults" in their early teens (where, two decades
earlier, Boomers had lingered in "post-adolescence" well into their twenties).
At every phase of life, 13ers have encountered a world of more punishing
consequence than anything their Silent or Boom elders ever knew. Consider the
l3ers' matter-of-fact approach to sexuality, yet another trait that has brought
adult complaint. First-wavers were just reaching puberty when adults were emit-
ting highly charged sexual signals in all directions. At the time, sex education
322 GENERA TIONS

was unabashedly value-neutral, empty houses provided easy trysting spots, and
their parents were, as Ellen Goodman describes them, "equally uncomfortable
with notions that sex is evil and sex is groovy.'' With adults having removed
attitudinal barriers against the libido, l 3ers have begun re-erecting age-old de-
fense mechanisms: platonic relationships, group dating, and a youth culture
(reminiscent of Lost-era street life) in which kids watch out for their own safety
and for the physical integrity of their own circle of friends. Unlike Boomers,
l 3ers are coming of age knowing where the youth euphoria of the late 1960s
actually led. As Redlands College's Kim Blum puts it, "the sexual revolution
is over, and everybody lost."
The 13er lifecycle experience has, so far, been the direct inverse of the Silent.
Where the Silent passed through childhood in an era of parental suffocation and
entered young adulthood just as barriers to youth freedom began to loosen, 13ers
have faced exactly the opposite trend. Where the Silent grew up with a childlike
awe of powerful elders, 13ers have acquired an adultlike fatalism about the
weakness and uncertainty of elders-and question their ability to protect the
young from future danger. When the first Silent were children, America was in
the skids of depression, but by their twentieth birthday, public confidence was
vast and rising. When the first 13ers were born, America was riding high and
G.I. leaders seemed to be achieving everything at once-but then, as they reached
adolescence, the nation mired itself in doubt. The Silent emerged from their
storybook childhood hoping to add some nuance and subtlety to a culture they
found oversimple. Thirteeners, by contrast, are growing up in what teacher and
author Patrick Welsh describes as "a world of information overload ." Hearing
others declare everything too complex for yes-or-no answers, 13ers struggle to
filter out noise, cut through rhetoric, and isolate the handful of practical truths
that really matter. Also unlike the homogeneous young Silent, 13ers are coming
of age with sharply diverging personal circumstances (what an economist would
call a "spreading bell curve") in education, family economics, and career op-
portunities. Where their parents once struggled to break free from a tight gen-
erational center of gravity, 13ers wonder if they will ever be able to find one.
Confronted with these facts of life, 13ers have built a powerful survival
instinct, wrapped around an ethos of personal determinism. In their world, what
a person is, what he looks like, and whether or not he succeeds depend less on
what a person is inside than on how he behaves. Thirteeners are constantly told
that whatever bad things strike people their age-from AIDS to drug addiction,
from suicides to homicides-are mainly their own fault. In this sort of youth
environment, staying alert to the physical is an assertion of virtue. Unlike Boom-
ers at like age, a low-income l 3er probably comes from a world of splintered
families and general hopelessness-and has little in common with some ''Richie
Rich" out in the suburbs. And so kids feel obliged to dress up (at an age when
most Boomers dressed down) to preserve a sense of personal honor and to avoid
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 323

being "disrespected" in a real-life game of king of the mountain.

Doing what they feel they must, knowing it brings adult criticism, 13ers have
come to accept, even to take a perverse fun in, what a young rapper would call
"attitude," in being "BAAAAD." They tend to agree with their elders that,
probably, they are a wasted bunch. From the standpoint of an individual 13er,
weak peer competition isn't such bad news. Their own cultural artifacts make
half-comic reference to their own garbagey quality. Chris Kreski, the 26-year-
old lead writer for Remote Control, a 13er-designed TV-quiz-show parody,
admits his show is "stupid." (In I 3er lingo, words like "stupid," "bad," or
"random" are words of praise.) The Bon Jovi song You Give Love a Bad Name
became an instant hit among the teens of the 1980s. In 1990, when a think tank
issued yet another negative report on 13ers (documenting their "massive cheat-
ing, resume fraud, assaults on teachers, venereal disease, pregnancies, and ma-
terialism"), its authors afterward remarked that 13ers themselves seemed to
agree with these findings. In River's Edge, a film evoking how many l 3ers look
at life, one teenager mockingly says to his buddies, "You young people are a
disgrace to all living things, to plants even . You shouldn't even be seen in the
same room as a cactus ."
As they struggle to preserve what optimism and self-esteem they can, l 3ers
have developed what psychologist David Elkind calls the "patchwork self."
Two decades ago , older generations saw great promise in youth . Not now-not
these youths, anyway. As first-wavers find themselves elbowed aside by Boomers
seemingly at every tum, last-wavers lock their radars onto Nintendo in fantasized
quest of fortune or death, or join the Spurtlegurgles in singing the lyric of a
missionless childhood ("We're here because we're here because we're here
because we' re here " ). "So many things have already happened in the world
that we can 't possibly come up with anything else ," explains 15-year-old David
Peters, a fast-food worker in California . "So why even live?" No other gen-
eration in living memory has come of age with such a sense of social distance-
of adults doing so little for them and expecting so little from them .
Lacking the ego strength to set agendas for others, 13ers instead react to the
world as they find it. They're proud of their ability to poke through the hype
and the detail, to understand older people far better (they sense) than older people
understand them . They take solace in the privacy that affords them . Many even
delight in the most demeaning images of youth ever crafted by the electronic
media : Max Headroom, beheaded in an accident, imprisoned within TV sound
bites ; the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, flushed down the toilet as children,
deformed by radiation, nurtured on junk food; and Bart Simpson, the "under-
achiever" whose creator likens him to everyone's "disgusting little brother"-
the "little Spike-Head" whom William Bennett says he'll "straighten out" with
"a couple of soap sandwiches ." Beyond low self-esteem and blighted minds,
what these pop icons all have in common is that they were created and promoted
324 GENERA TIONS

by Boomers-the 13ers' principal nemeses. Some day, some way, 13ers would
love to get those Boomers on life's equivalent of Remote Control, swivel their
yuppie chairs around, and dump them in a vat of greenish goo.
"My generation was born on Friday the Thirteenth," insists Bowdoin Col-
lege's Gregg Linburg. "That's a day you can view two ways. You can fear it,
or you can face it-and try to make it a great day in spite of the label. That's
what my generation is going to do." Counting back to the Awakeners, Linburg's
peers are, in point of fact, the thirteenth to call themselves American citizens.
Demographers have so far given them a name at once incorrect and insulting:
"baby busters." Population is not the issue. Thirteeners outnumber Boomers
by ten million in 1990, a gap widening by the year, and their first-wave (1961-
1964) cohorts are among the biggest ever. "Baby bust" theorists see in the name
some new youth advantage in a world of easing youth competition-but try
telling that to collegians born in the smallish late- l 960s cohorts. Yet the worst
aspect of this "bust" nomer, and why 13ers resent it, is how it plants today's
25-year-olds squarely where they don't want to be: in the shadow of the ''boom,''
and negatively so-as though wonder has been followed by disappointment.
To young Americans uninterested in labels-to those who still remain what
Shann Nix calls "the generation with no name" -we assign a number: thirteen.
The tag is a little Halloweenish, like the clothes they wear-and slippery, like
their culture. It's a name they can see as a gauntlet, a challenge, an obstacle to
be overcome. The thirteenth card can be the ace, face down, in a game of high-
stakes blackjack. Kings and queens, with their pompous poses and fancy cur-
licues, always lose to the uncluttered ace, going over or going under. The ace-
like this generation-is nothing subtle, but it's nice to have around when you're
in a jam.

13er Facts

The 13th is the most aborted generation in American history. After rising
sharply during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the abortion rate climbed by
another 80 percent during the first six years ( 1973 to 1979) after the Supreme
Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Through the birthyears of last-wave 13ers,
would-be mothers aborted one fetus in three.
Parental divorce ha_sstruck 13ers harder than any other American generation.
In 1962, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages
should stay together for the sake of the children; by 1980, only one in five
thought so. A l3er child in the 1980s faced twice the risk of parental divorce
as a Boomer child in the mid-l 960s-and three times the risk a Silent child
faced back in 1950. Four-fifths of today's divorced adults profess to being
happier afterward, but a majority of their children feel otherwise.
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 325

No other American generation has ever grown up in families of such com-

plexity. In 1980, just 56 percent of all dependent children lived with two
once-married parents, another 14 percent with at least one previously mar-
ried parent, 11 percent with a stepparent, and 19 percent with one parent.
One in five had half siblings. The likelihood of children receiving support
payments from the noncustodial parent declined from the Boomer to l 3er
childhood eras.
No other child generation has witnessed such a dramatic increase in domestic
dissatisfaction (and surge to the workplace) on the part of mothers. Between
1960 and 1980, among mothers with children aged 5 or under, the proportion
with full- or part-time jobs rose from 20 to 47 percent. Through the 1970s,
the number of "latchkey" children under age 14 left alone after school
roughly doubled.
A Jate-l 980s survey of "teen trend setters" found 48 percent describing their
(mostly Silent) parents as "cool" -versus just 7 percent as "strict" and I
percent as "nosy ." According to youth marketer and pollster Irma Zand!,
l 3ers associate Jack of parental authority with family instability. Observes
Zand!, "I've never heard any teenager say, 'I wish my father were more
sensitive.'"
When they first reached high school, 13ers encountered much less of the
teacher-and-voter indulgence that had greeted their next-elders. The Boom-
era grade inflation came to an abrupt end: Youths born in 1961 received
10 percent fewer high school A's and 10 percent more C's than those born
in 1960. At the ballot-box, first-wave 13ers were the targets of the late-
1970s "Proposition 13" school-tax revolts in California and other states.
Similarly, during the decade after 1978 (that is, after the last Boomers had
reached age 18), the purchasing power of both the child-poverty benefit and
the federal minimum wage declined steeply and continuously.
A sampling of teachers who taught Boomers in the mid- J960s and 13ers in
the mid- l 980s was asked to compare the two, in forty-three measures of
aptitude and achievement. The score: Boomers 38, 13ers 4, with one tie.
The teachers scored Boomers higher in all academic skills, communications
ability, and commitment to learning. Thirteeners outscored Boomers in
negotiating skills, consumer awareness, adult-interaction skills, and "de-
fenses to prevent extreme dependency on parents or authorities."
The 13th is on its way to becoming the first generation since the Gilded to be
less college-educated than its next-elders. College completion rates, seven
years after high school graduation, fell from 58 percent for the Boomer
Class of 1972 to 37 percent for the 13er Class of 1980. Meanwhile, the
economic stakes of higher education have risen sharply. From 1973 to 1986,
326 GENERA TIO NS

the average' inflation-adjusted earnings of young college graduates fell by

6 percent-but for young high school dropouts , they fell by 42 percent.
By a two-to-one majority , 13er men prefer military to civilian public service-
in a sharp turnaround from the Boom youth era. Starting when the first 13er
cohort reached age 19, the armed forces began a dramatic three-year rise
in the quality of new enlistees . Thirteeners are the best-educated generation
of soldiers in American history .
Much like Michael J. Fox in Family Ties (the conservative kid of liberal
parents) , these are by far the most Republican-leaning youths in the sixty-
year history of age-based polling. From Boom to 13th, the partisan tone of
young voters has shifted strikingly-from roughly a ten-point Democratic
advantage to a Republican edge that, in 1985, reached eighteen points (52
percent to 34 percent). In fifteen of sixteen consecutive polls taken between
1981 and 1988, 13ers gave Ronald Reagan a higher approval rating than
any other generation-except the Lost.
Thirteener teenagers face a much lower risk of dying from disease than did
Silent teenagers forty years ago . But this 13er advantage has been almost
entirely offset by a much higher risk of dying from accidents, murder, and
suicide. Roughly 2,000 minors were murdered in 1988-twice the number
killed in 1965 (a year of urban riots when America had 6.5 million more
youths . under age 18). Homicide is now the dominant cause of youth .mor-
tality in America's inner cities. Among black males 15 to 24 years old
living in Washington, D.C ., murder accounted for 47 percent of all deaths
in 1987.
Fear is a pervasive reality within a generation of urban schoolchildren that
brings an estimated 135,000 guns (and six times as many knives) to the
classroom each day. Eight percent of urban seventh to twelfth graders say
they miss at least one day of school per month because they are physically
afraid to go . At the same time, l 3ers learn young that the only way to cope
with fear is not to show it. Says Bronx junior-high teacher Klaus Bornemann :
''The kid who demonstrates fear is raw meat.''
As teenagers, 13ers are committing suicide more frequently than any generation
since the Lost. In 1976, the child suicide rate rose above the previous
record, set in 1908. Through the 1980s, roughly 5,000 children under age
18 committed suicide each year, the largest number and proportion ever
recorded for that age bracket.
Already, 13ers have become the most heavily incarcerated generation in Amer-
ican history. From Boom to 13th, the proportion of youths in jail rose by
roughly one-third-for whites and blacks, women and men. The average
length of a sentence has risen by 12 percent during the first half-dozen years
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 327

in which J 3ers have entered the adult criminal justice system. In 1990 (when
13ers attained a majority of the U.S. prison population), one in every four
black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was in jail, on probation, or on
parole .
The decade of the 1970s brought a steep decline in the economic fortunes of
children . From the 1950s through the early 1970s, the over-65 age bracket
showed the highest poverty rate; since 1974, the under-18 bracket has shown
the highest. Thus, the distinction of occupying America's poorest age
bracket passed directly from Lost to 13th without ever touching G.I., Silent,
or Boom along the way . Roughly one I 3er in five now lives in poverty .
At the same time, I 3ers report the most negative generational attitude toward
welfare spending-and two-thirds believe that if they ever end up unem-
ployed, it's their own fault.
Through the 1980s, the 13ers' economic distress has moved right up the age
ladder with them . In 1967, male wage earners in their early twenties made
74 percent as much as older males; by 1988, that ratio had fallen to 54
percent. Between 1973 and 1988, the median income of households headed
by persons under age 25 (adjusted for inflation and family size) fell by 18
percent. The negative trend was not confined to unmarried 13er mothers;
even among married couples with children, the median income fell by 17
percent.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the proportion of household heads age 18 to 24
owning their own homes fell by one-third-the steepest decline for any age
bracket. In 1990, three out of four young men that age were still living at
home, the largest proportion since the Great Depression .
During the I 3er childhood era, America has substantially shifted the federal
fiscal burden from the old to the young . Since 1972, older generations have
deferred paying for some $2 trillion in current consumption through addi-
tional U.S. Treasury debt-a policy five times more expensive (in lifetime
interest costs) for the average 15-year-old than for the average 65-year-old.
Federal tax policy has shifted in the same direction. In 1990, according to
the House Ways and Means Committtee, a young 13er couple with one
worker, a baby, and $30,000 in wage income had to pay five times as much
($5,055 in taxes) as the typical retired G.I. couple with the same income
from public and private pensions ($1,073 in taxes) .

Before l 3ers came along, postwar sociologists generally assumed that hard-
ening cynicism was a function of advancing age. No longer. From 1965 to
1990, the share of all Americans under age 35 who look at a newspaper
daily declined from two-thirds to less than one-third-by far the steepest
drop of any age bracket. In a late-1980s survey of "Cynical Americans,"
328 GENERA TIO NS

researchers noted that '' the biggest surprise'' was how '' cynicism now seems
to defy the traditional partnership of youth and idealism.'' Today, cynicism
is ''hitting hardest among young adolescents-more than half of those age
24 and under. .. . They think it's all bull."

The 13er Lif ecycle

YOUTH: The years of the "Consciousness Revolution" were among the

most virulently anti-child periods in American history, producing a childhood
world Tom Cruise recalls as "kind of scattered ." Sacrificing one's own career
or conjugal happiness became passe-even, by the logic of the era, bad for kids
themselves. As the 1960s wore on, Silent mothers and fathers increasingly looked
at their children as hindrances to self-exploration. By the 1970s, they cast an
envious eye at young Boomers-who then mainly looked upon babies like
headaches, things you take pills not to have. Adults ranked autos ahead of
children as necessary for "the good life," and the cost of raising a child (never
much at issue when Boomers were born) became a hot topic. A flurry of popular
books chronicled the resentment, despair, and physical discomfort women were
said to endure when bearing and raising 13er children. In Ourselves and Our
Children (whose priorities revealed themselves in the juxtaposition of its title),
'' consider yourself'' was ranked ahead of' 'benefiting our children'' as a principle
of sound parenting. Popular parental guides emphasized why-to-dos over what-
to-dos, concluding that doing the right thing was less important than parent and
child each feeling the right thing . To accomplish that, authors like Thomas
Gordon (in Parental Effectiveness Training) advised parents to teach children to
understand behavioral consequences at very young ages. Popular books by
T. Berry Brazelton and Burton White stressed the determinism of the early
childhood years, suggesting that a child's lifetime personality might be substan-
tially sealed by the time he entered school. As Marie Winn would later note,
"early-childhood determinism appeared to be a gift from gods" for parents with
new wanderlust or careerism who could thereby conclude that their 6- or IO-
year-old children could cope with family trauma well enough, given how care-
fully they had been tended as tots.
Divorce, and its attendant confusion and impoverishment, became the central
fear of the 13er childhood world. In It's Not the End of the World, Judy Blume
offered children the tale of a once-happy family disintegrating amid shouting,
slapping, and crying. Hearing these messages, even kids in stable families felt
vulnerable and reacted by hardening their shells against adversity. While parents
tried to persuade themselves (like Kyle Pruett in The Nurturing Father: Journey
Toward the Complete Man) that family dissolution "freed" parent and child to
have "better" and "less constricted" time together, these kids saw things dif-
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 329

ferently. (Asked about his own divorced dad, Breakfast Club actor Anthony
Michael Hall said: "No comment, but yes, he lives.") Thirteeners knew that
where Boomers had been once worth the parental sacrifice of prolonging an
unhappy marriage, they were not. Coping with the debris, America's l 970s-era
children went from a family culture of My Three Sons to one of My Two Dads,
encountering step-thises, half-thats, significant others, and strangers at the break-
fast table beyond what any other child generation ever knew. Reading Norma
Klein's It's OK If You Don't Love Me, a child could ponder the fate of an
adolescent girl who juggled a sex life with two boyfriends while sorting through
her feelings about her mother's lover, her mother's former second husband, and
her father's second wife and their two children.
''The parent is usually a coordinator without voice or authority,'' observed
Kenneth Keniston in 1977, noting how the moms and dads of that decade ''hardly
ever have ... the power to make others listen to them." In homes, schools, and
courtrooms, America's style of nurturing children completed a two-decade pas-
sage from Father Knows Best to the tone of self-doubt in Bill Cosby's Father-
hood: "Was I making a mistake now? If so, it would just be mistake number
nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-three." Alvin Poussaint noted the dom-
inant media image of the parent as "pal," who was "always understanding;
they never get very angry. There are no boundaries or limits set. Parents are
shown as bungling, not in charge, floundering as much as the children." This
was not inadvertent. Parents who admit to being "many-dimensioned, imperfect
human beings," reassured the authors of Ourselves and Our Children, "are able
to give children a more realistic picture of what being a person is all about."
On the one hand, Silent parents were, like Cosby's Cliff Huxtable, gentle and
communicative; on the other hand, they expressed ambivalence where children
sought clear moral answers, abandoned a positive vision of the future, and
required children to respond very young to sophisticated real-world problems.
Like father and son in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, adults became more
childlike and children more adultlike .
Through the 1970s, the media reinforced the growing view among children
that adults were not especially virtuous, competent, or powerful. Adult life held
no secrets. From TV sit-corns to "breakthrough" youth books, older generations
made little effort to shield children from any topic, no matter what the effect on
a child's sense of security and comfort. "I hate the idea that you should always
protect children,'' wrote Judy Blume in defense of her books . ''They live in the
same world we do." Mad magazine's Al Feldstein put it more bluntly: "We
told them there's a lot of garbage out in the world and you've got to be aware
of it." One "Self-Care Guide" for latchkey children advised kids of "ways you
can protect yourself from mugging and assault: Always pay attention to what is
happening around you when you are on the street. " And so l3ers were delib-
erately encouraged to react to life as you would hack through a jungle: Keep
your eyes open, expect the worst, and handle it on your own.
330 GENERA TIO NS

APPROACHING RISING ADULTHOOD: Even as first-wavers reach

their late twenties, this generation cannot be said to have' 'come of age." Nothing
yet cements them emotionally. To date, the 13th remains a splintery generation;
people can (and do) find almost anything they want in these kids. Far more than
older generations, 13ers come with myriads of regional subgroups and ethnic
minicultures, each thinking its own thoughts, listening to its own music, laying
its own plans, and paying little heed to each other . Yet the first signs of bonding
are beginning to appear-a common alienation visible in 13er art and writing,
and in their growing awareness of their own economic vulnerability. '' Sure we're
alienated," admits American University student Daniel Ralph. "But who
wouldn't be, in our shoes?"
Thirteeners are coming to realize that they bear much of the burden for the
Reagan-era prosperity that so enriched the Silent and G.I.s. In inner cities , their
impoverishment has caused adult alarm; elsewhere, it has been less noticed,
thanks to a veneer of family-subsidized teen affluence. Even in the suburbs,
13ers entering the labor force are bearing much of their nation's new burden of
foreign competition and debt. In industries where productivity is stagnant, two-
tier wage systems hold elders harmless while making the new hires bear the full
cost-cutting burden. Where foreign investors bid up the price of real estate,
current homeowners profit, but would-be young homebuyers pay. Even as the
1980s-era spurt of tax reform lowered the tax rate on high-bracket incomes,
FICA taxes on after-school wages kept going up.
Spurred by a sense of economic need, youths are working younger, longer,
later at night, and at more dangerous jobs than any child generation since the
Lost. As federal administrators chart the steady rise in child labor law violations,
13ers carefully hone their survivalist ethic. Two-thirds believe they will have to
work harder than earlier generations simply to enjoy the same standard of living.
After leaving school, 13ers face tough choices made all the more frustrating by
the adult wealth they see around them. Scanning her life's options, one Wash-
ington, D.C., youth complained: "The way society presents it, I'll either be
strung out on drugs, a manager at McDonald's, or a lawyer." Something re-
sembling her middle course is the most frequent path, as many find themselves
doing the low-wage counter, delivery, and cleaning jobs Boomers have always
found demeaning-the "McJobs" that Amitai Etzioni describes as "more time-
consuming, less character-building" than what talented youths used to look
forward to. In most professions-law, medicine, business, the media-13ers
are encountering less promising promotion paths than the Boom knew at their
age, and a smaller likelihood of ever getting a second chance if they fail the
first time.
So far, they have concealed their plight thanks to the distinctly 13er habit of
calling as little attention as possible to what they are feeling. In life, as when
they walk down the street with their Walkmen and designer shades, they know
how to keep others from knowing what they're hearing, watching, or thinking.
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 331

They leave their troubles behind when they come to work-and take their minds
off the job when they leave. Boomer bosses like ad executive Penny Erikson
see them as "not driven from within," best suited for "short-term tasks" and
in need of "reinforcement from above." Ask 13ers how they're doing, and as
long as life stays reasonably patched together, "No problem" is their answer.
They have learned to adjust by moving quickly into and (when they see a dead
end) out of jobs. They look for quick strikes ahead of long-term promises, the
Wall Street Journal describing them as "more willing to gamble their careers
than ... earlier generations." Often, their best chance for success comes from
striking out on their own, finding a small market niche, and filling it more
cheaply and sensibly than older-run businesses-following the example of such
twenty-fiveish entrepreneurs as David Montague (folding bicycles) or Doug
Wadsworth (plastics recycling). But for every Darryl Strawberry who hits the
jackpot, untold others don't. And those who don't run smack into their deter-
ministic ethos-that failure means something must be wrong with you. A rising
number are masking their economic problems by "boomeranging" back into
the parental house after a few years of trying to make it on their own.
Having no place to "boomerang" to, inner-city l3ers inhabit an especially
grim world that does not like them, does not want them, and (as they see it) has
nothing to offer them. "There's a growing malaise that young people suffer
from,'' observes Victor Herbert, director of New York City high schools. "They
feel they're not to be trusted, they're not good people, and they don't have to
follow whatever inhibitions have been built up, especially when they're moving
in a crowd .' ' Urban kids have begun reacting with a nihilism that older gener-
ations consider proof of their worthless ruin. A new, reactionary style of sexism,
racism, and soulless violence has seeped into l3er-penned song lyrics. As "Ice-
T" raps about "bitches," young thugs commit what elders call "hate crimes"
targeted against gays, women, and high-achieving ethnic groups . A new breed
of young criminal shows a remorseless bent toward killing and maiming for no
serious reason . Prizefighter Mike Tyson has admitted to having "shot at a lot
of people .... I liked to see them run. I liked to see them beg." Where Boomer
youths who assaulted Silent victims were said to have mitigating reasons for
their antisocial behavior, 13ers who attack Boomer victims (as in the Bernhard
Goetz and the Central Park jogger cases) are condemned, in the Boom-led media,
as "evil" thugs deserving only of execution or, at best, a stiff term in some
boot-camp prison. Back in the late 1960s, Boomer crime was associated with
rage and betrayed expectations; today, the young l 3er criminal strikes elders as
emotionally detached-even insensible. William Raspberry accuses them of
being a "generation of animals," Stanton Samenow of having "the ability to
shut off their conscience." The kids themselves invented the word "wilding"
to describe their behavior. Asked why his friends go wilding, one New York
City youth explained, "Sometimes they do it for fun, sometimes they do it for
money, sometimes they just do it."
332 GENERA TIO NS

"We can arrest them, but jail is no deterrent," reports Washington Long,
chief of police in Albany, Georgia. "I've had kids tell me, 'Hell, I ain't got
nowhere else to go nohow.' " "For them, it's just a matter of fact," agrees
Washington, D.C., police chief Isaac Fulwood . "Oftentimes, they don't say
anything . They just sit there and say, 'Officer, do what you gotta do' "-like
the 16-year-old "wilder" Yusef Salaam, who asked his sentencing judge to
"Give me the max." (He got it.) As Terry Williams describes it in Cocaine
Kids, what is new about l3er criminals is their all-business attitude : their use
of calculated violence to protect inventory (smugglers), market share (competing
gangs), customer service (safe houses), accounts receivable (addicts), employee
relations (runners), and risk management (cops). A young drug-runner, says
Fulwood, "navigates in a world where most of us couldn't function, a world
where you've got to be cunning, slick, and mentally and physically tough."
And, of course, a world in which other choices seem even more hopeless. "I
got no plans I ain't going nowhere," sings Tracy Chapman, "So take your fast
car and keep on driving."
"When you get beneath the surface of their cheerfulness," observes Chris-
topher Lasch, "young people in the suburbs are just as hopeless as those in the
ghetto ... living in a state of almost unbearable, though mostly inarticulate,
agony. They experience the world only as a source of pleasure and pain." Like
a whole generation of Breakfast Clubbers, l3ers face a Boom-driven culture
quick to criticize or punish them but slow to take the time to find out what's
really going on in their lives . By one count, their ranks include a half-million
family "throwaways" -a word coined just for them. A generation of self-
perceived throwaways might as well take a few risks. Punkers who blast their
ears with boom boxes know what they're doing. "They tell me it will hurt me
down the line," explains one 20-year-old Ohioan with a deafening sound system
in his car, "but I don't care . I'm young and stupid, I guess." Thirteeners know
life holds no special favors, for them at least. "I keep hearing this is the best
time of our lives," says Harvard student Mandy Silber. "And I wonder-is it
all downhill?" Where the Silent and Boom at like age had every reason to expect
someday to nestle into law partnerships, tenured professorships, and seats on
the stock exchange, 13ers see very clearly the dead-end traps of a "McJobs"
economy . American Demographics predicts that the five fastest-growing job
fields of the early 1990s will be cashiers, nurses, janitors and maids, waiters
and waitresses, and truck drivers . Anytime they see others celebrate (or mor-
alize), 13ers watch their wallets-believing, as in the Bangles lyric, "Trouble
is, you can't believe that it's true/When the sun goes down, there's something
left for you. "
In Less Than Zero, an Ellis novel touted by its publisher as heralding a "New
Lost" generation, two youths have this exchange: "Where are we going?" "I
don't know, just driving." "But this road doesn't go anywhere." "That doesn't
matter." "What does?" "Just that we're on it, dude." Hemingway and Fitz-
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 333

gerald would have liked these kids, so open-eyed behind those Ray-Ban Wayfarer
sunglasses. "Prewar," Scotty would have called them. Not yet lost, but traveling
down that road.
* * *
Late in 1989, as East German students poured over the Berlin Wall, a Wash-
ington Post article described high school kids as "left flat" and "utterly un-
moved" by events that brought their teachers tears of joy. The youth attitude
that strikes elders as blase is, from the 13er perspective, unflinching and realistic.
They have already tramped through the dirty beach where idealism can lead.
Remembering how the "freedom" of open classrooms produced noisy chaos
and gave them what others constantly tell them was a bad education, they have
learned to be skeptical about what happens whenever barriers are broken down .
Maybe there will be new wars, maybe bad economic news-at the very least
new competition. These kids were less surprised than their teachers when Iraq
shattered the post-Cold War peace. American campuses were hardly fazed-
Berkeley freshman Charles Connolly speaking for many when he said, ''I think
we should go in there and take care of it, full throttle.'' Meanwhile, thousands
of Connolly's peers throttled off in unifonn to keep oil flowing from Saudi
Arabia to the big American homes and cars that so few 13ers can ever imagine
buying at the same age their parents did. Where the Korean War once featured
hardboiled, Trumanesque elders and sensitive, M*A*S*H*-like juniors, the Per-
sian Gulf crisis features the opposite . Silent 60-year-olds assume the complex,
polysyllabic tasks: satellite communications, multilateral negotiations, peace-
process evaluations . Thirteener 20-year-olds prepare for the brute, one-syllable
jobs: sweat, hide, move, hit, and kill.
Amid his Silent peers' euphoria over the end of the Cold War, pollster Peter
Hart published a highly critical report about "Democracy's Next Generation,"
noting that only 12 percent of them mentioned voting as an attribute of good
citizenship . Then again, 48 percent mentioned personal generosity . Having
grown up in an age of anti-institutional feeling, 13ers look at it this way: When
you vote, maybe you'll waste your time-or, worse, later feel tricked. But when
you do something real, like bringing food to the homeless, you do something
that matters, if only on a small scale . The president of MIT has likened the 13er
civic attitude to that of the Lone Ranger: Do a good deed, leave a silver bullet,
and move on .
In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman observes that when 13ers
were little, adults gave children "answers to questions they never asked ." That
problem still plagues this generation-except now the questions are, in effect,
what made you the way you are, and how can we fix it? Blue-ribbon Silent
committeemen (like Paul Volcker) anguish over how to change their attitude
about government, and inner-city Boomers (like Washington, D.C., health com-
missioner Reed Tuckson) "look internally" to understand "how we produced
these children." But 13ers consider such efforts a waste of time and energy .
334 GENERA TIO NS

From their angle, there's the temptation to play Max Headroom and say a
computer-programmed 'Tm sorry-sorry." Mostly, they figure such talk is point-
less-like aspiring opera singer Marie Xaviere, who says that "even if you
didn't want us, you made us. But we're here, and we're going to make the best
of it.'' They know they are a generation without an elder-perceived mission.
Yet "in spite of all the criticism and generally low expectations," Daniel Ralph
insists his generation 'will make a difference.'' What l 3ers ask of others, maybe
hopelessly, is to lend an unjaundiced ear and check out what Nancy Smith calls
"our 'attitude,' a coolness, a detachment . . . and the way we speak: ironic, flip,
uncommitted, a question mark at the end of every other sentence." "Dial into
our style," invites Miles Orkin in his essay "Mucho Slingage by the Pool."
"It's not like some fully bent tongue from hell or anything."
Their elders don't yet see it, 13ers themselves only dimly sense it, but this
streetwise generation does indeed bring a bag of savvy tricks their elders lack-
skills that may come in handy the next time America gets into real trouble. More
than anyone, they have developed a seasoned talent for getting the most out of
a bad hand. Take note, Beaver Cleaver: Thirteeners may never have glimpsed
Nirvana, but they know how to win.
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 335

MILLENNIAL GENERATION

Born: 1982-
Type: Civic (?)

In September of 1988 at Burrville Elementary in Washington, D.C., 5- and

6-year-old children arrived for their first day of kindergarten wearing brand-new
green-and-yellow coats and ties, blouses and dresses. If Boomer school board
member Nate Bush gets his way, these kids will wear school-issued clothes all
the way through high school, like it or not: '' Parents are going to have to exercise
their authority and say, I'm the parent, you 're the child, and this is a good
idea." A year later, having seen Japanese children in trim blue uniforms, Boomer
author James Fallows suggested their use in America "to promote some sense
of purpose and fellow-feeling at school .'' At Burrville Elementary, I 3ers in older
grades found the uniforms slightly humiliating, but the younger kids hardly
seemed to mind. These kids in green coats and yellow blouses are the vanguard
of America's MILLENNIAL GENERATION. Cute. Cheerful. Scoutlike.
Wanted. Not since the 1910s, when midlife Missionaries dressed child G.l.s in
Boy Scout brown, have adults seen such advantage in making kids look alike
and work together. Not since the early 1900s have older generations moved so
quickly to assert greater adult dominion over the world of childhood-and to
implant civic virtue in a new crop of youngsters.
Even the timing of this new generation is historic. Its birthyears will stretch
to and probably just beyond the year 2000, the end of the second millennium.
As the 1990s begin, the year 2000 is becoming a national target date, much like
the 1969 deadline President Kennedy once set for landing a man on the moon-
except this time, the goal aims at the nurture of what some are calling a "new
generation'' whose excellence Americans hope to celebrate when the Millennium
arrives. In 1990, the nation's governors set an ambitious agenda of educational
goals for the year 2000, including a 90 percent high school graduation rate for
the "Class of 2000." President Bush agreed, promising that by the year 2000
"U.S. students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achieve-
ment." Also in 1990, investigations into child labor practices found violations
at an all-time high, prompting some reformers to set the year 2000 as a goal for
removing children from dangerous and exploitive jobs and pushing them back
into school and family life. Former Surgeon General Everett Koop has declared
the nation's determination to produce the "smoke-free high school Class of
2000." And a Washington, D.C., group describing itself as "Concerned Black
Men" has launched "Project 2000" to provide "young black boys with con-
sistent, positive, and literate black role models" in time for the Millennium .
336 GENERATIO NS

MILLENNIAL GENERATION (Born 1982 to ?)

TYPE: Civic (?) FAMILY TREE

Projected number: 76,000,000 Typical grandparents: Silent
Now alive in U.S.: 33,000,000 Parents: Boom and Thirteenth
Percent immigrant: 12% Children: (new Adaptive and new Idealist)
Typical grandchildren: (new Reactive)

.SAMPLE MEMBERS, birth (death) FUTURE PERIOD OF

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
1982 Hilary Morgan Plurality in Congress: 2035-2060 (proj.)
1982 Dooney Waters Term of Presidency : 2040-2065 (proj.)
c. 1983 Cecilia Chichan Majority of Supreme Court: 2050-2075
c. 1983 Jebbie Bush (proj.)
1985 Jessica McClure
1985 Tabatha Foster (1988) PROMINENT FOREIGN PEERS
1987 "Baby M"
1982 Prince William

Age Date HISTORY AND LIFECYCLE

0-0 1982: "Class of 2000" born; flurry of books demand protection for children
0-1 1983: Cute-baby movie trend begins
0-2 1984: Time cover story proclaiming "The End of the Sexual Revolution"
0-3 1985: U.S. becomes debtor nation; crying-baby antideficit ads
0-5 1987: "Everybody's Baby" Jessica McClure rescued ; Baby "M" case
0-6 1988: Surge in "cocooning," celebrity pregnancies, school uniforms
0-7 1989: Webster case limits Roe v. Wade; antidrug crusade grows
0-8 1990: Educational goals set for the year 2000; first Children's Summit at UN
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 337

Fueling this adult mission toward the Millennial generation is palpable (mainly
Boom) disappointment in how the 13th is turning out , and second thoughts about
how 13ers were raised . "I'm sorry to say it," observed federal judge Vincent
Femia in 1989, "but we' ve lost a generation of youth to the war on drugs . We
have to start with the younger group, concentrate on the kindergartners .' ' The
circa-1990 preoccupation with "drugs" reflects a broader anxiety about harms
that were done and should not be repeated . In a 1990 Atlantic cover story,
Boomer Karl Zinsmeister suggests "preventing young criminals from infecting
a class of successors" by "putting the full weight of public protection on the
side of babies and schoolchildren." Though " it may be too late to save the 'me
first' generation from the folly of the new feudalism," notes former New York
mayor Edward Koch (also in 1990), a "new generation " could be provided "the
experience of working successfully with others ." In films like Parenthood , the
Boom culture has drawn a striking contrast between hardened teenage l 3ers and
cute Millennial "Babies on Board."
First-wave Millennials are riding a powerful crest of protective concern, dating
back to the early 1980s, over the American childhood environment. In 1981,
the year before the ''Class of 2000'' was born, a volley of books assaulted adult
mistreatment of children through the 13er birthyears (Children Without Child-
hood, The Disappearance of Childhood, Our Endangered Children , All Grown
Up and No Place to Go). Within the next couple of years, other authors began
reconsidering the human consequences of divorce , latchkey households, and
value-neutral education . In 1984, two kids-as-devils movies (Children of the
Corn, Firestarter) flopped at the box office, marking the end of a dying genre-
and the start of a more positive film depiction of children . Through the mid-
l 980s, studios released several child-as-victim movies (The Shining, Cujo), and
in the late 1980s, cuddly-baby movies (Raising Arizona , Three Men and a Baby,
Baby Boom , For Keeps, She 's Having a Baby). The new cinematic children
began helping adults-not, like film 13ers, by sharing parental burdens, but by
reminding parents to cope with life more responsibly on their own. From 1986
to 1988, polls reported a tripling in the popularity of' 's taying home with family .''
From Jane Pauley's twins to Bruce Willis' Lamaze class, the Boom ' s media
elite reinforced the new interest in infant nurture . By 1988, babies were declared
a "fad" by the San Francisco Chronicle , "the new lovers" in the New York
Times .
The changing tone of the popular culture coincided with the ebbing of the
Consciousness Revolution in the early 1980s. First-wave Millennials arrived in
an America awash in moral confidence but in institutional disrepair. Some social
changes (deferred marriage, smallish dual-income households) became uncon-
troversial facts of American life, while others ("open " marriages, mind-altering
drugs) were rejected . The rates of abortion, voluntary sterilization, and divorce
either plateaued or reversed. A few legislators began criticizing the antichild
policy consensus-from unchecked growth in federal borrowing to dwindling
338 GENERATIONS

health benefits for impoverished mothers . In 1985, while the Grace Corporation
sponsored TV public service ads linking the national debt with a crying baby ,
Congressman John Porter blasted huge budget deficits as " fiscal child abuse."
In 1988, Forbes magazine ran a cover story entitled "Cry , Baby: The Inter-
generational Transfer of Wealth, " a new KIDS-PAC lobby was formed around
children ' s interests, and child care surged ahead of foreign policy as the issue
of most concern to voters. In 1989, while federal attorneys were filing the first-
ever lawsuit against apartment units that banned children, George Bush admitted
he was " haunted" by the plight of inner-city children and pointed with hope to
the straight-arrow example of one crack-house child-7-year-old Dooney
Waters.
" The '60s Generation , Once High on Drugs, Warns Its Children," headlined
the Wall Street Journal in 1990. As parents, teachers , and prosecutors, fortyish
Boomers are setting about to protect children from the social and chemical residue
of the euphoric awakening they themselves had launched a quarter century earlier.
At dinner tables around the nation, 40-year-old parents are telling small children
to stay away from drugs , alcohol, AIDS, teen pregnancy, profanity, TV ads,
unchaperoned gatherings, and socially aggressive dress or manners. Likewise ,
at press conferences, 40-year-old political candidates are trying to persuade the
public that although maybe they did experiment a little with drugs, they never
really enjoyed it. While Tipper Gore battles lurid rock lyrics, Michigan's' 'mother
lion, " Terry Rakolta, campaigns against sex and violence on prime-time tele-
vision, and Barbie's doll band changes from the old "Rockers" to the cleaned-
up " Sensations ." Grown-up Boomer radicals who once delighted in shocking
their own moms and dads now surprise themselves with their own strictly per-
fectionist approach to child nurture. In growing numbers, fathers are demanding
" daddy-track" work schedules that allow them more time at home to raise their
young children . Garry Trudeau, father to young twins, drew a Doonesbury strip
that showed a Boomer proudly explaining that he had raised his girl "like an
Asian child . .. by teaching her the value of discipline , hard work, and respect
for others . "
In general , Boomer parents are determined to set an unerringly wholesome
environment for their Millennial tots. Where Silent parents had brought 13er
kids along to see R-rated movies made about them, Boomers take their Millen-
nials to see G-rated movies made for them . Where the old 13er Willy Wonka-
style movies had stressed individualism and differences among kids, the new
Boom-produced films (An American Tail, Oliver and Company, The Land Before
Time) stress civic virtues: equality, optimism, cooperation, and community.
Where the Disney animation studios laid off cartoonists during the 13er era,
they began replenishing their staffs during the Millennial era-and now employ
more artists than at any time since the 1937 production of Snow White. Boom
scriptwriters are crafting plots with stronger moral lessons and less ambivalent
messages about drugs, alcohol, and teenage sex. In the late 1980s, even the
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 339

bellwether Cosby Show shifted focus. Mom and dad Huxtable became less pally
and more in charge - making punishments stick , and telling little Rudy "you're
too young" to do this or know about that. Meanwhile, evangelical Boomers are
taking Dr. Dobson' s advice in Dare to Discipline.
Not since the Teddy Roosevelt-era furor over runaway streetcars have adults
made such serious efforts to take danger out of the child's daily life . In 1990,
New Yorkers expressed deeper anger over nine stray-bullet killings of small
children than they had ever felt about the much larger number of murders among
teenage I 3ers. In the safer suburbs, a wide assortment of new child-safety devices
has recently swamped the market-including the Gerber drawer latches, stove
knob covers, furniture comer cushions, toilet locks , I-See-U car mirrors, and
Kiddie Kap bicycle helmets (all displayed in a " Perfectly Safe" catalogue). The
1980s decade began with states passing laws requiring infant restraints in au-
tomobiles; the decade ended with talk of requiring infant restraints in commercial
airplanes-and (in Howard County, Maryland) with the nation's first-ever bicycle
helmet law.
Ever so gradually , adults of all ages are rediscovering an affection and sense
of public responsibility for other people's children. Back in the 1970s, the Boom 's
"Big Chill" gatherings were all-adult affairs . During the 1980s, they started
including babies , then small children, and now bigger children. Infant and toddler
seats began appearing in restaurants that had never before had them . In 1987,
the whole nation anxiously followed the fate of little girls in distress : "Every-
body's Baby,'' 18-month-old Jessica McClure, saved after being trapped for two
days in an abandoned well in Lubbock , Texas; 2-year-old Tabatha Foster, whose
five organ transplants were made possible by $350,000 in public donations (much
of it from celebrities); and 4-year-old Cecilia Chichan, the sole survivor rescued
from the crash of Northwest Flight 255 in Detroit.
This new generation of children is being treated as precious-often, more
precious than their parents . A judge in Washington , D .C., recently sentenced a
pregnant first-time drug offender to jail for the explicit reason that her behavior
put her unborn child at risk . Where the media once urged parents to allow their
l 3er children plenty of room for self-discovery , adult society (in the media,
legislatures, and courts) is now prodding parents to control the child environment
and is enforcing its intention with tough new laws that make parents civilly or
criminally liable for their children's misbehavior. Commenting on a new Cali-
fornia law that incriminates parents for gang vices committed by children, Ellen
Goodman observes that lawmakers have "turned the Bible on its head . ...
They 've decided that the sins of the sons shall be visited upon the parents." For
the first time in living memory, calls are rising for special orphanages, "acade-
mies," and Boys Towns for small children whose (mostly 13er) parents are
deemed socially unfit-places in which William Bennett says children "will be
raised and nurtured" under "strong rules and strong principles ." Where 13er
kids were best known as latchkeys, throwaways, boomerangs, and other terms
340 GENERA TIO NS

implying that adults would just as soon have them disappear, Millennials have
so far been perceived very differently-as kids whom adults wish to guard with
dutiful care. During the two most famous custody battles of the 1980s, newspaper
stories focused less on the parents than on the children: New Jersey's "Baby
M" and the District of Columbia's Hilary Morgan. Two decades ago, such baby
stories would have seemed bizarre beyond comprehension. Today they attract
intense nationwide concern.
As Hilary's peers reach school age, public education is moving toward "new
traditionalism," values, and greater adult assertiveness. Kindergartens have be-
come more academic, and elementary schools are stressing "good works" -an
emphasis on helping out with family and neighborhood chores. Sex education
now includes calls for continence, replacing what had earlier been a carefully
nonjudgmental, value-neutral approach . In a series of censorship and search-
and-seizure cases, the G.1.-dominated U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a
two-decade trend toward student rights and strengthened the hand of school
disciplinarians . As Boomers replace Silent as parents and teachers, public schools
have started to earn higher approval ratings in public polls. Teachers are rising
in public esteem (and pay), and PT As are flourishing with new membership and
purpose. What Chester Finn calls "a seismic shock" has gripped the adult mood
toward education, with sharply increasing support for more homework, longer
school days, toughened graduation requirements, greater parental involvement
in classrooms , and a nationally standardized curriculum. No way will perfec-
tionist Boomer parents let their tots reach age 17 unable to pass the Ravitch-
Finn history and literature test.
Boom parents and teachers have also been slowing down the childhood de-
velopment clock-unlike the Silent, who sped it up. From 1976 through 1988,
the proportion of students held back in elementary school jumped by one-third.
In 1989, roughly one of every five kindergarten-eligible children were deliber-
ately kept in preschool programs . The sale of Gesell Test materials, used for
determining a child's kindergarten readiness, jumped 67 percent between 1984
and 1987. Meanwhile, publishers of children's literature have reversed the l3er-
era emphasis on rushing readers to more sophisticated subject matter. Parents
now read babylike cloth and cardboard books to Millennial children-books
that, when l3ers were little, had to be imported from Europe if they could be
found at all. New story lines (like Oak Tree 's Value Tales) focus less on family
problems than on family virtues.
If the circa-1990 nurturing trends please the Boom, they are in effect a
repudiation of the way in which many Silent raised their own kids. "Drown the
Berenstain Bears" became Boomer Charles Krauthammer's cry against youth
literature that celebrates the parent as pal. At school board and PTA meetings,
Boom parents in their thirties often chastise the elder Silent for their permis-
siveness . Where the Silent would rather give kids complete information and then
let them make up their own minds, Boomers are more inclined to establish firm
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 341

rules, reinforced by adult supervision and careful attention to any transgressions.

In angry answer to suggestions that the answer to drugs lies in more information
about them, William Bennett said of little crack-house Dooney: ''This child does
not need drug education. That child needs protection, that child needs order,
and that child needs love." Goodman acknowledges that "we are now seeing
various attempts to put parents in charge, to shore up authority, to foster at least
the image and maybe the reality of a traditional family unit." Many wonder if
the offspring of such families will develop the openmindedness we now take for
granted in children. "What they' re learning is that life is black and white,"
observes columnist Anna Quindlen , without hearing ''the long version of answers
to life's questions" and without gaining "a measure of empathy and understand-
ing to shade the primary colors of censure ." Admitting that today's third and
fourth graders "seem more evolved young citizens than we were" at that age,
Quindlen sees them assimilating society's "Shalt Nots" about crime, drugs,
pollution, and education with disquieting energy and unanimity.
The Millennials show every sign of being a generation of trends-toward
improved education and health care, strengthening families, more adult affection
and protection, and a rising sense that youths need a national mission . A two-
decade animus against children, of course, cannot reverse itself overnight. Polls
in the mid-l 980s still showed adults more self- than child-focused in behavior,
though less so than a decade earlier. Divorce and abortion rates are stuck at high
levels, if down a bit from their early-1980s peak . Thirteeners are delaying
parenthood even more than Boomers at like age, but are showing a greater
commitment to making marriages last. Sex, violence , and alcohol and cigarette
advertising in the media remain accessible to small children, though the pro-
portion of R-rated films has been falling and the standards for PG ratings have
stiffened. American elementary schools are still underfunded in comparison with
those of other developed nations, but tax revolts against their fiscal base are
gradually cooling off. Massive federal budget deficits continue, albeit with more
evidence of adult guilt over the burdens they will someday impose on today's
children . Overall, the arguments of those who stress more values, more structure,
and more protection in the child's world are strengthening, from one year to the
next, while the arguments of those who disagree are losing ground.

Millennial Facts

First-wave Millennials , born after the great 1960s and 1970s plunge in Amer-
ican fertility rates, have the lowest child-to-parent ratio in American history.
They arrived at a time when only 2 percent of all kids under age 18 live
in families with five or more kids-just one-fourth the proportion of first-
wave 13ers.
342 GENERATIONS

In contrast to l3ers-and despite their small number per family-Millennial

babies frequently arrive to parents who want them desperately. The abortion
rate peaked in 1980 and has since shown a gradual decline . Infertility treat-
ment and "preemie" (premature infant) care have become two of the fastest-
growing fields in medicine. From 1986 to 1988, the number of infertility-
related doctor visits quadrupled. In 1970, a two-pound baby had only a 5
percent chance of living; in 1990, 90 percent survive-at an average cost
of over $100,000 per child.
The early 1980s marked a decisive turnaround in public attitudes toward public
schools: the beginning of "quality education" as a political issue; the first
year most parents approved of the performance of their local school districts;
and the first of seven straight years in which teacher salaries increased faster
than inflation-after seven straight earlier years of real salary decline.
The poverty rate for children under six peaked in 1983 (at 24.6 percent) and
thereafter has gradually declined. The U.S. divorce rate peaked in 1981;
the homicide rate against children age 1-4 peaked in 1982.
Since 1983, an increasing share of children below the poverty line have been
made eligible for Medicaid assistance. In 1990, despite pressure to reduce
federal spending, Congress expanded Medicaid to cover all poor children
under age 18 by the year 200 I -starting with everyone born after September
30, 1983, upon reaching 6 years of age. (No 13ers need apply.)
According to national surveys, the per capita savings rate for children age 4
to 12 held steady at about 15 percent from 1968 to 1984-but by 1989 it
had risen sharply, to over 30 percent. In the early 1980s, kids that age saved
only one-third as much as they spent on candy, soft drinks, and snacks.
Today, with the encouragement of their parents, they save more than they
spend on convenience food. Over the last decade, the proportion of child
income coming from allowances (rather than job earnings) has risen steadily.

* * *
"Only Eight Years Old," headlines an ad in a 1990 issue of the Atlantic,
"And He's Teaching Me About Science!" Twenty years ago, such an ad would
not have appeared. Or, if it had, no one would have believed it. Now we do.
Boomer moms and dads are setting out to produce kids who are smart and
powerful and dutiful-kids possessed of rational minds, a positive attitude, and
selfless team virtue. Someday, Boomers hope, Millennials will build according
to great ideals their parents can only envision, act on vital issues their parents
can only ponder. These children are not being raised to explore the inner world
(Boomers figure they can handle that arena just fine), but instead to achieve and
excel at the outer.
THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 343

Each day, we see dreams and wonder reappear in adult chatter about these
little citizens just now learning to walk, talk, and read. In 1988, NASA official
Thomas Paine predicted that "the first Martians are already born and toddling
around somewhere here on earth .'' Others speculate that these smart preschoolers
might grow up to be great scientists who can solve the riddle of cancer, great
engineers who can protect the environment, and great producers who can put
an end to world hunger. If they do, a girl born today can expect to live, on
average, into her nineties. That will take her beyond the year 2080, past Amer-
ica's Tricentennial. As Mom and Dad gaze into baby's big beautiful eyes, they
wonder-we all wonder-what those eyes will someday see.
 Part III
THE FUTURE
 Chapter 12

THE PAST
AS PROLOGUE

"T
1 omorrow Is Another Day.'' ' ' Somewhere over the Rainbow. '' The glim-
mering Futurama at the 1939 New York's World Fair. " There'll Be Bluebirds
over the White Cliffs of Dover." During the turning-point years of 1937-1943 ,
in the midst of a CRISIS ERA , these messages reflected how Americans of all
ages looked at the future. People felt hope, determination, and total consensus
about where society should go: toward material abundance (millions of cars and
shoes) and spiritual simplicity (home and apple pie) . It was all within reach, but
conditioned on a struggle everyone knew would demand total unity from all,
total sacrifice from some. There was little debate about right and wrong, only
about how to get the job done . Americans looked to elders for strategic vision,
to midlifers for tactical means, and to rising adults for selfless muscle . All those
who today remember this mood-this sense of all-encompassing urgency suf-
fused with childlike innocence-wonder why it has proved so hard to rekindle .
Such moods do not arrive often . But they do arrive from time to time. On
three earlier occasions Americans have experienced a similar feeling: in the
1680s, in the 1770s, and (briefly) around 1860. On each of these occasions,
Americans braced for a raging storm, urging one another not to lose hope that
the sun would shine afterward.
Moving forward a couple of decades, we can see what the future looked like
in an OUTER-DRIVEN ERA. Here we find Tomorrowland, a 1950s image of
afriendly future: moving sidewalks , soft-hued geometric shapes, futuristic Mu-
147
348 GENERA TIO NS

zak, and smiling, well-scrubbed families . In Disney's Carousel of Progress, the

"progress" remains fixed, while the "carousel" (what moves) is the audience,
sitting in chairs and watching household life get predictably easier, cleaner, and
more scientific . Laying out the years to come with all the confident linearity of
a monorail, Tomorrowland had what the "crisis" future didn't: specificity and
certainty. Yet it also lacked urgency, moral direction, and hope-and today's
visitor to the G.1.-Jetson household finds it about as warm as push-button trans-
mission. We sense much the same when we visit the Smithsonian Institution's
Hall of Machines, full of huge, perfectly engineered turbines from the 1876
Centennial Exposition (the mechanical future of the midlife Gilded) . Or when
we page through the geometrical street plans for the District of Columbia and
the countless square townships drafted around 1800 (the Palladian future of
midlife Republicans) . Or when we read the circa-1710 poetic odes to flax and
shipping (the worker-bee future of midlife Glorious). During each of these eras,
Americans looked into the future and saw Tomorrowland: secure, tangible,
comfortable, under control-and distressingly spirit-dead.
Moving forward yet another cycle notch, we arrive in an AWAKENING
ERA-and encounter a sudden discontinuity. Sometime between the mid-1960s
and the early 1970s, the American vision of the future shifted from Tomorrow land
to Pepperland. Erector-set affluence was now a ghastly material cancer, publicly
disdained and privately taken for granted . Of course we got to the moon (so
Americans thought). In another decade , we would be exploring the outer planets,
and in another four or five, shuttlecrafting to Alpha Centauri. But all that out
there felt trivial compared to what people felt in here. Americans searched for
soul over science, meanings over things. They explored an inner future without
dates or chronology-a euphoric experience, celebrated by coming-of-age
youngsters who sensed the Millennium (Childhood's End) in what seemed like
total holocaust for everything their elders had built (Soylent Green). Where have
we seen Pepperland before? Try Greenwich Village around 1900. Or the New
England communes of the 1840s. Or the Connecticut Valley in the late 1730s.
Or the Puritan flagship Arabella in 1630. 'I see a new heaven and a new earth,''
cried Jonathan Edwards 250 years ago. Looking toward the future, so have many
Americans during each of these eras .
A final step forward lands us roughly in the mid-l 990s, somewhere near the
middle of an INNER-DRIVEN ERA . To understand how the future will look
then, we can reflect on where the mood has been heading over the last several
years. According to most l 980s-era opinion polls, Americans of all ages emerged
from their "Consciousness Revolution " feeling terrific about their personal,
inner lives-but never so worried about the disintegrating foundations of their
social, outer world . By 1990, people came to share a disquieting sense of
fragmenting community, of eroding public purpose, of institutions that no longer
function, of mounting financial and environmental liabilities that must someday
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 349

fall due. Three or four decades ago, we knew we could do everything but worried
we could no longer feel anything. Today we sense the reverse. Once again, this
mood is nothing new . Recall America on the eve of World War I, steeping in
inward satisfaction just when a floodtide of crime, boozing, immigrants, and
political corruption threatened to wipe all "decency" off the continent. Or
America around 1850, building moral confidence but helpless in the face of
implacable sectionalism that (too soon) would trigger war. Or the colonies in
the early 1750s, rejuvenated with spirit but reeling from violence, mobs, insur-
rections, and imperial machinations beyond anyone's control.
These four visions of the future are all component pieces of a broader social
mood that accompanies our four successive constellational eras: AWAKENING,
INNER-DRIVEN, CRISIS, and OUTER-DRIVEN. In each era, the mood is
determined by the unique combination of different generational types at each
stage of life. Recognize the Awakening mood of the 1970s? We can't imagine
it without "square" Civics entering elderhood, "spoiled" Idealists coming of
age, and sensitive, passage-prone Adaptives sandwiched in between . How about
the Crisis mood of the 1930s? Unthinkable without Civics and Idealists in re-
versed positions, and (this time) gritty Reactives sandwiched in between.
Drawing on the American experience, this chapter examines what these pat-
terns say about how the social mood changes, how generations mature, and how
the generational cycle helps or hurts the future .
Cycles and futures are not supposed to be a happy mix . When Americans
talk of generations, they like to associate them with hopes for progress-in
particular, with the American Dream that each successive generation will fare
better over time . The very concept of a historical cycle may seem to threaten
these hopes and this dream . If history runs in circles, after all, how can it move
forward? As the generational biographies have shown, however, our cycle is
perfectly compatible with the progress of civilization by any standard normally
used to measure it-material, spiritual, social, or cultural. All the cycle explains
is when and why different generations apply different standards in working
toward progress. Wherever we use the word "cycle," the reader may if he
wishes replace it with "spiral," with all the opportunity and danger implicit in
that word . A spiral turns in a circle while at the same time moving upward-
or downward.
Our cycle (or spiral) may offer more reason to be optimistic about the future
than the conventional linear view of history. Consider, for example, the per-
spective of many of today's elder G .l.s , who came of age during the Great
Depression and who tend to measure the American Dream by Civic mile-
stones: public order, community purpose, friendly neighborhoods, dutiful fam-
ilies, benign science, and a rapidly ascending standard of living. Take those
milestones, assess the trends of the past two or three decades, and reflect on
what a linear view of history would conclude about America's future. Now that's
350 GENERA TIO NS

pessimism. But a cycle offers hope. It suggests, as we have just seen, that the
standards by which Americans measure progress shift from one era to the next-
from material to spiritual, from community improvement to self-perfection, from
basic survival to civilized refinement-and then back again . As the Missionary
historian James Truslow Adams bravely wrote during the dark hours of the Great
Depression, the American Dream gives every youth "the chance to grow into
something bigger and finer, as bigger and finer appeared to him." So too for
every new generation .
One lesson of the cycle is that every generational type has its own special
vision of the American Dream . Each type can fare well or badly in fulfilling
that vision. Likewise, each can leave gifts-or harms-to its heirs . We call
these "generational endowments ." Looking to the cycle, we can see important
differences in the endowments each generational type gives to the future.
To appreciate the connection between generations and progress, we need to
build paradigms-first of the four constellational moods, and then of the peer
personality and lifecycle of each generational type .

The Cycle of Constellational Moods: A Paradigm

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Despite
George Santayana's warning , many fundamentals of history do seem to repeat
no matter how much we try to remember and learn from them. Indeed, were
history purely random, it would be less important-and remembering it would
be pointless . Most of us, however, sense that history does leave telltale traces
of a certain regularity, that we can learn from parallels between the culture,
fashions, politics-or simply the moods-of different periods .
To identify some of these parallels , let's begin by lining up all the constel-
lational eras in American history . There have been as many of these-eighteen-
as there have been generations. In Chapter 2, we defined each era as a generation-
long birthyear period preceding each aligned constellation (which occurs in the
year the last cohort of each new generation is born) . We display these eras in
Figure 12-1. Notice how the Civil War Cycle had only three eras (including an
abbreviated combination of Inner-Driven and Crisis eras), just as it had only
three generational types.
Since a constellational era typically lasts about twenty-two years, a four-era
cycle lasts roughly eighty to one hundred years , or about the lifespan of a long-
lived individual. To calibrate the duration of America's five cycles, in fact, we
might compare them with five Idealist lifespans laid end-to-end . Consider the
sequential lives of Simon Bradstreet (1603-1697), Benjamin Franklin (1706-
1790), Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), and Albert
Gore, Jr. ( 1948- ). Each of these individuals has witnessed (or in the last case
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 351

FIGURE 12-1
Constellational Eras,
Dated by Generational Birthyears

INNER- OUTER-
AWAKENING DRIVEN CRISIS DRIVEN
CYCLE ERA ERA ERA ERA

PRE-COLONIAL: Elizabethan
Renaissance
1584-1614

COLONIAL: Puritan Religious Glorious Age of

Awakening Intolerance Revolution Enlightenment
1615-1647 1648-1673 1674-1700 1701-1723

REVOLUTIONARY: Great French and American Era of Good

Awakening Indian War Revolution Feeling
1724-1741 1742-1766 1767-1791 1792-1821

CIVIL WAR: Transcendental Civil Reconstruction,

Awakening War Gilded Age
1822-1842 1843 1859 1860-1882

GREAT POWER: Missionary World War I, Depression, Superpower

Awakening Prohibition World War II America
1883-1900 1901-1924 1925-1942 1943-1960

MILLENNIAL: Boom
Awakening
1961-1981 1982-

can expect to witness) each constellational era at some point in his or her life.
A similar end-to-end exercise could be performed with notable members of other
generational types with the same result. Everyone who lives a normal lifespan
experiences every constellational era once. Of course, each type witnesses each
era .from a different phase-of-life perspective. Idealists, for example, see an
Awakening era as rising adults and a Crisis era in elderhood, while Civics see
these two periods from a reversed perspective. Again, we notice how age location
governs the two-way interaction between generations and history.
Associated with each type of era is a paradigmatic mood. But what are these
352 GENERATIONS

moods, and how do we identify them amid the noise of history? How can we
say that the mood in the 1950s, for example, was anything like the mood in the
1870s-or, for that matter, in the 1710s?
To identify a mood, we must first strip away the cumulative shape of civi-
lization that every constellation largely inherits from the past-such as affluence,
technology, basic social mores and cultural norms, and established political
institutions . We must also strip away the chance events and the passing fashions,
language, and mannerisms through which a mood expresses itself. Again, it may
help to envision a "spiral," where the direction of the spiral indicates the
cumulative progress-or, if it happens, decline-of civilization, and where the
random perturbations in the spiral indicate era-specific events. What remains-
the circle of constellational moods-is driven by the repeating overlap of gen-
erational types.
Popular music offers a lively illustration of how cyclical recurrences can be
distinguished from linear trends. Clearly, over the past century and a half, we
can map out a steady improvement in the technology and marketing of music.
Progressives came of age with live ballads and marches performed largely by
professionals. Missionaries brought home the first widely marketed song sheets
for home piano play. The Lost enjoyed the first Victrolas, with cylindrical
records. G.l.s bought the first 78s for songs broadcast on AM radio. The Silent
listened to stereos with 33-rpm LPs. Boomers played cassettes in their cars
and popularized FM radio. Thirteeners love their compact disks. Today's elec-
tronics industry is abuzz with talk of the new digital technology that awaits
Millennial teenagers. Yet over this same period, behind the linear improvement,
popular music has reflected the mood of each new era and the type of each new
peer personality. Over the Great Power Cycle, the most memorable Missionary
songs were spirituals and blues, soulful and angry; the Lost had jazz, improvised
and naughty; the G.l. invented big-band swing, standardized and upbeat; and
the Silent had folk and rock, subversive and infused with social conscience. So
far in the Millennial cycle, that pattern has repeated-with Boomer music inward-
seeking and tinged with fury (adding the "acid" and "Jesus" to rock) and l3er
music punkish, prankish, and diverse.
When we look at history this way, searching for basic patterns in social
behavior, we can spot several that coincide with the constellational eras. Figure
12-2 lists them.
Some of the trends shown in Figure 12-2 resist quantification. "Attitude
toward institutions" obviously cannot be measured. Few historians would dis-
agree, however, that prevailing attitudes toward government and family in 1740
and 1975 (especially among rising adults) represent an opposite extreme from
the prevailing attitudes in 1700 and 1940. Take your choice: the frenzied bonfires
of young John Davenport or the crisp "Family Well-Ordered" essays of young
Cotton Mather; the hippies of Wheeler Ranch or the Seabees of Guadalcanal.
Other trends can be quantified, at least partially. A growing tolerance for personal
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 353

risk , for instance , usually results in more criminal behavior. The historical record
suggests that rates of crime (or public complaints about crime) have risen steeply
during every A wakening era since the 1730s and have reached cyclical highs
during every Inner-Driven era since the late 1740s. " It seems to be now become
dangerous for the good people of this town to go out late at night without being
sufficiently well armed," commented the New York Gazette in 1749. So have
many New Yorkers told each other in the 1840s, the 1910s-and, yes , the
1980s.
Several major social indicators generally track the cycle shown in Figure
12-2. For example :

Rates of substance abuse tend to rise steeply during an Awakening era, peak
near its end , and then fall after last-wave Idealists finish coming of age (and
first-wave Idealists enter midlife). The sharpest alcohol-consumption turn-
around in American history occurred in the late 1830s (the end of the
Transcendental Awakening), followed by a further decline in the 1840s.
The second-sharpest occurred between 1900 and 1910 (the end of the Mis-
sionary Awakening) , followed by a further decline during Prohibition. More
recently, per capita alcohol consumption began accelerating around 1960,
peaked around 1980 (the end of the Boom Awakening) , and has lately been
falling. For mind-altering drugs, from opiates to hallucinogens, the pattern
is much the same . Each time, young Idealists get most of the euphoria
while society looks on indulgently , after which young Reactives get most
of the blame when society begins cracking down. Commenting on this long-
term cycle , historian David Musto notes that "a person growing up in
America in the 1890s and the 1970s would have the image of a drug-using,
drug-tolerating society; a person growing up in the I 940s-and perhaps in
the 2000s-would have the image of a nation that firmly rejects narcotics ."
Fertility tends to rise during Outer-Driven eras , when Idealists are born. The
Puritans , Awakeners , Transcendentals , and Boomers were all the products
of birth booms, just as their Adaptive next-elders were all the products of
Crisis-era birth dearths . For the Missionaries, the anomalous Civil War
Cycle created a somewhat different pattern: the birthrate suddenly fell for
war-baby first-wavers (born from 1860 to 1865), but thereafter stabilized
until the early I 880s-the only birthrate plateau during an otherwise steady
downslope that stretched 130 years from the Gilded through the Silent.
Birthrates always ease during Awakening eras , either by stabilizing after
earlier growth (for Liberty babies) or by falling sharply (for l3er babies).

Immigration tends to rise during an Awakening era, peak during an Inner-

Driven era, and fall during a Crisis era-each trend reflecting a different
social consensus about pluralism and community. Since most immigrants
have always ranged in age from their mid-teens to late thirties, Idealist and
354 GENERATIO NS

FIGURE 12-2
Constellational Moods, by Era

INNER- OUTER-
AWAKENING DRIVEN CRISIS DRIVEN
ERA ERA ERA ERA

(Aligned Constellation at End of Era)

ELDER: Civics Adaptive Idealists Reactives

MIDLIFE: Adaptives Idealists Reactives Civics

RISING: Idealists Reactives Civics Adaptives

YOUTH: Reactives Civics Adaptives Idealists

CYCLE CALENDAR: Year 1-22 Year 23-44 Year 45-66 Year 67-88

NURTURE OF under- over-

CHILDREN: protective tightening protective loosening

SEX ROLE narrowest widest

DIVISIONS: narrowing point widening point

TOLERANCE FOR
PERSONAL RISK: rising high falling low

INDIVIDUALISM rising maximum rising maximum

VS. COMMUNITY: individualism individualism community community

WORLD VIEW: rising maximum rising maximum

complexity complexity simplicity simplicity
BEHAVIOR TOWARD
IDEALS: discover cultivate champion realize

BEHAVIOR TOWARD
INSTITUTIONS: attack redefine establish build

SENSE OF fix do what fix do what

GREATEST NEED: inner world feels right outer world works

VISION OF
FUTURE: euphoric darkening urgent brightening

(especially) Reactive generations have had foreign-born flavors. The Lib-

erty, Transcendental, Gilded, Boom, and 13th comprise, in fact, the only
American generations in which the share of immigrants has risen over their
next-elders. Civic generations, on the other hand, have always shown a
marked decline in their immigrant share. Civics enter rising adulthood during
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 355

a Crisis era, when immigration is more difficult or less attractive-and

when elder Idealist leaders typically take a hard anti-immigrant stance in
order to "protect" the national community better than their Adaptive pre-
decessors .
Economic growth tends to accelerate smoothly during an Outer-Driven era,
falter during an Awakening era, proceed irregularly during an Inner-Driven
era, and encounter severe setbacks or dislocations during a Crisis era. From
1942 to 1973, for example, U.S. real output per worker grew far more
rapidly than during any other comparable period over the last century. (The
former year signaled the turning point of a Crisis era, the latter of an
Awakening era.) Since 1973, growth in the American standard of living
has slowed dramatically. Earlier episodes of robust economic growth follow
roughly the same pattern: 1692 to 1735, 1789 to 1837, and 1867 to 1893.
Toward the end of each of these peri09s, the public consensus underlying
economic progress disintegrated as America entered an Awakening era.
Ultimately, the progress itself either stopped, decelerated, or (at best) fluc-
tuated erratically. At the other end of the cycle, Crisis eras typically include
periods of serious material hardship-sometimes directly related to war
(1774-1789, 1861-1867), sometimes not (1929-1938).

Readers who reflect on these social indicators (and on the cyclical trends
noted in Figure 12-2) will have no problem recognizing where we are today:
approaching the middle of an Inner-Driven era. Nor will they have trouble
figuring out where we have been over the last several decades and, more im-
portant, where we are headed.

Let's now summarize the mood of each constellational era:

THE MOOD OF AN AWAKENING ERA reflects society ' s transition into

a spiritual awakening . The focus on inner life grows to maximum intensity, as
secular interest in outer life declines . Artistic culture is highly innovative. New
social ideals, emerging out of utopian experiments in individual autonomy and
perfect fellowship, are used to attack and weaken established institutions. Society
has difficulty coalescing around common goals, and any social effort requiring
collective discipline encounters withering controversy . Wars are unlikely, and
those that occur are controversial when fought and badly remembered afterward.
Sex role distinctions narrow, public order deteriorates, and crime and substance
abuse rise. A euphoric enthusiasm over near-term spiritual progress eclipses
public concern over secular problems, contributing to a high tolerance for risk-
prone lifestyles. Child-rearing reaches the cyclical point of minimum protection
and structure. The era's defining, two-apart generational dialogue arises between
coming-of-age Idealists and aging Civics-a noisy clash that elevates the new
 356 GENERA TIO NS

values of youth but leaves institutional leadership with the old. Sample military
conflicts: Spanish-American War, Vietnam War.

THE MOOD OF AN INNER-DRIVEN ERA begins where the fervor of

the awakening leaves off . Satisfaction with personal and spiritual life is high,
and individualism flourishes . Cultural and social life fragments amid signs of
growing socioeconomic inequality . While confidence in established institutions
sinks to a cyclical nadir, new efforts arise to redefine or recreate institutions
around new ideals. Frenetic and pleasure-seeking lifestyles emerge, side by side
with growing seriousness of purpose and a declining public toleration for aberrant
personal behavior. Perceptions about society's collective future darken, time
horizons shorten, and mounting secular problems are deferred. Wars become
more likely-and are fought with moral fervor but without consensus or follow-
through. Sex-role distinctions narrow to their thinnest point, families strengthen,
and child-rearing begins to move back toward protection and structure . The era's
defining, one-apart generational dialogue arises between rising-adult Reactives
and midlife Idealists-open hostility between risk-taking adventurers on one side
and punitive moralizers on the other. Sample military conflicts: King George's
War, French and Indian War, Mexican-American War , World War I, the 1989
Panama invasion, the 1990 Persian Gulf deployment.

THE MOOD OF A CRISIS ERA reflects society's transition into a secular

crisis. A grim preoccupation with outer-world peril grows to maximum intensity,
as spiritual curiosity declines . Artistic culture avoids nuance, often (in the form
of propaganda) overtly reinforcing "good" conduct. Worldly problems are no
longer deferred, but are allowed to congeal into a struggle requiring total con-
sensus, aggressive public institutions, and personal sacrifice. Wars are very
likely, and they are fought with fury and efficacy. Sex role distinctions widen,
public and family order strengthen, and personal violence and substance abuse
decline. A rush of hopeful confidence in near-term secular progress crowds out
worries about questionable public means and contributes to a low tolerance for
risk-prone lifestyles. Child-rearing reaches the cyclical point of maximum pro-
tection and structure. The era's defining, two-apart generational dialogue arises
between coming-of-age Civics and aging Idealists-a friendly alliance that har-
nesses the worldly energy of the young but leaves values in the hands of the
old. Sample military conflicts: King Philip's War, colonial Glorious Revolution,
American Revolution, Civil War, World War II.

THE MOOD OF AN OUTER-DRIVEN ERA begins where the grim

trauma of the recent crisis leaves off . The sense of community reaches its cyclical
peak . Individualists are ostracized, and social and cultural life tends toward
friendly blandness and homogeneity. The ideals that triumphed in the Crisis era are
secularized and institutionalized. The emphasis is on planning, doing, and build-
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 357

ing-though a few loners begin voicing disquiet over the spiritual cost of rapid
economic and scientific progress . Perceptions about the society's collective future
brighten, and public time horizons lengthen. Wars tend to be unwanted echoes
of the recent crisis-and are fought with consensus but without enthusiasm .
Sex-role distinctions widen to their maximum point, but family cohesion begins
to weaken, and child-rearing gradually becomes looser and more indulgent . The
era's defining, one-apart generational dialogue arises between rising-adult Adap-
tives and midlife Civics-a low-keyed competition between sensitive doubters
on one side and powerful builders on the other. Sample military conflicts: Queen
Anne's War, War of 1812, Korean War.

The Cycle of Generational Types: A Paradigm

Having built a paradigm for the moods of the constellational cycle, let's do
the same for each generational type . To be sure, no individual generation can
fit such a paradigm exactly. This is especially true for the two generations most
affected by the mistimed crisis during the Civil War Cycle-the Gilded and
Progressives . Yet as we have seen in Chapter 5, even this exception offers a
powerful normative message for each of today's living generations.

The IDEALIST Lifecycle

Nurtured as children amid secular confidence and coming of age during an

awakening, Idealist generations travel a prophetic lifecycle. Early in life, Idealists
believe themselves closer to God than older generations; late in life, all gener-
ations regard them as repositories of lofty values beyond the comprehension of
youth . At a distance, we remember Idealists best for their coming-of-age passion
(William Tennent, Nat Turner, William Jennings Bryan) and for their principled
elder stewardship in times of crisis (Samuel Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin
Roosevelt) . Their phases of life:

YOUTH: The Idealist generation grows up in a post-crisis era of mellowed

Reactive elders, vigorous Civic midlifers, and conformist Adaptive rising adults.
Parental protectiveness is high but receding, maintained by the confidence of
Civic fathers but gradually subverted by the sympathy of Civic mothers . Children
are indulged by parents in a world gripped with secularism, rationalism, and
community-spirited conformism. Older generations hope the new children can
bring a richer moral dimension to a world needing little additional safety or
order, but showing symptoms of cultural sterility .

RISING ADULTHOOD: Having cultivated a strong inner life during child-

hood, Idealists come of age experiencing a spiritual awakening. They burst forth
358 GENERA TIO NS

FIGURE 12-3
Idealist Lifecycles

YOUTH RISING MIDLIFE ELDER

PURITAN Elizabethan Puritan Religious Glorious
(born 1584-1614) Renaissance Awakening Intolerance Revolution

AWAKENER Age of Great French and American

(born 1701-1723) Enlightenment Awakening Indian War Revolution

TRANSCENDENTAL Era of Transcendental Civil Reconstruction,

(born 1792-1821) Good Feeling Awakening War Gilded Age

MISSIONARY Reconstruction, Missionary World War I, Depression,

(born 1860-1882) Gilded Age Awakening Prohibition World War II

BOOM Superpower Boom

(born 1943-1960) America Awakening

with angry challenges to their elders' public and private behavior, which they
regard as intolerably deficient in moral worth. Unable to defend themselves
effectively, aging Civics ultimately cede the values agenda to the young. Mean-
while, rising Idealists launch the entire society into a fever of renewal, which
typically peaks and is already half forgotten by the time their last wave has
entered rising adulthood. Right-brained spiritualists, they encourage individual
autonomy, resist social cooperation (except as a means of self-discovery), and
erode prevailing distinctions between sex roles.

MIDLIFE: After their coming-of-age outburst, the Idealists' first instinct is

to retrench, to concentrate on perfecting the inner life . Entering midlife, they
gradually reshape institutions around new values and assume a judgmental stance
against what they perceive to be the moral vacuum of the younger Reactives.
They come to political power slowly but resolutely, beginning with relatively
weak leaders tolerant of their peers' self-immersed impulses. Gradually, splits
emerge and deepen between Idealist factions holding competing moral posi-
tions-each insisting on applying absolute principles to the outer world, but
disagreeing with the other factions over what those principles should be.
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 359

ELDERHOOD: One Idealist faction ultimately prevails, setting an agenda

for decisive collective action. Producing leaders of great moral authority, Idealists
impose their will sternly on people of all ages-calling on younger Reactive
and Civic generations to make sacrifices for principled causes . The society now
passes through an era of secular crisis-a key historic turning point, possibly a
major war . After the crisis, public institutions substantially reflect the inner
visions of Idealist elders, who look upon themselves as vital links to culture and
civilization. From the young, they seek personal obedience and respect more
than public power or reward .

The REACTIVE Lifecycle

Nurtured as children during an awakening and coming of age amid spiritual

confidence but secular unease, Reactive generations travel a picaresque lifecycle.
Early in life, Reactives desperately seek to escape or outwit the judgments of
next-elder Idealists; late in life, they make unthanked sacrifices for next-junior
Civics. At a distance, we remember Reactives best during their rising~adult years
of hell-raising (Paxton Boys, Missouri Raiders, rumrunners) and during their

FIGURE 12-4
Reactive Lifecycles

YOUTH RISING MIDLIFE ELDER

CAVALIER Puritan Religious Glorious Age of

(born 1615-1647) Awakening Intolerance Revolution Enlightenment

LIBERTY Great French and American Era of

(born 1724-1741) Awakening Indian War Revolution Good Feeling

GILDED Transcendental Civil Reconstruction, Missionary

(born 1822-1842) Awakening War Gilded Age Awakening

LOST Missionary World War I, Depression, Superpower

(born 1883-1900) Awakening Prohibition World War II America

THIRTEENTH Boom
(born 1961-1981) Awakening
360 GENERATIONS

midlife years of tough, in-the-fray leadership (George Washington, Ulysses

Grant, Harry Truman). Their phases of life:

YOUTH: The Reactive generation is child to an era of still powerful Civic

elders, tom Adaptive midlifers, and moralizing Idealist rising adults. With Adap-
tive approval, children are left free to find their own norms of behavior and
adjust to a world of narrowing sex-role distinctions. No longer protective, parents
expose children to real-world anxieties and dangers. With a largely self-absorbed
adult society immersed in a spiritual awakening, youths are given little sense of
mission or direction. Adults tend to view them harshly-at best, as inconvenient;
at worst, as disappointing or even wicked.

RISING ADULTHOOD: Reactives come of age with little collective self-

esteem. Their early contact with the real world, however, gives them strong
survival skills and high hopes for individual success. They perceive midlife
Idealists as pompous and judgmental, and are themselves perceived as amoral
and devoid of inner life. Defining themselves in cynical opposition to the Ide-
alists, who by now are starting to govern with an increasingly heavy hand, young
Reactive adults engage in social and economic entrepreneurship, tinged with
pleasure-seeking and other high-risk behavior.

MIDLIFE: Playing to win but half-expecting to lose, Reactives enter midlife

accepting wide gaps in personal outcomes-and between sex roles. They regard
success or failure as a private matter while they gradually learn to abide, and
no longer fight, the Idealist stigma against their generation. They become cautious
in family life and gradually mellow in personality. Their ablest peers become
society's most cunning, pragmatic, and colorful public figures-military and
commercial managers of great realism, effective leaders for the secular crisis
congealed by elder Idealists.

ELDERHOOD: Elder Reactives remain undemanding in a new, post-crisis

era when society begins praising the energy of Civic midlifers and indulging a
new crop of Idealist youths. Aging leaders compensate for their generation's
earlier bingelike behavior by shunning risk and encouraging conformism. By
instinct, old Reactives are wary conservatives, "not born yesterday," inclined
to warn more than guide. They retire into an individualist, if neglected, role.

The CIVIC Lif ecycle

Nurtured as children amid spiritual confidence and coming of age during a

secular crisis, Civic generations travel a heroic lifecycle. Early in life, Civics
believe themselves more powerful than older generations; late in life, all gen-
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 361

FIGURE 12-5
Civic Lifecycles

YOUTH RISING MIDLIFE ELDER

GLORIOUS Religious Glorious Era of Great

(born 1648-1673) Intolerance Revolution Enlightenment Awakening

REPUBLICAN French and American Era of Transcendental

(born 1742-1766) Indian War Revolution Good Feeling Awakening

G.I. World War I, Depression, Superpower Boom

(born 1901-1924) Prohibition World War II America Awakening

MILLENNIAL
(born 1982-2003?)

erations regard them as uniquely opt1m1st1c, collegial, and competent. At a

distance, we remember Civics best for their collective coming-of-age triumphs
(the Glorious Revolution, Yorktown, VJ-Day) and for their crowning midlife
achievements (the Peace of Utrecht and slave codes, the Louisiana Purchase and
steamboats, the Apollo moon launches and interstate highways) . Their phases
of life:

YOUTH: The Civic generation spends childhood during a post-awakening

era of sensitive Adaptive elders, values-oriented Idealist midlifers, and pleasure-
seeking Reactive rising adults. Idealist parents look upon these children as spe-
cial, an instrument through which their inner visions can be achieved or defended.
The child environment, now perceived to be dangerous, is pushed back toward
greater protection and structure . Since adults expect children to be dutiful, smart,
and potentially powerful, youths develop a clear collective mission and high
ambitions for cleaning up and rebuilding the outer world.

RISING ADULTHOOD: Coming of age, Civics develop activity-oriented

peer relationships, peer-enforced codes of conduct, and a strong sense of gen-
erational community . They band together at a historic moment and-guided by
the principled wisdom of elder Idealists and the realistic leadership of midlife
Reactives-successfully shoulder a secular crisis. After doing their duty un-
selfishly , they afterward expect, and receive , generous praise and reward from
other generations. Left-brained achievers and instinctive team players, they ex-
362 GENERA TIO NS

pect human relationships to be clearly defined and push for wider distinctions
between acceptable sex roles.

MIDLIFE: Empowered by the hubris of early success, Civics reach midlife

as builders and doers, defenders of a wholesome but conformist culture . After
impatiently awaiting their tum atop society, they push aside the aging Reactives
and enter leadership roles with vigor, certain of their own ability to make things
work. They try to institutionalize and rationalize every sphere of social life, from
science to religion, statecraft to the arts. Their midlife hubris, however, often
encourages them to overreach and push secular perfection too far. As Civics
begin passing out of midlife, they elicit a stormy crusade of moral purification
from coming-of-age Idealists.

ELDERHOOD: Old age does not weaken the Civic reputation for unusual
energy and collective purpose. As elders, however, they grow frustrated at how
the new spiritual agenda saps the strength of their powerful institutions, which
they fear may not survive without their special competence. They detach them-
selves from new cultural trends but retain an active role in public affairs. From
the young, Civics seek institutional power and economic reward more than
personal respect or obedience.

The ADAPTIVELifecycle

Nurtured as children during a crisis and coming of age amid secular confidence
but spiritual unease, Adaptive generations travel a genteel lifecycle. Early in
life, Adaptives try to excel in the subordinate tasks given them by next-elder
Civics; late in life, they seek approving judgments from next-junior Idealists .
At a distance, we remember them best during their quiet years of rising adulthood
(the log-cabin settlers of 1800, the Great Plains farmers of 1880, the young
suburbanites of 1960) and during their midlife years of flexible, consensus-
seeking leadership (the Whig "compromises" of Henry Clay and Daniel Web-
ster, the "good government" reforms of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson, the budgetary and peace "processes" of Phil Gramm and James Baker
III). Their phases of life:

YOUTH: The Adaptive generation enters childhood surrounded by stem

Idealist elders, pragmatic Reactive midlifers, and aggressive Civic rising adults.
A secular crisis erupts. Reactive-led families surround children with an inten-
sively protective, even suffocating style of nurture. Children are expected to stay
out of the way of harm-and of busy adults . Though assured of their collective
worth, they are told their individual needs take a low priority as long as the
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 363

FIGURE 12-6
Adative Lifecycles

YOUTH RISING MIDLIFE ELDER

ENLIGHTENMENT Glorious Age of Great French and

(born 1674-1700) Revolution Enlightenment Awakening Indian War

COMPROMISE American Era of Transcendental Civil

(born 1767-1791) Revolution Good Feeling Awakening War

PROGRESSIVE Civil Reconstruction, Missionary World War I,

(born 1843-1859) War Gilded Age Awakening Prohibition

SILENT Depression, Superpower Boom

(born 1925-1942) World War II America Awakening

community is struggling for its survival. Adaptive youths inherit a world of

widening sex-role distinctions . They grow up well behaved, while wondering
how (or if) they can live up to the expectations of powerful elders who are
sacrificing so much on their behalf .

RISING ADULTHOOD: Taught to pursue acceptance from older genera-

tions, Adaptives come of age emulating successful adult behavior. Not old
enough to participate in the crisis as adults, they fail to experience a cathartic
rite of passage-and fail to acquire the self-confidence of their next-elders.
Individually insecure in an era of public optimism, they try conforming to the
expectations of elders, which now means playing the ameliorator to the Civics'
grand post-crisis edifice. Meanwhile, they probe cautiously for a fresher, more
fulfilling role . This effort leads to a cult of professional expertise (beating the
Civics at their own game) and to critical gestures of conscience and humanism
(exposing the Civics' spiritual shortcomings). Young adults infuse popular cul-
ture with new vitality and provide encouraging mentors to new youth movements
that hit just too late for them to join .

MIDLIFE: Adaptives enter midlife while coming-of-age Idealists are trig-

gering a spiritual awakening. This new phase of life poses an awkward personal
"passage " for a generation forced to choose between the outer mission of older
Civics and the inner mission of younger Idealists . Post-passage , still searching
364 GENERA TIO NS

for an elusive catharsis , Adaptive midlifers compensate for their earlier confor-
mism by engaging in high-risk political and family behavior. In public life, they
focus on issues low in substance but rich in personality and drama. Those who
reach positions of leadership tend to rely on expertise, process, and pluralism-
and, in so doing, tend to postpone unpleasant choices .

ELDERHOOD: Entering old age while a more sober and values-oriented

leadership style is emerging, Adaptives remain personally flexible and culturally
sensitive. By instinct, elder Adaptives are trusting liberals-believers in the
inherent goodness of man and his need for second chances. Just as they once
took cues from Civic elders, now they adopt the agenda of younger Idealists
while wishing to be accepted as full partners in the new values regime . They
preserve a social conscience, show a resilient spirit, and never stop raising new
questions.

In Figure 12-7, we summarize the peer personalities of each of the four

generational types.
These contrasting peer personalities lead to important contrasts in leadership
styles. Figure 12-8 compares the best-remembered American political leaders of
each type-listing two from each generation over the first four cycles . We include
only those who have held a major office: colonial governorships for the first
cycle, the Continental Congress for the Awakeners, and U.S. Presidents (or, for
the Silent, Presidential nominees) thereafter.
For each set of eight names in Figure 12-8, reflect on common elements, the
outline of a composite peer personality . The following impressions emerge:

Idealist leaders have been cerebral and principled, summoners of human sac-
rifice, wagers of righteous wars. Early in life, none saw combat in uniform;
late in life, most came to be revered as much for their words as for their
deeds.
Reactive leaders have been cunning, hard-to-fool realists, taciturn warriors
who prefer to meet problems and adversaries one-on-one . They include the
only two Presidents who had earlier hanged a man (Washington and Cleve-
land), one governor who hanged witches (Stoughton), and several com-
manders who had led troops into battle (Bacon, Washington, Grant, Truman,
and Eisenhower).
Civic leaders have been vigorous and rational institution-builders, busy and
competent even in old age. All of them, entering midlife, were aggressive
advocates of technological progress, economic prosperity, social harmony,
and public optimism.
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 365

FIGURE 12-7
Peer Personalities,
by Generational Type
IDEALIST REACTIVE CIVIC ADAPTIVE

Lifecycle Type: prophetic picaresque heroic genteel

Parental Attachment strongest independent strongest obedient

in Youth: to mother of both to father to both

Coming-of-Age
Experience: sanctifying alienating empowering unfulfilling

Principal Focus, inner- whatever outer- tom between

Coming-of-Age: world works best world inner & outer

How Perceived
Coming-of-Age: stormy bad good placid

Preoccupation in
Rising Adulthood: reflecting competing building ameliorating

Attitude detached risk-seeking energetic conformist

Transition to to to to
in Midlife: judgmental exhausted hubristic experimental

Preoccupation
in Elderhood: civilization survival community family

How Perceived visionary, lonely, busy, sensitive ,

as Elders: wise caustic confident flexible

Style of righteous, pragmatic , grand, process-fixated,

Leadership: austere cautious expansive pluralistic

God is ... truth persuasion power love

How It Is Nurtured: relaxing underprotective tightening overprotective

How It Nurtures: tightening overprotective relaxing underprotective

Positive principled savvy rational caring

Attributes: resolute perceptive selfless open-minded
creative practical competent expert

Negative ruthless amoral overbold indecisive

Attributes: selfish pecuniary unreflective guilt-ridden
arrogant uncultured insensitive neurotic
366 GENERATIONS

FIGURE 12-8
Political Leaders,
First Four Cycles by Generational Type

DOMINANT GENERATIONS RECESSIVE GENERA TIO NS

IDEALISTS REACTIVES
John Winthrop (MA) Nathaniel Bacon (VA)
William Berkeley (VA) William Stoughton (MA)
Samuel Adams George Washington
Benjamin Franklin John Adams
James Polk Ulysses Grant
Abraham Lincoln Grover Cleveland
Herbert Hoover Harry Truman
Franklin Roosevelt Dwight Eisenhower

CIVICS ADAPTIVES
Gurdon Saltonstall (CT) William Shirley (MA)
Robert "King" Carter (VA) Cadwallader Colden (NY)
Thomas Jefferson John Quincy Adams
James Madison Andrew Jackson
-- Theodore Roosevelt
-- Woodrow Wilson
John Kennedy Walter Mondale
Ronald Reagan Michael Dukakis

Adaptive leaders, reflecting a more complicated mixture of passive and ag-

gressive masculinity, have been advocates of fairness and the politics of
inclusion, irrepressible in the wake of failure. With the single exception of
Andrew Jackson, all those listed in Figure l 2-8 rank among the most expert
and credentialed of American political figures.

We can extend these analogues beyond national leaders to the broader oc-
cupational world. To be sure, each generational type (and each generation) has
included many individuals who have made important achievements in every
realm of human endeavor. But if we recall the most influential members of our
eighteen generations and batch their careers by generational type, striking patterns
emerge. As shown in Figure 12-9, certain occupational callings can be linked
with the four peer personalities.
We find American history dominated by Idealist thinkers, Reactive risk-takers,
Civic doers, and Adaptive improvers . This pattern offers clues about the enduring
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 367

FIGURE 12-9
Principal Callings, by Generational Type

DOMINANT GENERATIONS RECESSIVE GENERATIONS

IDEALISTS REACTIVES
Preachers Entrepreneurs
Writers Brigands
Radicals Industrialists
Publishers Generals
Teachers Salesmen

CIVICS ADAPTIVES
Statesmen Artists
Scientists Lawyers
Economists Therapists
Diplomats Legislators
Builders Statisticians

legacy that each type leaves behind for its heirs-the legacy we call '' generational
endowments."

Generational Endowments

Most Americans have always cared deeply about their national destiny and
have liked to think they are adding to-not subtracting from-the sum total of
civilized progress they pass on to heirs. Over the centuries, however, the way
Americans have felt and behaved as societal legators has changed substantially
from one era to the next. Each generational type has shown its own special
endowment tendencies, good and bad .
Central to a generation's endowment motivation is its awareness of what
Auguste Comte termed its "morphology" -its awareness of death . Most social
categories are essentially immortal. If we think of ourselves as white or black,
Christian or Jew, northerner or southerner, we are not compelled to view the
future with special urgency. Any work we leave undone in our lifetime can be
completed later by another member of our group. But generations are different.
Each has only a limited time to make its mark or otherwise keep its peace .
Individuals also understand that their own time is limited, of course-but
most of the 440 million Americans who have ever lived have had trouble rec-
ognizing direct links between their own behavior and the progress of civilization .
368 GENERA TIO NS

Thus when people make major sacrifices on behalf of the future, social scientists
tend to puzzle over such behavior, seeing it as contrary to self-interest (what
economists call the irrational "endowment motive") or as a blind instinctual
drive to provide for one's own family (an attempt, say sociobiologists, to ensure
the survival of one's own DNA) . Nothing loftier seems plausible, however
inadequately such motives explain the behavior of great social benefactors, such
as an Andrew Carnegie or a Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet as members of gen-
erations, we have less difficulty appreciating how we steer the destiny of our
society. Just as age location connects our personal biographies with the broad
currents of history, so do generations bridge the gap between personal and social
goodwill . Whatever other reasons we might have to behave well toward the
future , our generational membership prompts us to act now rather than later .
Each generation realizes that when it fades, so too will fade its own way of
thinking about the future.
From Robert Beverley in the 171Os to John Kennedy in the 1960s, Americans
have generally agreed that each generation has an obligation to leave behind a
more secure and affluent world than it inherits . Around the time of the drafting
of the United States Constitution and the absorption of state debts into one
national debt, Thomas Jefferson argued that since each generation is '' as an
independent nation," it is thereby entitled to disclaim any debts from the past
(and, presumably, any promises to the future). Madison and Hamilton believed
otherwise, and their view prevailed. Indeed , their view has always prevailed.
Successive American generations have rarely hesitated to bind their heirs through
public and private action, producing an impressive record of material and insti-
tutional endowments. But this record is not without its peaks and valleys. Over
the centuries, the "present versus future" debate has sometimes been resolved
in favor of the future, sometimes in favor of the present. Children (and unborn
generations) cannot vote, and grand plans for the future often cannot override
the urgencies and desires of the moment. This is especially true in an Inner-
Driven era, a time when society trusts values more than institutions . In this
regard, the circa- I 990 policy paralysis over trade and budget deficits has much
in common with the circa-19 IO stalemate over urbanization.
Many Americans today express doubts about their society's capacity-or
willingness-to do anything worthwhile on behalf of future generations. On the
one hand, polls indicate that adults worry increasingly (and rather hopelessly)
about the harms they are passing on, from massive debts and inadequate schooling
to a despoiled environment and crumbling infrastructure . On the other hand,
many flaunt a lack of concern in their daily lives . A favorite bumper sticker
among G.l.s declares "We're Spending Our Children's Inheritance," while a
Boomer favorite trumpets "Whoever Dies with the Most Toys Wins ."
Is America abandoning any interest in its own destiny? The cycle suggests it
is not. As we have seen, each constellational era has its own vision of what the
future needs, and today's vision is consistent with the mood of an Inner-Driven
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 369

era. True enough, America's enthusiasm about material and public-order en-
dowments is now quite low . As an aging Civic generation passes from power,
this feeling is (on schedule) sinking to a cyclical nadir. Yet if we think about
other kinds of endowments-such as the retooling of institutions in the direction
of pluralism, compassion, and fair process-it is hard to recall when Americans
have ever been so hard at work . With an Adaptive generation in power, the
country's activity in this area has recently been (again on schedule) energetic
and growing . Just as a society's vision of the future shifts with the constellational
mood, so does the primary focus of its endowment activity. How it shifts depends
on the phase-of-life positioning of peer personalities .
To see how this works , let's look at the link between endowments and gen-
erational types:

Throughout its lifecycle, each generation's endowment efforts are concentrated

in areas closely connected to its peer personality.

Clearly, a generation can endow the future in any number of ways . It can
build airports, establish corporations, write poetry, protect the wilderness, fight
to preserve liberty, expand rights for the handicapped, fund a pension plan, or
teach children how to spell. It can add to the accumulated stock of physical,
natural, or human capital-or add to the ancestral legacy of political, artistic,
and spiritual capital. But since different generations think and feel differently
about life, their preference among kinds of endowment will not be uniform or
random. Idealist generations do not grow up eager to tum beaches into concrete
harbors, nor Civic generations to found spiritual cults. Likewise, young Reactives
seldom daydream about making life failsafe through flowcharts, nor do many
young Adaptives yearn to vanquish competitors in Top Gun dogfights. Instead,
each generation concentrates on making endowments expressive of its lifelong
peer personality. Reflect on the types of endowments Americans celebrate on
four major national holidays. On Thanksgiving, we celebrate the spiritual values
of daily life, thanks to the (Idealist) Puritans; on July Fourth, national inde-
pendence, thanks to the (Reactive) Liberty; on Memorial Day, public heroism,
thanks to the (Civic) G.I.s; and on Martin Luther King's Birthday, cultural
pluralism, thanks to the (Adaptive) Silent.
Looking through the biographies of America's eighteen generations, we can
see that every generation makes at least some mark in every variety of endow-
ment. But, as with so much else, an important pattern emerges. Figure 12-10
summarizes how each generational type shows a special instinct-and talent-
for certain endowment activity.
As a generation matures, its endowment behavior becomes part of its peer
personality-part of its self-image and its image in the eyes of elders and juniors .
Just as each generation (and type) tends to stake out a matching endowment
370 GENERA TIO NS

FIGURE 12-10
Principal Endowment Activities,
by Generational Type

DOMINANT GENERATIONS RECESSIVE GENERA TIO NS

IDEALISTS REACTIVES
Principle Liberty
Religion Pragmatism
Education Survival

CIVICS ADAPTIVES
Community Pluralism
Technology Expertise
Affluence Social Justice

agenda, so do other generations come to defer to that generation (and type) for
providing such endowments. Over the past several decades, for example, Amer-
icans of all ages have looked to G.l.s for big constructions, to the Silent for
fairness, to Boomers for reflection. Similarly, early-nineteenth-century Ameri-
cans looked to Republicans for institutions, to Compromisers for mediation, to
Transcendentals for religion-and, later, to the Gilded for hard-nosed realism.
Whatever its type, a generation works to achieve endowments with an intensity
that varies over its lifecycle. In youth, its endowment activity is virtually nil.
Coming of age, it begins building a legacy by fulfilling or challenging the
endowment expectations of elders. Maturing into midlife leadership, it begins
to make major contributions on its own. As its first cohorts enter elderhood-
typically attaining the highest leadership posts while realizing its agenda must
soon be either completed or abandoned-its activity reaches maximum intensity
and then falls off. Moving beyond elderhood (right around the time the next
generation of its type is entering youth), a generation typically sees its agenda
neglected. Since each type of generation is pushing a certain endowment activity
throughout its lifecycle, this dynamic gives endowment behavior a characteristic
pattern during each constellational era. Specifically:

The endowment behavior of each constellational era reflects the NEW endow-
ment activity of the generational type coming of age; the STRONG and
RISING endowment activity of the type entering midlife; the PEAKING,
then FALLING activity of the type entering elderhood; and the DORMANT
activity of the type moving beyond elderhood (and moving into youth).
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 371

FIGURE 12- II
Endowment Behavior,
by Constellational Era

PRINCIPAL INNER- OUTER-

ENDOWMENT AWAKENING DRIVEN CRISIS DRIVEN
ACTIVITIES ERA ERA ERA ERA
Modern Example: 1970s 1990s 1930s 1950s

IDEALIST Principle strong peaking,

endowments: Religion new and then dormant
Education rising falling

REACTIVE Liberty strong peaking,

endowments: Pragmatism dormant new and then
Survival rising falling

CIVIC Community peaking, strong

endowments: Technology then dormant new and
Affluence falling rising

ADAPTIVE Pluralism strong peaking,

endowments: Expertise and then dormant new
Social Justice nsmg falling

We show this dynamic in Figure 12-11, which indicates how society-wide

attention to different endowments shifts over time .
Let's summarize the endowment activity of each era:

AN AWAKENING ERA begins with Civic endowment activity in confident

overdrive . Society is building big things, exploring new worlds, organizing new
institutions . As the moral claims of young Idealists emerge , a spiritual awakening
lashes out at society's secular bias-which suddenly halts and frustrates its
forward motion . By the end of the era , Civic "progress" is mired, while the
fairness- and process-oriented endowments of the Adaptive ameliorators gain
favor. The old Reactive focus on prudence and realism now appears stodgy and
old-fashioned .

AN INNER-DRIVEN ERA begins with Adaptive endowment activity reach-

ing high tide-pushing pluralism to the limit, infusing justice with process, and
making institutions highly professional and complex . Coming-of-age Reactives
apply new survival skills to a world they find harsh . The values- and morality-
372 GENERATIONS

oriented endowments of Idealist moralizers gradually gain popularity. Civic

endowments, now seen as gridlocked and unworkable, attract little new interest
until near the end of the era .
A CRISIS ERA begiris with Idealist endowment activity rising to maximum
fury . Society now places total priority on establishing a consensus of good-
versus-bad, right-versus-wrong. Sometime near the peak of the secular crisis,
this fervor gives way to the sharp-eyed , prudential endowments of midlife Re-
actives. The energy and teamwork of coming-of-age Civics emerge from a new
chrysalis . By now, the old Adaptive sensitivity to process and pluralism is deemed
a wasteful, even subversive luxury .
AN OUTER-DRIVEN ERA begins with Reactive endowment activity in
great popular demand-emphasizing survival and stability, and consolidating
new institutions while preserving families and tradition from encroachment. The
more ambitious and collectivist endowments of the Civic builders gradually gain
popularity . Coming-of-age Adaptives build expertise . Tired of moral crusades,
society turns its back on Idealist endowments until near the end of the era .

Within any era, the most striking pattern is not so much the emergence of a
new endowment activity (which is gradual), but the decline of an old activity
(which is rapid). Since younger generations have grown accustomed to relying
on an older generation to champion its own preferred endowment activity, they
are unprepared to fill the gap when that older generation passes on. Like a table
with one leg jerked away, therefore, society suffers a "tilt" or disequilibrium
from the sudden absence of this endowment activity. The implications are clear:
In each era, the most noticeable endowment neglect or reversal is likely to
occur in the endowment activity associated with the generation currently
passing beyond elderhood .

In a Crisis era, for example, due process and fair play fall into disfavor-
not only from the force of events, but also because the generation that everyone
expects to defend them is disappearing . Think back to the aggressive regimen-
tation of economic and social life during the mid- I 930s, or to the mass internment
of Japanese-American citizens a few years later. Where were the Adaptives?
Where were the Progressive trust-busters and champions of due process? They
were, by then, too old to be heard. We could ask similar questions of prior
Crisis eras . Where were the Adaptive conciliators during the Civil War or the
American Revolution? The Compromisers or Enlighteners were, by this time,
too old or discredited .
The same pattern holds for other types of eras. The culturally sterile "end of
ideology" decade of the 1950s (an Outer-Driven era) could have used a few
zealous Idealists to stir things up-but the Missionaries were disappearing. Much
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE 373

the same could be said for the culturally quiescent Jeffersonian era of the early
1800s (then feeling the loss of the Awakeners) or the circa-1880 height of the
Gilded Age (when the Transcendentals were fading). The Do-It-Now euphoria
that gripped America from the late 1960s through most of the 1970s (an Awak-
ening era) needed something very different: a splash of ice-water realism . Skep-
tical Reactives might have sobered us up and spared us disappointment later on .
But it was too late; by the time of Model Cities and Woodstock, all but a few
of the Lost had passed from the scene. Today , America is moving into an Inner-
Driven era-with Adaptives adding layers of institutional process and detached
Idealists still perfecting new values . Whose endowment activity are we beginning
to miss the most? The G.I.s , the only living generation that still knows how to
unify the community and get big things done .
The overlapping pattern between generations and endowment behavior leads
to a final lifecycle observation:

Each generation develops a lifelong endowment agenda pointing toward the

endowment activity that society neglected or reversed during its youth.

The Silent, like every earlier Adaptive generation, grew up in a crisis-gripped

world that had little time for refinement, sensitivity , or play-by-the-rules fairness.
Their lifelong agenda has pointed toward rectifying such mistakes, toward raising
again the banner dropped in old age by the Progressives . (It was, for example,
a Silent-dominated Congress that recently awarded $20,000 in damages to every
Japanese-American interned during World War II.) Boomers, like every earlier
Idealist generation, grew up as children during a cyclical low tide of spiritual
curiosity. Their lifelong endowment agenda points toward infusing society with
new spiritual energy. Indeed, the Boom is the first generation since the Mis-
sionaries to show signs of preparing for late-in-life moral crusades. For 13ers,
we should ask what they will someday sense was missing from their childhood
environment. Most likely, it will be something all generations have missed since
the mid-l 960s: the active presence of the pragmatic Lost. As for the newly
arriving Millennials, perhaps they will grow up yearning for something Amer-
icans are about to miss: the active presence of the team-playing G.I.s.
"As is the generation of leaves," wrote Homer, "so it is with the generations
of men, which alternately come forth and pass away." Endowment behavior
reflects a stabilizing dynamic intrinsic to the generational cycle, which ensures
that no one dimension of progress is pushed too long-or lies dormant too long.
Like Homer's "leaves," each kind of endowment activity has its own season.
This makes the cycle of generations a powerful force for rejuvenation, a balance
wheel for human progress , and-if all generations play their roles well-a
guarantor of the American Dream.
The past is prologue . Let's tum to the future.
 Chapter t 3

COMPLETING THE
MILLENNIAL CYCLE

History is full of sparks. Some have blazed for a moment, then died. Others
have touched off conflagrations out of all proportion to the sparks themselves.
Suppose authorities seriously suspected that a band of terrorists, linked to a
fanatically anti-American nation, had smuggled a nuclear bomb into New York
City. How would America respond? To answer this question, we would need
to know when this event is taking place-specifically, during which constella-
tional era.
Suppose the terrorist threat had arisen during the last Awakening era, say
around 1970. At that time, it would surely have unleashed raging national cross-
currents of secular confidence and spiritual rebellion. Almost any official re-
sponse would have been intensely controversial. G.I. leaders in their fifties,
acting as hubristic crisis managers, would have played down the threat by assuring
the public that daily life need not be disturbed-while working to control the
situation through vigorous technological means. Angry coming-of-age Boomers
would have organized behind a variety of symbolic and emotional responses,
accusing the U.S . government of lying (one way or the other) and blaming it
all on some monstrous institutional plot. Caught in between, the thirtyish Silent
would have puzzled for reasons why any foreigner could hate us so much.
Evacuation would have taken place in a mood of collective hysteria and disbelief.
America would have been at war with itself more than with the perpetrators .
Alternatively, suppose this nuclear terrorism were to happen sometime in the
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 375

early 1990s, in the middle of the current Inner-Driven era. By then, the span of
roughly a quarter century will have entirely reshaped the likely national re-
sponse-which would now stress caution, conciliation, and deferral. Silent cab-
inet officers would consult allies, form committees, review options, and invite
full public discussion . After initiating multilateral negotiations, leaders would
generally try to wait things out. The crisis would frustrate but not anger Boomers
(who would trade philosophic remarks about how it was bound to happen sooner
or later) and would hardly ruffle young l 3ers (many of whom might rush toward
the city to sell or volunteer transportation to families wanting to leave) . Official
evacuation plans would be expensive and overcomplicated and would elicit little
public confidence that they would work as intended. Most people would stay
calm and simply make their own plans . Chances are , the nation would squeeze
by the immediate threat undamaged, but leave its underlying causes either un-
solved or, at best, mildly ameliorated.
Finally, suppose the terrorists were to strike during the upcoming Crisis
constellation, sometime around the year 2020 . Once again, a quarter turn in the
generational constellation would prompt a response that, from today's perspec-
tive, seems unrecognizable. Boomer leaders in their sixties would neither hide
nor ponder the rumor; instead, they would exaggerate the threat (who said there
was a bomb in only one city?) and tie it to a larger sense of global crisis . Unifying
the nation as a community, these leaders would define the enemy broadly and
demand its total defeat-regardless of the human and economic sacrifices re- :
quired. Evacuation would be mannerly, with cooperative Millennial youths seek-
ing and accepting orders from elders and with pragmatic midlife l 3ers making
sure no time is wasted . The nation would act promptly and decisively as a single
organism . For better or for worse, Americans would be far more inclined than
in other eras to risk catastrophe to achieve what its leaders would define as a
just outcome .
Here we have one hypothetical event , and three hugely contrasting responses.
In all likelihood, the impact on history would come less from the act of terrorism
itself than from the response it would provoke.
In looking ahead to the future, no one can say whether nuclear terrorism will
ever strike. Nor can anyone be sure about any number of troubling scenarios
often mentioned in predictions about the early twenty-first century: the use of
chemical, germ, or nuclear weapons by small nations; revolution in Latin Amer-
ica; belligerent Third World fundamentalism; AIDS; the global warming trend;
ozone depletion; exhaustion of fossil fuels; the abuse of high-tech genetics; trade
wars; or a debt-fueled financial crisis . Nobody can today predict what specific
problems or events America's leaders will face in the 2010s and 2020s. Likewise,
around 1745 and 1910, respectively, nobody could have predicted the Boston
Tea Party or Pearl Harbor Day-still less the rapid and momentous sequels to
those events.
When experts investigate the future, they typically rely on quantitative pro-
376 GENERA TIO NS

jections. But these same experts acknowledge that they are helpless before the
great mysteries of human nature : how people will respond to those problems,
how they will think, behave, and vote. When energy forecasters probe the long-
term future of fossil fuels, for example, they seldom ask whether Americans in
the twenty-first century will act any differently than they did during the "Me
Decade" 1970s. Implicitly, these forecasters assume people would react to an-
other oil shortage by behaving the same way: government with complex regu-
lation, producers with market chaos, consumers with angry gas lines. Likewise,
economists who make long-term Social Security projections tend to assume that
persons in pre- and post-retirement age brackets will maintain the same political
attitudes that people in these age brackets have shown in the recent past. In other
words, they assume that old Silent and Boomers will sustain the "senior citizen"
benefits lobby with the same intensity as G.I.s, and that younger 13ers and
Millennials will subsidize elder benefits as willingly as the Silent and Boom have
in recent decades. Straight-line projections like these can be way off the mark-
the equivalent of forecasting how the Civil War would be waged by studying
the speeches of Henry Clay . History tells us one thing for certain about social
behavior : It never remains the same for long. The realistic question is not whether
it will change, but how and when .
That is where the qualitative insight of the generational cycle can help.
Through it, we can check out the mysterious wild cards of social behavior and
assess what other forecasters normally avoid-future constellational moods and
the peer personalities of today's generations as they age into new phases of life.
Using our hypothetical nuclear terrorism as a point of departure, reflect on how
America did in fact respond to perceived threats against the national community
at analogous moments during the Great Power cycle: at the time of the Chicago
Haymarket Riot of 1886 (in an Awakening era); at the time of the sinking of
the Lusitania in 1915 (an Inner-Driven era); or at the time of the attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941 (a Crisis era). In each of these examples, history was determined
less by the sparklike event itself than by the mood of the constellational era in
which it occurred .
This is not to say that history is invariant, with predetermined outcomes. Any
era can bring forward good or bad leaders, good or bad choices. What we do
suggest is that constellational eras and generational lifecycles follow predictable
patterns, within which each generation has a limited choice of scripts. During
social moments-secular crises especially-those scripts become more fateful,
more determinative of history, more likely to result in triumph or tragedy.
Building from the paradigms of the last chapter, we can extend these gen-
erational scripts into the future. The Millennial Cycle already began (as all cycles
must) with one social moment: the Boom Awakening of the late 1960s and
1970s. The next-what we call the "Crisis of 2020" -is due to begin when
the Millennial Cycle has run about halfway through its course. The current cycle
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 377

is still young, still unfolding . It will surely bring many surprises. Yet , with four
centuries as a guide, we should be able to anticipate its major trends and turns.
In the pages that follow, we present a generational itinerary of America's
future, from the 1990s through the 2060s . It is a story of hope and worry, of
opportunity and danger. Each of today's generations will face the future with
its own unique peer personality, its own special mission of endowment. How
will they fare? Contemporary readers can speculate. Only our heirs will know
for sure.

Completing the Eras of the Millennial Cycle

Somehow the past always seems nearer than the future. World War I started
eight decades ago in Europe. That's not so long ago. The year 2069 is the same
distance in the future. Just the sound of that year conjures an unfathomable
(even, some might think, irrelevant) future. But the Census Bureau predicts that
roughly 35 million presently living Americans will live through the 2060s-
nearly three times more than today 's twelve million surviving Lost and G.l.s
who were youngsters in 1914. History records what happened over the past eight
decades. Now let's look at what the cycle tells us about the next eight.
We start with an automatic demographic projection, reminding us how old
we shall all be at twenty-two-year intervals into the future-from 1981 until the
year 2069.
Figure 13-1 starts with 1981 because that was the last cohort year of a new
(Reactive) generation and thus marks an aligned Awakening constellation. Mov-
ing forward from 1981, using twenty-two-year multiples, we estimate that the
next four aligned constellations will occur around 2003 (Inner-Driven), 2025
(Crisis), 2047 (Outer-Driven), and 2069 (Awakening). Notice how, in Figure
13-1, the age brackets of living generations are roughly aligned with the four
phases of life in 1981 and at all subsequent twenty-two-year intervals . We cannot
project these aligned constellations with precision, of course . For another two
or three decades, we cannot even be sure whether 1981 is in fact the last l 3er
cohort-and beyond that, the boundary years are even less certain . Knowing
that generations average twenty-two years in length, however, we can make
reliable estimates and project future rhythms with a relatively small margin of
error.
Figure 13-2 displays the generational constellations in future aligned years
and shows the lifecycle phase of each generation alive in those years.
Here we see the mix of peer personalities America can expect during each
era. For the three generations yet to be born, we indicate their probable type .
We also add a fifth life phase , ''post-elderhood,'' in recognition of the unprec-
edented leap in elderly life expectancy over the last half century. In 1940, men
378 GENERATIONS

FIGURE t3-t
Completing the Millennial Cycle:
Generational Ages in Aligned Constellation Years

ALIGNED AWAKEN- INNER- OUTER- AWAKEN-

CONSTELLATION: ING DRIVEN CRISIS DRIVEN ING

YEAR END: 1981 2003 2025 2047 2069

Missionary Age99+

Lost 81-98 Age 103+

G.I. 57-80 79-102 Age IOI+

Silent 39-56 61-78 83-100 Age 105+

Boom 21-38 43-60 65-82 87-104 Age 109+

Thirteenth 0-20 22-42 44-64 66-86 88-108

Millennial 0-21 22-43 44-65 66-87

(New Adaptiw) 0-21 22-43 44-65

(New Idealist) 0-21 22-43

(New Reacthe) 0-21

and women at age 65 were expected to live another twelve and thirteen years,
respectively; today, they are expected to live another fifteen and nineteen years,
and these numbers may rise further in the decades ahead. Recall how the en-
dowment activity of any generation moving through elderhood crests amid con-
troversy and then declines sharply. The growing presence of post-elders,
therefore, could be an important cycle innovation, full of new opportunity and
new danger.
Figure 13-2 shows two future social moments-a secular crisis and a spiritual
awakening. These moments begin and peak (though they do not always end)
sometime during the era preceding an aligned Awakening or Crisis constellation.
The cycle indicates that the period 2004-2025 is due to become the next Crisis
era, the period 2048-2069 the next Awakening era. Applying the paradigms of
Chapter 12, we can forecast how the constellational mood will shift over the
next several decades.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, America has been and will remain in an
Inner-Driven mood. On schedule, each of today's generations is maturing in a
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 379

FIGURE 13-2
Completing the Millennial Cycle:
Constellational Eras and Phases of Life
INNER- OUTER....------,
AWAKENING DRIVEN CRISIS DRIVEN AWAKENING
ERA ERA ERA ERA ERA
ALIGNED 1981 2003 2025 2047 2069
YEAR
POST-ELDER Lost G.I. Silent Boom Thineenth
(Reactive) (Civic) - (Adaptive) : (Idealist) (Reactive)

ELDER G.I . %ent %m ~eenth ~nnial

(Civic) (Adaptive) - (Idealist) (Reactive) - (Civic)

MIDLIFE Silent Y.oom ~eenth~nnia1%ew

- (Adaptive) : (Idealist) - (Reactive) : (Civic) - Adaptive)

RISING Boom J<:eenth~nnialy::ew %ew

- (Idealist) : (Reactive) - (Civic) : Adaptive) - Idealist)

YOUTH !- Thineenthx:::nnial%ew %ew %ew

- (Reactive) (Civic) - Adaptive) : Idealist) - Reactive)

predictable direction as it begins to enter a new phase of life . The G.I.s are
becoming energetic " post-elders," the Silent sensitive elders, Boomers moral-
istic midlifers, and l 3ers alienated rising adults. Also on schedule, these same
generations have emerged from the recent awakening feeling good about their
personal lives yet worried that this spiritual afterglow cannot thrive forever on
the strength of secular endowments made in pre-awakening decades .
The opening years of this era, the middle to late 1980s, ranked among the
less eventful of modern American history. The national mood was calm, with
values quite settled in contrast to the awakening 1970s. G .I. leaders stayed on
as reliable caretakers at the very top of public institutions increasingly regarded
as ineffective. The Silent-now filling most lesser posts, from Congress and
Cabinets to state legislatures and corporate directorships-impressed their made-
by-committee stamp on political and economic life. Boomers, still wrapped up
in young families and new careers, made their yuppie phase of political remission
the subject of much wonderment. Thirteener youths showed early signs of eco-
nomic distress and cultural alienation . And Millennial babies benefited from a
rekindled adult affection for infants. Most Americans worried that the country
380 GENERA TIO NS

was not facing up to its long-term challenges, but found it very difficult to
concentrate attention on an effective response. By the decade's end, talk of a
"new world order" felt premature in a society unsure of its own foundations.
As the 1990s dawn, the generational constellation-and mood-resemble those
of 1910, 1845, 1750, and 1650.
What will the 1990s bring? With the fading presence of G.l.s, public con-
fidence in old institutions will wane even further. Elder Silent leaders will discuss
and debate-but never rule out-any perceived institutional inequity . Midlife
Boomers will come out of remission trumpeting moral rectitude. Coming-of-age
13ers will game the system without any pretense of higher principle. Meanwhile,
public life will become more zealous, less friendly. Social intolerance will grow,
respect for privacy decrease. New "values" coalitions will arise while older
voting blocks based on economic, class, and racial self-interest weaken . Child
nurture will become stricter, and the protective function of schools and neigh-
borhoods will attract growing public support. The senior citizen movement will
weaken and the child lobby strengthen. The widening gap between haves and
have-nots will be increasingly recognized as a problem-and people at both
ends of the economic spectrum (the intractably poor and the greedy rich) will
be attacked for Jacking acceptable civic virtue. Boomer-retooled justice will
punish aberrant behavior with growing severity and overtones of moral retri-
bution; Boomer-retooled institutions will strictly regulate conduct (from drug use
to parenting) formerly regarded as matters of personal choice.
During the 1990s, three distinct generational cultures will emerge. At the
elder end, the Silent will struggle to buttress and defend their pluralist culture-
an emphasis on lifestyle tolerance, economic opportunity, and process-protected
fairness . These efforts will peak before the mid-1990s and then decline steeply.
Displacing the Silent will be the Boom' s moralistic culture-an emphasis on
ethical absolutes, community values, and accountability in public and private
life. Meanwhile, l3ers will advance into rising adulthood engaged in an alienated
culture-an emphasis on getting what you can, without excuses, in a world that
(as they will then see it) never cared about giving them much.
When America reaches an aligned Inner-Driven constellation, sometime
around 2003, each generation will fully occupy a new phase of life. The surviving
G.l.s will be very old, the Silent in elderhood, Boomers in midlife, l3ers in
rising adulthood, and Millennials in youth. The generational alignment will match
the constellations of 1924, 1855, 1766, and 1673. At al/four of these moments,
Americans perceived their social life to be fragmenting into centrifugal and
uncontrollable wildness. The Boomer and l 3er cultures will by then be moving
into self-contained camps: loud, moralizing aggressors on the older side and
atomized, pleasure-seeking victims on the younger-a vindictive age polarization
America has not witnessed since the Roaring Twenties. Looking down the age
ladder, elder Silent will express dismay at growing signs of tribalism, nativism,
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 381

social intolerance, and just plain meanness. Boomers will voice exasperation
over the ineffective leadership (however well-intentioned) of their next-elders
and fury at the help-myself nihilism of their next-juniors . Looking up , 13ers
will sense among older generations an utter impracticality , an inability to see
the world for what it really is.
As America moves into the ensuing Crisis era , long-deferred secular problems
can be expected to reemerge with fearsome immediacy . The aging Silent will
participate eagerly in the new search for institutional solutions that work while
reminding their juniors (something few will then want to hear) that the solutions
should be fair as well. Boomers, their first-wave cohorts frowning on the' 'Golden
Age" sales brochures beginning to arrive by mail, will turn up their moral
megaphones to full blast. If ever there were a time to turn Pepperland into reality,
many Boomers will be thinking , that time is nearing . On the brink of midlife
and now beginning to tire, 13ers will sense their party boat drifting toward a
waterfall-and will start thinking about which way to leap, and when. Millen-
nials, busy transforming college life, will astound and delight elders with their
friendly, optimistic, and team-playing attitude .
Moving further ahead , perhaps halfway into the Crisis era, history suggests
the mood will calm somewhat. Engulfed in the electric air before a storm and
perhaps already buffeted by the first shock , Americans will look toward the
future with a new attitude of personal realism and public determination. The
sense of community will strengthen, with one set of ideals pulling most political
energy into its orbit. As each generation begins to feel the full burden of its next
phase of life, each will push for a new social role definition: stewardship for
elder Boomers, pragmatic management for midlife l 3ers, teamwork for rising-
adult Millennials. The generational cycle will approach its moment of maximum
opportunity-and danger.
At this point, most likely late in the Crisis era, some spark of history can be
expected to ignite a new social moment-a secular crisis-snapping generations
into these new roles. Such a crisis will give Boomers a chance to thrust their
awakening ideals into the core of a new national (perhaps even global) order,
13ers a chance to redeem themselves while playing for the ultimate stakes, and
Millennials a chance to demonstrate civic virtue and triumph over great adversity.
Meanwhile, a new generation of child Adaptives, smothered by heavily protective
13er nurture, will cower at the sight of adults doing great deeds.
Enter the "Crisis of 2020."
When will this crisis come ? The climactic event may not arrive exactly in the
year 2020, but it won't arrive much sooner or later. A cycle is the length of
four generations, or roughly eighty-eight years. If we plot a half cycle ahead
from the Boom Awakening (and find the forty-fourth anniversaries of Woodstock
and the Reagan Revolution), we project a crisis lasting from 2013 to 2024 . If
382 GENERA TIO NS

we plot a full cycle ahead from the last secular crisis (and find the eighty-eighth
anniversaries of the FDR landslide and Pearl Harbor Day), we project a crisis
lasting from 2020 to 2029. By either measure, the early 2020s appear fateful.
How old will each generation be when the crisis arrives? On average, history
tells us, the crisis begins sixty-two years after the Idealists' middle birthyear and
nineteen years after the Civics' middle birthyear. It peaks five or ten years later.
Thus, at the peak of the crisis, the surviving Silent will be in their mid-eighties
and beyond, the Boomers in elderhood, 13ers in midlife, Millennials in rising
adulthood, and a new generation of Adaptives in youth .
What will precipitate this crisis? It could be almost anything, including in-
cidents trumped up by a generation of elderly warrior-priests, gripped with visions
of moral triumph. The spark that catches fire may seem accidental, but-as with
many past examples (the overthrow of Andros, the Boston Tea Party, Lincoln's
election, and Pearl Harbor)-old Idealists may have a hand in stirring events to
maximum political effect, mobilizing younger generations into action.
How significant will this crisis be? Recall the parallel eras: the Glorious
Revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the years spanning
the Great Depression and World War II. The Crisis of 2020 will be a major
turning point in American history and an adrenaline-filled moment of trial. At
its climax, Americans will feel that the fate of posterity-for generations to
come-hangs in the balance .
What will the national mood be like? This crisis will be a pivotal moment in
the lifecycles of all generations alive at the time . The sense of community will
be omnipresent. Moral order will be unquestioned, with "rights" and "wrongs"
crisply defined and obeyed. Sacrifices will be asked, and given. America will
be implacably resolved to do what needs doing, and fix what needs fixing.
How will this crisis end? Three of the four antecedents ended in triumph, the
fourth (the Civil War) in a mixture of moral fatigue, vast human tragedy, and
a weak and vengeful sense of victory. We can foresee a full range of possible
outcomes, from stirring achievement to apocalyptic tragedy.
What happens if the crisis comes early? What if the Millennium-the year
2000 or soon thereafter-provides Boomers with the occasion to impose their
"millennial" visions on the nation and world? The generational cycle suggests
that the risk of cataclysm would be very high. During the 2000-2009 decade,
Boomers will be squarely in midlife and nearing the peak of their political and
institutional power. From a lifecycle perspective, they will be exactly where the
Transcendentals were when John Brown was planning his raid on Harper's Ferry.
Boomers can best serve civilization by restraining themselves (or by letting
themselves be restrained by others) until their twilight years, when their spiritual
energy would find expression not in midlife leadership, but in elder stewardship.
Let's assume the crisis arrives on schedule, around the year 2020. Once the
end is in view, all generations will gaze hopefully toward the milk and honey
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 383

of the post-crisis world. By the year 2030, American society will settle into an
Outer-Driven era . Boomers will start moving on to the old-old rung , l3ers to
elderhood, and Millennials to midlife. New Adaptives will quiescently come of
age, and an indulged new crop ofldealist children will command adult affections .
The decade after the crisis-probably the 2030s-will be a slow-moving period
in American history , a time of community and family life , spiritual staleness,
and benign confidence about the future . The era will be upbeat but culturally
bland, reminiscent of antecedent eras around 1710, 1800, 1880, and 1955.
Midlife Millennials will set out on giant secular projects, while the more cautious
rising-adult Adaptives will concentrate on smallish, ameliorative agendas. By
this point, circa-2000 America will be remembered as socially disorganized,
wild but fun, and somewhere on the cusp of what will then be perceived as the
"modem" era-much as the 1920s were remembered in the 1950s.
After another quarter century has passed-when l 3ers are eightyish curmud-
geons and first-wave Millennials on the brink of elderhood-a highly secular
culture will be due for resacralization. We can expect that a team-playing cadre
of sixtyish Millennials will then provide brittle targets for a rising generation of
Idealist zealots. At that point the Millennial Cycle will come to a close, and a
new cycle will begin . Past spiritual awakenings have started , on average, about
sixty-five years after mid-cohort Civic births , peaking seven years later. This
suggests the next awakening-the next era like the late- l 960s ''Consciousness
Revolution"-will heat up sometime in the 2050s . The next cycle moment to
match the early Reagan-Bush years (with Civic elders, Adaptive midlifers, Ide-
alist rising adults, and Reactive youths) will occur around the year 2069, the
scheduled date for the next aligned Awakening constellation . We stop our chro-
nology there, with today's infants in old age. The 1980s will then be recalled
as dimly as Americans today know the decade after 1900-and school history
lessons will breeze through the years between 1945 and 1990 much as today's
move briskly from 1865 to 1910.
While every era is a drama of many actors, each generation follows its own
script. Therefore, the drama is best understood when told actor by actor-along
the generational diagonal.

Completing the Missionary and Lost Diagonals

For the roughly one thousand Missionary supercentenarians and the one mil-
lion surviving Lost (mostly in their nineties), the future holds mainly the re-
membrance of the past. In 1990, the oldest known American with a confirmable
birthdate was 112. The quiet witness borne by these scattered last-wave Mis-
sionaries more than 130 years after that generation's first birthyear can remind
others how far the lifespans of their last 112-year-old survivors might reach: into
384 GENERA TIO NS

the 2030s for G.1.s, the 2050s for the Silent, the 2070s for the Boom, the 2090s
for 13ers, the 21 IOs for Millennials. Centenarians have lately been America's
fastest-growing age bracket, a trend that could easily continue through the twenty-
first century.
As they live on into the 1990s, the Missionaries and Lost can offer other
important reminders for younger generations of their same type. Boomers would
do well to reflect on how Missionaries changed from brash young refonners to
stern elder "Victorians," and how they transcended the zeal and self-absorption
of their youth to produce greatness in old age. Similarly, I 3ers can learn important
lessons from the Lost: how history dealt them short-tenn excitement but longer-
tenn pain; how so many "ran on empty" to the point of exhaustion; how life
went on and alienation passed; how at a critical hour they exercised practical
realism as no other generation could; and how, at life's end, they became risk-
averse conservatives. Today's 25-year-olds today exhibit many of the tendencies
of what Fitzgerald tenned the ''prewar'' personality of the Lost. Perhaps I 3ers
can aspire to match the best of what the Lost became-the Nobel-laureate
authors, the savvy adventurers, the level-headed pragmatists-with less of the
impulse toward self-destruction.

Completing the G.I. Diagonal

Most of the thirty million G.I. survivors believe they have a lot of living yet
to do. They are right. Six in ten G.l.s will live another ten years, one in four
another twenty. But this generation that hates the word "old" is beginning to
realize it is becoming just that. Gradually, G.1.s are drifting beyond what ger-
ontologists (with G .I. blessing) not long ago christened the "young old" phase
and into the "old old" phase until recently associated with the Lost. As they
coin new names for themselves-maybe something like "Super Seniors" -
G.l.s will energize the contemporary image of what it means to be over 80.

Entering Post-Elderhood in an Inner-Driven Era (1991-2003)

Physical decline will come hard to a generation whose definition of self (and
virtue) has always been so closely tied to activity, to getting things done. Many
G.l.s will feel newly depressed, finding a loss of purpose, sensing a loss of
respect. Yet the core of this generation will try, as always, to keep spirits up.
Many of those in failing health will move from seniors-only condos into member-
run "planned care communities," euphemized updates of what the Lost bluntly
called "nursing homes." Wherever G.l.s live, their peer society will remain as
friendly and collegial as ever.
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 385

The mutually supportive relationship between government and G.l.s will

continue into the latter's deep old age. Over the next fifteen years, public attention
to the needs of senior citizens will shift up the age bracket, away from issues
that not long ago were on the minds of 60-year-olds (early retirement, reduced
income and property taxes) and toward those of concern to 80-year-olds (long-
tenn custodial care, access to life-extending technologies). The G.I. lobbies will
make the case, with Silent support and Boom acquiescence, that their generation
is "entitled" to the best-available health care, regardless of income or, more
important, age. Like the Glorious and Republicans before them, G.I.s will expect
to be treated well, and their juniors will generally comply-with any request
involving material reward . And, as has always been the case with G.I. benefits,
the long-tenn cost will be initially underestimated.
With the G .l.s alone atop the age ladder, however, this "please-thank you"
relationship with government will take an unfamiliar tum. Forty years ago,
everyone understood that giving this generation public rewards for public deeds
was a fonn of future-oriented investment. These young G.l.s were the future.
When they prospered, America prospered-and their Idealist and Reactive neigh-
bors (Missionary and Lost) looked on with approval, even though they shared
less in the public largess. During the 1990s, as G.l.s continue to get rewards,
their Idealist and Reactive neighbors (Boom and 13th) will again look on with
little objection and will again neither receive, nor expect to receive, like treat-
ment. Yet there is one obvious difference: The G .l.s will no longer be the future.
The generations looking on with noses pressed against the glass will not be older,
but younger. The G .I. self-perception will not change at all. They will still see
themselves as nice kids getting a public allowance for good deeds. But the same
behavior that two life phases ago (in an Outer-Driven era) had the feel of
investment will now (in an Inner-Driven era) have the feel of consumption.
G. I. s did not expect their lifecycle story to tum out this way . From the moment
they first came of age, they followed their elders' instructions to save, invest,
build, and be patient, pursuant to a Social Security "deal" through which G.l.s
would be rewarded later in their lifecycle by younger (and presumably wealthier)
generations. Through the postwar boom, everyone assumed that these juniors
would be able to afford the burden with little trouble-thanks to an expanding
workforce, rising levels of savings and investment, and heady rates of produc-
tivity growth . Benefit levels kept rising, enabling G.1.s to receive back many
times what they and their employers had paid into the trust funds. G.l.s assumed
their children and grandchildren would later enjoy the same pyramiding benefits
when their own turns came.
But something happened along the way. Sapped by deficits, inflation, and a
pro-consumption tax bias, savings rates did not rise. (They fell.) Productivity
growth did not speed up . (It slowed down .) Younger generations did not have
larger families. (They had smaller ones .) Moreover, the public cost of supporting
G.I. elders soared beyond all earlier projections-thanks to a mixture of auto-
386 GENERATIONS

matic cost-of-Jiving hikes, earlier retirement, greater longevity, health-care in-

flation, and the G.l.s ' own political muscle . In time, the cost began crowding
out most other public resource priorities .
The result? Through the 1980s, generational transfer payments undermined
the youth-focused investment activity that G.l.s undertook earlier in their life-
cycle, and ushered in a historic reversal of phase-of-life income patterns. From
Progressives to Missionaries to Lost, every elder generation the G.l.s knew
earlier in life had accepted, in old age, lower per capita incomes and higher
(typically much higher) poverty rates than generations in youth or rising adult-
hood. The G.l.s, by contrast, became America's first generation of elders whose
per capita income (after taxes) exceeds the average for all younger people . Today,
when all income transfers are considered, America has ten times more l3ers and
Millennials than G .l.s living below the poverty line. Even so, the federal gov-
ernment currently spends ten times more per G.I. than it does per 13er and
Millennial child. When the G.l.s were young, by contrast, elder Missionaries
used government to direct resources in exactly the opposite direction-away
from elders, and toward youth.
What went wrong, and when? The typical G.I . answer bears the bruises of
their old generational battle with the Boom-and shows a clear parallel to the
old Republican-Transcendental quarrels of the early nineteenth century. Many
G .l.s charge that Boomers have betrayed history-much as the aging Jefferson
blamed the young in the 1820s and Albert Gallatin blamed the young in the
1830s and 1840s. What went wrong, in the G.I. view, is that America's recent
crop of rising adults have lacked the civic virtues G.l.s possessed in their own
youth. From the crumbling apartments of Pruitt-Igo to the debt-leveraged buyouts
on Wall Street, Boomers have always seemed to grind down more than build-
to care about self more than community , about consuming more than saving,
about preserving personal independence more than working hard or building
families. When things went wrong (again in the G.I. view) was during the late
1960s and 1970s. True enough. In their coming-of-age euphoria, Boomers de-
tested the material creations of their G.I. elders and castigated the very concept
of deferring current consumption for the sake of future rewards-a concept
Boomers considered to be a central pathology of their elders' mind-set. Yet this
Boom Awakening clouded the G .I. judgment as well, by subtly egging on their
sense of worldly hubris. In effect, Boomers told the G.l.s : "You've made
material life effortless, so why bother working at it?" And G .l.s answered:
"You're right, we have done rather well. Maybe it is time to let go." And so
they did.
Much rested on this acquiescence. Despite their l 960s-era criticisms, the
Boom and Silent have always depended on the G .l .s-the generation that in
their eyes has always epitomized secular endowment-to defend the ethic of
investment. When the G .l.s indicated it was okay to feed off the future, other
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 387

generations accepted that decision from the ones who ought to know . From the
early 1970s forward, roughly halfway through the G .I. tenure of political lead-
ership, America initiated a fundamental shift in its allocation of resources: from
the future to the present , from investment to consumption, from young to old.
G.I.s have benefited personally from this shift, while l3ers (and possibly Mil-
lennials) stand to bear its biggest cost.
Today ' s seniors can rest easy on two counts . First, no younger generation
will ever take away a significant part of their retirement " deal" against G.I .
opposition . Whenever G.I.s claim that their public and private affluence belongs
to them because they earned it, they will encounter little dissent from the one
generation that could challenge them: the Boom . Yes, Boomers will think, you
did earn it-and , like a Jeffersonian "independent nation" generation, you have
the right to take it all with you . Boomers are willing to shell out high Social
Security taxes with little expectation they will get the money back, because they
themselves gain something immaterial in return: personal independence from
their parents and the ability to redefine social values without interference from
politically powerful elders. Second, the G.I.s can take some solace in recognizing
that they are not the first generation to see their own unique endowment type
erode upon moving behind elderhood . That happens to all generations. If the
Great Society plan for a well-ordered cornucopia now seems out of reach, G.I.s
can nonetheless be proud that much of what they built still endures.
Most of all, as the 1990s progress, G .I. s will notice younger generations start
to miss their old " Civic " magic for making things work and start to see in the
G.I. peer personality something America badly needs to relearn . Generational
monuments like lwo Jima , once symbols of intimidating G .I. power, will become
shrines to a Civic spirit remembered , but increasingly perceived as weak and
endangered . Where people of all ages will look to Boomers for values, they will
still (Boom included) look to G.I.s for guidance on secular endowments, deep
into the latter's "old old" age . Thanks to lengthening lifespans , a significant
number of G.I.s will live to see this , and may well be heartened by it.
If these post-elders decide to help America rekindle a sense of teamwork and
productive community, then younger generations are likely to follow . If G.l.s
themselves suggest that their wealthiest members deserve no health- or nursing-
care subsidies or that rank-and-file seniors deserve no discounts below what
harder-pressed 13ers must pay in full-for everything from property taxes to
bus rides-their example may encourage a new generation of children to start
acting as selflessly as G .I.s themselves did in youth. IfG .l.s themselves support
additional investment in education, Boom and I 3er parents may join them in
putting the needs of children ahead of their own . If G .I. s stop tolerating trade
and budget deficits that are (by simple arithmetic) elder-favoring, younger voters
may well agree that , yes , we really should stop burdening children with debt.
Will G .I.s relax their collective expectation of late-in-life reward? History
388 GENERATIONS

says they will not. By the standards of their respective centuries, Glorious and
Republican elders died relatively wealthy, but culturally isolated and unhappy
about how their heirs were managing public affairs. Yet history has one blind
spot: Neither of these Civic predecessors had the G.l.s' opportunity, as the first
set of powerful post-elders in American history, to reach all the way across the
cycle and help raise a new Civic generation. In the 1990s, the G .l.s will have
this chance, with the Millennials.
The power of this G.1.-Millennial bond is the major question mark in the
remainder of the G.I. lifecycle and offers the most likely catalyst for a late-in-
life repair of senior-citizen endowment behavior. G.l.s know, through their own
experience, that Civic generations need a positive relationship with government
starting with childhood. G .l.s (like Boomers) were able to ignore rising poverty
among 13er children-but (also like Boomers) they may find Millennial poverty
far less tolerable . Raising the Millennials is mainly the task of Boomers, of
course-and this will complicate the G.I. task of helping these children . Today's
seniors will never feel comfortable with the Boomer personality-nor the Boom
with the G.I. personality. But as the 1990s progress, both generations may begin
to realize that much of this antagonism has heretofore rested on their respective
phase-of-life positions. Younger Idealists and older Civics collectively repel each
other, but older Idealists and younger Civics, just as strongly, attract each other.
In post-elderhood, therefore, G.l.s can make an important discovery about
their children: that Boomers , in midlife, are coming to resemble the G.l.s ' own
parents-the righteous Missionaries-whose patriarchal persona today's seniors
remember so admiringly. G.l.s know they raised Boomers differently from the
way they themselves were brought up. Nonetheless, they expected Boomer
"yuppies" to behave as dutifully and collegially as they themselves had in the
1930s and 1940s. Instead, the tempestuous Boomers followed the Missionary-
led path through rising adulthood-a phase of life during which G.l.s knew their
parents only through a child's undiscerning eye . As custodians of the memory
of great Missionary leaders, G.I. senior citizens may come to see in Boomers
not the embodiment of Civic-type virtues, but the factory of those virtues . The
more G.l.s notice this, the less they may feel inclined to opt out of the world
of younger generations, or to deplete any more of the endowments they worked
so hard for so many decades to build. In return, Boomers may see in G.I. post-
elders a living example of the competence and power they envision for
their cherished Millennial children. This could prove to be a mutually pleasing
finale to the still-simmering G .l.-Boom rift-much as the midlife Awakener Ben-
jamin Franklin finally grew to respect the "Do-Good" memory of Glorious
Cotton Mather, the very symbol of Civic order that Franklin had ridiculed as
a young man.
Time-and "their" twentieth century-is running out on this generation.
Yet at this writing, a G.I. Commander-in-Chief still sits in the Oval Office, and
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 389

millions of George Bush's peers enjoy a life as healthy and energetic as his .
These senior citizens remain politically powerful out of proportion to their num-
bers, and have ample time left to make an important choice between two cur-
rencies of elderhood . Were G .l.s to relinquish some of their claims to secular
reward, they might redeem a greater measure of the inner reward available to
the elders they knew in their own youth: the confidence that, in their final years,
they are doing what they can to endow their heirs with a better world. No
generation of younger Americans will dare force this trade-off on the G.l.s. It
is a decision only they can make.

Completing the Silent Diagonal

The Silent, like all their Adaptive predecessors, have thus far glided through
history. Blessed with economic good fortune, they have been spared both the
outer sacrifices of their elders and the inner trauma of their juniors . But they
have been denied adventure and have never felt fully comfortable at any age.
The Silent have spent a lifetime realizing two important facts: First, they are
not G.l.s; second, they are not Boomers. As they grow old, they will still be
aware of these two facts. At the same time, the aging Silent will grow increasingly
worried about the fate of the generation they raised-the young I 3ers-whose
unromantic outlook on life seems so oddly different from what they recall of
their own early years.

Entering Elderhood in an Inner-Driven Era (1991-2003)

As the 1990s proceed, a new breed of American elder will emerge: the ''high-
tech" senior, running his MacIntosh with software on investments, leisure op-
portunities, and eligibility rules for this or that special benefit. No American
generation has ever entered old age better equipped than the Silent. Today's
sixtyish men and women stand at the wealthier edge of America's wealthiest-
ever generation, poised to take full advantage of the generous G.1.-built old-age
entitlement programs. Armies of merchandisers and seniors-only condo salesmen
will pounce on these new young-oldsters as they complete a stunning two-
generation rags-to-riches transformation of American elderhood. Where the
1950s-era elder Lost watched their offspring whiz past them in economic life,
the l 990s-era elder Silent will tower over the living standards of their children.
In 1960, 35-year-olds typically lived in bigger houses and drove better cars than
their 65-year-old parents. In the year 2000, the opposite will be the case.
Were this to happen to any other living generation, it would feel like a triumph.
But not for the Silent. In old age, as always, the Silent will carry what Benita
390 GENERATIONS

Eisler calls that "corpse in the trunk." Anxiety. Guilt. The capacity to see
drought in sunny weather, flood the minute it starts to shower. No generation
has more difficulty enjoying a good thing-or has such keen antennae for sensing
the needs of others. Once the Silent perceive that their affluence is generational
and is unlikely to be exceeded by .their own l 3er children, they will feel a genuine
hurt.
As these high-tech seniors stare at their amber monitors, they will wonder
whether they deserve such a long list of late-in-life rewards. The Silent weren't
denied jobs in the Great Depression (new toys and second helpings, maybe).
The Silent didn't win any war (they tied one). The Silent didn't build grand
endowments (they handled the details). The very word "entitlement," so com-
fortably uttered by G.I.s, will have a newly embarrassing ring. The Silents' core
achievements-civil rights, sexual liberation, mainstreaming for the handi-
capped-are not the sort to make them feel entitled to pecuniary reward. From
their perspective, the mere acceptance of reward would call into question the
sincerity of the original undertaking. Any Silent doubts will be reinforced by
Boomers, who will find ways of saying' 'No, you 're not entitled!'' if the question
is ever asked.
The ascendance of Silent into the "young old" age category will begin a
fateful erosion of the political consensus on federal retirement policy-a con-
sensus that has warded off all challenge since the mid-1960s. Throughout their
lives, the Silent have been easy targets for scandals. That will not change in the
1990s, as the media begin to expose a growing number of affluent Silent retirees
(and ex-officeholders) for alleged abuses of public generosity-stories the media
would never attempt (and the public never accept) about G.I. retirees. Mean-
while, long-term forecasts for retirement and health-care programs will become
decidedly less sanguine. Old-age benefits will then become negotiable, "on the
budget table" in ways unthinkable back in the 1970s and 1980s. Cast on the
defensive and equipped with a libertarian sense of equity, the Silent will suggest
some sort of compromise-for example, that their nonpoor members get back
the Social Security and Medicare money they once paid into the trust funds,
maybe with a little interest, but nothing more. Entitlement programs will thus
begin moving toward "means testing," targeting benefits on the needy. State
and Fortune-500 pension plans that had once looked so attractive to early retirees
will begin eroding in purchasing power. Subsidized health care will be subject
to new triage regulations disfavoring the old. Civil service and military retirees
who can lay no claim to G.1.-style heroism will face new challenges against
"double dipping," automatic COLAs, and veterans' benefits for non-service
related illnesses. Private pension plans will face public pressure to reduce their
enormous (and largely unfunded) retiree health-care liabilities. Gifts and estates
will be subject to higher taxes by legislators who will consider Silent wealth less
"earned" than the G .I. facsimile. All this will meet with little effective resistance
from Silent-run elder organizations, which will back away from aggressive, G.1.-
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 391

style lobbying and take a conciliatory new line on young-to-old transfers (except
those involving the very old G.l.s, which will still be stoutly defended). Like
the Silent themselves, their elder lobbies will become more self-doubting, plu-
ralist , other-directed, and compromising .
Silent elders will not share the G. I. instinct for peer-group collegiality . In-
stead, they will look for social activities that bring them in contact with youth
and adventure . An unprecedented number will use their time, money, and talent
to help others, at home and overseas. Recalling their Peace Corps days, the
Silent will assemble a variety of public-spirited "Senior Corps" to channel elder
talent and expertise toward solving social problems. Their generous gifts and
bequests will usher in a golden age of private philanthropy . Redirecting Social
Security income to charity (or to their own 13er children) will become a popular
trend among the wealthy. The Silent will look upon automatic "senior citizen"
discounts as unnecessary, even unfair-and younger generations will agree. The
Silent will be more reluctant than G.I. elders to say "Read my lips-no new
taxes" when private sacrifice is asked to meet a heartfelt public need. This most
affluent of living generations may well lead the call for greater progressivity in
the tax structure .
Reversing the G.I. trend toward collective separation, these new-breed elders
will want to stay actively engaged in an increasingly Boom-dominated society .
The postwar trend toward ever-earlier retirement will backtrack. The Silent will
insist on the right of 70-year-olds to participate in the world of younger people-
to remain useful, help others, and stay employed if they wish. Many early retirees
will feel guiltily idle and rejoin the workplace in people-oriented service jobs-
whether they need the money or not . The visual and print media will see an
increase in the number of old columnists and news anchors, bravely resisting
the weakening of their generation 's pluralist message. "Seniors Only" living
communities will become more uncommon and controversial, perhaps even the
objects of legislative or juridical attack . Boomers who were perfectly happy
when G .I. s chose to separate will see reprehensible antichild (and anti-Millennial)
attitudes in similar Silent behavior. Most Silent will agree.
That powerful , collegial G.I. name " senior citizen " will fit the Silent peer
personality awkwardly at best. While perhaps continuing to use the term, the
Silent will look for ways to humanize it, to make it more personal and accessible .
The Silent will feel less the senior citizen than the senior partner; they may be
attracted to the simple noun "senior," a more modest term when standing alone,
one that evokes the image of the sympathetic upperclassman. Their nicknames
will be quaintly hip, evoking memories of the 1950s and making gentle fun of
themselves-perhaps something like ''Oldster ,'' ' 'Granddaddio,'' or ''Old Bop-
per." They will camouflage their new phase-of-life uncertainty in a rich smile
of irony, unconcerned about juniors taking over the mantle of power-and
powerless to stop it, anyway .
The " Old Bopper" mind-set will combine a denial of age with a better-late-
392 GENERATIONS

than-never search for catharsis. So far, the Silent have seen a millstone in every
age milestone-and around the year 2000, sociologists will discover an unsettling
new lifecycle "passage" in the mid-sixties. New-breed elders try thinking,
acting, and looking young. To guard against appearing old, the Silent will keep
their wardrobes within mainstream fashions, and will undergo many a face-lift
and tummy tuck. Seniors-only tours will fall sharply in popularity, supplanted
by those catering to grandparents with grandchildren. In the company of younger
people, Silent elders will scale mountains, ride rapids, hack through jungles,
backpack through deserts, parachute from planes-anything with a little tingle
of death-defying risk. Many will keep ambitious checklists of everything they
still want to do-for example, to see every great Broadway musical, visit every
national park, or traverse every continent. "Senior circuits" of aging Silent
athletes will gain in popularity. This nostalgia for youth and romance will extend
to music and film as well; Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe will remain powerful
Silent icons. Aging performers like the Everly Brothers or Peter, Paul, and Mary
will stay popular well into their old age, with rock and roll replacing the G.I.
fox-trot at senior sock hops. "Wake up Little Susie, Wake up!" will reverberate
in even the most formal of ballroom settings .
The elder Silent will be wealthy enough to provide a gold mine for targeted
products and services. Marketers will tap into them by appealing to their sense
of irony, their earnest sentimentality, and (especially) their thirst for catharsis.
Old Boppers will feel an unquenchable yearning to be true individuals, to feel
alive, to dabble in slightly juvenile adventures in risk and defiance-even while
retaining their lifelong confidence in expertise and attention to detail. They will
continue to emulate whatever Boomers happen to be doing or feeling. In electoral
politics, the Silent will be slow to make up their minds, and more swayed than
others by candidates with high name recognition, impressive credentials, and
proven management skills. On the surface they will delight in zany, iconoclastic
rhetoric, yet underneath they will insist on genial, flexible temperaments .
The aging Silent will usher in a renaissance of the American extended family.
More than at any other time in American history, 65-year-olds will have parents
still Jiving. Nor can the Silent count on their own children to leave home once
and for all. Run the 13er "boomerang" child syndrome on fast-forward, and
picture a continuing stream of young adults abandoning small urban apartments
and returning to the large homes of their Silent parents. Sooner or later, many
a 13er live-in child will drop the hint, the parent will relent, and the master-
bedroom coup d'etat will occur. The typical G .I. parent, who scrimped long
years to afford household comfort, would never give in so easily. But the Silent
are a softer touch. Having been empty-nesters rather early, they will attach less
value to the privilege of living alone in a big home. Besides, the Silent will be
culturally compatible with their children in ways the G.I.s were not. Around the
tum of the century, these 65-year-old rock-and-rollers will get along just fine
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 393

with their 35-year-old post-punk children . Grandparents will welcome the chance
to help nurture a new generation of children-a task they realize they performed
too young the first time around . Silent authors will do to the "art" of grand-
parenthood what they once did to the "art" of sex: They will scrutinize it
endlessly , making it the subject of countless books, films, plays, songs, and
paintings . And they will professionalize it with consultants, seminars, and global
conferences .
The Silent will see in extended family life a certain measure of atonement
for the damage they did to the family (individually or collectively) back in the
years of the Boom Awakening . Many will come to regret the hurried and un-
protected upbringing they gave 13ers. But while the Silent confess easily to
mistakes, they are loath to admit that any mistake is final. Like old John Crit-
tenden or John Dewey, they will never quit trying to set things right. In the
1990s and beyond, generous help to their adult children will offer the Silent
another chance to do just that.
The personal lives of Old Boppers will be more complicated than what we
today associate with G .I.s . Their "swinging" will occasionally infuriate their
juniors. Like William Byrd II, the Silent will still "play the fool" in their late
sixties and beyond, still succumb to sexual dalliances and experimental urges.
They will always be drawn to the emotional complexity of life and interested in
the daily lives of younger people. Even when their health fails, they will be
reluctant to enter a long-term-care facility . Their physical decline will bring a
surge in at-home elder care, mostly financed by the Silent themselves. Whatever
long-term-care subsidies the G .l.s win in the early 1990s will not be extended
to Silent elders above the poverty line .
The Silent spent a lifetime taking cues by looking up and down the age ladder.
In youth, they looked entirely up . In old age, they will look entirely down. In
government, aging Silent leaders will offer the grayer hues of public adminis-
tration , deferring rather than solving core problems and only occasionally taking
a breakaway risk . Hobbled by locked-in G.I. artifacts-budget deficits, low
marginal tax rates, uncancelable defense projects, entitlements programs running
on autopilot-the Silent will blame their political indecisiveness on circum-
stances supposedly beyond their control. Like the Compromiser "Great Trium-
virate," they will prefer to ameliorate old policies rather than start over again
from scratch. Whatever the problem, their approach will focus on better process
(a new budget amendment , a new incentive tax scheme, a new blue-ribbon
commission) rather than on the ultimate. desired outcome. To Boom critics, Silent
leaders will reply that the world is complicated and that aggressive solutions are
premature-admitting, at the same time , that all points of view must be con-
sidered.
The Silent seem fated to pass from national power with the shortest and
weakest tenure since the Enlightener days of Alexander Spotswood . Already
394 GENERATIONS

leapfrogged by Boomers in the White House and House Republican lines of

succession, their zero for six in Presidential campaigns (dating back to 1968)
might well end up zero for nine or ten. History suggests that an Adaptive
generation gets its best chance to produce a charismatic leader (an Andrew
Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, Jr.)
while entering midlife, not while entering elderhood. To win the Presidency, a
Silent would have to forget the old G.1.-style New Deal coalition and replace
the cult of expertise with the more values-laden campaign style of the Boom-
for example, by showing interest in religion, demanding stem punishment for
moral miscreants , displaying anger in public, and projecting an empathic sense
of community . Silent women may do better than their male peers in presenting
such themes . Yet regardless of sex, a Silent candidate's best chance may arise
if the American political system feels either "on hold" or deadlocked. The more
quickly a sense of social or economic emergency arises, the less likely the Silent
will be able to slow their slide from power.
Their slide has already begun. The Silent share of congressmen and governors
peaked at 68 percent in 1983 and has been declining gradually ever since, to 65
percent in 1989. Following the usual pattern, this decline will accelerate during
the early to middle 1990s and leave the Silent with no more than a 35 percent
share after the year-2000 election. At some point in the 1990s, Silent officeholders
may well fall victim to Boomer attacks on professionalism, an alienated 13er
mood, or their own self-doubts-marking an abrupt end to the enormous electoral
success Silent incumbents have enjoyed in recent years.
Silent elders will be of mixed mind about Boom-led social and political trends.
They will complain about Boomers and l 3ers dismantling their procedural so-
lutions for civil rights, and they will fear for the wounded egos of heavily
chaperoned Millennial children . They will try to calm the inner passion of the
Boomers and lend sensitivity to Boomer crusades. They may assert new virtue
in the word "liberal" to younger generations-who, in tum, will find Silent
sentimentality and technobabble increasingly rococo. Like aging Enlighteners,
the seventyish Silent elite will dislike the rising trend toward mean-spirited public
life. Like aging Compromisers, they will prefer conciliation over crisis. Like
aging Progressives, they will trust electoral or judicial or legislative process over
principle. And like all three, they will be mostly ignored . As the Inner-Driven
era ends, the Silent will age into America's biggest worriers about the future-
not exactly pessimists (the Silent believe there's always a second chance), just
worriers.
The Silent have never been and never will be collectively powerful, but will
continue enriching others with a gentler kind of endowment. Until the next
Adaptive generation comes of age-in the 2030s-no other generation will press
the case for other-directed social compassion , pluralism, sympathy for the un-
derdog, and procedural fairness. Nor will any other have the Silent capacity for
intergenerational understanding . The Silent can mediate the upcoming cultural
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 395

clash between Boom and 13th. So too can they set the underlying " rules of the
game" for the Crisis of 2020. Their success at these tasks will hinge on their
ability to separate the fundamental from the aesthetic, to know when to join (and
how to mentor) the Boomers, and to realize that the Millennials , unlike the l 3ers,
require a protective nurture to thrive . Past the year 2000 , as the ranks of the
Silent begin to thin, other generations will come to miss the politeness, tolerance,
and niceness that Americans now associate with people in their fifties and early
sixties .

Entering Post-Elderhood in a Crisis Era (2004-2025)

As the forces of history amass under Boom leadership, the Silent can remind
Boomers of kindness, 13ers of conscience, Millennials of caution . The danger
will lie in any attempt by aging Silent leaders to get too much in the way of the
thickening forces of history-for example, if an eightyish President (or Supreme
Court) insists on scrupulous process at a moment when younger generations
begin to coalesce around the need for decisive action . The last time this happened,
during the Presidency of old Compromiser James Buchanan , the foot-dragging
of elder Adaptives helped foment the most destructive crisis in American history.
The same could occur if antiquarian Silent leadership helps usher in the Crisis
of 2020 .
The Silent will reach their final lifecycle "passage"-death-at a time no
less awkward than any of their earlier milestones . Three of every four can expect
to depart during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, years when the cycle
suggests the skies of history will darken . Some will live on into the midst of
crisis . But, like Cadwallader Colden, Roger Taney, and Louis Brandeis (who
died in 1776, 1863, and 1941, respectively), their last survivors may have to
say farewell at the most unsettling of times : right around the year 2020 . They
will know what the crisis is, but not how it will turn out. Future events will
confirm what the Silent have always sensed is their lot: born at the wrong time,
ten years too soon or ten years too late.

Completing the Boom Diagonal

The fate of the Boom is one generational future that has already attracted
wide public attention. Thus far , most demographers and social scientists have
reached two major conclusions : that the Boom's vast size will alone give it
unusual electoral power, and that its collective late-in-life personality will fall
somewhere in the spectrum between the hippie and the yuppie . Wrong on both
counts .
First, any suggestion that the Boom will dominate the electorate by dint of
396 GENERATIONS

raw numbers is flat-out mistaken. Its greatest numerical edge occurred in the
late 1970s, right around the pre-yuppie peak of its political detachment. That
edge shrank gradually in the 1980s and will erode further with each successive
decade. In 1990, l3ers outnumbered .Boomers by 14 percent. Starting in 1996,
l3ers will eclipse Boomers in raw voting clout-and around the year 2016, the
Boom will slip behind the Millennials and become America's third-largest gen-
eration of eligible voters.
Second, if Boomer fiftysomethings or seventysomethings repeat the behav-
ior pattern of their teens or thirties, theirs would be the first American gener-
ation ever to do so. Yes, they will always listen to 1960s music, debate the
"lessons" of Vietnam, and show a weakness for granola and mineral water.
But while all generations are steered by their coming-of-age experiences,
none returns there. History suggests the celebrated Boomer trek from hippie
to yuppie will lead to someplace still different-someplace their heirs will
find far more memorable.

Entering Midlife in an Inner-Driven Era (1991-2003)

In the early 1990s, some Boomers will look back upon their awakening as a
moment of generational trajectory, propelling them on a path of collective des-
tiny. Others will express open contempt for any such pretension. As all Boomers
assert their midlife values, they will subject their coming-of-age awakening-
what it did and did not accomplish-to growing scrutiny. Along with this scrutiny
will come stormy peer-on-peer invective. Boomers should not be surprised to
see this happen. They are following the script of every prior Idealist generation
entering midlife, dating back to the first charges and countercharges of "hy-
pocrisy" traded among Winthrop's small wilderness gathering in the 1640s.
The 1990s will bring fuller development to several important Boomer trends
of the late 1980s. Though yuppies will still be around, Boomer perfectionism
will begin to express itself Jess in the realm of personal fulfillment than in the
realm of social virtue. Boom politics will become more intensely values-laden.
Like Missionaries in their forties and fifties, Boomers will grow increasingly
pompous, intolerant, uncompromising, snoopy, and exacting of others. At the
same time, they will become more dutiful, principled, and demanding of them-
selves.
The Boom' s era of political remission will end sometime in the 1990s, perhaps
around the time the last G.l. President departs. The "generational politics"
touted by so many over the last two decades will finally start bearing results-
but it will be linked to inner-world, not outer-world, ends. Notwithstanding their
current reputation for personal selfishness, Boomers will not mobilize around
appeals to collective self-interest-for example, around tax, labor, trade, or
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 397

retirement issues. Instead, they will look for lofty commitments on matters of
principle. To other generations, their moral perfectionism will seem whiny,
mean-spirited , even (in the context of the Boomer past) hypocritical. But it will
reflect a growing generational commitment to solve the unsolved-an attitude
that will help revitalize a sense of national community .
Boomer interest in real-world institutions will assume a new seriousness. As
the 1990s progress , a growing share of all school districts, state legislatures,
and corporations will emerge entirely retooled around Boom values-while the
remainder will seem almost Mesozoic in their pristine G.1.-ness or (more often)
their fuzzy Silentized G.1.-ness . Following the path of every other Idealist gen-
eration, Boomers will begin with local and grassroots institutions and work their
way up to the most powerful bodies of national leadership . Their share of
Congress and governorships (now 21 percent) will expand rapidly in the mid-
1990s and will probably become a plurality following the 1994 or 1996 election .
If Boomers follow the Missionary pattern , they will reach their lifetime peak
share of national leadership around the year 2005, just as the Inner-Driven era
is ending, sixty-two years after the birth of their first cohort.
Each step of the way, Boomer-retooled institutions will grow teeth. In power,
Boomers will scrap Silent process, regard no budget item as "untouchable,"
and attack political arrangements (from the sugar cartel to sweetheart defense
contracts) that, in recent decades, have seemed impenetrable. Seeing new virtue
in community, they may see advantage in taxes (on consumption), regulation
(on speculative investment and pleasure-seeking leisure), and public intrusions
into what others will consider matters of personal and business privacy. Regional
planning and consumer groups will propel their causes by asserting ethical values
ahead of individual self-interest. An antidrug and pro-environmental alliance
may well emerge as the nation's most potent lobby, at all levels of government.
And as the Boom moves beyond the age of procreation and begins to equate
sexual freedom with 13er license, the balance of power in the abortion debate
may well tum toward the evangelical last-wavers. Growing numbers of Boom
feminists may shift their focus away from self and toward progeny-perhaps
acquiring the view of aging Transcendental Susan B. Anthony that abortion is
"degrading to women" because it encourages them to "treat our children as
property to be disposed of." If so, a decade of abortion prohibition could be
for Boomers what a decade of alcohol prohibition was for Missionaries .
Whatever righteous causes Boomers have in mind, they will remain a hard
sell for political and commercial marketers. At the voting booth, fiftyish Boomers
will show all the perversity of the fiftyish Silent-with more of the independence
and less of the niceness . They will disdain party allegiances, argue at fund-
raisers, hang up on telemarketers, and generally take far less interest in flesh-
and-blood candidates than in abstract issues. To reach them, aspiring politicians
will have to demonstrate candor, simplicity, moral rectitude, serenity of soul,
398 GENERATIONS

even a hint of detachment. The appealing air of the minister will be more effective
than the polished air of the expert . Product marketers will have to take much
the same tack. Boomers will seek high purpose in what they buy : quality over
quantity, uniqueness over comfort , inner satisfaction over outer popularity. The
perfect Boomer product will , like the perfect health food ; allow a gesture of
austerity in the very act of consumption . Boomers will seek ways to express
their defiance of material urges while still indulging in them-for example, by
using mail-order and home-delivery .services that allow them to buy without
stooping to shop.
Boomer-run corporations will keep relentless focus on the "bottom line" -
not just profits, but principles about what companies should mean to their owners ,
employees, customers , and neighbors. Like Henry Ford , Boomer manager-
owners will try to tum firms into agents of public and private virtue. Even well-
performing companies will downsize staffs , defer dividends, or shift marketing
strategies to achieve values-related goals. This managerial style will strike 13ers
as ruthless, even "puritanical" -but in return for this added moral authority,
Boom executives will be prepared to accept a narrowed pay gap between them-
selves and their workers.
In contrast to credentialed Silent careerists, the midlife Boom elite will have
highly eclectic backgrounds . A growing number of nonlawyers will enter politics,
non-Ph.D .s publish in academic journals, nonpriests give sermons, even non-
doctors give medical advice. Some of the most promising Boomer politicians
(and Presidential candidates) will spring from outside the ranks of law, govern-
ment, and party politics . The Boom elite will assiduously maintain individual
identities apart from institutions . Many a Boomer will work for a corporation
and have a business (or profit-making hobby) on the side. The Boomers' high-
tech home offices will have the same individuating effect on the American
workplace that the Missionaries' automobiles had on the American community.
Feeling in control of their choices, midlifers will make career switches easily.
Turnover will rise in top-level jobs. In Congress, resignations over matters of
principle will become more common , Silent-style PACs will weaken, and name
recognition and incumbency will lose much of their present-day advantage .
Throughout the top echelons of government and business , interest in philosophy ,
literature, and the arts will rise-and interest in "how-to" manuals will fall .
Midlife Boomers will concentrate less on infusing perfectionism into their
personal lives (today's effete yuppie stereotype) and more on infusing it into
their family and public lives . They will openly insist on enforcing a new sense
of local (and, gradually , national) community-and will battle against vestiges
of Silent-style pluralism and rights-protected fairness. Many of today 's media
experts are predicting that the official ''Millennial ' ' -the year 2000-will trigger
a tidal outpouring of Aquarian weirdness from fiftyish Boomers, from bacchanals
serving homemade wine and Yugoslavian brie to Vedic mantras hummed on
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 399

mounta in tops at sunset. The experts will be disappointed. By then "into" their
new institutional roles, Boomers will no longer be satisfied with cultural ephem-
era; instead, they will push an austere and stripped-down version of their New
Age morality (an update of what midlife Missionaries called ' 'Decency ' ') straight
into mainstream social life. The culture war between the Boom and 13th can be
expected to heat up for precisely this reason. Most of today's 13ers are quite
content to see Boomers pass their leisure hours among their own peers, in retreat
from the real world. All 13ers have to do is stay out of the way. But when
Boomers decide to stay home on weekends and tell 13ers how to behave, that's
when the battles will begin . Americans who have lately grown accustomed to
looking upon (Silent) 50-year-olds as a nice , open-minded bunch will sense a
new and cold wind as first-wave Boomers pass the half-century mark.
Around the year 2000, Boomers will settle in as a more cerebral "older"
generation . They will seek the classic and the enduring over the faddishly popular.
They will challenge sex, profanity , and violence in the media-and will get
results . Like all Idealist generations entering midlife, Boomers will mount a
relentless attack on all forms of substance abuse . They will strike blow after
blow against tobacco-taxing, restricting, and humiliating anyone involved in
its production and use . The alcohol industry can expect its sternest challenge
since Prohibition. The firearms industry will fare better thanks to the fact that
the Boom will not dislike violence per se, just meaningless (read: "13er")
violence. Boom opinions will be nitpicked (but emulated) by the Silent, resented
(but coped with) by the 13th.
In inner cities, Boomer civic and religious leaders will reestablish moral
principles and police the world of youth activities with far greater attention to
ends than means . Sharing the Boom cult of community, the midlife black elite
will assert moral leadership in troubled neighborhoods that (in their view) need
them . Inner-city religious leaders will become sharply intolerant of youth mis-
behavior. The black Boom elite will back away from procedural mechanisms
like affirmative action-and will instead force younger people to build "char-
acter" and accept more responsibility for their own condition. When black
Boomers call attention to white racism , their purpose will not be (as it was for
Progressives and Silent) to galvanize the white establishment to act, but rather
(as it was for Transcendentals and Missionaries) to galvanize the black com-
munity to act on its own . In the tradition of Frederick Douglass and W.E .B .
DuBois, black Boomers may ultimately make their most enduring contributions
in letters and cultural leadership .
Like prior Idealist generations, the Boom will produce an explosion of women
into public life. By the year 2000, midlife women will surge into boardrooms,
media anchor booths, university presidencies, and Congress-and will begin
making plausible runs for the White House . Aging Boom women may see in
their own peers the apogee of their lifelong struggle for equality with men
400 GENERA TIO NS

in public life. Like Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they will rage
against the growing willingness of younger generations to abandon the feminist
cause, rewiden sex role distinctions , and push women back toward the pedestal
of family life .
Boomer judgmentalism will land heavily on the criminal justice system. In
contrast to the Silent, midlife Boomers ~ill find it easier to condemn individuals
and harder to condemn ''society'' -a word that for them will now mean '' Boom
society," whereas for the like-aged Silent it had meant "G .I . society." Boomers
will define new crimes, from limitations on freedom of speech to new vagrancy
statutes for panhandlers who refuse to Jive in austere shelters. Criminal juries
will be unrelievedly harsh, appeals shortened , sentences lengthened, parole
boards weakened, prison life regimented , and the worst offenders executed with
a grim efficiency not seen since the stem tenure of Missionary judges. Boomers
will develop new "shaming" approaches to punishment, emphasizing confes-
sion, humiliation, and personal reform where the Silent always thought it fairer
to stick to rules . This will be a sore point for 13ers, destined to become the
leading objects of the harsh new Boom penology.
In civil law, similarly , Boom judges and juries will show a new sternness .
Inquiring into culpability rather than '' deep pockets,'' they will be more inclined
to grant "punitive" damages than to compensate for pain and suffering . Liti-
gation will be streamlined and made less costly-and more final. Private industry
will find in moral rectitude an effective strategy for winning (or avoiding) law-
suits. After recasting the insurance industry in line with new values, Boomers
will treat insurance assets as community resources and limit plaintiffs to stingier
awards. A Boomer jury will resist making the community pick up the tab where
it deems an individual to be at fault.
As demanding as this generation will be of others, the Boom will be no less
demanding of its own members. Grumpy midlifers will frown on nontraditional
sexual behavior, especially where it appears to threaten the family. Divorce will
become more stigmatic . Boomers will not tolerate impure behavior in public
life, and will expiate their own youthful excesses through the occasional pillaging
of public figures with hippieish pasts . Those who persist in Awakening era
behavior patterns deep into midlife (in the mold of the wayfaring Transcendentals
John Humphrey Noyes and Henry Ward Beecher) will suffer the opprobrium of
their peers. Meanwhile, just as the Transcendental elite disdained Millard Fill-
more and the Missionary elite ignored Warren Harding, Boomers may well be
disappointed with their first cadre to achieve national political prominence. Their
collective power will be stymied by high individual self-esteem (the notion that
"I" could do better than anybody who might be on the ballot) . The "debunk-
ers" -the Boom's Mencken-like challengers from within-will chip away at
any early effort to energize the generation into an aggressive political consensus .
As Boomers pass through their forties and fifties, two trends bear watching.
The first is the grace with which they accept their advancing years . So far,
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 401

Boomers have not much noticed the aging proces s. In part , this reflects a strength-
ening focus on the spiritual and cerebral over the physical-but also an urge to
remain forever the youngish generation while appearing not to care about it. If
Boomers cling to a youth-fixated narcissism into their forties and fifties, America
will be heading for trouble . When the Silent emulated the mannerisms and
physique of youth, Boomers did not feel at all bothered; if anything, they felt
flattered. But when the older generation has higher collective self-esteem , any
midlife "fountain of youth" poses a direct threat to the social role of rising
adults . If fiftyish Boomers try too hard to look and act thirty, they will endanger
an effective late-in-life partnership with I 3ers and increase the risk that any later
crisis could turn out badly . History ' s best relationships between midlife Idealists
and rising-adult Reactives (Landon Carter with George Washington , or Gertrude
Stein with Ernest Hemingway) have all featured the Idealist who played the
repository of culture, the reminder of stable , deeply rooted values-not the
youthful sprite . Like a Bradstreet, Franklin , Longfellow , or Sandburg, Idealist
generations have the capacity to age elegantly, in their own eyes and in the eyes
of others .
The second trend to watch will be the strength and behavior of midlife Boomer
factions, especially the split between the New Age (modernist) and evangelical
(traditionalist) camps , whose major l 980s-era battles focused on abortion and
sex education . The search for a Boom values consensus will hinge, in part, on
the nation 's economic performance. With modernism emanating largely from
the generation's better-off first-wavers and traditionalism more from worse-off
last-wavers, any further widening of this economic gap will aggravate values
conflicts . The Boom may split along geographical lines-for example, with
urban, bicoastal New Agers squaring off against heartland evangelicals . This
could prompt talk of regional secessions. Yet if the Transcendentals demonstrated
how sectionalism can rapidly grow into implacable hatred , the Puritans, Awak-
eners, and Missionaries proved that an Idealist generation, however fragmented
early in life, retains the capacity to find common principle in times of approaching
crisis. If Boomers unify, the initial evidence will be the coexistence of divergent
values in the same communities, and the emergence of new and seemingly odd
alliances like the Missionaries' pre-World War I " reform trinity" of funda-
mentalists , feminists , and western agrarians. If Boomers reach a midlife con-
sensus in support of cleaning up the world of the Millennial child, that will bode
well for the decades to follow .

Entering Elderhood in a Crisis Era (2004-2025)

Picture a holiday parade one decade into the next century. Will there be any
crisply marching, eyes-ahead, flag-carrying war veterans, followed by purple-
fezzed Shriners driving silly cars in tight formation s? Hardly . In their place will
402 GENERATIONS

be bearded old vets in ragtag khaki, their step defiantly out of sync with younger
drummers, their eyes piercing the crowd with moral authority. In 2004, thirty-
five years after Woodstock, Boomers will range in age from 43 to 60. By 2026,
the youngest Boomer will be 65, the oldest 82. In the intervening era, as this
generation passes through its life phase of maximum power, history suggests it
will encounter a secular crisis comparable to the greatest moments in American
history. Meet the old Boom, the next embodiment of Hawthorne's "Gray Cham-
pions," combining "the leader and the saint" to show the descendants of the
Puritans "the spirit of their sires." Boom principle-or righteous fury-will
cast a long shadow over the entire twenty-first century. If the future follows the
cycle, old Boomers will bring world history to a decisive turning point. Whatever
the outcome, younger generations will later remember, in black-and-white, the
stem Boom sense of moral imperative-decades after the floral hippie and pin-
striped yuppie images have been forgotten to all but the historian.
One rather safe prediction experts often make about elderly Boomers is that
they will collide with underfunded federal pension and health-care systems,
starting in the mid-2010s. This is one issue where the unprecedented size of the
Boom Generation does matter. A straight-line extrapolation of recent productiv-
ity, fertility, and longevity trends indicates that by the year 2025, younger
workers would have to hand over 30 to 40 percent of their payroll to provide
old Boomers with G.1.-style public support. To extract such taxes, Boomers
would have to wage and win a furious political war against l3ers and Millennials,
a war that would surely sap their moral authority. Perhaps it is a war old Boomers
could win. History says it is not a war they will wage.
All their lives, Boomers have been bracing themselves for an old age of
diminished material dependence. As the 1990s dawn, more than seven of every
ten Boomers do not think Social Security will help them when they are old. For
G .l.s at like age, any doubts about their future public reward would have triggered
prompt and effective political action . But for inner-fixated Boomers, this negative
expectation simply requires an adjustment to karma and is not a great cause for
alarm. No matter how hard life gets, no matter how serious the world's problems,
Boom self-esteem will remain unconquerable. Old Aquarians will consider them-
selves ''together'' people. Sensing their physical mortality and their susceptibility
to the fourth dimension (time), Boomers will tum focus to the fifth-the spiritual.
Other generations will find this attitude peculiar, even frightening. But thanks
to this inner fixation, Boomers will cope with harsh economic realities gracefully,
without wasting resources they would rather direct toward loftier community
goals.
In what they demand from the young, old Boomers will be utterly unlike
elder G.l.s, who gave their juniors full reign over their society's values and
demanded economic benefits in return. Social Security originated seventy-five
years after the birth of the first Missionary cohort and was, at that time, primarily
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 403

a youth-oriented program. For a pittance of support, Missionary elders vacated

jobs for younger breadwinners-in return for retaining the moral authority to
guide the young through an era of great trial. During the darkest hours of crisis,
old Missionaries accepted declining living standards in order to help see America
through to triumph-and, thereafter, to reward young G.I. heroes. That, in
Missionary eyes, was the proper ethical arrangemen't.
The Boom will do much the same. In national politics, with the G.I.s by then
almost entirely gone and the Silent weakening, Boomers will force a dramatic
tum in the politics of Social Security . In the 2010s, they will lay the terms for
an entirely new intergenerational "deal," snapping the chain of ever-rising
benefits that G.I.s insisted would never end. Boom leaders will thoroughly
recast-and probably rename-Social Security and Medicare. To avoid raising
the burdens on younger generations, they will leave their peers with a purchasing
power below what the G.I.s and Silent will have enjoyed, exempting only the
"deserving" poor from the new regime of old-age austerity. Affluent Boomers
will receive little economic recompense from a lifetime of payroll taxes paid to
support others. Yet in a turnabout from the G.I. entitlement ethic, Boomers will
derive self-esteem from knowing they are not receiving rewards from the com-
munity.
Thanks to Boomer asceticism, the proportion of circa-2020 national income
spent on elder medical care may rise little if at all above what it is today-
despite their larger numbers, their longer lifespans, and (very likely) the huge
variety of expensive medical technologies then available. Driven by personality
as much as economics, Boomers will widely prefer less costly "self-care" to
hospital care wherever feasible. Elder use of chemical medications will decline,
offset by a growing reliance on alternative medical approaches-from New Age
homeopathy to evangelical faith-healing. Federal health policy will dispense with
the G .I.-era notion that elder beneficiaries can privately decide with their doctors
how much of the younger taxpayers' income they want to spend on health care.
Instead, the type and extent of health-care assistance old Boomers receive will
be a tightly regulated social decision.
This intergenerational deal will be two-sided. In return for an austere elder-
hood, Boomers will demand sweeping moral authority-and, in all likelihood,
will retain national leadership until they reach advanced old age and see their
values firmly locked in place. The Boom share of Congress and governors,
though peaking before 2010, will remain a dominant plurality into the 2020s.
Like their Awakener and Missionary predecessors, Boom leaders will exercise
their greatest political influence unusually late in life . Even after their govern-
mental tenure expires, moreover, they will still insist on setting America's cul-
tural and intellectual tone . Occupations that today are associated with the Boom-
education, media, the arts-will gray with them . From university lecterns to
news anchor booths to the Oval Office, America circa 2020 will value the
404 GENERA TIO NS

visionary over the pragmatic, the learned over the energetic, the resolute over
the yielding---,-inshort, the old over the young (which in that era will mean
Boomers over 13ers). Throughout American society, elders will be looked upon
as titans-not especially competent in practical matters, but unquestioned chief-
tains of national purpose. Boom women will attain a level of public power that
will seem unprecedented then, legendary afterward.
This two-sided deal will reverberate throughout America's economic and
family life. To elder Boomers, "retirement " will arrive gradually and be of little
social consequence . The very concept of a fixed retirement age will blur, late-
in-life career changes will be encouraged, and Boomers who retire early to a
life of pure consumption will suffer the disapproval of their peers. Many will
reach elderhood in an independent mind-set: self-employed, gripped with creative
visions, and (by today ' s standards) nearly pensionless.
The typical old Boomer will be not a busy "senior citizen," but a meditative
patriarch. Not a pie-baking grandma or hook-baiting grampa, but a steel-willed
Grand Mother or Grand Father . Not a "Golden Ager" squeezing consumption
out of a debt-fueled economy, but an ascetic elder glowering down from Sinai,
looking upon himself as a critical link in human civilization, without whose
guidance the young might sink into Philistinism. Old Boomers will still listen
to their " classic rock" music-but what Boomer.shear and what grandchildren
overhear will be entirely different. The same "Can't buy me love" lyric that
may remind an old Boomer of carefree self-exploration will come across to a
15-year-old in the year 2025 as a severe, even smug message of self-denial.
Boomers will study history and reread literature dimly remembered from youth.
Those with time and money will travel solo (or in small groups) in search of
self-discovery and wisdom: to a Shakespearean festival, an Israeli kibbutz, maybe
an archaeological dig. Looking old (and surrounding oneself with old things)
will become fashionable . Just as high self-esteem was linked with the appearance
of youth when Boomers were young , so will it be linked with the appearance
of age when Boomers are old. The very word "old" will possess a new grace,
making age-denying euphemisms ring odd. "Senior citizen" may even become
a tenn of derision, bringing to mind discredited images of G.1.-style Sun City.
As Old Aquarians flock to cathedrals of twenty-first-century spiritualism, they
will break from the young more than the circa-2000 elder Silent. In contrast to
G.l.s, however, this will be more an inner than outer separation. Regional
communities now associated with Boom culture-northern California, Colorado,
Oregon, and Massachusetts (a focal point for every earlier Idealist generation in
old age)-will age with this generation and assume an air of stuffy principle,
off-putting to fun-loving younger adults. Many an old Boomer will relocate to
university communities, especially those combining high-quality scholarship
with pleasant climates (Palo Alto, Austin, Westwood, the Carolina Triangle).
On campus, they will be part professor and part pupil in an almost Woodstockian
redefinition of university life.
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 405

Small towns and rural life will acquire the same appeal to evangelical Boomers
they once had to Bible Belt Missionaries, as repositories of enduring values.
The circa-1990 New Age camps scattered throughout the American countryside
will age in place and grow in size, offering final homes to flower-child wayfarers.
New Age or not, communal living will enable those of modest means to share
expenses in an era of reduced pensions, providing emotional support for the very
large share of elders who will never have prepared for retirement and who will
lack spouses, children, or both. This time, the Boom' s Pepperland will not bring
the social rejuvenescence of a spiritual awakening; rather, it will represent a
collective ratification of Boom values that, increasingly, will seem old to others.
By the 2010s, this aging generation will feel its collective mortality, along
with a sense of urgency about unsolved (and previously deferred) problems in
the outer world. Events that earlier would have elicited compromise or stalemate
will now bring aggressive action pursuant to Boom principle. The Crisis of
2020-the Gray Champion's hour of "darkness, and adversity, and peril"-
will be at hand.
Whatever the crisis turns out to be, old Boomers may be inclined to attribute
it to "mistakes" America made when it turned its back on the future during the
Inner-Driven era of the 1980s and 1990s. Responding to domestic and inter-
national challenges in ways unimaginable today, Boom leaders will be policy
perfectionists, inclined to enforce principle even at the risk of toppling the existing
order. These elders will see in themselves a global mission-ethical, ecological,
economic, and quite possibly military. This generation's quest for righteous-
ness-having been local through rising adulthood and national in midlife-will
extend globally in elderhood . They will define the acceptable behavior of other
nations narrowly and the appropriate use of American arms broadly. Like other
old Idealists, Boomers will not instinctively dislike authoritarian regimes; indeed,
they will be quite authoritarian themselves. The question they will ask is whether
such authority is exercised for good or for evil. Boomers will find enemies, most
likely in new places. Unlike their G.I. fathers, Boomers will have little interest
in a continued U.S .-Soviet rivalry . They may even find a second superpower
useful in helping to maintain order in an ethically disheveled world. Instead, the
old Boom is far more likely to direct its global wrath at the Third World. Their
quest for environmental asceticism may put them on a collision course with
developing societies whose first priority is to enjoy a higher material standard
of living-no matter what air is polluted or how many forests slashed. Terrorists
and drug traders may or may not still be major problems by the 2010s, but
Boomers will have grown accustomed to blaming this ilk for whatever goes
wrong overseas. Most Third World leaders, moreover, will be a generation
younger than the Boom, who by then will associate men in their forties with a
roguish amorality .
Great peril might arise if Boomers find themselves confronting old religious
fundamentalists whose inner zeal matches their own . The most terrible war in
406 GENERA TIO NS

American history featured Idealist leaders on both sides (Lincoln and Davis, and
their respective Congresses) . All the other crises have pitted elder Idealist leaders
against younger, less godly opponents (Puritans against Bacon, Andros, and
King James II; Awakeners against General Howe and King George III; Mis-
sionaries against Hitler and Tojo) . Picture a 70-year-old William Bennett deliv-
ering a "Confrontation and Consequence" missive to a twenty-first-century
Ayatollah. Then imagine the aftermath.
Whatever the circumstance and whoever the adversary, the Crisis of the 2020s
will transform Boomers into America's next Gray Champions, the principled
elders to whom younger generations will tum for determination and vision. The
time will be right for a great leader to emerge, some elder man or woman with
"the eye, the face, the attitude of command" of an Abraham Lincoln or Franklin
Roosevelt.
The major question-indeed, the one whose answer may decide whether
Boom leadership will end in triumph or tragedy-will hinge on this generation's
capacity to restrain (or let others restrain) its latent ruthlessness. Like William
Berkeley or Joseph Bellamy, William Sherman or Douglas MacArthur, elder
Idealists seek total victory by whatever means available . Historically, aging
Idealists have been attracted to words like "exterminate" and "eradicate," words
of apocalyptic finality. If the purpose of crisis is inner principle, the degree of
outer-world destruction needed for those ideals to triumph will be of secondary
consideration. Make no mistake: Faced with crisis, this generation of onetime
draft resisters will not hesitate, as elder warrior-priests , to conscript young sol-
diers to fight and die for righteous purpose. This stop-at-nothing zeal is already
apparent in the first Boomer cohorts to reach their mid-forties, from Elliott
Abrams and Oliver North at one ideological edge to Mitch Snyder and Denis
Hayes at the other. Picture these individuals as national elders, uncalmed by
anyone older-and then realize they represent their generation's moderate first
wave, whose youth was marked by relatively few (but increasing) social path-
ologies. Add in the fiery passion of the more evangelical last-wavers, sharpen
everyone ' s moral conviction, reduce everyone ' s level of tolerance, subtract the
active presence of any adult Adaptives-and that is the leadership awaiting
America, circa 2020 . It is easy to picture aging Boomers as noble, self-sacrificing
patriarchs-but just as easy to see these righteous Old Aquarians as the worst
nightmare that could ever happen to the world.
Other generations of spiritualist elders have had visions of apocalypse; this
one will have the methods . Had the Transcendentals discovered an immensely
destructive weapon, they no doubt would have used it to destroy Richmond (or
Washington) . Lacking such a weapon, the Missionaries set loose a smart young
Civic generation to invent and build one-which the country was in a mood to
use, as events showed . The Boom will be the first Idealist generation to enter a
crisis with the weapons of Armageddon at its immediate command . Will the
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 407

Boom do what the G.1.s haven't (and the Silent almost surely won't) and use
nuclear weapons in anger, willing to risk annihilation to vindicate truth and
justice? If a Doomsday Machine appears to aging leaders as a path toward
generational Valhalla, the temptation could be strong.
While the era presided over by Boomer Gray Champions will be a time of
extreme danger, so too will it be a time of historic opportunity . Boomers will
enter old age during an era of looming challenges that would seem insurmountable
by the incrementalist standards of the 1980s and 1990s. From unsustainable
entitlements to insufficient investment, from decaying infrastructure to an Amer-
ican economy controlled by foreign creditors, from Third World revolution to
nuclear proliferation, from depleted fossil fuels to a poisoned atmosphere-
Boom elders will be in position to guide the nation, and perhaps the world,
across several painful thresholds . If Boomers fail at this mission, history suggests
that no other American generation will be commensurately empowered for the
remainder of the twenty-first century.
Let us hope that old Boomers will look within themselves and find something
richer than apocalypse. If they see (and assert) themselves as beacons of civi-
lization, younger Americans may well look up to them as G .l.s did to the great
Missionary leaders: as elders wise beyond the comprehension of youth. If the
Gray Champions among them can seize this historic opportunity, they can guide
a unified national community through the gates of history to a better world
beyond.

Entering Post-Elderhood in an Outer-Driven Era (2026-2047)

Boomers will grasp the reins of power until around the peak of the crisis, at
which time they will either exit heroically (Missionary-style) or be tossed out
(Transcendental-style) . Having gathered around the drumbeat of Boomer prin-
ciple going into the crisis, younger generations will now want to escape from
the stern Boom shadow. They will want to taste something material, practical,
friendly-in short , something non-Boom. As they face this inevitable reaction,
old Boomers will also face a temptation that has confronted every aging Idealist
generation since the Puritans: to take their church with them (just as Civics are
tempted to take their community with them) as they pass beyond their tenure of
power . It is the temptation to believe, like the elder Missionary poet Wallace
Stevens in Opus Posthumous, that " God is in me, or else is not at all."
The Boomers will also do what all generations must: They will die. If the
end comes easy to no generation, Idealists are at least able to see in death a
form of spiritual transcendence. The preferred Boomer departure will be one
with a reason, with a meaning. Here and there, a few Don Quixotes will delib-
erately link their death to one final stand for principle. Driven by a mixture of
408 GENERATIONS

economics, ecological concern, and moral assertion, Boomers will redefine the
ethics of comforting the dying-and of hallowing the dead. Many Boom authors
will (like Stevens) publish posthumously, in an effort to extend their cultural
reach as far as possible into the future. In some circa-2020 equivalent of the
New Deal or Marshall Plan, old Boomers may succeed in defining core principles
that their Millennial children will then cement into place through the middle of
the twenty-first century .
When the year 2030 dawns, Boomers will range in age from 69 to 87.
Assuming the crisis has turned out well, eightyish first-wavers will then reflect
back on a well-timed lifecycle . A person born in the late 1940s will recall growing
up indulged, coming of age at an exciting if hazardous time to leave home, and
passing through rising adulthood in an era that prized consumption and careerism.
Among Boomers lucky enough to last eight decades (more than half of those
alive today), the second forty years will be just as memorable. Boomers will
have spent midlife in an era well suited to the sober realizations of mature parents
and community leaders, entered old age just as elder wisdom was newly ven-
erated, and reached their collective deathbeds knowing the necessary deeds had
been done, allowing heirs to live happily ever after (or so it may seem at the
time). If this all comes to pass, this generation may be eulogized as Franklin
Roosevelt was by Churchill, for having died "an enviable death."
By the year 2050, America will have a few very old Boomer survivors, the
twenty-first-century equivalents of Susan B. Anthony or Robert Frost. These
celebrated elders will join others in rejoicing over the enormous secular power
of their midlife Millennial children. By the mid-2050s, as the next Idealist
generation comes of age, three or four million old Aquarians will remain alive.
More than a few will be on university faculties somewhere, telling tittering
young audiences what the Woodstock 1960s were like, and finally-around age
100-getting a chance to see them happen again.

Completing the 13er Diagonal

The generational cycle is a sneaky fortune wheel for a Reactive genera-

tion . It spins, it turns-and just when it lets you think you've lost, it tantalizes.
Just when you think you've won, it clicks again, and you've lost. So will it
be for 13ers.

Entering Rising Adulthood in an Inner-Driven Era (1991-2003)

The '' Society for the Acceleration of Time'' calls upon Boomers to hurry
up, get old, and get out of the way . Organized fleetingly in 1989, this mock-
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 409

serious 13er lobby articulates the feeling of many of today's 25-year-olds : an

anxiety about whether young adults can ever rise out of the shadow of the
domineering Boom. The nation's next great generational rivalry is brewing , on
the edge of bubbling over.
Throughout American history, the nastiest one-apart generational feuds have
been between midlife Idealists and rising Reactives. This has happened every
time-between Puritans and Cavaliers; Awakeners and Liberty; Transcendentals
and Gilded; Missionaries and Lost. Idealists invariably come to look upon
younger Reactives as a wild, soulless, and "bad" generation-while Reactives
see older Idealists as pompous, authoritarian, and (in power) more than a little
dangerous . Thirteeners and Boomers are already beginning to regard each other
this way. During the 1990s, this mutual suspicion will harden. The last skirmish
between these two oil-and-water types arose just before World War I, grew mean
after the Armistice, and contributed mightily to the ''roar'' of the 1920s. Some-
thing like this "roar" lies in America's near-term future.
The cycle suggests that 13ers will suffer an alienating event when their first
cohorts are in their thirties . This nasty stroke of history will convince them that
theirs is indeed a luckless lifecycle . It could be AIDS ; this epidemic, which has
thus far mainly struck the Boom, will ravage the 13th if it expands unchecked.
Or it could be a diplomat-directed but youth-scourging military campaign-
something on par with the Progressive-led intervention against Kaiser Wilhelm
II or the Enlightener-led war against French Canada. (Lining up the l 3er lifecycle
with those of the Liberty and Lost, such a campaign would occur sometime in
the early 1990s.) But most likely, the alienating event will take the form of an
economic downturn. Even a brief one will serve the purpose .
Economic threats loom heavy on the I 3er horizon . To begin with, their first
class graduated from college in 1983-which means that this generation's as-
piring elite has yet to confront even mildly harsh conditions in the national
economy. Second, never before in American history have public-benefit " safety
nets" been tilted so heavily toward retired elders (no matter how affluent) and
away from rising adults (no matter how poor) . The great majority of 13ers in
poverty, for example, are not eligible for a penny in subsidized health care .
Finally, many are coming of age with unprecedented financial burdens . No
previous American generation has arrived in the workforce paying such high tax
rates on their first dollar of earnings, bearing such large high-interest student
loans, facing so many anti-youth "two-tier" wage and benefit scales, or en-
countering such high housing costs relative to income.
If the economy weakens, 13ers will feel stranded as a generation, sensing
little of the elder goodwill G.l.s enjoyed through the Great Depression, nor the
public exaltation of youth that buoyed Boomers through the stagflated 1970s.
To their regret, l 3ers will find themselves paying a price for the generational
criticism they endured (but did not answer) through the 1980s. Young workers
410 GENERATIONS

will find themselves perceived, and treated, as the most expendable employees.
To keep their jobs, they will have to show not just promise, but bottom-line
results. In sharp contrast to the l 950s-era experience of the rising Silent, many
l3ers will pass through their twenties unable to sustain the quality of life-and,
especially, the level of consumption-they enjoyed as adolescents . Many of
those from affluent families will "boomerang" back to parental homes, dragging
out their child-era dependency. Those from harder-pressed families will fall into
an unsupported poverty. As the year 2000 approaches, the worries of circa-1990
youth will crystallize into a bleak adult reality: Theirs may be America's first
generation since the Gilded to reach age 40 with a lower standard of living than
their parents had enjoyed at like age.
These setbacks will send shock waves through the most market-oriented rising
generation since the circa-1920 Lost. Unlike the Silent and Boom, l3er self-
esteem rests heavily on hopes for economic success-a fact confirmed by count-
less youth polls over the past decade . Once they perceive themselves failing in
the marketplace-amid continuing criticism of their cultural and moral defi-
ciencies- l 3ers are likely to react in the same hard-bitten manner as the Lost
did when they encountered the Missionary vice squads. Many will quietly blame
themselves. Others will lash out against midlife Boomers, who will remain
contemptuous of l3er ideas and aspirations (in stark contrast with how rising-
adult Boomers were treated by their own next-elders). Boomers, by then standing
in the way of the jobs, pay, and promotions, will require l3ers to prove them-
selves in a hotly contested marketplace-in effect, forcing them to move in what
Boomers will consider the "wrong" direction in order to survive. The Boom's
midlife quest to impose moral judgments on grown-up Breakfast Clubbers will
strike a growing chorus of 30-year-olds as pitiless and Scrooge-like.
Once alienation sets in, l3ers will accentuate behavior patterns that today
strike older generations as frenetic , soulless, and physically shocking-confirm-
ing elder judgments that this truly is a "wasted" generation. Thirteeners will
then put their own stamp on the American mood. There will be no mass move-
ments or organized plans; instead, they will burst forth with a hedonistic cross-
culture that will look, taste, smell, sound, and feel anti-Boom. It will be defiantly
noncerebral, probing the physical devil where the like-aged Boom once probed
the spiritual sublime, seeking pleasure where next-elders once sought beatitude,
evoking the black prankishness of Halloween where the hippie culture once
evoked the image of a spring rainbow. Young novelists, filmmakers, songwriters,
and columnists will produce works that will seem interesting if puzzling to the
aging Silent, wholly inarticulate to Boomers, and keenly expressive to l3ers
themselves. This clash of jaundiced rising adults with righteous midlifers will
resemble the 1920s-not the 1960s.
By the late 1990s, professional athletics will offer an exaggerated example
of what will be happening to l 3ers throughout the economy and culture. Pay
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 411

will be increasingly market-driven and disconnected from the bargaining power

of organized labor. Year-to-year results will be rewarded more than lifetime
achievement. The stars who can win, show Ruthian bravado, and fill arenas will
make fantastic sums (enhanced by international bidding) . At the other edge,
nonstar journeymen will lose ground and attract little public sympathy when they
fail. The fun in sports will have a brassy quality, more akin to pure entertainment
than civic ritual. Boomers will look upon 13er athletes as gladiators and will
pointedly urge Millennial children to look elsewhere for role models.
Throughout the economy , the 13ers' preoccupation, indeed their need , will
be personal economic survival. For many, the clearest path to success may be
to leave elder-led institutions and strike out on their own . They will seek market
niches where quick deals matter more than big words, and will take care of tasks
Boomers may find useful if a bit distasteful (delivery services or solid waste
disposal , for instance). Such businesses will bring fortunes to a lucky few, but
most of those engaged in them will be poorly paid. Looking for a lightning strike
at success, 13ers will dart from job to job. Their mobility will discourage em-
ployers from investing in job training-or from offering pensions to new hires.
The international marketplace will provide this generation with its most prom-
ising economic frontier-and a way to take advantage of its underappreciated
linguistic and computer skills. At times, young entrepreneurs will engage in
global business activities their elders will look upon as piratical, opportunist,
even traitorous . Many will seek their fortune in the service of America's creditors,
helping them purchase, manage, or liquidate American assets. Lucrative op-
portunities may arise in nations with fledgling capitalist economies-in enter-
prises like fast food, fashion , and entertainment. Boomers will regard video
stores in Prague as a symptom of decadence, and the Silent will despairingly
contrast their own Peace Corps days spent teaching English to Nigerians with
young McDonald's employees teaching Hamburger IOI to Muscovites . Thirteen-
ers will never be widely attracted to public service or the nurturing professions
(teaching, medicine, the ministry) in the manner of the G.I.s, Silent, or Boom.
Instead, whatever their careers, they will aim for opportunities with a bottom
line. Their economic realism will strike many elders as unfeeling, selfish, even
reactionary . But, over time, 13ers will shrug off these complaints . Like all rising-
adult Reactives before them , they will see themselves as nomads driven by
necessity in a world whose economic harshness is not their fault.
Even as they scramble after new opportunities, l 3ers will react with skepticism
to world events that elders may hail as promoting human freedom. Any further
euphoria of elder Silent over "breaking down barriers" will remind them of
their chaotic childhood-something that felt good to every generation but their
own. If chaos brings new ethnic or economic unrest, and if that leads to conflict,
it will be their job, not their elders', to fight any war necessary to clean up the
mess left behind-the sort of "modem war" (as Hemingway put it) in which
412 GENERATIONS

"you die like a dog for no good reason." Reminiscent of the doughboy Lost,
any homecoming celebration for l 3er soldiers will be tinged with elder criti-
cism-and will heighten feelings of alienation. In war or out, l 3ers will find
themselves bearing a major share of the burden for any economic or social
transitions. But they won't be easily suckered. Like the "Don't Tread on Me"
Liberty of the 1760s, life's hard knocks will have taught these 30-year-olds to
stay away from the complicated abstractions of the aging Silent and the high-
minded crusades of midlife Boomers. As the Boom rises to power, l3er voters
will tum even more antigovemment than they are today. As Boomers begin
endorsing global crusades, l3ers will tum toward isolationism-and, like the
l 920s-era Lost, will take pleasure in revealing elder "lies." In families, com-
munities, and national politics, l3ers will press to simplify the complex, narrow
the bloated, and eliminate the unworkable. They will be drawn to blunt, no-
nonsense candidates .
Thirteener culture will be far more ethnically diverse than the Boom's. Where
the Lost catapulted Eastern and Southern Europeans to prominence, l3ers will
do the same for Hispanics and Asians . The Chinese democracy movement and
political controversies in Latin America will provide the grist for poignant intra-
generational clashes . With this new ethnic diversity will come a new, youth-
propelled racism and a propensity for "hate crimes." Lacking a cultural center
of gravity, l 3ers of all backgrounds-including the white middle class-will
feel at risk in ways their Boomer and Silent parents did not. The most stellar
young ethnic achievers will encounter a festering racial hostility from their own
peers, much as the Jewish Lost did in the 1920s.
Most of the children allowed to grow up poor or unskilled in the 1970s and
1980s will carry their incapacities and pathologies with them into adulthood.
Through the 1990s, unmarried mothers and the undereducated of both sexes will
remain just as unemployable (and dependent) in their thirties as they were in
their teens. Efforts at adult remedial education will be halfhearted and ineffectual.
Worse, many of today's youth gangsters will ripen into their adult facsimile,
waging Capone-style wars with police (most of whom, by then, will be canny
l3ers themselves). Older generations will blame the nation's problems of crime,
drugs, and disintegrating inner cities on their attitude of treating life as a game.
By the late 1990s, as l 3ers wholly fill the crime-prone phase of life, street crime
will be perceived as evil, and the criminal beyond rehabilitation except through
the sternest of regimens. Once Boomer judges go to work, this will almost surely
become the most permanently warehoused (and executed) generation in American
history. Nor will many l3ers rise to defend their criminal peers. By their ethos,
if you're bad and are caught, you don't complain about your punishment.
Rising l 3ers will sense they will never gain much collective esteem from
others. Americans who today look upon 25-year-olds as a wasted bunch will, a
decade from now, look upon 35-year-olds in much the same way. Any stroke
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 413

of luck they enjoy in the marketplace-whether lower housing prices or wage

inflation in the service sector-will be proclaimed "bad news" by older gen-
erations . Their greatest skills will go relatively unnoticed : the capacity to observe,
to identify unmet needs, to be "smooth" and conceal feelings when necessary,
to move quickly when the moment is right , and to make sure that whatever
people try does in fact work as intended. Likewise, l3ers will come to believe
that the best way to win individually is by taking incredible risks . They will
figure that those who play by the (mostly Boom) rules probably won't get
anywhere-so why play by the rules? Many will thus embrace what might be
called the "lottery ticket" mentality: A 13er will be prepared to risk a loss (since
he'll already be losing) for a tiny chance to win big. Their career paths will take
on a kinetic frenzy. Thirty-year-olds will jump at opportunities their elders will
find inconsequential and take on long odds their elders will find incomprehen-
sible. Their greatest successes will come in small businesses that outhustle and
(thanks to low wages and benefits) underprice elder-dominated rivals . The U.S.
Postal Service may well come under ruinous attack from new enterprises run by
piece-rate 13ers who-as veteran bicycle messengers , delivery drivers, and com-
puter hackers-will know how to move information more cheaply and reliably
than tenured civil servants .
Economic risk-taking and cultural alienation will drive 13ers to seek stability
in family life. First-wavers may continue the Boom trend toward late marriage-
not out of any quest for postadolescent self-discovery, but rather out of economic
necessity and an unwillingness to repeat the mistakes of their early-marrying,
heavily divorcing Silent parents . Seeing the dual-income household as a nec-
essary condition for affluence while knowing from personal experience the perils
of a latchkey childhood, 13ers of both sexes will look upon working motherhood
as a temporary necessity to be overcome later in life when income permits . Many
will begin marriage and parenthood in Silent homes, enabling them to receive
substantial elder help with child care . Once they begin to tire of risk-taking (as
did the Lost in the late 1920s), 13ers will become more conservative in their
private lives. Turning away from marital infidelity and divorce, they will make
a great effort to shield their offspring from the less pleasant facts of life .
Despite their economic problems, 13ers will blossom into America's leading
generation of shoppers, thanks largely to purchases they will make for others
(in extended families, or in new shopping services). Accordingly, they will have
a huge influence on products, styles, and advertising-much as the Lost had in
the 1920s. Once marketers realize this, the American media will be barraged
with messages stressing bluntness over subtlety, action over words, the physical
over the cerebral. The most successful of these messages will hint at l 3er
alienation and appeal to a sense of dark humor. Many ads that effectively target
l3ers will be pointedly anti-Boom. For example, Pepsi might hit back at the
1990 Coca-Cola ad showing fortyish jeans-clad Boomers on a verdant hillside,
414 GENERA TIO NS

teaching their Millennial children the Woodstockian chant ''I'd like to teach the
world to sing in perfect harmony .'' A retaliatory ad might run a clip of that
blissful scene, jerk it fast forward to an image of old hippies, and end with a
metallic clang and a message (draped in black): "Drink Pepsi. The Anti-Coke."
Two sets of questions will haunt their rising adulthood. First, will their Silent
and (especially) Boom elders learn to appreciate that this generation does indeed
offer a pragmatic sensibility that America will find important, even essential, in
the decades ahead? Will the Silent stop despairing over how 13ers are turning
out so unlike what they had envisioned-and will they instead see young adults
who know how to compensate for some of the Silent's own worst mistakes?
Will Boomers come to realize that the 13ers' very different childhood environ-
ment has endowed them with valuable antidotes to the Boom's own worst ten-
dencies-or will Boomers continue to look on them not just as juniors, but as
inferiors? The answers to those questions will affect the depth of 13er alienation
and the surliness of this forthcoming generational clash.
The second set of questions has more to do with 13ers themselves. By the
spin of the cycle, whatever phase of life they happen to occupy will be (as it
has already been) tempest-tossed, laden with perhaps the wrong kind of adventure
for people their age. Over four centuries, Reactive generations have been assigned
the thankless job of yanking American history back on a stable course-and,
afterward, have gotten few rewards for their sacrifices. Will this realization
prompt l 3ers to bum out young-or will it harden a gritty self-confidence around
an important generational mission? As America's most perceptive living gen-
eration, 13ers can recognize a few crucial facts of life that Boomers will not-
forexample, that without a little "bad" pragmatism, even the most noble Boomer
dreams will never get off the ground. More to the point: Without a few black
sheep to slow the shepherd , those aging Boomers might really do something
crazy.

Entering Midlife in a Crisis Era (2004-2025)

Early in the new century, as fortyish 13ers watch graying Aquarians get ''into''
national leadership , they will appreciate that whatever bad hand history dealt
them, they at least grew up with clear heads. Their pleasure-seeking era will
draw to a close-along with the worst of the Idealist-Reactive tussle. Boomers
might then start discerning in them the rough-hewn tools needed to achieve lofty
Boom visions-and, in return, 13ers might see in Boomers the leadership without
which they might never find larger purpose in their own lives.
Sometime around the year 2010, this generation will hit a hangover mood
like that of the Lost in the early 1930s and the Liberty in the late 1760s: a feeling
of personal exhaustion mixed with a new public seriousness. Forty- and fifty-
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 415

year-olds will fan out across an unusually wide distribution of personal outcomes,
reminiscent of a night at the bingo table. A few will be wildly successful, others
totally ruined, while the largest number will have lost a little ground since the
days of Boomer midlife . Many of the early-rising stars will now be replaced in
the limelight by steadier peers-the equivalent of Lost "brains" -in what may
seem like a twenty-first-century Revenge of the Nerds . Midlife Asian-Americans
will establish their ethnic group as a major cultural and intellectual force, akin
to the midlife German Gilded or midlife Jewish Lost.
Thirteeners will make near-perfect 50-year-olds. On the one hand, they will
be nobody 's fools. If you really need something done, and you don't especially
mind how it's done, these will be the guys to hire . On the other hand, they will
be nice to be around. More experienced than their elders in the stark reality of
pleasure and pain, l 3ers will have that Twainlike twinkle in the eye, that Tru-
manesque capacity to distinguish between mistakes that matter and those that
don't. In business , they will excel at cunning, flexibility, and deft timing-a
far cry from the ponderous, principles-first Boomer style . In sports, the com-
bination of l 3er coaches and Millennial players may well produce a new golden
era of athletic teamwork. In the military, 13ers will blossom into the kind of
generals young Millennial soldiers would follow off a cliff. Their leading pol-
iticians may strike old Boomers as uncerebral , yet plainspoken, sensible, quick
on their feet-and more inclined to deal than to argue .
In the early twenty-first century, 13ers will make their most enduring mark
on the national culture. Their now-mature keenness of observation and their
capacity to step outside themselves will kick off exciting innovations in literature
and filmmaking . The "Brat Pack" will expand and mature into the best on-
screen generation since the Lost. As parents of growing children, 13ers will by
now be too affectionate, too physical-too eager to prevent teenagers from
suffering the same overdose of reality they will recall from their own youth. In
so doing, they will tip the scales toward overprotection of children-much as
the Liberty did in the 1780s, the Gilded in the 1860s, and the Lost in the 1930s.
Midlife parents, mothers especially, may hear themselves criticized by Millen-
nials for "momming" a pliant new generation of Adaptives .
Thirteeners will see, and evaluate, the Crisis of 2020 with the sharpest eye
of all living generations. By lifecycle position and peer personality , they will
have the most capacity for maneuver and can be expected to produce the Crisis
era's most colorful leaders and stigmatized traitors-reminiscent of how the
Cavaliers produced the courageous rebels as well as the Stuart collaborators; the
Liberty, the rugged Patriots as well as the raging Tories; the Gilded, the blue
and gray commanders as well as the Copperheads and bandits; and the Lost, the
managers of D-Day as well as the isolationists and fascists . Some untamed 13er
factions may try to pitch the national mood toward dangerous adventure (like
the pre-Civil War Gilded) or toward dangerous isolationism (like the pre-World
416 GENERA TIO NS

War II Lost) . If so , their own peers will be best positioned to resist-and, like
Arthur Vandenberg in 1941, to call their bluff. Midlife l3ers will have little
ability to influence the nature and timing of whatever crisis the Boom will
congeal, but will instead provide able on-site managers and behind-the-scenes
facilitators, the ones whose quick decisions could spell the difference between
triumph and tragedy.
Controlling the Boom may indeed emerge as the 13ers' most fateful lifecycle
mission. This will be the generation best able to deflect any Boomer drift toward
apocalyptic visions . In an age of rising social intolerance , the very incorrigibility
of midlife 13ers will at times be a national blessing. The task of preventing
disaster may well fall to life- and liberty-loving 50-year-olds, pockmarked
by hard experience, to tell zealous Boomers to "get real, " to find cannier solu-
tions that pose fewer risks or that do less to erode personal liberty . A l 3er
may someday be the general or Presidential adviser who prevents some righteous
old Aquarian from "loosing the fateful lightning" and turning the world's
lights out.
Those who sustain their alienation into midlife may find themselves the targets
of a Boom-Millennial alliance to root out l3er pessimism, fear, or greed from
public life-much as Franklin Roosevelt rallied the G.l.s against the Lost trio
of " Martin, Barton, and Fish," or as Samuel Adams rallied the Republicans
against Liberty Tories . The capacity of circa-2020 50-year-olds to mellow the
national mood, and their success in being heard by old Boomers, will hinge on
the ability of these two generations to calm their earlier quarrels and build mutual
respect. As they age in place, they will, like siblings, half remember and half
forget how they behaved toward each other in earlier years.
Whatever goes wrong in the crisis, l3ers will get more than their share of
the blame ; whatever goes right, they will get less than their share of the credit.
Even now, as 25-year-olds, they know the feeling . They had better get used to
it. When you're Reactive, it comes with the territory .

Entering Elderhood in an Outer-Driven Era (2026-2047)

The end of the crisis era will hit this generation on the opening cusp of its
era of national leadership-and the beginning of its physical decline. In 2025,
the oldest 13ers will be 64, the youngest 44. The crisis will have interrupted
their peak earning years . Many will be a bit too young to be spared personal
sacrifice , a bit too old to start life over again .
History suggests l3ers will suffer a rough and neglected old age. Those who
fail to provide for themselves will end up poor, by the standard of the era . When
Boom leaders introduce a new youth focus into public benefits programs , l 3ers
can expect to find themselves passed over in the transition . Those who were
counting on large inheritance s from affluent Silent parents may find them sub-
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 417

stantially taxed away by Boom-run legislatures . Older generations will take little
interest (and may indeed see waste) in letting 13ers get something for nothing.
Even self-earned , private investments may prove hazardous, thanks to some
twenty-first-century equivalent of the Liberty's Continental dollars and the Gild-
ed's Confederate dollars. Old Boom leaders eager to reward young Millennials
for their public service may resort to huge doses of inflation-in effect , wiping
out the accumulated private wealth claims of midlife 13ers. Unlike Boomers,
I 3ers will not have spent a lifetime preparing themselves psychologically for an
ascetic old age . Material well-being will matter deeply to them, and they will
cherish whatever remains of their economic and social independence . Yet, as
they age, they will feel warmly toward younger generations they will mostly
admire-and will not seek to improve their own standard of living at the expense
of youth . Rather , like the elder Gilded and Lost, l 3ers will take a wistful pleasure
in seeing their children shoot past them economically .
The men and women who were once such wild risk-takers will settle into a
reclusive old age, engaging in pursuits that will be seen at the time as conven-
tional, even fogyish . As has been true for all their Reactive predecessors , the
13th will be the last generation to have fully come of age before a history-bending
crisis . Thus, they will be perceived as (and feel like) relics from the past, with
habits and values still rooted in some repudiated "old regime." They will be
crusty old conservatives, restraining the young from misjudging human nature
through naive overconfidence .
Sometime around the mid-2020s, 13er candidates will win a clear majority
of national leadership posts. Their post-crisis Presidents might well be jockish
heroes like Washington , Grant , and Eisenhower-admired more for personality
than for vision . Like the Gilded and Lost , l3er leaders will distrust debt and
inflation as instruments of public policy . Indeed, they may be inclined to keep
tax rates high to force the nation to produce more than it consumes-exactly
the opposite of the national choices they will remember from their own youth.
Under their leadership , America will tum its energy toward building the outer
world , not toward cultural depth or spiritual fervor. But that won't be held
against J 3ers . In time, the maturing Millennials will fault them for a very different
reason : for being do-nothing obstructionists, barriers to the execution of the
unfinished moral agenda of the now-lionized Boomers.
Like Increase Mather, Patrick Henry, and Mark Twain, the most popular l3er
elders will warn against the danger of pushing too far and too fast in a cruel
world rigged with pitfalls . But younger generations will not listen . In an Outer-
Driven era, the can-do Millennials will be too busy coaxing smiles out of their
oh-so-adorable Idealist babies.
418 GENERATIONS

Completing the Millennial Diagonal

Watching today's little kindergartners at play focuses the mind on what these
children might someday accomplish. We wonder whether the tiny boys and girls
now playing with Lego blocks might become great twenty-first-century architects
and builders. Whether the tykes out capturing lightning bugs might grow up as
the nation's next great generation of Nobel-laureate scientists. Whether the first-
graders now reciting the Pledge of Allegiance might someday show an extraor-
dinary talent for teamwork and public service. Whether the children now being
taught to say "please" and "thank you" will remember those lessons. The
generational cycle tells us not just to wonder, but to expect such a destiny from
these kids. America's mothers and fathers are today giving birth to the nation's
next great Civic generation, inheritors of the tradition of Cotton Mather, Thomas
Jefferson, and John Kennedy. History suggests there is but one condition: The
crisis they encounter as rising adults must tum out well. For this reason, these
children have the most riding on the post-1990 endowment behavior of the G.I.,
Silent, and Boom Generations.

Entering Youth in an Inner-Driven Era (1991-2003)

To elders disappointed in 13ers, the onset of Millennial youth will bring.

unremitting good news. As these kids pass through school, they will sail smoothly
behind a debris-clearing insistence on quality education and good behavior. The
first impact of midlife Boomer nurture will be felt in day care and the primary
grades. Throughout the nation's public schools, Boom teachers and administra-
tors will join the Transcendentals and Missionaries as renowned midlife edu-
cators. Silent elders will be far less inclined than G.I. elders to mount
"Proposition 13" rebellions against school taxes. In its twilight years of Silent
leadership, Congress will repair the "safety net" for the benefit of infants and
small children. The ambitious educational goals set in 1990 for the year 2000
will be substantially achieved: From suburbs to inner cities, schools will show
rising aptitude scores, and American children will gradually improve their rank-
ing vis-a-vis the Japanese, Europeans, and others who have consistently out-
scored 13ers.
By the late 1990s, the social environment for American adolescents will show
huge contrasts from what it was during the late 1970s. By degrees, the child's
world will move toward greater protection. In and out of school, Millennials
will hear a sterner, more resolute adult message than l 3ers ever knew. Boomers
will crisply define right and wrong, caring less about a child's opinion than their
own (G.I.) parents had cared about the Beaver's back in the 1950s. Thanks to
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 419

the active presence of family-focused l 3ers, home-employed Boomers, and live-

in Silent grandparents, the quality of home child care will improve, and neigh-
borhoods will retain more daytime adults. Parents or not , adults of all ages will
show far less tolerance for criminal behavior by and against children and will
push the unruly remnants of the I 3er youth era beyond the fringe of family life.
Boomers will try to guard Millennials against l3er wildness. And, even when
they fail, that wildness will serve the same purpose that Lost wildness served
for G.l.s: It will show child Millennials what to avoid-a negative standard by
which elders and kids can together take pride in the civic virtue of the new
generation. Millennials will become a generation of trends, from a Jess protected
and still rambunctious first wave to a highly protected, purposeful, and unusually
smart last wave. The Millennial Walt Disneys are already in elementary school;
the Millennial George Bushes will be born just after the year 2000.
The Millennial youth culture will be more clean-cut and homogeneous than
any seen since that of the circa-1930 G .l.s. By the first decade of the twenty-
first century, schools will at last be fully computer-equipped and the learning
style of students will shift from an MTV-ish "paraJiel" thinking back to a more
logical "serial" thinking. Where Boomers and 13ers had once seen computers
as a force for social individuation, Millennials will see them as a force for social
homogenization . Teen peer leaders will express a growing interest in community
affairs and a growing enthusiasm for collective action. Under the Boom regime
of get-tough laws and no-kidding moral standards, teen pathologies-truancy,
substance abuse, crime, suicide, unwed pregnancy-will all decline. Adults will
welcome a change in teen sex, which will become Jess matter-of-fact and starkly
physical, more romantic and friendly. These trends will be apparent not just in
affluent suburbs, but also in inner cities where peer-pressured boys will show
more responsibility toward their sexual (and parental) relationships . Teen music
will become more ballad-like, wholesome, and singable, with top tunes appealing
to all generations. (To Millennial ears, on the other hand, l3er music will sound
chaotic-and old Boomer classics will sound oddly ethereal and unpleasantly
androgynous .) From music to fashion to cinema, the adolescent culture will
accentuate, even celebrate, sexual distinctions .
When the first Millennials come of age in the early twenty-first century, l 3ers
will begin mellowing-just in time for these young Civics to develop a positive
impression of the Reactive peer personality. The G .I. recollection of their l 920s-
era fun-loving (Lost) and strict (Missionary) teachers offers an illustration of
what may lie in store . Where Millennials will respect Boomers as beacons for
the "should-dos" of life, they will rely on 13ers as avuncular guides to the
"want-to-dos." Millennials will see their next-elders as daring, puckish, and
full of mischief. In return, I 3ers will see these kids as extremely smart but
naive-a bit too optimistic for their own good and in need of a lesson or two
about real life. College-age Millennials will be fascinated by l 3er cultural trends,
occasionally joining in l 3er naughtiness-but will try to do so discreetly, so as
420 GENERA TIO NS

not to disappoint the high Boomer standard. Later, l 3ers will show a continuing
kindness toward a younger generation getting a better deal out of life (though
maybe a bit less fun) than they ever got at the same age.
While still in their youth, Millennials will be called upon to perform civic
deeds. Community institutions (schools, libraries, churches, police) will become
increasingly important in a child's life. Scout programs will be revitalized, and
new ones formed. Boomers will prod Millennial adolescents to spend more time
studying, practicing, and organizing with some socially useful purpose in view.
By law and family fiat, teen employment will be sharply curtailed. Child tele-
vision viewing will decline, and what programs Millennials do watch will be
sanitized and laden with moral lessons. Universities will provide new govern-
ment-aided forms of tuition finance, linked to the performance of public service
before, during, or after college. Around the year 2000, a wave of very different
freshmen will descend on America's camp"!ses, showing a great talent for student
politics, for athletic teamwork, and-in the classroom-for math and science.
Through adolescence, Millennials will look upon government as a more benign
and reliable means of providing for their age bracket than a helter-skelter mar-
ketplace increasingly shaped by rising 13ers. A Boom-enacted program of man-
datory national service will put millions of youths in uniform-a compulsion
Millennials will not mind nearly as much as Boomers did (or 13ers would) at
like age. Instead, they will see in it the opportunity to prove their civic virtue
and earn public adulation. Whatever practical agenda comes their way, Millen-
nials will figure out a solution, organize, cooperate, share burdens, and get the
job done-all with an effectiveness and cheerfulness that will stun their elders.
For all their excellence, the first Millennials to come of age will also seem a bit
bland. They won't waste their time reflecting on values or following spiritual
impulses-nor will Boomers ask them to do so.
Aging Boomers will gradually realize their style of nurture is producing better
doers than feelers, better rationalists than spiritualists. In short, these kids will
bear an eerie resemblance to the G.I.s against whom Boomers rebelled in the
late 1960s. But that likeness won't bother most Boom midlifers, who will see
in Millennials precisely what the country needs to overcome adversity. Like the
old Awakeners, who loved their Republican kids while lamenting the Liberty,
Boomers will develop far better lifelong friendships with Millennials than with
13ers. Indeed, the relationships between older Idealists and younger Civics have
ranked among the warmest intergenerational bonds in American history.

Entering Rising Adulthood in a Crisis Era (2004-2025)

Early in the Crisis era, rising-adult Millennials (especially the first wave) will
encounter economic and social hardship. Unlike 13ers, however, they will
emerge undaunted-thanks to their patience, confidence, and powerful instinct
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 421

for community. Around the time their last wave is reaching its late teens, a
secular crisis will peak, just as it did for the Glorious, Republicans, and G.I.s.
This cathartic moment will seal the Millennials as a generation, distinguishing
them forever from midlife l 3ers and younger Adaptives, and fixing their cohort
boundaries . For now, we locate the former boundary between the 1981-1982
cohorts and the latter between the 2003-2004 cohorts . Both locations are esti-
mates. Most likely, we will have to wait another four decades before drawing
the Millennial end-year with any precision, just as in 1910 we would have had
to wait until the late 1940s to draw it for G.l.s.
The Millennials' Civic peer personality is not preordained. If the crisis comes
too soon or (worse) unfolds badly, the Millennials will mirror the Progressives,
a smart but hobbled generation that was later unable to realize the agenda of its
Idealist elders. But if the crisis allows the Millennials to coalesce as a genuine
Civic type, this generation will show more teamlike spirit and more likemind-
edness in action than most Americans then alive will recall ever having seen in
young people. Before the crisis, many Millennials may be attracted to global
ideologies that promise material utopias through collective action. As the nation
unifies, new voters will coalesce politically and may produce an electoral land-
slide, perhaps even a sudden party realignment, that will strengthen the mandate
of aging Boom leaders .
Elderly Boomers will see in this generation an effective instrument for saving
the world. Having themselves screamed against duty and discipline when young,
Boomers will now demand duty and discipline from post-adolescents. They will
get both. In return, old Boomers (joined by midlife 13ers) will shower youthful
heroes and heroines with praise and reward. Inevitably, rising Millennials will
start feeling the intoxication of hubris. They will resist elders-Boomers in-
cluded-whom they perceive as unwilling to relinquish private and material
privilege. Just as young Republicans muzzled the Tory Awakeners and young
G.l.s voted the laissez-faire Missionaries out of office, so too will Millennials
rise up against whomever they perceive to be enemies of community solidarity
and public action.
Millennials will carry out whatever crisis mission they are assigned-as long
as they can connect it with their own secular blueprint for progress. If crisis
brings war, soldiers will obey orders without complaint. If it involves environ-
mental danger or natural resource depletion, young scientists will make historic
breakthroughs. If the crisis is mostly economic, the youthful labor force will be
a mighty engine of renewed American prosperity. Whatever their elder-bestowed
mission, these rising youths will not disappoint. Assuming the crisis turns out
well, Millennials will be forever honored as a generation of civic achievers.
422 GENERATIO NS

Entering Midlife in an Outer-Driven Era (2026-2047)

When the crisis is past and a new Outer-Driven era is dawning, the age bias
of public institutions will tilt far (perhaps too far) in the direction of Millennials,
a generation that people of all ages will by then equate with investment in the
long-term future-much as government tilted in favor of Republicans in the
1790s and G .l.s in the late 1940s. In politics, as a sense of national community
builds, Millennial voters may well congeal into an "end of ideology" generation
whose political parties will show little difference in style. Meanwhile, they will
take steps to solidify their peer conformity by unmasking radicals who embraced
the wrong "ism" in their eager youth (the early-twenty-first-century equivalent
of Republican Jacobinism or G.I. communism) . The political culture of fortyish
Millennials in the 2030s will be highly conformist. Only team players will be
invited.
By manner more than conviction, Millennials will construct a circa-2030
national mood reminiscent of the post-World War II "American High." Rising
leaders will feel an obligation to complete the unfinished agenda of revered
Boom elders. Institutions will strengthen, construction will boom, and American
society will substantially change its outward appearance. In churches, ministers
will emphasize social fellowship over spiritual self-discovery. In universities,
brilliant minds will feel in godlike control over nature. Scientists will design
(and taxpayers will fund) grand projects that glorify the thinker-doer-builder.
"Right-stuff" Millennials will command (and younger technicians will copilot)
manned space flights to the nearest planets. Midlife parents and their children
(with old-fashioned 13ers looking on) will perceive themselves as distinctly
"modem." The days of V-8 engines and vacuum tubes will seem as quaint in
the 2030s as the days of steam turbines and telegraph lines did in the 1950s.
Like earlier Civic generations, fiftyish Millennials will feel most comfortable
with widely separated sex roles. They may begin to view the assertive moral
posturing of very old Idealist women as anachronistic-and look upon the sus-
picious self-sufficiency of aging 13er women as antisocial and possibly danger-
ous. To the chagrin of old feminists, Millennials will exalt the masculine and
criticize the feminine influence on public life-and do the reverse in private life.
This resurgent sexism will limit the life options of rising Adaptive women,
thereby planting the seeds of a mid-twenty-first-century feminist renaissance.
Thanks to the Millennial team orientation, ethnic loyalties will weaken relative
to the sense of national community. Applying the circa-1990 definition, this is
far and away the most "minority" generation in American history . But by the
middle of the twenty-first century, the very word "minority" will have an odd
ring to a generation more inclined to homogenize than pluralize. Racial inte-
COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE 423

gration will again be a public goal. This will give historic opportunity for Mil-
lennial blacks and Hispanics to achieve a far greater measure of social and
political equality than their Silent grandparents ever knew. As Millennials try
to rid the nation of racial and ethnic distinctions, however, they will be opposed
by rising Adaptives who will see advantage in preserving pluralism .

Entering Elderhood in an Awakening Era (2048-2069)

Sometime in the 2040s, vigorous veterans in their fifties may well march
down Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanied by parade floats carrying their instru-
ments of valor. They will celebrate the inauguration of America's first Millennial
President. The message to other generations will be much the same as it was
back in 1961: the arrival in power of a great and heroic Ci vie generation .
Watching from the sidelines will be a new (and probably "boom") crop of
kids, raised indulgently and scientifically by Millennial moms and dads . These
kids will notice something a bit stale, a bit unreflective in the veterans' parade.
Beyond that, watch out: Within a few years, just as busy Millennials are un-
dertaking their grandest-ever projects, the fury of youth will erupt. By the 2050s,
sixtyish Millennials can expect to find themselves on the wrong side of a two-
apart " generation gap" reminiscent of the late 1960s. They will think back on
what good children they were back in the 1990s and puzzle over why their
children cannot afford them the same respect they once showed their own Boom
parents. After the fires of a new awakening have cooled, and after a series of
outer-world disappointments, Millennials will retreat together into a comfortable
old age-wondering with each other if their lifetime constructions can survive
a rising generation of narcissists .
As a Bushlike President stages his generation's final inaugural-this could
happen on January 20, 2069-old Millennial heroes, by now in their seventies,
will march down Pennsylvania Avenue for the last time . The next President will
come to power knowing about the Crisis of 2020 only through a child's eye, or
from film clips . When that happens, Americans of all ages will feel something
missing .
By our present-day capacity to reckon the future , the Millennial Generation
will have an unfathomably long reach . Perhaps a million will live to see the
twenty-second century. Some will be around to celebrate the arrival of babies
who will live into the twenty-third century , babies who will grow up looking
upon John Kennedy as distantly as Kennedy looked upon Thomas Jefferson.
Those of us born in a year that will then seem ancient-in 1910, 1930, 1950,
or 1970-can hardly imagine what world these future children might inherit,
and what world they might pass on in their turn . We can only guess at the great
wonders they will see, the great deeds they will accomplish, the great truths
424 GENERATIONS

they will grasp . They too will play their role in the drama of American gener-
ations.
It has been a vast and magnificent pageant, with so many acts and so many
actors since John Winthrop first felt the hand of God. Yet surely one with even
more acts and actors yet to come .
 Chapter 14

THE BEGINNING
OF HISTORY

Most of us, as individuals, feel a rather limited connection with the larger
story of human progress. Few are lucky (or unlucky) enough to participate in
great events, fewer still with any sense that our own personal acts make any
appreciable difference. But through our generational membership, we all take
part in history-bending moments. And, through our cross-generational relation-
ships, we communicate across eras of mind-bending length.
Each person stands at the apex of an unfolding generational drama, heir to
the past and ancestor to the future. Charles Francis Adams, U .S. ambassador to
England during the Civil War, stood at the center of an extraordinary family
tree. He published a ten-volume biography of his grandfather (a U.S. President),
compiled a twelve-volume diary of the notes of his father (also a President), and
then saw one of his sons (a celebrated author) write a biography of him. Consider
the lifespan of his extended family: Charles' grandfather John was born in 1735,
and his grandson Charles Francis III died in 1954. Both their lives overlapped
his by roughly two decades . Thus, Charles Francis Adams was nurtured by an
ancestor and gave nurture to an heir whose combined lifespans extended 220
years.
Setting aside its unique career portfolio, the Adams family tree resembles
that of most Americans today. Picture a Boomer woman, age 40 in 1990, whose
grandmother was age 70 when she was born, and who has a 5-year-old daughter
in kindergarten. Suppose that child will also, at age 35, give birth to a daughter
4')<;
426 GENERA TIO NS

who will live to age 85. Consider the lifespan of this Boomer's extended family:
Her grandmother was born in 1880, and her granddaughter will survive until the
year 2105. If this Boomer woman lives to age 80, she will-much like Charles
Francis Adams-be nurtured by or herself nurture family members whose com-
bined lifecycles extend 225 years . That span includes parts of four centuries,
reaching from the days of Civil War widowhood to an era in which (who knows?)
women astronauts might explore the moons of Jupiter.
We ask our reader to make this same calculation about the reach of your own
lifecycle. Think of the oldest family ancestor (or mentor) you knew as a child,
and the youngest heir (or protege) you expect you will know at age 80. That is
the span of generational history you occupy . Chances are, your span will roughly
match the current length of the history of the American nation, the 214 years
from 1776 to 1990. In an age when a "long-term" weather forecast stretches a
few months and a "long-term" budget forecast a few years, this two-century
epoch demonstrates what "long-term" does in fact mean. And why we should
care about it. No generation is the first; surely, none wishes to be the last. The
reader should think of himself and his generation as lying nowhere near the end
of our story, but somewhere in the middle, or even toward the beginning.
In their perspective on history, Americans alive today have much in common
with their ancestors. The generations alive in 1910, 1845, 1750, or 1650 all saw
themselves living at the edge of the future. They felt pride and regret about days
gone by, hope and anxiety about days to come . Some current trends pleased
them, others not. They were learning what they could from the old, teaching
what they could to the young . Each generation had its own "diagonal" con-
nection with the events of its time, its own glimpse of the cycle, its own vision
of the future. Each encountered a crisis at some phase of life. We have every
reason to expect this pattern to continue into the twenty-first century-except,
next time, any crisis with a bad ending could bring unprecedented tragedy. The
cycle teaches us that bad endings can take decades to build and in their early
phases can be hard to foresee-hinging, as do all great episodes in history, on
how small children are nurtured, and whether elder generations offer the young
a constructive mission upon coming of age.
Mankind's rejuvenative capacity is no less remarkable than the genesis of life
itself. If the cycle has any central lesson, it is that each generational type makes
its own unique contribution to human progress-something its members alone,
among the living, can provide in sufficient measure to keep civilization from
veering toward disaster. In the 1990s no less than in decades gone by, the cycle
will look to each living generation for something special. From surviving G.I.s,
the cycle will ask civic example and protection against erosion of worldly en-
dowments. From the elder Silent, it will ask an other-directed kindness. From
midlife Boomers, vision and values. From rising-adult 13ers, pragmatism and
defense of individual liberty. From young Millennials, new civic energy and
devotion to community .
THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY 427

Two generations have especially important roles in the drama ahead . With
the G.I.s having mostly made their mark and the Silent running out of time to
make theirs, the vortex of history is inexorably moving toward the Boom and
13th. No less is riding on them than once rode on Franklin and Washington,
Lincoln and Grant , or Roosevelt and Eisenhower. As these examples make clear,
the scripts awaiting both generations are markedly at odds with what Americans
now associate with their recent phases of life. Future generations of Americans
must rely on aging Boomers to build a very unyuppielike ethic of community
responsibility and principled self-sacrifice . Where their G.l. parents were heroes
young, history warns Boomers to expect their greatest test in old age . Similarly,
future generations are counting on l 3ers to graduate from Liar's Poker and
mellow into midlife cautionaries, guardians of family life, and protectors against
Idealist excess. Where the Silent hedged their bets in youth and took their chances
in midlife, history warns 13ers to prepare for the opposite. If Boomers and 13ers
pursue their respective missions well, the cycle of generations will also be a
cycle of progress for those who follow.
"For ourselves and our posterity." The Preamble to the United States Con-
stitution includes these five words, a summons to treat the present and future as
partners in human destiny . When reading (or writing) history, we naturally
digress from remembrances of others to imagine future remembrances of our-
selves. Just as we are all heirs of ancestors we mostly admire, so too are we all
ancestors to heirs whose admiration we should wish to earn . Reflecting on the
story of America's eighteen generations, we realize that all of us alive today
were once "posterity" in the dim vision of times gone by . And, perhaps, we
will remind ourselves of our sacred obligation to act as kindly toward the future
as ancestral generations once did toward us.
 THE GENERATIONAL CYCLE IN AMERICA
DEMOGRAPHICS WCATION IN HISTORY LEADERSHIP ERA SAMPLE MEMBERS
YEARS TOTAL! PERCENT SCIENCE,
GENERATION BORN NUMBER IMMI- PERCENT RISING CONGRESS
& PRESI- SUPREME MILITARY,
(Type) (Duration) (AliveToday)2 GRANTI SLAVE3 YOUTH ADULTHOOD MIDLIFE ELDERHOOD GOVERNORS4 DENCYS COURT6 POLmCS LETTERS &COMMERCE

PURITAN 1584-1614 25,000 100% 1% Elizabethan Puritan Religious Glorious CT: 1620--1683 JohnWinthrop JohnCotton MylesStandish
(Idealist) (31years) Renaissance Awakening Intolerance Revolution VA:1609--1677 WilliamBerkeley RichardMather JohnRolfe
CAVALIER 1615-1647 100,000 61% 4% Puritan Religious Glorious Ageof CT: 1683-1707 JacobLeisler IncreaseMather BenjaminChurch
(Reactive) (33years) Awakening Intolerance Revolution Enlightenment VA:1655-1690 ElishaCooke SamuelWillard NathanielBacon
GWRIOUS 1648-1673 160,000 42% 12% Religious Glorious Ageof Great CT: 1707-1741 JamesBlair CottonMather PeterSchuyler
(Civic) (26years) Intolerance Revolution Enlightenment Awakening VA:1705-1741 GurdonSaltonstall RobertBeverley "King"Carter
ENLIGHTENMENT 1674-1700 340,000 34% 17% Glorious Ageof Great Frenchand CT:1741-1769 JamesLogan JohnPeterZenger WilliamShirley
(Adaptive) (27years) Revolution Enlightenment Awakening IndianWar VA:1749--1768 ElishaCooke,Jr. SamuelJohnson Cadwallader
Colde1

AWAKENING 1701-1723 550,000 19% 18% Ageof Great Frenchand American 1774-1775 1774-1782 BenjaminFranklin JonathanEdwards ElizaPinckney
(Idealist) (23years) Enlightenment Awakening IndianWar Revolution PeytonRandolph JohnWitherspoon IsraelPutnam
LIBERTY 1724-1741 1,100,000 24% 19% Great Frenchand American Eraof 1776--1786 1775-1801 GeorgeWashington PatrickHenry EthanAllen
(Reactive) (18years) Awakening IndianWar Revolution GoodFeeling JohnAdams ThomasPaine BenedictArnold
REPUBLICAN 1742-1766 2,100,000 17% 17% Frenchand American Eraof Transcendenta1 1787-1813 1778-1825 1791-1826 ThomasJefferson JohnMarshall JohnPaulJones
(Civic) (25years) IndianWar Revolution GoodFeeling Awakening JamesMadison AlexanderHamilton Eli Whitney
COMPROMISE 1767-1791 4,200,000 10% 15% American Eraof Transcendenta1 Civil 1813-1839 1825-1861 1829--1860 AndrewJackson DanielWebster MeriwetherLewis
(Adaptive) (25years) Revolution GoodFeeling Awakening War HenryClay Washington
Irving SamuelF.B. Mo

TRANSCENDENTAL1792
- 1821 11,000,000 20% 13% Eraof Transcendenta1 Civil Reconstruction, 1839--1869 1845-1869 1861-1889 AbrahamLincoln RalphWaldoEmerson WilliamShennan
(ldealisl) (JOYears) GoodFeeling Awakening War GildedEra JeffersonDavis HarrietBeecherStowe RobertE. Lee
GILDED 1822-1842 17,000,000 28% 10% Transcendenta1 Civil Reconstruction, Missionary 1869--1895 1869--1897 1890--1910 UlyssesGrant MarkTwain AndrewCarnegie
(Reactive) (21years) Awakening War GildedEra Awakening GroverCleveland EmilyDickinson JohnD. Rockefelle
PROGRESSIVE 1843-1859 22,000,000 27% Civil Reconstruction, Missionary WorldWarI, 1895-1911 1897-1921 1911
- 1923 TheodoreRoosevelt JohnDewey ThomasEdison
(Adaptive) (17years) War GildedEra Awakening Prohibition WoodrowWilson HenryJames AlexanderG. Bell

MISSIONARY 1860-1882 45,000,000 23% 1% Reconstruction, Missionary WorldWar1, GreatDepression, 1911

- 1939 1921- 1945 1925-1941 HerbertHoover UptonSinclair AlbertEinstein
(Idealist) (23years) (3,000) GildedEra Awakening Prohibition WorldWarII FranklinRoosevelt W. E. B. DuBois HenryFord
LOST 1883-1900 45,000,000 21% Missionary WorldWarI, GreatDepression, Superpower 1939--1953 1945-1961 1941
- 1967 HanyTruman ErnestHemingway GeorgePatton
(Reactive) (18years) (1,100,000) Awakening Prohibition WorldWarII America DwightEisenhower F.ScottFitzgerald A1Capone
G.I. 1901-1924 63,000,000 9% WorldWarI, GreatDepression, Superpower Boom 1953-1977 1961- 1967
- JohnKennedy Ann Landers RobertOppcnheime
(Civic) (24years) (29,000,000) Prohibition WorldWarII America Awakening RonaldReagan JohnSteinbeck WilliamWestmorelar
SILENT 1925-1942 49,000,000 9% GreatDepression, Superpower Boom Millennial 1977- WalterMondale MartinLutherKing,Jr. NeilArmstrong
(Adaptive) (18years) (40,000,000) WorldWarIl America Awakening Era MichaelDukakis PhilipRoth CariSagan

BOOM 1943-1960 79,000,000 10% Superpower Boom Millennial FICStQuarter, BillBradley GarryTrudeau StevenJobs
(Idealist) (18years) (69,000,000) America Awakening Era 21stCentury WilliamBennett PeggyNoonan OliverNorth
THIRTEENTH 1961-1981 93,000,000 ii% Boom Millennial FirstQuarter, SecondQuarter, AmyCarter MichaelLewis MaryLouRetton
(Reactive) (21years) (79,000,000) Awakening Era 21stCentury 21stCentury SamanthaSmith BretEastonEllis TomCruise
MILLENNIAL 1982-2003? 76,000,000 12% Millennial FICStQuarter, SecondQuarter, ThirdQuarter, JebbieBush HighSchool CeciliaChichan
(Civic?) (22years?) (33,000,000) Era 21stCentury 21stCentury 21stCentury DooneyWaters "Classof 2000" "BabyM''

KEY: IAII persons ever born; for living generations, includes decedents and midrange census forecast for future births and immigration 2U.S. residents alive as of January I, 1991 3Siaves at any point in their lives <fFirstand last year of generational (a) occupancy of colc
r ..............
0.-, ..-.-1 u:-. .. :n , __ n....... :--: ..- ... .. ,. .. 1.,, -- 1,::-,n 1'7'71.. n.,
-1 .. -1: ..., ,., .. ,..,,.....,~ .... .-1 - -- .... ,..,,... .... ,: .......... 1 r,. .. ,._n f"....,.- 1'7'7A 1'7QQ. ,. .. ,,.., .. 1.,...,.1: .... ,., ,.,.,.,....., .. ..., .,.,,1 _ ......- ...... ti,.,..,1, u .......... "''' ~ r ..........u - .... 1'7QQ _ IQQI i::; .... , .... ..i 1.... , ., ............. .
 GLOSSARY

COHORT: All persons born in the same year.

COHORT-GROUP: All persons born in a limited span of consecutive years .
AGE LOCATION: The age of a cohort-group at a particular moment or era in
history .
PHASES OF LIFE: Twenty-two-year age brackets defined according to central
social role:
Elderhood: Age 66 and over; central role : stewardship .
Midlife: Age 44-65 ; central role: leadership .
Rising Adulthood: Age 22-43 ; central role: activity.
Youth: Age 0-21 ; central role: dependence .
GENERATION: A cohort-group whose length approximates the span of a phase
of life and whose boundaries are fixed by peer personality .
PEER PERSONALITY: A generational persona recognized and determined by
(1) common age location; (2) common beliefs and behavior; and (3) perceived
membership in a common generation .
GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL: The diagonal formed by any generation when
age is plotted on the vertical axis and the date on the horizontal axis .
FIRST WA VE and LAST WA VE: "First wave" refers to a generation's early-
born cohorts, more likely to be children of the second-prior generation; "last
430 GLOSSARY

wave" refers to a generation's late-born cohorts, more likely to be children

of the first-prior generation.
SOCIAL MOMENT: A brief era (typically about a decade) when people per-
ceive that historic events are radically altering their social environment. There
are two types of social moments:
Secular Crisis: When society focuses on reordering the outer world of insti-
tutions and public behavior.
Spiritual Awakening: When society focuses on changing the inner world of
values and private behavior.
DOMINANT and RECESSIVE GENERATION: A dominant generation (Ide-
alist or Civic) encounters social moments while entering rising adulthood and
again while entering elderhood; a recessive generation (Adaptive or Reactive)
encounters social moments while entering youth and again while entering
midlife .
GENERATIONAL TYPES: Four basic types of peer personalities and life-
cycles, determined by age location relative to social moments; they normally
recur in the following fixed order :
An Idealist generation encounters a spiritual awakening entering rising adult-
hood and a secular crisis entering elderhood.
A Reactive generation encounters a spiritual awakening entering youth and
a secular crisis entering midlife .
A Civic generation encounters a secular crisis entering rising adulthood and
a spiritual awakening entering elderhood .
An Adaptive generation encounters a secular crisis entering youth and a
spiritual awakening entering midlife.
GENERATIONAL CYCLE: A set of consecutive generations beginning with
an Idealist-type and ending with an Adaptive-type; alternatively, a set of
constellational eras, beginning with an Awakening era and ending with an
Outer-Driven era .
GENERATIONAL CONSTELLATION: The relative age location of all four
generational types at any single moment in history .
ALIGNED CONSTELLATION: The special constellation that arrives (roughly
every twenty-two years) when the last cohort of a new generation is born and
when every generation is aligned with a single phase of life. There are four
aligned constellations, and they normally recur in fixed order :
Awakening constellation: Idealist rising adults, Civic elders.
Inner-Driven constellation: Reactive rising adults, Adaptive elders .
Crises constellation: Civic rising adults, Idealist elders.
Outer-Driven constellation: Adaptive rising adults, Reactive elders .
GLOSSARY 431

CONSTELLATIONALERA: The era, roughly twenty-two years long, pre-

ceding each aligned constellation and sharing the same name.
CONSTELLATIONALMOOD: The social mood characteristic of any given
constellation or constellational era.
ENDOWMENT:Any enduring social legacy, helpful or hurtful, that an older
generation passes on to younger generations.
ENDOWMENTACTIVITY: The sphere of social life in which each type of
generation tends to concentrate its lifelong endowment efforts.
 Appendix A

A THEORY
OF GENERATIONS

As is the generation of leaves. so too of men:

At one time the wind shakes the leaves to the ground
but then the flourishing woods
Gives birth , and the season of spring comes
into existence ;
So it is with the generations of men , which
alternately come forth and pass away .
-Homer , lliad , Sixth Book

One generation passeth away , and another generation cometh :

but the earth abideth forever.
-Ecclesiastes I :4

At the dawn of recorded history , the standard measure of cosmic time in nearly all lndo-
European cultures was not the year or the century, but the generation .
When transcribing myths of prehistoric Aegea into verse in the eighth century B.c.,
Hesiod rarely used any other concept to measure time's passage . His sequential "gen-
erations" marked not only the appearance of the gods-Gaea , Uranus , Cronus, and
Zeus-but also the five sequential ages or generations of mankind (Gold, Silver, Bronze,
Heroic, and Iron). Philo, writing of the legendary founding of Phoenicia, originated his
story with ''Genos, '' the first ruling male god . The Old Testament begins with ' 'Genesis, ''
the godly act of begetting the universe, and measures time ever afterward with a seemingly
434 APPENDIX A

endless series of generations "begetting" one another. With Homer, the generation
appears in a more specifically historical context. Though rarely mentioning years, Homer
tells us that Nestor, patriarch of Pilos, had seen "two generations of men die" prior to
the Trojan War and presently "ruled over a third." Herodotus and Thucydides routinely
measured the age of a civilization by counting its generations. The myths and legends
of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Celts, Teutons, Slavs, and Hindus reveal a
similar taste for generational clockwork.
What exactly do these narratives mean by a "generation"? Etymology, unfortunately,
does not help us much. In Indo-European languages, the word nearly always derives
from the root stem gen-, which (in its verb form) means nothing more specific than "to
come or bring into being.' ' In modem English, we retain this entirely abstract meaning
in our verb "to generate." But bring what into being? If we think literally of parents
and children, of course, we arrive at one basic definition, the family generation: the set
of all children "brought into being" by a father or mother. Modem English preserves
this meaning in special words such as "genealogy" (the record of parent-to-child lineage)
and expressions such as "third-generation immigrant" or "ten generations of kings."
The family definition is sometimes perfectly adequate for interpreting myth and history.
When we learn, for example, that Zeus belongs to the second-generation descendants of
Uranus, we know precisely what is meant-that Zeus is the grandchild of Uranus.
As the abstract root implies, however, "generation" has always been used in a very
different sense as well. Genus can also refer anything new that the cosmos or society at
large "brings into being" at a single moment in time. That can include what we call a
"cohort generation"-a cohort-group sharing an age location in history and therefore a
common peer personality . When Hesiod described the five generations of mankind, he
was making no implicit reference to parentage . Rather, he was emphasizing that each
new genos (translated variously as "race" or "age") lives at about the same time and
possesses a distinct way of life and set of values. When Homer's like-aged Achaean
heroes, having sailed home in triumph after sacking Troy, later acknowledge each other
as members of "the same generation, " genealogy is likewise irrelevant. They were all
shaped in the same way, at the same time, and at the same stage of life. Today, of course,
we still use this meaning. Sometimes we apply it to things: a "new generation" of cars,
computers, or ideas. More often, we apply it to people: "my generation" versus "your
generation." Yet many age-old expressions like "a generation of peace" have meanings
that are perfectly ambiguous. Rather than specify whether they mean family lineages or
cohort-groups, most writers-modem as well as ancient-have leaned on the nuances
of both.
For millennia, poets and philosophers have sensed that the generation, however de-
fined, connotes the ebb and flow of life, of families, and of historical time. Over the last
couple of centuries, many writers have grown specifically interested in what we call a
"cohort" generation. But so malleable a concept still eludes most efforts to understand
it. The central questions remain unanswered: what exactly is a generation, how does it
develop a distinct peer personality, and why do peer personalities tend to arrive in cycles?
We have already summarized our theory of generations in Part I. This appendix, retracing
that ground in more detail, is intended for the reader interested in our theory's intellectual
roots and core logic.
We begin by distinguishing the "cohort" from the "family" generation and by looking
at the mixed record of modem writers who have grappled with the generations approach
APPENDIX A 435

before us . Since a consensus theory of cohort generations has yet to step forward, we
offer our own . For this, we journey to a mythical "Cohortia," a traditional society with
an invariant lifecycle . There we see how a social moment can establish well-defined
cohort generations of similar length . We also see how a modern Cohortia can establish
a continuous sequence of cohort generation s alternating between dominant and recessive
types. Finally, we explain where and why we can expect a four-stroke generational cycle
to emerge-precisely the cycle confirmed by our examination of American history .

The Cohort Generation

In 1970, historian Philip Greven , Jr. , wrote a pathbreaking account of seventeenth-

and eighteenth-century family life in a small New England farming town. Entitled Four
Generations : Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover , Massachusetts, the
book makes skillful use of town records to draw a detailed portrait of early New England
social life: births , deaths, migration, occupations, property , wills, and households. Greven
organizes his presentation of chapters and data according to four generations . He defines
the first as the group of (mostly) 25-to-45-year-olds who originally settled the town in
the 1640s and 1650s. He defines the others strictly in terms of genealogy. The second
generation consists of the first generation's children; the third , of its grandchildren; and
the fourth, of its great-grandchildren .
When Greven wants to look at life in a purely familial context, his generational scheme
is logical and convenient. He can always be certain that each member of one group is
exactly one parent-child link removed from the previous group . Should he discover, for
example, that members of the second Andover generation all share some trait (say , parental
strictness) that may influence their children , he can examine the consequences in the third
generation : the set of all their sons and daughters . When Greven wants to look at life in
a historical context, on the other hand, the scheme becomes useless. Since women give
birth bver a spread of many years (ordinarily , from their late teens to their mid-forties),
each successive generation of children has lifespans that begin and end over ever-longer
periods . Greven's first generation was born mostly within a two-decade span. But by the
fourth generation , he finds births stretched out over more than a century. Several fourth-
generation Andoverans were already married by 1715, sixty years before the American
Revolution. Several others did not marry until the late 1780s, when Madison was ham-
mering out the U.S. Constitution .
What if we wanted to focus on another sort of generation-say, the young Andoverans
that fought in the French and Indian War? Fortunately, Greven has this contingency in
mind. Scattered throughout his book, he tabulates the same data by cohort-group, and
somewhere among these tables we could examine the 1725-1740 war-fighting cohorts .
Not surprisingly , most scholars who cite Greven also prefer the birth year rather than the
family numbers. Most historians want to locate people in history , not in genealogies .
The example of colonial Andover brings us back to the basic distinction between
family and cohort generations-and the confusion between the two meanings that has
plagued the word since Homer and Hesiod . Is one type of "generation " better than the
other? Not necessarily. It all depends on the object of the inquiry.
The family generation is important when we want to examine the link between a
436 APPENDIX A

specific group of parents and all of their children (or vice versa). For most other purposes,
however, the concept is treacherous . Except in a few specialized cases (inheritance and
dynastic titles, for example) , genealogical ties rarely carry much force beyond the third
generation . More important , family generations live only in "family" time, a rhythm of
births unique to each lineage and having no lasting connection to historical or "social"
time. There is no intelligible way to apply the concept to an entire society. Where would
we begin? Even if we could trace everyone back to his society's original Adam and Eve ,
the result would be senseless. Many schoolmates would find themselves ten generations
removed from each other.
We could, of course , j ust select the Adams and Eves arbitrarily . This is what Greven
does by applying a " first generation " tag on all of the first Andover settlers-a natural
choice since , after all, they did found a new colony . Ordinarily, the tagging would not
be so simple : Imagine the problem if we wanted to study Columbus, Ohio, starting in
the year 1900. Selecting the first generation, moreover , only delays the inevitable. Before
long, the ever-diverging threads of family time will come back to haunt us . Assume that
our first generation is born over a twenty-year period and that the distribution of births
by age is the same as that of modern-day America-relatively narrow by historical
standards . The result, shown in Figure A-1 , would remind us of Andover. The second
generation would be born over a period of about fifty years, the third over eighty-five
years , the fourth over more than a century, and so on . Alternatively, our reader might
imagine a simple experiment. Suppose you invited all your cousins to a family reunion.
Then, in a variation on the old St. Ives riddle, suppose you asked your grandparents to
invite the grandchildren of all their cousins. Chances are , some of those invitees will be
newborn infants, while others will have died of old age. Everyone coming to the party
will belong to the same family generation. But what else will you and your guests all
have in common? Surely, far less than the people you meet at a high school or college
reunion .
The cohort generation, by contrast, has no direct connection with genealogy or lineage .
It is defined, instead, as everyone who is " brought into being" at the same historical
moment-that is, everyone who belongs to the same cohort-group . Fathers and mothers
or brothers and sisters in the same family generation do not necessarily belong to the
same cohort generation . But unlike the family generation, all members of the same cohort

FIGUREA-1
Distribution of Family Generations

/ Generation I
...---- ..
Generation4
I
0 50 !00 150
Year
APPENDIX A 437

generation live in the same social or historical time. At any given moment, members of
a cohort generation can all be found in a common age bracket. They all share both a
special history and a special type of personality and behavior shaped by that history . And
cohort generations can follow each other, consecutively, without any loss of historical
definition over time .
In fact, cohort generations are to societies what family generations are to families .
In both cases, the earlier generation is always older than the next and normally exercises
authority over those that follow-the cohort type in a public setting, the family type in
a private setting. In both cases, several distinct generations will appear to layer themselves
at any one moment, creating the patterns we call "generational constellations." Looking
up the constellation of family generations, for instance, a child sees the roles of parent,
grandparent, and great-grandparent each filled by people having distinct individual per-
sonalities . Likewise, looking up the ladder of cohort generations, a youth sees older life
phases-rising adulthood, midlife, and elderhood-each filled by cohort-groups having
distinct peer personalities. But again, there remains a crucial difference: Genealogy creates
a separate time thread of family time for each lineage; only the cohort-group binds all
the threads together into a single rope of social time .

Modern Efforts to De.fine the Generation

For centuries after Homer, hardly any western mind bothered to distinguish between
family and cohort generations . In the context of family life (especially when "generation''
had a number attached), judges , clerics, and philosophers assumed without hesitation
that the word referred to lineage: the "third generation of daughters," the "fourth-
generation owner," the "fifth-generation legacy," and so on. Yet in the context of social
life the meaning could abruptly shift to the cohort-group . Chroniclers used "rising gen-
eration" to refer, at any given moment, to everyone approaching adulthood, "declining
generation" to refer to everyone approaching old age. The translators of the King James
Bible wrote of great events affecting "this'" or "that" generation of Hebrews and of
specific groups of adults similarly praised ("a chosen generation") or damned ("a gen-
eration of vipers"). Linked to a personal pronoun, the meaning depended entirely on the
idiom. To curse a neighbor " and all his generation" was to speak ill of his family and
his children. To observe that David "served his own generation" was to speak of his
peers .
Why so little effort to distinguish between meanings? For the same reason there was
scant interest in the underlying concept of the birth cohort: the power of tradition. Until
the eighteenth century, even the most educated westerners rarely doubted that history
moved at a glacial pace, that seasonal rhythms were timeless, and that phases of life
passed down unaltered from parent to child . All evidence indicated that the lifecycle was
indeed universal. At special moments-a Trojan War or an Old Testament prophecy-
one could notice a distinct cohort generation emerge, but there seemed little need to insist
on a rigorous definition. As time passed on, so too would "that generation," and then
all would be as before. Special interest in the cohort generatiQn awaited a new world
view, a new belief that history had speed and direction and that frequent Trojan War-
like moments could be expected . Such a belief arrived in the late eighteenth and early
438 APPENDIX A

nineteenth centuries , along with democratic revolutions, the early stirrings of industrial-
ization, and the modem dogmas of rationalism and progress .
The first westerners to attach a modem significance to generations were the propa-
gandists supporting the French Revolution in the 1780s and 1790s. No coincidence here.
Just as these philosophes liked to call themselves a unique generation, pushing mankind
into a wondrous age of improvement, so too did they ponder how elites, in any age, set
new rules for society. Although their interest was limited to "political" generations of
like-aged leaders, many took great care to define generations and locate them in history.
Thomas Jefferson, writing home from the salons of Paris in 1789, concluded that a
generation must be a cohort-group precisely thirty-four years long. (He later revised it
to 18.2 years .) Similarly, in 1809, the scholar Jean-Louis Giraud sliced up centuries of
French history into fifteen-year generations . These early definitions were crude and me-
chanical, but gradually lent the word ominous new overtones. After Robespierre and
Napoleon (European peers of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, respectively), the
western public needed little help in understanding how suddenly a special generation
could arise-and how thoroughly it could change the world.
In the mid-nineteenth century , a new Victorian cadre of scientists and philosophers
touched off a more serious wave of interest in generations. For Auguste Comte, John
Stuart Mill, and Emile Littre, the basic question remained what it had been for the earlier
Parisians: how generations determine the pace of civilized progress. But now the focus
widened beyond mere politics. Comte saw generational change as the causal dynamic
behind all social change . Littre agreed, suggesting that the character of each generation
is no less complex than that of each stage of human life or historical evolution. (In 1863,
he coined the word "cohort " to explain personality contrasts between French leaders
then in power.) Mill defined a generation broadly as "a new set of human beings" who
"have been educated, have grown up from childhood, and have taken possession of
society. " Like the others, Mill rejected the notion that successive "political generations"
can influence each other independently of culture, science , manners, and mores. "In the
filiation of one generation to another," he noted, "it is the whole which produces the
whole, rather than any part a part. "
The cohort generation remained a live subject for the rest of the nineteenth century-
mostly because few writers could resist guessing its length. Antoine Coumot and Ottokar
Lorenz, for example, talked about a " three-generation century ." Few writers, however,
had much that was new to say on the subject. One important exception was the Italian
historian Giuseppe Ferrari, who developed a penetrating model of generational cycles in
the 1860s and 1870s (to which we shall return). Another exception was Wilhelm Dilthey,
whose writings-little known until decades after his death-addressed the confusion still
clouding the meaning of "generation ." The word, Dilthey insisted, has two separate
definitions. The first is a "span of time" that " lasts from birth until that age when, on
the average, a new ring of life is added to the generational tree. " However, "a generation
is also a term applied to a relationship of contemporaneity between individuals, that is,
between those who had a common childhood, a common adolescence, and whose years
of greatest manly vigor partially overlap. We say that such men belong to the same
generation. '
During the two decades following the cataclysm of World War I, the generation entered
yet another vogue, again from a new perspective. To the rising social thinkers of the
APPENDIX A 439

1920s, the link between generations and progress seemed a waste of time. Far more
interesting in that decade of relativism was how each generation creates its own subjective
reality, its own psychology, emotions, values, art. To Fram;ois Mentre, who coined the
term "social generations " in a book by that name in 1920, a generation was "a state of
collective mind embodied in a human group that endures for a certain time ." To Jose
Ortega y Gasset , a generation represented the "vital sensitivity" of a society, "a pulsation
of its historical energy ." Like many others , Ortega noticed an alternation between gen-
erations that are historically " decisive " and those that are not. During the interwar years ,
art historians like Wilhelm Pinder and Julius Peterson popularized the notion of a "cul-
tural" generation. Karl Mannheim puzzled over what he called the " Generations Prob-
lem" from exile, a safe distance from his increasingly dangerous German peers. Oddly,
despite the rise of fascism (and Stalinism) throughout Europe, most scholars regarded
the "political generation " as a tired subject.
Attempts to solve this "generations problem" became one of the many intellectual
casualties of global war, and the problem remained dormant for the first two decades of
the postwar era. At the height of student activism in the late 1960s, it briefly resurfaced
in response to the counterculture movement of American Boomers and their "Generation
of 1968" European agemates . When the political fuss died down, however , so did the
interest-after producing memorable song lyrics, but far less innovative social thinking
than in earlier eras .

The ''Generations Problem'' Today

We can now look back over two centuries of generational writing. Setting aside their
many differences of opinion, nearly all of the authors in this modem school have struggled
to define "generation" in explicitly cohort-as opposed to family-terms and to bring
this definition to the attention of the western world. Where have their efforts been
successful? And where have they failed?
Among successes, one stands out: The cohort "generation" has entirely reshaped our
popular understanding of the word . The new meaning has crept into our intuitive vocab-
ulary, into the daily parlance of several languages, and into our basic perception of
historical change. Since the 1920s, for example, no 20-to-25-year cohort-group has come
fully of age in America without encountering at least one determined attempt to name
it. Nor do we any longer confuse such terms with family lineage. Four centuries ago,
we would have thought that a young person "talkin' 'bout my generation" had a story
to share about his grandfather or grandchildren . Today we know otherwise-that he has
a story to share about his peers, about how they all came of age and have come to see
life. Nowhere in recent years has the cohort generation gained such unprecedented le-
gitimacy as in the polling and marketing industries. For thousands of professionals, the
"Baby Boom Generation" has become synonymous with a cohort-group whose tastes
marketers are willing to pay millions to understand . Gradually and almost by default, we
have watched a precise and infant science (the study of cohorts) merge with popular
idiom (the generation) .
Triumphant in popular culture, the cohort generation has been confined by experts to
440 APPENDIX A

the shadow world of unproven hypothesis. This remains the great failure of generations
writing . Present-day historians mention a "generation" only in passing. Academics dis-
cussing aging, lifecycles, sociology, and politics hardly touch the word. Most of the
blame for this unfriendly reception can be directed at the generations writers themselves.
From Comte through Mannheim and beyond, their writings have been sometimes colorful,
eloquent, and painstakingly empirical-but seldom explanatory. Three obvious and re-
lated questions can be asked of cohort generations. How do they arise? Why should they
change personality at any particular cohort boundary? And why should they have any
particular length? You can read endless tomes of generations literature looking for answers
to these questions. You won't find any.
Over the years, the expected length of a cohort generation has vexed many a writer.
Clearly, to be a usable concept, we need to know approximately how long it is. Why
not three years? Why not ninety years? Responding to these queries, however, generations
writers have typically resorted to evasion or nonsense. A few-Mill and Mannheim, for
example-finesse the issue by refusing to speculate on length. They tell us how to find
out, in effect, but they won't get their own hands dirty. Most other writers go to the
other extreme, telling us exactly how long every generation must be. The magic number,
they insist, is "precisely" thirty-three years (Lorenz, Coumot), or thirty years (Comte,
Dilthey), or twenty-five years (Littre), or 18.2 years (Jefferson), or fifteen years (Ortega).
Not a single writer justifies either the precision or absolute regularity of these time
spans . Worse, many fail to defend even the approximate number-a failure revealed by
their vague reference to the average length (or half-length) of a family generation, rein-
forcing the age-old confusion surrounding the very meaning of the concept. As recently
as 1946, Johan Huizinga believed it was a fair criticism of the entire generations school
to observe that " the generation, biologically speaking, is and always will be a completely
arbitrary period of time." Small wonder that skeptics have regarded the cohort generation,
like astrology, as a provocative idea searching blindly for a reason. Or that Bob Dylan
might seem to offer the last word on the subject.
In the remainder of this Appendix, we offer the specifics we see lacking in the writings
of others. Our approach is consistent with the conclusions of the best generations writers-
including Littre, Ferrari, Dilthey, Mentre , and Ortega-who agree that the length of a
cohort generation must be linked to the length of a phase of life, not to family genealogy .
It also leads us to the basic dynamic of the recurring cycle we have identified in American
history .

A Journey to Cohortia
'
Join us on a journey to the mythical land of Cohortia.

Cohortia is a traditional society, largely free from the most serious kinds of historical
shocks. From time to time, Cohortians encounter bloody wars, deadly famines, and
charismatic shamans. But not often .
APPENDIX A 441

Traditional Cohortia

Let us make two initial assumptions about Cohortians. First, we assume their social
behavior is governed by a well-defined and relatively unchanging lifecycle . In each life
phase, a "good Cohortian" is expected to fulfill a cluster of age-based social roles.
Second, we assume the Cohortian lifecycle includes four basic life phases, each based
on a multiple of the span between birth and coming of age. Let's assume the same twenty-
two-year life phases we described in Chapter 2:

ELDERS (age 66-87). Central role: stewardship (supervising, mentoring, channeling

endowments, passing on values).
MIDLIFE ADULTS (age 44-65). Central role: leadership (parenting, teaching, di-
recting institutions, using values).
RISING ADULTS (age 22-43). Central role: activity (working, starting families and
livelihoods, serving institutions, testing values) .
YOUTH (age 0-21). Central role : dependence (growing, learning, accepting protection
and nurture, avoiding harm, acquiring values) .

These phase-of-life role descriptions are suggestive only. All the first assumption
requires is that each role be basically different and that the age-borders be reasonably
well defined. Cohortians are quite ordinary in this respect. Every society recognizes
lifecycle passage points, and practically every society acknowledges a sharp "coming-
of-age" separation between the roles of youth and rising adulthood. It does not matter
how many live into midlife and elderhood, since these central roles can be performed (if
lifespans are short) by only a few people .
Now imagine a sudden shock-a "social moment" -such as a major war or revo-
lution. And add a third assumption: Any social moment affects an individual's personality
differently according to his current phase of life. It does so by triggering a behavior
response conditioned by the phase-of-life role . For youths, the response might be de-
pendence (keeping out of the way); for rising adults , activity (arming to meet the chal-
lenge); for midlifers, leadership (organizing the troops); and for elders, stewardship
(establishing the purpose of the war). The stress of responding to the social moment
leaves a different emotional imprint and memory with each group according to the role
it is called upon to play . These differences, furthermore, are reinforced by the social
interaction within each group. Youths might mirror each other's dread and anxiety, for
example, while rising adults might collectively encourage each other's valor and sense
of duty. With this social moment, four adjacent cohort-groups separately coalesce into
generations, each with a distinct peer personality . The more serious the trauma, the
sharper the contrasts between peer personalities. The length of these generations depends
on the length of the phases of life, assumed here to be twenty-two years.
Letting time pass after the war is over, we notice the continuing influence of the social
moment. Twenty -two years after the social moment, when each generation has risen one
442 APPENDIX A

phase-of-life notch, four distinctly different peer personalities still exist . Those who were
elders during the war have passed on, but a new crop of youths (all born after the war)
has arrived. Having no firsthand memory of the trauma, these youths develop a peer
personality unlike that of any of the elder generations. Assume, for now, that nothing
else happens thereafter. When forty-four years have passed, the number of distinct gen-
erations falls to three: elders and midlifers (who remember the war as rising adults and
youths) and everyone younger than age 44 . After sixty-six years, only two discrete
generations are left: elders and everyone younger than age 66. By the eighty-eighth year-
that is, by the fourth postwar constellation-the "war-touched" generations vanish en-
tirely. All living Cohortians are, once again, products of the traditional lifecycle.
Figure A-2 illustrates this dynamic. As in Chapter 2, we show time horizontally and
phases of life vertically, revealing cohort-group lifecycles along the diagonal. Time is
measured in years, with the "O" for the first aligned constellation, "22" for the next,
and so on . Each cohort-group is given a letter in order of its birth. Notice that social
moments are shown starting before the aligned constellation. Suppose, as is likely, the
social moment is not a brief cataclysm, but something akin to the ten-year Trojan War .
In this case, the social moment would start earlier than "Year O" -and, as it rages,
would mark each cohort as it enters each phase of life. Youth cohorts, for example,
would come of age during the war as they go off to fight in it. The catalyzing moment
would then arrive, as it certainly did for Troy's conquerors, near the end of the social
moment,
To understand how this interaction of generations and history might work, imagine
Cohortia literally re-enacting the Trojan War. For purposes of illustration, let's introduce
Homer's cast of characters, each representing a generation:

PHASE-OF-
PHASE OF LIFE
LIFE ROLE
DURING DURING
COHORTIAN HOMERIC SOCIAL SOCIAL
GENERATION CHARACTER MOMENT MOMENT

B Nestor Elderhood Stewardship

C Agamemnon Midlife Leadership
D Odysseus Rising Adulthood Activity
E Telemachus Youth Dependence

A little background may help the reader locate these characters. In the Iliad, we learn
through flashbacks about the prewar constellation (year - 22). Nestor (B), ruler of Pilos,
is somewhere in midlife; Agamemnon (C) is the rising-adult chief of the House of Atreus;
Odysseus (D) is a child in Ithaca; and Telemachus (E) is not yet born. The war itself,
the central drama of the Iliad, begins near the year - 10 and ends in year 0. Odysseus
and his coming-of-age peers Ajax and Diomedes are forged by war into collective giants,
a triumphant and heroic cohort-group; Agamemnon, now a haunted figure entering midlife,
leads the troops; and Nestor, in old age, presides with his wisdom over the Achaean
alliance. Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Odysseus' wife Penelope manages on her own to
APPENDIX A 443

raise their only child , Telemachus . Like most of his (cohort E) peers , Telemachus reflects
the personality of what the British call their " air raid generation'' : sensitive and eloquent ,
yet insecure and cautious.
In the dramatic climax of the Odyssey, Homer takes us ahead one more step: almost
exactly a generation further to year 22. Agamemnon would now be an old man, had he
not been treacherously murdered by his wife for his own sins. In midlife, Odysseus finally
makes it back to Penelope in Ithaca , where he once again plays the hero and saves the
kingdom. Telemachus comes of age-obediently and with his father 's help-and looks
forward to inheriting the kingship in an era of sweet peace . There the saga ends. What
will happen in years 44, 66, or 88? Homer does not say . As Telemachus moves into
midlife and Odysseus into elderhood, the number of identifiable generations will begin
to narrow . Presumably , the dark ages'' will reclaim the Greek kingdoms and the lifecycle
will return to gray tradition . It is not a story that would interest the epic poet , at least
not until a new social moment arrives.
And yet, reflecting on the last scenes of the Odyssey , we cannot help wondering how
these postwar cohort-groups (F , G, H, and I in Figure A-2) could revert so quickly to
Cohortia's traditional lifecycle and personality . Consider the scenario . Cohort F youths
grow up while the midlife leadership role is filled by the heroic peers of Odysseus (D).
But cohort G youths grow up (and cohort F fills rising adulthood) while that same role
is played by the far less confident peers of Telemachus (E) . Given the different nurturing
and leadership styles of these two postwar constellations , it seems likely that the peer
personalities of these two younger groups will also differ-from each other and from the
traditional lifecycle . And if they differ, so might cohorts Hand I, and so on .
Thus far , traditional Cohortia does not allow for this possibility . We implicitly assume

FIGURE A-2
Traditional Cohortia

Social
Moment
Time in Years Yr -22 Yr 0 Yr 22 Yr 44 Yr 66 Yr 88

Phase of Life

ELDER, age 66-87

MIDLIFE, age 44-65

RISING, age 22-43

YOUTH, age 0-21

Note : Circle marks cohort-group in or entering that phase of life during social moment.
444 APPENDIX A

that each phase of life, together with its role definition, is forever fixed by custom-
regardless of the peer personality passing through it. A social moment merely puts a
personality mark on a cohort-group, but otherwise has no lasting influence. But that raises
a provocative question: What happens when the power of tradition is removed? To answer
this question , let's drag Cohortia into modernity . Here we find the impact of a social
moment to be more far-reaching.

Modern Cohortia

In modern Cohortia, we ease the power of tradition by making two new assumptions.
First:

A social moment not only shapes personality according to current phase-of-life roles,
but also forges an enduring bond of identity between each cohort-group and its
role-an acquired style that redefines both how each group will later regard itself
and how it will later be regarded by others .

In modern Cohortia, in other words, a phase-of-life role is no longer totally rigid, but
can now be modified by the generational personality passing through it. If a social moment
shapes an active peer personality among rising adults, for example, this cohort-group
will take an active role and self-image with it as it ages. With apologies to Homer, let's
go back and modernize the Trojan War. A modern Odysseus would not simply return to
Ithaca in midlife with the personality of a war hero. He and his peers would modify the
very definition of midlife according to the same role-by projecting heroic activity into
political, cultural , and family behavior. (Dante and many later writers amended Homer's
account in precisely this fashion, by depicting an aging, hubristic Odysseus organizing
new missions and voyages .) A modern Telemachus and his peers might very well Jet this
happen, since their role during the war-dependence and emulation-will continue to
shape their later behavior and self-image .
Our second new assumption about modern Cohortia puts a biological and social limit
on how long any generation can modify phase-of-life roles :

A central role acquired during a social moment can extend into the next life phase-
but not into the life phase after that.

If the central role of rising adulthood is activity, a generation shaped by that role can
transfer it to midlife, but not to elderhood. Even a modern Odysseus cannot, in old age,
sustain society's active role in the face of physiological decline and his approaching
awareness of his own mortality . Nor, eventually, would society permit him to do so.
The dependent role of childhood can likewise be transferred to rising adulthood, but not
to midlife. The time would come when the modern Telemachus would have to abandon
dependence for the role of leadership, by necessity if not by choice .
Now let's retrace the story depicted in Figure A-2, recast for modern Cohortia. In
APPENDIX A 445

year 0, the story begins unchanged: We see the same social moment hitting all four
cohort-groups and shaping each into a distinct generation . In year 22, the generations all
move up a lifecycle notch-but this time, each one takes its war-defined role or style
along with it. Here is where we notice the pliable rising adult (Telemachus), the heroic
midlifer (Odysseus) , and perhaps the too-cunning elder (Agamemnon) . In year 44, each
generation moves up a second lifecycle notch. But now, at last, the two surviving event-
shaped generations (D and E) must abandon their acquired central roles.
This will not happen by free choice, since the roles have become wedded to each
group's underlying personality-nor by social design, since modem Cohortia lacks firmly
prescribed behavior . Thus, the reshuffling of central roles is not likely to happen gradually.
Far more likely, it will happen suddenly through a new social moment-triggered, in
effect, by the new generational constellation. The time will arrive when the social tension
between original and acquired roles (in midlife and elderhood) becomes intolerable. The
time will also arrive when a new, coming-of-age cohort-group-postwar babies who
never knew the sixtyish Odysseuses as heroic young warriors nor the fortyish Telema-
chuses as deferential children-will insist on claiming an active social role .
At this point, we cannot say what type of new event to expect, except to point out
that it will depend upon the external and domestic circumstances of modem Cohortia. It
need not be another war. All we require somewhere near year 44 is a new and distinct
social moment that will reidentify each cohort-group with the original central role as-
sociated with its new phase of life. In particular, we can expect the new event to thrust
some new active role on the now-rising adults (F) and some new dependent role on the
new crop of children (G). The generational dynamics of modem Cohortia are illustrated
in Figure A-3.
Modernity does not alter the way in which Cohortia shapes generational personalities
during social moments. It does, however, trigger the arrival of new social moments timed
to shape a new array of distinct generations at two-constellation intervals. Notice that in
each constellation, there are always four distinct personalities . Notice, as well, that the
two-constellation (or forty-four-year) rhythm creates two basic types of generational
lifecycles. Generations D, F, and H encounter social moments in or entering rising
adulthood (coming of age) and later in or entering elderhood . Because they tend to transfer
their active rising-adult role into midlife, their style always dominates major social and
cultural change in Cohortia . That is why we call these generations "dominant." Gen-
erations E, G, and I encounter social moments in youth and later in or entering midlife .
Their styles tend to be overshadowed by the more potent personalities of their next-elders
or next-juniors. That is why we call these generations "recessive."
So far, we have assumed that every social moment creates a positive association
between each generation and its expected social role . But this may not always happen.
In particular, an unsuccessful experience for a dominant, rising-adult generation may
prevent it from forging any meaningful bond with its role during the social moment.
Thus :

A society must resolve a social moment successfully in order to shape the coming-of-
age generation as dominant; otherwise, it will shape the coming-of-age generation
as recessive, unable or unwilling to take its active role with it into midlife.
446 APPENDIX A

FIGUREA-3
Modern Cohortia

Social Social Social

Moment Moment Moment
Time in Years Yr -22 YrO Yr 22 Yr 44 Yr 66 Yr 88

Phase of Life

ELDER, age 66-87 A

= C

MIDLIFE, age 44-65

RISING, age 22-43

YOUTH, age 0-21

Note: Circle marks cohort-group in or entering that phase of life during social moment.

As we have seen, this happened once in America, when the Progressives emerged
from the Civil War with few positive associations with their coming-of-age role-partly
because this anomalous social moment arrived ahead of schedule. From the American
experience alone, of course, we cannot say just how often this might happen. The
possibility that social moments may frequently arrive off-schedule and end in tragedy
may explain, aside from the stronger force of tradition, why modern Europe has failed
to produce dominant generational types of the same power, color, and variety as those
of the New World (to the American eye, at least).

From a Two-Stroke Rhythm to a Four-Type Cycle

The regenerative quality of peer groups-their capacity to grow, wither, fall, and
then renew themselves-has fascinated philosophers, historians, and dramatists since the
beginning of time. The very structure of Greek tragedy, as in the plays of Aeschylus,
centers on the concept of age-related hubris. This combination of blindness and over-
reaching inevitably has generational consequences ("visit the sins of the father on the
sons") and, by implication, teaches generational lessons . But the simple fact that one
generation's tragic excesses do not lead to a permanent cycle of destruction and decay
reflects the capacity of successor generations to learn from, and compensate for, the
mistakes of their elders . These successors, in turn, then make their own mistakes. Over
APPENDIX A 447

the last two centuries, cross-generational rejuvenation has been a recurring theme in story
and song, from Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons to Graham Nash's Teach Your Children.
Even where tradition is strong, we can observe this dynamic in individual families:
the parents who unknowingly err in raising their children and the children who rise above
the setback but later compensate by erring in the opposite direction with their own children.
Where tradition is weak and life phases can be redefined by distinct peer personalities,
we can observe it happening across entire societies. In a social context, the "parents"
and "children" refer not to families but to cohort generations. Returning to the dynamics
of social moments in modem Cohortia, Jet's assume the following:

During a new social moment, each generation will redefine the central role of the phase
of life it is entering in a direction that reverses the perceived excesses of that role
since the last social moment.

The premise here is that generation-specific styles forged during a social moment will
later become dysfunctional as time passes and that most people will sense this fact. Given
the opportunity-that is, given a new social moment-each generation will seek a new
style, appropriate for its phase of life, that compensates for past excesses and steers
society back on the right course. For example, over the forty-four long years that modem
Odysseus and his peers have been busy redefining Cohortian adulthood in terms of endless
martial projects, we could imagine a growing consensus that a different sort of style is
called for-perhaps a search for values and principles that would give such projects a
fresh sense of purpose. When the next social moment arrives, therefore, each generation
will not only reclaim its generic life-phase role, but will shift its style in a compensatory
direction. Sometime near year 44 in modem Cohortia, we might witness an old Odysseus
relinquishing at last his worldly agendas; a midlife Telemachus stepping gently into power,
careful to avoid his father's swagger and hubris; a coming-of-age cohort-group of zealous
Dionys ians more keen on inner than outer discovery; and a new crop of hardscrabble
youths whom no one expects to be obedient.
This impulse to compensate for excess shows up not only in the desire of adults to
correct past mistakes, but also in the hope of adults to spare their own children from
such mistakes. In short:

Each generation has a formative, nurturing relationship primarily with other two-apart
generations (dominant with dominant, recessive with recessive); each tries to cul-
tivate in the second-younger generation a peer personality it perceives as comple-
mentary to its own.

Any generation's children (using 20-to-25-year cohort-groups) typically fall into both
of the two next-younger generations. Yet for the entire period that any generation is
situated mostly in midlife-the life phase in which it combines its influence as parents
with norm-setting leadership in public life-the generation then situated mostly in youth
will be exactly two generations removed. The elder generation of parents, therefore, will
set the nurturing tone for any generation of children . As we noted in Chapter 3, recent
448 APPENDIX A

American history offers some familiar illustrations: the G.I.s (not Silent) set the parental
tone for Boom children; the Silent (not Boom) for I 3er children; and, it appears, the
Boom (not 13ers) for Millennial children-even though the biological link splits about
evenly in all three cases.
This two-apart nurturing relationship reinforces the pendular swing in social direction.
Dominant (or recessive) parents in midlife set the parental tone for dominant (or recessive)
children who will later assume the same Iifecycle role in modem Cohortia's two-stroke
rhythm . Tacitly or explicitly, a parental generation will encourage its younger counterpart
to acquire a style that compensates for the self-perceived imbalance in the elder peer
personality . Around the year 22, for example, the dominant midlife peers of modem
Odysseus will try to coax something different from discipline and valor out of the dominant
postwar youth, perhaps by encouraging a bit more spirit and demanding a bit less duty.
Around the year 44 (overlapping with the next social moment), the recessive midlife
peers of modem Telemachus will do the same for the recessive generation then in youth,
perhaps by loosening family authority. The sequel that we have here conceived-coming-
of-age prophets and self-sufficient children-shows how occupants of the two younger
life phases can take an active role in the next social moment.
By year 44, once again, a new two-stroke rhythm is underway-but with a new twist.
Rather than simply revert to where everything stood forty-four years earlier, the society
now turns toward an array of phase-of-life styles that reverses the direction in which the
society was moving before . If we assume that these directions are bipolar, then the two-
stroke rhythm begins to look more like a four-stroke cycle. Even in Homer's traditional
Cohortia, we can glimpse hints of such a dynamic . Reflect on Nestor (the wise elder)
and Agamemnon (the cunning midlifer), and try to imagine a social moment forty-four
years prior to the sack of Troy that might have shaped these two personalities . Nestor
would then have been a rising adult (dominant) and Agamemnon a child (recessive) .
Now compare them to another pair at year 0, Odysseus and Telemachus : same ages,
same dominant-recessive types, yet an entirely unlike pair of personalities. One social
moment made the coming-of-age Nestor wise , the child Agamemnon opportunistic; the
next made the coming-of-age Odysseus heroic, the child Telemachus deferential.
The recurrence of compensating peer personalities is an important force for regen-
eration and balance in human civilization. What is it, in man, that makes this cycle a
gravitational orbit around timeless norms of human behavior, with successor generations
moderating the excesses of their elders? Why is the cycle not a centrifugal spiral, with
successor generations lunging toward ever more dangerous extremes? We do not know.
The answer may be rooted in a basic social instinct for balance between risk and caution,
between reflection and activity, between passion and reason, or between the emulation
of mothers versus fathers. We leave such questions to anthropologists and psychologists .
Whatever the reason, this instinct has worked to mankind's benefit in the past and enhances
the prospects for survival and progress in the future.

The Four-Part Generational Cycle

From the Hebrew tribes' flight from Egypt to their founding of a new society in
Canaan, the early books of the Old Testament tell the most dramatic story of unfolding
APPENDIX A 449

cohort generations known to the West. Examining this story schematically, we have little
trouble identifying-in choreographed succession-four distinct peer personalities.

First, the holy peers of Aaron and mother-protected Moses: the young adults who
awakened their people to the spirit of their one true God ("I am who I am"), defied
the authority of the most powerful institution on earth (Pharaoh's Egypt), and later
on-during midlife and old age-led the Hebrews through the wilderness to the
threshold of Canaan (their "promised land") .
Second , a tough generation of "stiff-necked" backsliders: the worshipers of the golden
calf, "murmurers" and "men of little faith"-for whose sins God punished the
Hebrews with extra trials and tribulations. Possessed of divided loyalties and split
timing, they were too young to have been exalted by Moses' spiritual awakening,
but too old not to remember the enticing fleshpots of Egypt.
Third, the dutiful soldier-peers of Joshua: the children who were nearly all born after
Exodus and who first came of age in victorious battles in the wilderness; the young
adults whom the patriarch Moses anointed for leadership (none older was allowed
to enter Canaan); and the midlifers of martial unity and discipline who succeeded
in conquering the natives of Canaan through decades of warfare.
Fourth, the original generation of Judges: the invisible children whose births were
overshadowed by war; the obliging young adults who served the mighty Joshua;
and the midlifers whose exercise of power was marked by political fragmentation,
petty feuds, and uncertainty about the future.

Setting aside the gigantic lifespans of a few major actors, we can recognize the rhythm
pulsing through this story. It is the generational calendar of Cohortia. Using twenty years
as the length of a Hebrew life phase (Numbers informs us that all Hebrew males age 20
and older were normally "able to go to war"), we count double that span to take us
from one social moment to the next. Exactly forty years pass between the Moses-led
Exodus and the Joshua-led invasion of Canaan. Another forty years take us to the death
of Joshua and his peers . Only then, as the story fades in the absence of new social
moments, do the first Judges climb to leadership ("and there arose another generation
after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel").
Perfectly in time with this rhythm, we also notice the familiar oscillation between
Cohortia's two basic generational types, dominant and recessive:

Moses' peers . Type: dominant. Social moment (year 0) as rising adults and again (year
40) as elders.
Golden Calf peers . Type: recessive . Social moment (year 0) as children and again (year
40) as midlifers.
Joshua 's peers. Type: dominant. Social moment (year 40) as rising adults and story
end (year 80) as elders .
First Judges' peers. Type: recessive . Social moment (year 40) as children and story
end (year 80) as midlifers.
450 APPENDIX A

Clearly, a two-stroke cycle does not do justice to the range of personalities that emerges
in this story. Although both dominant generations (of Moses and Joshua) are shaped as
rising adults by social moments, we cannot help noticing how much these two moments
differ from each other. Moses' peers encounter a spiritual, inner-driven crisis: an urgent
need to inspire heart-felt values, even if it means defying the world. The Golden Calf
generation is later perceived (by the standards of its next-elders) to be unprincipled and
sinful. Joshua's peers, on the other hand, encounter a secular, outer-driven crisis: an
urgent need to establish a new world, even if it means neglecting the heart. Similarly,
the First Judges' peers are later perceived (by the standards of their next-elders) to be
weak and ineffective.
The dynamic of Exodus is a four-type cycle: the first two-part beat triggered by
prophecies and other-world agendas, the next two-part beat by emergencies and this-
world agendas. In lifecycle timing, these successive dominant or recessive generations
have much in common. Yet in outlook and behavior, their personalities appear to be
diametrically opposed.
This four-type cycle illustrates a fundamental pattern that arises most distinctly when,
as in America, generations are left free to develop and express their own personalities .
Why? Think back to the lessons of Cohortia. Picture a generation that has been shaped
young by an inner-driven event and has spent two constellations redefining the adult role
in spiritual terms. As this peer group enters old age, it will likely leave behind it a society
well stoked in moral conviction, but imperiled by mounting and unsolved practical prob-
lems. Or picture the reverse: a generation shaped young by outer-driven event-leaving
behind, as it enters old age, a rational and secularized world crying out for spiritual
rebirth.
As we learned in Cohortia, cohort generations do not happen often in traditional
societies. A four-type generational cycle would be rare indeed. That is what makes the
Exodus cycle so striking. To begin, it needed a providential moment, the Hebrews'
spiritual awakening. And to propel itself thereafter, it needed a successful outcome and
a temporary loosening of lifecycle traditions, perhaps brought about by the dislocation
of wandering and war.

The Tradition of the Four-Type Cycle

We should not expect a well-defined, four-type cycle of generations to be characteristic

of premodern societies. Nor, Exodus aside, has it been. Yet we need not look far to find
provocative bits and pieces of such a cycle. On the one hand, the great classical histo-
rians-Homer, Virgil, Thucydides, Livy, and Polybius-often identify cycles launched
by heroic, Joshua-like generations. On the other hand, ancient religious chronicles more
often focus on cycles launched by spiritual, Moses-like generations (such as those be-
ginning with Abraham, Samuel, Christ, or Mohammed). Apparently, premodern observers
knew of two basic types of dominant generations: one martial or institutions-founding,
the other spiritual or values-founding.
Whenever these observers discuss a lengthy sequence of generations, moreover, it is
significant that the number four is most often cited as a cyclical endpoint. The Old
APPENDIX A 451

Testament often refers to curses and punishments reaching "unto the fourth generation, "
rarely three and never five. The poetry and prose of the classical era took for granted
that human history traveled through cycles of four "ages " - where "ages" could refer
to anything from millennial epochs to generations. (Hesiod's belief in five never became
popular.) So too in the Islamic world . "Prestige lasts only four generations in the best
of cases,'' Ibn Khaldun wrote in the fourteenth century, observing how political dynasties
seem to follow a four-generational pattern. The first builds. The second has personal
contact with the builder. The third sustains what was built as a matter of tradition . The
fourth destroys. The fifth builds again, and so forth.
Whatever may have prompted each version of the four-generation formula, ancient
and medieval cycle theorists apparently agreed on one thing: that the fifth generation-
or the first generation of the next cycle-would bring with it redemption and a new
beginning. A termination to old curses . A new Golden Age . A purging of inherited
tragedy. In religious terms , this four-generation span reaches from one generation of
prophet-redeemers to the next-in secular terms, from one generation of hero-builders
to the next.
In the nineteenth century , the four-type cycle again attracted attention. Among the
early generations writers , Comte , Littre, and Ferrari separately suggested that generations
can plausibly be arranged in a fourfold morphology . Littre's categories reflect vivid and
distinct personality types : scientific, aesthetic , moral, and industrial. Begin with the third,
and his sequence parallels Exodus . Writing a few years later, Ferrari identified a cycle
even closer to that ancient example . In Teoria dei periodi politici, published in 1874,
Ferrari claimed that social and political change-the " ebb and flow of history," as he
put it-is driven by a repeating cycle of four generational types . Each of his four types
reflects a distinct personality , with opposite personalities appearing two generations apart .
The first is preparatory ; the second, revolutionary; the third, reactionary ; and the fourth,
harmonizing . The leadership style of each successive type lines up with a parallel sequence
in history : a subversive period , a solution , a struggle against the solution, and a final
victory that confirms the solution.
Now let's combine Ferrari's "ebb and flow" with Littre ' s morphology . Starting with
Ferrari ' s second type and Littre's third, and adding a brief summary of the role played
by each, we create what we might call the "Littre-Ferrari cycle ." Note how closely it
matches the four-generation drama of Exodus.

First, a "revolutionary ' (Ferrari) or "moral " (Littre) generation forges an entirely
new array of feelings and values , and works to fulfill its implicit agenda .
Second , a "reactionary" (Ferrari) or "industrial" (Littre) generation struggles against
the values emphasis of its elders, and prefers pragmatism and independence .
Third, a " harmonizing" (Ferrari) or" scientific' (Littre) generation identifies problems,
builds a social consensus, agrees on rational solutions, and works effectively to
achieve them.
Fourth, a "preparatory " (Ferrari) or "aesthetic " (Littre) generation perfects and em-
bellishes the solution, yet undermines the consensus and provides lone forerunners
for the next values revolution. (Then the cycle repeats.)
452 GENERATIONS

Within the past quarter century, Julian Marias (a Spanish sociologist-philosopher) and
Samuel Huntington (a Harvard professor of government) have separately proposed a four-
part generational cycle. Marfas published his paradigm in 1967 in an effort to clarify and
explain Ortega's original two-stroke oscillation between "polemic" and "cumulative"
types (roughly, what we call "dominant" and "recessive"). In Marias' cycle, the first
generation creates and initiates, the second fabricates a stereotyped personality, the third
reflects and theorizes, and the fourth stylistically challenges forms and customs.
In 1981, Huntington developed a similar model based on social and political change
in American history. He notes an alternating pattern between inner- and outer-driven
behavior: a period of newly conceived values and "creedal passion," followed by a
period of effective public action that institutionalizes these ideals. Huntington calls this
the "Ivl" ("Institutions versus Ideals") cycle-a cycle of four parts. In it, "moralism
eventually elicits cynicism, cynicism produces complacency, complac.ency leads to hy-
pocrisy, and hypocrisy in due course reinvigorates moralism .' ' Between the polarities of
inner- and outer-driven behavior, Huntington finds "gaps" roughly the same length as
two life phases. He Jines up American social moments-what we call spiritual awakenings
and secular crises-almost exactly as we do.
In his earlier writings, Huntington acknowledges that a generation is an "experiential
and attitudinal group" and that American history can be interpreted in terms of a cycle
in which ''major struggles'' take place ''between the advance guard of the new generation
and the rear guard of its predecessor." "There certainly is an extraordinary tendency to
interpret American politics in terms of cycles," he concludes. "I think we can relate
cycles to generational analysis." Curiously, however, his 1981 model hardly mentions
generations . As such, his theory is incomplete. But when we combine Huntington's
rhythm of history with Marfas' generational alternation, a very useful composite emerges .
Lining up Marfas' third phase with Huntington's first, we create what we might call the
"Manas-Huntington cycle":

First, an inner-driven, moralistic generation reflects and theorizes, distills new values
and ideas, and begins a period of "creedal passion" -that is, a society-wide effort
to close the gap between ideals and reality.
Second, a cynical generation stylistically challenges forms and customs.
Third, an outer-driven, morally complacent generation institutionalizes the ideals iden-
tified earlier.
Fourth, a hypocritical generation fabricates a stereotyped personality . (Then the cycle
repeats.)

In its fundamentals, this Marfas-Huntington cycle is very similar to the Littre-Ferrari

cycle identified a century earlier, to the cycle of Exodus, and even to the hints of a full
cycle we found in Homer's Iliad . Figure A-4 summarizes the correspondence of gener-
ational types between our own four-part cycle and the earlier paradigms.
As we recall from Chapter 4, each of these four types has a distinct lifecycle and a
special relationship to spiritual awakenings and secular crises. Each shapes and is shaped
APPENDIX A 453

FIGURE A-4
Five Generational Cycles Compared

MARI AS- LI TIRE-

OUR CYCLE HUNTINGTON FERRARI EXODUS THE ILIAD

IDEALIST inner-driven revolutionary Aaron , Moses Nestor

moralist moral prophetic wise

REACTIVE anticustom reactionary Golden Calf Agamemnon

cynical industrial sinful cunning

CIVIC outer-driven harmonizing Joshua Odysseus

institutionalizing scientific heroic hubristic

ADAPTIVE stereotyped preparatory Judges Telemachus

hypocritical aesthetic fragmented deferential

by history. Altogether, these types order themselves into four parallel types of constel-
lations, each with a matching era and mood.
Figure A-4 summarizes a remarkable set of correspondences that has fascinated the
West in theory and myth over the span of three millennia. The four-part generational
cycle refuses to expire. Like the concept of the generation itself, it has never fully emerged
from shadowy speculation and established itself as a legitimate intellectual tradition .
Perhaps, in time, it will.
 Appendix B

AMERICAN POLITI CAL

LEADERSHIPBY
GENERATION

For reference, we offer the following three tables as summary indicators of American
political participation by generation.

Figure B-1 shows generational participation in several key political events before the
swearing-in of the first U.S. Congress in 1789: colonial delegates to the Stamp Act
Congress (1765); known members of the Boston Tea Party riot (1773); signers of
the Declaration oflndependence ( 1776) and Constitution (1787); and state governors
and delegates to the Continental Congress (every odd-numbered year from 1775 to
1787, omitting delegates whose birthdates are unknown).
Figure B-2 lists American Presidents (including presidents of the Continental Congress)
by generation, lifespan, party, term, and age.
Figure B-3 computes each generation's "national leadership share" for every odd-
numbered year since 1775. From 1789 through 1989, this is a simple average of
each generation's percentage share of all House members, all senators, and all
governors. From 1775 through 1787, it is a simple average of each generation's
percentage share of delegates to the Continental Congress and state governors. (For
these years, the share with unknown birthdates is designated "NA" to make the
known shares easier to interpret.) House members, senators, and delegates are
counted if they are officially in office at the end of the listed calendar year; governors
are counted if they serve at least six months of the listed year, whether or not they
are in office at the end of the year. The table was calculated from a database
containing about 15,000 names: all congressmen and governors from 1787 through
1989 and all delegates to the Continental Congress from 1774 through 1788.
TABLE B-1
Political Leadership Before 1789, by Generation

AWAKENING LIBERTY REPUBLICAN TOTAL

COLONIAL DELEGATES TO THE STAMP ACT CONGRESS
(New York City ; October 7-25, 1765) . . ... . .. .. .. . ........... . ........ . . . .. .... 14 13 0 27
52% 48% 0% 100%
[average age] (51] (36] [NA] (44]
KNOWN MEMBERS OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY RIOT
(Boston; December 16, 1773) . ... .. .... . .................... . ..... ... .. .... . ... 15 62 78
1% 19% 79% 100%
[average age J [57] (39] (23] (27]
SIGNERS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
(Philadelphia; July-August, 1776) .. ... .. .. .. .... .. . ... . .. ......... ... ... . .. .... 11 35 10 56
20% 63% 18% 100%
[average age] [61] [44] (32] [45]
SIGNERS OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
(Philadelphia; September 17, 1787) . ... .... .. .. .. . .. ... . ....... . .......... .. ... . 4 13 22 39
10% 33% 56% 100%
[average age] [69] [52] [37] [46]
TABLE B-1 (continued) AWAKENING LIBERTY REPUBLICAN TOTAL
Political Leadership Before 1789, by Generation

REVOLUTIONARY OR STATE GOVERNORS

AT END OF YEAR 1775 ..... .... 80% 10% 10% 100%
(percentages only) 1777 . ..... . .. 33% 67% 0% 100%
1779 .. .. ..... 25% 50% 25% 100%
1781 ........ . 23% 62% 15% 100%
1783 . ........ 23% 77% 0% 100%
1785 .. ...... . 23% 77% 0% 100%
1787 ... . . . ... 23% 62% 15% 100%
DELEGATES TO THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
AT END OF YEAR 1775 . . . . .. ... 22% 66% 12% 100%
(percentages only) 1777 .... ... .. 17% 58% 25% 100%
1779 . ...... .. 16% 61% 22% 100%
1781 .. . . ..... 13% 53% 34% 100%
1783 ....... .. 5% 47% 48% 100%
1785 ....... .. 0% 43% 57% 100%
1787 ...... . . . 2% 24% 75% 100%
TABLE B-2
American Presidents, 1774-1989, by Generation

AGE DURING
PRESIDENT GENERATION LIFESPAN STATE TERM TERM
***CONTINENTAL CONGRESS***
Peyton Randolph AWAKENING 1721-1775 VA 1774, 1775 53, 54
Henry Middleton AWAKENING 1717-1784 SC 1774-1775 57-58
John Hancock LIBERTY 1737-1793 MA 1775-1777 38-40
Henry Laurens LIBERTY 1724-1792 SC 1777-1778 53-54
John Jay REPUBLICAN 1745-1829 NY 1778-1779 33-34
Samuel Huntington LIBERTY 1731-1796 CT 1779-1781 48-50
Thomas McKean LIBERTY 1734-1817 DE 1781 47
John Hanson AWAKENING 1721-1783 MD 1781-1782 60-61
Elias Boudinot LIBERTY 1740-1821 NJ 1782-1783 42--43
Thomas Mifflin REPUBLICAN 1744-1800 PA 1783-1784 39-40
Richard Henry Lee LIBERTY 1732-1794 VA 1784-1786 52-54
Nathaniel Gorham LIBERTY 1738-1796 MA 1786-1787 48--49
Arthur St. Clair LIBERTY 1736-1818 PA 1787-1788 51-52
Cyrus Griffin REPUBLICAN 1748-1810 VA 1788-1789 40--41
 AGE DURING
PRESIDENT GENERATION LIFESPAN PARTY TERM TERM

***UNITED ST ATES***
George Washington LIBERTY 1732-1799 Federalist 1789-1797 57-65
John Adams LIBERTY 1735-1826 Federalist 1797-1801 61-65
Thomas Jefferson REPUBLICAN 1743-1826 Dem-Republican 1801-1809 57-65
James Madison REPUBLICAN 1751-1836 Dem-Republican 1809-1817 57-65
James Monroe REPUBLICAN 1758- 1831 Dem-Republican 1817-1825 58-67
John Quincy Adams COMPROMISE 1767-1848 Dem-Republican 1825-1829 57-61
Andrew Jackson COMPROMISE 1767-1845 Democrat 1829-1837 61-69
Martin Van Buren COMPROMISE 1782-t'862 Democrat 1837-1841 54-58
William Henry Harrison COMPROMISE 1773-1841 Whig 1841 68
John Tyler COMPROMISE 1790-1862 Whig 1841-1845 51-54
James Polk TRANSCENDENTAL 1795-1849 Democrat 1845-1849 49-53
Zachary Taylor COMPROMISE 1784-1850 Whig 1849-1850 64- 65
Millard Fillmore TRANSCENDENTAL 1800-1874 Whig 1850-1853 50-53
Franklin Pierce TRANSCENDENTAL 1804-1869 Democrat 1853-1857 48-52
James Buchanan COMPROMISE 1791-1868 Democrat 1857-1861 65-69
Abraham Lincoln TRANSCENDENTAL 1809-1865 Republican 1861-1865 52-56
Andrew Johnson TRANSCENDENTAL 1808-1875 Republican 1865-1869 56-60
Ulysses S. Grant GILDED 1822-1885 Republican 1869-1877 46-54
Rutherford B. Hayes GILDED 1822-1893 Republican 1877-1881 54-58
James A . Garfield GILDED 1831-1881 Republican 1881 49
 AGE DURING
PRESIDENT GENERATION LIFESPAN PARTY TERM TERM

Chester A. Arthur GILDED 1830-1886 Republican 1881-1885 50-54

Grover Cleveland GILDED 1837-1908 Democrat 1885-1889 47-51
Benjamin Harrison GILDED 1833-1901 Republican 1889-1893 55-59
Grover Cleveland GILDED 1837-1908 Democrat 1893-1897 55-59
William McKinley PROGRESSIVE 1843-1901 Republican 1897-1901 54-58
Theodore Roosevelt PROGRESSIVE 1858-1919 Republican 1901-1909 42-50
William H. Taft PROGRESSIVE 1857-1930 Republican 1909-1913 51-55
Woodrow Wilson PROGRESSIVE 1856-1924 Democrat 1913-1921 56-64
Warren G . Harding MISSIONARY 1865-1923 Republican 1921-1923 55-57
Calvin Coolidge MISSIONARY 1872-1933 Republican 1923-1929 51-56
Herbert Hoover MISSIONARY 1874-1964 Republican 1929-1933 54-58
Franklin D. Roosevelt MISSIONARY 1882-1945 Democrat 1933- 1945 51-63
Harry S. Truman LOST 1884-1972 Democrat 1945-1953 60-68
Dwight D. Eisenhower LOST 1890-1969 Republican 1953-1961 62-70
John F . Kennedy G.I. 1917-1963 Democrat 1961-1963 43-46
Lyndon B. Johnson G.I . 1908-1973 Democrat 1963-1969 55-60
Richard M. Nixon G.I. 1913- Republican 1969-1974 56-61
Gerald R. Ford G.I. 1913- Republican 1974-1977 61-63
Jimmy Carter G.I. 1924- Democrat 197]-1981 52-56
Ronald Reagan G.I. 1911- Republican 1981-1989 69-77
George Bush G.I. 1924- Republican 1989- 64-
TABLE B-3
National Leadership Share, 1775-1989, by Generation
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1775 NA 51% 38% 11%

1777 NA 25% 62% 12%
1779 NA 21% 56% 24%

1781 NA 18% 57% 25%

1783 NA 14% 62% 24%
1785 NA 12% 60% 29%
1787 NA 12% 43% 45%
1789 1% 3% 41% 55%
1791 1% 1% 34% 64%
1793 1% - 28% 69%
1795 1% 2% 17% 79%
1797 2% 16% 77% 4%
1799 1% 10% 83% 6%

1801 1% 12% 73% 14%

1803 2% 12% 70% 16%
1805 2% 11% 71% 16%
1807 3% 10% 64% 23%
1809 3% 6% 59% 32%
1811 2% 5% 52% 42%
1813 1% - 47% 51%
1815 2% - 37% 60%
1817 2% - 32% 66%
1819 1% - 25% 73% 1%

1821 2% - 20% 77% 1%

1823 2% 15% 80% 2%
1825 1% 7% 85% 6%
1827 1% 8% 82% 9%
1829 1% 6% 81% 12%
1831 1% 4% 76% 18%
1833 2% 4% 67% 27%
1835 1% 2% 61% 35%
1837 1% 1% 55% 43%
1839 1% - 47% 52%
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1841 1% - 35% 64%
1843 1% - 25% 75%
1845 - 22% 78%
1847 17% 83%
1849 14% 85%
1851 13% 86% 1%
1853 8% 88% 3%
1855 7% 88% 4%
1857 4% 90% 6%
1859 2% 90% 9%

1861 1% 87% 12%

1863 1% 78% 21%
1865 1% 73% 27%
1867 - 63% 37%
1869 - 44% 56%
1871 - 40% 60%
1873 - 39% 60% 1%
1875 - 33% 66% 1%
1877 - 26% 73% 1%
1879 - 21% 76% 3%

1881 16% 79% 5%

1883 14% 74% 12%
1885 11% 74% 15%
1887 10% 71% 19%
1889 9% 63% 27%
1891 5% 60% 34% 1%
1893 2% 58% 39% 1%
1895 2% 46% 48% 4%
1897 1% 36% 57% 7%
1899 - 30% 61% 9%

1901 - 26% 60% 13%

1903 - 23% 57% 20%
1905 16% 57% 27%
1907 13% 50% 36%
1909 10% 50% 40%
1911 5% 47% 48%
1913 4% 40% 56%
1915 3% 36% 60% 1%
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1917 1% 27% 70% 2%

1919 1% 22% 76% 2%

1921 - 21% 77% 2%

1923 13% 83% 4%
1925 10% 81% 9%
1927 11%78%12%
1929 7% 77% 16%
1931 3% 77% 20%
1933 2% 72% 26% 1%
1935 1% 62% 35% 2%
1937 - 52% 44% 3%
1939 1% 42% 50% 6%

1941 - 35% 57% 8%

1943 - 31% 59% 10%
1945 - 25% 58% 16%
1947 18% 57% 26%
1949 13% 55% 32%
1951 10% 49% 40%
1953 8% 44% 48%
1955 6% 42% 52%
1957 4% 37% 59%
1959 2% 31% 66% 2%

1961 1% 26% 69% 4%

1963 1% 20% 75% 5%
1965 14% 76% 9%
1967 11% 74% 14%
1969 8% 72% 19%
1971 7% 68% 26%
1973 4% 63% 33%
1975 2% 54% 43% 1%
1977 1% 47% 50% 2%
1979 - 37% 58% 4%

1981 - 30% 63% 6%

1983 - 21% 68% 11%
1985 - 20% 68% 12%
1987 18% 66% 16%
1989 - 14% 65% 21%
 NOTES ON SOURCES

Birthyears and Ages. For birthyear and other biographical information used throughout
this book, we relied on Gale Research Company , Biography Almanac (1987) ; Charles
Scribner's Sons, Dictionary of American Biography (1930); C . & G . Merriam Co . ,
Webster's Biographical Dictionary (1969); R. R. Bowker, Who's Who in American Pol-
itics (12th ed. , 1989-90) ; Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa (eds.), The Almanac of
American Politics (National Journal , various editions); Congressional Quarterly , Inc. ,
American Leaders, 1789-1987: A Biographical Summary (1987) ; John W. Raimo, Bio-
graphical Directory of American Colonial and Revolutionary Governors , 1607-1789
(Meckler Books , 1980); U.S . Congress. Biographical Directory of the American Con-
gress, 1774-1927 (1928); and Greenwood Press , American Writers Before 1800: A Bio-
graphical and Critical Dictionary (1983) . Where an exact year is unknown, we note
''c. '' (for ' 'circa ' ') before an approximate year often cited by historians. Except in special
cases (for instance , in Appendix B, where we list the ages of Presidents), we generally
assume that an individual was born on January I when we refer to his or her age at a
given historical moment , even if this means we sometimes overshoot an age by one year.
Thus, we might claim that James Madison was 37 years old on the first Fourth of July ,
even though Madison (born on August 27, 1749) was actually 36 years old. All Old Style
(Julian) calendar dates before 1752 have been converted to New Style (Gregorian) dates .
Political Leaders. Where we refer, in a given year, to the collective age or generation
of colonial governors, Continental Congress delegates , congressmen, Supreme Court
Justices, or Presidents of the United States, we relied upon information provided by the
above sources. To derive the numbers, we used a computer database (described in Ap-
pendix B).
466 NOTES ON SOURCES

Source Abbreviations
Abs Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (annual), by
table
AD Ameri can Demographi cs
AHR Ameri can Historical Review
AmB Charles Scribner's Sons, Dictionary of American Biography (1930)
AmW Greenwood Press, American Writers Before 1800: A Biographical and Critical
Dictionary (1983)
AQ American Quarterly
CLH Emory Elliott (ed.), Columbia literary History of the United States (1988)
CPR Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports (various series and years)
EnE Glenn Porter (ed.), Encyclopedia of American Economic History (1980)
EnS David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968)
EPr U.S. Executive Office of the President, Economic Report of the President
(annual)
HSt Bureau of the Census , Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial
Times to 1970 (1975), by data series
Hth National Center for Health Statistics, Health, United States, 1987 (1988), by
table
JAR Journal of Ameri can History
JEH Journal of Economic History
JFH Journal of Family History
JIH Journal of Interdisciplinary History
JSH Journal of Social History
OxA Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (1965)
PO Public Opinion
POQ Public Opinion Quarterly
NYT New York Times
SHG Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley's Harvard Graduates (1958), by vol. and class
year
SSP Social Security Administration, Social Security Area Population Projections,
1989 (Actuarial Study No . 105, 1989)
VM Virginia Magazine
VSt National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the United States
(1990), volume, part, and table.
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly
WP Washington Post
WSJ Wall Street Journal
Yth U.S . Department of Education, Youth Indicators, 1988: Trends in the Wei/-
Being of American Youth ( 1988)

Population Data. Unless otherwise noted, all numbers referring to population, deaths,
births, fertility rates, family size, households, immigration, and population by age and
race since 1790 were derived from publications of the Bureau of the Census. Through
1970, most of these data are available in HSt , chs . A-C; since 1970, they are available
NOTES ON SOURCES 467

in CPR , series P-25 , in Abs , and in VSt (annual) . Before 1790, we relied on the non-
Census data and sources published in "Colonial and pre-Federal Statistics " in HSt, ch.
Z. All projections of generational populations into the future ( 1988-2080) have been
derived from the " Middle Series" fertility , mortality, and immigration assumptions in
Gregory Spencer, Projections of the Population of the United States, by Age, Sex, and
Race : 1988 to 2080 (Bureau of the Census , 1989) . Population and Immigration by
Generation. Through 1790 (roughly , through the last Compromiser birthyear) the pop-
ulation figures calculated for each generation are an estimate of all non-Indian births
within the non-Canadian British colonies of North America plus all permanent net im-
migration to these territories. After 1790, they include all births within all territories
under jurisdiction of the United States plus all permanent net immigration. Since even
rudimentary birth data are not available before 1909, nor official immigration data before
1820, many of these figures include estimates . Before the twentieth century , we ordinarily
proceeded by (I) interpolating the population at the last cohort birthyear of each gener -
ation, (2) estimating the share of the population born since the last cohort birthyear of
the previous generation , and (3 ) adjusting the growth for estimated infant and child
mortality. We then further adjusted this " native-born and youth-immigrant" total by
adding an estimate of the foreign -born population in this cohort-group that immigrated
at older ages. Before 1790, although most demographers and historians agree on ap-
proximate population data (total and by age ) and on approximate child mortality rates,
little is known about overall colonial fertility and immigration. In general, our approach
was to combine approximate estimates from various sources (e.g ., New England passenger
lists , Virginia " headright " registrations, and anecdotal evidence from Philadelphia and
New York City ) with plausible fertility and mortality estimates to generate _numbers
consistent with overall population . Our estimate of total immigration from 1620 to 1700
(about 150,000 whites , plus 25 ,000 blacks) is roughly consistent with other estimates.
See, for instance , Wesley Frank Craven , White, Red , and Black : The Seventeenth-Century
Virginian (1971) ; review of Craven by Edmund S . Morgan (VM , Jul 1972); James Horn,
"Servant Immigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century," in Thad W. Tate
and David L. Ammerman (eds.) , The Chesapeak e in the Seventeenth Century (1979);
and David Hackett Fischer , Albion 's Seed : Four Bri1ish Folkways in Nor1h America
( 1989). Our immigration estimates from 1700 to 1790 (about 480,000 whites , plus 250,000
blacks) are somewhere in the middle range of most estimat es . See J . Potter , "The Growth
of Population in America , 1700-1860 ," in D. V. Gl ass and D .E.C. Everley (eds.),
Population in History (1965).

Spelling and Notation. All citation s from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century docu-
ments have been conformed to modem spelling and punctuation conventions. Lengthy
book or pamphlet titles have been abbreviated where convenient. In the references that
follow, every source is noted in full the first time it is mentioned under a chapter heading;
thereafter , it is noted only by author's last name and date. In Chapters 7 to 11, ''Cycle
Background" notes cover sources important to two or more generations in the cycle. The
"Backgrounds" to individual generations tend to cover sources important to that gen-
eration alone.
 468 NOTES ON SOURCES

PREFACE

For a survey of attitudes toward history, see "DemoMemo" (AD, Dec 1985); 68% of
recent college graduates reported using history "rarely" or "never ," the highest per-
centage for any of the twenty subjects covered (versus, for example, 19% for mathematics,
28% for physical education, 35% for English, and 41% for art). Gail Sheehy, Passages:
Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976); Benita Eisler, Private Lives: Men and Women
of the Fifties (I 986). Previous books coauthored by current authors: Lawrence M. Baskir
and William Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War and the Vietnam
Generation (1978), and Reconciliation After Vietnam (1978); Peter G. Peterson and Neil
Howe, On Borrowed Time: How the Growth in Entitlement Spending Threatens America's
Future (1988). On "falsifiability," see Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
(1959), ch. 4. The Schlesinger cycle is most fully presented in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
The Cycles of American History (1984). Leopold von Ranke, Uber die Epochen der
neueren Geschichte (1910), 529-31.

CHAPTER 1: PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME

Thompson, in a speech nominating George Bush for President (Aug 17, 1988), during
the Republican National Convention . For references to polls and other data about the
Lost, G .I., Silent, Boom, and 13th Generations , see the text and source notes for Chapters
JO and 11. We reserve our brief summary of the "generations school"-its authors and
writings-to the Appendix A text and source notes. " Among democratic nations, each
generation is a new people" appears in Tocqueville , Democracy in America (1835;
Random House translation, 1945), 62. On p. 105 appears Tocqueville's more famous
remark: "Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are
constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is
every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are
soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea . .. . " On Gorbachev's
peers, see Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, .The Thaw Generation: Coming of
Age in the Post-Stalin Era (1990). For outstanding analyses of generational dynamics
abroad since the French Revolution, see the various writings of Anthony Esler, Lewis
S. Feuer, Yves Renouard, John Eros, Louis Mazoyer, William J. McGrath, Sigmund
Neumann, Julian Peterson, and Peter Loewenberg (Western Europe); Daniel R. Brower,
and Abbott Gleason (Russia); Marvin Rintala (Finland); Marvin Zeitlin (Cuba); S. N.
Eisenstadt (Africa, Israel); William Quandt (Arab world); and William Preston (Canada) .
For an excellent bibliography on the subject of foreign generations, see Anthony Esler,
Generations in History: An Introduction to the Concept (1982), and Alan B. Spitzer,
"The Historical Problem of Generations" (AHR, Dec 1973). Four reasons why the United
States should exhibit sharper generational cleavages than Old World societies are offered
in Samuel Huntington, "Generations, Cycles , and Their Role in American Develop-
ment," in Richard J. Samuels (ed.), Political Generations and Political Development
NOTES ON SOURCES 469

(1976). Samples of Daniel Webster's oratory appear in Paul D. Erickson, The Poetry of
Events : Daniel Webster's Rhetoric of the Constitution and Union (1986). Francis Fu-
kuyama, "The End of History" (The National Interest , Summer 1989).

CHAPTER 2: LIFE ALONG THE GENERATIONAL DIAGONAL

The books cited at the beginning of Chapter 2 all rank among the best generational
writings of their respective cohort-groups: Gail Sheehy, Passages (1976), 18-19, IOI,
344; Cheryl Merser, " Grown-Ups": A Generation in Search of Adulthood (1987), 19,
21; Daniel Levinson, The Seasons of a Man's Life (1978), ch . 6; Erik Erikson, Childhood
and Society (1950) and The Life Cycle Completed (1982); Erikson (1950), 413 . Malcolm
Cowley, Exile 's Return (1934); Ellen Lagemann, A Generation of Women (1979). The
Cohort-Group Biography. The "life-course fallacy" and "fallacy of cohort-centrism"
are elegantly defined in Matilda White Riley, " Aging, Social Change, and the Power of
Ideas," in Stephen R. Graubard (ed.), Generations (1979); see also Riley , "Aging and
Cohort Succession: Interpretations and Misinterpretations" (POQ, Spring 1973). The
third fallacy, what we refer to as the ' 'age-bracket fallacy,'' Riley ( 1979) calls the "fallacy
of age reification." Sheehy (1976) quotes Borges at the opening of part I; Levinson
(1978), 322. In 1863, Littre first defined the word "cohort" as everyone born at the
same time-according to Annie Kriegel, " Generational Difference: The History of an
Idea, " in Graubard (1979). The Generational Diagonal. "Aging seems to produce .. . "
is the conclusion of John Crittenden , " Aging and Party Affiliation" (POQ, 1962). Nearly
a decade later, rebuttals to Crittenden sparked a lively debate: see Neal E. Cutler, "Gen -
eration, Maturation, and Party Affiliation," Crittenden , "Reply to Cutler," and Cutler,
"Comment" (all in ibid., 1969-70); see also Norval D. Glenn and Ted Hefner, "Further
Evidence on Aging and Party Identification" (ibid ., Spring 1972). During the 1980s, the
simple aging-Republicanism model at last gave way to the alternative hypothesis- perhaps
first offered (but little noticed) in A. Campbell et al., The American Voter (1960)-that
the events of the early 1930s forged a tie between young adults and the Democratic Party
strong enough to withstand the test of advancing age. Virtually every age-graded political
survey taken during the 1980s showed persons over age 65 leaning more Democratic
than the rest of the electorate and persons under age 30 leaning more Republican. See
PO for the best year-by-year summaries of these findings; see also source notes for
Chapters IO and 11. The pathbreaking results of the Seattle Longitudinal Survey have
appeared in Schaie, Longitudinal Studies of Adult Psychological Development (1983),
"Late Life Potential and Cohort Differences in Mental Abilities," in Marion Perlmutter
(ed.), Late Life Potentials (Special Publication Series of the Gerontological Society of
America, undated), and, with Iris Parham, "Social Responsibility in Adulthood: Onto-
genetic and Sociocultural Change" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1974).
On the SAT-score decline and the Wirtz Commission findings, see the report of the
Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline, On Further Examination
(College Entrance Examination Board, 1977). For the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
cohort analysis of SATs and other aptitude test scores, see CBO, Educational Achieve-
ment: Explanations and Implications of Recent Trends (Aug 1987) and Trends in Edu -
cational Achievement (Apr 1986). For the best bibliography on cohort differences in
470 NOTES ON SOURCES

aptitude test scores since World War I, see Brian Waters, The Test Score Decline (Human
Research Resources Organization, 1981). Sources for Figure 2-1. Grade-school aptitude
data are taken from CBO (1987); the 17-year-olds' alcohol consumption data from Jerald
Bachman, Lloyd Johnson, and Patrick O'Malley , Monitoring the Future (Institute for
Social Research, Survey Research Center , University of Michigan; annual); the 18-year-
olds' alcohol consumption data from the American Council of Education's Cooperative
Institutional Research Program at UCLA (directed by Alexander Astin et al.; annual);
the arrest rates for arson, robbery , and assault from U .S. Department of Justice, Age-
Specific Arrest Rates, 1965-85 (FBI Crime Reporting Program, 1986); and the "driving
while intoxicated" arrest rates from U.S. Department of Justice, Special Report: Drunk
Driving (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Feb 1988). For suggestive age-bracketed data on
suicide, see Rene Diekstra and Keith Hawton, Suicide in Adolescence ( I 987), and Howard
S. Sudak, Amase B. Ford, and Norman B. Rush (eds.), Suicide in the Young (1984);
see also source notes for Chapter I I . From Cohorts to Generations. In the cohort
samples ranging from 1633 to I 970, the political leadership data were calculated from
the authors' own database (see above and Appendix B); most of the other data are indirectly
referenced in the source notes for Chapters 7 through 11. Contemporaneous news reports
indicated that seventeen of the twenty-five American soldiers killed in Panama were born
between 1967 and 1970.

CHAPTER 3: BELONGING TO A "GENERATION"

"You belong to it. .. " is a statement by Hunt Conroy, a character in Thomas Wolfe,
You Can't Go Home Again (1934), 715 . The 1946-1964 cohort definition of "the Baby
Boom" arose simply because demographers observed, in retrospect, that 1946 and 1964
marked an especially large rise and fall in the total fertility rate of American women.
That this definition adequately identifies " Baby Boomers" as a behavioral and attitudinal
"generation" has since become a standard working assumption among many journalists
and social scientists. See Richard Easterlin, Birth and Fortune (1980); Landon Jones,
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (1980); and Cheryl Russell,
JOOPredictions for the Baby Boom (1987). Marias, Generations : A Historical Method
(1967; University of Alabama Press translation, 1970), 101-2 . Alan Spitzer, "The His-
torical Problem of Generations " (AHR, Dec 1973). For a description of the sharp age-
graded differences in Vietnam-era draft eligibility, see Lawrence Baskir and William
Strauss, Chance and Circumstance (1978). Ortega , The Modern Theme (1923; Harper
and Row translation, 1961), 14-15; Mannheim, " The Problem of Generations," in Paul
Kecskemeti (ed.), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge ( I 952); Ferrari, Teoria dei
periodi politici (1874), 7-15. Chronology: Cominon Age Location in History. Mann-
heim (1952); Ortega, in Marias (1970), 84, 98; Pinder, The Problem of Generation in
the History of European Art (1928), cited in Marias (1970), I 14, I 17. Merser, "Grown-
Ups": A Generation in Search of Adulthood (1987), 98. Attributes: Common Beliefs
and Behavior. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (1838), cited in Marias (1970), 24;
Dilthey, various sources, paraphrased in Marias (1970), 52-7; Ortega (1961), 14-15;
Julius Peterson, "Literary Generations," in Ermatinger (ed.), The Philosophy of Literary
Science (1930), cited in Marias (1970), 122. The surveys of college freshmen have been
published annually since 1966 by the American Council on Education's Cooperative
NOTES ON SOURCES 471

Institutional Research Program at the University of California at Los Angeles (directed

by Alexander Astin, et al). For marriage data from the early 1700s, see Daniel Scott
Smith, "The Demographic History of Colonial New England," in Maris A. Vinovskis
(ed.), Studies in American Historical Demography ( 1979), and the summary of historical
research presented in Vinovskis, Fertility in Massachusetts from the Revolution to the
Civil War (1981), 42-9; see also Chapter 7 source notes. Awareness: Perceived Mem-
bership in a Common Generation. Marias (1970), 106; F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes
of the Jazz Age" (1931), in Malcolm and Robert Cowley (eds.), Fitzgerald and the Jazz
Age (1966). On the 1942-1943 cohort division between Silent and Boom generations,
see source notes for Chapters IO and 11. Ortega, in Marias ( 1970), 94; Mannheim ( 1952).

CHAPTER 4: THE FOUR-PART CYCLE

Nixon, in "Footprints in the Cosmic Sand," WP 7/20/89; Lewis, in Michael L. Smith,

"Selling the Moon," in Richard Fox and T. Jackson Lears (eds.), The Culture of Con-
sumption ( 1983); Reagan, last televised address as President (Jan 1989); Sheehy, Passages
(1976). For a fuller explanation of the four-part cycle, see Appendix A.

CHAPTER 5: THE CYCLE IN AMERICA

For the complete story of "The Gray Champion," see Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told
Tales (first series, 1837). Eighteen American Generations. For evidence on the mortality
and fecundity of pre-Puritan cohorts, see Chapter 7 source notes. Ortega, in Manas,
Generations: A Historical Method (1967; University of Alabama Press translation, 1970),
158-9. Arthur Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (1925, 1948), ch. 5;
Daniel Elazar, The Generational Rhythm of American Politics (monograph presented to
the Center for the Study of Federalism, Temple University, 1976); Samuel Huntington,
"Paradigms of American Politics: Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many" (Political
Science Quarterly, Mar 1974); and Morton Keller, "Reflections on Politics and Gener-
ations in America," in Stephen Graubard (ed.), Generations (1979) . Merser, "Grown-
Ups": A Generation in Search of Adulthood (1987), 98 . Spiritual Awakenings.
McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (1978), ch. I; see also two works that
helped inspire McLoughlin: Anthony F. C. Wallace, "Revitalization Movements" (Amer-
ican Anthropology, 1956); and Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant (1975). After de-
scribing the "Puritan Awakening" of the early seventeenth century, McLoughlin begins
his count with the "First Great Awakening" of the 1730s and 1740s and reaches the
"Fourth Great Awakening" by the late 1960s and 1970s.

CHAPTER 6: FROM PURITANS TO MILLENNIALS AND BEYOND

Films: Rosemary's Baby (1968); The Exorcist (1973); Exorcist /I (1977); The Omen
(1976); Damien-Omen /I (1978); The Final Conflict (third in "Omen" series, 1981); It's
Alive! (1974); It Lives Again (1978); Demon Seed (1977); Paper Moon (1973); Taxi
Driver (1976); Bugsy Malone (1976); Carrie (1976); Willy Wonka and the Chocolate
472 NOTES ON SOURCES

Factory (1971); Kramer vs. Kramer (1979); The Shaggy Dog (1959); Raising Arizona
(1987); Three Men and a Baby (1987); Baby Boom (1987); and Parenthood (1989). For
an excellent analysis of this spate of "bad-child" movies, see Kathy Merlock Jackson,
Images of Children in American Films : A Sociocultural Analysis (1986). Rental apart-
ments: Vance Packard, Our Endangered Children (1983), 44-5. Child abuse: U.S . House
of Representatives, U.S. Children and Their Families (Report of the Select Committee
on Children, Youth and Families; Mar 1987), 74. Homicide rate against children: Hth,
table 30. Sterilizations: Battelle Memorial Institute, Cosmopolitan Report: The Changing
life Course of American Women (1986), vol. I, 7.36-7 . Legal abortions: Hth, table 10;
for data before 1973, see Battelle Memorial Institute ( 1986), vol. I , 7. 38. Tax rates:
U.S. Treasury analyst Eugene Steuerle, cited in Allan Carlson, "What Happened to the
'Family Wage '?" (Public Interest, Spring 1986). Poverty by age bracket: CPR, series
P-60. R-rated movies: survey cited in Cobbett Steinberg, Real Facts: The Movie Book
of Records (I 981 ), 41. Teacher salaries: see Chapter 11 source notes . For sources on
Cavalier, Liberty, Gilded, and Lost children, see source notes for Chapters 7, 8, 9, and
10, respectively . A lucid account of the early-twentieth-century reversal in adult attitudes
toward child safety is available in David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at
Play (1985), and Vivian A. Zelizer , Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social
Value of Children (1985) . The most striking "great man" accounts of oedipal bonding
between son and mother (or hostility between son and father) have featured leaders of
what we would call "Idealist" generations . For example: Martin Luther in Erik H.
Erikson, Young Man Luther : A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958); Oliver
Cromwell in Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: lord Protector (1974); Jonathan Edwards in
Richard L. Bushman, "Jonathan Edwards as Great Man: Identity, Conversion, and Lead-
ership in the Great Awakening," in Robert J. Brugger (ed.), Our Selves/Our Past:
Psychological Approaches to History (1981); Abraham Lincoln in L. Pierce Clark, Lin-
coln: A Psycho-Biography (1933); Franklin Roosevelt in Noel F. Busch, What Manner
of Man? (1944). For suggestive insights into the mother (or father) focus of Idealist (or
Civic) youths as generational peer groups, see source notes for Chapters 7 through I!-
especially, on the (Idealist) Puritans, David Leverenz, The language of Puritan Feeling:
An Exploration in literature, Psychology, and Social History (1980); on the (Idealist)
Awakeners, "The Evangelicals," in Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament (1977);
on the (Civic) Republicans , Catherine Albanese, Sons of the Fathers (1976); on the
(Idealist) Transcendentals , George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psy-
chological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (1979); on the (Civic) G.l.s, Betty
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique ( 1963); and on the (Idealist) Boomers, Kenneth Keniston,
Young Radicals (1968), Lewis Feuer, The Conflict of Generations: The Character and
Significance of Student Movements ( 1969), and Henry Malcolm, Generation of Narcissus
(1971). Works by the cited leaders of "Civic" generations: James I of England (pre-
Colonial "generation of 1560"), Daemonology (1597); Cotton Mather (Glorious), The
Wonders of the Invisible World (1692); and Philip Wylie (G.l.), Generation of Vipers
(1942). Cycle Theories of American History. Frank Klingberg, "The Historical Al-
ternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy" (World Politics, Vol. 4, 1951-52). For
the Schlesingers' cycle theory, see Arthur Schlesinger, Paths to the Present (1949), and
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (1986). On Schlesinger Jr. 's
forecast on the 1988 election, see Schlesinger, Jr., "Wake Up, Liberals, Your Time Has
NOTES ON SOURCES 473

Come," WP 511188: see also discussion in "Co nventional Wisdom" (Newsweek, Nov
21, 1988), and "Letters to the Editor" (Newsweek, Dec 19, 1988). "It is the generational
experience ... "appears in Schlesinger, Jr. (1986), 29 . For a discussion of the "political
generation" concept , see Marvin Rintala , "Generations" article in EnS. We summarize
the tradition of "generations" writing--including the pioneers of the four-part cycle
mentioned here-in Appendix A text and smirce notes. The Predictive Record of the
Generational Cycle. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post (Oct 1989) was the first to
coax Joan Quigley to admit that her astrological charts failed to predict "the Big One"
in her own hometown. Looking for Analogues. Mentre , in Marias (1970), 155; Pinder,
in ibid., 115-16. Esler, Generations in History : An Introduction to the Concept
(1982), 152.

CHAPTER 7: THE COLONIAL CYCLE

COLONIAL CYCLE BACKGROUND. See Daniel J. Boorstin , The Americans: The Colonial
Experience (1958); David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four Br itish Folkways in
America ( 1989); ''Transfer of Culture ,' ' in T . H. Breen , Puritans and Adventurers ( 1980).
On New England: James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (1921); and
Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (1930). On the southern colonies:
Sigmund Diamond, "Virginia in the Seventeenth Century" (American Journal of Soci-
ology, 1958); and Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," in James
M. Smith (ed.), Seventeenth-Century America (1959). On family life: Edmund Morgan,
The Puritan Famity ( 1944); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: F amity Life in Plymouth
Colony (1970); and Gerald F . Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, "T he Puritan Family and
Religion: A Critical Reappraisal" (WMQ, Jan 1982). On community life: Philip J. Greven,
Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land , and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts
(1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years: Dedham ,
Massachusetts, /636-/736 (1970); Sumner Chilton Powell , Puritan Village (1965); and
Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure
in Eighteenth-Century New England (1976). On the role of women: Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England,
1650-1750 ( 1982); Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The' 'Weaker Sex'' in Seventeenth-
Century New England (1980); and Julia Cherry Spruill, Women's Life and Work in the
Southern Colonies ( 1938). On education and intellectual life: Samuel Eliot Morison,
The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (1936); Bernard Bailyn, Education in the
Forming of American Society (1960); Kenneth A. Lockridge , Litera cy in Colonial New
England (1974); and Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(1939) and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953). On religion: David
Hall, The Faithful Shepherd : A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth
Century ( 1972); and David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusia sm in the New World (1985). On
old age: David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (1977); John Demos, "Old Age
in Early New England," in John Demos and Sarane Spence Boocock (eds.), Turning
Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (1978); and David Hackett
Fischer, Growing Old in America (1977). On the economy and demographics: Gary M.
474 NOTES ON SOURCES

Walton, "The Colonial Economy," in En; James A. Henretta, The Evolution of Amer-
ican Society, 1700-1815 (1973); and essays in Maris A. Vinovskis (ed.), Studies in
American Historical Demography (1979).

COLONIAL CYCLE REFERENCES. Shakespeare, Hamlet (c. 1600); Foxe, Book of Martyrs
(first English edition, 1563). On James I's notorious campaign against witchcraft, see
H. R. Trevor~Roper, "The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries," in Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (1967). Preparing for the
Puritans: The Reformation Cycle. Countless historians have referred to the "Refor-
mation generation"; for a thorough tour through every stripe of spiritual leader and
extremist sect (and a discussion of the Reformation's generational dimension), see George
Williams, The Radical Reformation (1967). Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the
Elizabethan Younger Generation (1966), 4-5, 66, 68, 185, 240-2 . The Colonial Cycle.
Aside from the afflicted girls and several local magistrates , we do not know for certain
who joined the large crowd that watched the September 22 executions at Salem. We
know that Stoughton and both Mathers had been present at previous executions and that
the New England elite-including Leverett , the Brattles, and the ailing Bradstreet in
Boston-took an avid interest in the trials . William Drummond (one of Bacon's rebel
leaders, executed in 1676 by William Berkeley), cited in Clifford Dowdey, The Virginia
Dynasties : The Emergence of ' 'King'' Carter and the Golden Age ( 1969), 85-6 . Thomas
Brattle had already been commended by Isaac Newton for his observations (at age 22)
on Halley's Comet in 1680. Quote on Leverett is from a eulogy by Nathaniel Appleton,
A Great Man Fallen in Israel (1724) .

PuRITAN BACKGROUND. For an overview of the Puritan peer personality : Edmund Mor-
gan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958); John Adair, Founding
Fathers: The Puritans in England and America (1982); David Leverenz, The Language
of Puritan Feeling (1980); Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (1968); Edmund
Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea ( 1963); Miller ( 1939); Larzer Ziff,
Puritanism in America (1973); Francis J . Bremer, The Puritan Experiment (1976); Andrew
Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (1989); and T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, "The Pu-
ritans' Greatest Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeenth-Century Mas-
sachusetts" (JAH, Jun 1973). On the sad story of the Puritan Chesapeake settlers:
"Looking Out for Number One," in Breen (1980); and Carville V. Earle, "Environment,
Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia," in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman
(eds.), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (1979). On the Puritans' European
background: Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (1972) and "Social
Mobility in England, 1500-1700" (Past and Present, Apr 1966); H. R. Trevor-Roper,
"Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change" and "The General Crisis of the Sev-
enteenth Century," in Trevor-Roper (1967); Esler (1966); and Christopher Hill, Society
and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1967) .

PuRITAN REFERENCES. Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630), in Edmund

Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas (1965), doc . 5. On age of New England settlers, see
"Moving to the New World," in Breen (1980). On age and mortality of Virginia settlers,
see Diamond (1958), and Irene W. D. Hecht, "The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 as a Source
for Demographic History" (WMQ, Jan 1973). Mayflower passengers quoted by Francis
NOTES ON SOURCES 475

Higginson, in A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethans in America ( 1959), 129-30. Cotton, God's

Promise to His Plantations ( 1634). Facts. Education : By 1640, there were 114 university
men in New England; for family ratio, see Morison (1930), 184. Hobbes, in Mark H .
Curtis, "The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England" (Past and Present, 1962).
Age of M.P .s: Stone (1972), 133. Women: Keith Thomas, "Women and the Civil War
Sects" (Past and Present, 1958); Lovejoy (1985), chs. 1-3; and Emery Battis, Saints
and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony (1962). Longevity : Fischer, (1977), 42-7; and John Demos, "Notes on Life
in Plymouth Colony" (WMQ, Apr 1965). Youth. George Herbert, Doomsday (pub.
posthumously, 1633). Joseph Hall, "A Puritane," in Characters of Virtues and Vices
(1608); see also "Malvolio" in William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601), and "Zeal-
of-the-Land Busy" in Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614). Leverenz (1980), 3-4; see
also Delbanco (1989). Coming of Age. Herbert, in Lovejoy (1985), 9; Winthrop, in
Morgan (1958), 12, 29. Rising Adulthood. On "love," see Hall (1972), 87, Breen and
Foster (1973), and Lockridge (1970) . Cotton, in Morison (1930), 116; Wheelwright, in
Lovejoy (1985), 84. Midlife. Morgan (1963), 129-30. Winthrop's famous "little speech"
(1645), in Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees : The Winthrop Dynasty of New
England, 1630-1717 (1962) , 24. Elderhood. "Cosmic optimism" appears in Miller,
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1961), 37-8; comment on John Eliot,
in Adair (1982), 248; Shepard, in ibid., 128.

CAVALIER BACKGROUND. For an outstanding analysis of the negative generational self-

image of New England Cavaliers, see Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan
New England (1975). See also Leverenz (1980), ch . 7; Delbanco (1989), ch . 7; and Perry
Miller, "Declension in a Bible Commonwealth," in Nature's Nation (1967). On the
Cavalier "literature of self-condemnation": Miller , Errand into the Wilderness (1956).
On the southern Cavalier: the excellent essays in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman
(eds.), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (1979); Warren M . Billings (ed .),
The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-
1689 (1975); and Dowdey (1969). On Cavalier adventure: Alan Vance Briceland, West-
ward from Virginia: The Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frontier, 1650-17 JO
(1987); Frank Sherry, Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy (1986); and Cyrus
H . Karraker, Piracy Was a Business (1953). On the significance of King Philip's war to
midlife New Englanders: Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, So Dreadful a Judgment
(1978); Douglas Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War
(1958); and Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance
of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700 (1969) . On Bacon 's Rebellion: Wilcomb E.
Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel (1957).

CAVALIER REFERENCES. Josiah Coale, in Lovejoy (1985), 116; most of Lovejoy's

"Quakers of the First Generation" were Cavaliers. On vital statistics in the Chesapeake:
Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, " 'Now -Wives and Sons-in-Law': Parental Death in a
Seventeenth-Century Virginia County," in Tate and Ammerman (1979) . Berkeley, in
Breen (1980), 128. Stone (1972), 133; he adds, "The unexpected conservatism of the
young is still puzzling ." On the age and timing of the servant migration to the Chesapeake:
Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (1971 ),
and review by Edmund Morgan (VM, Jul 1972). Fischer (1989); Richard S. Dunn,
476 NOTES ON SOURCES

Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-1717 (1962), vi,
191-2; Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955),
109. Facts. Odds for Maryland servant: Russell R. Menard , "From Servant to Freeholder:
Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland" (WMQ,
Jan 1973). Regional differences: Fischer (1989); and "Transfer of Culture," in T. H.
Breen (1980). Educational decline: the consensus of historians on New England's second
generation is summarized in Elliott (1975), 45-51. Harvard graduates: Morison (1930),
211. Youth. On Chesapeake servants: see Peter Wilson Coldham, "The 'Spiriting' of
London Children to Virginia: 1648-1685" (VM. Jul 1975); Marcus W. Jemegan, Laboring
and Dependent Classes in Colonial America , /607-1783 (1931); and Lois Green Carr
and Lorena S. Walsh, "The Planter's Wife: The Experiences of White Women in Sev-
enteenth-Century Maryland" (WMQ, Oct 1977). Revel, in Billings (1975), 137; Wig-
glesworth , in Richard M. Gummere, Seven Wise Men of America (1967), 32; Eleazar
Mather, in Elliott (1975), 18. Coming of Age. Miller (1953), 11; Richard Mather, in
ibid .. 28. For a sampling of "the bitter charges of the aging first-generation settlers
against their sons," see Elliott (1975); mayor of Bristol, in James Hom, "Servant Em-
igration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century," in Tate and Ammerman (1969);
Berkeley, in Dowdey (1969), ch . 2; Stoughton, New England 's True Interest (1670);
Handlin, "The Significance of the Seventeenth Century," in Paul Goodman (ed.), Essays
in American Colonial History (1967). Rising Adulthood. Winthrop, in Dunn (1962),
199-200 ; Mather, An Earnest Exhortation (1676). Midlife. On Cavalier collaboration
with James H's new regime, see Theodore B. Lewis, " Land Speculation and the Dudley
Council of 1686" (WMQ, Apr 1974). At least fifteen of the nineteen "witch" suspects
(two men, thirteen women) executed in Salem in 1692 appear to have been Cavaliers;
most of the accusers were younger. See John Demos, Entertaining Satan : Witchcraft and
the Culture of Early New England ( 1982); and Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of
a Woman (1987). From the 1660s on, the average age of witch suspects had been rising-
apparently tracking this cohort group over time. According to Demos, all fourteen Salem
suspects who had previously been accused of witchcraft were Cavaliers; in personality,
they were "abrasive in style, contentious in character-and stubbornly resilient in the
face of adversity." Elderhood. Selyns, in AmW; Mather, Pray for the Rising Generation
(1679); Tompson, New England 's Crisis (1676), in Slotkin and Folsom (1978), 215;
Scottow, Old Men's Tears for Their Own Declensions (1691); Burt, A Lamentation (pub.
posthumously, 1720); Wigglesworth, God 's Controversy with New England (1662); De-
mos (1978).

GLORIOUS BACKGROUND. On the history-shaping event that united them as a generation:

David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America ( 1972). On the first (King Wil-
liam's) war against France: Howard Peckham , The Colonial Wars 1689-1762 (1964).
On the social achievements of southern Glorious: "Horses and Gentlemen," in Breen
(1980); Carole Shammas, "English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Vir-
ginia," and David W. Jordan, "Political Stability and the Emergence of a Native Elite
in Maryland," both in Tate and Ammerman (1979); Jack P. Greene, "Foundations of
Political Power in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1720-1750," in T. H. Breen (ed.),
Shaping Southern Society: The Colonial Experience ( 1976); and Virginia Bernhard, ''Pov-
erty and the Social Order in Seventeenth-Century Virginia" (VM, Apr 1977). For New
England: Philip S. Haffenden, New England in the English Nation, 1689-17/5 .(1974);
NOTES ON SOURCES 477

and "War, Taxes, and Political Brokers, " in Breen (1980). On the tightening trend in
childhood and adolescence: Roger Thompson , " Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massa-
chusetts " (JFH, Summer 1984); and Lorena S. Walsh , " 'Till Death Us Do Part' :
Marriage and Family in Seventeenth-Century Maryland , " in Tate and Ammerman (1979) .
On changing attitudes toward sex roles: Spruill (1938) ; Ulrich , ( 1982), and "Vertuous
Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature , 1668-1735" (AQ, Winter 1976);
and Margaret W . Masson, "The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate:
Puritan Preaching, 1690-1730" (Signs, Winter 1976). On important parallels between
the world views of Cotton Mather and Robert Beverley : Richard S. Dunn, "Seventeenth-
Century English Historians of America, " in Smith (1959).

GLORIOUS REFERENCES. Colman , in Miller (1953) , 414; Thomas Shepard , Jr., Eye
Salve (1673); Wadsworth, in Miller (1953), 463 ; Mather , in ibid., 440, 410; Colman,
in AmW; Carter, in Dowdey (1969) , 220; Wadsworth , in Ulrich (1976). For the best
description of this elevation of "reason " and "g ood works ," see Miller (1953), chs.
14-16. On the compatibility of science and witchcraft : Sanford Fox, Science and Justice :
The Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials (1968) ; and Kenneth Silverman, The life and Times
of Cotton Mather (1984) . Facts. Election to town offices: Cook, Jr. (1976), 105-7 .
Virginia House of Burgesses: Henretta (1973) , 91. Youth. Virginia and Massachusetts
statutes, cited in Bailyn (1960), 26; Increase Mather , The Divine Right of Infant Baptism
( 1690); Oakes, New England Pleaded With (1673) . On the new attitude toward conversion :
"Beyond Conversionism," in Hall (1972); Perry Miller, " 'Preparation for Salvation'
in Seventeenth-Century New England" (Journal of the History of Ideas, 1943); Robert
G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant : Church Membership in Puritan New England (1969);
and Perry Miller, "The Half-Way Covenant" (New England Quarterly, Dec 1933).
Oakes, The Unconquerable ... Soldier (1674); John Carter, in Dowdey (1969), 101.
Coming of Age. See Lovejoy (1972) ; Mather , in Miller (1953) , 159; "War , Taxes, and
Political Brokers," in Breen (1980); Mather, Addresses to Old Men and Young Men and
little Children (1690). Rising Adulthood. Cotton , A Meet Help (1699); Budd , Good
Order Established (1685) . Midlife. Wise, A Word of Comfort (1721). On economic
progress : Walton (1980); Henretta (1973); Terry L. Anderson, " Economic Growth in
Colonial New England" (JEH, Mar 1979); and David H . Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial
New England (1972) . On the establishment of slavery : Winthrop D . Jordan, White Over
Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro , 1550-1812 (1968); "A Changing Labor
Force and Race Relations in Virginia , 1660-1710," in Breen (1980); Paul C. Palmer,
"Servant into Slave: The Evolution of the Legal Status of the Negro Laborer in Colonial
Virginia" (South Atlantic Quarterly, Summer 1966); and James H. Brewer , "Negro
Property Owners in Seventeenth-Century Virginia" (WMQ, Oct 1955). Sewall, The
Selling of Joseph (1700); Sewall, in Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The
Abolition of Slavery in the North (I 967), 60 . Elderhood. Colman, in Miller (1953), 400;
sumptuary laws, Stannard (1977) , 115; Mather , in Stannard (1977) , 150, and in Demos
(1978). Colman, Sermon after the Funerals of Brattle and Pemberton (1717) ; Carter, in
Dowdey (1969) , 154.

ENLIGHTENMENT BACKGROUND. For two skillful portraits of the Enlightener peer per-
sonality-in two regions-see Peter N. Carroll , The Other Samuel Johnson : A Psycho-
history of Early New England (1978), and Kenneth A . Lockridge , The Diary, and life,
478 NOTES ON SOURCES

of William Byrd ll of Virginia, 1674-1744; see also "The Generations of the Golden
Age" and "Life in Thrall," in Clifford Dowdey, The Golden Age: A Climate for Great-
ness, Virginia 1732-1775 (1970). On the Enlighteners' impact on political life: William
Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (1981); Kenneth A.
Lockridge and Alan Kreider, "The Evolution of Massachusetts Town Government, 1640
to 1740" (WMQ. Oct 1966); Edward M. Cook, Jr., "Social Behavior and Changing
Values in Dedham, Massachusetts, 1700-1775" (WMQ, Oct 1970); and Jack P . Greene,
"The Growth of Political Stability," in John Parker and Carol Urness (eds.), The Amer-
ican Revolution: A Heritage of Change (l 973). On their impact on cultural and religious
life : James Truslow Adams, Provincial Society , 1690-1763 (1927); Thomas J. Werten-
baker, The Golden Age of Colonial Culture (1949); and J. William T. Youngs, Jr.,
"Congregational Clericalism: New England Ordinations Before the Great Awakening"
(WMQ. Jul 1974). On slavery: Allan Kulikoff, "The Beginnings of the Afro-American
Family in Maryland," in Land, Carr, and Papenfuse (eds.), Law, Society, and Politics
in Early Maryland (1977) .

ENLIGHTENMENT REFERENCES. "Speeches of the Students of the College of William

and Mary Delivered May I, 1699" (WMQ. Oct 1930); Pencak (1981), 61; Foxcroft, in
Miller ( 1953), 449; Appleton, Faithful Ministers ( 1743). Facts. Mobility in New England:
"Migration and the Family in Colonial New England : The View from Genealogies"
(JFH, 1984). Marriages in the South: Walsh (1979). Royal Society memberships: see
list in Morison (1936), 274-5 . Youth. On Johnson's "tame and pliable" youth, see
Carroll (l 978); on his later, critical reference to "bogeymen," see ibid .. 159. Willard,
A Child's Portion (1684); Mather, The Young Man's Preservative (1701). On the im-
plosion of family life in New England, see "Puritan Tribalism," in Morgan (1944).
Coming of Age. Miller (1953), 335. On coming-of-age behavior: Dowdey (1970) and
Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America,
1625-1742 (1968) . Rising Adulthood. Gazette, cited in ibid., 466; Paine (father of
Constitution signer Robert Treat Paine), in Miller (1953), 321; Henry Peacham, The
Complete Gentleman (1622); on Byrd II, see Lockridge (1987), 21. Greene (1973).
Midlife. Wigglesworth, in Miller (1953), 454; Niles, Tristitiae Ecclesiarum (1745);
Doolittle, A Short Narrative (1750); Henry Flynt on Appleton, in SHG, vol. V, Class of
1712; Dexter, in William T . Youngs, Jr., God's Messengers: Religious Leadership in
Colonial New England, 1700-1750 (1976), 128. Elderhood. Chauncy, in Miller (1953),
420; Johnson, in Carroll (1978), 140; Gay' s acquaintance, in SHG. vol. VI, Class of
1714; Perkins' letter in ibid .. vol. VI, Class of 1717; Greaves and Appleton, in ibid.,
vol. V, Class of 1703 and 1712; the (self-written) epitaph of Byrd II, in Alden Hatch,
The Byrds of Virginia (1969), 174-5 . The courtroom victory of printer Peter Zenger is
commonly cited as a pioneering victory for "freedom of the press."

CHAPTER 8: THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE

REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE BACKGROUND. See Boorstin (1958); Fischer (1989); Dowdey

(1970); John C. Miller , Origins of the American Revolution (1943); Rhys Isaac, The
Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982); Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible:
Social Change, Political Consciousness , and the Origins of the American Revolution
NOTES ON SOURCES 479

(1979); Marcus Cunliffe, The Nation Takes Shape: 1789-1837 (1959). On political lead-
ership: Cook ( 1976); James Kirby Martin, Men in Rebellion ( 1973); Jackson Turner Main,
Political Parties Before the Constitution (1973); and H. and James Henderson, Party
Politics in the Continental Congress (1974) . On family life and generational themes:
Edwin G. Burroughs and Michael Wallace, "The American Revolution: The Ideology
and Psychology of National Liberation" (Perspectives in American History, 1972); Jay
Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Au-
thority, 1750-1800 (1982); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution
(1981); Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical
Imagination (1978); Melvin Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ide-
ology and the Beginnings of the American Republic ( 1985); Daniel Blake Smith, "The
Study of the Family in Early America: Trends, Problems, and Prospects" (WMQ, Jan
82); and Rhys Isaac, "Order and Growth, Authority and Meaning in Colonial New
England" (AHR, Feb-Jun 1971). On community life: Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan
to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1970); Greven
(1970); Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter life in Eighteenth-Century
Chesapeake Society (1980); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (1968) and Cities
in Revolt: Urban life in America, 1743-1776 (1955); Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable
Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (1970); Christine Leigh Heyr-
man, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts,
1690- 1750 (1984); Douglas Lamar Jones, Village and Seaport: Migration and Society
in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (1981); Gregory H. Nobles, Divisions Throughout
the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1740-1775 (1983);
and Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (1976). On the role of women:
Mary Beth Norton, liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American
Women, 1750-1800 (1980); Elaine F. Crane, "Dependence in the Era of Independence:
The Role of Women in a Republican Society," in Jack P. Greene (ed.), The American
Revolution (1987); Joan Hoff Wilson, "The Illusion of Change: Women and the American
Revolution," in Alfred F. Young (ed.), The American Revolution (1976); and Linda K.
Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980).
On childhood and education: Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of
Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (1977); Edward
Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (1975); Lockridge (1974); Lawrence A.
Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (1970); James Axtell,
The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (1974); Peter
Gregg Slater, Children in the New England Mind (1977); John F. Roche, The Colonial
Colleges in the War for American Independence (1986); and Melvin Yazawa, "Creating
a Republican Citizenry," in Green (1987). On religion: Lovejoy (1985); William G.
McLoughlin, "The Role of Religion in the Revolution," in Stephen G. Kurtz and James
H. Hutson, Essays on the American Revolution ( 1973); Cushing Strout, The New Heavens
and New Earth: Political Religion in America (1973); John F. Berens, Providence and
Patriotism in Early America, /640-1815 (1978); and Nathan 0. Hatch, The Sacred Cause
of liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England ( 1977).

REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE REFERENCES. Langdon, Government Corrupted by Vice, and

Recovered by Righteousness (delivered in Watertown, May 31, 1775). The exact text of
Langdon's sermon in Cambridge sixteen days later has not survived, but we can safely
480 NOTES ON SOURCES

assume it was (if possible) even more vehement; the next day, Langdon visited and prayed
with the wounded. Prescott, in AmB. Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of
Religion in New England (1743). Bellamy in Heimert (1966), 471; Hawley, in ibid.,
470; Morgan, in North Callahan, Daniel Morgan, Ranger of the Revolution (1961), 25.
Cecilia M. Kenyon, "Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Rep-
resentative Government" (WMQ, 1955). Brackenridge portion of Brackenridge and Philip
Freneau, The Rising Glory of America (1771 ); Evans, A Discourse Delivered in New
York (1784), in Royster (1979), 246; John Adams to Jefferson (Aug 24, 1815), in Lester
J. Cappon (ed.), The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959); Rush, An Address to the People
of the United States ( 1787); Dwight, America ( 1772); Morgan, ''The American Revolution
Considered as an Intellectual Movement," in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Morton
White (eds.), Paths of American Thought (1963). Adams, in Samuel Flagg Bemis, John
Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1949), 28; Jackson,
"Announcement to His Soldiers" (1812), cited in Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and
Children (1975), 14; Webster, in Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate (1987), 35.

AWAKENING BACKGROUND. Any effort to understand this generation must begin with
the event that shaped them as rising adults. For the big picture: McLoughlin (1979), ch.
3; J. M. Bumsted and John E. Van de Wetering , What Must I Do to Be Saved? : The
Great Awakening in Colonial America (1976); and Cedric B. Cowing, The Great Awak-
ening and the American Revolution ( 1971). For finer detail: Bushman ( 1970); Nobles
(1981); Heyrmann (1984); Nash (1979); Harry S. Stout, "The Great Awakening in New
England Reconsidered: The New England Clergy" (}SH, Fall 1974); James Walsh, "The
Great Awakening in the First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut" (WMQ,
Oct 1971); J. M. Bumsted, "Religion, Finance, and Democracy in Massachusetts: The
Town of Norton as a Case Study" (}AH, Mar 1971); and Cowing, "Sex and Preaching
in the Great Awakening" (AQ, Fall 1968). The definitive description of the evangelical
(and, implicitly, generational) link between the Great Awakening and the Revolution is
Alan Heimerl, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the
Revolution (l 966); see also McLoughlin (1973); Strout (1973); Behrens (1978); Hatch
(l 977); Miller, "From the Covenant to the Revival," in Nature's Nation ( 1967); Morgan,
"The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution" (WMQ, 1967); and Harry S. Stout,
"Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution"
(WMQ, Oct 1967). For the best biographical prototype of the Awakener peer personality,
see Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in
Eighteenth-Century New England (1979).

AWAKENING REFERENCES. Post on Davenport, cited in Nash (1979), 210; Salem min-
ister, in ibid ., 212; Bushman (1970), 187, and (ed.) The Great Awakening (1970), xi.
French diplomat Barbe Marbois on Benezet during the Revolution, in AmW; for preaching
"hate" and much more, see "Samuel Adams," in SHG, vol. X, Class of 1740; Franklin,
entry for c. 1721 in Autobiography ( 1790). Edward Everett ( 1835) on Adams in Pauline
Maier, The Old Revolutionaries (1980), 47; John Adams on Sherman, in AmB; for
Edwards, see Heimerl (1966); Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974).
Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (1750); Hawley, in Shaw
NOTES ON SOURCES 481

(1981) , 145; Trumbell, in AmB; Oliver, esp . in Origin and Progress of the American
Revolution : A Tory View (unpublished until 1961); Curwen and Auchmuty, both cited in
AmW. Facts. New churches , and numbers and ages of conversions: Cowing (1971), I;
Bumsted and Wetering (1976), ch. 7; Walsh (1971); and Strout (1973), 41. "Age of
Presbyterians: Research of William H. Kenney," in ibid. , 39. College students: SHG.
Publications : Hatch (1977), 39; and Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial
Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 ( 1985), 22. Women : see Rosemary R. Ruether
and Rosemary S. Keller , Women and Religion in America, vol. 2: The Colonial and
Revolutionary Periods ( 1981). Age of office-holding: Cook, Jr. (1976), 185-6; and Gross
(1976), 62-3. Witherspoon: Cremin (1970), 301. Youth. Cotton Mather, A Family Well-
Ordered (1699). On the attachment of many young Awakeners-especially evangeli-
cals-to their mothers. see Greven (1977), part 2; Whitefield, in ibid ., 24; Adams, in
AmB and in Ralph Volney Harlow, Samuel Adams , Promoter of the American Revolution :
A Study in Psychology and Politics (1975). Edwards, in Richard L. Bushman, "Jonathan
Edwards as Great Man,' ' in Robert J. Brugger (ed.), Our Selves/Our Past: Psychological
Approaches to History (1981); Woolman, in Edwin H. Cady, John Woolman (1965), 27.
Boston press, cited in Bridenbaugh (1968), 388-9; Nash (1979), 133. Coming of Age.
Edwards, Faithful Narrative (1737); Chauncy (1743); Tennent, The Danger of an Un-
converted Ministry (1740); Finley, in Greven ( 1977), 116-7; Edwards, in Heimert (1966),
62; Franklin. in Nash (1979), 220 . Rising Adulthood. Adams, in Maier (1980), 34;
Livingston, Philosophic Solitude ( 1747); Carter, in "Introduction" to Jack P . Greene
(ed.), The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter (1965); Pemberton, in Heimert (1966), 30;
Bland, A Modest and True State of the Case ( 1753); Fothergill, in Peter Brock, Pioneers
of the Peaceable Kingdom (1968), 128. Midlife. Bellamy, in Heimert (1966), 344-5.
Analogy between "Committees" and "communion of colonies" made by Mayhew in
1766; see Strout (1973), 70-71. On "college enthusiasm," see Beverly McAnear, "Col-
lege Founding in the American Colonies, 1745-1775" (Mississippi Valley Historical
Review, 1955); on " civic enthusiasm," see Max Savelle, Seeds of liberty: The Genesis
of the American Mind (1948), and Richard L. Merritt, Symbols of American Community,
1735-1775 (1966). Witherspoon, in Roche (1986), 29; Parsons , in Heimert (1966), 421;
Hawley, in ibid., 472. Elderhood. Adams, in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the
American Republic , 1776-1787 ( 1972), 123-4, and in Maier (1980) . On Calvinistic piety
in the Continental Congress, see Strout (1973), 67-8. Bellamy, in Heimert (1966), 471.
Sherman, A Short Sermon on the Duty of Self-Examination ( 1789); Adams, in Maier
(1980); Carter, in Greene (1965). On the Awakener role in the slavery question, see
Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation : The Abolition of Slavery in the North ( 1967);
on the new Awakener attitude toward death, see Stannard (l 977). Hatch, "The Origins
of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the
Revolution" (WMQ. Jul 1974); Heimert (1966), 12; Edwards, in ibid., 59 . Franklin on
seal: see Berens (1978) , 107.

LIBERTY BACKGROUND. For insights into the Liberty ' s basic connection to history, see
"On Faith and Generations in Revolutionary Politics," in Maier ( 1980); Kenyon ( 1955);
Jack P. Greene, "Search for Identity " (JSH, Winter 1969-70); C. A. Weslager, The
Stamp Act Congress ( 1976); Robert M. Weir, "Who Shall Rule at Home: The American
Revolution as a Crisis of Legitimacy for the Colonial Elite" (JIH , Spring 1976); John
482 NOTES ON SOURCES

W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots (1986); Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-Federalists
(1961 ); and J . E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: Conceptualization of Economic Life in
Eighteenth Century America (1974) . On their coming-of-age experience with war: Fred
Anderson, A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War
(1984); James G . Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits (1970); and John Ferling,
"Soldiers for Virginia: Who Served in the French and Indian War" (VM, Jul 1986). On
their reputation for riot and violence: Richard Maxwell Brown, "Violence and the Amer-
ican Revolution," in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, Essays on the American
Revolution (1973), and "Back Country Rebellions and the Homestead Ethic in America,
1740-1799," in Brown and Don E. Fehrenbacher (eds.), Tradition, Conflict, and Mod-
ernization: Perspectives on the American Revolution (1977); Maier, "Popular Uprisings
and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America" (WMQ, Jan 1970); Douglas Green-
berg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691-1776 (1976); and
Jesse Lemisch, "Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary
America" (WMQ, Jul 1968).

LIBERTY REFERENCES. Washington, in John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of

George Washington (1988), 26, 54; Adams' diary, in Greven (1977), 251; Wolfe to Lord
George Sackville (1759), in Weir ( 1976); Awakener chaplain was John Cleaveland, cited
in Anderson (1984), 217. For historian on Sears, see Maier (1980), 64. Landon Carter,
in Greene (1965); Benjamin Franklin, in Sheila L. Skemp, "William Franklin: His
Father's Son" (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Apr 1985); Bartlett,
in Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War (1979), 272; Adams' diary, in Weir
(1976); Adams to Jefferson, in Donald E . Cooke, Fathers of America's Freedom (1969),
15. On new words for the elderly, see Fischer (1978), ch. 2. Henry, in Robert Douthat
Meade, Patrick Henry, Patriot in the Making (1969), vol. 2, 35. Dickinson, The American
Liberty Song (1768); Warren, The Massachusetts Song of Liberty (1770); Hopkinson, My
Days Have Been So Wondrous Free (1759). For "Liberty" theme in rioting, see Shaw
(1981). Facts. Diphtheria and child mortality rate : Greven (1970), ch. 7; Axtell (1974),
73-5; Maris A. Vinovskis, "Angels Heads and Weeping Willows: Death in Early Amer-
ica," in Vinovskis (1979); and John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (1953). War
casualties : Nash (1979), 245; Anderson (1984); and Lydon (1970), ch. 9. Drinking and
crime: Bridenbaugh (1955) and (1968); and W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic
(1979) . Riots: Brown (1973); and Maier (1970) . The six Continental Congress delegates
accused of treason were Robert Alexander, Andrew Allen, Isaac Low, John Joachim
Zubly, William Samuel Johnson, and Silas Deane; the last two were later acquitted
(Johnson soon enough to become a Constitution signer, Deane over fifty years after his
death). "Localism": Main (1973), esp. Appendix. Youth. Johnson, Elementa Philo-
sophica (1752); Chauncy (1743). Edwards, Conversions and Revival in New England
(1740); Edwards' aggressive campaign against "immoral books" in the hands of youth
led directly to his resignation from Northampton's church in 1750. Eliot, An Evil and
Adulterous Generation (1753), which dealt mostly with youth vices; Franklin, Poor
Richard's Almanac (1733-58). See Douglas Lamar Jones, "The Strolling Poor: Tran-
siency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts" (]SH, Spring 1975). For the unprecedented
erosion of family authority over children during this period , see "A Note on the Historical
Family," in Burroughs and Wallace (1972), Moran and Vinovskis (1982), Isaac (1971),
Greven (l 970), Bushman (1970), Lockridge (1970), and Smith (1980). Coming of Age.
NOTES ON SOURCES 483

DeLancey , in Nash ( 1979), 237; British officers, in Anderson (1984) and Ferling (1986);
William Pencak , War, Politics , and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (1981), 122.
Rising Adulthood. Colden , in Arthur M. Schlesinger , "The Aristocracy in Colonial
America, " in Goodman ( 1967); Carter, in Greene (1965); Franklin, in Nash (1979), 283;
John Eliot on Samuel Adams , in Maier (l 980), 6. See Emory G . Evans, "Planter
Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia" (WMQ, Oct 1962). " Vir-
ginians are ... ," cited by Rhys Isaac, "Preachers and Patriots: Popular Culture and the
Revolution in Virginia," in Alfred F. Young (ed.) , The American Revolution (1976);
Boone, in Appendix to John Filson , Discovery , Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky
(1784). Midlife. Harrison, in Cooke (1969), 54; Washington to Lund Washington (Dec
17, 1776), in Ferling (1988), 181; Mason, Virginia "Declaration of Rights" (1776);
Banastre Tarleton on Francis Marion ("as for this damned old fox, the Devil himself
could not catch him"), cited in Hugh F. Rankin , Francis Marion : The Swamp Fo.x (1973),
113: " ... like a Christian or a gentleman" appears in David C . Whitney , The Colonial
Spirit of '76 (1974) , 296; Henry , in Maier (l 980), 289; see also Kenyon (1955) and Main
(1973) . Elderhood. Jefferson on Washington, in David C. Whitney , The American
Presidents ( 1967), 3. Washington, Farewell Address (I 796) ; Fischer ( 1977), 93,. 88;
Adams to Benjamin Rush (1809), in Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of
Progress (1952), l ; Adams on "great men," in Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the
New Land: The American Experience since 1790 (1978) , 32; Stiles, in Edwin Gaustad,
"Society and the Great Awakening in New England" (WMQ . Oct 1954); see also Darline
Shapiro, "Ethan Allen: Philosopher-Theologian to a Generation of American Revolu-
tionaries" (WMQ, Apr 1964). Emerson, in Kammen (1978), 104.

REPUBLICAN BACKGROUND. For a penetrating lifecycle analysis of this generation, see

Peter Charles Hoffer , Revolution and Regeneration: life Cycle and the Historical Vision
of the Generation of 1776 (1983). For other central themes in the Republican peer
personality: title essay of Trevor Colboum (ed .), Fame and the Founding Fathers : Essays
by Douglass Adair ( 1974): Catherine Albanese , Sons of the Fathers : The Civil Religion
of the American Revolution (1976); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "The Founding
Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution" (Political Science Quarterly, Jun 1961); John
M. Murrin, "Self-Interest Conquers Patriotism: Republicans, Liberals , and Indians Re-
shape the Nation," in Jack P. Greene (ed.), The American Revolution (1987); Garry
Wills, Inventing America (1978): and Jan Lewis, "Domestic Tranquillity and the Man -
agement of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia' ' (WMQ , Jan 1982).
On their participation in war and victory: Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at
War: The Continental Army and American Character , 1775-1783 (1979); the excellent
essays in John Ferling (ed.), The World Turned Upside Down: The American Victory in
the War of Independence (1988); and John R. Yan Atta, "Conscription in Revolutionary
Virginia" (VM. Jul 1984). On their generational achievements in politics and culture:
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976), parts 3-4; David Lundberg and
Henry F. May, "The Enlightened Reader in America" (AQ, Summer 1976); Richard
Buel, Jr. , Securing the Republic: Ideology in American Politics , 1789-1815 ( 1972); Russel
Blaine Nye, The Cultural life of the New Nation , 1776-1830 (1960); Lester H. Cohen,
"Creating a Usable Future: The Revolutionary Historians and the National Past," in
Greene (1987); and David H. Fischer, "The Myth of the Essex Junto" (WMQ, Apr
1964).
484 NOTES ON SOURCES

REPUBLICAN REFERENCES. Humphreys, The Glory of America (1783); song of New

York recruits, in Royster (1979), 8; ibid., 8; see Julian P. Boyd, "Thomas Jefferson's
'Empire of Liberty'" (Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1948); Morgan (1967); Jay
to John Lowell (1796), in David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conserv-
atism (1965), 9; Madison and Gallatin, in AmB; Hamilton, in Vernon L. Parrington, The
Colonial Mind (1927; 1954, vol. I), 309-10; William Wirt on Marshall, inAmB; Barlow,
The Canal: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy (1802);
Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1960), 29; see "Roman Virtue," in
Howard Mumford Jones, 0 Strange New World (1952); Knox, in AmB; Hale, in ibid.;
Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt (1804), in George Seldes (ed.), The Great Thoughts
(1985), 209; see John P. Diggins, "Slavery, Race, and Equality: Jefferson and the Pathos
of the Enlightenment" (AQ, Summer 1976). Facts. Nutrition and height: Robert W.
Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, and James Trussel, "Exploring the Uses of Data on Height,"
and Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Georgia C. Villaflor, "The Early Achievement of Modem
Stature in America" (Social Science History, Fall 1982); and S. F. McMahon, "Pro-
visions Laid Up for the Family: Toward a History of Diet in New England, 1650-1850"
(Historical Methods, Winter 1981). Colleges and clerical callings: Roche (1986), 9.
Freemasonry: Albanese (1976), ch. 4; and Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American
Revolution, 1763-1783 (1941), 100-1. Town offices: Cook (1976), 105-7, 191. Age of
"Federalists": Elkins and McKitrick (1961). Hamilton, in Albanese (1976), 203. "Ven-
eration": Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). On Samuel
Wilson, alias "Uncle Sam," see AmB . Youth. Fliegelman (1982), 22. On sudden rise
in numbers of tutors in New York City and Philadelphia, see Cremin (1970), 539; on
domestic colleges, see McAnear (1955) and Smith (1980). Witherspoon, in Cremin
(1970), 300; Marshall, in AmB; on Jefferson, see Dowdey (1970), 197, 241-2; Kenneth
S. Lynn, A Divided People (1977), 68. Coming of Age. Dwight, Columbia (final version
appeared in 1783); ballad in 1779, cited in Albanese (1976), 56; Rush to William Peterkin
(1784), in Yazawa (1987); Randolph, in Maier (1980), 289; The Federalist (Mar-May,
1788): seventy-seven essays, of which Hamilton wrote fifty-one, Madison twenty-nine,
and Jay five. Rising Adulthood. "Caesar," "Lycurgus," and "Publius" were popular
pamphlet pseudonyms; "mechanical courage," in Royster (1979), 227. Webster, in
Norman Risjord, Forging the American Republic, 1760-1815 (1973), 245. On "female"
monarchism and "male" republicanism, see Greven (1977), part 5; Federalists on Jef-
ferson and France, in Fliegelman (1982), 234; Jefferson on Adams' Presidency, in Merrill
D. Peterson, Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue (1976), 82; historian Crane
(1987) on Jefferson; Hitchcock, An Oration: Delivered July 4, 1788, cited in Albanese
(1976), 209. Midlife. Jefferson, first inaugural address (Mar 4, 1801); Joel Barlow, The
Columbiad (1807); Livingston, in AmB . Elderhood. Marshall, in ibid.; Madison, in
Marshall Smelser, The Democratic Republic, 1801-1850 (1968), 187; Jefferson, in Nye
(1960), 31; and in Peterson (1987), 128; Jefferson to Martha Jefferson (1787), in Morgan
(1967); Freneau, in Hoffer (1983), 129; Humphreys, in ibid., 121; Gallatin (at age 88),
in Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age (1981), 227; Jefferson, in Hoffer (1983), 123;
Hamilton, in The Federalist (1788), no. 15; Pickering, in Hoffer (1983), 87; "happify,"
in Webster, The American Spelling Book (1798), cited in Fliegelman (1982), 161; Web-
ster's "empire of reason" (1789), in Hoffer (1983), 58; Rush, in Jacqueline S. Reinier,
"Rearing the Republican Child: Attitudes and Practices in Post-Revolutionary Philadel-
phia" (WMQ, Jan 82).
NOTES ON SOURCES 485

COMPROMISE BACKGROUND, Except perhaps for the unconventional approach of Mi-

chael Paul Rogin, Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975),
no major efforts have been made to describe the overall Compromiser lifecycle and peer
personality . For penetrating biographical insights: Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Trium-
virate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1987); Irving H. Bartlett, Daniel Webster (1978);
Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign
Policy (1949); and Burke Davis, Old Hickory: A Life of Andrew Jackson (1977). On the
Compromiser "second-generation" approach to politics: Cunliffe (1959); Leonard D.
White, The Jeffersonians (1951); David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American
Conservatism (1965); Robert V. Remini, The Revolutionary Age of Andrew Jackson
(1976); and Matthew A. Crensen, The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in
Jacksonian America ( 1975). Changes in their attitudes toward family, culture, religion,
and sex roles are addressed by Fliegelman (1982); Smith (1980); Norton (1980); Kerber
(1980); Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860" (AQ, Summer
1966); Claudia Goldin, "The Economic Status of Women in the Early Republic" (Journal
of Interdisciplinary Studies, Winter 1980); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American
Culture (1977); Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness : Family and Values in Jefferson 's
Virginia (1983); Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Phi-
losophy, 1805-1861 (1970); and David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social
Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971) . For their social environment during
midlife and beyond, see source notes for Chapter 9, esp. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The
Age of Jackson (1945); Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and
Politics (1985); and Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age (1981).

COMPROMISE REFERENCES, Webster, Bunker Hill Monument speech (1825), cited in

Kammen ( 1978), 17; Jefferson, in Meriwether Lewis, The Expedition of Lewis and Clark
(1814, 1966), xiv, vii; for references to "post-heroic" and "second" generation, see
Rogin ( 1975), Kammen (1978), Lewis (1983), Fischer (1965), and Remini (1976);
Beecher, in Hatch (1977), 174. Jackson on the Tariff of 1828, in Robert Remini, Andrew
Jackson (1966), 118; Crenson (1975), 159; Walter Channing (William ' s brother) sug-
gested that "the blame" for poverty "goes to society itself"-cited in Rothman (1971),
173. John William Ward, Andrew Jackson : Symbol for an Age (1953), 49-50 . John
Randolph, Gregg's Motion to Annex Florida (House of Representatives; Mar 6, 1806);
Rogin (1975), 50; Channing, The Union (1829); Garrison, in Vernon L. Parrington, The
Romantic Revolution in America (1927; 1954, vol. 2), 325. Clay, in Peterson (1987),
469; Webster, in Bartlett (1978), 33; Taylor, in Silas Bent McKinley and Silas Bent,
Old Rough and Ready: The Life and Times of Zachary Taylor (1946), 286. Facts.
Romantic themes in magazines: Herman R. Lantz et al., "Pre-Industrial Patterns in the
Colonial Family in America: A Content Analysis of Colonial Magazines" (American
Sociological Review , Jun 1968), and "The Preindustrial Family in America: A Further
Examination of Early Magazines" (American Journal of Sociology, Nov 1973). Romantic
novels: Nye (1960), 247-58; and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in
England, 1500-1800 (1977), 318, 284. Age of generals in Warof 1812: Smelser (1968),
227, 319. Wise (1834), in Kammen (1978), 15. Women's education: Norton (1980),
268, 287-9; see also Linda K. Kerber, " Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for
the Republic, 1787-1805," in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (eds.), The Hofstadter
Aegis (1974). Political lexicon: Cunliffe (1959), 178-9. Workforce engaged in farming:
486 NOTES ON SOURCES

Paul David, "The Growth of Real Product in the United States Before 1840: New
Evidence, Controlled Conjectures" (JEH, Jun 1965). Fertility and divorce: evidence
summarized in Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions (1988), 51-2,
61. Relative wealth as elders: evidence summarized in Fischer (1977), 229. Youth. Clay,
in Peterson (1987), 8-9; on the new importance of ''respectability,' ' see Jeannette Mirsky
and Allan Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney (1952), 3-4 . Coming of Age. Randolph,
in OxA, 367; Adams in letter to Columbian Centinel (1793), in Bemis (1949), 36; Webster,
in Bartlett (1978), 33. On "old maids," see Pessen (1985), 47; Southgate, in Mary
Cable, The Little Darlings (1972), 64. On Webster, see Bartlett (1978), 38 . Clay, in
Clement Eaton, Henry Clay (1957), 61. Rising Adulthood. Webster, in George B. Forgie,
Patricide in the House Divided : A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age
(1979), 82; Wirt, in White (1951), 346; on "standing" versus "running" for office, see
Fischer (1965); on "the cult of true womanhood," see Welter (1966). Midlife. Irving,
in Parrington (1927; 1954, vol. 2), 201; Tocqueville (1835, 1945), vol. 2, 275-8, 35;
Cooper (1837), in Eaton (1957), 137; Emerson (1837), in Nye (1960), 293; Stevens, in
Alphonse Miller, Thaddeus Stevens (1939), 97-8; Morison, in OxA, 574; Hale et al., in
Douglas (1977), 52-5 . Elderhood. Clay, in Remini (1976), 159; Scott, letter to W . H.
Seward (Mar 3, 1861); Hone, in Smith (1981), 1079; Buchanan, in Kenneth M. Stampp
(ed.), The Causes of the Civil War (1986), 84. Richard Henry Dana on Webster, in Smith
(1981), 1088.

CHAPTER 9: THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE

CIVIL WAR CYCLEBACKGROUND. See Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age : A Peo-
ple's History of the Ante-Bel/um Years (1981), and Trial by Fire : A People's History of
the Civil War and Reconstruction (1982); James MacGregor Burns, The Workshop of
Democracy (1986); J.C . Furnas, The Americans: A Social History of the United States
(1969); Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America : Society, Personality, and Politics (1985);
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945); Richard Hofstadter, The American
Political Tradition ( 1948), chs. 5- 7; Robert V. Remini, The Revolutionary Age of Andrew
Jackson (1987); Clement Eaton (ed.), The Leaven of Democracy (1963); David Brion
Davis (ed.), Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology (1979); essays in
Kenneth M. Stampp, The Causes of the Civil War (1974); James M. McPherson, Battle
Cry of Freedom (1988); Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (1935); Daniel Boorstin,
The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973); John Chamberlain, The Enterprising
Americans : A Business History of the United States (1961); John Hope Franklin, From
Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (1980); C. Vann Woodward, The
Burden of Southern History (1960); and Francis Simkins and Charles Rowland, A History
of the South (1972). On political leadership: essays in James L. Bugg, Jr., and Peter C.
Stewart (eds.), Jacksonian Democracy (1976); Dumas Malone and Basil Rauch, Crisis
of the Union, 1841-1877 (1960); John L. Hammond, The Politics of Benevolence : Revival
Religion and American Voting Behavior (1979); and W. R. Brock, An American Crisis:
Congress and Reconstruction, 1865-1867 (1963). On family, community life, and the
role of women: Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida, New
York, 1790-1865 (1981); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions : A
NOTES ON SOURCES 487

Social History of American Family Life ( 1988); Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth :
Law and Family in Nineteenth Century America (1985); Carl Degler, At Odds: Women
and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (1980); Ann Douglas, The
Feminization of American Culture ( 1977); essays in Michael Gordon (ed .), The American
Family in Socio-Historical Perspective (2nd ed., 1978); and Herbert G. Gutman, The
Black Family in Slavery and Freedom , 1750-1925 (1976) . On childhood and education:
Mary Cable, The Little Darlings (1975); Joseph Hawes and Ray Hiner, Growing Up in
America: Children in Historical Perspective (1985); Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage : Ad-
olescence in America , 1790 to the Present ( 1977); Robert M. Menne!, Thorns and Thistles:
Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825-1940 (1973); Oscar Handlin, Facing
Life: Youth and the Family in American History (1971); essays in Harvey J. Graff (ed.),
Growing Up in America ( 1987); Carl F. Kaestle , Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools
and American Society. 1780-1860 (1983); David Nasaw, Schooled to Order (1979);
Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (1962); and Lewis
Feuer, The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements
(1969), ch. 7. On religion : Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American
People (1975 ); Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial
Role (1968); Cushing Strout, The New Heavens and New Earth: Political Religion in
America (1973); and essays in William O'Neill (ed.), Insights and Parallels: Problems
and Issues of American Social History (1973). On old age: Andrew Achenbaum, Old
Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 ( 1978); David Hackett Fischer,
Growing Old in America ( 1977), William Graebner, A History of Retirement ( 1980); and
Daniel Scott Smith. "Old Age and the 'Great Transformation': A New England Case
Study," in Stuart F. Spicker et al. (eds.), Aging and the Elderly (1978) .

CIVIL WAR CYCLE REFERENCES. ''C orkscrew sensation'' appears in McPherson ( 1988),
344; Riddle, in ibid., 345; on expression "baptism of blood," see Charles Reagan Wilson,
Baptized in Blood : The Religion of the Lost Cause , /865-1920 (1980) ; Jackson, in
McPherson (1988), 455; Holmes, in T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (1981), 124.
Pessen (1985), 70; Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization ( 1927,
1933 ed.) , vol. II, ch. 18.

TRANSCENDENTAL BACKGROUND. For the best overall portraits of the Transcendental

peer personality : George B. Forgie , Patricide in the House Divided : A Psychological
Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (1979); Peter Walker, Moral Choices : Memory,
Desire , and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Abolition ( 1978); Lois Banner, "Religion
and Reform in the Early Republic " (AQ, Dec 1971); William G . McLoughlin, "The
Second Great Awakening," in Revivals, Awakenings , and Reforms (1978); James Moor-
head, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869 (1978);
Tuveson (1968); O'Neill (1973); Strout (1973); see also Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A
Problem in American Institutional Life (2nd ed ., 1968), and 1. G. Randall, "The Blun-
dering Generation" (Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Jun 1940). For revealing
biographies: Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln : The Prairie Years and the War Years
(one-vol. ed. , 1954); Charles Sellers, James K. Polk: Jacksonian, 1795-/843 (1957);
Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of
Reform (1980); Alphonse B. Miller, Thaddeus Stevens (1939); Clifford Clark, Jr., Henry
 488 NOTES ON SOURCES

Ward Beecher (1978); and Julius Silberger , Jr., Mary Baker Eddy (1981) . On social,
religious, and literary movements: John M. Whitworth, God's Blueprints: A Sociological
Study of Three Utopian Sects (1975); Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social
Movement, 1830-1850 (1981 ); Laurence Veysey (ed.), The Perfectionists: Radical Social
Thought in the North, 1815-1860 (1973); David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum
(1971); Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (1963);
Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham
and Health Reform (1980); Vernon L. Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America,
1800-1860 (1927; 1954, vol. 2); Yan Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England
(1936); Perry Miller (ed.), The American Transcendentalists (1957); and essays by Nina
Baym and Lawrence Buell in ClH. On feminism: Miriam Gurko , The ladies of Seneca
Falls: The Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement (1974); Rosemary R. Ruether and
Rosemary S. Keller, Women and Religion in America, vol. I; Margo Hom, "'Sisters
Worthy of Respect': Family Dynamics and Women's Roles in the Blackwell Family"
(JFH; vol. 8, 1983); and Irene Quenzler Brown, "Death, Friendship, and Female Identity
During New England's Second Great Awakening" (JFH; vol. 12, 1987).

TRANSCENDENTAL REFERENCES. Emerson, life and letters in New England (1867);

"madmen ... ," in Parrington (1927; 1954, vol. 2), 337; Poe, in Yan Wyck Brooks,
The World of Washington Irving (1944), 453. "Hair parted in the middle ... " is from
George William Curtis (born 1824), cited in Smith (1981), 675-6; of all the early Brook
Farm members with known birthdates, Curtis was the only one not born between 1797
and 1820-see Rose (1981), Appendix C. Hawthorne, Blithesdale Romance (1852) and
Hawthorne, in Smith (1981 ), 986-7. Emerson, "Circles," in Essays, First Series (1841);
Emerson, Journals, in Randall (1940); Emerson's "not a book ... ," in Russel Blaine
Nye, The Cultural life of the New Nation (1960), 111; Seward, speech at Rochester,
New York (Oct 25, 1858), in Stampp (1959), 105; Sherman, in Sandburg (1954), 661;
Garrison, in Strout (1973), 163; Emerson, "Fate," in Conduct of life (1860); Thoreau,
in Forgie (1979), 95; Parker , in ibid. , 89; Herndon, letter to Charles Sumner (1860), in
Stampp (1959), 106; Emerson, "The Transcendentalist" (1842 lecture, first published
in The Dial in Jan 1843); Holmes, in Brooks Atkinson (ed.), The Selected Writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1940), xv; Seward, Senate speech (Mar 11, 1850), in Stampp
(1959), 103; Garrison, in Smith (1981) , 637; Melville , in Smith (1981), 1160; Stowe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); Garrison (1837), in Strout (1973), 164; Emerson, "Self
Reliance," in Essays, First Series (1841); Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
(1849); Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1855); Poe, "A Dream Within a Dream" (1827);
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835; Random House translation, 1945), 142; Trol-
lope, in Smith (1981), 245-6; Stowe, in Smith (1981), 660; Emerson, "On the Uses of
Great Men," in Representative Men (1850); description of Lincoln by his friend William
Herndon, cited in Smith (1982), 577; Howe, Battle Hymn of the Republic (1862); Lincoln,
address (Apr 11, 1865); Holmes, in Parrington (1927; 1954, vol. 2), 445-6; Melville,
in Smith (1982), 950; Adams, cited in Ken Bums (director), The Civil War (documentary
film, 1990). Facts. Childbearing: Catherine M. Scholten, "'On the Importance of the
Obstetrick Art': Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825" (WMQ, Jul
1977). Birthnames: David Hackett Fischer, "Forenames and the Family in New England,"
in Robert Taylor and Ralph Crandall (eds.), Generations and Change (1986); see also
NOTES ON SOURCES 489

Mintz and Kellogg ( 1988), 49. Student unrest: Rudolph (1962), 118; Feuer (1969), 321-
3; and Kett (1977) , 47-59. Nye (1960), 232. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits : Spiritualism
and Women's Rights (1989), chs . I, 3. Opium : Smith (I 981 ), 687; and David T . Court-
wright, Dark Paradise : Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940 (1972), ch. I. Alcohol:
W. J. Rorabaugh , The Alcoholi c Republic (1979), Appendix I; Pessen (1985), 20; and
Chapter 12 source notes . Noyes , History of American Socialisms (1870). Beards: Alison
Lurie, The language of Clothes ( 1981), 65-8 . The sixteen leading Republican Radicals
are identified in Brock (1963) , ch. I . Youth. Ramsay , in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment:
The Science of Freedom (1969), 23; Kett (1977), 60 ; British visitor William Faux, in
Furnas (I 969), 591; Bushnell, "The Age of Homespun" ( 1851), cited in Douglas (1977),
60; Kett (1977) , 37; Harriet Martineau's comments on the Lowell factory girls, discussed
in Furnas (1969), 477; Beecher, in Banner ( 1971); Emerson, "The Transcendentalist"
(1842). Coming of Age. Polk, in Sellers (1960), 47; Garrison , "The Liberator's Prin-
ciples ," Jan I , 1831; Fuller, in Smith (1981 ), 727; Emerson on Longfellow, in OxA,
528; Longfellow , "The Warning," cited in Smith (1981), 623-4. Rising Adulthood.
Whitman, in Jerome Loving, "Walt Whitman," in CLH; Emerson, "The Poet," Essays,
Second Series (1844); Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849);
"the unfolding . . . " appeared in The Dial (1841) , cited in Parrington (1927; 1954, vol.
2), 340; Ahlstrom (1975), vol. I, 574. On the Gothic revival, see Clifford Clark, Jr.,
"Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History" (JIH, Summer 1976). Foreign
visitors Captain Marryat, Frances Trollope , and Captain Basil Hall, all cited in Smith
(1981) , 249, 914 , and in Pessen (1985) , 27-8; Parker, in Miller (1957), 357-9. Midlife.
Whittier, "Lines Inscribed to Friends Under Arrest for Treason Against the Slave Power"
(1856); Stowe (1852) . The caning was administered in 1856 by South Carolina's "ex-
terminating angel," Congressman Preston Brooks (age 37), against Massachusetts Senator
Charles Sumner (age 45) . Phillips, in Woodward ( 1960), 52; Thoreau, in ibid ., 52;
Whitman, Years of the Modern (1860, first pub. 1865); "Redeemer President" appears
in Whitman, The Eighteenth Presidency! ( 1856); Lincoln, in Forgie (1979), 287; Garrison,
in Smith ( 1981), 609 ; Phillips, in Hofstadter ( 1948), 144; Stevens, in Miller ( 1939), 182;
Melville , in Smith (1982), 563-4. Elderhood. Longfellow, Elegaic Verse and Morituri
Salutamus (1875); Longfellow described by the younger Carl Schurz, in Smith ( 1981),
977; Parker, in Fischer (1977), 114; Fisher, in Smith (1862), 951; Stevens as described
in a contemporary press account , in Miller (1939), 353; Barnes, The Peaceful Death of
the Righteous (1858); Child, in Fischer (1977), 121; Holmes, "On His Eightieth Birthday"
(1887). Tarkenton, in Furnas (1969), 550; Phillips , in Hofstadter (1948), 163; Anthony,
''The Solitude of Self" (1892) ; Brown, in Sandburg (1954) , 158-9; Garrison, in Strout
(1973) , 164; Eddy , Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875).

GILDED BACKGROUND. The Gilded lifecycle is best approached through the words of
those who lived it: Mark Twain , Roughing it (1872), and, with Charles Dudley Warner,
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today ( 1873); Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
(1906); George Armstrong Custer, My Life on the Plains (1874); Ednah D. Cheney (ed.),
Louisa May Alcott : Her Life , Letters, and Journals (1889); Ulysses S. Grant, Personal
Memoirs (1885); Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (1886); William James,
Pragmatism ( 1907); and John D. Rockefeller , Random Reminiscences of Men and Events
(1909). For other accounts of the age they shaped and their leading personality types: H.
490 NOTES ON SOURCES

Wayne Morgan (ed.), The Gilded Age (1963); John G. Sproat , "The Best Men" : Liberal
Reformers in the Gilded Age (1968); Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded
Age (1971); Sean Dennis Cashman , America in the Gilded Age (1988); Milton Rugoff,
America's Gilded Age : Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change ,
/850-/890 (1989); Seymour J . Mandelbaum , Boss Tweed's New York (1965); Samuel
Carter, The Last Cavaliers : Confederate and Union Cavalry in the Civil War (1979);
Richard O'Connor, Wild Bill Hickok (1959); and Matthew Josephson , The Robber Barons :
The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (1934) . For the meaning of war and the far
West to their lives: Ralph Abrahamson , The American Home Front (1983); Reid Mitchell,
Civil War Soldiers (1988); McPherson (1988); John Mack Faragher, Women and Men
on the Overland Trail (1979); Rodman Paul , The Far West and the Great Plains in
Transition, 1859-1900 (1988); and "The Western Hero ," in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin
Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950). For their midlife impact on society
and culture: essays in Daniel Walker Howe (ed.), Victorian America (1976); Richard
Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought , 1860-1915 (1945); Vernon L. Par-
rington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism , 1860-1920 (1930); Robert Green Mc-
Closkey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise, 1865-19/0 (1951); "A
Chromo Civilization," in Furnas ( 1969); and David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual
Morality and Social Control , 1868-1900 (1973) .

GILDED REFERENCES. Twain (1872); on estimated age breakdown on 49ers, see HSt,
series A-204 to A-209, for California in 1850; Mann (1846), in Furnas (1969), 550; on
youth gangs named "Roach Guards ," "Little Dead Rabbits ," etc ., see Kett (1977), 89,
92; Brooks, "The Younger Generation of 1870," in New England: Indian Summer,
1865-1915 (1940), 438; Adams , in McPherson (1988), viii; Boorstin (1973), Part I;
Blaine, in Hofstadter (1948), 176; Hofstadter, ibid., 176; Conkling, Nominating Speech
for Grant (Jun 5, 1880); Sumner , in Bums (1986), 159; Mann, in Maurice Wolfthal,
"Johnny Couldn't Read in 1905 Either," WP 2/24/90; Strong, in Smith (1981); Whitman,
in Malone and Rauch (1960); Longfellow , in OxA, 732-3 ; James , What Maisie Knew
(preface, 1907-9). Beard, in Morgan (1963), I ; Cram, in Harvey Wish, Society and
Thought in Modern America (1952), 372; Parrington, in Morgan (1963), 257; Morison,
in OxA, 732; Dickinson, No . 288 (c. 1861); James , The Will to Believe (1897) and The
Meaning of Truth (1909); Carnegie , The Gospel of Wealth (1900); Twain (1872). Facts.
For evidence that the Gilded suffered higher child mortality rates than their next-elders,
see Yasuki Yasuba, Birth Rates of the White Population in the United States , /800-1860
(1962), 86-96; for rising-adult mortality, see casualty figures for Civil War below; for
elderly mortality, see also below . In the Confederate states, higher rates of extreme
poverty due to the war are well documented; elsewhere, they can be inferred from
anecdotal accounts of the new urban poor, of the plains settlers, of the new wave of
immigrants, and of the social dislocation after the war. Mills, " The American Business
Elite: A Collective Portrait" (JEH. Dec 1945, Supplement V). Kett (1977), 132. Nutrition
and height: Robert W. Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman , and James Trussel , "Exploring the
Uses of Data on Height" (Social Science History, Fall 1982). Life expectancy at age 65:
see data for 1900- 7 in SSP, Table IO; for evidence that the numbers are higher for earlier-
born (Transcendental) cohorts , see Warren S. Thompson and P. K. Whelpton, Population
Trends in the United States (1969), 239-40. War casualties: McPherson (1988) , 285,
NOTES ON SOURCES 491

818, 854-6 ; Malone and Rauch (1960), 263; and Randall (1940) . Rates of gross capital
fonnation: Robert E. Gallman, "Gross National Product in the United States, 1834-
1909," in National Bureau of Economic Research, Output, Employment, and Productivity
in the United States after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth (vol. 30, 1966). Wholesale
prices: HSt , E-40 , E-52. Youth. Macrae , in Smith (1981), 914; Howells, in Furnas
(1969), 922; Police Chief George Matsell, in Christine Stansell, "Women, Children, and
the Uses of the Streets,'' in Graff ( 1987); Charles L. Brace, The Dangerous Classes of
New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (1872). On tenn "self-dependence,"
first urged for children in the 1830s, see Brown, (1987) . Alcott, "My Kingdom" (written
at age 13). On early childhood independence, see Kett (1977), 103-8; on dropping college
enrollment, see Rudolph (1962) , 218-40; on student reactions to elder Transcendental
lecturers , see Feuer (1969) , 321. Rudolph (1962), 76; Brown student, in Handlin (1971),
132. Coming of Age. Cincinnati newspaper, cited in McPherson (1988), 29; Irving,
"The Creole Village," in Wolfert' s Roost (1855) ; Emerson, in Kett (1977), 94; Greeley,
editorial in the New York Tribune; on "Lincoln shouters" and "hurrah boys , " see
Sandburg (1954), 173; on "Deeds not words!" see Furnas (1969), 128; Shennan, in
Smith (1982), 336-7; Twain , in Tuveson (1968), 208; Holmes, Jr., in Lears (1981), 118.
Rising Adulthood. Timrod , in Wish (1952), 13; Hayes, in Burns (1986) , 201. Midlife.
See "American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith," in Howe (1976) ; Norton,
in Morgan (1963). 81; Twain, in Wish (1952), 395. Elderhood. Norton, in Sara Norton
and M. A. De Wolfe Howe (eds .), Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (1913), vol. II, 272-
3; Achenbaum (1978), 54, 39; Osler , "The Fixed Period" (Johns Hopkins Valedictory
Address, 1905), in Graebner (1980), 4-5; Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907);
Hale , Cosmopolitan (1903), cited in Fischer (1977) , 158; Twain, "Seventieth Birthday"
(Dec 5, 1905). Holmes, in Cushing Strout, "Three Faithful Skeptics at the Gate of
Modernity, " in Howard H. Quint and Milton Cantor, Men , Women , and Issues in Amer-
ican History (1975); James ' " bitch-goddess," in letter to H. G . Wells (1906) ; James '
" cyclone ," in Burns (1986) , 292 ; Twain, "By Order of the Author," in Huckleberry
Finn (1884) .

PROGRESSIVE BACKGROUND. The Progressives are best understood by starting with their
innovative mood in midlife and then working outward : Richard Hofstadter (1948), chs .
9-10, and The Age of Reform (1955); Hofstadter (ed.), The Progressive Movement : 1900
to 1915 (1963); Robert S. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967); Morton
Keller, Affairs of State : Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (1977); Mary
0. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity : A Crisis in the Professionalization of American
Science, 1865-1905 (1975) ; Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management
in the Progressive Era , 1890- 1920 (1964) ; Nathan G. Hale, Jr . , Freud and the Americans :
The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 ( 1971); Jackson Lears,
No Place of Grace : Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture , 1880-
1920 (1981); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in
American Business ( 1977), and ''The Beginnings of 'Big Business' in American Industry''
(Business History Review , Spring 1959); and William L. O'Neill, Divorce in the Pro-
gressive Era (1967) . For biographical insights: Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The
Psychologist as Prophet (1972); Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality
and Innovation ( 1970); John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson ( 1956); Theodore Roosevelt,
492 NOTES ON SOURCES

The Strenuous Life (1900); and Hugh Hawkins (ed.), Booker T. Washington and His
Critics (1962) . For youth and coming-of-age experiences: Kett (1977), chs. 5-6; George
Winston Smith and Charles Judah, Life in the North During the Civil War (1966); and
Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City (1979) . For the Progressive influence on cultural
and social life: David W. Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1870-1917 (1970); George E.
Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912 (1958); James Weinstein, The Cor-
porate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (1968); Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers
in the Urban Age: Social Reform in Boston, 1880-1900 (1954); Donald Pizer (ed.),
American Thought and Writing in the 1890s (1972); Louis Filler (ed.), Late Nineteenth
Century Liberalism (1962); Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against
Formalism (1947); and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955).

PROGRESSIVEREFERENCES.Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911);

Wilson, in Blum (1956), 64; LaFollette, in Boorstin (1973), 567; Roosevelt, in Bums
(1986), 349. Wilson, in Hofstadter (1955), 230; T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation
to Self-Realization," in Richard Fox and Lears (eds.), The Culture of Consumption (1983);
Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895); Hall, in Lears (1983); Hall, in Hale,
Jr. (1971), 372. "ProfessorTweetzers" and "Doctors of Dullness," discussed in Rudolph
(1962), 401; "goo-goos" and "Miss Nancys," in Morgan (1963), 56, and in Filler
(1962), xxxii. Fels, in Mowry (1958), 94; Hearst, in Bums (1986), 369; Howells, in
Lears (1981), 48; Adams, in ibid., 291; Sheldon, In His Steps (1897). Wilson, Message
to the U.S. Senate (Aug 19, 1914); Morison, in OxA, 811; Wiebe (1967), 166; Roosevelt,
in Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: The Era of Excess (1962), 139; Wilson's "opinion,"
Address to the Associated Press (Apr 20, 1915), and "what's right," cited in Blum
(1956), 161. Facts. Rotundity : Levenstein (1988), 12-14. Bellamy, "Pledge of Alle-
giance" (1892); Bates, America the Beautiful (1893); Sousa, Semper Fide/is (1888);
Lazarus, "The New Colossus" (inscription for the Statue of Liberty, written in 1886).
Certification : Kett (1977), 157. Law schools: Boorstin (1973), 62-4. Brookings, in ibid.,
213. Articles on "middle age": Kett (1977), 162. Hale, Jr. (1971), 29 . Divorce rates:
Degler (1980), 166; and O'Neill (1967), 19-20. Drug abuse: H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs
in America: A Social History , 1800-1980 (1981); and Chapter 12 source notes. "Somatic
remedies" to female hysteria: G. J . Barker-Benfield, 'The Spermatic Economy: A
Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality," and Carl N. Degler, "What Ought to Be and
What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century," both in Gordon (1978).
Atlantic Monthly, cited in Lears (1983). Youth. French visitor Georges Fisch, in Smith
and Judah (1966), 309-11. On compulsory school attendance and the high school move-
ment, see Furnas (1969), 749-50, and Kett (1977), 122-31; on report cards, see ibid.,
116. Bushnell, in ibid., 114. Kett, in ibid., 116; for a similar conclusion, see Ryan
(1981), 145-85; Beecher, in Kett (1977), 124. Coming of Age. Sunday school spokesman
was Daniel Wise, in ibid., 120; YMCA official, in ibid., 119; Kett, in ibid., 119;
Roosevelt, in Paul (1988), 197. On general decline in violence, see Eric H. Monkkonen,
"The Organized Response to Crime in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America"
(JIH, Summer 1983) and Lane (1979). Roosevelt, in Hale, Jr. (1971), 46. Rising Adult-
hood. Gompers, in Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America: A People's History of
the Post-Reconstruction Era (1984), 237; Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth ( 1894);
Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890); Cable, The Silent South (1885); Bellamy, Looking
NOTES ON SOURCES 493

Backward (1888); Blodgett , in Morgan (1963), 56 . Midlife. McKinley, in ibid., 168;

Michelson, at dedication ceremony for University of Chicago physics lab (1894) . Roo-
sevelt , The Strenuous life (1900); on origin of the word " muckrakers," see Roosevelt
(1906), in Hofstadter (1963), doc. 2. Chopin, The Awakening (1899); Wilson, in Blum
(1956), 127. Elderhood. Jewett , The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) ; Hall, in Hale,
Jr. (1971) , 5; Sullivan , cited in Calvin B. T. Lee , The Campus Scene: 1900-1970 (1970),
23; " international kiss, " cited in Burns (1986). Brandeis' "Men of zeal" appears in
Olmstead v. United States (1928); "trial and error," in Burnet v. Coronado Oil and Gas
(1932); Kelley, according to Felix Frankfurter, in Otis L. Graham, Jr., An Encore for
Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (1967), 171. Dewey, in Wish (1952),
519; James, What Maisie Knew (preface, 1907-9); James, ibid.; Ray Stannard Baker on
Harris, in Smith (1984), 749; North, in Boorstin (1973), 172; James (Aug 10, 1914), in
Leon Edel (ed .), Henry James: Selected letters (1987), 713; James, letter to Hugh
Walpole (1913) .

CHAPTER 10: THE GREAT POWER CYCLE

GREAT POWER CYCLE BACKGROUND. See James MacGregor Burns, The Workshop of
Democracy (1986); Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America: A People 's History of
the Post-Reconstruction Era (1984) , and Redeeming the Time: A People's History of the
1920s and the New Deal (1987); William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A
Narrative History of America , 1932-1972 (1974); and J.C. Furnas, The Americans: A
Social History of the United States, 1587-1914 (1969), and Great Times: An Informal
Social History of the United States, 1914-1929 (1974). For social histories of specific
periods and topics: Walter Lord, The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War
(1960) ; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (1931 ), and Since Yesterday (1940); Joseph
Goulden, The Best Years: 1945-1950 (1976); William O'Neill, The American High: The
Years of Confidence, 1945-1960 (1986); Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table:
The Transformation of the American Diet (1988); H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America:
A Social History, 1800-1980 (1981), and Morgan (ed.), Yesterday's Addicts: American
Society and Drug Abuse (1974); Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Ex-
perience (1973); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955); Robert
and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929), and Middletown in
Transition (1937); and Andrew Gallagher, Jr., Plainville Fifteen Years later (1961) . For
excellent anthologies chronicling the American mood at three specific moments, see
Robert Sklar (ed.) , The Plastic Age (1917-1930) (1970); Harold Stearns (ed .), America
Now (1938); Andre Siegfried, America at Mid-Century (1955); and Huston Smith (ed .),
The Search for America (1959) . On youth: Mary Cable, The little Darlings (1975);
Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (1977);
Margaret Steinfels, Who's Minding the Children: The History and Politics of Day Care
in America (1976); David Nasaw, Schooled to Order (1979); Vivian Zelizer, Pricing the
Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985) ; Joseph Hawes and Ray
Hiner, Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective (1985); essays in
Harvey J. Graff (ed .), Growing Up in America (I 987); essays in Michael Katz (ed.),
Education in American History (1973); John Folger and Charles Nam, Education of the
494 NOTES ON SOURCES

American Population (Census Monograph, 1960); Frederick Rudolph , The American

College and University: A History (1962); Lewis F . Feuer, The Conflict of Generations :
The Character and Significance of Student Movements (1969), ch . 7; Helen Horowitz,
Campus life ( 1987); Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful : American Youth in the
1920s (1977); and Calvin B . T . Lee, The Campus Scene : 1900-1970 (1970). On family
life: Carl Degler , At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to
the Present (1980); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social
History of American Family life ( 1988); essays in Tamara K. Hareven (ed .), Transitions :
The Family and the life Course in Historical Perspective (1978); Battelle Memorial
Institute, The Cosmopolitan Report: The Changing life Course of American Women
(1986); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America ( 1979); essays in Michael Gordon (ed .),
The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (2nd ed. , 1978), esp . Daniel Scott
Smith, "The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Interpretation and Evidence";
Alfred Kinsey , Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) , and Sexual Behavior in the
Human Female (1953); John Demos, Past. Presellt, and Personal: The Family and the
life Course in American History (1986); Mary E. Cookingham , "Combining Marriage,
Motherhood, and Jobs Before World War II: Women College Graduates, Classes of
1905-1935" (JFH, Summer 1984); and John Model!, "Normative Aspects of American
Marriage Timing Since World War II" (JFH, Summer 1980). On cultural life: Warren
I. Susman, Culture as History : The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth
Century (1984); and Lewis Perry, lntel/ectua/ life in America: A History (1984) . On
politics : Warren Miller , American National Election Studies Data Sourcebook , 1952-
1978 (1980); Anthony Orum (ed.), The Seeds of Politics: Youth and Polirics in America
(1972); Norman H. Nie et al ., The Changing American Voter (1976); and Angus Campbell
et al., The American Voter (1960) . On old age: David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in
America (1977); Harvey Lehman, Age and Achievement (1953) ; Andrew Achenbaum,
Old Age in the New land: The American Experience since 1790 ( 1978); essays in Bernice
Neugarten (ed .), Middle Age and Aging (1968); William Graebner, A History of Retire-
ment: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, I885-1978 (1980); and
U.S. House of Representatives, Retirement Income for an Aging Population (Committee
on Ways and Means, Aug 25, 1987), and Overview of Entitlement Programs, 1990 Green
Book (Committee on Ways and Means, Jun 5, 1990) sections 1, 3-4, and appendices H
and I.

GREAT POWER CYCLE REFERENCES. Laurence, in George Seldes (ed.) , The Great
Thoughts (1985); Stimson, Churchill, Oppenheimer, and "another young physicist," all
cited in Manchester (1974) , 378-9 ; Baker , Growing Up (1982), 230 . On the "interim
committee" on the A-bomb, see Manchester (1974), 375; MacArthur, in OxA, 1045,
1062-3, Groves, in Manchester (1974), 379; Truman, in ibid., 382, 367. For average
age of World War II combat troops, see John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory ( 1976),
339. Styron, in "My Generation" (Esquire , Oct 1968). Songs: Peter, Paul, and Mary,
Where Have All the Flowers Gone ? (written by Pete Seeger, 1961); Barry McGuire, Eve
of Destruction (1965); Tom Lehrer, So long Mom (1965) and Wernher von Braun (1965).
Roosevelt's reference to a "mysterious cycle" of "generational destiny " appears in his
acceptance speech to the 1936 Democratic National Convention; Henry Steele Commager,
The American Mind : An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the
1880s (1950), 42; Hofstadter , Age of Reform (1955), 166; Degler, "The Third American
NOTES ON SOURCES 495

Revolution," in Out of Our Past (1970); the " new generation " was John Kennedy ' s
reference to his own (G .I.) peers in his inaugural address (Jan 20, 1961).

MISSIONARYBACKGROUND,For a lifecycle overview of the Missionaries, beginning

with their formative experiences as rising adults, see John Higham , "The Reorientation
of American Culture in the 1890s," in Writing Ameri can History (1970); William
McLoughlin , "The Third Great Awakening ," in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reforms
(1978); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America
(1976) ; Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (1968), and Appointment at Armageddon : Muck-
raking an_d Progressivism in the American Tradition ( 1976); Henry David, The History
of the Haymarket Affair (1936); and Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies : The Story of Synd-
icalism in the United States (1967) . On the broader Missionary impact on society and
culture : Jean B. Quandt , From the Small Town to the Great Community : The Social
Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (1970); Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in
America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965); Henry F . May, The End
of American Innocence ( 1979); William O 'Neill , Feminism in America : A History (1989);
James R . McGovern, "The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners
and Morals" (}AH, Sep 1968); Harvey Wish, Society and Thought in Modern America
(1952) ; Commager (1950); Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: The Era of Excess (1962);
Kenneth T. Jackson , The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (1967) ; John Hicks,
Republican Ascendancy, 1921-1933 (1960); Arthur M. Schlesinger , Jr., The Coming of
the New Deal (1959); Otis L. Graham , Jr. , An Encore for Reform : The Old Progressives
and the New Deal (1967), and The Great Campaigns : Reform and War in America,
1900-1928 (1971 ); Arthur Ekirch, Jr., Ideologies and Utopias: The impact of the New
Deal on American Thought (1969) ; and Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A
History of Modern American Reform (1956) . See also sources that overlap with the
Progressives: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955); Donald Pizer (ed.), American
Thought and Writing in the 1890s (1972); Morton White, Social Thought in America :
The Revolt Against Formalism (1957) ; and T . Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-
modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981) . For bio-
graphical insights : EJlen Lagemann , A Generation of Women (1979); Mercedes M.
Randall, Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch (1964) ; Jane Addams, Twenty Years
at Hull House (1910); Sherwood Eddy, Pathfinders of the World's Missionary Crusade
(1945); James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) ; Walter
William Liggett, The Rise of Herbert Hoover (1932) ; William AJlen White, Puritan in
Babylon (1938); and Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (1964).

MISSIONARY REFERENCES.Bryan , speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention,

in Pizer (1972), 380, 375; Herron, in Smith (1984), 483 . Norris, The Octopus (1901);
Sinclair, The Jungle ( 1906); Steffens , Shame of the Cities ( 1904). Descriptions of Addams
appear in G. J . Barker-Benfield, "Mother Emancipator" (JFH, Winter 1979). Chapman,
in Smith (1984) , 715; Lodge, in Lears (1981) , 239; Crane, "In the Depths of a Coal
Mine" (McClure's, 1894). "A generation of ideals," in Winston Churchill, Mr. Crewe' s
Career (1908); see also Richard and Beatrice Hofstadter, "Winston Churchill: A Study
in the Popular Novel" (AQ. Spring 1950); White, in Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry
Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republi c (1950), 262; saying attributed
to Chapman, in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (1968) , 863; fellow student on Chap-
496 NOTES ON SOURCES

man, in Smith (1984), 712. Gilman, This Man-Made World (1911); Jack London, Call
of the Wild (1903); Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Roosevelt, State
of the Union message (Jan 6, 1942), in E. Taylor Parks and Lois F. Parks (eds.),
Memorable Quotations of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1965), 227; Roosevelt, first inaugural
address (Mar 4, 1933) and speech (Jan 17, 1938), in ibid .. 257, 55-56. Howe, Confessions
of a Reformer (1925), cited in Susman (1984), 89; Santayana, Character and Opinion
in the United States (1920); the Mount Hennon crusade and "Evangelization of the
World" motto is described in Eddy (1945); 43; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis
of the Old Order, 1919-1933 (1957), 19; Johnson, in Manchester (1974), 355; the Speer
description appears in Eddy (1945), 269; Speer, Missionary Principles and Practice
(1902); "World War II Wise Men" appears in "The New American Establishment"
(U.S . News and World Report, Feb 8, 1988); Wharton, in Cheryl Merser, "Grown-Ups"
(1987), preface. Facts. Christmas: Boorstin (1973), 158-62. High schools: Edwin Dexter,
A History of Education in the United States (1906), 173. Share of all youths attending
school: HSt, H-433. Coed colleges: Dexter (1906), 448. College degrees: HSt , H-751;
see also Huston Smith ( 1959), 91; Page Smith ( 1984), 589-90; Kett ( 1977), 178. College
unrest: Horowitz (1987), ch. 2; and Feuer (1969), 332-6. Settlement movement: ibid.,
339; and John P. Rousmaniere, "Cultural Hybrid in the Slums: The College Woman and
the Settlement House, 1889-94," in Katz (1973). Filler (1968), 3-7. Alcohol and drug
abuse: Chapter 12 source notes; and J. C. Burnham, "New Perspectives on the Prohibition
'Experiment' of the 1920's" (]SH, Fall 1968). "Nadir" of black history: Rayford Logan,
The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir , 1877-/901 (1954); and Woodward
(1955) . Lynching of blacks: HSt, H-1170. Diet revolution: Levenstein (1988), 86. Mar-
riage age: Fass (1977), 66-9; Peter Uhlenberg, "Changing Configurations of the Life
Course," in Hareven (1978); Warren S. Thompson and P. K. Whelpton, Population
Trends in the United States ( 1969), 203-6; and Ruth Freeman and Patricia Klaus, ''Blessed
or Not? The New Spinster in England and the United States in the Late Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries" (JFH, 1984). McGovern (1968). Age of cabinet members:
Harvey Lehman, "The Age of Eminent Leaders, Then and Now" (American Journal of
Sociology, 1947). Falling mortality, age 65 to 85: HSt , B-190, B-191; on rising life
expectancy at age 65, see SSP, table 10. Poverty by age bracket in 1949: Eugene Smo-
lensky, Sheldon Danziger, and Peter Gottschalk, "The Declining Significance of Age in
the United States: Trends in the Well-Being of Children and the Elderly since 1939"
(Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison , 1987). Youth.
Abbott, Gentle Measures in the Management of the Young (1871), cited in Cable (1975),
100-1; Trippe, Home Treatment for Children (1881 ), cited in ibid.; Cable, ibid ., 105;
DuBois, in Smith (1984), 626; Addams (1910). On the importance given to the mother's
role during the 1890s, see Martin U. Martel, "Age-Sex Roles in American Magazine
Fiction (1890-1955)," in Neugarten (1968). Mrs. James Roosevelt, My Boy Franklin
(1933); Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877); Johanna Spyri, Heidi (English translation,
1884); Alger, Bound to Rise (1873); Canby, in Cable (1975), 104. Coming of Age.
Hyde, The Evolution of a College Student (1898), cited in Kett (1977), 177; Baker, in
Smith (1984), 596; Steffens, in Horowitz (1987), 51-2; Herron, "Message of Jesus to
Men of Wealth" (1891); Herron, Between Caesar and Jesus (1899); Howe (1925), in
Susman (1984), 89; 0. Henry, The Trimmed Lamp ( 1907); Crane, "The Blue Battalions,"
in Pizer (1972), 31; Hearst editorial, in Furnas (1969), 864; "Gentle Jesus . . . ," in Joe
NOTES ON SOURCES 497

Hill,/. W.W. Songbook; Sinclair, The Jungle (1906). Rising Adulthood. Hovey, in Lears
(1981), 115, 119; Griffith, Birth of a Nation (film, 1915); Beveridge, in Wish (1952),
393, and in Lord ( 1960), 8; DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography
of a Race Concept (1940); Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Masters, Spoon River
Anthology (1915). "The home is in peril" is discussed in McGovern (1968); fictional
southern belle in Glasgow, Phases of an Inferior Planet ( 1898). On ' 's ervantless kitchen,''
see Levenstein (1988), 60-71; on "minimalist house," see Gwendolyn Wright, Mora/ism
and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago , 1873-
/9/3 (1980). Canby, in Fass (1977), 73. Midlife. Bryan, in Sinclair (1962) , 16-17;
Adams (1926), in Fass (1977), 17; Wilson , in Furnas (1974), 236; Follett and Park, in
Quandt (1970), 141; Woods, in Graham , Jr. (1971), 99. Ford , in Susman (1984), 137-
9; White, A Puritan in Babylon (1938) . On rising imprisonment rates during the 1920s,
see discussion in Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Organized Response to Crime in Nineteenth-
and Twentieth-Century America" (JIH . Summer 1983). On the number of executions
(which doubled between 1910 and 1920), see Margaret Callahan, Historical Corrections
Statistics in the United States. /850-1984 (U .S. Department of Justice, 1986), 217 .
Elderhood. Roosevelt , Speech to the 1936 Democratic National Convention , in Parks
and Parks (1965) , 147; Armstrong, in Graebner, (1980), 186; Wagner, in ibid., 185;
Graham, Jr. ( 1967), 108-9 ; for contemporary labels, see ibid .. 168; Mencken, "The
New Deal Mentality" (1936); Congressman Dewey Short likened MacArthur to "God
Himself, " in Manchester (1974), 563; Mott described by Eddy (1945), 3 IO. Baruch,
speech (Apr 16, 1947), in Seldes (1985), 35. On origin of term " foreign aid," see
Boorstin (1973), 568-79. "The Great Society" was first coined by British social scientist
Graham Wallas (born 1858) in 1914; for its growing use among American Missionaries,
see Adams, Epic of America (1931 ). Lindsay on Bryan, in "Bryan, Bryan , Bryan ,
Bryan," Collected Works (1925); Bryan, in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political
Tradition ( 1948), 186; Berenson, Aesthetics and History (1948); Roosevelt , State of the
Union speech (Jan 6, 1941).

LOST BACKGROUND, For the Lost peer personality, the unmatched source is the lifetime
writing of Malcolm Cowley, esp. Exile 's Return ( 1934), A Second Flowering: Works
and Days of the Lost Generation ( 1956), with Robert Cowley (eds.), Fitzgerald and the
Jazz Age (1966), and The View from Eighty (1981). See also F. Scott Fitzgerald, "My
Generation" (Esquire, Oct 1968); Edmund Wilson (ed.). The Crack-Up (1945); and
George Burns, The Third Time Around (1980). No other generation expressed its peer
personality so vividly in literature and music; see esp . F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of
Paradise (1920) ; Thomas Wolfe, You Can 't Go Home Again (1940); Ernest Hemingway,
A Fare well to Arms ( 1929) and The Old Man and the Sea ( 1952); Gunther Schuller , The
History of Jazz (1968) ; and Ronald Morris , Wait Until Dark : Jazz and the Underworld
(1980). For the youth and rising adulthood of the Lost: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half
Lives (1890); Jane Addams. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909); Selwyn K.
Troen , "The Discovery of the Adolescent by American Educational Reformers, I 900-
1920: An Economic Perspective," in Graff (1987); Boyhood and Lawlessness (Survey
Associates, 1914); Anthony Platt. The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (I 969);
David Nasaw. Children of the City: At Work and at Play (1985); G. Stanley Hall,
Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology . Anthropology, Sociology,
498 NOTES ON SOURCES

Sex, Crime , Religion and Education (1905); Van Wyck Brooks, "The Culture of In-
dustrialism" (Seven Arts , 1917); Greer Collin, The Great School Legend (1973); S. E.
Ellacott, Conscripts on the March (1965); Robert Liston , Greeting: You Are Hereby
Reported for Induction ( 1970); Quincy Wright, A Study of War (1965); Fass (1977);
Furnas (1974); Sklar (1970); F. J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the
Postwar Decade (1955); and Sara Alpern and Dale Baum, " Female Ballots: The Impact
of the Nineteenth Amendment " (Jiff, Summer 1985). On their trials in midlife and old
age: Winona Morgan, The Family Meets the Depression (1939); Niebuhr, Moral Man in
Immoral Society (1932); Robert Sobel, The Origins of Interventionism (1960); James
Abrahamson , The American Home Front (1983); Donald Rogers, Since You Went Away
(1943); Clay Blair, The Forgotten War (1987); Reuben Hill, Family Development in
Three Generations (1970); Martha Riche, "The Nursing Home Dilemma" (AD, Oct
1985); and Riche, "The Oldest Old" (AD, Nov 1985).

LOST REFERENCES. Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberl ey ( 1920); cummings, in Cowley

(1956), 14; Dos Passos, in ibid. , 12; Fitzgerald , This Side of Paradise (1920); Richard
Whiting , Ain't We Got Fun ? (1920); Fitzgerald (1920); "the lies of old men" appears
in Pound (1920); last words of Wolfe according to Max Perkins, in Cowley (l 956), 185;
Ruth's autobiography , cited in Susman (1984), 143-4. On articles on juvenile delin-
quency, see Nasaw (1979), 90; Allen (1931), ch. 5; Missionary President was Franklin
Roosevelt in his first inaugural address (Mar 4, 1933); Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles
(1920); Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up " (Esquire, Feb 1936), later included in Edmund
Wilson (ed.), The Crack-Up (1945); Coughlin, radio address (Feb 5, 1939), in Why Leave
Our Own ? (1939); Roosevelt during 1944 campaign, in Manchester (1974), 320;
MacLeish, The Irresponsibles (1940); Stimson , On Active Service in Peace and War
(1948); Hemingway , The Sun Also Rises (1926); Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men
(1926); Comer, " A Letter to the Rising Generation," and Bourne, "The Two Genera-
tions" (Atlantic Monthly, Feb and May, 1911); Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
(1932) and " A Clean Well-Lighted Place" (1933); Miller, op-ed essay, NYT 917174.
Facts. Child labor: Degler (1980) , 70; Lord (1960), 299; and HSt, series D-31, D-80.
Newsies: Nasaw (1985), ch. 5. Unionism: Burns (1986) , 534. Sugar Consumption : HSt,
G-911. Education : Folger and Nam (1960) , chs. 1-2, 4-5; and HSt, H-433, H-707, H-
755, H-764. First I.Q. tests: Boorstin (1973) , 220-3. Years of schooling, 1952 and 1970:
Stephen Crystal , America 's Old Age Crisis (1982), 33. Drug abuse: Morgan (1981).
Homicide: HSt , H-972. Vocabulary: Stuart Berg Flexner, Listening to America (1982).
Influenza: Alfred Crosby , Epidemi c and Peace (1976) . Mortality rates in elderhood: HSt,
B-190, B-191 ; on stagnant life expectancy at age 65 , see SSP, table IO. Suicide: Herbert
Hendin, Suicide in America (1982) , ch. 2; and Morton Kramer et al. , Mental Disorders!
Suicide (1972), 207. Longitudinal surveys: K. Warner Schaie and Iris Parham, "Stability
of Adult Personality Traits: Fact or Fable?'' (Journal of Personality and Social Psy-
chology, 1976). Black "Great Migration ": Reynolds Farley, "The Urbanization of Ne-
groes in the United States" (JSH, Spring 1968). Share of elder Lost who are naturalized
citizens: " A State by State Look at the Oldest Americans" (AD , Nov 1986). Party
affiliation: Miller (1980); "Opinion Roundup" (PO, May-Jun 1985 and Nov-Dec 1986);
and Alan Spitzer , "The Historical Problem of Generations" (AHR, Dec 1973). Housing
of elder Lost: Hill ( 1970), p. I08 . Income of elder Lost: Riche ( 1985); and G. Lawrence
NOTES ON SOURCES 499

Atkins. ' 'The Economic Status of the Oldest Old" (Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly,
Spring 1985). Social Security benefit level by cohort, and poverty and pension coverage
by age bracket: U.S. House of Representatives (1990), 116-21, 1001, 1011. Youth.
O'Hanlon, in "Virginia, Santa Can't Find Your House," WP 12/24/89; Smith, The
Science of Motherhood (J 894), in Cable (1975), 102; Bums (1980), 9-10; Riis (1890);
Marx, in Nasaw (1985) , 26. On football player deaths , see Lee ( 1970), 7; Hall (1905);
Wolfe , You Can't Go Home Again (1940). Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (1930), in
Nasaw (1985), 141. Corning of Age. Carter, in Cowley and Cowley (1966), 48-9; Cowley
(1934). 18; student organizer, Harry Laidler (1925), in Feuer (1969), 344; Brooks, Wine
of the Puritans (1908); "Sex O'Clock," discussed in Nasaw (1985), 140; Mencken, in
Lee (1970), 12; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929); Thompson, in "Virgil Thomp-
son ... ," NYT 10/ 1/89; Fitzgerald (1968); Barton, A Young Man 's Jesus (1914), cited
in T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization," in Richard Wrightman
Fox and Lears (eds.), The Culture of Consumption (1983); Lewis, Main Street (1920)
and Elmer Gantry (l 927); Carter (Atlantic Monthly , Sep 1920). Rising Adulthood.
Fitzgerald, in Andrew Trumbull, Scott Fitzgerald ( 1962), 183; McKay, Home to Harlem
(1928); Locke (1925); Brown , "A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Literature,"
in Abraham Chapman (ed.), Black Voices (1968); Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age"
(1931 ), in Cowley and Cowley (1966); producer on "neckers ... , "cited in Lewis (1931),
101-2; Carnegie's 'always avoid ... " appears in "At 75, Carnegie's Message Lives
On," NYT 12118/87; Fitzgerald first heard "living well ... " from his friend Gerald
Murphy, according to Calvin Thomas, living Well ls the Best Revenge (1962), 141;
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); Vanzetti, letter to his son (1927), in Seldes (1985),
429; O'Neill, The Emperor Jones (1920); Lewis, in Daniel Aaron, "Literary Scenes and
Literary Movements" in CLH; Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (1929). Midlife. Cowley
(1934), 306; Fitzgerald (l 931 ). in Frederick J . Hoffman, "Some Perspectives on the
1920s," in Sidney Fine and Gerald S. Brown (eds.), The American Past ( 1970); Niebuhr
(1932); Wilson, in Manchester (1974) , 77; Ickes and Roosevelt, ibid., 115, 114. Eld-
erhood. Hemingway ( 1929); Eisenhower's ''respectable image,'' in letter to Henry Luce,
cited in Fred Greenstein and Robert Wright , "Reagan ... Another Ike?" (PO, Dec-Jan
1981), and "military-industrial complex" (Jan 1961), in Manchester (1974), 877; Ken-
nedy to Congress (May 25. 1961), in "Looking Back at Apollo," WSJ 7120189. Andrus
(1965), in "AARP's Catastrophe ," WSJ 10/2/89; on "disengagement" theory of retire-
ment, see Graebner (1980), 233 , 241; Miller , Death of a Salesman (1949); Parker, in
Manchester (1974), 246. Thompson, "Virgil Thompson ... ," NYT 10/1/89; Parker, in
Seldes ( 1985), 321; Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942); Tillich, in Paul Tillich and
Huston Smith, "Human Fulfillment ," in Smith ( 1959); Barton, in Susman (1984), 126;
"play the sap" appears in Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929)-later im-
mortalized by Humphrey Bogart on camera (1931 ); for "American High ," see O'Neill
(1986); 18 Again.' (film. 1988); Cowley (1956), 248.

G.I. BACKGROUND. Despite crisp cohort boundaries and a peer culture of exceptional
solidarity, fewer histories or biographies have been written about this generation than
about the Lost, Silent, or Boom. See Manchester (1974); O'Neill (1986); Alfred Kazin,
Starting Out in the Thirties ( 1965); Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar (1966); Betty
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique ( 1963); and Eda LeShan, The Wonderful Crisis of Middle
500 NOTES ON SOURCES

Age (1973). For revealing data on the G .I. peer personality: Leonard Cain, "Age Status
and Generational Phenomena" (Gerontologist, Sep 6, 1987); and Schaie and Parham
(1976). On the transition from protected children to heroic young adults: Nasaw (1985);
Zelizer (1985); Robert Paul Smith, "Where Did You Go?" "Out" "What Did You Do?"
"Nothing" (1957); Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and
Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (1981); David MacLeod, Building Character in the American
Boy: The Boy Scouts , YMCA, and Their Forerunners , 1870-1920 (1983), and "Act Your
Age: Boyhood, Adolescence, and the Rise of the Boy Scouts of America," in Graff
(1987); Fass (1977); Sheila Bennett and Glen Elder, Jr ., "Women's Work in the Family
Economy" (JFH, Summer 1979); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and
Domestic Service in Industrializing America (1978); Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers
(1942); Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (1943); David Brinkley, Washington Goes
to War (1988); and S. E. Ellacott, Conscripts on the March (1965). For the G .I. per-
spective on postwar America at midlife and beyond: William Whyte, The Organization
Man (1956); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1959); Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
(1952); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960); Richard Rovere, The American Estab-
lishment (1962); Alistair Cooke, Generation on Trial: U.S.A . v. Alger Hiss (1952); John
Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958); John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
(1961); Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
( 1965); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1969); Seymour Martin Lipset,
Political Man (1960); Richard Nixon, Six Crises (1962); Eric Sevareid, This ls Eric
Sevareid (1964); Stewart Alsop, The Center : People and Power in Political Washington
( 1968); Theodore White, The Making of the President ( 1961 through 1973) and America
in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956-1980 (1982); Kenneth Keniston,
Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (1971), and Lee Iacocca, Jacocca: An
Autobiography (1984). For elderhood: Henry Pratt, The Gray Lobby (1976); Alan Pifer
and Lydia Bronte (eds.), Our Aging Society (1986); Henry Fairlie, "Talkin' 'Bout My
Generation" (New Republic, Mar 28, 1988); Samuel Preston, "Children and the Elderly:
Divergent Paths for America's Dependents" (Demography, Nov 1984); Beatrice Gross
and Sylvia Seidman (eds.), The New Old: Struggling for a Decent Aging (1978); Erik
Erikson, Joan Erikson, and Helen Kivnick, Vital Involvement in Old Age (1986); and
Ken Dychtwald and Joe Flower, Age Wave: The Challenges and Opportunities of an
Aging America (1989).

G.I. REFERENCES. Marshall, cited by Ronald Reagan, speech to Republican National

Convention (Sep 15, 1988); U.S . News & World Report, cited in Michael L. Smith,
"Selling the Moon," in Fox and Lears ( 1983); Hoffer, in ibid.; "born in this century . . . "
appears in Kennedy's inaugural address (Jan 20, 1961); for discussion of "generational
watershed," see Lola Irelan, "Retirement History Study: Introduction" (Social Security
Bulletin, Nov 1972); Cain (1987); interviewer on Reston, in "Reston, Retiring at 80 .. . , "
NYT 11/5/89; Henry Malcolm, Generation of Narcissus ( 1971), 43; the Superman car-
toonists (both G .l.s) were Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster; Kennedy (1961); Rand, "Apollo
11," in Leonard Peikoff (ed.), Voice of Reason (1988). "What we need ... , "in Skinner,
Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971); Skinner, Walden Two (1948). Lipset (1960); Singer,
in "Isaac Singer's Perspective on God and Man," NYT 10/23/68; Boorstin, The Genius
of American Politics (1953); Wylie (1942); Friedan (1963); Ferdinand Lundberg and
Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947); Lynn White, Jr., Educating
NOTES ON SOURCES 501

Our Daughters (1950); Degler (1980), 440; on "witchhunt" vocabulary , see Manchester
(1974), 492; Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1956); Fass (1977), ch. 3; Roosevelt, radio
message to the Young Democratic Clubs of America (1935), in Parks and Parks (1965),
41; Malvina Reynolds, in Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs (1964); Goulden
(1976), 427; Bush, in biographic film, televised (Aug 17, 1988) during the Republican
National Convention; Bell, in Everett Ladd, "205 and Going Strong" (PO. Jun-Jul
1981); Reagan, 1985 State of the Union Message; LeShan (1973), 21; Harold Arlen and
Johnny Mercer, Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive (song, 1944); Teller, in "Star Wars ... , "
NYT 2113190.Facts. Federal spending as a share of GNP, in 1929 and 1980: EPr ( 1990),
tables C-1, C-79. Child labor: Degler (1980), 70; Cain (1987); and HSt, series D-31,
D-80. On "allowances," see Morgan (1939), 82-3. Figures on "doing the dishes" :
ibid .. 35. Infant and child mortality: HSt, 8-182 to 8-184, 8-202 to 8-205; and Levenstein
(1988), ch. 10. Adult height: Robert W. Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, and James Trussel,
"Exploring the Uses of Data on Height" (Social Science History, Fall 1982); and John
Kieran, "Sports," in Stearns (1938). Mortality: HSt , 8-182 to 8-189. Life expectancy
at age 65: SSP. table IO. Education and schooling: Cain (1987), 85; Fass (1977), 123-
6; Christian Gauss, "Education," in Stearns (1938); HSt. H-433, H-707, H-755; and
Folger and Nam (1960), chs. 1-2, 4-5 . Foreign-language achievement: O'Neill (1986),
35. On-campus religious organizations: Burns (1986), 515; and Fass (1977), 45-6,
137-8. Voting data: Miller (1980); Nie (1976), 85-7; Campbell (1960), 148; Michael
Nelson (ed.), The Elections of 1984 (1985), 99; Burns (1986), 514; and various surveys
published in PO through the 1980s. Black G.I. voters: research by John Morsell, in
Lipset (1960), 281. G.I.s faring better than parents: "Opinion Roundup" (PO, Nov-Dec
1986). Homeownership data: Ben Wattenberg, The Real America : A Surprising Exami-
nation of the State of the Union (1974), 347; and O'Neill (1986), 12-20. Poverty rates
by age bracket: CPR, series P-60. On age-bracket comparisons of homeownership, health-
insurance coverage, discretionary income, household net worth, and other measures of
economic well-being: U.S. House of Representatives (1987), part II, chs. 5, 10; Preston
(1984); Peter G. Peterson and Neil Howe, On Borrowed Time (1988), chs. 2, 5; "Eco-
nomic Status of the Elderly," in EPr (1985), ch. 5; and American Council of Life
Insurance, Datatrack No . 16: Household Income and Wealth (Dec 1986). See also Martha
Riche, "Big Spenders" (AD, Apr 1986); Greg Duncan et al., "The Changing Fortunes
of Young and Old" (AD, Aug 1986); Blayne Cutler, "Mature Audiences Only" and
Charles Longino and William Crown, "The Migration of Old Money" (AD, Oct 1989);
Leslie Lenkowsky, ''Why Growing Old Is Growing Better'' (PO, May-Jun 1987); ''Gree-
ner Era for Gray America" (Insight, Mar 2, 1987); and "The Booming Business of
Aging," WP 4/22/88. On financial "worry" by age bracket: "Opinion Roundup" (PO,
Feb-Mar 1985). On 'senior'' lobby members and newspapers: Gross and Seidman ( 1978),
147; Peterson and Howe (1988), 20, 72; "Gray Power" (Time, Jan 4, 1988); "AARP
Flexes Its Muscles," WP 4/18/88; and "Old Money, New Power," NYT 10/23/88. Growth
in federal benefits to the elderly, 1965-1989: U.S. House of Representatives (1990),
1058-68; and Peterson and Howe (1988), 154. Social Security payback: ibid., 108-9;
for a similar finding, see Michael Boskin, Too Many Promises: The Uncertain Future
of Social Security (1986), ch. 4. Surveys on anxiety: "Opinion Roundup" (PO, Feb-
Mar 1985); and polls cited in Preston (1984). "Happiest" generation data: "Opinion
Roundup" (PO, Feb-Mar 1985); see also "Elderly Belie Old Stereotypes," WP 319/86.
Harvard Class of '40: "The Graying of the Class of '40," WP 4125190. Youth. Spargo,
502 NOTES ON SOURCES

The Bitter Cry of the Children (1904); on rage over child nutrition, see Levenstein (1988),
chs. 8-10; on Little Mothers' Leagues, see Hawes and Hiner (1985), 285; Eleanor Porter,
Pollyanna (1913); Harold Gray, little Orphan Annie (cartoon strip, from 1924); literary
Digest, cited in Fass (1977), 37. On "gang instinct" and scouting, see MacLeod (1983)
and (1987); on vocationalism, see Edward Krug, The Shaping of the American High
School, 1880-1920 (1964). Rodgers, in Hawes and Hiner (1985), 130; Bush, in Nicholas
King, George Bush : A Biography (1980), 14; "fine friends" appears in Cornell Sun
article (1920), cited in Fass (1977), 248; for "rating and dating," see ibid., ch . 4; "fair
play" was a standard set by Joan Crawford, in Sklar (1970), 49; Krutch, in Lee (1970),
70; Cowley, Exile's Return (1951 ed.), 294. Coming of Age. Shuford, in Lee (1970),
36; Harper 's, cited in ibid., 48, and in Orum (1972), 25; poll comparing God and FDR,
in Manchester (1974), 83; NRA pledge, in ibid., 89; young communist bulletin, cited in
Orum (1972), 39; Susman (1984), 172; Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath (1939); Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs (film, 1938); Pegler, in Allen (1939), 232; Lewis, It Can't Happen
Here (1935); From Here to Eternity (film, 1953); Yank editor, in Manchester (1974),
355; Mary Martin, My Heart Belongs to Daddy (song, 1937); Bing Crosby, in Holiday
Inn (film, 1942; later remade into White Christmas. 1954); Mead, in Smith (1959), I 16-
7. Rising Adulthood. The Best Years of Our lives (film, 1946). Opinion data, in American
Institute of Public Opinion, Gallup Poll (1972), poll of 5/28/45 on poison gas, of 10/19/
45 on Japan, and of 11/19/54 on corporal punishment. Mr . Smith Goes to Washington
(film, 1939); Whyte (1956); Sloan Wilson, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955); Mills
(1959); Bell (1960); Galbraith (1958); Lipset (1960), 448. Midlife. Taylor, The Uncertain
Trumpet (1960); Sevareid (1964), 12; Kennedy, in Manchester (1974), 491; Bell, in Ladd
(1981); Frost, speech at Kennedy inaugural (Jan 20, 1961), cited in Halberstam (1969),
38; Kennedy campaign slogan, in ibid., 43; Halberstam on "thinker-doers" McNamara
and Bundy, in ibid., 215, 43; Rovere, The Establishment (1962); Johnson, Democratic
Party nomination speech (Aug 1964); White (1982), 125; "America's Mood Today"
(Look, Jun 29, 1965); Nixon (1962), xvi; Rusk, in Alsop (1968), 120; McNamara, in
ibid., 150; Bums, Wald, and Gardner are all cited in Wattenberg (1974), 15, 18, 22;
Nixon, in address to the nation on the situation in Southeast Asia (Apr 30, 1970); Mayer,
in "Children's Crusade: A Search for Light," Los Angeles Times 11/16/69. Elderhood.
Lost Horizon (film, 1937); for opinion data on euthanasia, see American Institute of
Public Opinion (1972), poll of 6/21147; Robert E. Wood of Modern Maturity, in "When
Ads Don't Fit the Image" (Newsweek , Jan 22, 1990). For the politics of Social Security
in the early 1970s, see Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (1979), chs.
17-18, and Michael Boskin (ed.), The Crisis in Social Security (1977); for the fiscal
consequences of the 1972 Social Security benefit hike and "double-indexing," see Pe-
terson and Howe (1988), chs. 6-7 . AARP membership appeal, from a mailing received
by authors (on Sep 6, 1988). Dychtwald and Flower (1989), 134-5; Sun City resident,
in ibid., 135; for figures on toy purchases, on educational expenses paid by grandparents,
and on parents of divorced children, see ibid ., 256, 255, 254; "G .I. benefit," in "The
Baby Boomers Tum 40" (Time, May 19, 1986). For poll data comparing feeling "wise"
with feeling "friendly," see Gross and Seidman (1978), 102-9 ; LeShan (1973), 279;
Apple, in Fischer (1977), 156; Joan Erikson, in "Erikson, in His Own Old Age, Expands
His View of Life," NYT 6/ 14/88; for 1989 newsroom survey, see Richard Harwood,
"Boomers in the Newsroom," WP 7/30/89. Lautenberg, in "With Saudi Oil Fields
Secured, Bush Now Needs to Define Long-Term U.S. Objectives in the Gulf" WSJ
NOTES ON SOURCES 503

8/30/90; Dychtwald, in "Today's Grandparents Get Fed Up with Baby-Sitting," San

Francisco Chronicle 8/23/90. Bush, inaugural address (Jan 20, 1989). The "Gross Na-
tional Product" concept was first defined by Simon Kuznets in 1946. It's a Wonderful
Life (film directed by Frank Capra, 1946); Cocoon (film directed by Ron Howard, 1985);
Pryor, "Goodbye to Our Century" (Modern Maturity, Jan 1989).

SILENT BACKGROUND. For the Silent peer personality: Gail Sheehy, Passages: Pre-
dictable Crises of Adult Life (1976); Benita Eisler, Private Lives: Men and Women of
the Fifties (1986); Howard Junker, "Resume of the Young Man as a Non-Generation"
(Esquire , Dec 1965); the two "My Generation" essays by first-waver William Styron
and last-waver Frank Conroy, Esquire (Oct 1968); Daniel Levinson, The Seasons of a
Man's Life (1978); and Rose N. Franzblau, The Middle Generation (1971). For youth
and coming-of-age experiences: Glen Elder, The Children of the Great Depression ( 1974);
Ernie Anastos , 'Twixt: Teens Yesterday and Today (1983); Russell Baker, Growing Up
(1982); James Bryant Conant, The American High School Today (1959); Clay Blair, The
Forgotten War: Ameri ca in Korea , 1950-1953 (1987); Max Hastings, The Korean War
(1989); Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960); Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation
(1971); Malcolm X (with Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965); LeRoi
Jones, Blues People (1963); Whyte (1956); David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, The
Lonely Crowd (1950); David Riesman, Faces in the Crowd (1952); Jack Newfield, A
Prophetic Minority : The American New Left (1967); James Gordon, "The Class of '62,"
WP 6/14/87; Daniel Callahan, Generation of the Third Eye (1965); and Otto Butz,
"Unsilent Generation" (Life, Feb 17, 1958). For rising adulthood and midlife: Victoria
Secunda, By Youth Possessed (1984); Robert and Joan Morrison, From Camelot to Kent
State" ( 1987); Andrew Cherlin. Marriage Divorce Remarriage (1981 ); Morton Hunt,
Sexual Behavior in the 1970s (1974); Linda Sexton, Between Two Worlds: Young Women
in Crisis ( 1979); Ellen Goodman, Turning Points ( 1979); and Ralph Abernathy, And the
Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (1989). For data on income, wealth,
and career paths: Richard Easterlin, Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on
Personal Welfare (1980); and American Council of Life Insurance, The Prime Life
Generation ( 1985). For the Silent perspective on culture and society: Alvin Toffler, Future
Shock (1970); Ben Wattenberg (1974) and The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong
(1984); Daniel Yankelovich , New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned
Upside Down (1981); Barbara Gordon, Jennifer Fever: Older Men and Younger Women
(1988); Bill Cosby. Fatherhood (1986); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970); Charles
Reich, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef (1976); Thomas Peters, In Search of Excellence:
Lessons from America 's Best-Run Companies (1982); David Broder, The Changing of
the Guard: Power and Leadership in America ( 1980); Robert Reich, The Next American
Frontier ( 1983) and The Resurgent Liberal (and Other Unfashionable Prophecies) ( 1989);
Marvin Harris, America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture (1982); John
Naisbitt, Megatrends ( 1982), and with Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000 ( 1989); Paula
Brown Doress (Boston Women's Health Collective) , Ourselves , Growing Older (1987);
and Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (1985).

SILENT REFERENCES. "The Class of '49" (Fortune, Jun 1949); on average age of class
of '49, see ibid.; Manchester (1974), 576; Conroy (1968); How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying (film, 1967); Peggy Sue Got Married (film, 1986); William O'Neill,
504 NOTES ON SOURCES

cited in Manchester (1974), 577; Riesman and Glazer (1950); Kirkpatrick, "On Moving
into a High-Tech House ," WP 6/27/88; Crowe , in " From Cold War to Odd Couple"
(Newsweek , Jul 31, 1989); Franzblau ( 1971), x; Eisler ( 1986), 18; for age of Peace Corps
volunteers, see "Yesterday's New" (Harvard Magazine, Jul-Aug 1989); Junker (1965);
Greene, " Fiftysomething-and in Charge," NYT 1/2/90; Franzblau (1971) , x; Dylan,
My Back Pag es (song , 1964, later popularized by The Byrds); Easterlin (1980). On youth
crime: see, during 1940s and 1950s, drop in murder rate, in HSt, H-971, and drop in
youth incarceration rate, in Callahan (1986), 136. On youth suicide rate: Hth, table 31;
Hendin (1982), ch . 2; and Kramer ( 1972), 207 . On illegitimate births since 1940: HSt,
B-30, B-31. On teen unemployment rate: Pr (1990), table C-39; see also discussion of
cohorts and employment in Charles Murray, losing Ground : American Social Policy,
1950-/980 (1984), ch. 5. " Woody Allen school, " in Goodman, "Some Advice for the
80' s," San Francis co Chronicle 9/ 10/88; "erosion of confidence," in Goodman, "Con-
sent and Compromise," WP 10/3/89; Eisler (1986), 304; Toffler (1970), 230,283,430;
Schneider, "JFK 's Children: The Class of '74" (Atlantic, Mar 1989); "The Can't Do
Government, " in cover story "ls Government Dead?" (Time , Oct 23, 1989); Will, in
" Another Muddy Message" (Newsweek , Nov 21, 1988); "supply-side star," description
of Eastwood in Eastern Revi ew (Jan 1989), citing New York Review of Books in 1982;
Raspberry, "The Unraveling of America," WP 10111190; Fortune (Jun 1949); "fifty-
somethings" appears in Greene (1990); Eisler (1986), 356. Facts. Child labor: Degler
(l 980) , 70; and HSt, series D-31. Per capita income growth from age 20 to 40: Sheldon
Danziger and Peter Gottschalk , " Families with Children Have Fared Worst" (Challenge,
Mar-Apr 1986); see also American Council of Life Insurance ( 1985), and ''The (P)lucky
Generation" (AD, Jan 1983). Household wealth and cohorts born in the 1930s: Frank
Levy and Richard C. Michel, Economic Status Across Generations: Prospects for the
Future (Urban Institute, 1990), 91, 162. Fertility: Battelle Memorial Institute
(1986), ch . 7; and Jeane Clare Ridley et al., paper presented at annual meeting of
Population Association of America (Apr 1987). Women's education: Folger and Nam
(1960), 143-4 . Sex: Hunt (1974), 190; see also Kinsey (1948) and (1953). Divorce:
Robert T. Michael, " The Rise in Divorce Rates, 1950-1974: Age-Specific Components"
(Demography, May 1978). Surge in "helping professions": Otto Butz, "Defense of the
Class of '58," NYT Magazine 5/25/58. Public interest groups: "Public Interest Law
Groups: Prospering Amid Adversity, " WP 11/ 17/88. Charity: "Who Gives to Charity"
(AD, Nov 1986). Congressional bureaucracy : Norman Ornstein et al., Vital Statistics on
Congress (1984), chs. I, 6-7; and "What Is Congress Trying to Hide?" WSJ 8/15/89 .
Voting behavior: Miller (1980); and " Opinion Roundup" (PO, Dec-Jan, 1981). Age
preference of today's 55-year-olds: "Opinion Roundup" (PO, Feb-Mar 1985). Youth.
Eisler (1986), 29; Gone With the Wind (film, 1939); for "total situation" parenting, see
Hawes and Hiner ( 1985), 502; Bundeson, The Baby Book ( 1927); Watson, Psychological
Care of Infant and Child (1928); "Tootle," in Hawes and Hiner (1985), 400; Holling
C. Holling, Paddle to the Sea (1941); Conroy (1968); "Most of us kept quiet .. . "
appears in ibid .; graffiti, in George F. Will, " Giuliani: He's No Fiorello," WP
10/26/89. The Tender Trap (film and song, 1955); Dion DiMucci, A Teenager in love
(song, 1959). Coming of Age. Baker (1982), 230, 228; "Don't say .. . " motto, cited
in Lee (1970), 92; for Silent youth attitudes toward politics, see "Anti-Democratic
Attitudes of High School Seniors in the Orwell Year" (Phi Delta Kappan, Jan 1984);
NOTES ON SOURCES 505

Goodman (1960); Heller, in Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics (1985), 95; Manch-
ester (1974). 578-9; Buckley, God and Man at Yale (1951); Cook (1971), 40; Herb
Caen, in "Baghdad-by-the-Bay" column in San Francisco Chronicle 4/2/58; Elvis Pres-
ley, All Shook Up (song, 1957). Rising Adulthood. Sheehy (1976), 39, 123-4 ; Updike,
in Eisler (1986), 187; Callahan (1965), 13; Ray Charles, What'd I Say? (song, 1959);
Port Huron Statement (1962), cited in Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (1969), 327; Har-
rington, The Other America : Poverty in the United States ( 1962); Silberman, Crisis in
the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (1970); Peter, Paul, and Mary, If
I Had a Hammer (song written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes, 1962); Nader, Unsafe at
Any Speed (1965); Styron ( 1968). Midlife. Viorst, It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty, and
Other Tragedies of Married Life (1968); Weinberg, in Morrison and Morrison (1987),
231; Hoffman, in ibid., 293; Agnew, in Manchester (1974), 1220; Updike, Couples
(1968); Gordon (1984); "tender sometimes ... " appears in Sheehy (1976), 170; Millett ,
Brownmiller, Atkinson, all cited in Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (1981), 48; Eisler
(1986), 308. Approaching Elderhood. Broder (1980), 12; Broder's "Fit Fifties Gen-
eration," WP 8/15/89; Hart, in Schneider (1989); Reagan , in WP 2/25/88; "the magic
of the machine" appears in George Bush, biographic film, televised (Aug 17, 1988)
during the Republican National Convention; Richard Gaines on Dukakis, cited in " The
Silent Generation's Candidate," WP 6/5/88; Moynihan , "W hat Chills the Blood of
Liberals,' ' WP 9/24/89; Aaron (and others) , cited in Hobart Rowan , '' America's Divided
But Strong," WP 5117190; Nye , "The Misleading Metaphor of Decline" (Atlantic, Mar
1990); Wattenberg, "Opinion Roundup" (PO, Aug-Sep 1983); Naisbitt (1982), 39;
Souter, in "Souter: 'I Have Not Made Up My Mind' on Roe," WP 9115/90; Bellah
(1985); Phillips, Post-Conservative America (1982); Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling (1989);
Gilder , "The Message of the Microcosm" (American Spectator, Dec 1987); "Hubble
Probe Opens as Scientists Reassess Mission ," WP 6/29/89; Sheehy ( 1978), 45; Grossman,
in "Parenthood II: The Nest Won't Stay Empty," NYT 3/12/89; Toffler, PowerShift
(1990); Peters, Thriving on .Chaos (1987); Levinson, in "Fo r Many, Turmoil of Aging
Erupts in the SO's, Studies Find," NYT 217189;Goodman on Schroeder , in "She Couldn't
Repackage Herself, " WP 9/29/87. Lois Wyse, Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grand-
mother (1990); for "21st Century Club," see "Using Social Security Checks for Greater
Need ," NYT 9124189 . Nader, referring to the Center for Civic Leadership in Princeton,
New Jersey, in " Alumni Cross 34 Years, Arrive at a Decision," WP 12/17/89; Union
of International Associations, in ''What's in Store for the 1990s?" WP 211190;Korean
War Memorial fund-raising pamphlet, " The Last Battle," received by author in 1988;
Kelly, "Listen Up, You Baby Boomers: The Silent Generation Is Clearing Its Throat, "
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel 12/29/89; Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, People (song, 1963).

CHAPTER 11: THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE

MILLENNIAL CYCLE BACKGROUND. For an overview of the awakening years, see Wil-
liam Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972
(1974), parts IV-V ; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987); U.S.
Riot (Kerner) Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Dis-
506 NOTES ON SOURCES

orders (1968) ; National (Eisenhower) Commission on the Causes and Prevention of

Violence, Violence in America ( 1969); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:
American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations ( 1979); and Marvin Harris , America
Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture (1981). For social overviews of the post-
Awakening years, see Robert Bellah et al. , Habits of the Heart: Individualism and
.Commitment in American Life (1985); Richard Reeves , American Journey: Traveling
with Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America (1982); Charles Murray, Losing
Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1984) ; Jann Wenner, Twenty Years of
Rolling Stone : What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been (1987); Arnold Mitchell, The Nine
American Lifestyles: Who We Are & Where We Are Going (1983); John Naisbitt, Mega-
trends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives (1982); and Kevin Phillips, Post-
Conservative America : People , Politics , & Ideology in a Time of Crisis (1982) . For the
private and public economics of emerging and maturing generations: Easterlin ( 1980);
Peter Peterson and Neil Howe, On Borrowed Time: How the Growth in Entitlement
Spending Threatens America's Future (1988); Americans for Generational Equity, The
Generational Journal (1988-89, various editions) ; Congressional Budget Office, Trends
in Family Income : 1970-1986 (1988); Jerry Gerber et al. , Lifetrends: The Future of Baby
Boomers and Other Aging Americans ( 1989); and American Council of Life Insurance,
Datatrack and Trend Analysis Program reports (1982-87 , various editions). For changes
in the education and social environment of youth: Bureau of the Census, Characteristics
of American Children and Youth (various editions) ; U .S. Department of Education, The
Condition of Education: A Statistical Report ( 1986); report of the (Wirtz Commission)
Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline, On Further Examination
(College Entrance Examination Board , 1977); David Bromley , Mary Crow, and Martha
Gibson, "Grade Inflation: Trends, Causes, and Implications" (Phi Delta Kappan, Jun
1978); Michael Gose, "Students of the 1960s Versus 1980s: A Report of Teacher Per-
ceptions" (High School Journal , Feb 1986); on testing data, see bibliography in Brian
Waters, The Test Score Decline (Human Research Resources Corporation, 1981); Diane
Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (1983); Calvin Lee,
The Campus Scene, 1900-1970 (1970); Helen Horowitz, Campus Life : Undergraduate
Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (1987); Alexander Astin,
Kenneth Green, and William Korn, The American Freshman : Twenty Year Trends, 1966-
1985 (1987); Jerald Bachman, Lloyd Johnston, and Patrick O' Malley, Monitoring the
Future : Questionnaire Responses from the Nation's High School Seniors (1976-89, var-
ious editions); Margaret Steinfels , Who's Minding the Children ?: The History and Politics
of Day Care in America (1973); Joseph Hawes and Ray Hiner, American Childhood
(1985); and Ernie Anastos , 'Twixt: Teens Yesterday and Today (1983) . For crime data,
see Marvin Wolfgang and Neil Weiner (eds. ), Criminal Violence (1982); and Bureau of
Justice Statistics, Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice (1983) , Criminal Victimi-
zation in the United States ( 1985), and other bulletins and special reports. For other social
and political data , see Warren Miller, American National Election Studies Data Source-
book, 1952-1978 (1980); AD (1979-90, various issues); Louis Harris, inside America
(1987); Anthony Casale , Tracking Tomorrow 's Trends: What We Think About Our Lives
and Our Future (1986); and Department of Defense , Population Representation in the
Military Services (various years) . For the changing experience of women , see Betty
Friedan, The Second Stage (1981 ); and Battelle Memorial Institute, The Cosmopolitan
Report: The Changing Life Course of American Women (1986).
NOTES ON SOURCES 507

MILLENNIAL CYCLE REFERENCES. Allen , " Woodstock, for What It' s Worth, " WP
8/15/89: Slick , in .. Overheard " (Newsweek, Sep 4, 1989); Guthrie, in "Woodstock"
(Life, Aug 1989); Hair (musical , 1968; film, 1979); Cunningham , Letter to the Editor:
"Who Cares About the '60s , " WP 8/24/89; Hoogeveen , Letter to the Editor: " Rose-
Colored History," WP 919189; Easy Rider (film, 1969); William McLoughlin , "The
Fourth Awakening ," in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reforms (1978) .

BOOM BACKGROUND. The best single generational biography is Landon Jones , Great
Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (1980) . For the first-wave Boom
self-image, see Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the
Sixties Generation ( 1987); Ralph Whitehead , Glory Days : The Baby Boom Generation
and the American Dream (Center for National Policy , 1986); Joyce Maynard, Looking
Back (1973) ; Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky , What Really Happened to the
Class of '65? (1976); and Joel Makower, Boom: Ta/kin' About Our Generation (1985).
For the last-wave self-image , see Gottlieb ( 1987); Cheryl Merser , Grown-Ups (1987);
Wanda Urbanska: The Singular Generation : Young Americans in the 1980s (1986); Lan-
sing Lamont, Campus Shock (1979); Benjamin Hart , The Third Generation : Young Con-
servative Leaders Look to the Future ( 1987); and Arthur Levine , When Dreams and
Heroes Die (1980) . For data profiles: The Baby Boom Generation: A Report Describing
the Characteristics and Attitudes of America's Largest Generation and Its Impact on
Society (American Council on Life Insurance, 1983); Daniel Yankelovich et al., The
Sixties Generation : A Profile (1986); Cheryl Russell, JOOPredictions for the Baby Boom
(1987); U.S. Department of Justice, Delinquen cy in Two Birth Cohorts (1985); Morton
Hunt, Sexual Behavior in the 1970s ( l 974); and Rex Weiner and Deanne Stillman,
Woodstock Census: The Nationwide Survey of the Sixties Generation ( 1979). For Boomers
and economics : Phillip Longman. Born to Pay : The New Politics of Aging in America
(1987); Louise Russell, The Baby Boom Generation and the Economy (1982); and U.S.
Congress , Joint Economic Committee, Working Mothers Are Preserving Family Living
Standards (staff study, 1986). For the Boom Awakening and youth culture : Kenneth
Keniston (1971) and Young Radicals : Notes on Committed Youth (1968); Lewis Feuer,
The Conflict of Generations (1969), chs. 8-9; Victoria Secunda, By Youth Possessed
(1987); Jacob Brackman, "My Generation ," Esquire (Oct 1968); Joan and Robert Mor-
rison, From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words of Those Who
Lived It (1987); Otto Butz (ed.), To Make a Differen ce: A Student Look at America
(1967); James Simon Kunen , Strawberry Statement : Notes of a College Revolutionary
(1969); Jeffrey Hadden , "The Private Generation " (Psychology Today , Sep 3, 1969);
Susan Littwin, The Postponed Generation : Why American Youth Are Growing Up Later
(1986); Charles Reich , The Greening of America (1970); Mitchell Goodman (ed .), The
Movement Toward a New America: The Beginning of a Long Revolution ( 1970); Robert
Pielke, You Say You Want a Revolution : Rock Music in American Culture (1986); and
Herbert London, Closing the Circle: A Cultural History of the Rock Revolution (1984) .
For the Boom-G.l. "generation gap" and its legacy: Alexander Klein (ed .), Natural
Enemies: Youth and the Clash of Generations (1969); Edgar Friedenberg (ed.), The Anti-
American Generation (1971); James DiGiacomo and Edwart Wakin, We Were Never
Their Age ( 1972); Henry Malcolm, Generation of Narcissus ( 1971); K. Ross Toole, 'Tm
Tired of the Tyranny of Spoiled Brats" (Reader's Digest, Jun 1970); Anthony M. Casale
and Philip Lennan, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The Fall and Rise of the Woodstock
508 NOTES ON SOURCES

Generation (1989); and Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Sec-
ond Thoughts About the Sixties ( 1989). For the Vietnam dimension: Lawrence Baskir
and William Strauss, Chance and Circumstance : The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam
Generation (1978); Center for the New Leadership, Enduring Legacies : Expressions from
the Hearts and Minds of the Vietnam Generation (1987); and John Wheeler, Touched
with Fire: The Future of the Vietnam Generation (1984). For "New Age" and related
religious movements: Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social
Transformation in the 1980s (1980); R. T . Gribbon, Thirty-Year-Olds and the Church:
Ministry with the Baby Boom Generation (1981); Howard Means, "God Is Back: Wash-
ingtonians, Especially Baby Boomers, Are Returning to Religion in Increasing Numbers,"
Washingtonian (Dec 1986); and "For Young Baby Boomers, Deeper Faith," Atlanta
Journal 3/3/90. For the "yuppie" era: Frank Levy and Robert Michel, "Are Baby
Boomers Selfish?" (AD, Apr 1985); "The Baby Boomers Tum 40" (Time cover story,
May 19, 1986); "Baby Boomers Have Sixties Heritage, but Charities Say They're
Cheap," WSJ 9/11/86; and Quinn Mills, Not Like Our Parents : A New Look at How the
Baby Boom Generation ls Changing America (1987).

BOOM REFERENCES. Gitlin (1987), 355; Brackman (1968); Erikson, "Toward the Year
2000" (Daedalus, Summer 1967); Brackman (1968); Gitlin (1987), 433; on "alcoholics,
drug dealers ... , " see "Take Back the Park," San Francisco Chronicle
8/26/90; Abigail Truffaut, "The Rise of the Neo-Puritans," WP 7/8/90. The Who, My
Generation (song, 1965); Jones (1980), book title; Manchester (1974), 287; Time, 1965
article cited in Medved and Wallechinsky (1976), 3; Time, cover story,
1/6/67; Easterlin (1980), 147; Gottlieb (1987), 8; Caddell, "The Politics of the Baby
Boom," in David Boaz (ed.), Left, Right, and Baby Boom (1986); Brackman (1968);
Keniston (1968), 73; Allison, in Time, "Let It Be Vivid, Let It Be Now!" in Klein
(1969); Radcliffe speaker, in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "Students and the Velocity of
History," in ibid. For Boom opinion surge toward Reagan in 1980, see Richard Wirthlin
et al., "Campaign Chronicle" (PO, Feb-Mar 1981). Keniston (1968), 55; Malcolm
(1971), 56; Feuer (1969), 470. Gitlin (1987), 426; Lasch (1979), book title; The Graduate
(film, 1967); Katy Butler, "The Great Boomer Bust" (Mother Jones , Jun 1989); Pielke
(1986), 181; Keniston (1968), 80; Ferguson (1980), 87; Urbanska (1986), 82; Tickel, in
"Reluctant Couple Converts to Activism," WP 212189. For the shift in economic well-
being from first wave to last, see income data by age bracket since 1960 in CPR, series
P-60; see also" '50s Baby Boom Losing Ground in Economic Race," WP 9/8/84, Mills
(1987), 16, and "New Arguments About America's New Jobs" (PO, Jul-Aug 1987).
Rise in marriage age from first to last cohorts: HSt, A-158, A-159, and Abs, no. 126;
see also Willard L. Rodgers and Arland Thornton, "Changing Patterns of First Marriage
in the United States" (Demography, May 1985). "The Great American Boom" (Fortune,
Jun 1946); see also Jones (I 980), 20; Butler (1989). Facts. Demographic "Baby Boom" :
see summary in Jones (I 980), 19-35. Day care: Steinfels (1973), 72-3. Aggressive
medicine: Carol Foster (ed.), Growing Up in America (1989), 36; see also Phyllis
McGinley, "The New Breed of Parents," in Klein (1969); and "Penicillin Losing Some
Punch," San Francisco Chronicle 2/23/89. Keniston (1968), 51. Poll on attachment to
mothers: Barbara Bryant, "High School Students Look at Their World" (Ohio State
Department of Education, 1970). Wylie, The Sons and Daughters of Mom (1971). Ac-
NOTES ON SOURCES 509

cidental deaths: Yth, 102. Drunk driving: U.S. Department of Justice, Special Report :
Drunk Driving (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Feb 1988). Suicide: Hth, table 31; Herbert
Hendin, Suicide in America (1982), ch. 2; and Rene F. W. Diekstra and Keith Hawton,
Suicide in Adolescence (1987), ch. I. lllegitimate births: Abs, no. 87. SAT slide: Wirtz
Commission Report (1977). Grade inflation: Astin et al. (1987), 85; and Bromley et al.
(1978). Nontraditional grading: "Downgrading No-Grade " (Time, Feb 4, 1974). Di-
minishing academic requirements: Ravitch (1983), 225. Educational achievement: Russell
(l 987), 47; and data published in CPR, series P-20. Crime: U.S. Department of Justice
(1985); and Wolfgang and Weiner (1982), 193. Sexual behavior: Hunt (1974), 152-3,
190, 258-61 , 315. Vietnam combat and draft experience: Baskir and Strauss (1978), 5,
30-1, 69 . Opinions on Vietnam: Yankelovich et al. (1986). Opinions among noncollege
Boomers: Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. , " The Political Future of
Activist Generations," in Philip G . Altbach and Robert S. Laufer (eds.), The New
Pilgrims : Youth Protest in Transition (1972). Boom opinion on American response to
Iraq: CBS News-New York Times poll, cited in "Opponents to U.S . Move Have Poverty
in Common, " NYT 918190 . Religion: Naisbitt (1990), 275-88; "For Young Baby Boom-
ers, Deeper Faith," Atlanta Constitution 313190; and (on first- versus last-wave contrasts)
CBS News-New York Times "48 hours" poll (Dec 5- 8, 1989). Boomer vote for Jackson
and Robertson: CBS News-New York Times poll (2/8/88, Iowa Caucus); ABC News exit
poll, in WP 2117/88 (NH primary); CBS News-New York Times poll, in "Portrait of the
Super Tuesday Voters,' ' NYT 3/ 10/88; and CBS News-New York Times poll (617/88, CA
and NJ primaries). Income: Frank S. Levy and Richard C. Michel , "The Economic
Future of the Baby Boom' ' (paper presented at conference of Americans for Generational
Equity on Apr 10-11, 1986); in these figures, " G.I . father" was born in 1919, "Silent
father" in 1929, and "first-wave Boomer" in 1943. Boomer lifestyle comparisons with
their parents: Whitehead (1986). Youth. LeShan (1973), 116-7 ; Spock, in "When a
Generation Tums 40" (U.S. News and World Report, Mar 10, 1986); California psy-
chologist, Dr. Leo Pirojnikoff, in Littwin (l 986), 20; Merser (l 987), 106, 88; the Beatles,
I Want to Hold Your Hand (song, 1964); The Rolling Stones, Let' s Spend the Night
Together (song, 1967); Bruce Springsteen, Dancing in the Dark (song, 1984). Coming
of Age. On Sproul Hall pickets, see Ravitch (1983) , 196; Collier and Horowitz (1989),
319; Kunen (1969); Moynihan, "Nirvana Now" (American Scholar, Autumn 1967); on
the proportion of Boomers who were radicals, see Ravitch (1983), 223; Keniston (1968),
81; poll on noncollegiate support for Wallace, cited in Lipset and Ladd (1972); Gitlin
(1987), 318; 1970 Gallup Poll, cited in Lipset and Ladd (1972); Brown, ibid., 318; Reich
(1970), 217; the Beatles, Let It Be (song, 1970); Lamont, in Horowitz (1987), 255.
Rising Adulthood. Dartmouth student, in LeShan (1973), 128; Daily Californian (grad-
uation issue, 1971); Levenstein (1988), 204; "Manifesto of the Person," by Theodore
Roszak, cited in Ferguson (1980), 36; Urbanska (1986), 211; Darman, in "Darman's
Soft Shoe," WP 8/ 10/89. For data defining the yuppie, see " The Big Chill (Revisited)
or Whatever Happened to the Baby Boom?" (AD, Sep 1985); and " Played Out: The
Going Gets Tough and Madison Avenue Dumps the Yuppies," WSJ 12/9/87. Approach-
ing Midlife. O'Rourke, " What Next for the Boomers? The New Seriousness?" WP
3/8/88; Grey Advertising Agency, cited in " Sponsors' New Message: Buy It, But Have
Patience," NYT 8127190; Merser (1987), 49; Allen, "Star Athletes and the Aging of
Aquarius," WP 6120190; Kors, "It's Speech, Not Sex, the Dean Bans Now," WSJ
510 NOTES ON SOURCES

10/12/89. On "New Puritanism," see "Do as I Do: The New Puritanism," Washington
Times 5/11/89; for "inappropriately directed laughter," see George Will, "Liberal Cen-
sorship," WP 11/5/89; for "Green" theme, see "Mother Nature's Guilt Trip," WP
4/22/90; for "chastity," see "Chastity Organization: Starting Over in Purity," NYT
1/28/90; O'Neill, "Words to Survive Life With: None of This, None of That," NYT 51
27/90; Snyder, in Letter to the Editor, WP 1/4/89; "Earth First" motto, in "Environ-
mentalists Hurt, Then Held in Blast," NYT 5126190; Sharpton, in "The Black Man's
Burden," WSJ 8/20/90; Steele, in George Will, "The Stab of Racial Doubt" (Newsweek,
Sep 24, 1990); Zinsmeister, "Growing Up Scared" (Atlantic, Jun 1990); WSJ, cited in
George Will, "Stuck in the Sand-for Good," WP 9/9/90; Webb's "ruthless," in "At
Least the Navy Knows What It's Doing in the Gulf," WP 4/20/88; Webb's "prisons,"
in "Don't Call on the Guard," WP 4/13/89; on Boomer attitudes toward capital punish-
ment, see U.S. Department of Justice, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics (Bureau
of Justice Statistics; 1986), 102-3; "The Fryers Club Convention" (Newsweek, Aug 27,
1990); antismoker activist, in Victoria Sackett, "Discriminating Tastes: The Prejudice
of Personal Preference" (PO, Jul-Aug 1987); Bennett, in Richard Cohen, "Czar William
at the Winter Palace," WP 2123190;Gingrich, in Thomas Edsall, "The Great Divider, "
WP 3/23/89; "Apocalypse Darman , " coined in Paul A. Gigot, "Potomac Watch," WSJ
9/28/90; Russo, in "Democrats Vent Rage at Darman," WP 1131/90;Dorgan, in "Degree
of Acrimony in Recent Political Battles Worries Analysts Who Say Worse Is Yet to
Come," WSJ 6/12/89; Becker, in "Environmentalists Hope for Scorcher," WP 6/21/89;
Boswell , "This Game of Arrogance Needs Heavy Humbling," WP 3/16190; Fallows,
"We Need a Good, Healthy Trade Crisis," WP 314190;Winner, "In Third World, Earth-
Day's a Cruel Joke," Fairfax Journal 4/27/90; Collier and Horowitz (1989), 335; Casale
and Lerman ( 1989), 211. Bentsen, in 1988 Vice-Presidential debate; Metzenbaum on
Bennett , in Mary McGrory, "Drug Czar's First Stop: D.C. ," WP 3/9/89; Stein, "Oh,
I Miss the Revolution, " NYT 4/4/88; Reich (1970), 350; Good Housekeeping, "The
'Decency Decade' Begins Today," NYT 112190.

THIRTEENTH BACKGROUND. For good examples of the 13er peer personality and style:
Nancy Smith, "Twenty -five and Pending: A Lost Generation Wants to Get Out of the
Baby-Boom Shadow," WP 7/2/89; David M. Gross and Sophronia Scott, "Twenty-
something" (Time, Jul 16, 1990); Miles Orkin, "Mucho Slingage by the Pool," NYT
10/5/89; Brett Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero ( 1985); and assorted 13er biographies in Peter
Gareffa (ed.), Contemporary Newsmakers: The People Behind Today's Headlines (1985
and subsequent years) . For 13er lifecycle experiences: Neil Postman, The Disappearance
of Childhood (1982); Marie Winn, Children Without Childhood (1983); Vance Packard,
Our Endangered Children: Growing Up in a Changing World (1983); David Elkind, All
Grown Up and No Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisis (1984); "Born in the '60s," WP
(four-part series, May 27-30, 1986); Burton Pines, Back to Basics (1982); and Victoria
Secunda ( 1987). For attitudes shown toward 13er youths in popular culture: Mary DeMarr
and Jane Bakerman , The Adolescent in the American Novel Since 1960 (1986); Kathy
Merlock Jackson, Images of Children in American Film: A Sociocultural Analysis (1986);
and Judy Blume, Letters to Judy: What Your Kids Wish They Could Tell You (1986).
For elder criticism of I 3ers: Benjamin Stein, "Valley Girls View the World" (PO, Aug-
Sep 1983); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education
NOTES ON SOURCES 511

Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987); Diane
Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., What Do 17-Year-Olds Know?: A Report on the First
National Assessment of History and Literature ( 1987); Lynne Cheney, 50 Hours: A Core
Curriculum for College Students (1989); U.S. Department of Education, A Nation at
Risk : The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in
Education , 1983); Steve Allen, Dumbth and 81 Ways to Make America Smarter (1985);
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987); and
Peter Hart, "Democracy's Next Generation" Report (People for the American Way,
1990). For data profiles: "The Sparse Generation" (National Journal, special issue;
March 8, 1986); Children's Defense Fund, A Children's Defense Budget: An Analysis of
Our Nation's Investment in Children (1987); Leonard Ramist and Solomon Arbeiter,
Profiles, College-Bound Seniors (College Board, 1983); Reho Thorum, "The High School
Student of the Seventies" (High School Journal, Oct 1977); and Allan Ornstein, "The
Changing High School Student Culture" (High School Journal, Oct 1981). For 13er
family nurture : Jean Okimoto and Phyllis Jackson Stegall, Boomerang Kids: How to Live
with Adult Children Who Return Home ( 1987); Helen Swan and Victoria Houston, Alone
After School: A Self-Care Guide for Latchkey Children and Their Parents (1985); Lynette
Long and Thomas Long, The Handbook for Latchkey Children and Their Parents ( 1983);
Sheila Kamerman, Parenting in an Unresponsive Society (1980); Kyle Pruett, The Nur-
turing Father: Journey Toward the Complete Man (1987); Boston Women's Health Book
Collective, Ourselves and Our Children: A Book by and for Parents (1978); Lenore
Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution (1985); Bill Cosby, Fatherhood (1986); and Andrew
Cherlin, Marriage Divorce Remarriage (1981 ). For education: Ivan IJlich's De schooling
Society (1971); Charles Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American
Education (1970); C. H. Rathbone, The Informal Classroom (1971 ); Nancy Dearman
(ed.), The Condition of Education (1982); and Patrick Welsh, Tales Out of School: A
Teacher's Candid Account from the Front Lines of the American High School (1986).
For the economic and social hardships of 13er youths: Danziger and Gottschalk (1986);
National Association of State Boards of Education, Code Blue: Uniting for Healthier
Youth (1990); Blayne Cutler, "Up the Down Staircase" (AD , Apr 1989); Howard
Sudak, Amasa Ford, and Norman Rushforth (eds.), Suicide in the Young (1984); Terry
Williams, Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring ( 1989); Cheryl Hayes
(ed.), Risking the Future: Adolescent Sexuality, Pregnancy , and Childbearing (1987);
Nicholas Lemann, "The Origins of the Underclass" (Atlantic, Jun 1986); U.S. Bureau
of Justice Statistics, Teenage Victims (1986); and Lawrence Greenfeld and Patrick Law-
son, 'Trends in Prison Populations,'' presented at the National Conference on Punishment
for Criminal Offenses ( 1987). For youth opinion: Yth; National Association of Secondary
School Principals, The Mood of American Youth (1984); and Roper Organization, The
American Chicle Youth Poll (1987).

THIRTEENTH REFERENCES. For Patton screening, see Hart ( 1987), 67-9; the Georgetown
University minister is Father Lawrence Madden, in Pines ( 1982), 237; Smith (1989);
"Twentysomething" (Time, Jul 16, 1990); for polls of high school seniors on fear of
national catastrophe, see National Association of Secondary School Principals (1984),
42-4; Felicity Barringer, "What IS Youth Coming to?" NYT 8/19/90; Top Gun (film,
1986); The Breakfast Club (film, 1985); sex, lies. and videotape (film, 1989); Bad
512 NOTES ON SOURCES

Influence (film, 1989); Schwartz, Bicvcle Days (1989); Schwartz, in "John Burnham
Schwartz, in Early Bloom," WP 5/23/89; Lewis. Liar's Poker (1989); U.S. soldier in
Panama, in WP 114190; Goodman, "Why Kids Tune Out Politics," WP 12/2189; Baker,
"Herky-Jerky Bang Bang," NYT 6/30/90; Lea, in "God's Green Beret," San Francisco
Chronicle 9/1/90; " Hopes of a Gilded Age, " WP 6/14/86; "Rettonization ," in Gareffa
(1985), no. 2; Mandel. " Canseco : A Schmuck for Our Times,'' San Francisco Chronicle
2126/90; Ad Council poster, in "Depression" (Newsweek , May 4, 1987); U.S. Department
of Education (1983); Bloom ( 1987); Ravitch and Finn, Jr. (1987), 261-2; Cohen, "John-
ny' s Miserable SATs," WP 914190; Anderson. " Fighting the Dumbness Trend," WP
1/21/90; Allen ( 1989); Carnegie report, in "Colleges Lack a Value System, Report Says,"
San Francisco Examiner (4/30/90); "junky ," quoting the president of Bradford College,
in William Raspberry , "Getting Kids Ready for School," WP 5/9/88; Kuttner, "Our
Sheltered Political Class," WP 8/31/90; People for the American Way, cited in "A
Frivolous Decade," WP 113190; Rathbone, in Ravitch (1983), 249; Hirsch (1987); Rath-
bone, in Ravitch (1983), 249; Paper Moon (film, 1973); Ellis (1985); "proto-adults"
appears in "Teens : On the Road to Grown-Up Cares," WSJ 217190; Goodman, in Elkind
(1984), 13; Blum, in statement given to author; Welsh (1986), 15; Kreski, in "MTV's
Game Show Tries to Be Dumb and Finally Succeeds," WSJ 8/11/89; Bon Jovi, You Give
love a Bad Name (song, 1986); the think tank study is "The Ethics of American Youth,"
The Josephson Institute, cited in William Raspberry, "Values from the Good Old Days,"
WP 1117/90; River's Edge (film, 1986); Elkind (1984), 17; Peters, quoted in "Time to
Toast the Post-Posties,' ' San Fran cisco Chronicle 4/8/90; Matt Groening on Bart Simpson,
in "An Animated Conversation with Bart's Creator" (Rolling Stone, Jun 28, 1990);
Bennett on Bart Simpson, in "Personalities ," WP 5/28/90; Linburg, in statement given
to author; for rising college tuitions , see Terry Hartle, "Are College Costs a Problem?"
(PO, May-Jun 1987); Nix, in "The Posties ," San Francisco Chronicle 3/9/90 . Facts.
Legal abortions per 100 live births: Hth , table 10; for data before 1973, see Battelle
Memorial Institute (1986), vol. 1, 7-38 . Rise in divorce rate per 1,000 married women:
for 1920-1970, HSt, 8-217; since 1970, Abs, no. 126. Surveys on bad marriages: cited
in Preston ( l 984) . Risk of parental divorce : National Center for Health Statistics , Sup-
plements to the Monthly Vital Statisti cs Report (series 24, no. l, May 1989). Feeling
happier after divorce : Wjnn (1983), 139. Family complexity: "Children Stepping Out"
(AD , May 1985); and Cherlin (1981), 86. Working mothers: "Family Crises" (National
Journal, Apr 16, 1988); and Yth, 38-41. Latchkey children: Long and Long (1983), 23.
"Cool" parents: Sunkist Teen Trendset Survey (1989). Zandl. in "Check It Out!" WP
9/23/90. Average grades: published annually in Astin et al. ( 1978 and later years). Trend
in family-assistance benefits per recipient: U.S. House of Representatives, Children in
Poverty (Committee on Ways and Means, May 22, 1985), 189-219; and Overview of
Entitlement Programs , 1990 Green Book (Committee on Ways and Means, Jun 5, 1990),
section 7. Trend in minimum wage: "Minimum Wage: Bulwark of the Privileged," WSJ
6/15/89. Boom versus 13th teacher survey: Gose (1986). College completion: "College
Completion Rates Are Said to Decline Sharply, " WSJ 7/28/89; and "Drop in Black
Enrollment Traced Partly to Military Service ," WP 1115190 . Earnings by educational
background: Joe Schwartz, "The Forgotten Market" (AD, May 1988). Military enlist-
ment: U.S . Department of Defense (1987) . Republican leanings: "Opinion Roundup"
(PO, Nov-Dec 1986); and National Journal (1986). Mortality rates: VSt, vol. II, part
NOTES ON SOURCES 513

A, section I and part B, table 8-6; Hth, tables 21- 31; and Yth, 102-3 . Youth violence
and fear: see Zinsmeister (1990); and Bornemann, in ibid.; see also National Association
of State Boards of Education (1990). Suicide: Hth, table 31; Sudak (I 984) ; Diekstra and
Hawton (1987), ch. I ; and Hendin (1982) . ch. 2 . Incarceration: U.S. Department of
Justice, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States , 1850-1984 (Bureau of
Justice Statistics; 1986), 34; and U.S. Department of Justice (1986) , 399-401 ; see also
" Young Law Breakers Jamming Country's Detention Centers," NIT 7117/88, and
"Study : I in 4 Young Black Men Is in Jail or Court-Supervised , " WP 2127190. Poverty
by age bracket: CPR , series P-60 (annual) ; see also Congressional Budget Office (1988),
38. Attitudes toward welfare and unemployment: "The Age of Conservatism" (AD, Nov
1986). Male wage-earners by age bracket: U.S . Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled
in Children's Defense Fund (1987) , 257; see also Cutler (1989), and "To Be Young,
Male, and Black," WP 12/28/89. Household median income: Congressional Budget Office
( 1988), 94, 96. Homeownership by age bracket : Census survey data updated yearly since
1972 by National Association of Home Builders; see also "Home Ownership Found to
Decline," NIT 10/8/89. Youths living at home: "Twentysomething" (Time , Jul 16,
1990); Okimoto and Stegall (I 987) , 5; and "Parenthood II: The Nest Won't Stay Empty,"
NIT 3/12/89. Tax comparison : Ways and Means (1990), 1148. Newspaper readers by
age bracket: Times Mirror survey, cited in "Profiles of Today 's Youth: They Couldn't
Care Less," NIT 6/28/90 . " Cynical Americans" survey: "Cynical ? So Who's Cynical?"
WP 6/23/89; survey author Phillip Mirvis, quoted in ibid ., wrote The Cynical Ameri cans:
Living and Working in an Age of Discontent and Disillusion (1989). Youth. Cruise, in
Gareffa (1985), no. 4; " good life" survey , in Harris (1981), 114; Boston Women's
Health Book Collective (1978), 5; Thomas Gordon , Parental Effectiveness Training
(1970); T. Berry Brazelton, Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development (1969);
Burton White , The First Three Years of Life (1975); Winn (1983) , 24- 5; Kyle Pruett,
The Nurturing Father : Journ ey Toward the Complete Man (I 987); Hall, in Gareffa (I 985),
no. 3; Norma Klein, It 's OK If You Don't Love Me (1977); Keniston , All Our Children
(1977), 18; Cosby (1986) , 93; Poussaint , in "Here's What Most Parents Look Like to
Kids Watching TV " (ad), NIT9 /27/88; Boston Women's Health Book Collective (1978) ,
5; Close Encount ers of the Third Kind (film, 1977). For "breakthrough" youth books,
see DeMarr and Bakerman (1986); for children in films, see Jackson (1986); Blume
(1986), 273; Feldstein , in Winn (1983), 64; Long (1983). Approaching Rising Adult-
hood. Ralph, in statement given to author; on. rising child labor law violations, see
"Secretary Dole: Stiffer Child Labor Penalties," WP 6129190. On perceptions about
working harder and living standards , see " Twentysomething" (Time, Jul 16, 1990); see
also CBS News poll, 2/23/89. "The way society presents it ... " appears in Jill Nelson,
" After Graduation? " WP 516190; Etzioni , in " Teens Overemployed ," Cleveland Plain
Dealer 11/2/87. For youths as shoppers, see "Teens: On the Road to Grown-Up Cares, "
NIT 217190 , and Cutler (1989); Erikson , in " Twentysomething" (Time, Jul 16, 1990);
" The Baby-Busters : New Generation Asks More Than Its Elders of Corporate World ,"
WSJ 10/26/88; on 13er entrepreneurs, see "The Year in Start-Ups, " (INC, Nov 1989).
Herbert, in "Schools See Empty Desks at Halloween," NIT 11/1/89; lce-T , cited in
"Fighting Words ," WP 10/ 15/89; Tyson, in "Tyson ' s Sensational Punch Lines," WSJ
6/23/89; Raspberry , " Living and Dying Like Animals," WP 11/2/89; Samenow, "The
Wilding of Central Park, " WP 512189; New York City youth on " wilding," quoted on
514 NOTES ON SOURCES

ABC World News Tonight 4/24/89. Long, in "Hard Crime, Hard Times Hit 'Breadbasket
of the Confederacy,'" WP 8/19/89; Fulwood, in "Washington's Year of Shame," WP
l/l/89; Salaam, in "N.Y. Jogger's Assailants Given Maximum Sentences," WP
9/12/90; Williams (1989); Fulwood, in op. cit.; Chapman, Fast Car (song, 1988); Lasch,
"The I's Have It for Another Decade," NYT 12/27/89. For "throwaways," see "Some-
body Else's Kids" (Newsweek, Apr 25, 1988), and "Discarded Population Put at Nearly
500,000," WP 12/12/89. Youth with "Boom" cars, in "Laws Aim to Tum Off Ear-
Splitting 'Boom' Cars," NYT 1117190;Silber, in "Grads Going for Gold,'' San Francisco
Examiner 6111189;job predictions, in AD marketing brochure, mailed to public (1990);
Bangles lyric, in Debbi Peterson and Susanna Hoffs, Angels Don't Fall in Love (song,
1986); Ellis (1985); "U .S. Students Left Flat by Sweep of History," WP 12/2/89; Con-
nolly, in "Berkeley Feels Mideast Storm as a Ripple of Fear," NYT 8/29/90; Hart (1990);
president of M.I.T . is M. Richard Rose, in "Silver Bullets for the Needy" (Time, Mar
16, 1987); Postman (1982), 90; Tuckson, in "Growing Up in D.C., What Went Wrong?"
WP 517189;Xaviere and Ralph, in statements given to author; Smith (1989); Orkin (1989).

MILLENNIAL BACKGROUND, For examples of the early- I 980s shift in child nurture and
elder attitudes toward children: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Family and Nation ( 1986);
Lisbeth Schorr, Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage (1988); Karl
Zinsmeister, "The Rising T-hreat to American Children" (unpublished, American En-
terprise Institute, 1987); "Through the Eyes of Children: Growing Up in America Today"
(Time cover story, Aug 8, 1988); Tipper Gore, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society
(1987); and Lester Brown et al., "The Children's Fate," Natural History (1986). For
data: U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families,
U.S. Children and Their Families: Current Conditions and Recent Trends (1987); Chil-
dren's Defense Fund (1987); and Joe Schwartz and Thomas Exter, "All Our Children"
(AD, May 1989).

MILLENNIAL REFERENCES. Nate Bush, in "D .C. Students' Uniform Response: 'No
Way' to Dressing Alike," WP 9/22/88; see also "School Uniform Idea Catching On in
D.C.," WP 9/3188; Fallows, "A Few Pointers" (Atlantic , Nov 1989). President Bush
on "mathematics and science," cited in William Raspberry, "No. l in Math-the Wrong
Goal," WP 3/23/90; on child labor investigations, "Why Business Tums to Teen-Agers,"
NYT 3/26/89; Koop, in "Class of 2000 Vows to Be 'Smoke-Free,' " Boston Herald
8/31/88; on " Project 2000,'' see "Adding Gentle but Firm Persuasion," WP 218190;
Femia, in "P .G. Youths in Drug Cases Increasingly Tried as Adults," WP 11/9/89;
Zinsmeister ( 1990); Koch, in "A New Age of New Feudalism," NYT 12/26/89; Parent-
hood (film, 1989). New wave of books on childhood: Winn (1983); Postman (1982);
Packard (1983); Elkind (1984). New wave of books on divorce, latchkey kids, and value-
neutral education: Weitzman (1985); Diane Medved, The Case Against Divorce (1988);
Judith Wallerstein, Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce
(1989); Bloom (1987); Ravitch and Finn, Jr. (1987). Films: Children of the Corn (1984);
Firestarter (1984); The Shining (1980); Cujo (1983); Raising Arizona (1987); Three Men
and a Baby (1987); Baby Boom (1987); For Keeps (1988); She's Having a Baby (1988).
Poll on "staying home with the family," in "The Eighties Are Over" (Newsweek, Jan
4, 1988); "Boomers Give Birth to a Fad,'' San Francisco Chronicle 8/2/88; "In This
NOTES ON SOURCES 515

Year's Movies, Baby Knows Best," NYT 3/13/88. Porter (Congressional Record, Apr
4, 1985); Forbes (Sep 14, 1988); Bush, in "Bush Urges Teen-Agers to Help Ghetto
Dwellers," WP 10/5/88; "The 60s Generation, Once High on Drugs, Warns Its Children,"
WSJ 1129190;Gore ( 1987); on Rakolta, see "The Mother Who Took On Trash TV,"
WP 10/10/89; Trudeau in Doonesbury (syndicated comic strip, undated). Films: Willy
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971); An American Tail (1986); Oliver and Company
(1989); The Land Before Time (1988). On number of Disney cartoonists, see p. 86 ,
Fairfax Journal 11/17/88. James Dobson, Dare to Discipline (1970); see "Pater Familias
of Family Values." WSJ 10117/88. See "Jessica McClure: For 58 Hours She Was Every-
body's Baby, " WP 5127/89; Goodman, "Sins of the Kids: Should Parents Pay ... , "
WP 519189. Bennett, in "Bennett Suggests Orphanages as Drug Refuge," WP 4/28/90;
for approval ratings on teachers, see U.S. Department of Education (1986), 90-1; see
also "Opinion Roundup" (PO, Summer 1986); Finn, "A Seismic Shock for Education,"
NYT 913/89; for hold-back data, see "Debate Intensifying on Screening Tests Before
Kindergarten," NYT 5/11/89, and "Schools Start Flunking Many More Students in Drive
on Mediocrity,'' WSJ 11/30/88; for sale of Gesell Test materials, see ''Debate Intensifying
on Screening Tests Before Kindergarten," NYT 5/11/89; Krauthammer, "Drown the
Berenstain Bears," WP 5/8/89; Bennett, in "President Promises: 'Dooney Doesn't Have
to Sell Drugs,'" WP 917/89: Quindlen, "The Shalt Nots," NYT 10114190.Facts. Fertility
and family size: National Journal (1986) . Legal abortions per 100 live births: Hth, table
10. On cost and survival of "preemies": "Whose Baby Is It, Anyway," WP 4/22/88;
Mary Semander, "Don't Give Up on Premature Babies," USA Today 5122190;and Parade
5/28/89. Attitudes toward public schools: U.S. Department of Education (1986), 90-1.
Trend in teacher salaries: ibid .. 68. Child poverty rate: CPR, series P-60. Divorce rate
per 1,000 married women: since 1970, Abs, no. 126. Homicide rate against children:
Hth, table 30. Medicaid eligibility: Congressional Research Service, Medicaid Source
Book: Background Data and Analysis (1988); and "Deficit or No Deficit, Unlikely Allies
Bring About Expansion in Medicaid," NYT I 114190.Advertisement (Atlantic, Jan 1990);
Paine, on ABC-Nightline (Sep 29, 1988).

CHAPTER 12: THE PAST AS PROLOGUE

The opening "Crisis era" lines come from Gone With the Wind (film, 1939), and the
songs Over the Rainbow (Harold Arlen, 1939) and The White Cliffs of Dover (Nat Burton
and Walter Kent, 1939). "The chance to grow ... " is from Henry Truslow Adams, in
Arthur Ekirch, Jr., Ideologies and Utopias (1969), 6. For discussion of 1980s-era polls
showing contentment with inner life running ahead of contentment with the outer world,
see PO (various issues); for a current look at this mix of "personal optimism and social
pessimism," see "90's, in Poll: A Good Life Amid Old Ills," NYT 1/1190, and "In-
trospective Electorate Views Future Darkly," WP 1121190.The Cycle of Generational
Moods: A Paradigm. Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905-6), vol. I. The New York
Gazette in 1749, cited in Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America,
1743-1776 (1955), 113. Available data on per capita U.S. alcohol consumption indicate
that cyclical peaks were reached in 1980-1981, in 1906-1910, and in 1830-1840. See
the First Statistical Compendium on Alcohol and Health (National Institute on
516 NOTES ON SOURCES

Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Feb 1981); NIAAA Quick Facts (CSR, Inc., periodic);
J. C. Burnham, " New Perspectives on the Prohibition 'Experiment' of the 1920s" (}SH,
Fall 1968); Jack S. Blocker, Jr., American Temperance Movements : Cycles of Reform
(1989); and Chapter 10 source notes. Although the data are spotty for the 1700s, the low
price of alcoholic beverages and the growing number of drinking establishments (per
capita) suggest that consumption during the late 1740s and 1750s was certainly unprec-
edented in the American colonies-and probably not again equaled until the next century.
See Chapter l and the statistical appendix to W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic:
An American Tradition (1979), and Bridenbaugh (1955), ch. 3. For similar trends in
narcotics consumption, see H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History,
1800-1980 (1981), and David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise : Opiate Addiction in Amer-
ica Before 1940 ( 1972). Musto, cited in 'Drug Use? Americans Can't Seem to Remember
When," WP 8/27/90. For data on trends in total fertility rates since 1800, see Ansley J.
Coale and Melvin Zelnick, New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States
(1963) and SSP, table 3. For earlier years, see source notes for Chapters 7 and 8. According
to Coale and Zelnick, fertility rates remained steady at roughly 4.3 from 1863 to 1885-
the only two-decade period between the 181Os and the 1930s when fertility did not decline
appreciably. For data on immigration, see the beginning of the source notes. For data
on standard of living growth (changes in real output per person employed) since 1929,
see EPr or the National Income and Product Account Statistics, published in U.S. Bureau
of Economic Analysis, Survey of Current Business (annual). Before 1929, see writings
of Simon Kuznets, John W. Kendrick, Robert E. Gallman, Paul David et al., described
in article bibliographies in EnE. Generational Endowments. Comte and Ferrari, both
cited in Marfas (1970); see source notes for Chapter 3. "Each generation is ... as an
independent nation" appears in a letter (Sep 6, 1789) from Jefferson in Paris to James
Madison in New York; see "The Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living," in Julian P.
Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 15 (1958), 384-99. See also Madison's
objections in his response (Feb 4, 1790), in Marvin Meyers (ed.), The Mind of the
Founder : Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (1973), 176-9. Hamilton's
objections can be inferred from his contributions to The Federalist (l 788). Later in life,
Jefferson himself seldom raised his earlier arguments against long-term public indebt-
edness . "As is the generation of leaves" appears in Homer, Iliad , book 6.

CHAPTER 13: COMPLETING THE MILLENNIAL CYCLE

Completing the Eras of the Millennial Cycle. Fo_rhistorical data on life expectancy at
age 65, see SSP , table 9. For the most recent future projections, see Social Security
Administration, Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and
Survivors' Insurance and the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds (1990), and
Gregory Spencer, Projections of the Population of the United States, by Age , Sex ,
and Race: 1988 to 2080 (Bureau of the Census, 1989). According to the Census "Middle
Series" projections, life expectancy for men and women at age 65 will rise from 15.1
and 19.4 years (today) to 16.6 and 21.4 years (in 2020) to 18.1 and 23.1 years (in 2060).
Completing the Missionary and Lost Diagonals. For data and estimates on the number
of Americans over age 100, see CPR, series P-23, no. 153, "America's Centenarians"
(Sep 1987); approximate estimate of 1,000 Americans age 109 and over in 1991 was
NOTES ON SOURCES 517

obtained from Gregory Spencer, U.S. Bureau of the Census. Completing the G.I.
Diagonal. On the rising material affluence of today's G.I. elders relative to youth and
rising adults, see source notes for Chapters 11 and 12. For a quantitative discussion of
trends in per capita income, public benefits dollars received, and numbers of Americans
in poverty-all by age group-see Peter G. Peterson and Neil Howe, On Borrowed Time
( 1988), ch. 2. In 1722, as a boy of 16, Benjamin Franklin helped his elder brother James
lampoon Cotton Mather by writing several famous essays under the sarcastic pseudonym
''Silence Do-Good.'' In 1784, at the age of 78, Franklin expressed his sincere appreciation
of Cotton Mather's efforts as a "doer of good" in a kind letter to a fellow elderly
Awakener-Cotton's own son Samuel; the letter is cited in Cedric B. Cowing, The Great
Awakening and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the 18th Century (1971),
126. Completing the Boom Diagonal. Susan B. Anthony, cited in "Not Every Feminist
ls in Pro-Choice Camp," Washington Times 7/23/90. The Social Security Administration
makes annual projections of the long-term future cost of Social Security cash benefits
and Hospital Insurance (Medicare, Part A) according to several economic, demographic,
and health-care-cost scenarios . Using the scenario that comes closest to actual American
experience over the last couple of decades, the Social Security Administration now projects
that the annual cost of Social Security cash benefits and Hospital Insurance (Medicare,
Part A) will exceed 30 percent of total worker payroll by the year 2025 and 40 percent
by the year 2050. See" Alternative III" in Social Security Administration, Annual Report
of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors' Insurance and the Federal
Disability Insurance Trust Funds (1990). Even this projection assumes that health-care
cost inflation will slow dramatically over the next ten years and does not include the tax
cost of other underfunded federal pension plans (military and civil service retirement)
and health-care benefit programs (Medicaid long-term care and Medicare, Part B). The
total burden could be considerably greater. See Peterson and Howe (1988), and John L.
Palmer and Barbara Boyle Torrey, "Health Care Financing and Pension Programs," in
Gregory B. Mills and Palmer (eds.), Federal Budget Policy in the 1980s (1984). The
"seven in ten" Boomers who doubt Social Security will help them comes from a poll
cited in "Opinion Roundup" (PO, Aug-Sep 1981) and a CBS News-New York Times
poll (Jan 20, 1990). In a survey conducted by the Daniel Yankelovich Group for IDS
Financial Services in 1989, people were asked whether they agreed with the statement
"I really don't think Social Security will amount to much by the time I retire." Of Silent
respondents (age 45-64), 36 percent agreed; of Boomer respondents (age 35-44), 60
percent agreed-the largest generational disparity among all responses to questions about
retirement. "God is in me .. . " appears in Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (1957);
"enviable death .. . " from Winston Churchill, speech before the House of Commons
(Apr 17, 1945). Completing the Thirteener Diagonal. On polls showing that l3ers
place much more importance on financial success than their next-elders at like age, see
the UCLA poll cited in Chapter 3 source notes; see also the survey data presented in
National Association of Secondary School Principals, The Mood of American Youth
(1984), 58-60; the Roper Organization Inc. , The American Chicle Youth Poll (1987),
18; and Yth, 122. "But in modern war there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying.
You will die like a dog for no good reason" appears in Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on
the Next War," in George Seldes (ed.), The Great Thoughts (1985), 180. Revenge of
the Nerds (film, 1984).
518 NOTES ON SOURCES

APPENDIX A: A THEORY OF GENERATIONS

On how "generations" were understood by the ancient Greeks, see Laura L. Nash,
"Concepts of Existence: Greek Origins of Generational Thought," in Stephen R. Grau-
bard, Generations (1979), and Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, (1957); in nonwestem
mythology, see the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (1968). Classical sources
by name and ascribed title: Hesiod (eighth century e.c.), Theogony; Philo (c. 20 e.c.-
c. A.O . 50), Cosmogony; Homer (eighth century e.c. ?), Iliad; Herodotus (c. 484-c . 425
e.c.), History; and Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400 e.c.), History of the Peloponnesian War.
On Nestor, see Iliad, book I. The Cohort Generation. Philip J. Greven, Jr . , Four
Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts ( 1970).
"A chosen generation" appears in New Testament, I Peter 2:9; "A generation of vipers"
in ibid., Matthew 3:7; "served his own generation" in ibid., Acts 13:36. See also the
historical usage of the word "generation" in modern English in the Oxford English
Dictionary (1928).
Especially over the last twenty years, an excellent literature has appeared on the major
themes and problems of the "generations" approach to social and cultural change. For
an introduction, see Julian Marfas, "Generations: The Concept," in EnS, and Genera-
tions: A Historical Method (1967, University of Alabama Press translation, 1970); An-
thony Esler, Generations in History (1982); Alan B. Spitzer, "The Historical Problem
of Generations" (AHR, Dec 1973); essays (esp. by Laura L. Nash, Annie Kriegel, Matilda
White Riley, and Morton Keller) in Graubard (1979); and Yves Renouard, "La notion
de generation en histoire," Revue Historique (Jan-Mar I 953). On what many social
scientists call "political generations," see essays (esp. by Richard J. Samuels and Samuel
Huntington) in Samuels (ed.), Political Generations and Political Development (1976);
Marvin Rintala, "Political Generations," in EnS, and "A Generation in Politics: A
Definition" (Review of Politics, Oct 1963); and Lewis S. Feuer, "Generations and the
Theory of Revolution" (Survey, 1972). On cohort analysis and generations, see Vern L.
Bengtson et al., "Generations, Cohorts, and Relations Between Age Groups," in Robert
H. Binstock and Ethel Shanas, Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (1985); and
Norman B. Ryder, "Cohort Analysis," in EnS.
Our summary of generations writing since the French Revolution owes much to the
excellent treatment of Marias, and we urge the reader to refer to Marias (1970) or to
Esler (1982) for fuller citations or translations. Thomas Jefferson, see source notes for
Chapter 12; Jean-Louis Giraud or "Soulavie," Tableau de l'histoire (1803) and Pieces
inedites sur Les regnes de Louis XIV, Louis XV, et Louis XVI (1809); Auguste Comte,
Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) and Le systeme de politique positive (1851-54);
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843); Emile Littre, Paroles de philosophie positive
(1860); Antoine Coumot, Consideration sur la marche des idees et des evenements dans
Les temps modernes (1872); Ottokar Lorenz, Die Geschichtswissenschaft in Hauptricht-
ungen und Aufgaben kritisch erortert ( I 886); Giuseppe Ferrari, Teoria dei periodi politici
(1872); Wilhelm Dilthey, various essays (written 1865-75); Franc,ois Mentre, Les gen-
erations sociales ( 1920); Jose Ortega y Gasset, El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923); Wilhelm
Pinder, Das Problem der Generationen in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (1926, 1928);
NOTES ON SOURCES 519

Julius Peterson, Die Literarischen Generationen (1930); Karl Mannheim, "Das Problem
der Generationen " (1928). The flurry of interest in the " generation gap" during the early
1970s resulted in one issue of Daedalus (no. 4, 1978) and two issues of Journal of Social
Issues (nos . 2 and 3, 1974) devoted entirely to topical articles on "generations ." Johan
Huizinga, " The Problem of Cultural History" (1946), in Marfas (1970) , 132.

A Journey to Cohortia. S. N. Eisenstadt, From Generation to Generation : Age Groups

and Social Structure (1956), offers a model of "age groups, " based on research on
societies throughout the world (past and present) , which supports our basic distinction
between "traditional " and " modern" societies. In most of the premodern societies cited
by Eisenstadt , social roles are rigidly and concretely prescribed by an individual's age-
group membership . The increasing " specialization " and "differentiation" that accom-
pany life in modernizing societies , however, steadily weaken the institutional link between
age and social roles . Rather than prescribe behavior , age groups become a more vol-
untaristic means of preparing individuals "psychologically " to make their own choices .
Thus, in modern societies, younger age groups are more apt to change their tone, aims,
and objectives according to the unique cohort-group currently passing through them-
even to the extent of manifesting " deviant" or "revolutionary" hostility against the
social roles recommended by older age groups currently in power . See also an insightful
commentary on Eisenstadt : Philip Abrams, ''Rites of Passage: The Conflict of Generations
in Industrial Society" (Journal of Contemporary History , 1970).
Many medieval authors-most notably Dante (Inferno, canto 26)-condemned Odys-
seus for his ceaseless efforts to lead glorious expeditions later in life . "The gods visit
the sins of the fathers upon the children " appears in Euripides (fragments); Ivan Turgenev,
Fathers and Sons (1862); Graham Nash , Teach Your Children (song, 1970). Remarkably
(in Iliad, book 1), Nestor recalls from his boyhood that his warrior elders were "a godlike
race of heroes" and that " in my youth, even these esteem 'd me wise ." The childhood
of Agamemnon (the name means "very resolute") was a gallery of horrors: Agamemnon ' s
father (Atreus) killed one of Agamemnon's brothers (Pleisthenes), killed two of Aga-
memnon's cousins and served them to their father (Thyestes) in a soup , and was killed
by another cousin (Aegisthus) ; as an infant, Agamemnon narrowly escaped death himself .
See Graves (I 957), vol. 2, 43-5 I.

The Four-Part Generational Cycle. See Old Testament , Exodus (ch . I) through Judges
(ch. 2). "From twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war . . . "
appears in Numbers 1:3; " and there arose ... " in Judges 2: 10. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqad-
dimah (written in the 1370s), cited in Marfas (1970), 198-207 . See Auguste Comte,
Emile Littre, and Giuseppe Ferrari, op . cit.; Julian Manas (1970), 170-88; and Samuel
Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981 ). Huntington's de-
scription of his "!vi " cycle appears in ibid .. 147; his earlier remarks on "generational"
cycles appear in Huntington (I 977) and Huntington, "Paradigms of American Politics :
Beyond the One, the Two , and the Many" (Political Science Quarterly , Mar 74) .
 INDEXOF NAMES

This index includes only the proper names of persons. Following each American name,
we indicate generational membership by an abbreviation within parentheses. An occa-
sional "?" following the abbreviation means that we were unable to verify the birthyear
and generation exactly. Following each foreign name, we indicate nationality and the
generation of the American cohort born in the same year. We use the designational
"Reformation Cycle" for birthyears between 1483 and 1583, and "Medieval" or "An-
cient" for earlier birthyears .

Aaron (Biblical), 449 165-66, 170-71, 174,178,366,425,

Aaron, Henry (SIL), 291 459
Abbott, Jacob (TRAN), 240 Adams, John Quincy (COMP), 151, 154, 181-
Abbott, Jim (13TH), 318-19 82, 184, 186-88, 366, 425, 459
Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem (BOOM), 300 Adams, Samuel (AWAK), 11, 38, 39, 89,
Abraham (Biblical), 450 FO, 152, 157-58, 160-62, 169, 357,
Abrams, Elliott (BOOM), 406 366,416
Achenbaum, Andrew (BOOM), 20, 214 Addams, Jane (MISS), 44, FO, 233-36, 238,
Adam (Biblical), 436 240, 255, 304
Adams, Abigail (REP), FO, 151, 154, 174 Addison, Joseph (England-GLOR), 138-39
Adams, Brooks (PROG), 220, 222 Aeschylus (Ancient), 446
Adams, Charles Francis (TRAN), 425-26 Agamemnon (Mythical), 442-43, 445, 448
Adams, Charles Francis, Ill (MISS), 425 Agnew, Spiro (G.I.), 290
Adams, Eliphalet (ENL), 146 Ahlstrom, Sidney (G.I.), 20, 202
Adams, Henry (GILD), 199, 206, 214, 220 Aidala, Jim (BOOM), 21
Adams, James Truslow (MISS), 243, 246, Ajax (Mythical), 442
350 Alcott, Louisa May (GILD), 12, 95, 208, 211
Adams, John (LIB), 38, FO, IOI, 152, 155, Alda, Alan (SIL), 283

521
522 INDEX
Alger, Horatio (GILD), 208, 241 Barlow, Joel (REP), 173-74, 179
Allen, Ethan (LIB), 38, FO, IOI, 166-67 , Barnes, Albert (TRAN), 204
169, 171 Barringer, Felicity (BOOM?), 317
Allen, Frederick Lewis (LOST), 20, 249 Bartlett, Josiah (LIB), 165
Allen, Henry (SIL), 295, 313 Barton, Bruce (LOST), 248, 250, 256, 260,
Allen, James Lane (PROG), 218 416
Allen, Steve (G.I .), 320 Bartram, John (ENL), 146, 148
Allen, Woody (SIL), FO, 280, 282, 290 Baruch, Bernard (MISS), 55, 234, 245, 246
Allison, Ronald (BOOM), 302 Bates, Katherine Lee (PROG), 221
Alsop, George (CAV), 130 Beard, Charles (MISS), 194, 207
Alsop, Joseph (G.I.), 274 Beard, Mary (MISS), 194
Alsop, Stewart (G.I.), 274 Bechtel, Stephen (G.l.), 272
Altgeld, John (PROG), 219 Becker, Boris (Germany-13TH), 318
Alvarez, Luis (G.I.) , 230 Becker, Dan (BOOM), 314
Anderson, Jack (G.I.), 320 Beecher, Catharine (TRAN), 223
Anderson, Sherwood (MISS), 243 Beecher, Henry Ward (TRAN), 400
Andre, John (REP), 178 Beecher, Lyman (COMP), 181, 186, 201
Andros, Sir Edmund (England-CAY), 80, 382 Beethoven, Ludwig van (Germany-COMP),
Andrus, Ethel (LOST), 259 182
Anne, Queen (England-GLOR), 130, 138, Beissel, Johann Conrad (ENL), 146
145-48, 357 Bell, Alexander Graham (PROG), FO, 217-18
Anthony, Susan B. (TRAN), 196, 205, 397, Bell, Daniel (G.I.) , 266, 273
408 Bellah, Robert (SIL), 93, 292
Apple, Dorian (SIL?), 276 Bellamy, Edward (PROG), 225
Appleton, Nathaniel (ENL), 145-46, 149-50 Bellamy, Francis (PROG), 221
Arendt, Hannah (G.I.), 262 Bellamy, Joseph (AWAK), 152, 161,406
Armour, Philip (GILD), 210 Bellingham, Richard (PUR), 127
Armstrong, Barbara (LOST?), 244 Beneze!, Anthony (AWAK), 157-58
Armstrong, Louis (LOST), 248, 259 Bennett, William (BOOM), 30, 55, 70, FO,
Armstrong, Neil (SIL), FO, 280, 293 300, 314-15 , 323, 339,341,406
Arnold, Benedict (LIB), 12, 38, 89, FO, 152, Bentsen, Lloyd (G.I.), 261, 315
166-67, 171, 178, 185,416 Berenson, Bernard (MISS), 246
Arthur, Chester A. (GILD), 208, 460 Bergson, Henri (France-PROO), 218-19
Astor, John Jacob (REP), 174 Berkeley, George (England-ENL), 146, 149,
Atkinson, Ti-Grace (SIL), 290 177
Attucks, Crispus (AWAK), FO, 158, 162 Berkeley, William (PUR), FO, 122-24, 128-
Atwater, Lee (BOOM), 300, 315 29, 133-35 , 366, 406
Auchmuty, Samuel (AWAK), 159 Berkman, Alexander (MISS), 242
Audubon, John (COMP), 182-83 Berlin, Irving (LOST), 247-48, 251
Augustus, Emperor (Ancient), 175 Bernstein, Carl (BOOM), 300
Aurangzeb, Mogul Emperor (India-CAY), Bernstein, Leonard (G.I.), 262
130-31 Bethune, Mary McLeod (MISS), 234, 239
Beveridge, Albert (MISS), 242
Babbitt, Irving (MISS), 244 Beverley, Robert (GLOR), FO, 137-39, 368
"Baby M" (MILL), 31, FO, 336, 340 Bhutto, Benazir (Pakistan-BOOM), 300
Bachman, Jerald (SIL?), 20 Bias, Len (13TH), 318
Bacon, Francis (England-Reformation Cycle), Biden, Joseph (SIL), 291
36, 88, 113 Billy the Kid (PROG), 224
Bacon, Nathaniel (CAV), 84, FO, 119, 122, Blackwell, Elizabeth (TRAN), 197, 200
128-30, 132, 134-35, 138, 146, 364, Blackwell sisters (TRAN), 197-see also
366,406 Blackwell, Elizabeth
Bailyn, Bernard (G.I.), 19, 131 Blaine, James G. (GILD), 207-8, 215
Baker, James A., III (SIL), 279-80, 291, 362 Blair, James (GLOR), 9, 95, FO, 138
Baker, Ray Stannard (MISS), 238, 241 Bland, Richard (AWAK), 158, 160-61
Baker, Russell (SIL), 228, 230, 287, 319 Blatch, Harriot (PROG), 219
Ball, Lucille (G.I.), 273 Blodgett, Geoffrey (SIL), 225
INDEX 523
Bloom, Allan (SIL), 320 Brownmiller, Susan (SIL), 290
Blum, Kim (13TH), 322 Brownson, Orestes (TRAN), 198
Blume, Judy (SIL), 328-29 Bryan, William Jennings (MISS), 93-95 , FO,
Boas, Franz (PROG), 226 218, 232-35 , 243,255,357
Bogart, Humphrey (LOST), FO, 248, 259 Buchanan, James (COMP), 89, 91, 182-83,
Bolivar, Simon (South America-COMP), 182 188, 395, 459
Bonaparte, Napoleon (France-COMP), 182, Buckley, William F. (SIL), 280, 288
438 Budd, Thomas (GLOR), 138, 142
Bonet, Lisa (13TH), 318 Bulkeley, Gershom (CAV) , 130
Bon Jovi, Jon (13TH), 318, 323 Bundesen, Herman (MISS), 286
Bonney, William-see Billy the Kid Bundy, McGeorge (G.l.), 274
Boone, Daniel (LIB), 38, 152, 164, 166, 169, Burke, Edmund (Britain-LIB), 166
171 Bums, George (LOST), 248, 254, 260
Boorstin, Daniel (G.I.) , 20, 173, 206, 264 Bums, James MacGregor (G.I.), 274
Booth, Evangeline Cory (MISS), 235 Burnside, Ambrose (GILD), 200
Booth, John Wilkes (GILD) , 208, 213 Burr, Aaron (REP), 37, 159, 176
Borah, William Edgar (MISS), 244 Burroughs , Edgar Rice (MISS), 236
Borges, Jorge Luis (Spain-LOST), 46 Burt, Jonathan (CAV), 135
Bork, Robert (SIL), 291 Bush, Barbara (SIL) , 279
Bornemann, Klaus (BOOMry), 326 Bush, George (G.I .), 27-28, 30-31 , 40, 66,
Boswell, Tom (BOOM) , 314 261- 62, 265, 270, 277, 279- 80, 287,
Boudinot , Elias (LIB), 458 315,335,338,383,389,419,460
Bourne, Randolph (LOST), 250 Bush, Jebbie (MILL), FO, 336
Boylston, Zabdiel (ENL), 146, 148 Bush, Nate (BOOM) , 335
Brackman, Jacob (BOOM), 299 Bushman, Richard (SIL), 20, 156
Bradford, Andrew (ENL), 146 Bushnell, Horace (TRAN), 201, 223
Bradford, William (PUR), 122 Butler, Joseph (England-ENL), 145
Bradley, Bill (BOOM), FO, 300, 315 Butler, Katy (BOOM), 303-4
Bradley, Milton (GILD) , 208 Byrd, William (BOOM) , 138, 141
Bradley, Omar (LOST), 258 Byrd, William, II (ENL), IO, FO, 145-46,
Bradstreet, Anne (PUR), 117, 122-24 149-50, 393
Bradstreet, Simon (PUR). 80, 89, 117, 122, Byrnes, James (MISS), 229
350, 401
Brandeis, Louis (PROG), IO, 218, 226, 395 Cable, George (PROG), 225
Brandt, Willy (Germany-G.I.) , 262 Cable, Mary (G.I.), 19, 240
Brattle, Thomas (GLOR), 118, 138 Caddell, Patrick (BOOM), 298, 301
Brattle, William (GLOR), 118 Caen, Herb (G.1.), 288
Braude, Ann (BOOM?), 200 Cagney , Jimmy (LOST), 251, 259
Brazelton, T. Berry (G.I.), 328 Cain, Leonard (G.I.) , 20, 261- 63
Breckenridge, Hugh Henry (REP), 152, 174 Calhoun, John C. (COMP), 54, 91, 181-82,
Breen, T. H., (SIL?), 141 188
Bremner, Robert (G.I.) , 19 Callahan , Daniel (SIL), 288
Brewster, William (England-Reformation Calley, William (BOOM), 310
Cycle), 93 Calvert, Leonard (PUR) , 123-24
Brezhnev, Leonid (Soviet Union-G.I.), 262 Calvin, John (France-Reformation Cycle), 93,
Bridenbaugh, Carl (G.I. ), 20 113-14, 116
Brinkley, David (G.I.), 274 Canby, Henry (MISS) , 240-41 , 243
Brisbane, Albert (TRAN), 198 Canseco, Jose (13TH), 319
Broder, David (SIL), 290 Capone, Alfonso (LOST) , 10, 247, 248, 252,
Brookings, Robert (PROG) , 222 257
Brooks, Van Wyck (LOST), 206-7, 255 Capriati , Jennifer (13TH), 318
Brown, H. Rap (BOOM) . 94, 310 Carlyle, Thomas (Britain-TRAN), 196
Brown. Jerry (SIL), 283 Carmichael, Stokely (SIL), 289
Brown, John (TRAN). 10, FO, 192, 196-97 , Carnegie , Andrew (GILD) , 38, 88, FO, 208-
200, 203, 205, 393 9, 214, 216, 368
Brown, Sterling (G.I.) , 256 Carnegie , Dale (LOST), 257
524 INDEX
Carroll, Charles (GLOR), 141 Clinton, DeWitt (COMP), 182
Carroll, Charles (LIB), 166 Clinton, George (LIB), 166, 168
Carroll, Lewis (Britain-GILD), 208 Clinton, Henry (REP), 178
Carter, Amy (13TH), FO Coale, Josiah (CAV), 129
Carter, Jimmy (G.I.), 30, 66, 262, 279-80, Cobb, Ty (LOST), 257
285, 312, 460 Cohen , Richard (SIL), 320
Carter, John (CAV), 130, 134, 141 Cohn, Roy (SIL), 279
Carter, John (LOST), 255-56 Colden, Cadwallader (ENL), 95, FO, 145-46,
Carter, Landon (AWAK), 161, 162, 165, 169, 150, 169, 366, 395
401 Cole, Nathan (AWAK), 158
Carter, Robert "King" (GLOR), FO, 138-39, Coleman, Gary (13TH), 30, 318
141, 143, 162, 366 Collier, Peter (SIL), 309, 314
Carter , Rosalynn (SIL), 279 Colman, Benjamin (GLOR), 137-38, 142-43
Casale, Anthony (BOOM), 314 Comer, Cornelia (MISS), 250
Cassatt, Mary (PROG), 218 Commager, Henry Steele (G.I.), 20, 232
Castro, Fidel (Cuba-SIL), 280 Comstock, Anthony (PROG), 223
Catherine II, "the Great," Czarina (Russia- Comte, Auguste (France-COMP), 66, 104,
LIB), 166 367,438,440,451
Ceausescu, Nicolai (Romania-G .I.), 37 Conkling , Roscoe (GILD), 207-8
Cech, Thomas (BOOM), 303 Connolly, Charles (13TH), 333
Cecil, Robert (England-Reformation Cycle), Conroy, Frank (SIL), 279, 286
113 Cook , Brett (13TH), 318
Cezanne, Paul (France-GILD), 208 Cook, Bruce (SIL), 288
Chandler, Raymond (LOST), 248 Cooke, Elisha (CAV), 129-30
Channing, William Ellery (COMP), 10, 93, Cooke , Elisha, Jr. (ENL), 89, FO, 145-46
95, 182-83 Coolidge, Calvin (MISS) , 234 , 244, 261, 460
Chaplin, Charles (Britain-LOST), 248 Cooney, Joan Ganz (SIL) , 280
Chapman, John Jay (MISS), 233, 235 Cooper , James Fenimore (COMP), 182-83,
Chapman, Tracy (13TH), 318 187
Charles, Prince (Britain-BOOM), 300 Cosby , Bill (SIL), 280, 329, 339
Charles, Ray (SIL), 279, 288 Costello, Frank (LOST), 252
Charles I, King (England-PUR), 119, 121-23, Cott, Nancy (BOOM), 20
130 Cotton, John (GLOR), 141
Charles II, King (England-CAY), 122, 124, Cotton, John (PUR), 94, FO, 117, 122-26
127, 130-31, 138 Coughlin, Father Charles E. (LOST), 250, 258
Chauncy, Charles (AWAK), 152, 157, 160, Cournot, Antoine (France-TRAN), 438, 440
168 Cowley, Malcolm (LOST), 20, 44, 58, 248,
Chauncy, Nathaniel (ENL), 149 255-57, 260, 270
Cheney, Richard (SIL), 279 Cram, Ralph Adams (MISS), 207
Chichan, Cecilia (MILL), FO, 336, 339 Crane, Stephen (MISS), 233, 236, 238, 242
Child, Lydia (TRAN), 204 Cranmer, Thomas (England-Reformation
Chopin, Kate (PROG), 225 Cycle), 114
Chrysler, Walter (MISS), 243 Cranston, Samuel (GLOR), 138, 141
Church, Benjamin (CAV), FO, 130, 134, 167 Crawford, Alan (BOOM), 21
Churchill, Winston (Britain-MISS), 228, 234, Crazy Horse (PROG), 218
408 , 444 Cremin, Lawrence (SIL), 19
Churchill, Winston (MISS), 235 Crenson, Matthew (BOOM), 183
Clark, George Rogers (REP), 173, 178 Crevecoeur, Saint-Jean de (France-LIB), 166
Clark, William (COMP), 54, 181-82 Crittenden, John (COMP), 188, 393
Clay, Henry (COMP), 10, 38, 54, 91, FO, Crocker , Charles (GILD), 209
181-82, 184-86, 188, 362 Crockett, David (COMP), FO, 182, 187
Clayton , John (ENL), 146 Cromwell, Oliver (England-PUR), IOI, 119,
Clemens, Roger (13TH), 318 121-22, 125, 131
Clemens, Samuel-see Twain, Mark Cronkite, Walter (G.I.), 66, 262, 274
Cleveland, Grover (GILD), 45, 208, 214 , 364, Cronus (Mythical), 433
366,460 Crosby , Bing (G.I.), 264, 272
Clifford, Clark (G.I.), 272 Crowe , William (SIL), 281
INDEX 525
Cruise, Tom (13TH), 94, FO, 318-19, 328 Donne, John (England-Reformation Cycle),
Crumb, Robert (BOOM), 55 114
Culpeper, Thomas (England-CAV), 138 Doolittle, Benjamin (ENL), 149
cummings, e. e. (LOST), 256 Doolittle, James H. (LOST), 267
Cunningham, John (13TH), 296 Dorgan, Byron (SIL), 314
Curler, Arent Van (CAV), 130 Dos Passos, John (LOST), 247, 256
Curley, James (MISS), 271 Douglas, Ann (SIL), 20
Curwen, Samuel (AWAK), 159 Douglas, Kirk (G.I.), 264
Custer, George (GILD), 208-9, 213 Douglas, Stephen (TRAN), 11
Czolgosz, Leon (MISS), 242 Douglas, William 0. (LOST), 252
Douglass, Frederick (TRAN), 38, 196, 399
Drake, Sir Francis (England-Reformation
D'Abo, Olivia (13TH), 296 Cycle), 113-14, 116, 122
Dante Alighieri (Medieval), 444 Dreiser, Theodore (MISS), 234
Darrnan, Richard (BOOM), 55, 312, 314-15 Drexel, Anthony (GILD), 213
Darrow, Clarence (PROG), 218-19 Drummond, William (CAV), 118
Darwin, Charles (Britain-TRAN), 209, 213 DuBois, W.E.B. (MISS), 16, 94, FO, 234,
Darwish, Tiffany (13TH), 318 236, 239-40, 242, 244, 256, 399
Davenport, James (AWAK), 156 Dudley,Joseph(CAV), 118,130
Davenport, John (PUR), 122, 127, 352 Dukakis, Michael (SIL), 27, 29, 72, FO, 280,
David (Biblical), 437 283, 287, 291, 366
Davidson, Jim (BOOM), 21 Dulany, Daniel (ENL), 146, 148, 150
Davies, Sir John (England-Reformation Dummer, Jeremiah (ENL), 148
Cycle), 114 Dunbar, Samuel (AWAK), 157
Davis, Angela (BOOM), 93, FO, 300,310 Duncan, Isadora (MISS), 234-35
Davis, Jefferson (TRAN), 38, 91, FO, 190, Dunster, Henry (PUR), 122-23
196, 198, 202, 204 Durbin, Richard (BOOM), 313
Dean, James (SIL), 280-81 Dustin, Hannah (GLOR), FO, 138
Decatur, Stephen (COMP), 183 Dwight, Timothy (REP), 154, 174, 177
Degler, Carl (G.l.), 20, 232, 264 Dychtwald, Ken (BOOM), 276---77
Delancey, James (AWAK), 169 Dyer, Mary (CAV), 130, 132
Demos, John (SIL), 20, 136 Dylan, Bob (SIL), 279, 281, 289, 440
Dempsey, Jack (LOST), 251
Deng Xiaoping (China-G.l.), 37 Easterlin, Richard (SIL), 281, 292, 301
Denton, Jeremiah (G.l.), 310 Eastwood, Clint (SIL), 280, 283, 290
D'Epiro, Peter (BOOM), 21 Eddy, Mary Baker (TRAN), 196, 198, 205
Descartes, Rene (France-PUR), 82, 122 Eddy, Sherwo9(1(MISS), 237
Dewey, John (PROG), 93, FO, 218-19, 226, Edison, Thomas (PROG), FO, 193, 217-18
254, 393 Edwards, Jonathan (AWAK), 92-95, FO, 149,
Dewey, Melvil (PROG), 225 154, 157-58, 160, 162-63, 168, 348
Dewey, Thomas E. (G.l.), 272 Ehrenreich, Barbara (SIL), 292
Dexter, Samuel (ENL), 149 Ehrlichman, John (SIL), 279
Di, Princess (Britain-13TH), 318 Einstein, Albert (MISS), FO, 229, 234, 245
Diamond, Jack "Legs" (LOST), 252 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (LOST), 30, 84, 89,
Dickinson, Emily (GILD), 208-9 FO, 185, 248, 254, 258, 260, 364,
Dickinson, John (LIB), 165-66, 175 366,417,427,460
Dilthey, Wilhelm (Germany-GILD), 66, 438, Eisler, Benita (SIL), 20, 281-83, 286, 290
440 Eizenstat, Stuart (SIL), 279
DiMaggio, Joe (G.l.), 262, 266 Elazar, David (SIL), 85
DiMucci, Dion (SIL), 287 Eliot, Andrew (AWAK), 168
Diomedes (Mythical), 442 Eliot, John (PUR), 122, 127-28
Dirksen, Everett (LOST), IOI, 248 Eliot, Thomas Steams (LOST), 248, 250
Disney, Walt (G.l.), 63, 66, 68, 88, FO, 97- Elizabeth, Queen (England-Reformation
98, 261-62, 271,348,419,423 Cycle), 113-14, 116, 122-23, 125
Dix, Dorothea (TRAN), 198 Elkind, David (SIL), 323
Dobson, James (SIL), 339 Ellington, Duke (LOST), 248-49
Donahue, Phil (SIL), 280, 283 Elliott, Emory (SIL), 20
526 INDEX

Ellis, Bret Easton (13TH) , FO , 318, 321, 332 Ford, Gerald R. (G.I.), 66, 262, 272, 279,
Ellison , Ralph (G.I.) , 273 285, 460
Ellsberg, Daniel (SIL) , 283 Ford, Henry (MISS), FO, 234, 243-44, 398
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (TRAN), 11, 38, 93- Forgie, George (SIL) , 20
Emerson , Ralph Waldo (Cont.) 95, FO , Forrest , Nathan (TRAN), 204
171, 187, 195-98 , 201-2, 205, 211- Foster, Tabatha (MILL), 336, 339
12, 214 Fothergill, Samuel (AWAK), 161
Endecott, John (PUR) , 122, 127 Fox, Michael J. (13TH), FO , 318, 320, 326
Ephron, Nora (SIL), 280 Foxcroft, Thomas (ENL), 93, 145-46
Erasmus , Desiderius (Medieval) , 93 Fox.e, John (England-Reformation Cycle), l l3
Erikson, Erik (G.I.), 44, 57, 276, 299 Frank , Barney (SIL) , 290
Erikson, Joan (G.I.), 276 Franklin. Benjamin (AWAK) , 11, 45, 84, FO,
Erikson, Penny (BOOM), 331 152, 157-58, 160-63, 165, 168-69,
Ervin, Samuel J., Jr. (LOST), 101, 259 350, 357 , 366, 388, 401, 427
Esler , Anthony (SIL), 19, 110, 114 Franklin, James (ENL), FO, 146, 148
Etzioni , Amitai (SIL), 330 Franklin , William (LIB) , 165
Euclid (Ancient) , 173 Franzblau . Rose (SIL), 281
Evans, Israel (REP), 152 Frazier , E. Franklin (LOST), 20
Evans, Lewis (ENL), 148 Freberg. Stan (SIL) , 288
Eve (Biblical), 436 Frederick II, " the Great" (Prussia-AW AK),
158
Freeman , Ruth (G.I.) , 239
Fairbanks. Douglas (LOST), 259 Fremont , John (TRAN) , 196
Fallows, James (BOOM), 314 , 335 Freneau , Philip (REP), 180
Fass, Paula (BOOM) , 20, 265 Freud, Sigmund (Austria-PROG) , 218-19 ,
Faulkner , William (LOST) , 248 223, 252
Feldstein , Al (SIL), 329 Friedan , Betty (G.l.), 262, 264
Fels, Joseph (PROG) , 220 Frontenac, Comte de (France-CAV), 130
Femia, Vincent (SIL?), 337 Frost, Robert (MISS), 234, 273, 408
Fendall , Josias (CAY), 130 Fuller , Margaret (TRAN) , 202
Ferguson , Marilyn (SIL), 21, 303 Fulton, Robert (REP), FO, 173- 74 , 178
Ferrari , Giuseppe (Italy-TRAN), 63-64, 105, Fulwood, Isaac (SIL), 332
438 , 440, 451-52 Furnas , J.C. (G.I.) , 20
Ferraro, Geraldine (SIL) , 279-80
Feuer , Lewis (G.1.), 20, IOI, 302 Gaea (Mythical) , 433
Field, Eugene (PROG), 218 Gaine, Hugh (LIB) , 167
Fielding , Henry (Britain-AW AK), 158 Gaines, William (SIL) , 288
Filler , Louis (G .I.), 238 Galbraith , John Kenneth (G.I.), 262, 273
Fillmore , Millard (TRAN), 196, 400 . 459 Gallatin, Albert (REP). 173- 74, 180, 386
Finley, Samuel (AWAK) , 158, 160-61 Gallup , George (G.l.), 273
Finn, Chester (SIL), 320, 340 Gandhi , Mahatma (India-MISS), 234
Finney, Charles Grandison (TRAN), 94, 194, Gardner, John (G.I.), 274
198, 202 Garfield, James A. (GILD), 208, 460
Fischer, Bobby (BOOM), 55 Garland , Judy (G.I.), 262, 270
Fischer , David Hackett (SIL) , 19-20 , 131, 170 Garrison , William Lloyd (TRAN), 38, 183,
Fish, Hamilton , Jr. (LOST), 250, 416 192, 196-99, 202-3, 205, 212
Fisher, Sidney (TRAN), 204 Garvey, Marcus (LOST) , 256
Fisk, James (GILD) , 213 Gates, John (PROG) , 222
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (LOST) , 20, 31, 58 , 66- Gates , William (BOOM), 300
67, FO, 247-51, 256-57 , 259 , 332-33 , Gaulle , Charles de (France-LOST), 248
384 Gay , Ebenezer (ENL), 146, ISO
Fitzgerald, Zelda (LOST), 256 George II. King (England-ENL), 145, 168,
Fitzhugh, William (GLOR) , 138, 141 356
Fliegelman, Jay (BOOM?) , 20 , 177 George III, King (Britain-LIB), 166, 406
Flood, Curt (SIL), 289 Gephardt, Richard (SIL). 291
Follett, Mary (MISS) , 244 Gershwin, George (LOST), 248
Fonda, Henry (G.I.) , 264 Gesell , Arnold (MISS), 340
INDEX 527
Gibson, Charles Dana (MISS), 243 Grossman, Robert (SIL), 292
Gilbert, Bob (G.I .), 278 Groves, Leslie (LOST), 229
Gilder , George (SIL), 292 Guinness, Alec (Britain-G.I.), 37
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (MISS), 235 Guisewite, Cathy (BOOM), 300
Gingrich, Newt (BOOM), 84, 300, 314 Guthrie, Ario (BOOM), 94, 295
Ginsberg, Allen (SIL), 288
Gipp, George (LOST), 267 Halberstam, David (SIL), 274
Giraud, Jean-Louis (France-REP), 438 Hale, Edward Everett (GILD), 215
Gitlin, Todd (BOOM), 20, 299, 302, 310 Hale, Nathan (REP), 174-75
Glasgow, Ellen (MISS), 243 Hale, Nathan G. (G.I.), 223
Glazer, Nathan (G.I.), 279 Hale, Sarah (COMP), 182, 187
Gleason, Jackie (G.I.), 262, 273 Haley, Alex (G.I.), 262
Goddard, Henry (MISS), 235, 252 Hall, Anthony Michael (13TH), 329
Godfrey, Arthur (G.I .), 261 Hall, Fawn (BOOM), 313
Goetz, Bernhard (BOOM), 331 Hall, G. Stanley (PROG), 220, 222-23, 226,
Gogh, Vincent van (Netherlands-PROO), 218 255
Gold, Mike (LOST), 255 Halsey, William F. (MISS), 245
Goldman, Emma (MISS), 234-35, 242 Hamilton, Alexander (REP), FO, 173-74,
Goldwater, Barry (G.I.), 253, 259 176, 178, 180, 368
Gompers, Samuel (PROG), 218, 225 Hammerstein, Oscar (LOST), 259
Goodman, Ellen (SIL), 281, 292, 319, 322, Hammett, Dashiell (LOST), 248
339, 341 Hammon, Jupiter (AW AK), 158-59
Goodman, Paul (G.I.), 287 Hampton, Wade (TRAN), 204
Gorbachev, Mikhail (Soviet Union-SIL), 37, Hancock, John (LIB), 12, 166, 169, 458
280 Handel, George Frederick (England-ENL), 146
Gorbachev , Raisa (Soviet Union-SIL), 37 Handlin, Oscar (G.I.), 19, 134
Gordon, Barbara (SIL), 290 Handy, William Christopher (MISS), 234, 242
Gordon, Thomas (G.I.), 328 Hanson, John (AWAK), 458
Gordy, Berry (SIL), 289 Harding , Warren G. (MISS), 234, 400, 460
Gore, Albert, Jr. (BOOM), 20, 70, 300, 315, Harrington, Michael (SIL), 230, 280, 288
350 Harris, Joel Chandler (PROG), 218, 227
Gore, Tipper (BOOM), 21, 338 Harris, Louis (G.I.), 20
Gorham, Nathaniel (LIB), 458 Harrison, Benjamin (GILD), 208, 460
Gorton, Samuel (PUR), 126 Harrison, Benjamin (LIB), 170-71
Gottlieb, Annie (BOOM), 20, 301 Harrison, Francis (MISS), 235
Gould, Jay (GILD), 209, 213 Harrison, William Henry (COMP), 182, 185,
Goulden, Joseph (G.I.), 265 459
Graebner, William (BOOM), 20 Hart, Gary (SIL), 29, 72, 280, 291
Graf, Steffi (Germany-13TH), 318 Hart, Peter (SIL), 333
Graham, Billy (G.l.), 262, 264 Harte, Bret (GILD), 208
Graham, Otis, Jr . (SIL), 245 Harvard , John (PUR), 122
Graham, Sylvester (TRAN), 202 Hatch, Nathan (BOOM), 20, 163
Gramm, Phil (SIL), 291, 362 Havel, Vaclav (Czechoslovakia-SIL), 280, 294
Grant, Ulysses (GILD), 12, 38, 45, 84, 88- Hawes, Joseph (SIL), 19
89, FO, 207-9 , 213, 364, 366, 417, Hawkins, John (England-Reformation Cycle),
427, 460 113, 116
Gray, Asa (TRAN), 204 Hawley, Joseph (AWAK), 152, 157, 162
Greaves, Thomas (ENL), 150 Hawley, Willis C. (MISS), 236
Greeley, Horace (TRAN), 199, 212 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (TRAN), 80-81, 96,
Green, Jacob (AWAK), 157 195-96, 200,204,402
Greene, Jack (SIL), 149 Hayden , Tom (SIL), 288
Greene, Nathanael (REP), 172, 174, 178 Hayes, Denis (BOOM), 406
Greene, Wade (SIL), 281-83 Hayes, Rutherford B. (GILD), 208, 213, 215,
Greven, Philip J., Jr. (SIL), 20, 435-36 460
Griffin, Cyrus (REP), 458 Hays, William Harrison (MISS), 244
Griffith, D . W. (MISS), 234, 242 Haywood, Bill (MISS), 234-35
Gross, Robert (BOOM), 20 Hearst, Patty (BOOM), 300, 310
528 INDEX

Hearst, William Randolph (MISS), 220, 234, Hoover, J. Edgar (LOST), 248-49
241-42 Hope, Bob (G.I.), 262, 264
Hefner, Hugh (SIL), 29, 280 Hopkins, Samuel (AWAK), 158
Heimerl, Alan (SIL), 20, 163 Hopkinson, Francis (LIB), 165-66
Heinz, Henry J. (PROO), 218, 224 Hom, Robert (BOOM), 21
Heller, Walter (G.I.), 287 Horowitz, David (SIL), 309, 314
Hellman, Lillian (G.l.), 277 Houston, Whitney (13TH), 318
Hemingway, Ernest (LOST), 58, FO, 248-49, Hovey, Richard (MISS), 242
251,256,258,332,401,411 Howe, Frederic (MISS), 236, 241
Henry, 0. (MISS), 242 Howe, Julia Ward (TRAN), 91, 192, 196, 198
Henry, Patrick (LIB), 12, 38, FO, 165-66, Howe, Margot (G.l.), 21
168, 170-71, 178,417 Howe, Neil (BOOM), 13-14, 21
Henry VIII, King (England-Reformation Howe, Simona (BOOM), 21
Cycle), 116 Howe, William (Britain-LIB), 152, 406
Henson, Jim (SIL), 29, 280, 293 Howells, William Dean (GILD), 208, 211,
Hepburn, Katharine (G.1.), 262 214, 220
Herbert, George (England-PUR), 125-26 Hubbard, L. Ron (G.I.), 264
Herbert, Victor (PROO), 218 Huizinga, Johan (Spain-MISS), 440
Herbert, Victor (SIL?), 331 Hull, Cordell (MISS), 245
Herndon, William (TRAN), 197 Hull, John (CAY), 130, 134
Herodotus (Ancient), 434 Hume, David (Britain-AWAK), 149, 177
Herron, George (MISS), 233, 241 Humphrey, Hubert (G.l.), IOI, 262, 285
Hershey, Lewis (LOST), 259 Humphreys, David (REP), 172, 180
Hesiod (Ancient), 433-35, 451 Huntington, Samuel (LIB), 458
Heston, Charlton (G.I.), 264 Huntington, Samuel P. (SIL), 19, 85, 105,
Hewitt, Paul (BOOM), 21 452
Heyrman, Christine (BOOM), 20 Huntley, Chet (G.l.), 274
Hi (Ancient), 105 Husbands, Herman (LIB), 168
Hickok, James Butler "Wild Bill" (GILD), Hussein, Saddam (Iraq-SIL), 76, 314
FO, 208,213 Hutchinson, Anne (PUR), 94, FO, 122, 124,
Hill, James J. (GILD), 209, 214 157-58
Hill, Joe (MISS), 242 Hutchinson, Thomas (AWAK), 157-58
Hiner, N. Ray (SIL), 19 Hyde, William (PROG), 241
Hirsch, E. Donald, Jr. (SIL), 321
Hiss, Alger (G.I.), 265 Iacocca, Lee (G.l.), 261-62, 272
Hitchcock, Enos (REP), 178 lbn Khaldun (Medieval), 104, 451
Hitler, Adolf (Germany-LOST), 226, 248, 406 Ibsen, Henrik (Norway-GILD), 208
Ho (Ancient), 105 Ickes, Harold (MISS), 258
Hobbes, Thomas (England-PUR), 82, 122, Irving, Washington (COMP), FO, 182-83,
124 187, 212
Hoffer, Eric (G.l.), 266
Hoffman, Abbie (SIL), 279-80, 289 Jackson, Andrew (COMP), 38, 84, FO, 98,
Hofstadter, Richard (G.l.), 20, 207, 232 154, 181-82, 184-88, 192-93, 211,
Hogarth, William (England-ENL), 168 366,459
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. (GILD), 192, Jackson, Jesse (SIL), 56, 280, 307
208, 212, 215 Jackson, Richard (BOOM), 21
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. (TRAN), 197, Jackson, Thomas "Stonewall" (GILD), 38,
199, 204 88. 190, 192, 208, 213
Holt, Emmett (MISS?), 269 Jagger, Mick (Britain-BOOM), 300
Homer (Ancient), 104, 373, 433-35, 437, James, Henry (PROO), FO, 207, 218, 226-27
442-44, 448,450,452 James, Jesse (PROO), 224
Hone, Philip (COMP), 188 James, William (GILD), 208-9, 213-15
Hoogeveen, Jeffrey (13TH), 296 James I, King (England-Reformation Cycle),
Hooker, Thomas (PUR), 122 102, 113, 119, 125
Hoover, Herbert (MISS), 45, 55, 78, FO, James II, King (England-CAV), 80, 119, 127,
233-34, 239, 244, 246, 248, 257, 272, 130-31, 137-38, 141,406
366,460 Jarvis, Howard (G.l.), 276
INDEX 529
Jay, John (REP), IOI, 173-74, 176, 178,458 285 , 315,335,366,368,418,423 ,
Jefferson, Thomas (CAY), 132 460
Jefferson. Thomas (REP), 9, 37, 45 , 68 , 84, Kennedy, Joseph (LOST), 257
88-89. FO, IOI, 104, 165, 172-80, Kennedy, Robert (SIL), 279-80, 290, 294,
186, 196-97 , 366,368 , 386-87, 394, 394
418. 423,438 . 440, 459 Kenyon, Cecilia (SIL?). 152
Jenney , William Le Baron (GILD), 208 Kerouac , Jack (G.l.), 66
Jewett , Sarah Orne (PROG), 226 Kerr, Clark (G.I.), 310
Jobs , Steven (BOOM), 300, 316 Kerrey. Bob (BOOM), 315
Johnson, Andrew (TRAN), 196, 213, 459 Kesey, Ken (SIL), 280
Johnson, James Weldon (MISS), 239 Kett , Joseph (SIL), 19-20, 201 , 210,221.
Johnson , Lyndon B. (G.I.). 66 , 104, 232, 223-24
237, 262, 272, 274, 310 , 460 Key, Francis Scott (COMP), 182
Johnson, Samuel (ENL), FO, 146-48, 150, Keyes, Alan (BOOM), 316
168 Khomeini , Ayatollah (Iran-LOST), 317
Jolson, Al (LOST), 251 Khrushchev, Nikita (Soviet Union-LOST), 37
Jones, John Paul (REP), FO, 174, 178 Kidd, William (CAY), 12, FO, 130, 132, 134
Jones, Landon (BOOM), 20 , 299 King, Ernest J. (MISS), 245
Jones, Mary "Mother " (GILD), 208 King, Martin Luther, Jr. (SIL), FO, 230, 280,
Jonson, Ben (England-Reformation Cycle). 285, 288, 290, 293-94 . 368-69, 394
114 King , Rufus (REP) , 176
Joplin, Janis (BOOM). 300 Kinte, Kunta (REP), 174
Joplin, Scott (MISS), 242 Kirk, Grayson (G.I.), 310
Jordan, David Starr (PROG), 219 Kirkpatrick , Jeane (SIL), 279
Jordan , Hamilton (BOOM), 30, 315 Klaus, Patricia (BOOM?), 239
Jordan. Michael (13TH), 318-19 Klein, Norma (SIL), 329
Jorgensen, Christine (SIL) , 290 Klingberg , Frank (G.I.), 102-3, 107
Joshua (Biblical), 449-50 Knox, Henry (REP), 173, 175
Junker, Howard (SIL), 281 Knox, John (Scotland-Reformation Cycle) , 93,
113
Kaestle , Carl (BOOM), 19 Koch, Edward (SIL), 337
Kaiser, Henry (MISS), 81, 236, 245 Kohl, Helmut (Germany-SIL), 280
Kaixi , Wuer (China-13TH), 318 Koop, C. Everett (G.I.), 31, 335
Kammen, Michael (SIL), 20, 162 Koppel , Ted (SIL), 280, 283
Kamps , Mary (G.I.), 21 Kors , Alan (BOOM), 313
Kaplan, Jeremy (BOOM), 21 Kraft, Joseph (G.I.), 274
Karloff, Boris (LOST), 259 Krauthhammer , Charles (BOOM), 340
Keane , John (SIL), 21 Kreski, Chris (13TH), 323
Keating, David (BOOM) , 21 Krutch, Joseph (LOST), 270
Keene, Karlyn , (BOOM), 20 Kuhn, Maggie (G.I.), 275
Kefauver, Estes (G.I.), 248 Kunen , James Simon (BOOM), 300, 309
Keith, George (CAY), 130 Kuttner, Robert (SIL), 320
Keller, Helen (MISS), 234 Kuznets, Simon (G.I.), 262
Keller, Morton (SIL), 85
Kelley , Florence (PROG), 226 Lafayette, Marquis de (France-REP), 174
Kellogg, Frank (PROG), 226 La Follette, Robert (PROG), 218-19
Kellogg , John Harvey (PROG), 219 Lagemann, Ellen (BOOM), 44
Kelly , Grace (SIL). 29, 287 La Guardia, Fiorello (MISS), 246
Kelly , Tom (SIL), 293 Lamb, John (LIB), 168
Kemp , Jack (SIL), 280 , 283, 292 Lamont, Lansing (BOOM), 311
Keniston, Kenneth (SIL), 20 , 101. 301-3, Lancaster, Burt (G.I.), 264
305 , 309, 329 Landers, Ann (G.I.), FO, 262, 277
Kennan, George (G.I.), 272, 277 Landis, Kenesaw Mountain (MISS), 243
Kennedy, Jacqueline (SIL), 279, 287 Landon, Alfred (LOST), 254
Kennedy, John F. (G.l.), 27, 29, 40 , 52, 55, Lane, William (BOOM), 21
57, 66, 68, 70, 72, 84, 88-89, FO, Langdon, Samuel (AWAK), 151
108, 259 , 261-64, 272-74. 279-80, Lasch, Christopher (SIL), 302, 332
530 INDEX

Laurence, William (LOST), 228 Lipset, Seymour Martin (G.1.), 263, 273
Laurens, Henry (LIB), 458 Littre, Emile (France-TRAN), 49, 104, 438,
Lautenberg, Frank (SIL), 277 440, 451-52
Lazarus, Emma (PROG), 221 Livingston, Robert (REP), 173, 179
Lea, Doug (SIL), 21 Livingston, William (AWAK), 158, 161
Lea, Larry (BOOM), 319 Livy (Ancient), 450
Lear, Norman (G.I.), 320-21 Lloyd, Henry Demarest (PROG), 225
Lears, T. Jackson (BOOM), 219 Locke, Alain (LOST), 256
Lee, Henry " Light-Horse Harry" (REP), 172, Locke, John (England-CAV), 130
178 Lodge, George Cabot (MISS), 233
Lee, Richard Henry (LIB), 168-9, 458 Logan, James (ENL), FO, 145-46
Lee, Robert E. (TRAN), II , 81, 88, FO, 192, Logan, Rayford (LOST), 238
194, 196, 199, 213 London, Jack (MISS), 236, 238, 255
Lee, Spike (BOOM), 300 Long, Huey P. (LOST), 248, 257, 258
Lee, Thomas (ENL), 146, 148, 150 Long, Washington (SIL?), 332
Lehman, Herbert (MISS), 55, 246 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (TRAN), 196,
Lehrer, Jim (SIL), 30 200, 202, 203-4, 207, 212, 214, 401
Lehrer, Tom (SIL), 230, 288 Longman, Phil (BOOM), 21
Leister, Jacob (CAY), FO, 129-30, 132, 134 Lorenz, Ottokar (Germany-GILD), 438, 440
L'Enfant , Pierre (REP), 172, 174, 178 Louis XIV, King (France-CAY), 130-31, 141
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (Soviet Union-MISS), Lowe, Rob (13TH), 319
234 Lowell, Francis Cabot (COMP), 182-83
Lennon, John (Britain-SIL), 280 Loyola, St. Ignatius (Spain-Reformation
Lennon, Julian (Britain-13TH), 318 Cycle), I 14
Leno, Jay (BOOM), 319 Luciano, Charles "Lucky" (LOST), 248, 252,
Lerman, Philip (BOOM?), 314 259
LeShan, Eda (G.I.), 262, 276, 307 Ludwig, Mary-see Pitcher, Molly
Letterman, David (BOOM), 300 Luther, Martin (Germany-Reformation Cycle),
Levenstein, Harvey (SIL), 239, 311 93, IOI, 113-14, 116
Leverenz, David (SIL?), 125 Lynch, Charles (LIB), 167
Leverett, John (GLOR), 118 Lynd, Alice (LOST), 20
Levinson, Daniel (G.I.), 20, 44, 46, 292 Lynd, Robert (LOST), 20
Levitt, William (G.I.), 262, 272 Lynn, Kenneth (G.I.), 177
Lewis, Anthony (SIL), 70 Lyon, Mary (TRAN), 202
Lewis, Jan (BOOM), 20
Lewis, Jerry (SIL), 279, 287
Lewis, John Llewellyn (MISS), 234, 258 MacArthur, Douglas (MISS), II, 55, 81, 229,
Lewis, Meriwether (COMP), 54, FO, 181-82 233-34, 236, 241, 245, 249, 258, 314,
Lewis, Michael (13TH), FO, 318-19 406
Lewis, Sinclair (LOST), 12, 247-48, 256-57, McCarthy, Joseph (G.I .), 262, 265, 280, 287
271 McCarthy, Mary (G.I.), 271
Lieber, Francis (TRAN), 1% McClellan, George (GILD), 213
Lightner, Candy (BOOM), 313 McClure, Jessica (MILL), 31, 35, 84, FO,
Lin, Maya (BOOM), 300 336, 339
Linburg, Gregg (13TH), 324 McCollum, Elmer (MISS), 235
Lincoln, Abraham (TRAN), II, 38, 45, 78, McCormick, Cyrus (TRAN), 198
84, 88-89, 91, FO, IOI, 190, 192-94, McCrea, Jane (REP), 178
196-99, 203, 205, 208, 212-13, 237, McEnroe, John (BOOM), 300
268,357,366,382,406,427,459 McFarland, George "Spanky" (SIL), 286
Lincoln, Mary Todd (TRAN), 199 McGovern, George (G.I .), 300--301
Lindbergh, Charles (G.I.), 29, 68, FO, 261- McGovern, James (SIL), 239
62, 266,271 McGroarty, John (MISS), 244
Lindsay, Vachel (MISS), 246 McGuire, Barry (SIL), 230
Lingg, Louis (MISS), 242 McKay, Claude (LOST), 256
Linkletter, Art (G.I.), 273 McKean, Thomas (LIB), 458
Lippmann, Walter (LOSn. 248, 257 Mackey, John (SIL), 289
INDEX 531

McKinley , William (PROG). 193. 218 , 225 , FO. 102, 117- 18, 135, 137-39 ,
233. 242, 460 141-43 , 147-48, 160-62, 352, 388,
McLean, Don (BOOM) , 300 418
MacLeish, Archibald (LOST). 250 Mather, Eleazar (CA VJ, 133
McLoughlin, William , Jr. (G.I.) , 19, 92-94, Mather, Increase (CAY), 89, 95, FO, 118,
298 129-30 , 134-35, 140,417
McNamara , Robert (G.I. ), 262 , 272, 274 Mather, Richard (PUR), FO, 121- 22, 133
MacNeil. Robert (SIL) , 29 Mather, Samuel (AWAK) , 162
MacRae. David (Britain-COMP?), 211 Mathers, Jerry "the Beaver " (BOOM), 30 ,
Maddison , James (CAY), 134 299-300, 334
Madison, Dolley (COMP), 89, FO, 182 Max, Peter (SIL), 289
Madison , James (REP) , 9, 37, 88, FO, IOI, Maximilian , Emperor of Mexico (Austria-
119, 159, 173-76, 178-79 , 366,368, GILD), 208
435 , 459 Mayer, Milton (G.I.), 274
Maier, Pauline (SIL). 20 Mayhew , Jonathan (AWAK), 157- 58, 162
Main, Jackson Turner (G.I.J , 168 Mellon , Andrew (PROG). 218
Malcolm , Henry (G.J.?). 263, 302 Melville , Herman (TRAN), 11, 197,199,200,
Manchester. William (G.I.J , 20. 274, 279, 203-4
287, 300-301 Mencken , H. L. (MISS). 11, 234, 244-45,
Mandel. Bill (BOOM) , 319 255, 400
Manes, Christopher (BOOM) . 300 Mentre, Frarn;ois (France-TRAN) , 109, 439-
Mann, Horace (TRAN) , 206-7 , 218 40
Mannheim , Karl (Germany-LOST), 34, 60, Merser, Cheryl (BOOM) , 20, 43-44, 46, 57,
64-65 , 68 , 104, 439-40 65, 308, 312
Mao Zedong (China-LOST). 248 Messersmith, Andy (BOOM), 311
Marcos. Ferdinand (Philippines-G.1.) , 262 Metacomet , "King Philip" (CAY), 88, FO,
Marias, Julian (Spain-G.I.J. 19, 59, 67, 105, 117, 122, 127, 130, 132, 134, 138,
452 146, 356
Maria Theresa. Queen (Austria-AW AK), 158 Metzenbaum, Howard (G.I.), 315
Marie Antoinette (France-REP), 174 Michelson, Albert (PROG), 225
Marion , Francis (LIB), 152. 165-66 . 170 Middleton, Henry (AWAK), 159,458
Markham, Edwin (PROG), 218 Mifflin, Thomas (REP), 458
Marlborough , First Duke of (England-GLOR), Milbourne, Jacob (CAV) , 132
138-39 Milk, Harvey (SIL) . 290
Marlowe, Christopher (England-Reformation Mill , John Stuart (Britain-TRAN), 104, 438,
Cycle) , 113 440
Marsalis, Wynton (13TH). 318 Millay , Edna St. Vincent (LOST). 249
Marshall , George (MISS), 55. 81, 229, 234, Miller, Arthur (G.I.), 259
236 , 245- 46. 260-61 , 408 Miller, Glenn (G.I.), 262
Marshall, John (REP). 37, 88, 159, 173-75 , Miller, Henry (LOST), 251
177, 179 Miller, Perry (G.I.) , 20, 128, 133, 148
Martin . Joseph W .. Jr. (LOST) , 250 , 416 Millett , Kate (SIL), 290
Martin , Luther (REP), 176 Mills, C. Wright (G .I.) , 209, 273
Martin, Mary (G.I.J, 272 Mills, Wilbur (G.I .), 275
Martin , Steve (BOOM) , 300 Milton, John (England-PUR), 121-22
Marx, Groucho (Julius) (LOST) . 248 , 252 Mitchum, Robert (G.I.), 264
Marx, Harpo (Arthur) (LOST) , 248, 254-55 Mohammed (Ancient), 450
Marx, Karl (Germany-TRAN), 196 Moley, Raymond (LOST), 258
Marx Brothers (LOST), 248. 259-see also Molineux, William (AWAK), 158, 162
Marx , Groucho. and Marx, Harpo Mondale, Walter (SIL), 84, FO, 279- 80, 366
Mary , Queen (England-Reformation Cycle) , Monroe, James (REP), 37, 95, 154, 173- 76 ,
114, 120 179, 197,459
Mason, George (LIB) , 166, 168 Monroe, Mariiyn (SIL), 280, 392
Massobrio, Carla (Canada-SIL) , 21 Montague , David (13TH), 331
Masters. Edgar Lee (MISS), 243 Moore, Clement Clarke (COMP), 182
Mather, Cotton (GLOR). 9, 68, 84. 88-89 , More , Paul Elmer (MISS), 244
532 INDEX

Morgan, Daniel (LIB) , 152, 165, 171 North, Oliver (BOOM), 30, FO , 300, 313,
Morgan , Edmund (G.I .), 20, 127, 154, 173 406
Morgan , Hilary (MILL), 31, FO, 336, 340 North, Simon Newton Dexter (PROG), 227
Morgan, John Pierpont (GILD) , 208 , 213, 215 Norton , Charles Eliot (GILD), 214
Morison, Samuel Eliot (LOST), 20, 187, 207, Noyes , John Humphrey (TRAN), 198, 200,
220 400
Morrill, Justin Smith (TRAN) , 234 Nye, Gerald P. (LOST), 248, 258
Morris, Gouverneur (REP) , 173-74 Nye, Joseph (SIL), 291
Morris , Lewis (GLOR), 138 Nye, Russel (G.I .), 199
Morris, Robert (LIB), 164, 166, 170-71
Morrison , Jim (BOOM) , 55, 95 Oakes , Urian (GLOR) , 140
Morse, Robert (SIL), 279 Occom, Samson (AWAK), 158-59
Morse , Samuel F. B. (COMP) , 88, 182-83 O'Connor, Sandra Day (SIL) , 89, 280
Moses (Biblical), 163, 449-50 Odysseus (Mythical), 442-45, 447-48
Moses, Robert (G.I.) , 272 Oglesby, Carl (SIL), 288
Mott, John (MISS) , 245 Oglethorpe, James (England-ENL), 146-47
Mott , Lucretia (TRAN), 350 O'Hanlon , Virginia (LOST), 254
Moyers, Bill (SIL) , 279, 289 Oliver , Peter (AWAK) , 157
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (SIL), 291, 309 Olsen, Merlin (SIL), 290
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (Austria-REP) , O' Neal, Tatum (13TH), 30, 318, 321
174 O'Neill, Eugene (LOST) , 247, 257
Munro, Andrew (CAY) , 132 O'Neill , Molly (BOOM?) 313
Murphy, Eddie (13TH) , 318 O'Neill, Tip (G.I .), 262
Murray , Charles (BOOM), 316 O' Neill, William (SIL), 20
Musial, Stan (G .I.), 29 Oppenheimer, J. Robert (G.I .), 88, FO, 228,
Mussolini, Benito (Italy-LOST), 248 230,262
Musto, David (SIL), 353 Orkin , Miles (13TH), 334
O'Rourke , P. J . (BOOM) , 312
Nader , Ralph (SIL) , 279-80 , 289 , 293 Ortega , Daniel (Nicaragua-BOOM), 300
Naisbitt, John (SIL), 280, 291 Ortega y Gasset, Jose (Spain-LOST), 34, 59,
Namath, Joe (BOOM), 300, 311 65-66, 82, 439-40, 452
Nasaw, David (BOOM), 19 Orwell, George (Britain-G .I.), 262
Nash, Gary (AWAK), 160, 167 Osborn, Sarah (AWAK), 159
Nash, Graham (Britain-SIL), 447 Osler , William (PROG), 214
Nast, Thomas (GILD) , 208, 237 O'Sullivan , John (TRAN), 198
Nation, Carry (PROG) , 218 Otis, James (LIB), 166
Nelson, Harriet (G .I.), 265
Nelson, Horatio (Britain-REP) , 174 Paar , Jack (G.I.), 273
Nelson , Ozzie (G.l .), 265 Packer, Al (GILD), 210
Nelson, Thomas (LIB), 169 Page, Mann (ENL), 146
Nestor (Mythical) , 434, 442, 448 Page, Matthew (GLOR) , 141
Neugarten, Bernice (G.I .), 20 Pahlavi, Shah Riza (lran-G.I.), 262
Newman , Randy (BOOM), 55 Paine, Thomas (ENL), 149
Newport, Elaina (BOOM), 21 Paine, Thomas (G.I.), 343
Newton, Isaac (England-CAV), 139, 145 Paine, Thomas (LIB), FO, 166, 171, 175
Nicholson, Jack (SIL), 280 Palmer, A. Mitchell (MISS), 78, 234, 243,
Niebuhr, Reinhold (LOST) , 248, 251, 258 246-47
Niles, Samuel (ENL) , 149 Park, Robert (MISS) , 244
Nix , Shann (13TH) , 20, 324 Parker, Dorothy (LOST), 248, 256, 259
Nixon, Richard M. (G.I .), 66, 68-69, 95, 97, Parker, Theodore (TRAN), 197, 203-4
262,272, 274-75, 279,285,287,317 , Parkman, Francis (GILD), 208
460 Parrington, Vernon (MISS) , 207
Nobel , Alfred (Sweden-GILD), 208 Parsons, Jonathan (AWAK), 162
Noonan, Peggy (BOOM), FO, 315 Pastorius, Francis Daniel (GLOR), 138
Noriega , Manuel (Panama-SIL), 319 Patton, George (LOST), 12, FO, 229, 248-49,
Norris , Chuck (SIL), 290 258, 260, 317
Norris, Frank (MISS) , 233, 238 Pauley, Jane (BOOM), 300, 337
INDEX 533

Peale, Norman Vincent (LOST?), 257 Powell, Jody (BOOM), 30, 315
Peck, Gregory (G.I.), 264 Prescott, William (LIB), 151-52
Pegler, Westbrook (LOST), 271 Presley, Elvis (SIL), 29, 279-80, 288, 392
Peirce, Charles (GILD), 213 Preston, Samuel (BOOM), 20
Pemberton, Ebenezer (AWAK), 161 Pruett, Kyle (SIL?), 328
Pencak, William (BOOM), 145, 169 Pryor, Hubert (G.I.), 278
Penelope (Mythical), 443 Pullman, George Mortimer (GILD), 209, 217,
Penn, William (England-CAY), 129-130 242
Pepper, Claude (LOST), 259 Purcell, Henry (England-GLOR), 139
Pepperrell, Sir William (ENL), 146, 150 Pusey, Nathan (G.I.), 310
Percy, Charles (G.I.), 21,272 Putnam, Israel (AWAK), FO
Perkins, Daniel (ENL), 150 Pynchon, John (CAV), 130
Perry, Oliver (COMP), 183 Pynchon, William (PUR), 122
Pershing, John Joseph (MISS), 243
Pessen, Edward (G.1.), 194 Quantrill, William (GILD), 12, 213, 215
Pestalozzi, Johann H. (Switzerland-REP), 201 Quartel, Robert (BOOM), 21
Peter, Paul, and Mary-see Stookey, Paul; Quayle, Dan (BOOM), II, 300, 315
Travers, Mary; and Yarrow, Peter Quigley, Joan (BOOM?), 105
Peter I, "the Great," Czar (Russia-GLOR), Quindlen, Anna (BOOM), 341
138
Peters, David (13TH), 323 Radner, Gilda (BOOM), 30, 300
Peters, Tom (SIL), 292 Rakolta, Terry (BOOM), 338
Petersen, Julius (Germany-MISS), 66, 439 Raleigh, Sir Walter (England-Reformation
Peterson, Peter G. (SIL), 21 Cycle), 88, 113-14
Philip, King-see Metacomet Ralph, Daniel (13TH), 330, 334
Phillips, Kevin (SIL), 292 Ramsay, David (REP), 201
Phillips, Wendell (TRAN), 198, 203, 205 Rand, Ayn (G.I.), 263
Philo (Ancient), 433 Randolph, Edmund (REP), 178
Phips, Sir William (GLOR), 138 Randolph, John, "of Roanoke" (COMP),
Phoenix, River (13TH), 321 182-83, 186
Picasso, Pablo (Spain-MISS), 234 Randolph, Peyton (AWAK), FO, 158-59 , 458
Pickens, T. Boone (SIL), 280 Randolph, William (GLOR), 138, 141
Pickering, Timothy (REP), 173, 180 Ranke, Leopold von (Germany-TRAN), 18
Pickford, Mary (LOST), 259 Raspberry, William (SIL), 283, 331
Pielke, David (BOOM), 303 Rathbone, Charles (Britain-G.I.?), 321
Pierce, Franklin (TRAN), 11, 196, 459 Rauschenbusch, Walter (MISS), 235
Pifer, Alan (G.I.), 20 Ravitch, Diane (SIL), 320
Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth (REP), 173, Reagan, Nancy (G.I.), 105
176 Reagan, Ronald (G.I.), 28, 66, 70, 72, 86,
Pinckney, Eliza (AWAK), FO, 158-59 IOI, 103, 261-62, 264,266, 276-77 ,
Pinder, Wilhelm (Germany-MISS), 65, 67, 279, 291, 300, 302, 312, 315, 318,
109,439 366, 381, 383, 460
Pitcher, Molly (REP), 172, 174 Reed, John (LOST), 247
Pocahontas (PUR), 122 Reich, Charles (SIL), 93, 310, 315
Poe, Edgar Allan (TRAN), 195-98 Remini, Robert (G.I.), 20
Poitier, Sidney (G.I.), 262, 264 Reston, James (G.I.), 263
Polk, James (TRAN), 196, 201-2, 366, 459 Retton, Mary Lou (13TH), FO, 318
Polybius (Ancient), 450 Revel, James (CAV), 133
Pontiac (AWAK), 158, 166, 169 Revere, Paul (LIB), FO, 166
Pope, Alexander (England-ENL), 145 Reynolds, Debbie (SIL), 287
Popper, Karl (Britain-G.1.), 14 Reynolds, Malvina (G.I.), 265
Porter, Cole (LOST), 259 Rhett, Robert Barnwell (TRAN), 197
Porter, John (SIL), 21, 338 Richards, Renee (SIL), 290
Porter, William Sydney-see Henry, 0. Rickenbacker, Edward V. (LOST), 250, 267
Postman, Neil (SIL?), 20, 333 Riddle, Albert (TRAN), 190, 192
Pound, Ezra (LOST), 247, 250 Ridley, Nicholas (England-Reformation
Poussaint, Alvin (SIL), 329 Cycle), 114
534 INDEX

Riesman, David (G.I.), 279 Ruth , George Herman "Babe" (LOST), 247-
Rifkin, Jeremy (BOOM), 316 49, 411
Riis , Jacob (PROG), 225, 254 Ryan, Mary (BOOM), 20
Riley, Matilda White (G.I.) , 46
Rittenhouse, David (LIB), 168 Sacco, Nicola (LOST), 248, 257
Rivera, Geraldo (BOOM) , 50 Sagalyn, Rafe (BOOM), 21
Robertson, Pat (SIL), 307 Sagan, Carl (SIL), FO, 230, 280, 290
Robeson, Paul (LOST), 248 St. Clair, Arthur (LIB), 458
Robespierre, Maximilien (France-REP) , 174, Salaam, Yusef (13TH), 332
438 Salinger, Pierre (SIL), 279, 289
Robinson, Edward G. (LOST), 259 Saltonstall, Gurdon (GLOR), FO, 138, 366
Rockefeller, John D. (GILD), 12, 95, FO, Samenow, Stanton (SIL), 331
207-9, 213, 219 Samuel (Biblical), 450
Rockefeller, Nelson (G.I.), 288-89 Sandburg, Carl (MISS), 234, 242, 401
Rockne, Knute (LOST) , 267 Sanders, Deion (13TH), 319
Rockwell, Norman (LOST) , 248, 258, 286 Sanger, Margaret (MISS), 234-35
Rodgers, Daniel (SIL), 270 Santayana, George (MISS), 234, 236, 350
Rogers , John (England-Reformation Cycle), Schaie, Klaus Warner (SIL), 20, 50
114 Schell, Jonathan (BOOM), 300, 316
Rogers, Robert (LIB), 166, 171 Schlesinger, Arthur , Jr. (G .I.), 15, 19, 85,
Rogers, Will (MISS), 234 102-5, 107, 237, 274
Rogin, Michael Paul (SIL), 20, 183 Schlesinger , Arthur, Sr. (LOST), 19, 102-5,
Rolfe, John (PUR), FO, 122 107
Rooney , Mickey (G.I.), 270 Schneider, William (SIL), 283
Roosevelt, Alice Longworth (LOST), 255 Schroeder, Patricia (SIL), 280, 292
Roosevelt, Franklin (MISS), 25, 31, 78, 81, Schultz, "Dutch" (LOST), 252
84, 88-89, 91 , FO, IOI, 104, 229, Schuyler, Peter (GLOR) , FO, 138
232-34, 236-37, 244-46, 249-50, 258, Schwartz, John (13TH), 319
262, 265, 267-68, 271, 286, 357, 366, Schweitzer , Albert (Germany-MISS), 234
382,406,408,416,427,460 Scopes, John T. (LOST), 218
Roosevelt, Sara (PROG), 241 Scott, Dred (TRAN) , 88 , 182, 194, 196
Roosevelt, Theodore (PROG), 10, 39, 84, FO, Scott, Sir Walter (Britain-COMP), 182
190, 217-22, 224-25, 232, 235, 238, Scott, Winfield (COMP), 182, 188, 192
242,255,339,362,366 , 394,460 Scottow, Joshua (CAY), 135
Root, Elihu (PROG), 226 Seabury, Samuel (LIB) , 167
Roper, Elmo (LOST), 20 Sears, Isaac (LIB), 164, 170
Ross , Edmund (GILD), 213 Sebenius , Jim (BOOM), 21
Ross, Katharine (BOOM), 302 Sedgwick , Catherine (COMP), 182
Rostow, Walt (G .I.), 274 Selyns, Henricus (CAY), 135
Roth, Philip (SIL), FO, 280, 288 Sevareid , Eric (G.1.), 273, 277
Rousseau , Jean Jacques (France-AW AK), 145, Sewall, Samuel (GLOR), 138, 142
158 Seward , William (TRAN), 197
Rovere, Richard (G.1.), 274 Shakespeare, William (England-Reformation
Royce, Josiah (PROG), 222 Cycle), 36, 113-14, 116, 122, 130,404
Royster, Charles (BOOM), 172 Sharpton, Al (BOOM), 313
Rubin, Jerry (SIL), 289 Shaw, Peter (SIL), 20
Rudd, Mark (BOOM), 94, 300 Shays , Daniel (REP), 166, 178
Rudman, Warren (SIL), 291 Sheehy, Gail (SIL), 20, 43-45, 57, 72, 288,
Rudolph, Frederick (G.I.), 19, 212 290, 292
Rupert, Prince (England-CAY), 131 Sheldon, Charles (PROG), 220
Rush, Benjamin (REP), 9 , 101, 154, 172, Shepard, Thomas {PUR), 122, 125, 128
174-75, 178, 180 Shepard , Thomas, Jr. (CAY), 137
Rusk, Dean (G.I.), 274 Sheridan, Philip (GILD), 213
Russell, Cheryl (BOOM), 20 Sherman, Roger (AWAK), 157-58, 160, 162
Russell, Lillian (MISS), 221 Sherman, William Tecumseh (TRAN), 81, 91,
Russo, Martin (BOOM), 314 FO, 196-97, 203, 212, 406
INDEX 535

Shields, Brooke (13TH), 318 Steele, Shelby (BOOM), 313

Shirley, William (ENL), 84, FO, 145-46, Steffens, Lincoln (MISS), 233-34, 238,
150, 366 241
Shocked, Michelle (13TH), 318 Stein, Benjamin (BOOM), 315
Shuford, Gene (G.I .), 270 Stein, Gertrude (MISS), 11, 250, 401
Shultz, George (G.I.), 29 Steinbeck, John (G.I.), FO, 262, 271
Sigourney, Lydia (COMP), 188 Steinem, Gloria (SIL), 29, 95, FO, 279-280,
Silber, Mandy (13TH), 332 290
Silberman, Charles (SIL), 288 Stephens, Alexander (TRAN), 192
Silvers, Phil (G.I.), 273 Stevens, Thaddeus (TRAN), 91, 187, 196-97,
Simmons, William (MISS), 235 203-4
Simon, Paul (SIL), 289 Stevens, Wallace (MISS), 406, 407
Simpson, Jerry "Sockless Socrates" (GILD), Stevenson, Adlai (LOST), 54, 248, 254, 285
214 Stewart, Jimmy (G.I.), 262, 264, 272, 278
Sinclair, Upton (MISS), FO, 233-34, 238-39, Stewart, Kelly (13TH), 21
242, 255 Stiles, Ezra (LIB), 166, 171
Singer, Isaac (G.I.), 264 Stimson, Henry (MISS), 228-29, 245, 250
Singer, Isaac M. (TRAN), 198 Stockman, David (BOOM), 300, 315
Sitting Bull (GILD), FO, 208-9 Stoddard, Solomon (CAY), 130
Skinner, B. F. (G.I.), 264 Stone, Lawrence (G.I.), 131
Slater, Peter Gregg (SIL), 19 Stone, Lucy (TRAN), 200, 400
Slick, Grace (BOOM), 55, 295 Stookey, Paul (SIL), 230, 289, 392
Sloan, Alfred (MISS), 243 Story, Joseph (COMP), 182
Smith, Alfred (MISS), 241, 244 Stoughton, William (CAV}, 117, 130, 133,
Smith, Daniel Blake (SIL?), 20 364, 366
Smith, Hannah (GILD), 254 Stowe, Harriet Beecher (TRAN), FO, 197-98,
Smith, Huston (G.I.?), 20 200, 203
Smith, Joseph (TRAN), 196, 202 Strauss, Eric (MILL), 21
Smith, Margaret Bayard (COMP), 182 Strauss, Janie (BOOM), 21
Smith, Nancy (13TH), 20, 317, 334 Strauss, Levi (GILD), 208, 212
Smith, Samantha (13TH), FO, 318 Strauss, Melanie (13TH), 21
Smith, Wade (G.I.), 20 Strauss, Rebecca (MILL), 21
Smoot, Reed (MISS), 236 Strauss, Suzy (G.I.), 21
Snyder, Mitch (BOOM), 55, 313, 406 Strauss, Victoria (13TH), 21
Socrates (Ancient), 157 Strauss, William (BOOM), 13-14, 21
Soderbergh, Steven (13TH), 318-19 Strawberry, Darryl (13TH), 331
Sousa, John Philip (PROG), FO, 218, 221 Streisand, Barbra (SIL), 280, 293
Souter, David (SIL), 291 Strong, Caleb (REP), 176
Southgate, Eliza (COMP), 186 Strong, George Templeton (TRAN), 207
Spargo, John (MISS), 269 Strout, S. Cushing, Jr. (G.I.), 20
Spark, Debra (13TH), 318 Stuart, James E. B. "Jeb" (GILD), 209
Speer, Robert (MISS), 237 Stuyvesant, Peter (PUR), 122
Spencer, Herbert (Britain-TRAN), 213 Styron, William (SIL), 230, 289
Spielberg, Steven (BOOM), FO, 300, 316 Sullivan, Mark (MISS), 226
Spitzer, Alan (SIL), 59 Sumner, John (MISS), 247
Spock, Benjamin (G.I.), 62, 68, 240, 300, Sumner, William Graham (GILD), 207, 214
308 Sumter, Robert (LIB), 165, 170
Spotswood, Alexander (ENL), 10, 146 Sunday, William A. "Billy" (MISS), 234-35,
Sprague, Frank (PROG), 218 242
Stalin, Joseph (Soviet Union-MISS), 37 Sununu, John (SIL), 279
Standish, Myles (PUR), FO, 122-23 Susman, Warren (SIL), 271
Stanford, Leland (GILD), 209, 214 Swift, Gustavus (GILD), 210
Stannard, David (SIL?), 20 Switzer, Carl "Alfalfa" (SIL), 286
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (TRAN), 38, 196, Sydney, Sir Philip (England-Reformation
198, 205, 400 Cycle), 36, 88, 113
Steams, Harold (LOST), 20 Symmes, Thomas (ENL), 146
536 INDEX

Taft , Robert A. (LOST), 254 Twain, Mark (GILD), FO, 206-9, 212, 214-
Taft, William Howard (PROG), 218-19 , 221, 16, 415, 417
242,460 Tweed, William Marcy "Boss" (GILD), 208,
Talcott, Joseph (GLOR), 138, 141 215
Taney, Michael (GLOR), 141 Tyler, John (COMP), 182, 459
Taney , Roger (COMP), 182, 188, 395 Tyson, Mike (13TH), FO, 318
Tarbell, Ida (PROG), 218
Tarkington, Booth (MISS), 204, 238 Updike, John (SIL), 288, 290
Taylor, Frederick Winslow (PROG), 218-19 , Uranus (Mythical), 433-44
222, 224 Urbanska, Wanda (BOOM), 20, 304, 311
Taylor, Maxwell (G.I.), 273
Taylor, Zachary (COMP), 182, 184, 188, 459 Valentino, Rudolph (LOST), 259
Tecumseh (COMP), 182 Van Brugh, John (England-GLOR), 139
Telemachus (Mythical), 442-45 , 447-48 Van Buren, Martin (COMP), 182, 184, 187,
Teller, Edward (G.I. ), 230, 266 459
Temple, Shirley (SIL), 279 Vandenberg, Arthur (LOST), 248, 258, 416
Tennent, Gilbert (AWAK), 158, 160 Van Doren, Charles (SIL), 279
Tennent, William (AWAK), 94, 357 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo (LOST), 257
Tennyson , Alfred, Lord (Britain-TRAN), 200 Veblen, Thorstein (PROG), 218-19
Tew, Thomas (CAY), 132, 134 Vesey, Denmark (COMP), 182
Thomas, Norman (LOST), 254 Victoria, Queen (Britain-TRAN), 196, 237
Thompson, Jim (SIL). 27 Vidal, Gore (SIL), 280
Thompson, Virgil (LOST), 256, 259 Viorst, Judith (SIL), 289
Thoreau, Henry David (TRAN), 11, 196-98, Virgil (Ancient), 450
200, 202-3 , 233, 264 Volcker, Paul (SIL), 333
Thucydides (Ancient), 434, 450 Volstead, Andrew (MISS), 235, 247
Thurow, Lester (SIL), 283 Voltaire, Fran~ois M. A. de (France-ENL),
Tibbets, Paul (G.I.) , 230 146
Tickel, Bill (BOOM), 304 Von Braun, Wernher (G.I.), 230
Tillich, Paul (LOST), 251, 260
Tillman , Benjamin (PROO), 218 Wadsworth, Benjamin (GLOR), 138-39
Timrod, Henry (GILD), 213 Wadsworth, Doug (13TH), 331
Tocqueville, Alexis de (France-TRAN), 36, Wagner, Richard (Germany-TRAN), 196
37, 187, 196, 198 Wagner, Robert F. (MISS), 245
Toffler, Alvin (SIL), 280, 282-83 , 292 Wald, George (G.I.), 274
Tojo, Hideki (Japan-LOST), 406 Walesa, Lech (Poland-BOOM), 37, 300
Tompson, Benjamin (CAV), 135 Walker, Alice (BOOM), 300
Townsend, Francis (MISS), 244 Wallace, Anthony (G.I.) , 92
Travers, Mary (SIL), 230, 289, 392 Wallace, George (G.I.), 309
Trippe, Mattie (GILD?), 240 Wallace, Henry (LOST), 254
Trollope, Frances (Britain-COMP), 198 Walpole, Robert (England-ENL), 145-46
Trudeau, Garry (BOOM), FO, 338 Walsingham, Francis (England-Reformation
Truman, Harry (LOST), 10, 31, 45, 95, FO, Cycle), 113
228-29, 234, 247- 49, 254, 258-60, Ward, John (G.I .), 183
333, 360, 364, 366,415 , 460 Ward, Montgomery (PROG), 218, 224-25
Trumbull, John (REP), 174 Warhol, Andy (SIL), 280, 288
Trumbull, Jonathan (AWAK), 157-58 Warner, Charles Dudley (GILD), 207-8
Trump, Donald (BOOM), 11, 300, 303 Warren, Earl (LOST), 248, 252, 260
Truth, Sojourner (TRAN), 196 Warren, Mercy (LIB), 165-66, 168
Tubman, Harriet "Moses" (TRAN), 192, 196 Washington, Booker T. (PROG), 90, FO, 193,
Tuckson, Reed (BOOM), 333 218-19, 242
Turgenev, Ivan (Russia-TRAN), 447 Washington, George (LIB), 12, 38-39, 45,
Turner, Nat (TRAN), 16, 94, FO, 192, 194, 84, 88, 90, FO, IOI, 152, 155, 164-
196--97, 202, 357 66, 170-72, 175, 186, 360, 364, 366,
Tushingham, Rita (Britain-SIL), 37 401,427,459
Tuveson, Ernest Lee (G.I .), 20 Washington, John (CAY), 132
INDEX 537

Washington , Martha (LIB), 166 William III, King (England-GLOR), 119-20,

Waters, Dooney (MILL), 31, FO. 336, 338, 138-39 , 146
341 Willis , Bruce (BOOM), 337
Watson, John B. (MISS), 286 Willkie, Wendell L. (LOST), 253-54
Watson, Thomas (PROG). 220 Wilmot, David (TRAN), 203
Wattenberg, Ben (SIL), 291 Wilson, Edmund (LOST), 258
Wayne, Anthony (REP), 172, 178 Wilson , Ernest (BOOM), 21
Wayne , John (G.I.), 262, 291, 310 Wilson , James (REP), 173, 176
Webb, James (BOOM), 314 Wilson, Samuel (REP), 174, 177
Webster, Daniel (COMP), 38, 54, 91, FO, Wilson , Sloan (G.I.), 273
154, 181-82 , 184, 186, 188, 362 Wilson , Woodrow (PROG), 10, 31, 45 , FO,
Webster, Noah (REP), 172, 174-75, 177-78 , 190, 193, 217-22, 225-26, 239,2 44,
180 253, 362, 366, 460
Weinberg, Jack (SIL), 289 Winfrey , Oprah (BOOM), 30, 300
Weinberger, Caspar (G.I.), 29 Winn , Marie (SIL), 20, 328
Wellington, Duke of (Britain-COMP), 182 Winner, Christopher (BOOM), 314
Wells, Ida (MISS), 239 Winthrop , Fitz-John (CAY), 130-13, 134
Welsh, Patrick (SIL), 20, 322 Winthrop , John (PUR), 11, 35, 82, 84, 92-95 ,
Welter, Barbara (SIL?), 20 FO, 117, 119, 121-22, 124, 126-27 ,
Werner, David (BOOM), 21 133, 366, 424
Wesley, John (Britain-AWAK), 158 Winthrop, John, Jr. (PUR), 122
West, Benjamin (LIB), 166 Winthrop, Wait (CAY), 131
West, Mae (LOST), 248 , 251, 259 Wirt , William (COMP), 187
Westinghouse, George (PROGJ, 217- 18 Wirtz, W. Willard (G.I.), SI
Westmoreland, William (G.I.), 29, FO. 262, Wise, Henry (COMP), 184
274, 363, 366 Wise, John (GLOR), 88, FO , 138, 142
Wharton , Edith (MISS), 237 Witherspoon, John (AWAK), FO, 157-59,
Wheelock , Eleazar (AWAK), 157 162, 177
Wheelright, John (PUR), 127 Wohl, Robert (SIL), 19
White, Burton (SIL?), 328 Wolfe , James (Britain-LIB), 164
White, Theodore (G.I.), 262 , 274, 277 Wolfe, Thomas (LOST), 58, 67 , 249, 255
White, William Allen (MISS), 235 , 238. 244 Woods, Robert (MISS), 244
Whitefield, George (AWAK), 94, 149, 155, Woodward , Bob (BOOM), 55 , 300
157-58, 160 Woodworth , Samuel (COMP), 182
Whitman, Walt (TRAN), 196-98, 200, 202-3, Woolman, John (AWAK), 38, 157-58, 160
207, 233 Woolworth , F. W. (PROG) , 224
Whitney, Eli (REP), 37, FO , 173-74, 178 Wormeley, Robert (LIB), 165
Whittier, John Greenleaf (TRAN), 202-4 Wouk, Herman (G.I.), 262, 264
Whyte, William (G.I.), 273 Wright, Frank Lloyd (MISS), 234-35, 241
Wiebe, Robert (SIL), 220 Wright , Gwendolyn (BOOM), 243
Wigglesworth , Edward (ENL), 149 Wright , Orville (MISS), 234
Wigglesworth, Michael (CAY), 130, 133, 135 Wright , Richard (G.I.), 273
Wilcox , Ella Wheeler (PROG), 226 Wylie, Philip (G.I.), 102, 264, 305
Wilde , Oscar (Britain-PROG), 218 Wyse, Lois (SIL), 292
Wilder, Thornton (LOST), 260
Wilhelm II, Kaiser (Germany-PROG), 218 ,
X, Malcolm (SIL), 285, 289
409
Xaviere, Marie (13TH) , 334
Wilkes, John (Britain-LIB), 166
Will, George F. (SIL), 283
Willard, Emma (COMP), 182, 188 Yale, Elihu (GLOR), 138
Willard, Frances (GILD), 214 Yancey, William (TRAN), 197
Willard, Richard (BOOM), 21 Yankelovich, Daniel (G.I.), 20
Willard, Samuel (CAY), FO, 130, 147 Yarrow , Peter (SIL), 230, 289 , 392
William, Prince (Britain-MILL), 336 Yasgur, Max (G.I. ?), 295
Williams, Roger (PUR), FO, 121-22, 126 Yasgur, Sam (SIL), 289
Williams, Terry (BOOM), 332 York, Duke of-see James II
538 INDEX

Young, Andrew (SIL), 280 Zenger, John Peter (ENL), FO, 146
Young, Brigham (TRAN), 38, 196, Zeus (Mythical), 433-34
198 Zinsmeister, Karl (BOOM), 313, 337
Zinzendorf, Nicolaus (ENL), 149
Zackheim, Adrian (BOOM), 21 Zuckerman, Michael (SIL), 20
Zappa, Moon Unit (13TH), 318 Zwingli, Ulrich (Switzerland-Reformation
Zelizer, Vivian (SIL?), 20 Cycle), 114
HISTORY

IS BRILLIANT!'
"6ENERATIONS -USA TODAY

H
ailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President
Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has
been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling,
reassessment of where America is heading .
William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succes-
sion of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-
one through the children of today . Their bold theory is that each generation
belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed
pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in
American history-a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises-from the
founding colonials through the present day and well into this millennium.
Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrifling intu-
itive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for
the twenty-first century.

"Thisis a bookthat explainsa lot:'

-WASHINGTON
POST

mightchangethe worldas muchas Darwin'sOriginof Species."

"Generations
-OAKLAND
TRIBUNE

HARPERePEREN . NIAL
www. ha rp e rp e r e n n i a I .c om

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byJudithKazdym
Leeds USA $18.99