With No Apologies to Tom Brokaw:

The Baby Boom and its Meaning in History

By Terry L. Shoptaugh

October 2010

Roland and Beth Dille Distinguished Faculty Lecture

With No Apologies to Tom Brokaw:

The Baby Boom and its Meaning in History

Terry L. Shoptaugh

August 2010

Abstract: This paper focuses on the ―baby boom generation‖ (those children born in the United

States between 1946 and 1964) as a case study of generation-identity. The paper reviews the origin of the “boom,” describes the impact it had on American society, reviews the controversies surrounding the “boomer generation,” and suggests how this group might be remembered by historians in the future.

With No Apologies to Tom Brokaw:

The Baby Boom and its Meaning in History

A few years ago, rock musician Ian Williams was asked if he created all his music to suit

the tastes of his principal audience, Generation X. He said, ―I don't like giving names to

generations. It's like trying to read the song title on a record that's spinning.‖ William‘s remark

has been widely repeated because it struck a chord with those who dislike the idea of labeling

people who are still alive. It‘s easy in 21st century America to mention this generation or that

generation and expect everyone to understand what you mean. But in real terms it is very, very

difficult to define a generation. Certainly parents have children who have children, and so on;

generations of a family thus exist. But people are born and die all the time. So beyond the scope

of a single family and its progeny, what exactly constitutes a generation? Historians routinely

write of the Founding Fathers or those who fought in the American Civil War or those who grew

up during the Great Depression. Many writers and speakers refer to these vast groups as

generations. Yet Benjamin Franklin was born more than fifty years before James Monroe, the

last president who was part of the American Revolution, Still, Monroe, like Franklin, is regarded

as a Founding Father. Similarly Dwight Eisenhower was almost thirty years older than my

father, one of the soldiers under Ike‘s command in Europe in 1944. Both are considered part of

the ―Greatest Generation‖ in books about World War II. Beyond one year in Europe however,

their lives and experiences were very different.1

So what exactly does a generation mean in American culture? What significance does it

have? It may help an understanding of these questions by noting that Ian Williams‘s answer was

in essence a marketer‘s reply, aimed toward assuring his listeners that his music was not intended

for just one specific audience but was accessible to everyone. It is very common in

contemporary American society for books, articles, motion pictures, web sites, blogs, and now

tweets to be employed as marketing tools, aiming their contents at a ―generation‖ of buyers who

will surely want to purchase something, indeed must buy something because it is part of ―your

generation.‖ We have for example Generation X, which one book tells us will ―save the world.‖

And on another hand we have the ―Greatest Generation,‖ so named because never again will

another group of Americans save the world as this one did. And of course we have the Baby

Boomers, which have been praised as an even greater generation than the greatest generation, but

at the same time has been condemned as being so ―selfish, shallow, greedy and egotistic‖ that it

has ruined the future for all who will come after it.2

In confronting these claims it is well to ask: who is selling what, who are they trying to

sell it to, and why? Pandering to buyers is a normal part of American culture. Baby Boomers,

for example, make up 78 million generally solvent and reliable consumers.3 Should it be a

surprise then that these thousands of books, magazines, web sites, blogs and tweets now exist to

cater to this enormous market? No. This is the richest, spending-est nation in the world. Few

salesmen in America would overlook the chance to sell something to the largest ―generation‖

market in American history.

But how significant, then, are generations to the study of the nation‘s past? And if so,

how are generations significant? What can an historian decide is common to all Baby Boomers,

what is significant about those common factors, and what can be inferred from these factors that

makes for a fair judgment? This is by no means easy to do. Recently, the retired telejournalist

Tom Brokaw tried to do it in his book Boom!: Talking about the Sixties. The book sold very

well and thus met the market test. But Brokaw was criticized for relying too much on the

memories of celebrities in his text and for unfairly comparing Baby Boomers to their parents, the

subject of his previous book, The Greatest Generation. Many readers thought that Boom was

rather shallow, that it lacked context on several subjects, like civil rights, the draft, the Chicago

convention of 1968, and the Great Society programs. Brokaw‘s method in creating the book

made such reviews almost inevitable, for he decided to hold a ―virtual reunion‖ (meaning filmed

interviews) with a ―cross-section of the Sixties crowd‖ (meaning people he knew well from his

days with NBC). Then by asking them questions like ―what seemed so important [in the sixties]

and seems foolish now‖ or ―who were the winners and who were the losers‖ in that era, he had,

with his own personal memories, a book. Faced with an era of much controversy and even

greater moral ambiguity, Brokaw‘s did not do much to clarify matters, which may explain why

he settled for a tepid statement that the sixties helped to create ―hardened ideological and

partisan positions‖ that still influence the nation.4

The criticism leveled at Brokaw carried a clear warning to those who would write about

the living – if you want praise from your audience, write nice things; if you don‘t, expect

difficulty. Many others have written about the Baby Boom, but virtually all have been lambasted

in one way or another for oversights and bias that readers have perceived in their conclusions.5

It is therefore imperative to note some of the most important parameters of the Baby

Boom. First, it is important to explain what the boom was. The boom was a sudden rise in

births rates. But, as we shall see, the identification of those born in the boom as making up ―a

generation‖ originated as a way to market goods and services for this mass of new customers.

Second, the birth explosion coincided with the fortunate economic situation that the

United States enjoyed from 1946 to the late 1960s. This in turn had an indelible impact on how

they became the target of marketing and how both prosperity and the generation ―tag‖

subsequently influenced the outlook of boomers. Closely tied to this marketing was the

burgeoning American media. All media, but especially television, relied heavily on presenting

information in compressed forms, using easily comprehended metaphors and ―tags‖ to tell a

story or make a point. It was therefore very easy for media outlets to seize on the ―boom‖ as a

quick way to refer to complex forces at work during the fifties and sixties. Boomers in turn were

entranced by television. Television informed their views of the world almost from infancy.

Television also encouraged boomers to act, almost instinctively, on the belief that ―things

happened‖ through dramatic actions, a view that had great influence on the events of the 1960s.

Finally, it is vital to remember that whatever else Baby Boomers are, they have

consistently reflected many of the most common values of American culture. As such, boomers

were and still are influenced by the idea of the American Dream. Future historians then will

find the boomers‘ place in America‘s history in what the boom was; in the economic setting in

which it occurred; in the impact of a highly developed media; and in the commonly held

American Dream of making life better than it was before.

The Baby Boom Defined

To the first question then -- what was the baby boom? It begins with the fact that

between 1946 to 1964 there was an enormous increase in the birth rate.6 Indeed, there were

marked increases in birth rates across the globe in the wake of World War II. The U.S., Canada,

Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Sweden, and Hungary had birth booms. By the mid-

1960s four out of every ten of the citizens in these nations were under the age of twenty. The

full reasons for this rise in birth rates are still being debated, but delayed marriages and

suppressed births due to economic depression and war certainly contributed, as did

improvements in nutrition and health care after the war ended. A lot of babies were born in a

comparatively short span of time and as a result the economics and cultures of the countries

involved in the boom were subjected to sudden and significant stresses.7

Let the Good Times Roll – Prosperity and the Boom

The baby boom happened during one of the grandest realizations of the American Dream

– that endless pursuit of a good life that is measured by what we do and how well we succeed.8

Thomas Jefferson wrote that all people had natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of

happiness. From the moment that European colonists arrived on these shores in search of ―free

land,‖ the pursuit of happiness in America has leaned heavily toward prosperity. World War II

ended with America as the most powerful and the richest nation on the planet. Unlike almost all

the other nations in the war the U.S. had almost no territorial damage at war‘s end. Americans

were making enormous profits from domestic business and international trade surpluses. Our

gross national product increased at a rate of four percent annually for eight years, then by almost

three percent for three more. There was no significant unemployment and family incomes rose

at an only slightly slower pace. In 1950 the average annual income for a family was just over

three thousand dollars, higher than that of any other nation. Prices remained relatively stable

throughout the ‗50s. And since the average family income rose more than sixty percent by 1959,

families had opportunities to spend and still save considerable amounts of money.9

Good times permitted the United States to absorb the stresses of the baby boom more

readily than any other nation. The boom itself ignited an economic need for new housing, new

schools, more clothes, more of just about everything. The columnist Sylvia Porter, who is

widely credited with first using the term ―boom‖ in this context, saw the prospects for money

making when, in 1951, she wrote in the New York Post that the nation had a ―bundle‖ of babies

―all over the bountiful land that is America.‖ This, she wrote, would fuel ―the biggest boomiest

boom ever known in history.‖ An expert on family finances, Porter predicted that the population

boom would feed economic growth for at least a decade.10

She was right. As historian James Patterson notes, the ―rise in births unleashed a dynamic

‗juvenile market,‘ especially for producers of toys, candy, gum, records, children‘s clothes,

washing machines, lawn and porch furniture, televisions, and all manner of household ‗labor-

saving‘ devices.‖ Diaper sales alone were adding $50 million a year to the economy.

Companies like Proctor and Gamble, Mattel and Levi Straus were rising to the status of

economic giants, while Johnson and Johnson likely sold enough ―no tears‖ shampoo to fill the

Devil‘s Lake basin. Economic health was mirrored by personal health. Most boom babies had

better medical care than their parents had in childhood; antibiotics developed after 1940 meant

that far fewer children in the fifties died of throat infections or other maladies that had killed

children in the 1920s. Personal nutrition for boom children was better as well.

A few personal memories underscore this point. In 1950, my father bought a house in

one of the first suburbs north of St. Louis. The monthly mortgage payment was $45. Dad was a

blue-collar worker, a printer. But he was skilled in offset work and was part of a good union,

and so was getting a middle-class income. Mom was already planning ways to pay off the

mortgage in twenty years instead of thirty. Within a few years the neighborhood was filled with

children. Growing up, we all watched as parents bought appliances, televisions, mixers and

stereos. Contrary to image of the stay-at-home mom, so celebrated in contemporary TV and

magazines, a good many mothers entered the job market, at least in part-time jobs. By 1956, in

fact, 51% of America‘s working women were married and most had children. As kids we

watched all this and quickly absorbed the lessons about product loyalty and the importance of

money.11

Yet, even in the midst of this plenty there were soft spots in the economy. The

percentage of Americans in poverty dropped steadily in the Fifties but it still exceeded twenty

percent at the end of the decade. While non-white minorities often suffered cruelly from poverty

-- Black Americans had an unemployment level double that of the national average -- the

majority of the poor were in fact white. Good times had not blessed everyone, a fact many

boomers remained ignorant about for some time.12

Education and the Television Generation

Beginning in 1951, all these children started pouring into public schools, in such numbers

that overall school enrollment went up at a rate of almost a million new students each year in the

fifties, and a two million jump for the 1959-1960 school year. This was twice the rate of the

nation‘s population growth. Additional resources for education were clearly needed, money for

new schools and more teachers. Thanks in part to the National Defense Education Act, and even

more to the willingness of millions of parents to pay taxes for schools they could only dream of

in the 1930s, spending per pupil more than doubled from 1950 to 1970, with some $21 billion

expended on construction alone. Even so, classrooms were crowded well into the 1960s,

especially in the explosively growing urban suburbs.13

A great deal remains to be studied about education in the 1950s. One area that has been

thoroughly researched is how American history was presented in textbooks. In those the story of

America was a success story in which the nation invariably solved every problem it confronted.

But even as it left students with a feeling that we too could solve any challenge, the story made

only limited mention of those men and women who had been systematically denied freedom and

opportunity. Perhaps just as bad, given what was going to happen in the sixties, the texts failed

to point out that large segments of society had opposed almost all of America‘s wars -- as much

as half of all the colonists were against independence from Great Britain, northern states had

opposed the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, and American entry into World War I was

afterward regarded by most of the nation as a grave mistake. Only World War II, which

Americans wanted nothing to do with before Pearl Harbor, was fought with near complete unity

and commitment. Since that war involved boomer parents, the contrast between their memories

of war and the historical reality was marked. This had an impact on the 1960s14

For the moment parents were satisfied with the education that boomers received. By the

late 1960s, three out of four students were graduating from high school, an increase of nearly 20

percentage points over the rate in 1950. And over half of these graduates went on to colleges.

Society at large saw in these numbers, ―[a further] sign that the American dream was alive and

well.‖ That feeling was soon dramatically challenged.15

But the greatest common memories of boomers probably were formed outside of school,

in the virtual world of the television set. Almost every boomer born before 1959 vividly

remembers the assassination of John Kennedy. It was the memory of the shocking event and a

testimonial to the power of television, which replayed it for us endlessly for weeks afterward.

Television may well constitute the greatest number of common memories among boomers. You

want to test a boomer‘s real sense of his or her youth? Ask them to sing the Oscar Mayer jingle.

Ask them which cigarette meant ‗fine tobacco.‘ Ask them if they liked Dick Van Dyke better

falling over the ottoman or dancing around it. Was it Cronkite of CBS or was it Huntley-

Brinkley on NBC? Having discovered the impact of on-the-spot coverage during the civil rights

marches, TV networks invested huge sums of money in smaller cameras, live coverage and

satellite feeds.. By 1965 we were seeing news as it happened.16

Television quickly blurred the lines between entertainment and reality. It gave an ever

growing population of viewers a widely shared popular culture, one that contained commonly

shared information, and perhaps as much misinformation. Entertainment programming could

guide a young viewer into thinking that in the real world everyone had plenty to eat, more than

enough comforts, and a family that solved every problem in an hour or less. We would lose

some of this reassurance as we came of age, but not all of it.17

Television mixed entertainment, news and advertising together in ever more creative

ways. American markets had for years been placing ads for toys, cereals and other children‘s

products into the commercial slots of children‘s shows. Then they began placing products within

the scenes of the shows themselves. The next step was inevitable: make the ads a drama staged

precisely for and about the children of the boom. In 1963, Alan Pottasch, one of advertising‘s

most reliable concept artists, put the finishing touches on a campaign he called the ―Pepsi

Generation.‖ Pottasch wanted to get PepsiCo ahead of its eternal rival, Coca-Cola, and he‘d

found his magic formula. ―Pepsi was young, spirited, people doing active things,‖ he later

explained, ―but younger we said, in mind, in attitude, in feeling. Young in spirit. Young in

heart.‖ These commercials encouraged boom children to see themselves as both unique and, in

some vague way, cohesive.18

The American Dream Confronts the Sixties

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote early in the 20th century that ―when

you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. ‖ For boomers 1964 was the beginning of

their own special abyss. Nineteen Sixty-Four was the last year of the Baby Boom and the last

year of economic complacency in the U.S.. For eighteen prosperous and largely peaceful years

(most boomers had no memory of Korea) the American Dream had looked to be an unstoppable

force. One American in every four was under eighteen now and the eighteen year olds were

entering college in record numbers.

It was at this moment, just at the time that Lyndon Johnson won his landslide election to

the presidency and just after the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, that some flies began dropping

into the nation‘s honey. American companies were facing growing competition from abroad.

German and Japanese industries, having finally recovered from World War II, were exporting

steel, electronics, and automobiles at record rates. The U.S. auto giants watched nervously as

more Volkswagens and Datsuns began to appear on American roads. Inflation, due in part to

increased defense spending as the Johnson administration expanded military aid to South

Vietnam, was beginning to climb, only a little at first but still steadily. President Johnson was

also nervous about pushing through Congress the full range of programs that constituted his

Great Society program. He had already predicted that parts of the program, the ones that made

up his War on Poverty, would not receive as much support from middle-class America as

previous Federal measures. Now he told Democratic Party insiders that his intentions to begin

bombing targets in North Vietnam would likely spark resistance in some parts of the nation.19

Vietnam became the catalyst for many of the social and political stresses that racked the

nation in the 1960s. The United States had been supporting the government of South Vietnam

since 1954, gradually increasing its aid against communist-backed insurgents that were supplied

by North Vietnam. The American involvement began in earnest in 1965 when American

bombers started attacking North Vietnamese targets and American ground troops entered South

Vietnam to commence a land campaign. The American public supported these efforts from the

first but Lyndon Johnson told his advisors that while public support was broad he doubted that it

was deep. Too many casualties, he suspected, would erode public support. He was right.

One of the several critical moments in the Cold War, Vietnam was fought by only a small

percentage of the young Americans available for military service. In all about three million

American soldiers served in Vietnam at one time or another. About seventy- five percent of

these soldiers were boomers. Two and half million men (mostly) is quite a large number, but

still no more than seven percent of the male boomers who were old enough to serve in Vietnam

during the peak years, 1965 to 1972. Most of these men were from working class families, those

unable to afford college and take advantage of the undergraduate student deferment that the

government allowed before 1971. Naturally, many soldiers and their families resented students

who had deferments.20

College students became a very vocal part of the anti-war movement over time. But at

the beginning, the earliest campus protests were organized by faculty and graduate students as

―teach-ins.‖ In 1965, teach-ins were conducted first at the Universities of Michigan and

Wisconsin and then spread from there. The public marches against the war began in 1966.

Television news coverage of these gave millions of Americans the impression that virtually all

college students were active in protesting against the war. This is not true however. Statistics

gathered from campuses and from police records show that at most ―only 20 percent of students

who attended college in the late 1960s participated in marches or protests [against the war], and

far fewer — 2 or 3 percent — regarded themselves as activists.‖ The college enrollment in 1965

was just less than four million students, while the highest college enrollment, in 1971, was about

8,500,000 students. As Joshua Zeitz, an historian who conducted research on the anti-war

movement for a special article in American Heritage noted, ―popular memory notwithstanding,

the sixties generation was never a political monolith. Nor was it uniformly engaged by public

issues.‖21

In addition, public opinion polls conducted throughout the war regularly showed that the

majority of boomers were ambivalent about Vietnam. Most told pollsters that they supported the

soldiers but feared that the American mission in Vietnam would not succeed. In the 1972

presidential election, only 12 percent of voters under the age of 25 went to the polls – and most

of them voted for Nixon. Studies of the anti-war movement further note that the unpopularity of

the war was strongest not among college students but among the working class citizens of all

ages as well as among Black Americans – in other words the backgrounds of draftees who did

most of the fighting. And, perhaps more surprising, there was a consistent negative response to

the war among large numbers Americans over the age of fifty-five.22

If other segments of society opposed the war even more strongly, why then did the

boomers become the image of the protests? Television, a key part of boomer childhood, played

a crucial role in highlighting the student role in protests. Vietnam was a windfall for a

competitive media. Cameras that had helped further the civil rights movement now taught many

protestors the importance of television in publicizing a cause. Richard Fernandez, a young

minister who began organizing local groups to oppose American involvement in Vietnam, made

it a major priority to attract TV news outlets. ―We were trying with other movement groups, all

the time to create this theater,‖ he later told an interviewer. ―We felt that our theater was finally

going to beat the [government] policy makers.‖23

And so public exposure gave birth to the image of the ―student radical.‖ If I may be

permitted another personal memory of the time, this one from 1967, when I heard a local radio

station interview a college professor who was on the faculty of (I think) Washington University.

He thought we had ‗no choice‘ but to fight a limited war in Vietnam, otherwise we‘d lose ground

in the Cold War. But then he also said he ‗understood‘ why many young men wouldn‘t want to

fight in such a muddled and thankless situation. His remarks were all very reasonable. But once

the listeners began calling, conservatives accused him of treason while liberals called him a shill

for the Johnson administration. I especially remember the caller who railed against the ―pro-red

hippies complaining on the TV.‖ In the mud-slinging, everyone ended up smeared while the

radio station reaped the benefits.

My own family didn‘t take much of a stand on Vietnam. My dad was a World War II

combat veteran, wounded in 1944, proud of his service. As far as he was concerned, if your

country called you had to go. But he was glad his sons probably wouldn‘t be called. In 1967,

my brother was in college with a student deferment and Dad wasn‘t about to suggest that he

enlist. Mom said as far as she was concerned if the government said the nation had to do this

then we had to accept their judgment. But she was uneasy, and just hoped that it would be over

before my brother graduated from college or before I was eighteen.24

The whole nation was uneasy by the end of 1967. The American troop commitment had

grown to half a million men by then, and American casualties, which had not reached 3000 at the

end of 1965, now stood at 80,000. A friend of my father, whose son had just been drafted, told

us that he had almost advised his boy to go to Canada. Like Dad, he was a veteran of World War

II, but he couldn‘t see how we could win. ―This is the Pacific all over again,‖ he said, ―they can

hide in the jungles and fight us this way for years. If we use the [atomic] bomb like in 1945,

we‘ll risk war with Russia or China. There‘s nothing out there worth that.‖ Polls showed that

the nation was adrift confusion -- most respondents still accepted the reasons for Vietnam, and

condemned the anti-war movement, but also worried that we had no real strategy for ―winning.‖

The word ―quagmire‖ began to appear in more and more news on the war.

Although the sixties are invariably equated with boomers, many sixties changes were

barely influenced by the young generation. This was most true in relation to the economy.

Money worries accompanied the war uncertainty. With war contracts and the space program, the

economy was growing nicely. Unemployment was almost nonexistent. But labor costs rose,

and many of the biggest companies were reporting declines in profit margin. Inflation was

hitting the pocketbooks of many families. With Johnson convinced that a Federal tax increase

would erode support for his policies even further, the government‘s deficit grew as well.

America was losing much of the exuberance it had enjoyed in the 1950s.25

The Tet offensive in January 1968 tipped the nation from uncertainty to anger. Watching

the American embassy under siege on TV news, they decided that the assurances given by the

White House that ―we were winning‖ were deliberately misleading. They needed someone to

blame and found their scapegoats in two diametrically opposed forces, the White House and the

anti-war protestors. Johnson‘s approval ratings as president plummeted to 26 percent. After an

embarrassing showing in the New Hampshire primary he withdrew from his re-election bid. As

for the protestors, the average American still opposed them as disruptive and basically disloyal,

so much so that after television coverage of the Democratic Party convention in Chicago focused

on the street violence between protestors and the city‘s police, four out of ten people polled who

favored the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam also thought that the Chicago police

used ―insufficient force‖ on anti-war activists. Even among other boomers, protestors had

become ―the most despised political group in the country.‖26

Boomers Divided

Vietnam continued for five more years after 1968. It also continued to divide the nation.

The media made much out of a ―generation gap‖ that developed between the boomers and their

parents. The schism was complex and rested in the different experiences and outlooks of the two

generations. Boomers‘ parents had grown up during the Great Depression, a time of privation

and despair. World War II changed that, bringing not only economic recovery but also unity in

victory. As a result the Depression generation thought of wartime as a time of unity.27 To a great

many of them, the sixties was baffling – too many sudden changes in race relations, economic

stability and foreign policy. The war question was a torrent that divided the country and

threatened the economic prosperity that they had enjoyed since 1945, This frightened older

Americans greatly. Would the hard times of the 1930s return?

Their apprehension increased as they watched their children coming of age. ―Young

people,‖ one writer of the sixties noted, ―become conspicuous during times of rapid population

growth.‖ Indeed they do, conspicuous and active, and often disturbing as status quos frequently

must give way. Historically, periods of social stress are accompanied by tensions between the

young and their elders. This had happened in the American colonies in the late 1600s, once birth

rates outpaced death rates. It did so again during the Revolution and independence from Great

British rule: most Founding Fathers were young men compared to the leaders of the colonial

governments. And it happened again in the 1920s as many second and third-generation

immigrant children turned away from their ancestors‘ Old World cultures. In the sixties, inter-

generational tensions occurred in the U.S., France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, and other nations

that had experienced their own baby booms.28

But the gap in the sixties went further than that between parents and their offspring.

Boomers themselves disagreed over key questions about America‘s character and how to

preserve and extend the American Dream. These differences became evident in 1964, when

Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party‘s ―Mr. Conservative,‖ ran for president. He lost

that election by an enormous margin, but he had planted the seeds of a conservative resurgence.

Ronald Reagan and many others would follow in Goldwater‘s footsteps. And, as war protestors

alienated voters who had routinely given their votes to Democratic Party candidates,

disagreements over the issues of civil rights, government regulation of society and church-state

relations were added to the foreign policy debates. During the sixties many boomers joined the

conservative revival. One boomer who signed on was Karl Rove, who was interviewed by

Brokaw for his book Boom. Rove, a high school junior in 1968, made a pilgrimage that year

from a moderate conservative to an admirer of Goldwater and George Wallace. Rove told

Brokaw that he committed to the hard line Republican ideas because he wanted to preserve the

―consistency of the belief that there is such a thing‖ as the American Dream. He believed that

irresponsible boomers threatened the dream by promoting ―materialism and self-fulfillment‖ and

practicing a philosophy in which ―if you‘ve got a problem, blame somebody else.‖ Rove then

climbed steadily in the ranks of social conservatives by tarring boomers for excessive liberal and

elitist values.29

Many conservatives born in the boom years joined in the criticism of ―spoiled boomers.‖

Charging that too many had been ―pampered‖ in the fifties, had been given too much, and had

led too easy a life, they led a counter-revolution against all they hated about the sixties. As

Leonard Steinhorn summarized it in his study, ―youth protestors‖ were tagged as ―spoiled and

ungrateful kids,‖ forever immature, forever self-centered. ―The Me Decade caricature of the

Seventies and the Yuppie stereotype of the Eighties fit perfectly into this storyline,‖ Steinhorn

concluded. Critics of boomers went to the well of the sixties again and again. Yet even while

this occurred, boomers as adults voted in very large numbers for Ronald Reagan and both of the

presidents Bush30

The political and social consensus of the fifties, never as strong as the popular media

made it seem, had disintegrated. The Democratic Party‘s long-term dominance in politics was

over by the late 1970s. Boomers who joined the liberal movements for social justice were

dismayed by this. Todd Gitlin, a major figure in the SDS during the sixties, has argued in

articles and books that the best legacy of the Baby Boom are the advances in social justice that

he and others have encouraged since the sixties. He sees himself and his allies as ―a generation

that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on [and] relinquished any title to patriotism without much

sense of loss.‖ As for his critics, Gitlin responds that they ―should ask themselves whether the

world‘s managers, left to their own devices, can be trusted to cease torturing and invading

peoples who are inconvenient, cease driving peasants off their lands and into starvation, keep

rainforests and battered species alive; and sustain the planet Earth and preserve us from

industrial poisoning.‖ Carl Pope, a former civil rights activist and SDS member, was more

wistful, telling Brokaw in an interview that while he and many others broke with their parents

―with breathless hubris‖ in the sixties, this sometimes created ―very consequential lapses in

judgment.‖31

The Roves, the Popes and Gitlins, make up the field forces of boomers who still man the

trenches to re-fight the sixties. Most boomers (including Rove) did not serve in Vietnam and

most were not anti-war activists, and in their later years many declined to join the fray over

which values matter most. A study in 1993 found that about 46 percent of boomers saw

themselves then as Democrats (with about a third of them being ―strong Democrats‖) and

another 42 percent of boomers identified themselves as Republicans (with about two of each five

saying they were ―strong Republicans‖). Eleven percent said they were independent. The year

1993 was when the oldest boomers were just about the same age as their parents were in the mid-

1960s. Subsequent studies confirmed that those born in the boom years are close to evenly split

between the two major political parties, but that most are moderate on most issues. As a result

the outcomes of elections usually rest on which party succeeds best in bringing out voters.32

Does this division mean that, as Brokaw put it, the ―lively and passionate and

unresolved‖ debates of the sixties drive the boomers politically?33 Are the sixties really a tin can

tied to the tail of every man and woman born in America between 1946 and 1964? Are those

years the sum total of boomer lives? If the sixties become the base for how historians finally

judge the entire population of the Baby Boom, then it may be an example of what the French

philosopher Voltaire meant when he wrote that ―historians are gossips who tease the dead.‖34

In the 1970s and 1980s, boomers put their education to great advantage, first as

workforce for the retooling of the American economy in a more competitive world market, and

then by using technical skills to revolutionize all aspects of the economy with the technology of

the personal computer. By the late 1980s, boomers were becoming the heart of American

business management. This included not just men in high management positions, as in the past,

but also growing numbers of women. It is interesting to note in this context that while the status

of women has grown significantly on the boomers‘ watch, many women raised in the boom

opposed the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. American women also exerted a

continuing influence on women‘s rights worldwide. Historians in the future will want to avoid

the polemics so frequently used today when discussing these matters and examine all of this with

unclouded eyes.35

Equating everyone born in the 1946-64 boom as nothing more than a member of a

stereotype is as exaggerated as it is misleading. Search the web, the contents of which can so

easily be replicated on new sites, and you will find endless claims that boomers are ―all alike,‖

because they are self-centered, materialistic, unpatriotic, ultra-liberal, intrusive, racist, ultra-

conservative, ignorant, snobbish, over-educated, arrogant, selfish, egotistic, intolerant, atheistic,

and know-it-alls who treat everyone else as inferiors and traitors to boot. The web offers a

witches brew of boomer bashing. Pick out your favorite boomer target and bash away: George

W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Oprah Winfrey, Ann Coulter, Al Gore,

Henry Louis Gates, Karl Rove, Ted Nugent, Al Sharpton, Dan Quayle, Jon Stewart, Michelle

Bachman, Bill Richardson, Ed Schultz, Glenn Beck and Keith Obermann – one or another can

represent all that you hate about ―this generation.‖ A host of social commentators, including

many just listed, can find in the sixties a gold mine that never stops paying – denounce the

sixties, announce ―a problem,‖ advocate a specific agenda and assign blame. This approach can

hardly summarize over 70 million lives with accuracy.36

In recent years a new version of generational sniping has emerged. This time the

generation gap is said to exist between boomers and their own children. Slap-dash wire stories

tell of boomer parents feeling their children to be lazy, undirected, indifferent and unworthy of

their parents‘ prior achievements. Kids returned the favor by saying they hate the ―tendency [of

boomer parents] to exaggerate the level of political ‗commitment‘ among young people during

the legendary 1960s.‖ One jibe bluntly condemned boomers for having ―****ed up the entire

planet!. Hope they had fun. Oh, by the way, thanks for the Debt, AIDS, Ozone Hole and lack

of jobs out there. [signed] Generation X.‖

Quick reporting of inter-generational invective requires almost no training or skills. But

when skills are actually applied, a different picture emerges. A 2009 study by the Pew Research

Institute concluded that while different outlooks exist between boomers and their children, ―the

generations appear to have found a way to disagree without being disagreeable.‖ Moreover the

two generations tend to agree on many things not connected to politics or economic policies – on

music, styles, entertainments and human rights. In other words they hold similar ideas about the

American Dream. Even so, tagging groups of Americans as ‗generations‘ has proven more

divisive than unifying within our society. This is markedly notable when comparisons are drawn

between generations – this one is more patriotic, that one harder working, etc. 37

Tom Brokaw began his book by conducting what he called a ―virtual reunion‖ of

boomers that could tell him about the sixties. Anyone who cares to can now browse dozens of

web sites about real reunions posted by high schools and colleges. On these sites graduates

frequently post memories. Browse sites of the sixties and early seventies and what you find are

only occasional references to Vietnam or the other usual media taglines for that era. Most often

the remarks start with happy memories of school, of friends and teachers. Then the remarks

proceed to descriptions of the writers‘ lives since – their successes, their children and

grandchildren, all the things they hope to do during the rest of their years. Those who do say

something in acknowledgement of the divisiveness of the 1960s, usually do so in a way that says

it was long ago and less important for them now. These types of remarks combined with polls

commissioned by a variety of agencies find that, as a group, boomers tend to share an optimistic

outlook, not only of their own lives but about the nation‘s future. Optimistic but also skeptical

and suspicious of those who can misuse power, a natural result of decades of witnessing

corporate and government scandals -- everything from Watergate to Vioxx to Enron. Both the

optimism and skepticism are wrapped tightly in the American Dream, which brings us full circle

back to where this essay began.38

Boomers as a group sought out the dream for a good life during the sixties. They

continued to do so thereafter. Just as their parents had, and just as their children now. Boomers,

it seems, have largely found the good life. A study by the Congressional Budget Office in 2003

concluded that boomers on the whole attained higher incomes than their parents and, contrary to

popular belief about the Great Depression generation, boomers as an aggregate have amassed

even higher savings. But there are large disparities. The wealthiest boomers have an average net

worth of nearly $800,000, while the poorest barely reach $2000. There was also the matter of

debt loads which the study found to be ―significantly high‖ among the lower half of boomer

incomes. As Pascal warned: ―It is not good to have everything one wants.‖39

Now, as the traditional years of retirement quickly approach, boomers face the challenge

of holding on to their dream. Since the downturn of late 2008, many economists have expressed

worry that the nation‘s sluggish finances and high debt load could be worsened if the majority of

boomers were to retire quickly and strain both the Social Security and Medicare systems.

Boomers enjoy good health and could live much longer than their parents.40 Meanwhile, even as

many employers offer early retirement incentives in order to trim their payrolls, other studies

warn that a wholesale loss of baby boom employees will result in major gaps in America‘s

professional and skilled work force, in jobs ranging from health care to construction workers and

from public school teachers to boilermakers. Nay-sayers, soothsayers and everyone else with

access to a microphone have already begun to weigh in to debate these questions. Like as not the

solutions found to this complex brainteaser will become another large piece of the boomer code

for future historians to decipher.41

Conclusion

No one can dispute that the American baby boomers exist as a birth cohort. Their large

numbers poised both opportunities and challenges for the nation, and not just during the years

when they passed from infancy to adulthood. As a market, they enabled advertising agencies to

redefine how best to sell products. As a force in the economy, they played a major role in

rebuilding American productivity after its post-World War II industrial dominance came to an

end. Since then, they have contributed greatly to the nation‘s continued prosperity, But they

must also accept responsibility for the nation‘s growing indebtedness.

As a generation of shared experiences and values, the boomer record is less clear. As

noted, while about 2.5 million boomers, mostly men who were born between 1946 and 1955,

fought in the Vietnam conflict, and perhaps another four million actively protested against that

war, another 30 million boomers took little stand on the issue, whatever their private views may

have been. Noncombatants in the sixties, most have since refused to choose between rigid

extremes in the culture wars that are constantly aired in the media. Since the 1960s, boomers

have been more diverse than united on almost every public debate.

Collectively, boomers tend to express optimism about the future. While they certainly

would not be able to agree collectively on the meaning of the American Dream, there is little

doubt that they have enjoyed living their varied versions of it. Across the span of their adult

years, boomers have on the whole supported expansions of social and political tolerance,

although some well-known individuals have made their mark with astonishingly vile expressions

of racism and sexism. Boomer children in recent years have indicated that as a group they will

support even further extensions of tolerance. If so, then the American Dream will continue to be

redefined.

Less to boomers‘ credit are their endless love affairs with competition, entertainment and

celebrity. Media forces have transformed much of the ordinary elements of life into staged

entertainment, and with the continued growth of reality television, any form of deception seems

acceptable in pursuit of fame. The seeming willingness of thousands to do anything, however

ridiculous, to attain celebrity runs rampant. Five decades ago, historian Daniel Boorstin

bemoaned American attractions for a ―world where fantasy is more real than reality.‖ Today,

lives are lived on 24 hour web cameras and lies are rehearsed for the sake of a moment on TV.

The seeds of this were planted in the American drive for success and attention. A future

historian could easily conclude that the ―boom‖ itself was no more than another plot concocted

for ratings, with the boomers acting as simultaneous performers and audience.42

There are literally thousands of variations and exceptions to these trends of course, as

befits such an enormous group of people. The quick and slick summaries offered by Tom

Brokaw and the many pundits notwithstanding, the lives of 78 million people cannot be

explained in a one-size-fits-all package. We need to look much closer at ordinary boomers‘ lives

since the sixties.43

Historians in the future will have a challenge in assessing the real meaning and

significance of ―boomers‖ as a force in society. Some will no doubt settle for reviewing the

debates and conclude that it represented a society undergoing transition or fragmentation. Some

will confront the mass of issues and decide that rather than choose from the answers offered by

contemporaries, they should change the questions. In so doing they will see, after our time has

come and gone, important connections that we cannot see in the middle of our time. As Ian

Williams noted, you cannot understand the whole record until it stops, and the boomers‘ record

is still playing .

NOTES

1 The subject of generations as major determinants in the shaping of America‘s past has become prevalent in popular literature. Two authors, William Strauss, trained in the law and a playwright, and Neil Howe, an economist and historian, have authored a series of books that claim all American history can be explained as a ―recurrent cycle of generations‖ that fall into four specific ―archetypes.‖ See their first book, Generations: The History of America's

Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991). Most scholars are skeptical about their argument.

2 For each of the aforementioned generations, see Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World (New York: Viking Press, 2008); Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998); ); Leonard Steinhorn, The

Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy (New York : Thomas Dunne Books, 2006).

3 The term ‗boomer‘ would not be coined until sometime in the early 1970s, but is used throughout the article for convenience.

4 Susan Borghei, review of Boom in History Teacher, volume 42, February 2009, pp. 239-40; Charles Kaiser review in Washington Post November 25, 2007. Brokaw, Boom, pp. xvi-xx1 (explaining his virtual reunion method), and P. 566 (on hardened positions). Over 100 general reader reviews of Brokaw‘s book can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Boom-Talking-SixtiesHappenedTomorrow/productreviews. For Brokaw‘s follow-up television documentary, ―Tom Brokaw Reports: Boomers,‖ see David Hinckley‘s column, ―Talkin' 'bout an Entire Generation,‖ New York Daily News, March 4, 2010.

5 See for example Landon Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980); Steinhorn‘s The Greater Generation; Steven M. Gillon, Boomer Nation: The Largest

and Richest Generation Ever and How it Changed America (New York: Free Press, 2004). Tom Shachtman, Decade of Shocks: Dallas to Watergate, 1963-1974 (New York: Poseidon Press, 1983). Jones‘s book is a well written narrative of the youth and early adult years of boomers, but he was criticized by anti-war figures for his paucity of first-hand interview material about their efforts. Schachtman‘s book was attacked for its unabashed

liberalism. Gillon‘s book I follows the fortunes of an handful of boomers and lacks substantial context. Steinhorn‘s

book is discussed further in another part of this article.

6 It is not a coincidence for the growth of ―generational consciousness‖ that an essay by German sociologist Karl

Mannheim – ―The Problems of Generations‖ – was translated into English during the boom and published in his collected works in 1952. This essay had great influence on how scholars and popular writers came to perceive the boom and the ―boomers‖ as they grew to adulthood. A full examination of this would require a separate essay, but a

good starting point is Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education

(Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).

7 Richard A. Easterlin, The American Baby Boom in Historical Perspective, (New York, National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper 79, 1962) explains the world-wide boom and shows how an increase in fertility does not define a generation. Russia and much of eastern Europe had actual declines in population after World War II, a consequence of the enormous loss of life among young males during the conflict. Poland had a ―mini-boom‖ but few of nations in the ―Soviet bloc‖ saw significant birth rate increases until the mid-1950s.

8 It is significant to the boomer experience that the first known use of the term American Dream was in the 1931 book The Epic of America by James Truslow Adams, just when the boomers‘ parents were struggling in the Great Depression. Adams wrote that they ―dream[ed] of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for

everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.‖ Adams quoted in the Library of Congress essay, ―What is the American Dream,‖ (http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/97/dream/thedream.html).

9 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 311-13; Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (2000) – Urging that we ―not reduce postwar gender and family history to decade- long increments,‖ Weiss makes a

compelling case that the ‗50s was very different from the nostalgic image often seen more popular books. To help place past income and prices in current perspective, it helps to know that the purchasing power of $100 in 1950 is roughly the same as about $950 today.

10 Porter‘s article, ―Babies Equal Boom,‖ is in the New York Post, May 4, 1951. For Porter‘s economic credentials

see her listing in Current Biography, 1941 edition, pp. 679-81. Although dated, David Potter‘s People of Plenty:

Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954) remains a classic for understanding how postwar comforts influenced Americans.

11 Patterson, p. 79; Weiss, pp. 49-81. See as well Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic

History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 paper edition), pp. 159-184.

12 Patterson, p. 64; Schachtman, p. 68. Frank Levy, The Changing American Income Distribution (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987) presents very useful census data for tracking economic change.

13 Jeff Goldsmith, The Long Boom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 11, points out that as of 2008, ―about 45 percent of all existing public schools were built between 1950 and 1969.‖ For general overviews of education after World War II, see Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in

American Education, 1876–1957. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1961) and Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools:

Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

14 For detailed looks at Cold War era texts, see Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the

Twentieth Century (New York: Little Brown & Co, 1979), and Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over

American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

15 Patterson, p. 70. See also Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Child-rearing in America

(New York: New York University Press, 2003) for a full discussion of the quality debate in education during the fifties and sixties.

16 Both Mary Ann Watson, The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 155-69, and David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York, Villard, 1993), pp. 188-94, provide insight into the impact of television. .Jacqueline Scott and Howard Schuman, ―Generations and Collective

Memories,‖ American Sociological Review, v. 54, n.3 (1989), pp. 359-81, has a fascinating examination of the impact of common memories on generations.

17 Neal Gabler, Life, The Movie (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998), and Gerard Jones, Honey, I'm Home!: Sitcoms,

Selling the American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1992) are excellent on the power of television.

18 Pottasch‘s remarks are quoted in his obituary, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 2, 2007. See also Sergio Zyman, The End

of Marketing as We Know It (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 56, 88-89. As former head of marketing for Coca Cola, Zyman‘s admiration for Pepsi‘s early grab for the boomer market is particularly interesting. Boomer

parents had been targeted as customers by radio and comic books in the 1930s, but the idea of referring to children as a ―generation‖ of specific customers was an innovation of the 1950s-early 1960s.

19 In addition to Patterson‘s detailed work, Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) is very good on the inter-connected economic and social problems of the 1960s and how these served to bring about the collapse of the national consensus that had dominated the 1950s.

20 David Mark Mantell‘s sociological study, True Americanism: Green Berets and War Resisters (New York: Columbia Teachers College Press, 1977) compares samples of those who fought to those who protested. The most interesting of Mantell‘s finding is that both groups sincerely believed they served the best interests of the nation.

21 Joshua Zeitz, ―Boomer Century,‖ American Heritage, October 2005, p. 39. Census figures show that some 38 million boomers were born by the end of 1955 (when some would be eighteen in 1973, the last year some combat soldiers were in Vietnam). This group, born from 1946 to 1955 is termed the ―leading edge boomers‖ by some

demographers (and excoriated by some conservatives as the ―spoiled boomers‖ who cheapened American values). Note that men and women were involved in protests in far more equal numbers than the American troops fighting in Vietnam. Up to a million young men lived in Canada during the Vietnam conflict to avoid the draft; most presumably were boomers, but the actual figures and demographics in not known.

22 Wells, pp. 9-75, is particularly good on the backgrounds of the anti-war leadership. See also Jones, pp. 96-103, 286-87. The one exception to the 20 percent limit on protests among college students was in the weeks following the killing of four students at Kent State University in May 1970. Then, over four million students on over 1300 campuses signed protests (against the actions of the Ohio National Guard, not the war per se).

23 Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 1994 paper edition), p. 74.

24 More than forty years later, the question of student deferments is still being debated. See for example, M. J. Rosenberg, ―The Blumenthal Case: Me, I'm Just Glad I Didn't Serve In Vietnam,‖ with 40 comments, posted May 20, 2010, on Huffington Post website -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/the-blumenthal-case-me-im_b_583220.html.

25 Patterson, 595-600; Matusow , pp. 175-76;

26 Patterson, pp. 678-85; Landon Jones, pp. 96-98; Wells, pp. 283-84 (quoted). David Farber‘s Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) is the best available study of the 1968 Democratic convention.

27 Unity in World War II was hardly perfect, as John M. Blum showed in his study V Was for Victory (New York: Haughton Mifflin, 1976).

28 Landon Jones has some perceptive remarks on the sixties generation differences, p. 99. See also Weiss, pp. 177-22, for intensive examination of how changes in the sixties altered the boundaries of marriage among Depression-era couples. Note as well that in 2008, the children of the ―echo boom,‖ sometimes called the ―millennials,‖ those born

after 1980, voted in record numbers to help elect the first African-American president of the United States. For some idea of what the echo boom portends, see Paul Abrams, ―Obama‘s Millennials – 83 Million Strong,‖ post on

the Huffington Post web site, June 30, 2008 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/obamas-millenials--83-mil_b_110065.html).

29 Jon Margolis, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 (New York: Morrow, 1999) is excellent for describing the importance of Goldwater‘s campaign to the conservative revival. Rove‘s remarks (in Boom, pp. 369-76) contain several internal contradictions that Tom Brokaw does not examine. Rove‘s recent autobiography, Courage and

Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight (New York: Simon and Schuster, Threshold Editions, 2010) is detailed on his commitments to conservatism, but murky on his own life and motivations. See a very good letter by Karen J. Winkler, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 1988, calling for further research on the the rise of the conservative movement during the 1960s.

30 Steinhorn, pp. 52-55. Steinhorn, a fervent champion of boomers, devotes much of his book to refuting charges that boomers are lazy, selfish, unpatriotic, etc.

31 Todd Giltin, “Varieties of Patriotic Experience,‖ in George Packer, ed. The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the

War of Ideas in America and the World (New York: Perennial, 2003); The Sixties: Years of Hope Days of Rage

(New York: Bantam Books, revised paper edition, 1993), p. 489. See also Carl Pope‘s remarks in Brokaw, Boom, pp. 409-17. Gitlin, born in 1943, is technically not a boomer but has identified with them throughout his career as a sociologist and activist, arguing in his books that the best of the generation are those of the ―New Left.‖

32 For the 1993 political affiliation after subsequent voting patterns, see the tables in Jack Dennis and Diana Owen, ―The Partisanship Puzzle,‖ in Craig and Bennett, eds., After the Boom (London: Rowman and Littlefield Pub., 1997), p. 46-47.

33 Brokaw, Boom, p. xvi. A full and careful look at all the remarks quoted in Brokaw‘s book reflect something that

the British historian A.J.P. Taylor once (venomously) said about reminiscences and oral history – ―old men drooling about their youth.‖ This is not to say that these memories were worthless; technology has made oral history very

valuable for gleaning information from those whose experiences would otherwise be lost to historians. But when interviewing public figures like Rove, Brokaw should have showed more awareness about the way in which the past can be re-forged as a tool for current needs. Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York, Pantheon, 2008) has a particularly good chapter on this -- ―Blaming It on the Sixties.‖

34 There is hope however, that the simplest interpretation will not prevail. In Birth Quake: The Baby Boom and Its

Aftershocks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), economic historian Diane J. Macunovich, offers another interpretation for the sixties, namely that the events of the decade were the beginning of a multi-decade change in life-styles as ―masses of young people tried to achieve the standard of living to which they had become accustomed in their parents‘ homes despite dramatic reductions [due to technology, inflation, energy costs and world market

challenges] in their earning potential relative to that of their parents.‖ Filled with detailed economic data,

Macunovich presents a thought-provoking thesis that multiple factors make the sixties part of a long-term change that is still occurring in many nations.

35 James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) is excellent on the rebuilding of America‘s economy in the post-sixties. Michele A. Paludi,‘s

three volume compilation, Feminism and Women's Rights Worldwide (New York: Praeger Press, 2009) has an excellent summary of American influence on women internationally. Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold, is illuminating about the influence of ―50‘s housewives‖ on the feminist movement and notes how the credit due to the mothers of boomers for the growing advancement of women in business and public life is often overlooked.

36 The literature on the ‗culture wars‖ (and even if it really exists) is extensive. The following provide a good

introduction: Wayne E. Baker, America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) James David Hunter, Culture Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Alan Wolfe, One

Nation, After All (New York: Viking, 1998), and Jacoby‘s work, cited above.

37 The Generation X in Cincinnati is quoted in Craig and Bennett, eds., After the Boom, p. 1. See as well Gordinier, pp. 140-142; Diana Owen, ―Mixed Signals: Generation X‘s Attitudes Toward the Political System,‖ in Craig and

Bennett, eds. The quote on ―disagreeing without being disagreeable‖ is from Pew Research Center, ―Forty Years

After Woodstock: A Gentler Generation Gap.‖ (Social and Demographic Trends Report, Center, August 12, 2009).

38 Alongside optimism, several writers, including Brokaw and Steinhorn, assert that boomers have a strong ―suspicion of authority.‖ While boomers have the highest percentage of college graduates among all birth cohorts,

more solid research is needed on the influence of education levels, skepticism, suspicion of authority and acceptance of facts among Americans of all ages. For a start see Jacoby‘s book, cited above, Cass R. Sunstein, Going to

Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Michael Specter, Denialism (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), and D. R. Wolfensberger, Congress and the People: Deliberative

Democracy on Trial (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

39 Even in the television documentary that Brokaw hosted several of the people he interviewed explicitly stated that the sixties were more about being young and ―having fun‖ than about the controversies connected to Vietnam. For

boomer optimism, see Steinhorn, pp. 145-47, and Goldsmith, The Long Boom, p. 22-24.

40 Current research in health and obesity suggest that boomers could have longer life spans than many of their children. See J. M. Lee, et. al. ―Getting Heavier, Younger: Trajectories of Obesity Over the Life Course,‖

International Journal of Obesity, 34: pp. 614-623.

41 Goldsmith, pp. 50-63; ―Skilled Workers needed to Replace Baby Boomers,‖ AP Press Release, January 23, 2010; Sharon DeVaney and Sophia Chiremba, ―Comparing the Retirement Savings of the Baby Boomers and Other Cohorts,‖ (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005) at http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/print/cm20050114ar01p1.htm. These and many other publications laud boomers as ―hard-working‖ and ―very productive.‖ These types of labels

are used so readily, however, that more hard, measurable data needs to be compiled for accurate comparisons.

42 Classic introductions to the cult of celebrity and ‗life as entertainment‘ in American culture include Gabler‘s

book, cited above, Daniel Boorstin, The Image (New York: Atheneum, 1962), and Richard Schikel, Intimate

Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (New York: Ivan R Dee, 1985). Jake Halpern, Fame Junkies: The Hidden

Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction (New York: Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, 2006) brings the subject up to date. As just one example of the pursuit of celebrity in current American culture, the intricately interlinked web sites of iwannbeon.com conducts research on the effect of celebrity hunger and at the same time offers individuals ―our unique ‗Personality Packaging‘ practices to help all people and businesses integrate some ‗celebrity‘ factors

into their ordinary routines.‖ (http://www.iwannabeon.com/i-wanna-be-on/about.html).

43 In recent years, with the advent of self-publication and easy to use sound and video recording technology, historians have been able to gather enormous amounts of first-hand information about civil rights participants, war veterans, women‘s rights activists and other groups. It would be fairly straightforward to gather similar information

from boomers about their lives; the tricky part would be to organize and preserve properly the materials gathered.

Terry Shoptaugh is the University Archivist at Minnesota State University

Moorhead. He also teaches classes in history and humanities. He is the author of

several published articles on aspects of the history of Minnesota and North Dakota,

and has published four books, including Moorhead: Images of America and They

Were Ready: The 164th

Infantry in the Pacific War. His book, You Have Been

Kind Enough to Assist Me: Herman Stern and the German-Jewish Crisis was a

finalist for the 2009 Minnesota Book Award in non-fiction.

Roland and Beth Dille Distinguished Faculty Lecture