Boomers -- ca. 1950 at the married student
housing site on the Moorhead State campus.

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 21^st 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 that 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 1960s[14]

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 20^th 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 Bush[30]

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.  ASee search results for this author Are you an author? Learn about Author Central s Ian Williams noted, you cannot understand the whole record until it stops, and the boomers’ record is still playing .

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