The Outstater
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.” — Chinese proverb
I am writing this at the approach of the season for high-school reunions. The thought occurs: Could there be one class year that holds the key to unlocking our current travail?
My vote is the class of 1963, those born at the tail end of World War II, one that has little in common with the others that will gather this fall to relive old times. It is said only half-jokiningly that its members are the last survivors of an alien civilization.
This is not exceptionalism, it is cohort analysis. These octogenarians carry a dire warning for society at large, one which I will sound in a minute. For now, though, the experience is captured romantically in Larry McMurtry’s classic “The Last Picture Show” or even George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” — cultural markers that flew by in a blink.
First, the demographics. Those born in 1945, the last year of the so-call Silent Generation, are demonstrably different from those born even a year later — more so than the difference between those born, say, in 1950 and those born in 1955.
There are obvious reasons. They belong to the first generation of Americans smaller than the previous one, and they were markedly fewer than those born even a year later. Births jumped from about 2.9 million in 1945 to 3.4 million in 1946 (a historic 20 percent increase) and then to 3.8 million in 1947, remaining elevated for nearly two decades afterward.
And it is not just the numbers. They were born into wartime conditions (rationing, national uncertainty, paternal absence). They had classmates being raised by single mothers, their fathers killed in combat. It seemed that every neighborhood had an elderly couple left childless by the war.
Today, intra-generational heterogeneity is widely acknowledged (Millennials, Generation Z, etc.). But the more stark contrast between the 1945 Silents and the 1946 Boomers is not. My assistant Grok has gathered key distinctions:
- Life experiences differed drastically in the timing and degree of internalization to civil rights, the counterculture and early feminism.
- This more often than other generations had older parental models, mothers and fathers who had delayed childbearing due to Depression and war.
- The most profound change perhaps was the sexual revolution, and how widely available birth control affected how young women chose a mate.
- The timing of education and labor-force entry also differed. They didn’t begin to learn to read until first grade compared with pre-school today. It wasn’t uncommon for them to hold down an adult-level jobs as early as age 14.
- Marriage/divorce patterns and health/mortality trends, good and bad, showed a sharp break after 1945.
All of this may explain something else — something we dare not dismiss as old-fogeyism: It is that those in the class of 1963 may have been the last to hold their elders in respect. Well, a least they didn’t outright mock them (let us count the SNL skits as testimony to the reverse).
This is the characteristic that I find most troubling: Subsequent generations do not take seriously much of what happened before they were born. That includes the cruel lessons of Communism and Islam, the heroism of the American frontier, the dynamics of the Christian nuclear family, complementary roles for the two sexes, the global context of slavery, the enrichment of reading a book, the economics (private property and equal opportunity) of Western Civilization, the moral complexity of the Civil War and much more.
Sadly, the only history that seems to stick is that which denigrates other generations, including and especially the founding one (Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, never forget). The irony, though, is that aging Boomers cannot now claim to be surprised that they themselves are reviled, in their case for being “privileged.”
I hope I am wrong about all of this, my perspective distorted by the pessimism of age. But if not, it bodes ill for escaping the situation in which we find ourselves. Amnesia makes for poor policy. — tcl
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