[theluckycountry]

Copyright © 1991 by William Strauss & Neil Howe
Printed in the United States of America

Preface

In a recent survey, new college graduates listed history as the academic subject whose lessons they found of least use in their daily affairs. In part, this reflects the show-me pragmatism of today’s rising generation. Yet as America embarks on the 1990s, people of all ages feel a disconnection with history. Many have difficulty placing their own thoughts and actions, even their own lives, in any larger story. As commonly remembered, history is all about Presidents and wars, depressions and scandals, patternless deeds done by people with power far beyond what the typical reader can ever hope to wield. If history seems of little personal relevance today, then what we do today seems of equal irrelevance to our own lives (and the lives of others) tomorrow. Without a sense of trajectory, the future becomes almost random. So why not live for today? What’s to lose?

During the 1970s and 1980s, this today fixation has rumbled throughout American society, top to bottom. Our Presidents and Congresses have expressed a broad-based preference for consumption over savings, debt over taxes, the needs of elders over the needs of children. In our private lives, we have seen the same attitude reflected in parents-come-first family choices, adults-only condos, leveraged Wall Street buy-outs, and the live-fast, die-young world of inner-city drug dealers. All these actions are more of a piece than many of us may feel comfortable admitting.

We offer this book as an antidote. More fundamentally, we hope to give our reader a perspective on human affairs unlike anything available in the usual history and social science texts. Once you have read this book, we expect you will reflect differently on much that you see in yourself, your family, your community, and the nation. You may understand better how the great events of American history, from wars to religious upheavals, have affected the lifecycles of real people, famous and common, in high political offices and in ordinary families. You may also gain a better sense of how you and your peers fit into the ongoing story of American civilization—a long and twisting human drama that offers each generation a special role. Appreciating the rhythm of this drama will enable you to foresee much of what the future holds for your own lifecycle, as well as what it holds for your children or grandchildren after your own time has passed.

This book presents the “history of the future” by narrating a recurring dynamic of generational behavior that seems to determine how and when we participate as individuals in social change—or social upheaval. We say, in effect, that this dynamic repeats itself. This is reason enough to make history important: For if the future replays the past, so too must the past anticipate the future.

If you are a BOOMER, you know yours is, beyond doubt, an authentic generation. You will recognize the generational boundaries separating you from others (and, if born from 1943 through 1945, you are probably delighted that someone finally put you where you always knew you belonged). Unlike the G.I. generation, you have no trouble recognizing how other generations have personalities very different from your own. Unlike the Silent generation, you have never imagined being anything other than what you are. But the great comfort you derive from your own identity is precisely what makes your generation troubling in the eyes of others. Like the peers of John Winthrop or Ralph Waldo Emerson, you perceive that within your circle lies a unique vision, a transcendent principle, a moral acuity more wondrous and extensive than anything ever sensed in the history of mankind.

True, like a Herman Melville or an H. L. Mencken, you often loathe the narcissism and self-satisfaction of your peers. But that too is an important trait of your “Idealist” generational type. Possessing unyielding opinions about all issues, you judge your own peers no less harshly than you judge your elders and juniors. Either way, you may well appreciate that the time has come to move the Boomer discussion beyond the hippie-tumed-yuppie, Boomer-ashy hypocrite theme. Stripped to its fundamentals, your generation of rising adults is no more hypocritical than Thoreau at Walden Pond, or Jefferson Davis during his seven-year retreat into the Mississippi woods.

You may feel some disappointment in the Dan Quayles and Donald Trumps who have been among your first age-mates to climb life’s pyramid, along with some danger in the prospect of Boomer Presidents and Boomer-led Congresses farther down the road. Watching Franklin Pierce and Stephen Douglas, the peers of Lincoln and Lee felt much the same trepidation about their own generation— with reason, as history soon demonstrated. You may see in your peers a capacity for great wisdom, terrible tragedy, or perhaps just an insufferable pomposity. Over the centuries, Idealist generations like yours have produced more than their share of all three. Having lived just half a lifecycle, you probably find it hard to imagine that your generation may someday produce strong-willed leaders on a par with a Sam Adams or a Benjamin Franklin, a Douglas Mac Arthur or a Franklin Roosevelt. That’s not surprising. Idealist generations—quite the reverse of Civic generations—typically exert their most decisive influence on history late in life.

To understand how this happens, you need to step outside your inner absorption, take a look at like-minded ancestors, and understand the fateful connection between the Idealist lifecycle and the larger flow of events. Perhaps you already sense that your Boomer peers, for all their narcissism and parallel play, will someday leave a decisive mark on civilization quite unlike anything they have done up to now. Your intuition is correct. History suggests they will.
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Well have they? left a decisive mark on civilization, world affairs? This book was published in 1991 and took several years to put together (the 1980's) It was a seminal work, no one before had looked at history as these two men did. Alas since that time many others have come forth to proclaim their own brand of generational theory, plagiarists most of them, not having the original mindset as Strauss and Howe, not putting in the deep research they simply mixed and matched and quickly published a book hoping to cash in on the interest Generations... had generated. This is most obvious in the generational boundaries that have been altered to suit the modern authors "opinion" on what constitutes a turning but there are many other flaws in their work.

Perhaps if the book had been written in a different time, in a more honest era, then genuine men of science and history could have added to it in a constructive way, but that is not the era we live in. We live in the era of deceit, in the era where peer review is a sick joke, if it happens at all! We live in the era of the scam, the grift and the swindle where nothing is as it seems and where everyone has their hand out and their hands in your pocket. Naturally it is the love of money that drives all this corruption, a book in itself if you wanted to define it. The book Generations is a huge tome and I myself have read only small portions. I found it as an epub free online where I find most of my books. "Another scam" that avoids copyright. Thankfully I'm not a Boomer, else I'd have a deep moral aversion to acquiring such

[theluckycountry]

In the text the authors use this classification for their generations. The 13er generation has subsequently been renamed Gen-X

One of these eighteen American generations, of course, is yours. All but the very oldest or very youngest of our contemporary readers belong to one of the following four generations:
• “G.I.” elders, born 1901-1924, age 66 to 89 as 1991 begins;
• “SILENT” midlifers, born 1925-1942, age 48 to 65;
• “BOOMER” rising adults, born 1943-1960, age 30 to 47;
• “13ER” youths, born 1961-1981, age 9 to 29 as of the year 1991.

Chapter 1
PEOPLE MOVING THROUGH TIME

Twenty-eight years had passed, but the message to other generations remained the same. George Bush’s inaugural parade, like John Kennedy’s in 1961, featured a full-scale model of his vehicle of valor: in Bush’s case a Grumman Avenger fighter plane, in Kennedy’s a PT-class torpedo boat. When Bush bailed out over ChiChi Jima, Michael Dukakis was a fifth-grader in Brookline, Massachusetts. Dukakis later served in Korea, but when he sat atop a tank in his Presidential campaign, people laughed. It just wasn’t the same. Back in 1944, Illinois Governor Jim Thompson had been in the second grade, three years behind Dukakis. “You don’t need to be shot down from the sky to know the world is a dangerous place,’’ Thompson remarked about Bush, “but my guess is it sure helps.’’ Marching alongside these two parade floats, both times, were saluting veterans—with one important difference. At Kennedy’s inaugural, the float-bearers were men of “vigor’’ in their late thirties and forties, celebrating their arrival into national leadership. At Bush’s, the vets were in their late sixties and seventies, evoking more remembrance than hope.

Time marches on. The aging paraders had to realize that 1989 would be the last time America would salute the triumphant Presidential arrival of a World War II combat hero. At age 20, George Bush had been among the Navy’s youngest fighter pilots when he was shot down over the Pacific. Almost certainly, the next American President will walk down Pennsylvania Avenue having known that war through a child’s eyes— or, perhaps, through nothing more than history books and film clips. When that happens, Americans of all ages will feel something missing.

In the thirty years from 1961 through 1990 (and counting), the American Presidency has been the exclusive preserve of men who ranged in age from 17 to 34 on Pearl Harbor Sunday, men belonging to what we call the G.I. Generation. Never before in the nation’s history has one generation held the White House so long. Few others have exercised such massive power over public events in each phase of life. From youth to old age, the G.I.s have been the confident and rational problem-solvers of twentieth-century America, the ones who knew how to get things done—first as victorious soldiers and Rosie the Riveters, later as builders of rockets and highways, lastly as aging Presidents in the era of democracy’s economic triumph over communism.

The G.I. lifecycle bears the imprint of the threshold moments that catapulted America into its modem superpower era. The first G.I. babies were bom in 1901, and the last will turn 75 in the year 1999—a span exactly coinciding with the “American Century’’ of economic growth, technological progress, and (mostly) military triumph. Following a debauched and dispirited “Lost Generation,’’ they brought cheerfulness, public spirit, and collective muscle to every problem they encountered. Older generations once looked upon them as good scouts with a mission of civic virtue. Decades later, younger generations came to see them as powerful and friendly, if also culturally complacent and overly “macho.” From childhood on, G.I.s have defined what contemporary America means by citizenship, that two-way symbiosis between man and government. In the person of George Bush, America clings to one last dose of that old war-hero “right stuff,” uncertain about what the future will be like without G.I.s at the helm.

Contemplating this generation’s inevitable passing from power, we have been waving it goodbye much as we would a beloved family member whose train is pulling out of a station—a station we could call midlife. But let’s walk down the track a bit. For some time now, this same train has been pulling into another station: elderhood.

The expression “senior citizen” is so much a part of our modem vocabulary that we forget how new it is—and how it did not come into wide use until the first peers of these seven G.I. Presidents started to reach old age. As with every other life phase, G.I.s have infused old age with uncommon collective energy. In the early 1960s, the elderly were America’s unhappiest, loneliest, and poorest age bracket. Politically, they tended to be unorganized, Republican-leaning, and hostile to government. Yet over the last quarter century, all these attributes have reversed direction. Polls now show most people over age 65 to be happy and socially assertive, members of an exploding list of senior clubs, condo associations, and lobbying groups. They are no longer fixed-income, thanks to inflation indexed government benefits. Meanwhile, the elderly poverty rate has fallen from the highest of any age bracket (in the mid-1960s) to well below the rate for children and young adults (today). Of all circa-1990 age groups, these elders are the heaviest-voting and by far the most Democratic-leaning, with polls showing them overwhelmingly supportive of big government. Yes, we can still find an elder age bracket whose members are substantially lonely, poor, and Republican. But they are not G.I.s. These very old people, mostly in their nineties, are the dwindling survivors of the Lost Generation.

How do we explain this dramatic change in what it means to be old in America, this sudden transformation both in the behavior of people past their middle sixties and in the treatment they receive from their juniors? We could, on the one hand, attribute it to a variety of complex, apparently unrelated factors: public policy, demographics, social and economic trends, changing family attitudes, and so on. Alternatively, we could attribute it to the gradual replacement of one generation by another in the elder age bracket. Let’s put it schematically: Is it easier to explain why 75-year-olds transformed from Type X in 1965 to Type Y in 1990, or to explain how the Y-like 50-year-olds we remember from 1965 aged into the Y-like 75-year-olds of 1990? The latter is by far the better explanation. Separate generations are aging in place.
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The thrust of this last sentence is that separate generations are "Starkly different" from each other. Each and every Generation thinks different from the others, completely differently! It's why these rapid changes occur when they come of age (the hippy/conscienceless/rebel/druggo shift in the early 1960's) when the boomers came of age and threw off the shackles of their conformist parents. They wanted a different world and they went out to make it. It explains why children, while seemingly conforming to the parents values when young, breakout in their teens to do things that typically dismay mom and dad. And when they finally come of age and move out, their lifestyles have little or nothing in common with their parents.

I saw it happen in my own life and the life of my peers and I have seen it happen twice more since with the Millennials and the Gen-Xers. But it's not something you notice until you understand it's there. Like when you buy a new car and suddenly notice all the other people driving the same car. You never noticed those models driving around before but now you have the same, they become obvious.

From a purely historically intellectual perspective the book generations is a total eyeopener to understanding the world around you and what is likely to come. The "Predictions" made in their second book, "The Fourth Turning An American Prophecy" came true in many cases, like the middle east war for oil for example and the authoritarian homeland security apparatus that came with it. But more than this to the mind of a pragmatic Gen-Xer I see great opportunity for personal prosperity and security from studying the contents of the book. As I said, I have not read but a small part, but like all good books the authors have been interviewed many many times and like with anything being promoted they gave away the best secrets in there interviews It was there I learnt the gist of the book and it's applications to my life.