The Graying of America

By Edwin Warner

In the 1960s the torch was passed from age to youth, but in the 1970s the torch is being handed back again. Youth --the obsession of a few years ago, the hope of some, the fear of others --no longer makes great waves. While the 1969 rock festival at Woodstock was hailed as an epic event of liberated youth, the even bigger 1973 festival at Watkins Glen was considered a casual outing. Between these two festivals youth somehow lost its mystique.

Two years ago, Sociologist John Seeley wrote: "The young are seemingly America's Number One love, Number One enemy, Number One public problem and Number One private preoccupation." Today the young would rank way down on almost anybody's list of preoccupations.

The radical young firebrands of the '60s--the Mark Rudds, Mario Savios, Jerry Rubins, Tom Haydens--have all but dropped out of sight. Today's heroes have left their youth a long way behind them. Henry Kissinger (age 50) and Buckminster Fuller (78), Margaret Mead (71) and Dorothy Day (75), John Sirica (69) and Walter Cronkite (56) look and act their age. Surely no one has done more for age than 76-year old Sam Ervin, whose Watergate hearings are a parable of the times. One by one, bright young men who had gone astray filed before the aged patriarch to do penance and seek absolution. Nor was Ervin averse to providing them with a few homilies on conduct. "Ervin embodies wisdom, and he demonstrates that he knows how to cut it," says Atlanta Psychiatrist Alfred Messer. Teenagers have blossomed out in Sam Ervin T shirts, and Rolling Stone has put his jowly face on the cover.

Youth is not making the scene the way it used to. The gusher of books and articles glorifying the young has largely dried up, and younger people are writing more sympathetically about their elders. David Kaufelt's first novel is appropriately titled Six Months with an Older Woman--and they are comically instructive months. One of the best of the recent books on older people, Nobody Ever Died of Old Age, was written by 34-year-old Sharon Curtin, a '60s radical.

The youth cult films of the '60s catered to the grossest fantasies of the times. In Wild in the Streets, a 19-year-old becomes President and puts over-35s in concentration camps. In // ... rebel students gun down parents and teachers for no apparent reason. Today Hollywood vaults contain films of this sort that were made after the generation battle had cooled; they are no longer box office.

Current films seem to be putting youth back in its place. In his past roles, Steve McQueen often played the rebel --against home, hearth or system. But in Junior Banner he is a dutiful son who finally wins enough money to send his pa to his dreamland, Australia. In The Emperor of the North Pole Lee Marvin is trailed by a brash youth who wants to replace him as king of the hobos. But the crown stays squarely put on the gray head. At the end of the film Marvin boots the youth off the rails, shouting: "Kid, you got no class, you'll never make it!"

Television, too, has deflated the pretensions of youth. Gone are such shows as The Young Lawyers and The Young Rebels. Their replacements treat age with more deference. An older and a younger detective collaborate in solving cases in The Streets of San Francisco; an older and a younger doctor pool their skills in Marcus Welby, M.D. A new show, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, starts this month. While Bob and Carol are in their swinging 20s, Ted and Alice are more conventional over-30s.

Today's more sober appraisal of youth is based partly on a striking demographic fact: America is growing older. There are proportionately fewer young people than in the 1960s. In that decade, as a result of the post-World War II baby boom, the age group of 14 to 24 expanded by an unprecedented 13 million, or 52%. Youth was bound to make more of a stir on the basis of numbers alone. In the 1970s, however, this age group will increase by only some 4.3 million, while in the 1980s it will decline. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median age of Americans may rise from 28.0 in 1970 to as high as 35.8 in the year 2000.

The overemphasis on youth in the 1960s was also part of the social dislocations of the time. If anything aroused generational solidarity, it was the Viet Nam War. To many observers, youth's almost unanimous opposition to the war made all young people seem alike. They appeared to speak with one magisterial voice, leading sympathizers to generalize: "They have something to tell us. We should listen." On most issues, in fact, youth spoke with as many voices as any other group, but the discords were drowned out in the uproar over war and generation gap. Class, ethnic and geographical differences went largely unexamined. When kids battled cops in the '60s, it was overlooked that the cops were often the same age as the kids. Once the war wound down, the convenient abstraction, youth, began to crumble.

The youth tide did not ebb without reshaping the landscape. A mere glimpse of the hair and clothing styles of Wall Street commuters is enough to convince anyone that the youth impact of the '60s was at least skin deep. And deeper. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, the draft was abolished, and students were given places of responsibility in college administrations. Age has paid another compliment to youth in taking over some of its protest tactics. People over 65, in particular, are organizing to better their lot.

When the war of the generations was at its most virulent, apocalyptic commentators thought that it might go on forever or end in victory for one side or the other. Perhaps America is fortunate in that no public passion seems to endure very long. Harvard Sociologist Seymour Lipset has calculated that American social obsessions--from Know Nothingism to McCarthyism --have a life cycle of four to five years. After that they quickly fade. The generational battle was true to the norm.

As Patrick Moynihan points out in The Public Interest, youth of the 1960s was highly isolated from the rest of society. And in isolation is bred arrogance and unworldliness. Age, on the other hand, did not have the benefit of easy contact with youth. There was a tendency either to defect rather mindlessly to youth, accepting uncritically an alteration of values, or to develop a siege mentality and fear and resent one's own children. It was all too easy, depending on one's point of view, to hold youth responsible for what was good in society or to blame it for what was bad. In this way, one could avoid the complexities and ambiguities of a genuine analysis of American life. Historian Eric Goldman expects the 1970s to be a "period of re-emerging consensus, when the young will not be so critical of the old and when the old will not be so rigidly protective of their values." That may be a somewhat sunny view of a decade that could produce almost anything --and probably will. But at least one fissure in American life has been partly patched, which shows that it can be done.

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