Members of the idealistic Boom Generation, which include some of our kin, were born between 1943 and 1960; there will probably be members of this generation playing on the world's stage at least until about 2050.1 Their parents were either the last wave of the civic-minded, heroic Greatest Generation or the first wave of the adaptive Silent Generation, who nurtured them in a relaxing way.
The Boom Generation grew up as increasingly indulged youths after a secular crisis (World War II), came of age inspiring a spiritual awakening (the Boom Awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s), and fragmented into narcissistic rising adults. They are now cultivating principle as moralistic midlifers, and will likely emerge as visionary elders during the next secular crisis. The Boom Generation (of the Prophet archtype in the Millennial Saeculum, or Cycle) basked as children in Dr. Spock permissiveness, suburban conformism, Sputnik-era schooling, Beaver Cleaver friendliness, and Father Knows Best family order. From the Summer of Love to the Days of Rage, they came of age rebelling against worldly blueprints of their parents. As their flower child, Black Panther, Weathermen, and "Jesus freak" fringes proclaimed themselves arbiters of public morals, youth pathologies worsened--and SAT scores began a seventeen-year slide. In the early 1980s, many young adults became self-absorbed "yuppies" with mainstream careers but perfectionist lifestyles. Entering midlife (and national power), they were trumpeting values, touting a "politics of meaning," and waging scorched-earth Culture Wars.2
Generations in the past whose peer personality closely resembled that of the Boom Generation include:
"Anarchist heaven on earth." "Redemption worth fighting for." That's how Todd Gitlin described People's Park--an oblong three-acre patch that Cal-Berkeley's Greatest Generation regents cleared in 1969 so they could put up a new student facility. The kids wanted to keep it a mixture of garden and hangout, a shrine to their budding consciousness. In the ensuing melee, the regents won the battle, but the young rioters won the war. Nothing was built.3
A year earlier, Columbia students had rebelled against a similar plan to erect a big gymnasium. There too, nothing was built. "You build it up, mother, we gonna tear it down," was Jacob Brackman's motto for his Boom Generation, then triggering America's most furious and violent youth upheaval of the Twentieth Century. After noticing the powerful inner life underlying the youth anger at Harvard, Erik Erikson remarked that he saw "more of a search for resacralization in the younger than in the older generation." Where Silent youths had come of age eager to fine-tune the system, cutting-edge Boomers wanted it to "burn, baby, burn."4
Afterward, to the surprise of many, the Boomer rage cooled. By the mid-1980s, People's Park had become infested with crime and social debris--while a nearby bakery sold $15 tarts iced with the message "Victory to the Sandanistas." The generation that came of age, like Brackman, deriding "banality, irrelevance, and all the ugliness which conspire to dwarf or extinguish the human personality," seemingly lay exposed (in Gitlin's words) as having gone "from J'accuse to Jacuzzi." In 1989, Berkeley's fortyish homeowners began forming neighborhood associations for the purpose of pushing "alcoholics, drug dealers, and wing nuts" out of their parks and out of their lives. Now, it appears, this generation is going from Jacuzzi to cold shower.5
As Boomers have charted their life's voyage, they have metamorphosed from Beaver Cleaver to hippie to braneater to yuppie to what some are calling "Neo-Puritan" in a manner quite unlike anyone, themselves included, ever expected. As The Who and countless others have been unceasingly (and, to some ears, annoyingly) "talkin' 'bout my generation," the Boom has outlived any number of temporary labels: the "Dr. Spock," "Pepsi," "Rock," "Now," "Sixties," "Love," "Protest," "Woodstock," "Vietnam," "Me," "Big Chill," "Yuppie," and "Post-Yuppie" Generation.6
Growing up warmed by a strong sun of national optimism, Boomers were blessed from the beginning with what their chronicler Landon Jones described as "Great Expectations." Their Greatest Generation parents fully expected them to grow up (in William Manchester's words) "adorable as babies, cute as grade school pupils and striking as they entered their teens," after which "their parents would be very, very proud of them." The parental plan was for these kids to grow up living in modern houses from which they would take speedy monorails to gleaming cities where they would shop, play, and (perhaps) work. In 1965, as the first Boomers filled colleges, Time Magazine declared teenagers to be "on the fringe of a golden era"--and two years later described collegians as cheerful builders who would "lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war."7
Hardly. As those sunny prophecies collapsed, one by one, Boomers next heard themselves collectively touted as a surly political powerhouse, easily capable of sweeping candidates of their choice to the White House. Not so (at least not until 1992). Starting with George McGovern in 1972, the Boom has played the role of political siren--first tempting candidates, then luring them to their demise.8
Meanwhile, the Silent Generation demographer Richard Easterlin predicted that the Boom would feel a lifelong "inadequacy" because of a numbers-fueled peer-on-peer competition. Wrong again. Even if many Boomers have felt pinched by the real estate and job markets, no Twentieth Century (or Twenty-first Century) generation has looked within and seen less "inadequacy" than the smug Boom.9
In Do You Believe in Magic? Annie Gottlieb declared the Boom "a tribe with its roots in a time, rather than place or race." First wave or last, Boomers recall that "time" as the 1960s, a decade they remember more fondly than do other generations. Their eighteen years of birth began (in 1943) with the first real evidence that Greatest Generation optimism would be rewarded with victory and ended (in 1960) with the first election of a Greatest President. Unlike the Silent Generation, Boomers lack any childhood recollection of World War II. Unlike Generation X, they were all reaching adolescence or lingering in "post-adolescence" (a term coined for them) before the Vietnam War drew to a close. Their first cohort, the 1943 "victory babies," have thus far ranked among the most self-absorbed in American history; their last cohorts are remembered by college faculties as the last (pre-Reagan-era) students to show Boomish streaks of intellectual arrogance and social immaturity.10
The Boom birthyears precede the demographic "baby boom" by three years at the front end, four at the back. "I think you could take the baby boom back a few years," agrees Boom pollster Patrick Caddell, noting how those born in the early 1960s (Generation X) "have had different experiences, and their attitudes don't really fit in with those of the baby boomers."11
From VJ-Day forward, whatever age bracket Boomers have occupied has been the cultural and spiritual focal point for American society as a whole. Through their childhood, America was child-obsessed; in their youth, youth-obsessed; in their "yuppie" phase, yuppie-obsessed. Always the Boom has been not just a new generation, but what Brackman has termed "a new notion of generation with new notions of its imperatives." Arriving as the inheritors of Greatest triumph, Boomers have always seen their mission not as constructing a society, but as justifying, purifying, even sanctifying it.12
Where the Missionaries had made the Greatest learn the basics, the Greatest taught Boomers critical thinking. Kenneth Keniston noted how, even in early childhood, Boomers showed an "orientation to principle." Coming of age, they applied their critical thinking--and new principles--back against the very scientism under which they had been raised. ("We were Bomb Babies," declared 23-year-old Ronald Allison in 1967. "We grew up with fallout in our milk.")13
Launching the modern "Consciousness Revolution," Boomers found their parents' world in need of a major spiritual overhaul, even of creative destruction. In 1968, a Radcliffe senior declared in her class's commencement prayer: "We do not feel like a cool, swinging generation--we are eaten up by an intensity that we cannot name." In 1980, a dramatic twelve-point shift among Boom voters turned a slim Reagan lead into a landslide. During the intervening years, Boomers led America through an era of inner fervor unlike any seen since the 1890s.14
The Consciousness Revolution was waged across a generation gap between Boomers and Greatest. It began within families, as a revolt against fathers. Most older Americans who studied young radicals in the late 1960s were struck by their attachment to mothers and their "ambivalence" (Keniston), "oedipal rebellion" (Malcolm), or attitude of "parricide" (Feuer) toward male authority. Many of the most memorable youth symbols of that era were direct affronts against the constructions of Greatest men--from the fury over napalm (whose forerunner, the flamethrower, had enabled Greatest G.I.s to overrun enemy pillboxes in World War II) and the two-fingered peace taunt (adapted from the old Greatest V-for-victory) to the defiant wearing of khaki (the Greatest color of uniformed teamwork) and the desecration of that very symbol of civic loyalty, the American flag.15
Several of the most celebrated youth uproars of 1969-1971 had a decided anti-Greatest ring: the hippie invasion of Disneyland, the burning of the Isla Vista Bank of America, the Earth Day burial of an automobile. Even as the society-wide generation gap receded in the 1970s, the Boom ethos remained a deliberate antithesis to everything Greatest: spiritualism over science, gratification over patience, negativism over positivism, fractiousness over conformity, rage over friendliness, self over community. "One wanted the young to be idealistic," Irving Kristol wrote at the time, "perhaps even somewhat radical, possibly even a bit militant--but not like this!"16
This quest for "self"--what Gitlin has termed "the voyage to the interior" and Christopher Lasch (more critically) the "culture of narcissism"--was a central theme of the Boom lifecycle through rising adulthood. Outwardly, it manifested in that distinctly Boom sense of suspended animation, of resisting permanent linkages to mates, children, corporations, and professions. Like Katherine Ross in The Graduate, Boomers approached the altar (or nursery, or corporate ladder) and heard something inside scream "STOP!"17
Having jammed the gears of the Silent-era coming-of-age treadmill, Boomers, finding themselves in a social no-man's-land, unable to satisfy their perfectionist impulses, wandered off to do what they wanted to do. Many simply grazed, lending no more than casual interest and wry comment to the world around them, applying what sounded to others like a pick-and-choose idealism and showing an apparent lack of interest in building community life. They developed a unique brand of perfectionism in consumption, a desire for the best within a very personal (and often financially austere) definition of taste. If a Boomer couldn't afford a house or family, he could at least afford the very best brand of mustard or ice cream--a "zen luxuriousness" with which Katy Butler watched her peers squeeze "the maximum possible enjoyment out of the minimum possible consumption." This mixture of high self-esteem and selective self-indulgence has at once repelled and fascinated other generations, giving Boomers a reputation for grating arrogance--and for transcendent cultural wisdom.18
The Boom's fixation on self forged an instinct to make plans or judgments according to wholly internalized standards, based on immutable principles of right and wrong. This gift for deductive logic over inductive experimentation made Boomers better philosophers than scientists, better preachers than builders. The highest-testing Boom cohorts, those born in the mid-1940s, reached the age where scientific achievement ordinarily peaks--yet their rise coincided with an era of declining American preeminence in engineering and math-and-science fields. Boomers were very late to win a Nobel Prize, Thomas Cech winning their first in 1989. (At the comparable time, the Lost, Greatest, and Silent Generations had won two, four, and six, respectively.)19
Instead, Boomers excelled in occupations calling for creative independence--the media, especially. Exalting individual conscience over duty to community, Boomers had difficulty achieving consensus and mobilizing as a unit--making them far weaker than the Greatest at getting big jobs done. Their sense of generational identity was more a Beatlean "Pepperland"--a zone of parallel play--than a peer society in the Greatest sense. Boomers sought to be "together" people--not together like the Greatest uniformed corps of the 1930s, but together as in a synchronous "good vibration." Boomers perceived their generational kinship as what Jonathan Cott called "the necklace of Shiva in which every diamond reflects every other and is itself reflected."20
Where Silent beatniks had expressed angst in poetry, earnestly seeking audiences, Boomer hippies megaphoned their "nonnegotiable demands" without much caring who listened. In the new youth culture, purity of moral position counted most, and "verbal terrorism" silenced those who dared to dissent from dissent.21
Having come of age with mainly an inner catharsis, Boomers sustained a compelling urge for the perfection of man's religious impulses, and for reducing any dependence on the physical self. In the adolescent years of Boom radicals, Keniston noted the "great intensification of largely self-generated religious feelings, often despite a relatively nonreligious childhood and background." This search for spiritual perfection was often aided by mind-altering drugs--what The Aquarian Conspiracy's Marilyn Ferguson described as "a pass to Xanadu" for "spontaneous, imaginative, right-brained" youths.22
The Boom's drug phase passed after bringing transcendence to the first wave, crime to the last--and, by 1990, was stripped of its spiritual trappings by Boomers (office-seekers, especially) who by then said they hadn't enjoyed what they had repeatedly ingested. In their subsequent search for spiritual euphoria, Boomers flocked from drugs to religion, to "Jesus" movements, evangelicalism, New Age utopianism, and millennialist visions of all sorts. As they did, they spawned the most active era of church formation of the Twentieth Century.23
The Boomers' self-absorption also lent their generation--male and female--a hermaphroditic, pistil-and-stamen quality. In The Singular Generation, Wanda Urbanska exalted their "self-sexuality," their "ability to give pleasure to oneself." Having grown up when sex-role distinctions had reached their 1950s-era zenith, Boomers of both sexes spent a lifetime narrowing them. Men were intruding into the domain of value nurturance that, in their youth, mainly belonged to Greatest mothers and teachers, while Boomer women were invading the secular roles once reserved for can-do Greatest males.24
These trends made Boomers more independent of social bonds, yet also more open to emotional isolation and economic insecurity. Concerned that their male peers might be unreliable providers, Boomer women were the first since the peers of Jane Addams to fear that early marriage and family might actually worsen their future household standard of living.
As Boomers began entering midlife, a schism emerged between mostly fortyish modernists and New Agers at one edge, and mostly thirtyish traditionalists and evangelicals at the other. Each side refused to compromise on matters of principle--believing, like anti-abortionist Bill Tickel, that "it's just easier to have blanket absolutes." This values clash reflected an important bipolarity between the generation's first and last waves, whose differences were widely noted by pollsters and marketers. At one end, the "victory" and "hello" babies of the middle and late 1940s were born almost entirely to the Greatest not long after the peak years of parental protectiveness. At the other, the babies of the conformist late 1950s were parented mostly by the Silent Generation just as that protectiveness was giving way, and came of age at the point of maximum freedom (some would say chaos) in adolescent life. To date, last-wave Boomers have fared worse than first-wavers in educational aptitude, financial security, and self-destructive behavior; first-wave Boomers have fared worse in marital stability--partly because they married earlier. (Greatest cohorts showed precisely the opposite trends, from first wave to last.) But measured by inner-life standards, the two ends of the Boom felt equally serene.25
This generation has a fuse-lit explosiveness well suggested by its name. In 1946, Fortune Magazine declared the start of "the Great American Boom," a "boom" not just in fertility, but also in economics, education, housing, and science. The robust achievements and optimism of that era left a lasting mark on children.26
If the Greatest measured their worth objectively, by the works they left to history, Boomers measure themselves subjectively, by the spiritual strength they see within. Many have had difficulty matching their parents' like aged achievements in economic and family life. Yet they have invariably considered their "consciousness" to be higher--and, by that yardstick, they were doing very well. From urban lofts to rural communes, downwardly mobile Boomers "face the truth about the way they live now with some dignity and grace," Katy Butler reported. "If it's by choice and it's not overwhelming, having no money can be a way of entering more deeply into your life." Many of them were "choosing" not to achieve by any worldly standard. But the American Dream has indeed lived on for this generation--in the form of a well-ravished soul.27
Here is a table of contents for a deeper exploration of the Boom Generation's lifecycle:
Birthyears for the Boom Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation