“You see these gray hairs?” Dorothy Parker asked in The New Yorker in 1928. “Well, making whoopee with the intelligentsia was the way I earned them.”
Parker was 35 when she wrote that. Old age seemed to come on earlier back in the day. I’m thinking especially of poor Edward Casaubon, the scholarly suitor in “Middlemarch.” Edward is perceived to be “dry” and “no better than a mummy” at 45.
I turn 60 this week. How old that seems will depend on how old you are. Unlike Aerosmith, I’m not ready for my “Peace Out” tour. Nor am I yet studying the merits of competing brands of compression socks. I do plan, eventually, to use an ear trumpet rather than hearing inserts, to better scare off children.
I was born in 1965, narrowly missing the baby boom. I’m an elder of the Generation X tribe, two-thirds or so of the way around life’s track. To get a better handle on where I, and we, are heading, I picked up James Chappel’s new book, “Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age.”
This is sober history, in the sense that it is no fun at all to read. “Golden Years” is related in baked-potato, hold-the-butter-and-salt prose. While reading it I felt my life slipping away more rapidly than usual. But Chappel, an associate professor of history at Duke and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center, knows this material front to back and he gets some important things said.
His book is a tour of America’s 20th century, in succeeding waves of oldies. He lingers especially on the passage of the Social Security Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. He rightly considers it to be “one of the great wonders of the American state,” as well as “our greatest poverty-reduction program.” He credits Social Security with helping invent the very notion of old age as a coherent stage of life.
He deplores right-wing efforts to privatize Social Security in the name of mammon, as well as attempts to privatize its imperfect but indispensable successor programs Medicare and Medicaid, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
As John Updike put it, pushing back against the historian Amity Shlaes’s criticism of the New Deal: “Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world.”
Chappel tracks the multiple ways that women, people of color and those with disabilities have found it harder to access benefits, and to achieve a dignified retirement. He shines a spotlight on figures you’re left wanting to learn more about.
These include Jacquelyne Jackson, the pioneering Black sociologist, and Maggie Kuhn, the charismatic founder of the advocacy group the Gray Panthers. Kuhn appeared more than once on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. On YouTube, you can find clips of her appearance with Candice Bergen on an early episode of “Saturday Night Live.”
Chappel attends to the changing language of age, how stigmatizing terms like “senior citizen” and “impotence” morphed into “older people” and “E.D.” We will all pass away amid euphemism. In her most recent collection of stories, Ann Beattie expressed surprise that the cosmetic industry has yet to come up with an ameliorating substitute for the word “wrinkles.”
The growth of AARP is accounted for, with its magazine, its discount clubs and its travel programs. It is a largely benign and sunny organization that focuses politically, when it does at all, on age discrimination.
Chappel spends several chapters teasing out the meanings of the sitcom “The Golden Girls,” about four older women living together in Miami, that ran on NBC from 1985 to 1992. It’s a show I didn’t watch, I am sorry to admit, because I was young then and I did not want to see a show about the old.
Chappel makes me want to revisit “The Golden Girls.” But I wish his book had taken us closer to the present day. I would have liked to see him unpack the content of more recent series — “Grace and Frankie,” “The Kominsky Method,” “Hacks.”
If Chappel’s book has an argument, it’s that the left has missed opportunities to strengthen and expand programs such as Social Security and Medicare. There has been no similarly ambitious legislation for a long time. Increasingly, the left is losing the intellectual battle as well.
Happy and few are those who aren’t worried about having enough money to see them through this life. Chappel traces the decline of pensions, and the rise of savings plans such as 401(k)s and IRAs. He concurrently tracks the rise in anxiety. Looking at one’s savings too often can encourage dementia in almost anybody.
William Faulkner felt washed up at 47. He wrote in a 1944 letter to Malcolm Cowley that he felt like a mare that had dropped, in the form of novels, too many foals. Faulkner already had two grandchildren. Maybe he’d have felt younger if he’d done as Hunter S. Thompson did and ordered them to call him Ace.
The post How America’s ‘Senior Citizens’ Became ‘Older People’ appeared first on New York Times.
