Boomers were the yuppies, not the hippies
The “baby boom” began in 1946 and ended in 1964. I’m a boomer. In fact, I was born in the mathematical center of the baby boom. I was 14 when Woodstock happened.
Boomers have been credited (or blamed) for the tumultuous ‘60s of civil rights and hippie fame. But that’s anachronistic. Here’s Louis Man and in his recent New Yorker article “What happened to the yuppie?”
“Most of the baby boomers had nothing to do with the civil-rights movement or the launch of the women’s-liberation movement, and only a few who were born before 1950 had much to do with the antiwar movement. When the first U.S. combat troops were deployed to Vietnam, in 1965, the oldest baby boomers were nineteen, and still in college*. The youngest were not yet one, and teething. On the other hand, the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers. The yuppie, not the hippie, is the baby boom’s contribution to American social history.
“ . . . [Jerry] Rubin was famous as a co-founder, with Abbie Hoffman, of the Youth International Party, the Yippies, in 1967, and as a leading participant in several iconic Vietnam-era protests, including the mass march on the Pentagon, in 1967, and the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in 1968. He was one of the Chicago Seven, whose trial arose out of those demonstrations, and was convicted, in 1970, of crossing state lines to incite a riot. (All the convictions were overturned on appeal.) not one of the defendants in the Chicago Seven trial was a baby boomer. Rubin was born in 1938. Hoffman was born in 1936.”
So the baby boomers were not the drivers of American social consciousness that some have painted them. They were the drivers of American avarice, the “greed is good” life philosophy. They are the generation of cynicism, not the generation of civic virtue. I don’t believe in tarring every member of a generation with the same brush, but if we want to credit historical periods to generational traits, that’s the historical reality.
*actually, most boomers didn’t go to college
I’ve seen this confusion a lot. Boomers remember the civil rights movement, the anti-war protests and all that great rock music, but they were the consumers, not the creators. Maybe I should say “we”, because I’m a boomer myself.
Yep. I remember it, and as they say, if you remember it, you weren’t there. And I wasn’t.
” . . . they were the consumers, not the creators.”
Which I guess justifies posting this on an Econ blog.
Kaleberg:
I was a part of a social movement from 68-71. I just wore camouflage, then green and carried an M14. When Washington was under the threat of the movement, I was a part of that social movement wearing green and carrying an M14 too. Just in a different venue than college kids protesting.
“What one finds, in the bullet points of American history since 1945, is a sea of contradictions. The generation that opposed Richard Nixon voted for Ronald Reagan. It demonstrated against war in Vietnam, but supported the invasion of Iraq. It marched for civil rights, but opposed affirmative action. It witnessed the feminist and gay liberation movements, but defeated the Equal Rights Amendment and dragged its feet on marriage equality. It created Earth Day, but denied climate change. It embraced rock ‘n’ roll, but censored rap. It defined the rebellious teenage subculture, but became helicopter parents. How boomers changed the world
And now, the ultimate irony: The youngest members of the generation that famously vowed not to trust anyone over 30 are receiving membership forms for AARP, and the oldest are cashing Social Security checks.”
The person you quote makes the strange assumption that a generation is a unit.
“The generation that opposed Richard Nixon voted for Ronald Reagan.” – all the boomers I know, and I’m a boomer, opposed both Tricky and Ronnie. “It demonstrated against war in Vietnam, but supported the invasion of Iraq.” – all the boomers I know demonstrated against both Vietnam and Junior’s War. And so on. Why did you bother quoting from her?
@Bob,
Looks like you didn’t bother to read my post. If you had, you would have seen this: “I don’t believe in tarring every member of a generation with the same brush, but if we want to credit historical periods to generational traits, that’s the historical reality.”
I also opposed both Nixon and St. Ronnie, so climb down off the cross. I quoted a link describing a generation, not you or me. Quit with the solipsism. This isn’t about you, m’kay?
Bob:
How many millions of baby boomers do you know? Give me something besides “your” perspective. God knows, you have one hell of a library at your disposal. I grabbed what I could grab. If you gotta better one, then lets have your quote.
Michaelson
looks like my note of support for your perspective got censored.
Kaleberg
it seems to me a little weird to call the participants in a social phenomenon the “consumers not the creators.”
Too of that mathematical oddity, this has long been a complaint of mine. To my experience there are/should be three if not five distinct “generations” ~ at least two if not three distinct generations of “hippies” the eldest as noted I have as little in common with as the yuppies: Michael J Fox in the Reagan years
And yet, some of my favored authors (and musicians), those who influenced my worldview: Kesey and Kerouac, Thompson and Wolfe, the whole sixties Peace Love and Dope atmosphere of “we could change the world” was/were of that elder, not-boomer generation
Not old enough to actually have been a “hippie” yet too old for what followed …
@Ten,
I was an avid reader of Kesey and Wolfe, the gonzo journalism thing. Never owned a motorcycle, never tried LSD.
Boomers were enabled by, not creators of, that mythos. OTOH, boomers own The Bonfire of the Vanities, I guess. Although as a grad student, all that exhilaration passed me by. I had to read about it years later.
The Summer of Love was a major social phenomenon that occurred in San Francisco during the summer of 1967. As many as 100,000 people, mostly young people, hippies, beatniks, and 1960s counterculture figures, converged in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park. Wikipedia
in 1967 the oldest boomers would have been 21, the youngest about 3.
hippies tended to be older than 3 and younger than 21. looks like significant overlap to me.
by 1984 those hippies would have been older than seventeen and younger than 35…facing a Reagan economy and raising children of their own, thus needing to become yuppies if they could. in other words: hippies plus twenty years or so are the same people as yuppies.
but not everybody dressed for success. either time.
My folks were end of Silent Era, born 1943 and 1944. They graduated from college in the Boston area 1965 and 1966 (Mom with HRC’s class, dad was John Kerry’s band leader at Hahvahd). Neither of them ever smoked weed, and they were a year early for the Summer of Love, making all Boomers too young to get credit for Civil Rights and Woodstock etc.
@Chris,
If you read my post, you’ll see that it makes exactly that point.
Chris
“get credit for”?
your parents were 23 and 24 1967, maybe too old for summer of love (but not necessarily). but the kids who were younger than them (aka boomers) were certainly there.
as for woodstock
Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Davy Guthrie (born July 10, 1947) is an American folk singer.[1] Like his late father, Woody Guthrie, Arlo is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice. Guthrie’s best-known work is “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”, a
born 1947, so definitely a boomer, creator and consumer.
Best of times, the worst of times. Two kids I did scouts with were KIA in Vietnam.
I was sophomore in college spring 1970.
Cambodia, and Kent State. The anti war movement on campus shut down colleges and universities faster and tighter than Trump on covid.
Even more conservative tech colleges where the engineers lusted for defense work and deferments shut down.
On civil rights, the up and coming boomers in the workplace helped or hindered the new ways.
We had the best of everything, including muscle cars, the draft, the war, rock and roll, and all around we are cool!
in the mid 60s, the oldest alienated boomers were the beatniks associated with the civil rights and anti-war movements (ie, i did a civil rights march to DC in 63 with a high school group, & three anti war DC demos in the years after that, including the exorcism of the Pentagon in 67). … after the west coast summer of love in 67, the press started calling anyone who had dropped out of the mainstream hippies, but i never bought that tag…then a lot of those called hippies became yuppies (Young Upwardly-mobile Professionals) as they got older…
A lot of the people born in the 30’s and early 40’s were part of the generation, whatever you wish to call it, that spawned the hippies but most of them were not hippies. They are the people who got drafted in large numbers or volunteered or went ROTC (like I did) or got married and had a kid to claim the Kennedy exemption from the draft. They were people trying to survive difficult times.
@Jack,
“The silent generation” according to the generational branding. FWIW.
They weren’t silent at the voting booth. That’s what cost Johnson and Humphrey the presidency. They “silently” acted on the protests of the 60’s. Interestingly, the draft may have done more for integration than Brown v. Board.
@Jack,
LOL! And they voted for the crook. That was pretty stupid.
I didn’t name the generation, you can look it up. Deal with it.
” Interestingly, the draft may have done more for integration than Brown v. Board.”
Actually, I think the Soviet Union and Cold War politics had more to do with integration than the draft.
Joel:
SDS did show up in Chicago, yes. I do not believe these were oldsters. Having served with many minorities, we did get used to each other and our differences. To your point, the leadership was older, many of the followers were younger.
I have no difficulty dealing with labels created by others since the lives lived are more genuine ad important than the labels. They voted for the crook because they didn’t know he was one and he promised to end the war. That turned out to be a lie. It happens.
I referred to the draft as an agent of integration because it put people together in a work environment who otherwise would have been unlikely to work together and need to depend on each other. The Soviet Union and the cold war created the tensions that lead to the belief that a draft was necessary and to that extent contributed to integration.
@Jack,
The Soviet Union used racial strife in America to score propaganda points with the developing world, which was mostly comprised of people of color. This international political pressure helped shame America into integration. Starting with Sputnik, the USSR also drove reform of science curricula in the US.
Jack:
There is also the issue of naming us. After WWII and the return of vets, the explosion of births was an ~3.5 million a year. The highest population growth in the nation, hence babyboomers. This went on even beyond a decade. I turned 19 in 68 and was draft eligible. Instead, I enlisted to have a choice and was accused of wanting to avoid the draft afterwards. Why wouldn’t I want to decide rather than let someone else decide? That point (after I got out) was stupid and meant to denigrate.
Does the name babyboomers fit or not? It does. What we have is some New Yorker author bleating his horn after the fact about being yuppies when the label did not even exist. Revisionist? My brother a couple of years younger than I, hitchhiked out to California which was something popular to do for that period of time.
The birth rate for babyboomers (or so-called) was 3.5 million (or greater) per year from 1946 till 1964. If babyboomers were wealthy enough, they were called “young urban professionals” which translated to Yuppy.
Some more content (This babyboomer was tired last night and could not recall how to post pictures. I need a new hard drive (in my head) to store data).
“The neologism yuppie was likely used and spread colloquially by word of mouth before appearing in print, probably for the first time in a 1980 issue of Chicago Magazine. Journalist Dan Rottenberg, who did not take credit for coining the term, used it in his article about a growing trend of individuals moving into fashionable neighborhoods in Chicago. Indeed, at the time, much of the media was hyping a reversal of so-called white flight, suggesting that baby boomers, characterized as a generation of former hippies who were then entering their 30s, were shifting away from the suburbanized notion of the American dream of their parents and toward a new idealized urban lifestyle.
Interest in these affluent young professionals grew, and in 1984 Newsweek magazine labeled 1984 as the “year of the yuppie,” noting that the generation was becoming increasingly influential in America’s political and economic landscapes. Yuppies were often portrayed in the media as career-minded, materialistic, self-serving, having a hedonistic lifestyle, and prioritizing physical fitness. They were thought to be fiscally conservative but politically liberal. Their values seemingly stood in sharp contrast to the anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, and nonconformist hippie ideals of the prior decades. Many former hippies, however, still believed in sexual liberation, feminism, and the right to abortion. The shift toward economic conservatism may have developed as a result of the inevitable loss of the hippies’ bright-eyed optimism following the cycles of inflation, recession, and high unemployment in the 1970s as well as the frantic end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Not all yuppies, however, were former hippies, and some favored more conservative views than others. As a whole, the political stance of yuppies was considered vague.”
Yuppie
Hope that helps clear the issue.
By date of birth, we are classified as babyboomers and this can not be changed. By age, I was becoming aware of social issues in my mid-teens. I wrote about one incident occuring when was 18.
Enough said.
@Bill,
Menand wasn’t referring to boomers in the 1960s as yuppies. Here’s the quote from the New Yorker article: “the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers.” So not at all “revisionist.” They were still boomers in 1984.
Indeed, they’re boomers today, although today they’re no longer young and they’re probably retired, so not “y” and not “p.”
Guess I’m a boomer but in the words of David Lowery. “I hate my generation.” Growing up the people I admired were ten to fifteen years older than me. My crew were a bunch of sellouts. You don’t go from “Peace Love and Understanding” to an eight figure salary at an investment bank with out being full of shit from the jump.
SW:
I did not clear $100,000/year till my fifties. When I retired, I was at about $125,000 with an expense account. My wife did well in sales so we joined the mid to upper-level middle class. I worked with every nationality one could think of.
I think this is economics, right Joel?
SW:
JIC if you thought I was one of the $800,000 guys.
““the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers”
those very same people woud have been between five and nineteen in 1964
and between 11 and twenty-five in 1970
so they were also hippies (some of them).
Coberly:
Yuppies appeared in the 1980s well after baby Boomers came into being. They are thought to be baby Boomers who gained wealth.
Bill
of course they appeared we’ll after the Boomers came into being. first the Boomers had to grow up enough to become hippies, then they had to get older and get jobs in the Reagan economy so they could become yuppies.
i posted a timeline showing the overlap beween boomers and hippies in1967 and 1969
and the overlap between the same boomers and the yuppies in 1980-1990
with reference to the draft, the vietnam war,
and a side note about Nixon, called a liar above because he said he’d end the war. only he did end the war in 1974.
maybe the computer ate it. but i have my suspicions about the little man behind the curtain.