Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069

538 Pages·1992·2.84 MB·English

by  by Neil Howe (Author)

Copyright © 1991 by William Strauss & Neil Howe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions
Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 195 Broadway, New York,
NY 10007.
It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and
affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to
print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to
that end.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strauss, William.
Generations : the history of America’s future, 1584 to 2069 / Willaim Strauss
and Neil Howe. — 1st. ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-688-11912-3 (pbk.)
1. Unites States—History. 2. Generations—United States— History Neil. II.
Title.
[E179.S89 1992]
973—dc20
. I. Howe,
92-8222
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
oo
oo

To our grandparents and grandchildren , whose lives will touch parts of four
To our grandparents and grandchildren , whose lives will touch parts of four
centuries
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
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
PREFACE
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
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.
We retell a favorite old tale in a brand-new way: the full story of America from
the Puritans forward, presented along what we call the “generational
diagonal”—the lifecycle course, childhood through old age, lived by the discrete
birthyear groups we define as “generations.” We identify eighteen such
generations through four centuries of American history, dating back to the first
New World colonists. Among these generations, we find important recurring
personality patterns—specifically, four types of “peer personalities” that have (in
all but one case) followed each other in a fixed order. We call this repeating
pattern the “generational cycle.” The cycle lies at the heart of our story and
offers, we believe, an important explanation for why the story of America
unfolds as it does. Read together, our eighteen generational biographies present a
history of the American lifecycle and a history of cross-generational
relationships. These relationships—between parents and children, between
midlife leaders and youths coming of age, between elders and their heirs—depict
history as people actually live it, from growing up in their teens to growing old
in their seventies.
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, bom 1901-1924, age 66 to 89 as 1991 begins;
• “SILENT” midlifers, bom 1925-1942, age 48 to 65;