| ‘Talkin’ Bout My Generation’ SOC professor’s defense of Baby Boomers stirs up debate by matt getty
Photo by Jeff Watts |
What do flower power, Reaganomics, civil rights, disco, women’s liberation, Earth Day, and gas-guzzling SUVs have in common? They’re all buzzwords and catchphrases linked with the Baby Boom generation, which—in part because of the contradictions found in this list—has often been vilified in the popular media as self-serving and hypocritical. Boomers protested the establishment when threatened with the draft during the Vietnam War, the conventional argument goes, but they embraced excess and the status quo in the ’80s, and ’90s when doing so served their interests. According to AU’s School of Communication professor and proud Baby Boomer Leonard Steinhorn, however, this increasingly popular appraisal of the 80 million Americans born between the mid-1940s and early 1960s misses something. The truth. In his new book The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy, Steinhorn argues that if you examine the cultural history beneath the buzzwords, Baby Boomers have done as much for their country as the vaunted “Greatest Generation” that preceded them. Simply put, “we’re a better America today because of what Boomers have accomplished,” says Steinhorn. To understand exactly how, he explains, you have to look at the 1950s “without the nostalgia.” According to Steinhorn, this era, which Baby Boomers rejected, hid some troubling hypocrisies of its own. “We were a country that talked about freedom and equality, but we were sending out German shepherds to go after people who wanted to sit at a lunch counter or vote,” he explains. “It was a time when women were told to stay home, blacks and other minorities were told to stay separate, Jews and other religious minorities were told to stay inconspicuous, [and] gays were told to stay ashamed and in the closet.” Five decades later these attitudes have not only declined, but as Steinhorn puts it, “they’ve been completely taken off the table.” To get from there to here, he argues, America didn’t simply evolve; it was transformed by a generation that said, “We have to make this country better live up to its ideals.” Though the popular conceit holds that such thinking ended after the ’60s when the Boomers grew up and sold out, Steinhorn maintains that this reading of American history overlooks four decades of quiet work that turned the ’60s’ revolutionary ideas into today’s unquestioned truths. “The ’60s have been institutionalized,” he says. “They’ve been woven into the very fabric of our lives.” But this history rarely gets traced, says Steinhorn, because it doesn’t make for a compelling story. “This is stuff that will never become a movie like Saving Private Ryan,” he says, pointing to the growth of women in the workplace, the recognition of multiculturalism in education, the acceptance of interracial relationships, and the explosion of environmental legislation. “It’s not epic, and it’s not Homeric, but it’s the stuff of daily life that has a profound influence on who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we respect each other . . . You just can’t overlook the stuff of life and say that doesn’t count in history.” The product of years of informal inquiry and eight months of solid research culled from such sources as the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, The Greater Generation is one of the first serious efforts to empirically understand the maligned generation’s impact. As such, it’s already stirred up some opposition. Frequent Boomer critic Jonathan Yardley took issue with the book’s claims in a recent Washington Post review. Last week, during an American Forum debate on the book broadcast live on WAMU 88.5 FM, Heritage Foundation vice president Michael Franc sharply questioned its thesis. Steinhorn, in fact, admits that in addition to the praise the book’s received, he’s gotten “[his] share of hate mail.” None of it has been a surprise though. On the one hand, Steinhorn explains, “people don’t like to have their predispositions questioned,” but, on the other hand, he sees a political dimension to the controversy. “I think that this story of the good things that have happened because of . . . the social liberalism of the Baby Boom generation is largely overlooked because there’s this caricature of Boomers as a bunch of selfish, materialistic narcissists,” he explains. “And the people who are most vocal about that caricature are the people most threatened by the changes Boomers represent.” Thus far, Steinhorn remains confident that the book has a response for every complaint. To those who have said that it ignores the contributions of non-Boomer social change leaders, he argues that “no generation exists in a vacuum.”Among others their age, he says, non-Boomers like Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy were “generals without an army,” but “Boomers became their army.” Furthermore, he points out, “FDR and Ike were from a different generation than the World War II generation. Should they get the credit for [World War II] and not the ‘Greatest Generation’?” To readers who have said it’s not appropriate for Steinhorn to define his own generation’s legacy, he urges them to look not at the book’s author but rather at its facts. And to those who say its too soon for anyone to define that legacy, he argues that it was already being defined long before he began writing. “If I ran a Lexis-Nexis search that associated the words ‘Baby Boom’ with ‘materialistic,’ ‘self-absorbed,’ or ‘selfish,’ you’d get hundreds of hits as if this was the only identity of this generation,” he said during last week’s debate. “So I wanted to set the record straight and that’s why I wrote this book. Because we can’t have history and culture written by bumper stickers and headlines.” As this look beneath buzzwords and bumper stickers invites a more reasoned Baby Boomer debate, Steinhorn is ultimately less concerned with defending his own generation than he is with informing the next. The Boomer values of tolerance, pluralism, and equality have become so accepted today “they’re almost being taken for granted,” he says. “Somebody has to point out that these freedoms have not always been there, these values and norms have not always been there—that it’s taken some decades of hard work by average people [and] ordinary citizens to effect those changes.” |
