Since I was born in 1948, naturally I've always considered myself to be part of the baby boomer generation.
And since I went to college at San Jose State University from 1966-71, the height of the Flower Child movement in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as elsewhere, and I embraced marijuana, psychedelics, long hair, and other trappings of that movement, naturally I've always considered myself to be a hippie who just happens to look now like the old man that I am.
What I've never considered myself to be is either a yuppie or the generation that spawned the hugely annoying Young Urban Professional who worshipped money and conspicuous consumption. That was so not me or my hippie generation. We danced to the different drummer of liberal causes, caring for the planet, equality for all.
Imagine my shock, then, when I read "What Happened to the Yuppie" by Louis Menand in the July 27, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. (Title in online edition is "When Yuppies Ruled.") This is a book review of Tom McGrath's Triumph of the Yuppie: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.
In the first part of the article I came across some facts that undermined my confidence that I was part of a generation of hippies.
The demographic that the term was intended to pick out—professionals under forty living in cities—was fairly small in 1984, something like 1.2 million people. But there were not a lot of bona-fide hippies in the nineteen-sixties, either.
In 1967, only one per cent of college students said that they had tried LSD, and in 1969 Newsweek estimated that there were ten thousand people living in communes—probably a lowball estimate, but, whatever the number, it was not huge, and communes tend to have a short life span.
Hippies and yuppies signified not as political constituencies but as social types. A social type stands for something that people think is important to identify either with or against. As with the Swiftie. There are people who really want to be Swifties, and there are people who can’t believe that there are people who really want to be Swifties.
But, no matter how little you care about Swifties, you have to have an opinion. Even professing indifference is an opinion. And your view on Swifties says something about you. You’re the kind of person who says whatever it was you just said about Swifties—or yuppies or hippies. It all hangs together.
Okay, that left most of my hippie self-image intact. Sure, most people in my generation didn't identify as hippies, but at least we were highly sympathetic toward the elevated values of hippies -- which were ever so different from the crass materialism of the yuppies.
However, reading onward in the article, I learned something highly disturbing: the yuppies that I looked down upon were baby boomers, my generation. And they didn't change from being hippies to yuppies; they had yuppie-dom in them all along. Yikes! I felt self-image ground crumbling beneath my feet.
McGrath is insistent, even a little overinsistent, on making sense of the yuppies as baby boomers. The idea is that, having been dissidents and countercultural idealists in the nineteen-sixties, the boomers flipped in the nineteen-eighties to embrace capitalism and materialism.
McGrath presents this less as a sellout than as a colorful new chapter in the history of postwar America as the pig passes through the python.
But, once you do the math, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The baby boom began in July, 1946, and ended in December, 1964—representing approximately seventy-six million people. Almost none of those people were actively involved in the political, social, or cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties. They were much too young.
It’s the difference between listening to the Beatles and being the Beatles. 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 postwar American social history.
Sigh... This is probably true. I hadn't thought much before about the leaders of the 60's social change movements being considerably older than us baby boomers, even those like me who were at the leading edge of the baby boom generation.
I always thought that we were revolutionary hippies. But the article argues that we're better thought of as traditionalist yuppies. Best I can come up with is that my generation is a mixture of each. I'm good at wishful thinking.
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