March 12, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment describes the first eight generations of America based on excerpts from Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991). The attached PDF has far more information than the following text. In the text I eliminated information on events, dates, and lifestyle as the generation aged leaving the character of the generations in skeleton terms. If you desire more information read the PDF.
To attain a feeling of what is not in the text, I included a sample of the additional information in two of the text generation descriptions. First, in the Liberty Generation you will see the events, dates, and data that I eliminated from the PDF. So, if you go to the PDF, you will find this information for all eight generations. [Note: the age numbers shown are the ages of people in that generation at the time of the event –from first born to last born.]
Second, in the Republican Generation you will find a Lifecycle description which describes the generation in its development as it ages, from Youth, to Coming of Age as an Adult, to Midlife, to Elderhood. The PDF includes a similar description for all eight generations.
There are two things to take note of as you read the generation descriptions. First, how different each generation is different. Second, compare the first generation of the Colonial Cycle – the Puritan Generation to the first generation of the Revolutionary Cycle – the Awakening Generation. Then do the same with each successive generation; in other words, compare the Cavalier Generation to the Liberty Generation, the Glorious Generation to the Republican Generation, and the Enlightenment Generation to the Compromise Generation. The comparison is what lead the authors to label them: Idealist for the first generation of the cycle, Reactive for the second, Civic for the third, and Adaptive for the fourth.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment describes the first eight generations of America based on excerpts from Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991). The attached PDF has far more information than the following text. In the text I eliminated information on events, dates, and lifestyle as the generation aged leaving the character of the generations in skeleton terms. If you desire more information read the PDF.
To attain a feeling of what is not in the text, I included a sample of the additional information in two of the text generation descriptions. First, in the Liberty Generation you will see the events, dates, and data that I eliminated from the PDF. So, if you go to the PDF, you will find this information for all eight generations. [Note: the age numbers shown are the ages of people in that generation at the time of the event –from first born to last born.]
Second, in the Republican Generation you will find a Lifecycle description which describes the generation in its development as it ages, from Youth, to Coming of Age as an Adult, to Midlife, to Elderhood. The PDF includes a similar description for all eight generations.
There are two things to take note of as you read the generation descriptions. First, how different each generation is different. Second, compare the first generation of the Colonial Cycle – the Puritan Generation to the first generation of the Revolutionary Cycle – the Awakening Generation. Then do the same with each successive generation; in other words, compare the Cavalier Generation to the Liberty Generation, the Glorious Generation to the Republican Generation, and the Enlightenment Generation to the Compromise Generation. The comparison is what lead the authors to label them: Idealist for the first generation of the cycle, Reactive for the second, Civic for the third, and Adaptive for the fourth.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE STUDY OF AMERICAN GENERATIONS – SEGMENT 2
THE COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY CYCLES – EXCERPTS
THE FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE COLONIAL CYCLE
Puritan Generation Born 1584 – 1614; Type: Idealist.
The Puritan Generation wrenched the West out of Renaissance complacency, founded a religious utopia in the New World, and comprised all but a handful of Europe’s first colonists on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Although a mere 12,000 emigrated to Massachusetts during the 1630s, after just their first year they outnumbered all of the adult colonists who had yet settled in New England (including the tiny band of Mayflower pilgrims who had migrated ten years earlier). By the end of the decade, they outnumbered the combined adult population of all the other English colonies in America, including the 33-year-old colony of Virginia.
Spiritual self-absorption was both the strength and the weakness of this generation. It gave the Puritans the confidence to plant the first successful colonies in the American wilderness. Yet it did so by making them think they were building the only perfect society since Adam’s Fall. They tried to freeze their church of peer-love and isolate it from every external corruption.
Cavalier Generation Born 1615 – 1647; Type: Reactive.
At their worst, the Cavaliers were an unlettered generation of little faith and crude ambition. At their best, the Cavaliers were a generation whose perverse defiance of moral authority gave America its first instinct for individual autonomy, for the “rights” of property and liberty – concepts utterly foreign to their Puritan elders. Yet whatever the colony, Cavaliers everywhere met life on similar terms: discarded in a childhood without structure, shamed while coming of age, and pushed into adulthood with few hopes other than climbing fast and avoiding judgment.
A young male servant coming to Maryland in the 1640s stood only a two-thirds chance of surviving the voyage. If he made it ashore, he faced a 57% chance of living out his indenture term, a 29% chance of ever owning enough land to support himself, a 6% chance of dying with an estate worth more than 1,000 pounds, and less than a 1% chance of ending up a respected “planter-merchant.”
Throughout the colonies, the Cavaliers probably represent the largest one-generation decline in educational achievement from their next-elders in American history. In the Chesapeake, 60% of young immigrants could not sign a name to their indenture contracts. The ultimate gamble and purest of Cavalier lifestyles: piracy and “buccaneering” was a rising plague along the Atlantic coast from the 1650s forward. Why not go for it? Everyone kept telling the Cavalier he was a loser anyway. A dead loser, he would no longer have to listen. A rich loser, no one would dare tell him in his presence. Even as elders they never tried to hide their generation’s faults, especially their vulgarity and irreligion. Nor did Cavalier ever stop blaming themselves for not measuring up to their elders. Most Cavaliers died before age 45; the rest entered old age without wealth or pretense – crusty, used up, and unaware of what they had given.
The Glorious Generation: Born 1648 – 1673; Type: Civic.
On the eve of the first Glorious births, Puritans entering midlife began changing their minds about how children should be raised. In 1647, lamenting the “great neglect of many parents” that had turned out so many jaundiced Cavaliers, the Massachusetts assembly ordered towns to provide primary schooling for children – a landmark statute soon copied elsewhere in New England. Also in 1647, Virginia required counties to “take up and educate” abandoned children and the next year opened its first “orphan’s court.”
Midlife Glorious took pride in their worldly accomplishments. They had reason. Throughout their active adulthood, from the 1670s to the 1720s, they presided over colonial America’s most robust era of economic growth, a 50 to 100 percent advance in living standards by most statistical measures. The Glorious succeeded not with Cavalier risk-taking, but rather by establishing “orderly” markets, pioneering paper money, and building what they liked to call “public works.” By the end of their lives, the Glorious had overcome every major challenge they had faced coming of age. They had taken America, politically, from chaos to stability; materially, from poverty to affluence; and culturally, from fanaticism to science.
Enlightenment Generation: Born 1674 – 1700; Type: Adaptive
Entering adulthood just as peace and prosperity dawned, they appreciated their good fortune and did not dare risk upsetting the status quo. Yet behind all the nice ornaments they added to colonial life—the minuets, carriages, and libraries; the lawsuits, vote counting, and purchased pews – lay an inner life of gnawing anxiety. The absence of a coming-of-age catharsis robbed them of a visceral peer bond. It made them better mediators for other generations than confident leaders of their own – and it impelled them to hunker down early a caution for which they paid by missing release later on.
The Enlighteners produced the first credentialed professionals in science, medicine, religion, and law: the first printers and postal carriers; and their wit and learning, they had one common denominator; a fatal indecisiveness, a fear of stepping too far in any direction. Enlighteners specialized in stalemating executive action through legislative process.
The Enlighteners were the most decent, accommodating, and pluralist of colonial generations. Their collective legacy can be inferred from the eulogies, which typically reflect a painful struggle for equilibrium. As mediators between the civic hubris of their elders and the inner fire of their juniors. Enlighteners prevented the colonial world from twisting too far in either direction. They pioneered “freedom of the press,” used their relative affluence to adorn colonial culture, and cultivated a respect for “due process” that their grandchildren later incorporated into a national Constitution. Yet for all the balance they brought to public life, their own personal lives took them on a zigzag path of overcompensation. As rising adults, they knuckled under too easily to rulebook conformity. No one called the Enlighteners a great generation, but then again, they did not try to be. They sought approval from others and tried to be helpful in great struggles that – often to their secret frustration -- never seemed to hit them full force.
THE FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE
Awakening Generation Born 1701 – 1723 Type: Idealistic.
The Battle of Bunker Hill tested a vision that had first inspired them decades ago as coming-of-age youngsters. Back then, an upswelling of godly euphoria had incited them to rage against their fathers. Much later, by the time of the Revolution, that ideal had matured into stern principles of civic virtue which leading Awakeners – from Sam Adams to Benjamin Franklin – preached entirely to their juniors. It was time for the old to think and the young to act.
The Great Awakening (1734 – 1743), began as a series of isolated spiritual revivals in the Connecticut Valley. It spread quickly, especially in the northern and middle colonies, and reach a peak in 1741 during the rousing American tour of the English. The Great Awakening has been credited with 250 new churches and 200,000 religious’ conversions, “chiefly” or “especially” the work of “young people.” Young spiritual prophets hit the road – converting Indians, denouncing slavery, gathering separatist churches, and founding communes. Rising Awakeners made poor citizens. Most avoided voting or running for office, and many left home at an early age to join newer, younger towns. In effect, they reversed their parent’s lifestyle. Values first, they insisted, then, worldly things.
Their moralistic leadership dominated the initial revolutionary movement. In the Continental Congress, old Awakeners enacted blue laws to make “true religion and good morals” the national credo. During the war, they relinquished political power to make room for the much younger-Republicans whom they trusted and loved. But even in the 1780s and 1790s, elderly Awakeners retained a voice of authority, a voice the young took seriously. Many of their political leaders favored a new Constitution that would empower the rising Republican elite, and many of their clergymen continued to agitate against the “sin of slavery,” forcing the legal or de facto emancipation of northern slaves by the end of the century.
Liberty Generation Born 1724 – 1741 Type: Reactive; Age Location: Great Awakening in youth, American Revolution Crisis in midlife. Population 1,100,000, Percent immigrants 24%, Percent Slaves 19%. U.S. Presidents: George Washington (1732-1799), John Adams (1735 -1826).
Significant History and Lifestyle:
Their lifecycle drove many of them to the brink of madness. Raised in an era of spiritual upheaval and economic dislocation, Liberty children hardly knew the care and protection of close family life. Until their mid-forties, they cut an unparalleled swath of crime, riot, and violence through American history. Hit by the Revolution just as they were entering midlife, the Liberty responded with characteristic frenzy. They mixed heroism with treachery, scrapped with each other, and ended up distrusted by everybody. No other generation so eagerly risked their lives for the Declaration of Independence. Nor did any other “turn Tory” in such massive numbers. The Liberty knew they were a black sheep among generations. When young, they felt the horrified dismay of elders who saw in them so few principles and so much cynicism. “Nothing has ever hurt me so much,” cried Benjamin Franklin of his Tory son William, “a man of deep deceit and light vanity” whom he later disinherited. In midlife, most Liberty deferred thanklessly to their gifted and confident juniors. General Washington trusted his youthful Republican aides far more than his own peers.
The Liberty matured into a notorious generation of drinkers, thieves, and rioters – to the dismay of elder Awakener moralists. They consumed more alcohol per capita than any other colonial generation. Between 1760 and 1775 they led more violent mobs than the cumulative total for all prior generations.
Republican Generation Born 1742 -1766; Type: Civic
In 1775, they were the dutiful young Minutemen who stood their ground at Concord bridge. In the winter of 1778, they were the cheerful soldiers who kept faith with General Washington at Velley Forge. Seven years after Yorktown, in 1788, they became the rising adult achievers – so many of them already famous – who celebrated the news of their new Constitution. Thus did the REPUBLICAN GENERATION come of age, performing the deeds of collective valor that gave birth to a new nation. Republicans saw themselves as tireless reasoners and builders, chosen by history to wrest order from chaos. Their most famous statesman (Jefferson) won equal fame as a scientist and architect Their most famous legislator (Madison) was hailed as the master builder of the Constitution.
While any in the Republican elite disapproved of slavery (and succeeded in ending the African slave trade), what they dislike worse was an angry debate about it. They feared any divisiveness that might imperil the great republic they had created. For this generation, some evils had to be accommodated for what they believed to be the greater good. They acted accordingly – and, late in life, often wondered why their children could not.
No other generation has ever matched the 47-year tenure spanning the Republicans’ first and last years of national leadership – from John Jay in 1778 (elected president of the Continental Congress at age 33) to James Monroe (whose second term as U.S. President expired in 1825 at age 67).
The Republican Lifecycle:
YOUTH: Around 1745, routine brutality among and against colonial teenagers aroused little adult sympathy. By 1770, the year of the “Boston Massacre,” the violent death of one child was enough to spark vehement public outrage. Over the course of just 25 years, American attitudes toward the young, reversed direction entirely – from neglect to protection, from blame to comfort. Despairing the wayward Liberty, midlife Awakeners wanted to ensure that this new crop of kids would grow up to be smart and cooperative servants to a dawning vision, a republic of virtue.
COMING OF AGE: When aging Awakeners stepped down from their posts during the war, many Republicans leapfrogged their Liberty next elders to fill vacancies. Riding a dazzling reputation for genius and optimism, they swept into town offices and the Continental Congress, drafted state constitutions and policy treatises, and grabbed most of the new state and national offices. Here these young heroes won their culminating victory drafting a stronger Constitution and ratifying it over churlish Liberty opposition.
RISING ADULTHOOD: Proud of their “mechanical courage” they had learned as a soldier, they behaved collegially and placed public interest over private gain. Energetic builders, they founded “Societies for Advancement of industry, invented the cotton gin (Whitney), and launched steamboats (Fulton).
MIDLIFE: They all arrived together: a new century, a new capital, a new President, and a new generation. Midlife Republicans deemed nothing to be beyond their collective power. So, it often seemed. From Jefferson’s Northwest Ordinance to Monroe’s acquisition of Florida, the Republicans quintupled the effective size of America’s domain which included the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
ELDERHOOD: In the fall of 1823, the public watched in awe as three white-haired and magisterial Virginians (Monroe, Madison, and Jefferson – averaged age of 72) conferred over a declaration today known as the Monroe Doctrine. With this grand twilight moment of Republican statecraft, Americans of all ages sensed that a magnificent generation was passing.
Yet, having hoped for so much, elderly Republicans expressed frustration over their waning influence on public life. After hearing the angry slavery debates of 1820, the 78-year-old Jefferson, shocked two younger generations when he declared: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.” A half century later, they tried to make their own young into replicas of themselves – to make them into “Republican machines” able “to perform their parts properly in the great machine of government of state.” It seemed a simple enough task for such powerful and heroic builders – the only “generation” of Americans praised throughout their lives (and every afterward) for unequaled glory. But it was this single task at which they failed utterly.
Compromise Generation Born 1767 – 1791 Type: Adaptive.
They lived an awkward lifecycle. Outwardly, fortune blessed them: Compromisers were coddled in childhood, suffered little in war, came of age with quiet obedience, enjoyed a lifetime of rising prosperity, and managed to defer national crisis until most of them had died. But behind these outer blessings lay inner curses. Their birthyear boundaries reflect nonparticipation in the major event of their era. Born in 1767, the eldest watched the Revolution as children and came of age when the military and political triumphs of the Republicans were already complete. Born in 1791, the youngest reached adulthood just ahead of new youth movements in religion and literature.
Compromisers spent their later years trying to please or calm their next juniors. History records little that is distinctly theirs. They sought what President Jackson called “the middle course” – between two regions (North and South), two parties (Whig and Democrat), and two neighboring peer personalities (confident manliness and moral passion). Their confusion spilled over into self-conscious cruelty toward slaves and Indians, chronic ambivalence about economic and territorial expansion, and – late in live – paralyzing irresolution over the approaching collision between abolitionism and King Cotton. All these efforts earned mixed reviews from other generations.
Around 1820, thirtyish late-wavers joined the rage of canal-building and cloth manufacture in the north, or migrated to the southwestern frontier, where they could make fortunes growing cotton. They knew their destiny lay in dutiful expertise, not heroism.
During the 1820s, southern compromisers founded dozens of antislavery societies, but their hopes for gradual emancipation were soon dashed by the polarizing rhetoric of rising Transcendentals. (By the late 1830s, all of these southern societies had been disbanded). As America entered the 1850s there seemed nobody left to lead the nation but weak, two-faced trimmers and angry young men. Meanwhile, as society raced toward urbanization and westward expansion, the American family drifted toward trouble, with rising divorce rates, budding feminism, and a disturbingly wild new batch of (Gilded) children.
Compromisers entered elderhood watching America drift toward painful outcomes: Indian removal, anti-immigrant riots, lawless frontiers, slave chases, and sectional hatred. Their last chance to mediate rising Transcendental passions – culminating in their Compromise of 1850 – earned them (Webster especially) precisely what Clay feared, the “scorn and contempt” of their next-juniors. A few years later, the dying Buchanan blamed the Civil War on both “the fanatics of the North” and “the fanatics of the South.” Like Buchanan, most compromisers died lamenting both sides, just as they had lived trying to accommodate both sides. Such is the painful, might-have-been legacy of a kind but confused generation sandwiched between two others of extraordinary power. The Compromisers inherited grandeur and tried to perfect it by adding humor, sensitivity, expertise, and fairness. They passed away fearing they had failed to preserve, much less perfect, the achievements of their forefathers. No American generation ever had a sadder departure.
Source: Generations: The history of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY CYCLES – EXCERPTS
THE FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE COLONIAL CYCLE
Puritan Generation Born 1584 – 1614; Type: Idealist.
The Puritan Generation wrenched the West out of Renaissance complacency, founded a religious utopia in the New World, and comprised all but a handful of Europe’s first colonists on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Although a mere 12,000 emigrated to Massachusetts during the 1630s, after just their first year they outnumbered all of the adult colonists who had yet settled in New England (including the tiny band of Mayflower pilgrims who had migrated ten years earlier). By the end of the decade, they outnumbered the combined adult population of all the other English colonies in America, including the 33-year-old colony of Virginia.
Spiritual self-absorption was both the strength and the weakness of this generation. It gave the Puritans the confidence to plant the first successful colonies in the American wilderness. Yet it did so by making them think they were building the only perfect society since Adam’s Fall. They tried to freeze their church of peer-love and isolate it from every external corruption.
Cavalier Generation Born 1615 – 1647; Type: Reactive.
At their worst, the Cavaliers were an unlettered generation of little faith and crude ambition. At their best, the Cavaliers were a generation whose perverse defiance of moral authority gave America its first instinct for individual autonomy, for the “rights” of property and liberty – concepts utterly foreign to their Puritan elders. Yet whatever the colony, Cavaliers everywhere met life on similar terms: discarded in a childhood without structure, shamed while coming of age, and pushed into adulthood with few hopes other than climbing fast and avoiding judgment.
A young male servant coming to Maryland in the 1640s stood only a two-thirds chance of surviving the voyage. If he made it ashore, he faced a 57% chance of living out his indenture term, a 29% chance of ever owning enough land to support himself, a 6% chance of dying with an estate worth more than 1,000 pounds, and less than a 1% chance of ending up a respected “planter-merchant.”
Throughout the colonies, the Cavaliers probably represent the largest one-generation decline in educational achievement from their next-elders in American history. In the Chesapeake, 60% of young immigrants could not sign a name to their indenture contracts. The ultimate gamble and purest of Cavalier lifestyles: piracy and “buccaneering” was a rising plague along the Atlantic coast from the 1650s forward. Why not go for it? Everyone kept telling the Cavalier he was a loser anyway. A dead loser, he would no longer have to listen. A rich loser, no one would dare tell him in his presence. Even as elders they never tried to hide their generation’s faults, especially their vulgarity and irreligion. Nor did Cavalier ever stop blaming themselves for not measuring up to their elders. Most Cavaliers died before age 45; the rest entered old age without wealth or pretense – crusty, used up, and unaware of what they had given.
The Glorious Generation: Born 1648 – 1673; Type: Civic.
On the eve of the first Glorious births, Puritans entering midlife began changing their minds about how children should be raised. In 1647, lamenting the “great neglect of many parents” that had turned out so many jaundiced Cavaliers, the Massachusetts assembly ordered towns to provide primary schooling for children – a landmark statute soon copied elsewhere in New England. Also in 1647, Virginia required counties to “take up and educate” abandoned children and the next year opened its first “orphan’s court.”
Midlife Glorious took pride in their worldly accomplishments. They had reason. Throughout their active adulthood, from the 1670s to the 1720s, they presided over colonial America’s most robust era of economic growth, a 50 to 100 percent advance in living standards by most statistical measures. The Glorious succeeded not with Cavalier risk-taking, but rather by establishing “orderly” markets, pioneering paper money, and building what they liked to call “public works.” By the end of their lives, the Glorious had overcome every major challenge they had faced coming of age. They had taken America, politically, from chaos to stability; materially, from poverty to affluence; and culturally, from fanaticism to science.
Enlightenment Generation: Born 1674 – 1700; Type: Adaptive
Entering adulthood just as peace and prosperity dawned, they appreciated their good fortune and did not dare risk upsetting the status quo. Yet behind all the nice ornaments they added to colonial life—the minuets, carriages, and libraries; the lawsuits, vote counting, and purchased pews – lay an inner life of gnawing anxiety. The absence of a coming-of-age catharsis robbed them of a visceral peer bond. It made them better mediators for other generations than confident leaders of their own – and it impelled them to hunker down early a caution for which they paid by missing release later on.
The Enlighteners produced the first credentialed professionals in science, medicine, religion, and law: the first printers and postal carriers; and their wit and learning, they had one common denominator; a fatal indecisiveness, a fear of stepping too far in any direction. Enlighteners specialized in stalemating executive action through legislative process.
The Enlighteners were the most decent, accommodating, and pluralist of colonial generations. Their collective legacy can be inferred from the eulogies, which typically reflect a painful struggle for equilibrium. As mediators between the civic hubris of their elders and the inner fire of their juniors. Enlighteners prevented the colonial world from twisting too far in either direction. They pioneered “freedom of the press,” used their relative affluence to adorn colonial culture, and cultivated a respect for “due process” that their grandchildren later incorporated into a national Constitution. Yet for all the balance they brought to public life, their own personal lives took them on a zigzag path of overcompensation. As rising adults, they knuckled under too easily to rulebook conformity. No one called the Enlighteners a great generation, but then again, they did not try to be. They sought approval from others and tried to be helpful in great struggles that – often to their secret frustration -- never seemed to hit them full force.
THE FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY CYCLE
Awakening Generation Born 1701 – 1723 Type: Idealistic.
The Battle of Bunker Hill tested a vision that had first inspired them decades ago as coming-of-age youngsters. Back then, an upswelling of godly euphoria had incited them to rage against their fathers. Much later, by the time of the Revolution, that ideal had matured into stern principles of civic virtue which leading Awakeners – from Sam Adams to Benjamin Franklin – preached entirely to their juniors. It was time for the old to think and the young to act.
The Great Awakening (1734 – 1743), began as a series of isolated spiritual revivals in the Connecticut Valley. It spread quickly, especially in the northern and middle colonies, and reach a peak in 1741 during the rousing American tour of the English. The Great Awakening has been credited with 250 new churches and 200,000 religious’ conversions, “chiefly” or “especially” the work of “young people.” Young spiritual prophets hit the road – converting Indians, denouncing slavery, gathering separatist churches, and founding communes. Rising Awakeners made poor citizens. Most avoided voting or running for office, and many left home at an early age to join newer, younger towns. In effect, they reversed their parent’s lifestyle. Values first, they insisted, then, worldly things.
Their moralistic leadership dominated the initial revolutionary movement. In the Continental Congress, old Awakeners enacted blue laws to make “true religion and good morals” the national credo. During the war, they relinquished political power to make room for the much younger-Republicans whom they trusted and loved. But even in the 1780s and 1790s, elderly Awakeners retained a voice of authority, a voice the young took seriously. Many of their political leaders favored a new Constitution that would empower the rising Republican elite, and many of their clergymen continued to agitate against the “sin of slavery,” forcing the legal or de facto emancipation of northern slaves by the end of the century.
Liberty Generation Born 1724 – 1741 Type: Reactive; Age Location: Great Awakening in youth, American Revolution Crisis in midlife. Population 1,100,000, Percent immigrants 24%, Percent Slaves 19%. U.S. Presidents: George Washington (1732-1799), John Adams (1735 -1826).
Significant History and Lifestyle:
- 1735 Ten-year diphtheria epidemic begins in norther colonies (Age: 0 – 11)
- 1756 French and Indian War declared, “privateering madness” in ports (Age 15 – 32)
- 1765 England imposes Stamp Act, rising adults organize “Liberty” mobs (Age: 25 – 41)
- 1775 Patrick Henry’s speech; Paul Revere’s ride; Battle of Bunker Hill (Age: 34 – 51)
- 1776 Declaration of Independence signed (Age: 35 – 52)
- 1781 Washington defeats Cornwallis at Yorktown; fighting stops (Age: 40 – 57)
- 1796 Washington refuses to run for third term (Age: 55 – 72)
- 1800 Nation mourns Washington’s death; Adams fails to win reelection (Age: 59 – 76)
Their lifecycle drove many of them to the brink of madness. Raised in an era of spiritual upheaval and economic dislocation, Liberty children hardly knew the care and protection of close family life. Until their mid-forties, they cut an unparalleled swath of crime, riot, and violence through American history. Hit by the Revolution just as they were entering midlife, the Liberty responded with characteristic frenzy. They mixed heroism with treachery, scrapped with each other, and ended up distrusted by everybody. No other generation so eagerly risked their lives for the Declaration of Independence. Nor did any other “turn Tory” in such massive numbers. The Liberty knew they were a black sheep among generations. When young, they felt the horrified dismay of elders who saw in them so few principles and so much cynicism. “Nothing has ever hurt me so much,” cried Benjamin Franklin of his Tory son William, “a man of deep deceit and light vanity” whom he later disinherited. In midlife, most Liberty deferred thanklessly to their gifted and confident juniors. General Washington trusted his youthful Republican aides far more than his own peers.
The Liberty matured into a notorious generation of drinkers, thieves, and rioters – to the dismay of elder Awakener moralists. They consumed more alcohol per capita than any other colonial generation. Between 1760 and 1775 they led more violent mobs than the cumulative total for all prior generations.
Republican Generation Born 1742 -1766; Type: Civic
In 1775, they were the dutiful young Minutemen who stood their ground at Concord bridge. In the winter of 1778, they were the cheerful soldiers who kept faith with General Washington at Velley Forge. Seven years after Yorktown, in 1788, they became the rising adult achievers – so many of them already famous – who celebrated the news of their new Constitution. Thus did the REPUBLICAN GENERATION come of age, performing the deeds of collective valor that gave birth to a new nation. Republicans saw themselves as tireless reasoners and builders, chosen by history to wrest order from chaos. Their most famous statesman (Jefferson) won equal fame as a scientist and architect Their most famous legislator (Madison) was hailed as the master builder of the Constitution.
While any in the Republican elite disapproved of slavery (and succeeded in ending the African slave trade), what they dislike worse was an angry debate about it. They feared any divisiveness that might imperil the great republic they had created. For this generation, some evils had to be accommodated for what they believed to be the greater good. They acted accordingly – and, late in life, often wondered why their children could not.
No other generation has ever matched the 47-year tenure spanning the Republicans’ first and last years of national leadership – from John Jay in 1778 (elected president of the Continental Congress at age 33) to James Monroe (whose second term as U.S. President expired in 1825 at age 67).
The Republican Lifecycle:
YOUTH: Around 1745, routine brutality among and against colonial teenagers aroused little adult sympathy. By 1770, the year of the “Boston Massacre,” the violent death of one child was enough to spark vehement public outrage. Over the course of just 25 years, American attitudes toward the young, reversed direction entirely – from neglect to protection, from blame to comfort. Despairing the wayward Liberty, midlife Awakeners wanted to ensure that this new crop of kids would grow up to be smart and cooperative servants to a dawning vision, a republic of virtue.
COMING OF AGE: When aging Awakeners stepped down from their posts during the war, many Republicans leapfrogged their Liberty next elders to fill vacancies. Riding a dazzling reputation for genius and optimism, they swept into town offices and the Continental Congress, drafted state constitutions and policy treatises, and grabbed most of the new state and national offices. Here these young heroes won their culminating victory drafting a stronger Constitution and ratifying it over churlish Liberty opposition.
RISING ADULTHOOD: Proud of their “mechanical courage” they had learned as a soldier, they behaved collegially and placed public interest over private gain. Energetic builders, they founded “Societies for Advancement of industry, invented the cotton gin (Whitney), and launched steamboats (Fulton).
MIDLIFE: They all arrived together: a new century, a new capital, a new President, and a new generation. Midlife Republicans deemed nothing to be beyond their collective power. So, it often seemed. From Jefferson’s Northwest Ordinance to Monroe’s acquisition of Florida, the Republicans quintupled the effective size of America’s domain which included the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
ELDERHOOD: In the fall of 1823, the public watched in awe as three white-haired and magisterial Virginians (Monroe, Madison, and Jefferson – averaged age of 72) conferred over a declaration today known as the Monroe Doctrine. With this grand twilight moment of Republican statecraft, Americans of all ages sensed that a magnificent generation was passing.
Yet, having hoped for so much, elderly Republicans expressed frustration over their waning influence on public life. After hearing the angry slavery debates of 1820, the 78-year-old Jefferson, shocked two younger generations when he declared: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.” A half century later, they tried to make their own young into replicas of themselves – to make them into “Republican machines” able “to perform their parts properly in the great machine of government of state.” It seemed a simple enough task for such powerful and heroic builders – the only “generation” of Americans praised throughout their lives (and every afterward) for unequaled glory. But it was this single task at which they failed utterly.
Compromise Generation Born 1767 – 1791 Type: Adaptive.
They lived an awkward lifecycle. Outwardly, fortune blessed them: Compromisers were coddled in childhood, suffered little in war, came of age with quiet obedience, enjoyed a lifetime of rising prosperity, and managed to defer national crisis until most of them had died. But behind these outer blessings lay inner curses. Their birthyear boundaries reflect nonparticipation in the major event of their era. Born in 1767, the eldest watched the Revolution as children and came of age when the military and political triumphs of the Republicans were already complete. Born in 1791, the youngest reached adulthood just ahead of new youth movements in religion and literature.
Compromisers spent their later years trying to please or calm their next juniors. History records little that is distinctly theirs. They sought what President Jackson called “the middle course” – between two regions (North and South), two parties (Whig and Democrat), and two neighboring peer personalities (confident manliness and moral passion). Their confusion spilled over into self-conscious cruelty toward slaves and Indians, chronic ambivalence about economic and territorial expansion, and – late in live – paralyzing irresolution over the approaching collision between abolitionism and King Cotton. All these efforts earned mixed reviews from other generations.
Around 1820, thirtyish late-wavers joined the rage of canal-building and cloth manufacture in the north, or migrated to the southwestern frontier, where they could make fortunes growing cotton. They knew their destiny lay in dutiful expertise, not heroism.
During the 1820s, southern compromisers founded dozens of antislavery societies, but their hopes for gradual emancipation were soon dashed by the polarizing rhetoric of rising Transcendentals. (By the late 1830s, all of these southern societies had been disbanded). As America entered the 1850s there seemed nobody left to lead the nation but weak, two-faced trimmers and angry young men. Meanwhile, as society raced toward urbanization and westward expansion, the American family drifted toward trouble, with rising divorce rates, budding feminism, and a disturbingly wild new batch of (Gilded) children.
Compromisers entered elderhood watching America drift toward painful outcomes: Indian removal, anti-immigrant riots, lawless frontiers, slave chases, and sectional hatred. Their last chance to mediate rising Transcendental passions – culminating in their Compromise of 1850 – earned them (Webster especially) precisely what Clay feared, the “scorn and contempt” of their next-juniors. A few years later, the dying Buchanan blamed the Civil War on both “the fanatics of the North” and “the fanatics of the South.” Like Buchanan, most compromisers died lamenting both sides, just as they had lived trying to accommodate both sides. Such is the painful, might-have-been legacy of a kind but confused generation sandwiched between two others of extraordinary power. The Compromisers inherited grandeur and tried to perfect it by adding humor, sensitivity, expertise, and fairness. They passed away fearing they had failed to preserve, much less perfect, the achievements of their forefathers. No American generation ever had a sadder departure.
Source: Generations: The history of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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