March 19, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
The Civil War Cycle had some unique generational aspects.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The Civil War Cycle had some unique generational aspects.
- The Civil War Crisis social moment had a profound effect on all three generations – seemingly much more than any social moment in American history.
- The Gilded generation transformed in midlife from a recessive to dominant generation which was most unusual. The transformation was most fortuitous as the era featured weak presidents.
- The entire Civil War Cycle was wrought with sadness from the horrors of the war – the per capita casualty rate exceeded the casualty rate of eight World War IIs and exceeded the cumulative total of all other American wars – to the extreme poverty of two generations in elderhood, to the crime rate of “street orphans” of the Gilded generation.
- Yet, the country emerged with a growing industrial economy of the 1870s and 1880s, blemished with the Jim Crow laws following Reconstruction.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE STUDY OF AMERICAN GENERATIONS – SEGMENT 3
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE – EXCERPTS
The Civil War Cycle had its origin when the failed Presidential bid of Andrew Jakson in 1824 fired a fresh mood of radicalism among coming-of-age Transcendentals – an accelerating enthusiasm over social reform, abolitionism and utopian communalism. The cycle extended through the pitched battles of the Civil War and came to an inglorious end with the conformism and spiritual decline of the “Gilded Age” or the 1870s and 1880s. Climaxing in tragedy, the cycle failed to produce a Civic-type generation. After swiftly elbowing aside Transcendental leadership in the years following the war, the Reactive Gilded transformed in midlife from a recessive to a dominant generation, assuming some of the traits (secularism, conformism, lengthy political tenure, and an indulgent style of child nurture) associated with the Civic type of life – but without the hubris of crisis-era success. Though first wave Progressives began life with a nurture similar to that of a Civic childhood, the trauma of war caused this generation to come of age smothered instead of empowered.
Depiction of the Three Generations in 1861 -- the Start of the Civil War.
Lincoln’s TRANSCENDENTAL GENERATION (Idealist, then age 40 to 69) had, in their twenties provided the original core of the 1830s-era evangelical and abolitionist movement. The extremism of William Lloyd Garrison, the stridency of young plantation owners, AND THE MEMORY OF Nat Turner’s violent slave rebellion had worked to snuff out any Compromiser hope of peaceful weaning the South from slavery. Now in their fifties, this generation was fully prepared to shed younger blood to attain what they knew was right. Preaching from pulpits and railing from Congress, peers of John Brown, Harriet “Moses” Tubman,” Julia Ward Howe, and Robert E Lee looked to war for what New Englanders heralded as “the glory of the coming of the Lord” and Virginians “the baptism of blood” for their newborn confederacy. The hand of God was felt in Richmond no less than in Washington – and over the next four years, these two capitals of “His Truth” would be bisected by a hundred-mile scar of mud and blood. All their lives, Transcendentals were a generation others feared but followed.
Stonewall Jackson’s GILDED GENERATION (Reactive, age 19 to 39) comprised the “ghastly wretches” Congressman Riddle saw scrambling away across Bull Run Creek. They had signed up for what they had expected to be a quick adventure, with maybe a little glory and profit mixed in – not much different from the California gold fields to which many had rushed as teenagers. For Gilded whites, any resolution at all to the thundering hatred between elder abolitionists and elder “Southrons” would at last allow them to settle the western frontier. For Gilded blacks, including the slaves who began fleeing northward on the “underground railroad,” Bull Run marked a necessary first step (albeit a tactical setback) toward flesh-and-blood freedom. But as the war settled into its meaner, later years, the jaunty opinion of their generation would sour. The same 25-year-olds who had shrieked or heard the rebel yell would, much later in their sixties, yell remember Bull Run – and Antietam, Gettysburg, and Atlanta – and warn the young against the horrors of war. Few would listen.
For Wilson’s PROGRESSIVE GENERATION (Adaptive, age 2 to 18), the news of Bull Run signaled the beginning of a family trauma that was destined to pass over their childhood like a dark and cruel cloud. They would not see daylight until 1865, when Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train journeyed from Wahington through New York to Illinois. The black-creped cortege would be seen by an astonishing seven million Americans, nearly one-fifty the population of the reunited nation.
In the Civil War, the midlife Transcendentals wrote the script and dominated the credits; the rising-adult Gilded did the thankless dirty work; and the child Progressives watched and worried. All three suffered the wreckage and became cohabitants of America’s only three-part cycle – the one whose crisis came too soon, too hard, and with too much ghastly devastation. This cycle is no aberration. Rather, it demonstrates how events can turn out badly – and, from a generational perspective, what happens when they do.
The Two Social Moments of The Civil War Cycle.
The Transcendental Awakening (1822 – 1837) was triggered by the evangelical preaching of Charles Finney and by widespread excitement over religious conversion, social reform, and radical idealism. Often merging with the popular “Jacksonian” movement, it peaked around 1831 with Nat Turner’s rebellion, the founding of abolitionist societies, and the rise of labor parties and new religious sects. After giving birth to the “transcendentalist” school of philosophy and literature, the fervor subsided along with the collapse of Jacksonian prosperity in 1837.
The Civil War Crisis (1857 – 1865) – “the Second American Revolution” according to Charles and Mary Beard – began in 1857, the year of Buchanan’s inauguration, the “Bleeding Kansas” debates, and the Dred Scott decision. The crisis extended through the war itself and ended with General Robert E Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (on Palm Sunday) and the assassination of President Lincoln (five days later, on Good Friday). Graying preachers gloried in the religious symbolism. But unlike other crisis eras, the denouement of the Civil War produced less optimism than a sense of tragedy having run its course. At the end of the 1860s, a disillusioned “bloody shirt” generation of generals, officers, and older soldiers surged into political office – a position of power they would hold (but exercise cautiously) for a very long time. Meanwhile, the coming-of-age generation – traumatized, not energized, by the most destructive military conflagration yet witnessed in world history – meekly avoided asserting itself in public life.
THE THREE GENERATIONS OF THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE
Transcendental Generation: Born: 1792 – 1821 Type: Idealist; Population: 11,000,000 Percent immigrant 20% Percent Slave 13% U.S. Significant History and Lifecycle:
In the 1850s, the Transcendentals emerged again into public life, this time as midlife champions on both sides of their “irresponsible conflict.” Summoning juniors to battle, they presided as leaders over four years of total war, which only ended when William Sherman vowed to punish the Confederacy to it “innermost recesses” and sixtyish Radicals demanded a postwar “reconstruction” of the southern soul. Southern “fire-eaters” like Robert Barnwell Rhett refused to apologize for slavery. Meanwhile, northerners like Willaim Seward declared the abolition of slavery to be “a higher law” than their father-drafted Constitution and Garrison condemned the half-slave Union as “a covenant with death, and agreement with hell.”
Throughout most of the 19th century, all Americans ridiculed, respected, or feared whatever age bracket the Transcendentals occupied as a moving repository of inner-driven passion and unbreakable principle. They cared only for what they thought of themselves. They valued inner serenity. Only later in life did their narcissism mutate into an irreconcilable schism between northern and southern peers, each side yearning for perfection no matter how the violence might blast the young. The Transcendentals may have been America’s most high-minded generation – but they also became, by any measure, its most destructive.
Transcendental Facts:
The Transcendental Lifestyle:
YOUTH: Transcendentals grew up instead in the orderly yet brightening climate of Jeffersonian America. Many parents used their rising affluence to give their children expensive toys and to seat them in individualized family portraits. In 1818, a British visitor noted “the prominent boldness and forwardness of American children” who are “rarely forbidden or punished for wrongdoing and “only kindly solicited to do right.” Transcendentals later felt nostalgia for their childhood, a friendly and preindustrial era. These children preferred meditation reading, and “solitude.” They are lonely; the spirit of their writing is lonely; they shun general society.
COMING OF AGE: The revolt against fathers warmed up during the outwardly placid late 1810s, when coming-of-age Transcendentals began rejecting noble ancestors. Fashions celebrating age (powder and queues, waistcoats, knee breeched) swiftly gave way to those celebrating youth (short hair, shoulder jackets, pantaloons). By the late 1820s as social and geographical mobility quickened with the first surge of industrialization, youths joined religion to a radical social agenda.
RISING ADULTHOOD: Down South, Transcendental preachers found goodness in slavery as fortyish “ultimatumists” began demanding secession. Foreign visitors in the early 1840s remarked on the “seriousness” and “absence of reverence for authority” or the “busy generation of the present hour.” “All that we do we overdo. We are so intent on our purpose that we have no time for amusement.”
MIDLIFE: The mood turned sour with the failure of European revolutions, the unpopular Compromise of 1850, frontier violence, and spectacular fugitive slave chases. In the mid-1850s, with lawless mayhem breaking out in “Bleeding Kansas,” midlife Americans feared that the rapacious younger Gilded were about to shatter their visions and rip America to pieces. Fiftyish preachers warned of Apocalypse from their pulpits. Once Lincoln’s election answered Walt Whitman’s plea for a “Redeemer President,” his peers grimly prepared for a Civil War that Lincoln insisted “no mortal could stay.” As the young marched off to bloody battle, midlife Transcendentals urged them on with appeals to justice and righteousness. And so, the North did – finding redemption at Gettysburg, in Sherman’s march, and in Emancipation. Afterward, Transcendentals felt spiritual fulfillment: a huge human price had been exacted for the young, but a new era was indeed dawning.
ELDERHOOD: Late in the 19th century, a generation that had once detested elderhood now found new powers in it. “A profound sense of the dignity and worthy of our souls.” The Gilded had their doubts. After blunting the postwar vengeance of aging Radicals, 30 and 40-year-olds moved swiftly in their late 1860s to purge the nation of Transcendental leaders. In three-straight Presidential elections (1868, 1872, and 1876), older Transcendental candidates fell to less reform-minded juniors. Older Confederates remained unrepentant, led younger white “Redeemers” (like the “Grand Wizard” for the postwar Ku Klux Klan) into chivalric symbols of the “Lost Cause.”
With their passing, the Transcendentals left behind an enduring projection of their peer personality. Exalting inner truth, they brought spirit to America – lofty imperatives of heartfelt religion and moral justice unknown to the Jeffersonian world of their childhood. They emancipated the slaves, wrote inspiring verse, and preserved the Union their fathers had created. But they also slaughtered the younger Gilded, thereby triggering a massive reaction that vaunted pragmatism over principle.
Gilded Generation: Born 1822 – 1842 Type: Reactive; Population 17,000,000 Percent immigrant 28% Percent slave 10%. Significant History and Lifecycle:
Hit by pain and hard luck that seemed to justify all the critics, the Gilded suffered from low collective self-esteem. They became skeptics, trusting principle less than instinct and experience. “As a rule, we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use,” wrote William James. The Gilded played for keeps and asked for no favors. Their ranks included those who struck gold and those who died trying; fugitive slaves and the posses chasing them; war profiteers and war widows; Pullman millionaires and sweating “coolies”; Irish immigrants and nativist mobs; General Custer and Sitting Bull.
Gilded Facts:
The Gilded Lifecycle:
YOUTH: The young Gilded had little choice. Some were the casual offspring of experimental communities; others were hungry arrivals by boat. Nearly all of them, looking up at uncertain midlifers and self-absorbed rising adults, understood at an early age that they had better take care of themselves. Parents complained of their roughness, lawmakers decried the new flood of “street orphans” who mixed huckstering with crime, an in 1849 the New York police chief condemned “the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares. No one cares for them, and they care for no one.
COMING OF AGE: In the 1840s and 1850s, the Gilded came of age pursuing what the aging Compromiser Washington Irving sarcastically called “the almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land.” These were frenetic years for 20-year-olds. Many stayed in the East, where they mingled with crowds of new immigrants, found jobs in new factories, and rode a roller-coaster economy. Others followed the “Go West, Young Man” maxim of Horace Greeley. In the North, they agreed with Lincoln’s argument that slavery posed a threat to free men everywhere—and were coaxed by the new party’s promises to enact a homestead law and build railroads. In the South, cries for battle rose from those whom Sherman darkly referred to as “young bloods” and “sons of planters.”.
RISING ADULTHOOD: For the young Gilded, the first years of the Civil War were more dashing than bloody. Following the deadly battles of 1862-63 and the first draft calls, however, the Gilded began to think twice about their prophetic next elders. Afterward, 35-year-olds saw mostly ruined farms, starving widows, diseased prisoners, dead bodies, and amputated limbs (carried away from Gettysburg by the wagonload). After a 42-year-old Edmund Ross, blocked the Radicals’ plot to impeach President Johnson, Gilded leaders dismantled Reconstruction and left their southern black peers to fend for themselves. The feisty women of this male-short generation focused their postwar energy on family solidarity and matured into the durable Scarlett O’Hara matrons of the Victorian era. The men found it harder to adjust. Some became rootless “bums” and “hobos.”
MIDLIFE: In 1876, the Gilded celebrated their midlife dominion with the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Hall of Machines stood for bigness, strength, and worldliness – and not a hint of the Transcendental inner life that most Gilded still associated with meanness and tragedy. During the 1870s, Gilded survivalism turned conservative. The first trust-builders like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie counted sales; the first rail tycoons counted miles of steel and tons of freight. The new wealth fortified a fiftyish up-from-nowhere elite that came to dominate both culture and politics. These new philistines eclipsed a succession of weak Presidents and tilted political power toward state and local governments.
ELDERHOOD: Where prior generation of elders had typically worked until death many now faced an involuntary, pension-less “retirement” in a rapidly urbanizing economy that substantially favored young adults. Never asking for special favors, the old Gilded kept to themselves and rarely complained about their treatment. Low expectations and a negative self-image were all part of the Gilded game plan: to live according to their own pragmatic rules – and if that meant massive lifecycle sacrifices, so be it. The Gilded rebuilt America while mainly wasting each other.
Progressive Generation: Born 1843 – 1859 Type: Adaptive; Population 22,000,000 Percent immigrant 27% Percent Slave 9%. Significant History and Lifecycle:
By the standard of their next elders, the Progressives lived a lifecycle in reverse. They set out as sober young parents in the shadow of Reconstruction. They taught the young the importance of emotional self-control, they reached the new century probing desperately for ways to defy taboos, tell secrets, and take chances. In social life, the peers of Woodrow Wilson sought to expose scandal and “open up” the system by insisting that “there ought to be no place where anything can be done that everybody does not know about.” In economic life, the Gilded obsession with self-denial and savings, turning their attention toward leisure and consumption instead. Progressives won respect for their intelligence and refinement. Yet so too did they make easy targets for their prissiness and indecision.
Progressive Facts:
The Progressive Lifecycle:
YOUTH: The child environment was abruptly pushed to suffocation by the Civil War. This implosion in family life reflected the desire of middle-class Americans to seal their lives off from the howling storm outside. The storm raged worst for Confederate children, many of whom lived with the fear of marauding armies – or who, as teenagers, became the homesick and traumatized kid soldiers of bloody campaigns late in the war. The extended wartime absence (or death) of fathers gave mothers a stronger role in the child’s world.
COMING OF AGE: The shell-shocked children of the Civil War reached their twenties eager to please adults, who advised them to show “neither excesses nor defects in your character, but a harmonious blending, a delightful symmetry, formed of fitting proportions of every high quality.” Progressives became the 19th century’s most docile students – preoccupied with grades, prizes, school spirit, and newly practical course work. Armed with impressive credentials, they hoped to make up in expertise what they obviously lacked in ruggedness.
RISING ADULTS: Through the 1870s and 1880s, the growing size and complexity of the industrial economy sparked a rising demand for the technical skills in which Progressives had been trained to excel. America was overrun with young lawyers, academics, teacher trainers, agronomists, and the first ever cadre of “career” civil servants and Congressional staffers.
MIDLIFE: President McKinley and his three White House successors entangled themselves in position shift by alternately urging and then hedging on subsequent Missionary causes, from child labor and woman’s suffrage to Prohibition and immigration. Meanwhile, many midlife women broke free from convention and threw their support behind a budding feminist movement. The last Progressive President, Woodrow Wilson, managed World War I in the complex manner of his generation. Afterward, Wilson tried to secure a “peace without victory.” Younger voters showed little interest in his League of Nations proposal, and a 79% Missionary Congress buried it for good.
ELDERHOOD: Poverty remained high among the elderly, but their overall income distribution was more even than among the Gilded, and the younger public grew more willing to discuss their hardships sympathetically, especially the question of what to do with elderly “in-laws.” As always, Progressives approached their economic status with foresight and planning. Around 1910 they began a vast expansion in private pension plans.
Progressives gave the Gilded Age its human face and helped make the Missionary Awakening an age of reform and not revolution. They waffled in the face of rapid social change. Vacillating on foreign policy and unwilling to forgo “cheap labor” immigrants, they invited a floodtide of jingoism and racism that swept over America at the turn of the century. Their accommodation of “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws sealed the fate of southern blacks. The Progressives never saw themselves as heroes or prophets. Rather, they saw themselves as a modern cadre of value-free meliorators who could link progress to expertise, improvement to precision. What few Progressives ever lost – no matter how old—was their urge to stay involved and thereby overcome a feeling that they had missed something early in life.
Source: Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE – EXCERPTS
The Civil War Cycle had its origin when the failed Presidential bid of Andrew Jakson in 1824 fired a fresh mood of radicalism among coming-of-age Transcendentals – an accelerating enthusiasm over social reform, abolitionism and utopian communalism. The cycle extended through the pitched battles of the Civil War and came to an inglorious end with the conformism and spiritual decline of the “Gilded Age” or the 1870s and 1880s. Climaxing in tragedy, the cycle failed to produce a Civic-type generation. After swiftly elbowing aside Transcendental leadership in the years following the war, the Reactive Gilded transformed in midlife from a recessive to a dominant generation, assuming some of the traits (secularism, conformism, lengthy political tenure, and an indulgent style of child nurture) associated with the Civic type of life – but without the hubris of crisis-era success. Though first wave Progressives began life with a nurture similar to that of a Civic childhood, the trauma of war caused this generation to come of age smothered instead of empowered.
Depiction of the Three Generations in 1861 -- the Start of the Civil War.
Lincoln’s TRANSCENDENTAL GENERATION (Idealist, then age 40 to 69) had, in their twenties provided the original core of the 1830s-era evangelical and abolitionist movement. The extremism of William Lloyd Garrison, the stridency of young plantation owners, AND THE MEMORY OF Nat Turner’s violent slave rebellion had worked to snuff out any Compromiser hope of peaceful weaning the South from slavery. Now in their fifties, this generation was fully prepared to shed younger blood to attain what they knew was right. Preaching from pulpits and railing from Congress, peers of John Brown, Harriet “Moses” Tubman,” Julia Ward Howe, and Robert E Lee looked to war for what New Englanders heralded as “the glory of the coming of the Lord” and Virginians “the baptism of blood” for their newborn confederacy. The hand of God was felt in Richmond no less than in Washington – and over the next four years, these two capitals of “His Truth” would be bisected by a hundred-mile scar of mud and blood. All their lives, Transcendentals were a generation others feared but followed.
Stonewall Jackson’s GILDED GENERATION (Reactive, age 19 to 39) comprised the “ghastly wretches” Congressman Riddle saw scrambling away across Bull Run Creek. They had signed up for what they had expected to be a quick adventure, with maybe a little glory and profit mixed in – not much different from the California gold fields to which many had rushed as teenagers. For Gilded whites, any resolution at all to the thundering hatred between elder abolitionists and elder “Southrons” would at last allow them to settle the western frontier. For Gilded blacks, including the slaves who began fleeing northward on the “underground railroad,” Bull Run marked a necessary first step (albeit a tactical setback) toward flesh-and-blood freedom. But as the war settled into its meaner, later years, the jaunty opinion of their generation would sour. The same 25-year-olds who had shrieked or heard the rebel yell would, much later in their sixties, yell remember Bull Run – and Antietam, Gettysburg, and Atlanta – and warn the young against the horrors of war. Few would listen.
For Wilson’s PROGRESSIVE GENERATION (Adaptive, age 2 to 18), the news of Bull Run signaled the beginning of a family trauma that was destined to pass over their childhood like a dark and cruel cloud. They would not see daylight until 1865, when Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train journeyed from Wahington through New York to Illinois. The black-creped cortege would be seen by an astonishing seven million Americans, nearly one-fifty the population of the reunited nation.
In the Civil War, the midlife Transcendentals wrote the script and dominated the credits; the rising-adult Gilded did the thankless dirty work; and the child Progressives watched and worried. All three suffered the wreckage and became cohabitants of America’s only three-part cycle – the one whose crisis came too soon, too hard, and with too much ghastly devastation. This cycle is no aberration. Rather, it demonstrates how events can turn out badly – and, from a generational perspective, what happens when they do.
The Two Social Moments of The Civil War Cycle.
The Transcendental Awakening (1822 – 1837) was triggered by the evangelical preaching of Charles Finney and by widespread excitement over religious conversion, social reform, and radical idealism. Often merging with the popular “Jacksonian” movement, it peaked around 1831 with Nat Turner’s rebellion, the founding of abolitionist societies, and the rise of labor parties and new religious sects. After giving birth to the “transcendentalist” school of philosophy and literature, the fervor subsided along with the collapse of Jacksonian prosperity in 1837.
The Civil War Crisis (1857 – 1865) – “the Second American Revolution” according to Charles and Mary Beard – began in 1857, the year of Buchanan’s inauguration, the “Bleeding Kansas” debates, and the Dred Scott decision. The crisis extended through the war itself and ended with General Robert E Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (on Palm Sunday) and the assassination of President Lincoln (five days later, on Good Friday). Graying preachers gloried in the religious symbolism. But unlike other crisis eras, the denouement of the Civil War produced less optimism than a sense of tragedy having run its course. At the end of the 1860s, a disillusioned “bloody shirt” generation of generals, officers, and older soldiers surged into political office – a position of power they would hold (but exercise cautiously) for a very long time. Meanwhile, the coming-of-age generation – traumatized, not energized, by the most destructive military conflagration yet witnessed in world history – meekly avoided asserting itself in public life.
THE THREE GENERATIONS OF THE CIVIL WAR CYCLE
Transcendental Generation: Born: 1792 – 1821 Type: Idealist; Population: 11,000,000 Percent immigrant 20% Percent Slave 13% U.S. Significant History and Lifecycle:
- 1812 War of 1812; elder generals disgraced (Age: 0 – 20)
- 1831 Nat Turner’s slave rebellion; Garrison launches abolitionism (Age: 10 – 39)
- 1859 John Brown’s raid on U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (Age: 38 – 67)
- 1863 Emancipation Proclamation; Union victorious at Gettysburg (Age: 42 – 71)
- 1865 Lee surrenders at Appomattox; Lincoln assassinated (Age: 44 – 73)
- 1868 Radical Republicans fail to impeach President Johnson (Age: 47 – 76)
- 1877 Reconstruction ends; U.S. troops leave South (Age: 56 – 85)
In the 1850s, the Transcendentals emerged again into public life, this time as midlife champions on both sides of their “irresponsible conflict.” Summoning juniors to battle, they presided as leaders over four years of total war, which only ended when William Sherman vowed to punish the Confederacy to it “innermost recesses” and sixtyish Radicals demanded a postwar “reconstruction” of the southern soul. Southern “fire-eaters” like Robert Barnwell Rhett refused to apologize for slavery. Meanwhile, northerners like Willaim Seward declared the abolition of slavery to be “a higher law” than their father-drafted Constitution and Garrison condemned the half-slave Union as “a covenant with death, and agreement with hell.”
Throughout most of the 19th century, all Americans ridiculed, respected, or feared whatever age bracket the Transcendentals occupied as a moving repository of inner-driven passion and unbreakable principle. They cared only for what they thought of themselves. They valued inner serenity. Only later in life did their narcissism mutate into an irreconcilable schism between northern and southern peers, each side yearning for perfection no matter how the violence might blast the young. The Transcendentals may have been America’s most high-minded generation – but they also became, by any measure, its most destructive.
Transcendental Facts:
- From the 1810s to 1830s, rising Transcendentals fueled the most rapid expansion of evangelical religion in American history. In the West, youthful settlers flocked to new Baptist and Methodist churches.
- The Civil War years began with Transcendentals enjoying the greatest one-generation political hegemony in American history (a 90% share of governors and Congress in 1860) and ended with the largest generational rout in the election of 1868 (when the Transcendental share plunged from 63% to 44%) – the steepest ever decline in one generation’s share of national leadership.
The Transcendental Lifestyle:
YOUTH: Transcendentals grew up instead in the orderly yet brightening climate of Jeffersonian America. Many parents used their rising affluence to give their children expensive toys and to seat them in individualized family portraits. In 1818, a British visitor noted “the prominent boldness and forwardness of American children” who are “rarely forbidden or punished for wrongdoing and “only kindly solicited to do right.” Transcendentals later felt nostalgia for their childhood, a friendly and preindustrial era. These children preferred meditation reading, and “solitude.” They are lonely; the spirit of their writing is lonely; they shun general society.
COMING OF AGE: The revolt against fathers warmed up during the outwardly placid late 1810s, when coming-of-age Transcendentals began rejecting noble ancestors. Fashions celebrating age (powder and queues, waistcoats, knee breeched) swiftly gave way to those celebrating youth (short hair, shoulder jackets, pantaloons). By the late 1820s as social and geographical mobility quickened with the first surge of industrialization, youths joined religion to a radical social agenda.
RISING ADULTHOOD: Down South, Transcendental preachers found goodness in slavery as fortyish “ultimatumists” began demanding secession. Foreign visitors in the early 1840s remarked on the “seriousness” and “absence of reverence for authority” or the “busy generation of the present hour.” “All that we do we overdo. We are so intent on our purpose that we have no time for amusement.”
MIDLIFE: The mood turned sour with the failure of European revolutions, the unpopular Compromise of 1850, frontier violence, and spectacular fugitive slave chases. In the mid-1850s, with lawless mayhem breaking out in “Bleeding Kansas,” midlife Americans feared that the rapacious younger Gilded were about to shatter their visions and rip America to pieces. Fiftyish preachers warned of Apocalypse from their pulpits. Once Lincoln’s election answered Walt Whitman’s plea for a “Redeemer President,” his peers grimly prepared for a Civil War that Lincoln insisted “no mortal could stay.” As the young marched off to bloody battle, midlife Transcendentals urged them on with appeals to justice and righteousness. And so, the North did – finding redemption at Gettysburg, in Sherman’s march, and in Emancipation. Afterward, Transcendentals felt spiritual fulfillment: a huge human price had been exacted for the young, but a new era was indeed dawning.
ELDERHOOD: Late in the 19th century, a generation that had once detested elderhood now found new powers in it. “A profound sense of the dignity and worthy of our souls.” The Gilded had their doubts. After blunting the postwar vengeance of aging Radicals, 30 and 40-year-olds moved swiftly in their late 1860s to purge the nation of Transcendental leaders. In three-straight Presidential elections (1868, 1872, and 1876), older Transcendental candidates fell to less reform-minded juniors. Older Confederates remained unrepentant, led younger white “Redeemers” (like the “Grand Wizard” for the postwar Ku Klux Klan) into chivalric symbols of the “Lost Cause.”
With their passing, the Transcendentals left behind an enduring projection of their peer personality. Exalting inner truth, they brought spirit to America – lofty imperatives of heartfelt religion and moral justice unknown to the Jeffersonian world of their childhood. They emancipated the slaves, wrote inspiring verse, and preserved the Union their fathers had created. But they also slaughtered the younger Gilded, thereby triggering a massive reaction that vaunted pragmatism over principle.
Gilded Generation: Born 1822 – 1842 Type: Reactive; Population 17,000,000 Percent immigrant 28% Percent slave 10%. Significant History and Lifecycle:
- 1845 Travel volume peaks along Oregon and Santa Fe Trails (Age: 3 – 23)
- 1848 U.S. wins Mexican war; Irish immigration; California gold rush (Age 6 – 26)
- 1860 Pony Express riders hired; Lincoln elected; South Carolina secedes (Age 18 – 38)
- 1863 51,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing at Battle of Gettysburg (Age 21 – 41)
- 1869 Grant takes office: golden spike laid in Utah (Age: 27- 47)
- 1876 Custer massacred at Little Big Horn (34 – 54)
- 1911 Supreme Court breaks up Standard Oil (Age: 69 – 89)
Hit by pain and hard luck that seemed to justify all the critics, the Gilded suffered from low collective self-esteem. They became skeptics, trusting principle less than instinct and experience. “As a rule, we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use,” wrote William James. The Gilded played for keeps and asked for no favors. Their ranks included those who struck gold and those who died trying; fugitive slaves and the posses chasing them; war profiteers and war widows; Pullman millionaires and sweating “coolies”; Irish immigrants and nativist mobs; General Custer and Sitting Bull.
Gilded Facts:
- With traditional apprenticeships dwindling in an era of rapid industrialization and cheap immigrant labor, many Gilded youth took to the streets and became the first generation of urban criminal gangs. By the 1840s, their violence prompted elders to organize the first big-city police forces and establish the first “reform” schools.
- Throughout their lifecycle, the Gilded defined today’s image of the western adventurer; from the youthful 49er and Pony Express rider before the Civil War, to the midlife rancher, cowboy, “bad man,” and Indian fighter of 1870s, to the grizzled old mountaineer of 1900.
- The number killed in more than six thousand Civil War battles exceeded the cumulative total for all other American wars – a per capita casualty rate equal to eight World War IIs combined. Nearly half the Gilded war dead were buried in unmarked graves.
- The Gilded include most of the postwar carpetbaggers and scalawags.
The Gilded Lifecycle:
YOUTH: The young Gilded had little choice. Some were the casual offspring of experimental communities; others were hungry arrivals by boat. Nearly all of them, looking up at uncertain midlifers and self-absorbed rising adults, understood at an early age that they had better take care of themselves. Parents complained of their roughness, lawmakers decried the new flood of “street orphans” who mixed huckstering with crime, an in 1849 the New York police chief condemned “the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares. No one cares for them, and they care for no one.
COMING OF AGE: In the 1840s and 1850s, the Gilded came of age pursuing what the aging Compromiser Washington Irving sarcastically called “the almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land.” These were frenetic years for 20-year-olds. Many stayed in the East, where they mingled with crowds of new immigrants, found jobs in new factories, and rode a roller-coaster economy. Others followed the “Go West, Young Man” maxim of Horace Greeley. In the North, they agreed with Lincoln’s argument that slavery posed a threat to free men everywhere—and were coaxed by the new party’s promises to enact a homestead law and build railroads. In the South, cries for battle rose from those whom Sherman darkly referred to as “young bloods” and “sons of planters.”.
RISING ADULTHOOD: For the young Gilded, the first years of the Civil War were more dashing than bloody. Following the deadly battles of 1862-63 and the first draft calls, however, the Gilded began to think twice about their prophetic next elders. Afterward, 35-year-olds saw mostly ruined farms, starving widows, diseased prisoners, dead bodies, and amputated limbs (carried away from Gettysburg by the wagonload). After a 42-year-old Edmund Ross, blocked the Radicals’ plot to impeach President Johnson, Gilded leaders dismantled Reconstruction and left their southern black peers to fend for themselves. The feisty women of this male-short generation focused their postwar energy on family solidarity and matured into the durable Scarlett O’Hara matrons of the Victorian era. The men found it harder to adjust. Some became rootless “bums” and “hobos.”
MIDLIFE: In 1876, the Gilded celebrated their midlife dominion with the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Hall of Machines stood for bigness, strength, and worldliness – and not a hint of the Transcendental inner life that most Gilded still associated with meanness and tragedy. During the 1870s, Gilded survivalism turned conservative. The first trust-builders like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie counted sales; the first rail tycoons counted miles of steel and tons of freight. The new wealth fortified a fiftyish up-from-nowhere elite that came to dominate both culture and politics. These new philistines eclipsed a succession of weak Presidents and tilted political power toward state and local governments.
ELDERHOOD: Where prior generation of elders had typically worked until death many now faced an involuntary, pension-less “retirement” in a rapidly urbanizing economy that substantially favored young adults. Never asking for special favors, the old Gilded kept to themselves and rarely complained about their treatment. Low expectations and a negative self-image were all part of the Gilded game plan: to live according to their own pragmatic rules – and if that meant massive lifecycle sacrifices, so be it. The Gilded rebuilt America while mainly wasting each other.
Progressive Generation: Born 1843 – 1859 Type: Adaptive; Population 22,000,000 Percent immigrant 27% Percent Slave 9%. Significant History and Lifecycle:
- 1863 Battle of Gettysburg; slaves emancipated (Age: 4 – 20)
- 1879 “Big Business” economy surges; Edison invents light bulb (Age: 20 – 36)
- 1898 Sinking of Maine triggers Spanish-American War (Age: 39 – 55)
- 1901 McKinley assassinated; Theordore Roosevelt becomes president (Age: 42 – 58)
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles; Wilson advocates the League of Nations (Age: 60 – 76)
By the standard of their next elders, the Progressives lived a lifecycle in reverse. They set out as sober young parents in the shadow of Reconstruction. They taught the young the importance of emotional self-control, they reached the new century probing desperately for ways to defy taboos, tell secrets, and take chances. In social life, the peers of Woodrow Wilson sought to expose scandal and “open up” the system by insisting that “there ought to be no place where anything can be done that everybody does not know about.” In economic life, the Gilded obsession with self-denial and savings, turning their attention toward leisure and consumption instead. Progressives won respect for their intelligence and refinement. Yet so too did they make easy targets for their prissiness and indecision.
Progressive Facts:
- The Progressives also accounted for the largest 19th century expansion in lawyers. In 1860, America contained only nine law schools requiring more than one year of training; by 1880, fifty-six required three years of training.
- Obsessive organizers, the Progressives invented the cash register, adding machine, carbon paper, mimeograph, and first workable typewriter. They were the first generation to use time clocks at work and to carry timepieces on their person (“pocket” watches after 1870; “wrist” watches after 1900). Later in life, Progressive Presidents founded the Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the first permanent Census office.
The Progressive Lifecycle:
YOUTH: The child environment was abruptly pushed to suffocation by the Civil War. This implosion in family life reflected the desire of middle-class Americans to seal their lives off from the howling storm outside. The storm raged worst for Confederate children, many of whom lived with the fear of marauding armies – or who, as teenagers, became the homesick and traumatized kid soldiers of bloody campaigns late in the war. The extended wartime absence (or death) of fathers gave mothers a stronger role in the child’s world.
COMING OF AGE: The shell-shocked children of the Civil War reached their twenties eager to please adults, who advised them to show “neither excesses nor defects in your character, but a harmonious blending, a delightful symmetry, formed of fitting proportions of every high quality.” Progressives became the 19th century’s most docile students – preoccupied with grades, prizes, school spirit, and newly practical course work. Armed with impressive credentials, they hoped to make up in expertise what they obviously lacked in ruggedness.
RISING ADULTS: Through the 1870s and 1880s, the growing size and complexity of the industrial economy sparked a rising demand for the technical skills in which Progressives had been trained to excel. America was overrun with young lawyers, academics, teacher trainers, agronomists, and the first ever cadre of “career” civil servants and Congressional staffers.
MIDLIFE: President McKinley and his three White House successors entangled themselves in position shift by alternately urging and then hedging on subsequent Missionary causes, from child labor and woman’s suffrage to Prohibition and immigration. Meanwhile, many midlife women broke free from convention and threw their support behind a budding feminist movement. The last Progressive President, Woodrow Wilson, managed World War I in the complex manner of his generation. Afterward, Wilson tried to secure a “peace without victory.” Younger voters showed little interest in his League of Nations proposal, and a 79% Missionary Congress buried it for good.
ELDERHOOD: Poverty remained high among the elderly, but their overall income distribution was more even than among the Gilded, and the younger public grew more willing to discuss their hardships sympathetically, especially the question of what to do with elderly “in-laws.” As always, Progressives approached their economic status with foresight and planning. Around 1910 they began a vast expansion in private pension plans.
Progressives gave the Gilded Age its human face and helped make the Missionary Awakening an age of reform and not revolution. They waffled in the face of rapid social change. Vacillating on foreign policy and unwilling to forgo “cheap labor” immigrants, they invited a floodtide of jingoism and racism that swept over America at the turn of the century. Their accommodation of “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws sealed the fate of southern blacks. The Progressives never saw themselves as heroes or prophets. Rather, they saw themselves as a modern cadre of value-free meliorators who could link progress to expertise, improvement to precision. What few Progressives ever lost – no matter how old—was their urge to stay involved and thereby overcome a feeling that they had missed something early in life.
Source: Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| generations_3l_the_civil_war_--_segment_3.pdf |