April 2, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
This for me is not only an insightful segment, but a fun one. It is a pause from generation descriptions to address a few details of generational analysis.
It begins with a refresher of the cycles we have covered to date, the social moments both awakening and secular crises from 1641 through 1945, and the four generational types of each of the four cycles we have investigated. Focusing on generational types, each is then defined and snippets of the four idealist type generations by generational cycle, followed by the four reactive generations, three civic type generations (remember there was no civic generation in the Civil War cycle), and lastly the four adaptive generations.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe contend that although the four generations in each cycle are very different from one another, the respective generations in each cycle are very similar in character. The snippets of each type which I have put together provide you with the grist to determine if you agree with the author’s conclusion.
The attached PDF contains a second analysis (pages 8 – 12) by the authors. Specifically, that following a social moment each of the “coming of age” lifecycle for each generation type resulted in similar outcomes for each cycle, as follows:
Again, read the snippets and see if you agree. This leads to the fun part. The next four segments will analyze the generations within the Millennial Cycle – Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z. Do the Boomers follow in the footsteps of previous idealist types? Generation X with the reactive types? Millennials with the civic types? and Generation Z with the adaptive types? It will be interesting to see if they do.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This for me is not only an insightful segment, but a fun one. It is a pause from generation descriptions to address a few details of generational analysis.
It begins with a refresher of the cycles we have covered to date, the social moments both awakening and secular crises from 1641 through 1945, and the four generational types of each of the four cycles we have investigated. Focusing on generational types, each is then defined and snippets of the four idealist type generations by generational cycle, followed by the four reactive generations, three civic type generations (remember there was no civic generation in the Civil War cycle), and lastly the four adaptive generations.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe contend that although the four generations in each cycle are very different from one another, the respective generations in each cycle are very similar in character. The snippets of each type which I have put together provide you with the grist to determine if you agree with the author’s conclusion.
The attached PDF contains a second analysis (pages 8 – 12) by the authors. Specifically, that following a social moment each of the “coming of age” lifecycle for each generation type resulted in similar outcomes for each cycle, as follows:
- Social change occurred by the idealist generations.
- The reactive generations deferred problems letting them fester.
- The civic generations overcame the problems the reactive generations let fester.
- The adaptive generations were risk-avoiding and indecisive leading to stability and conformity.
Again, read the snippets and see if you agree. This leads to the fun part. The next four segments will analyze the generations within the Millennial Cycle – Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z. Do the Boomers follow in the footsteps of previous idealist types? Generation X with the reactive types? Millennials with the civic types? and Generation Z with the adaptive types? It will be interesting to see if they do.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE STUDY OF AMERICAN GENERATIONS – SEGMENT 5
GENERATIONAL ANALYSES -- EXCERPTS
REFRESHERS
GENERATIONAL CONSTELLATIONS (Cycles):
To date, we have looked at four generational “constellations:”
SOCIAL MOMENTS:
GENERATIONAL ANALYSES -- EXCERPTS
REFRESHERS
GENERATIONAL CONSTELLATIONS (Cycles):
To date, we have looked at four generational “constellations:”
- The Colonial Cycle
- The Revolutionary Cycle
- The Civil War Cycle
- The Great Power Cycle
SOCIAL MOMENTS:
A SOCIAL MOMENT is an era, typically lasting about a decade, where people perceive that historic events are radically altering their social environment. There are two types of social moments: SECULAR CRISES, when society focuses on reordering the outer world of institutions and public behavior, and SPIRITUAL AWAKENINGS. When society focuses on changing the inner world of values and behavior.
For the four cycles of American History, each cycle has experienced one spiritual awakening and one secular crises. The are as follows:
Cycle |
Spiritual Awakening |
Secular Crises |
Colonial |
Puritan Awakening (1621 – 1640) |
Glorious Revolution (1675 – 1692) |
Revolutionary |
Great Awakening (1734 – 1743) |
American Revolution (1773 – 1789) |
Civil War |
Transcendental Awakening (1822 -1837) |
Civil War (1857 – 1865) |
Great Power |
Missionary Awakening (1886 – 1903) |
Great Depression – World War II (1932 – 1945) |
THE FOUR GENERATIONAL TYPES:
There are four generational types in each generational cycle: Idealistic, Reactive, Civic & Adaptive, as follows:
There are four generational types in each generational cycle: Idealistic, Reactive, Civic & Adaptive, as follows:
Idealist |
Reactive |
Civic |
Adaptive |
|
Colonial |
Puritan |
Cavalier |
Glorious |
Enlightenment |
Revolutionary |
Awakening |
Liberty |
Republican |
Compromise |
Civil War |
Transcendental |
Gilded |
-- |
Progressive |
Great Power |
Missionary |
Lost |
G.I. |
Silent |
Definitions of Generational Types:
SNIPPITS OF IDEALISTIC GENERATIONS:
Puritan: The Puritan Generation wrenched the West out of Renaissance complacency, founded a religious utopia in the New World. 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 eternal corruption.
Awakening: 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 preached entirely to their juniors. It was time for the old to think and the young to act. The Great Awakening has been credited with 250 new churches and 200,000 religious’ conversions,” chiefly” or “especially” the work of ‘young people.” Awakeners entering elderhood were America’s leaders of choice at the outset of the American Revolution.
Transcendental: The Transcendental filled the ranks of America’s abolitionists, southern expansionists, feminists, labor agitators, utopians, and reformers. 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 Transcendentals left behind an enduring projection of their peer personality. They emancipated the slaves, wrote inspiring verse, and preserved the Union their fathers had created.
Missionary: Their tumultuous awakening defined the Missionaries for life as a generation of moral pathfinders, men and women to whom any opinion was a religion once they decided it was right. Today’s elders recall Missionaries as history saw them last, as the visionary leaders who guided America through the Great Depression and World War II. The early Missionary childhood witnessed an unprecedented growth in American primary schooling. During the 1870s alone the number of high schools more than doubled from 1884 to 1901. After steadily rising from 1880 on, per capita alcohol and drug consumption peaked around 1905. Moving into midlife, Missionaries launched their memorable drive to eradicate all forms of substance abuse and my the mid-1920s they succeeded in pushing alcohol consumption to its lowest level in American history (Note: Prohibition started in 1920 and ended in 1933). Without question, Americans today have the Missionaries to thank for lifting America to its present-day status as a great global power.
Question: Are these four similar in nature?
SNIPPITS OF REACTIVE GENERATIONS:
Cavalier: 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 childhood without structure, shamed while coming of age, and pushed into adulthood with few hopes other than climbing fast and avoiding judgment. The ultimate gamble and purest of Cavalier lifestyles: piracy and “buccaneering” was a rising plague along the Atlantic coast from the 1650s forward. 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.
Liberty: He became a daredevil colonel of the Virginia militia at age 22 and meted out brutal discipline to his own like-aged soldiers, George Washington was not alone. The Liberty yearned to join the worthy causes led by their elders, holy reform, and the war for empire. But they soon learned that their elders did not like them. 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. 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 an treachery, scrapped with each other, and ended up distrusted by everybody. No other generation so eagerly risked their lives for the Declaration of Independence. Not 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. The Liberty matured into a notorious generation of drinkers, thieves, and rioters – to the dismay of elder Awakener moralists. The Liberty 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.
Gilded: 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. 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. 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. The gilded include most of the postwar carpetbaggers and scalawags. Gilded leaders dismantled Reconstruction and left their southern black peers to fend for themselves. The men found it hard to adjust from the war and some became rootless “bums” and “hobos,” wandering along newly built railways and evading postwar “tramp laws.”
Lost: The Great Depression dealt the Lost its cruelest blow, robbing them of what should have been their peak income years and ushering in public action that ran against their grain. In 1910, nearly one child in five between the ages of 10 and 14 (three in five between 15 and 19) was gainfully employed. Many worked in “sweatshops” in the cities, one Lost child in six worked at some point as a “newsie” hawking the headlines – including Irving Berlin, Jack Dempsey, Al Jolson, Groucho Marx, and Earl Warren. Lost youth showed little improvement in rates of illiteracy, absenteeism, dropout, or college entry. From 1880 to 1900, the share of all white children in primary schools dropped from 62 to 54 percent; for black children, from 34 to 31 percent. From 1900 to 1920 while the Lost came of age, America’s homicide rate rose by 700%. Just before it peaked in the early 1930s, Lost street hoodlums had matured into America’s biggest ever crime kingpins. The lost coined the word “underworld,” as well as “gangster,” “mobster,” “racketeer,” “moll,” and “getaway car.” The Lost account for the first black “Great Migration” out of the rural South and into the urban North. After growing up during the rise of Jim Crow and coming of age during the Wilson-era job boom, about 1.5 million black Americans emigrated out of the South from 1910 to 1930 – nearly three times the prior number of black emigrants since the Civil War.
Question: Are these four similar in nature?
SNIPPITS OF CIVIC GENERATIONS:
Glorious: 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.” During the 1650s and 1660s, the trend toward protective nurture strengthened. 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. 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.
Republican: In 1775m 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 Valley 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. No other generation had 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).
G.I. Children born just after 1900 were much more “favored” than those born just before – in families, schools, and jobs – and how that favored treatment led to important personality differences that have lasted a lifetime. First wave G.I.s were truly “special” kids who grew up in the most carefully shaped of 20th century childhoods, thanks to Missionary parents determined to produce kids as good as the Lost had been bad. World War II provided last wave G.I.s with a coming-of-age slingshot, a catharsis more heroic and empowering than any since that American Revolution. The combination of “good Kid” first wavers and heroic last wavers produced a generation of enormous economic and political power. The unstoppable energy of G.I.’s invented perfectly and stockpiled the atomic bomb, a weapon so muscular it changed history forever. So too did they become the nation’s greatest ever economists, social engineers, and community planners.
Question: Are these three similar in nature? Are they different from previous snippet groups?
SNIPPETS OF ADAPTIVE GENERATIONS:
Enlightenment: 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 purchase 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. The ENLIGHTENMENT 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. Enlightenment specialized in stalemating executive action through legislative process. No one called the Enlightenment 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 – oftn to their secret frustration – never seemed to hit them full force.
Compromise: The Compromise 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. They sought what President Jackson called the “middle course” – between two regions (North and South), two parties (Whigs 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 life – paralying irresolution over the approaching collision between abolitionism and King Cotton. All these efforts earned mixed reviews from other generations. Compromisers entered elderhood watching America drift toward painful outcomes: Indian removal, anti-immigrant riots, lawless frontiers, slave chases, and sectional hatred. 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. 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.
Progressives: The PROGRESSIVE child environment was abruptly pushed to suffocation by the Civil War. This implosion in family life reflected what historian Joseph Kett calls the midcentury “desire of middle- class Americans to seat their lives off from the howling storm outside.” The storm raged worst for Confederate children, many of whom live 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 shell-shocked children of the Civil War reached their twenties eager to please adults. They became the 19th century’s most docile students – preoccupied with grades, prizes, school spirit, and newly practical course work. Through the 1870s and 1880s sparked a rising demand for 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. Progressives won respect for their intelligence and refinement. Yet so too did they make easy targets for their prissiness and indecision. 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, and improvement to precision.
Silents: The SILENT have enjoyed a lifetime of steadily rising affluence, have suffered relatively fewer war casualties and have shown the 20th century’s lowest rates for almost every social pathology of youth (crime, suicide, illegitimate births, and teen unemployment). Silent lifecycle has been an escalator of prosperity, offering the maximum reward for the minimum initiative. In economic terms, the Silent lifecycle has been a straight line from a cashless childhood to the cusp of affluent elderhood – the smoothest and fastest rising path of any generation for which income data are available. Silent professionals account for the 1960s surge in the “helping professions” (teaching, medicine, ministry, government) and the 1970s explosion in “public interest” advocacy groups. Silent men could count on acquiring a house and car and raising a family comfortably. Silent women, however, began to resent being trapped at home, and Silent men prepared to break free of a claustrophobia they knew their elders never felt. By the late 1980s, people of all ages still looked to again G.I.s for leadership and increasingly to Boomers for cultural direction. In the Silent’s hands, America has grown more accustomed to deferring or learning to live with problems than to taking aggressive steps to solve them. It has also become culturally fragmented and less globally competitive.
Question: Are these four snippets similar in nature? Are they different than previous snippet groups?
LEARNING
COMMENT: As I reflect on the series to date, I read and typed segment 1 but found it somewhat confusing. It was chalked full of concepts, idioms and definitions that I had difficulty absorbing and putting it into something I fully grasped.
Then I read and typed all the generational history of our country (49 pages). I not only found it a very different way to look at our country’s history but one of extreme interest. It provided a sense of the ups and downs of society with a slightly different purview of its struggles. But I was disappointed as the authors promised patterns and cycles to aid understanding and potential provide a framework for prediction. I reread segment 1, particularly the definitions of the generational types as shown above. It still didn’t make sense to me. So, frustrated I decided to group like generational types over the four American generational cycles to see if that helped my comprehension. The result is the “Snippet” groups above. To my surprise and delight it provided real life explanations for each generational type. First how similar they were within the type classifications over 400 years, but how very different from one another within each one hundred year or so cycle. That gave me pause to conclude there is something to this framework and I began to comprehend the generational type definitions a bit better.
I am of the Silent Generation – An Adaptive Generation. As I read the four adaptive snippets it struck a bell about my own life as the snippets and my experience fit together, even to point of reflecting on the administration of the one and only Silent President – Joe Biden – which also fit. Reread the Adaptive Snippet and see if you agree. Now on to the next analysis to see if I can learn anything further relative to history before turning to the Millennial Cycle.
Source: Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
- Idealistic: A dominant, inner fixated IDEALISTIC GENERATION grows up as an increasingly indulged youth after a secular crisis; comes of age inspiring a spiritual awakening; fragments into narcissistic rising adults; cultivates principle as moralistic midlifers; and emerges as visionary elders guiding the next secular crisis. This applies to the Puritan, Awakening, Transcendental, and Missionary Generations of America’s four complete generational cycles.
- Reactive: A recessive REACTIVE GENERATION grow up as under-protected youths and criticized youths during a spiritual awakening; matures into risk-taking, alienated rising adults; mellows into pragmatic midlife leaders during a secular crisis; and maintains respect (but less influence) as reclusive elders. This applies to the Cavalier, Liberty, Gilded, and Lost Generations of America’s four complete generational cycles.
- Civic: A dominant outer-fixated CIVIC GENERATION grows up as increasingly protected youths after a spiritual awakening; comes of age overcoming a secular crisis; unites into a heroic and achieving cadre of rising adults; sustains that image while building institutions as powerful midlifers; and emerges as busy elders attacked by the next spiritual awakening. This applies to the Glorious, Republican, and G.I. Generations of three generational cycles.
- Adaptive: A recessive ADAPTIVE GENERATION grows up as overprotected and suffocated youths during a secular crisis; matures into risk-averse, conformist rising adults; produces indecisive midlife arbitrator-leaders during a spiritual awakening and maintains influence (but less respect) as sensitive elders. This applies to the Enlightenment, Compromise, Progressive, and Silent Generations of America’s four complete generational cycles.
SNIPPITS OF IDEALISTIC GENERATIONS:
Puritan: The Puritan Generation wrenched the West out of Renaissance complacency, founded a religious utopia in the New World. 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 eternal corruption.
Awakening: 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 preached entirely to their juniors. It was time for the old to think and the young to act. The Great Awakening has been credited with 250 new churches and 200,000 religious’ conversions,” chiefly” or “especially” the work of ‘young people.” Awakeners entering elderhood were America’s leaders of choice at the outset of the American Revolution.
Transcendental: The Transcendental filled the ranks of America’s abolitionists, southern expansionists, feminists, labor agitators, utopians, and reformers. 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 Transcendentals left behind an enduring projection of their peer personality. They emancipated the slaves, wrote inspiring verse, and preserved the Union their fathers had created.
Missionary: Their tumultuous awakening defined the Missionaries for life as a generation of moral pathfinders, men and women to whom any opinion was a religion once they decided it was right. Today’s elders recall Missionaries as history saw them last, as the visionary leaders who guided America through the Great Depression and World War II. The early Missionary childhood witnessed an unprecedented growth in American primary schooling. During the 1870s alone the number of high schools more than doubled from 1884 to 1901. After steadily rising from 1880 on, per capita alcohol and drug consumption peaked around 1905. Moving into midlife, Missionaries launched their memorable drive to eradicate all forms of substance abuse and my the mid-1920s they succeeded in pushing alcohol consumption to its lowest level in American history (Note: Prohibition started in 1920 and ended in 1933). Without question, Americans today have the Missionaries to thank for lifting America to its present-day status as a great global power.
Question: Are these four similar in nature?
SNIPPITS OF REACTIVE GENERATIONS:
Cavalier: 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 childhood without structure, shamed while coming of age, and pushed into adulthood with few hopes other than climbing fast and avoiding judgment. The ultimate gamble and purest of Cavalier lifestyles: piracy and “buccaneering” was a rising plague along the Atlantic coast from the 1650s forward. 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.
Liberty: He became a daredevil colonel of the Virginia militia at age 22 and meted out brutal discipline to his own like-aged soldiers, George Washington was not alone. The Liberty yearned to join the worthy causes led by their elders, holy reform, and the war for empire. But they soon learned that their elders did not like them. 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. 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 an treachery, scrapped with each other, and ended up distrusted by everybody. No other generation so eagerly risked their lives for the Declaration of Independence. Not 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. The Liberty matured into a notorious generation of drinkers, thieves, and rioters – to the dismay of elder Awakener moralists. The Liberty 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.
Gilded: 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. 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. 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. The gilded include most of the postwar carpetbaggers and scalawags. Gilded leaders dismantled Reconstruction and left their southern black peers to fend for themselves. The men found it hard to adjust from the war and some became rootless “bums” and “hobos,” wandering along newly built railways and evading postwar “tramp laws.”
Lost: The Great Depression dealt the Lost its cruelest blow, robbing them of what should have been their peak income years and ushering in public action that ran against their grain. In 1910, nearly one child in five between the ages of 10 and 14 (three in five between 15 and 19) was gainfully employed. Many worked in “sweatshops” in the cities, one Lost child in six worked at some point as a “newsie” hawking the headlines – including Irving Berlin, Jack Dempsey, Al Jolson, Groucho Marx, and Earl Warren. Lost youth showed little improvement in rates of illiteracy, absenteeism, dropout, or college entry. From 1880 to 1900, the share of all white children in primary schools dropped from 62 to 54 percent; for black children, from 34 to 31 percent. From 1900 to 1920 while the Lost came of age, America’s homicide rate rose by 700%. Just before it peaked in the early 1930s, Lost street hoodlums had matured into America’s biggest ever crime kingpins. The lost coined the word “underworld,” as well as “gangster,” “mobster,” “racketeer,” “moll,” and “getaway car.” The Lost account for the first black “Great Migration” out of the rural South and into the urban North. After growing up during the rise of Jim Crow and coming of age during the Wilson-era job boom, about 1.5 million black Americans emigrated out of the South from 1910 to 1930 – nearly three times the prior number of black emigrants since the Civil War.
Question: Are these four similar in nature?
SNIPPITS OF CIVIC GENERATIONS:
Glorious: 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.” During the 1650s and 1660s, the trend toward protective nurture strengthened. 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. 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.
Republican: In 1775m 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 Valley 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. No other generation had 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).
G.I. Children born just after 1900 were much more “favored” than those born just before – in families, schools, and jobs – and how that favored treatment led to important personality differences that have lasted a lifetime. First wave G.I.s were truly “special” kids who grew up in the most carefully shaped of 20th century childhoods, thanks to Missionary parents determined to produce kids as good as the Lost had been bad. World War II provided last wave G.I.s with a coming-of-age slingshot, a catharsis more heroic and empowering than any since that American Revolution. The combination of “good Kid” first wavers and heroic last wavers produced a generation of enormous economic and political power. The unstoppable energy of G.I.’s invented perfectly and stockpiled the atomic bomb, a weapon so muscular it changed history forever. So too did they become the nation’s greatest ever economists, social engineers, and community planners.
Question: Are these three similar in nature? Are they different from previous snippet groups?
SNIPPETS OF ADAPTIVE GENERATIONS:
Enlightenment: 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 purchase 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. The ENLIGHTENMENT 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. Enlightenment specialized in stalemating executive action through legislative process. No one called the Enlightenment 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 – oftn to their secret frustration – never seemed to hit them full force.
Compromise: The Compromise 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. They sought what President Jackson called the “middle course” – between two regions (North and South), two parties (Whigs 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 life – paralying irresolution over the approaching collision between abolitionism and King Cotton. All these efforts earned mixed reviews from other generations. Compromisers entered elderhood watching America drift toward painful outcomes: Indian removal, anti-immigrant riots, lawless frontiers, slave chases, and sectional hatred. 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. 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.
Progressives: The PROGRESSIVE child environment was abruptly pushed to suffocation by the Civil War. This implosion in family life reflected what historian Joseph Kett calls the midcentury “desire of middle- class Americans to seat their lives off from the howling storm outside.” The storm raged worst for Confederate children, many of whom live 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 shell-shocked children of the Civil War reached their twenties eager to please adults. They became the 19th century’s most docile students – preoccupied with grades, prizes, school spirit, and newly practical course work. Through the 1870s and 1880s sparked a rising demand for 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. Progressives won respect for their intelligence and refinement. Yet so too did they make easy targets for their prissiness and indecision. 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, and improvement to precision.
Silents: The SILENT have enjoyed a lifetime of steadily rising affluence, have suffered relatively fewer war casualties and have shown the 20th century’s lowest rates for almost every social pathology of youth (crime, suicide, illegitimate births, and teen unemployment). Silent lifecycle has been an escalator of prosperity, offering the maximum reward for the minimum initiative. In economic terms, the Silent lifecycle has been a straight line from a cashless childhood to the cusp of affluent elderhood – the smoothest and fastest rising path of any generation for which income data are available. Silent professionals account for the 1960s surge in the “helping professions” (teaching, medicine, ministry, government) and the 1970s explosion in “public interest” advocacy groups. Silent men could count on acquiring a house and car and raising a family comfortably. Silent women, however, began to resent being trapped at home, and Silent men prepared to break free of a claustrophobia they knew their elders never felt. By the late 1980s, people of all ages still looked to again G.I.s for leadership and increasingly to Boomers for cultural direction. In the Silent’s hands, America has grown more accustomed to deferring or learning to live with problems than to taking aggressive steps to solve them. It has also become culturally fragmented and less globally competitive.
Question: Are these four snippets similar in nature? Are they different than previous snippet groups?
LEARNING
COMMENT: As I reflect on the series to date, I read and typed segment 1 but found it somewhat confusing. It was chalked full of concepts, idioms and definitions that I had difficulty absorbing and putting it into something I fully grasped.
Then I read and typed all the generational history of our country (49 pages). I not only found it a very different way to look at our country’s history but one of extreme interest. It provided a sense of the ups and downs of society with a slightly different purview of its struggles. But I was disappointed as the authors promised patterns and cycles to aid understanding and potential provide a framework for prediction. I reread segment 1, particularly the definitions of the generational types as shown above. It still didn’t make sense to me. So, frustrated I decided to group like generational types over the four American generational cycles to see if that helped my comprehension. The result is the “Snippet” groups above. To my surprise and delight it provided real life explanations for each generational type. First how similar they were within the type classifications over 400 years, but how very different from one another within each one hundred year or so cycle. That gave me pause to conclude there is something to this framework and I began to comprehend the generational type definitions a bit better.
I am of the Silent Generation – An Adaptive Generation. As I read the four adaptive snippets it struck a bell about my own life as the snippets and my experience fit together, even to point of reflecting on the administration of the one and only Silent President – Joe Biden – which also fit. Reread the Adaptive Snippet and see if you agree. Now on to the next analysis to see if I can learn anything further relative to history before turning to the Millennial Cycle.
Source: Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| generations_5l_analysis_--_segment_5.pdf |