Why Has America Always Been Obsessed with Baby Boomers?

Ever since the first baby boomer was born (in Philadelphia, one minute after midnight on January 1, 1946), America has been fixated on the generation, a history of the group makes clear. Scrutinizing every aspect of the generation that would become known as boomers immediately became a national preoccupation among critics, an observation made repeatedly over the years. “No generation in history has ever been more lavishly analyzed, dramatized, mythologized, and agonized over than the Baby Boomers,” Tom Wolfe wrote in the American Spectator in 1990, thinking “myth is not too pompous a word for the aura that shone 'round about them.”

For some, the generation seemed like a different species of animal, with something entirely new about them. Baby boomers “grew up at a time when there was so much fat in the American economy that people in their teens and early twenties could lay hands on enough money to create styles of life all their own,” the novelist and student of American culture observed, such styles having “distinctive codes of dress and decor (and language).”

Supporters of baby boomers, such as Doug Bachtel, a University of Georgia demographer and sociologist, have argued that the generation legitimately deserves much of the credit for the civil rights, women's rights and environmental movements. “We made the world different, mostly for the better,” Bachtel (a boomer) said in 2001, an idea echoed by Cheryl Russell. “Boomers can be best appreciated for the social changes that have come about—the [greater] equality for women and minorities,” she (also a boomer) stated, thinking that “we’ve set in motion a more tolerant society.”

The mainstreaming of a college education was another important contribution the generation made to American society, Russell felt, especially for women. In 1950, just one-third of female high school graduates went to college but two decades later that number was up to nearly 70%.

Not just recognized experts but ordinary folks have come to the defense of baby boomers when the latter were attacked in some way. In 2001, for example, one critic wrote in the New York Times that the generation was “culturally frozen,” “fatuous,” “self-important,” and “lazy,” good reason for them to be “self-loathing.” One reader, Brent Green of Denver, was quick to point out the major contributions that boomers had made over the years, Including the building of the digital economy and launching of the longest economic recovery in American history.

While 20-somethings were at the time deemed the stars of online technology, Green reminded readers that boomers had set the stage by creating the personal computer, operating systems software, and the Internet. Beyond that, boomers had led “a war against arcane values and a hegemonic political and social power structure,” Green continued, leading to a lessening of government and corporate sovereignty and a much more equal society in terms of gender and race.

Of course, not everyone has felt that what baby boomers have given has outweighed or even equaled what they took. The “cohort's mere size made it important, economically and hence culturally, and self-importance has been its defining attitude,” the conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in the Washington Post just a few months later, summing up boomers’ principal collective trait as “infinite narcissism.”

Many Americans apparently concurred. When asked in a 2009 Zogby Interactive poll what would be the historical legacy of the generation, 42% of the nearly 5,000 adults surveyed responded “ushering in an era of consumerism and self-indulgence.” While 27% of the poll answered, “helping to bring lasting change in social and cultural values and ending a war,” another 11% replied “nothing at all, nothing really special,” this too not a particularly enthusiastic endorsement.

The Zogby Poll was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, as good a time as any to reflect on what baby boomers had achieved after that seminal event. As Steve Kluger of USA Today noted as thousands gathered in Bethel to celebrate what had taken place there in 1969, the anniversary sparked a wave of boomer bashing—an ironic thing given Woodstock’s message and display of peacefulness, togetherness, and belonging.

The usual complaints—boomers were destroying Social Security, taking jobs away from young people, hogging the housing market by refusing to move to retirement communities, telling their own story ad nauseam, and, most egregious, staying alive—were in wide circulation. While unfortunate, Kluger told readers, the antagonism and hostility being directed at the generation was less important than the progress that had been made. “The Boomer legacy remains vibrant,” he wrote, convinced that “the seeds were all there at Woodstock.”