Customer Reviews

Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

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A friend of mine lent me this book in 2002. Skeptical about any book purporting to predict the future, I immediately read their predictions section - after all, the book was published ten years before. To my surprise, I found that their predictions for 1992-2002 were largely correct! So I started again, at the beginning. The book is a work of genius.

The central tenet of this book is that generations don't age the same way, and when looking at generations through history, the correct way to look at them is by cohort - that is, by groups with similar birth years - rather than by age. In other words, if you're born in 1950 and grow up in the '60s and '70s, you'll be different at age 50 than you will if you're born in 1970 and grow up in the '80s and '90s. Strauss and Howe then trace a number of generational cohorts through American History, and find evidence of a cycle of generational types - usually a four part cycle, but in one case a three part cycle. For example, they liken Gen X (whom they call "13ers"), born in 1961-1980, to the "Lost" generation born in the late 1800s.

As a trailing edge boomer, born in 1960, I was not surprised to find that the authors, both boomers, correctly identify the defining characteristics of my generation - characteristics that I happen to dislike, as I'm in the minority that don't fit the mold all that well, but that I have to acknowledge as accurate for the majority. On the other hand, the description of the Silent generation, to which my parents belong, was an eye opener - it explained well why my fathers views of what different stages in a man's life are like seemed to alien to me. The description of Gen X was likewise enlightening, both in terms of explaining some of my previous business interactions with Gen Xers (they had always seem so surprised when someone actually gave them a break - turns out it's because they hardly ever got breaks from boomers) and helped me understand and interact much better with one particular Gen X who is very important to me - my wife. The description of the Millenials seems to be accurate so far for undergraduates I work with.

Two caveats when reading this book - first, remember it's American history, and the conclusions don't apply to those born overseas; second, the authors seem to emphasize the optimistic view of the future, for example focusing on the possibility that the current cycle will be a triumphant four part cycle, rather than an agonizing three part cycle as the Civil War cycle was. We don't yet know which way things will go.

Strauss and Howe have written several books since this one, expanding upon their general historical thesis. But this one is the seminal book, the important one, and the one on which the others are based.

The book basically is a theory of American history that is premised on generational behavior. The authors have been quite successful in explaining and in some instances predicting the cycles of events, values and opinions of American society. It's very much worth reading simply because the reader is likely to experience an enhanced understanding of what is happening around him/her in the body politic.

The basic insight in this book is a simple one: Instead of trying to build a theory of American history (as did Arthur Schlesinger) that is based on unexplained "cycles" and "swings" from liberal to conservative and back again, why not simply look at how American generations behave as they age? When you do that, as Strauss and Howe have found, you find that American generations behave with a certain consistency throughout their lives. If their formative experiences push them in a certain direction while young, they'll continue to act in that way as they get older. That is, if you understand that history is really the process of different generations moving through time, then the swings of American history no longer look so mysterious; they appear as predictable manifestations of the fact that different generations with different life experiences have risen to the foreground.

Of course, you don't want to take all of this too sweepingly, or else it starts to seem like astrology or historical biorhythms. Generations are diverse groups, and no two people within a generation are exactly alike. But there are clear trends of generational behavior, which Strauss/Howe substantiate quite well.

Their basic model is that there are four basic generational types, which tend to occur in this order: Idealist, reactive, civic, and adaptive.

The GI generation (born 1902-1924) that fought WWII is a classic example of a "civic" generation. Consider their life experiences; when they came of age, they were asked en masse to participate in the greatest government-directed effort imaginable, fighting and winning WWII. Then when they got done with that, many of them went to school on the GI bill. When they were young, government spending and focus was oriented on youth. When they aged, government spending and focus shifted along with them, to where it is now focused on their elderly group, through Social Security, Medicare, and the other elderly programs that dominate the federal budget. It was natural that this generation would come to think of government's priorities being oriented in their direction as the natural order of things. They are civic-minded and they tend to have a more benign attitude towards government than do other generations. Accordingly, they are generally suspicious of change in the government approaches they know (for example, strongly against Social Security personal accounts, as opposed to a government-defined benefit.) Also, as a civic generation, they didn't focus their energies on redefining the values and purpose of America, they had a job to do (win the big war), and they did it.

Contrast that with an "idealist" generation, the "boomer" generation. Many in this generation grew up with an assumption of unlimited economic opportunity and security. They therefore turned their attention to spiritual matters, questioning and often rebelling against the values of the GI generation as well as its follow-up generation, the Silent generation. It was this "idealist" element of the boomers that unleashed the social revolutions of the late 1960s. This streak of strong opinions is visible in the boomers to this day; many of the political leaders who are regarded on both sides as being among the most shrill and uncompromising are from the boomer generation. This was also true when they were youth in the late 1960s; not only the activists on the radical left, but also those who retreated into a dyed-in-the-wool conservatism. The Silent generation prior to them didn't generally split into such poles.

The contrast between the "Silent" generation and the boomers is instructive. The "Silents" followed on the GI generation, looked up to them, generally shared their values, and sought to expand and liberalize them somewhat incrementally. The "silents" worked within the system: the 1950s, for example, saw civil rights expanding, Brown vs the Board of Education, etc. They sought to expand the blessings of liberty but at the same time were generally trustful of the leadership of previous generations. Not so the boomers; as the boomers came of age, they loudly, and often with great hostility, attacked the core value systems of the generations before them as being inadequate to progress, and sought to make a new, purer system of values. The silents wouldn't have been nearly so bold.

You can see the results in our national politics. The GI generation dominated the presidency for some time (Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder) and then handed the baton off to the Boomers (Clinton, Bush the Younger.) The Silent generation was simply skipped over.

The so-called "Generation X" (1961-81 birth years in this book) is a classic example of a "reactive" generation. These generations usually followed idealist generations, and didn't have the economic optimism of their predecessors, and thus didn't feel the same security to reimagine the spiritual basis of their nation. These generations often receive great criticism from the generation before them for failing to uphold their ideals. When the Strauss/Howe book came out, this was happening to Gen X much more than is the case now; the boomers, anxious to preserve their spiritual vision, often expressed concern and even disgust about the cynical, world-weary attitudes of the generation that followed them. But the Gen xers had had a different experience; they were not taught, as were the boomers, that life was always going to be sunny for them economicallly. The boomers were blocking the job pipeline as these Gen Xers entered the workforce for the first time. And their life experience with government is exactly the opposite of the GI generation;at every stage of the Gen Xers maturation, government's resources have been directed to benefit someone else. Whereas the GIs will get far more out of Social Security than they ever put in, Gen X will put far more in than they will ever get out; small wonder that Gen X generally wants to be given personal accounts instead of sticking with the old system.

Only over time have the Gen Xers won the respect of previous generations, just as did previous "reactive" generations of their type. A great analogy are the generations that came of age before the American Civil War. The analogues to the boomers then were the "transcendental" generation: the Thoreaus and the Lincolns and the Garrisons -- many of the abolitionists and civil disobedients who found the value system of their nation to be lacking. They unleashed a social revolution that exploded in the Civil War. Meanwhile, the generation behind them, the Ulysses Grants of the world, were thought to be mundane, unimaginative, unimpressive. But it was the Grant generation that fought and won the Civil War, relying on the resourcefulness that a tougher life had required them to learn. The Gen Xers are showing similar resilience now.

As said, you can't take any of this too exactly; otherwise it starts to seem like the Chinese zodiac; it's not the case that everyone born in the Year of the Bunny is lucky and affectionate. But it is still the case that formative experiences are often a key to understanding generational behavior. Strauss and Howe provide a very useful way to think about history, and an entertaining book to boot.

I found Strauss and Howe's hypothesis of a four-stroke generational cycle fascinating, and it does have a lot to say about groups behavior, especially how society treats its members of different ages at different points in time. It also suggests points of departure for other historical studies, like why bebop, modern science fiction, and slapstick Hollywood cartoons developed at about the same time. (A personal note; many of my favorite classical composers were born between 1860 and 1885, which nearly coincides with Strauss and Howe's "Missionary" generation.) Finally, the book has a lot to suggest about the nature of historical interpretation--how similar events occuring at different times might inspire very different reactions. The idea becomes problematic when the writers extrapolate from the behavior of groups to the behavior of individuals. First of all, some of their examples don't fit with the generations they cite. (Grace Slick, for example, was actually born in 1941, putting her in the "Silent" generation instead of the "Baby Boom".) Secondly, the profiles Strauss and Howe construct for "typical" members of particular generations are so general, it's easy to find some things descriptive of oneself and the people one knows. Because human beings tend to want to impose patterns on behavior where none may exist, these generational profiles don't necessarily have any more validity than, say, horoscopes. Another problem is that the hypothesis is only extended to the USA. While the appendix has some speculations on how the four-stroke cycle might work elsewhere, the writers don't provide the support for it that they do for this country. This leads one to wonder if the cycle applies outside the USA at all. Then too, in a time when nations interact more than ever, how societies whose generational cycles are out of sync affect one another? Again, there are some good ideas in this book, but readers should approach it with some skepticism.

The theme of the book is that American history follows a repeating pattern comprised of four sequential "cohort generations" roughly 22-years each in length, thus the pattern repeats about every 88 years, give or take.

This is slow reading, but well worth the effort. If you expect to skim this book and get anything but sophomoric value out of it, forget it. The amount of research and scholarship to conceive the theory and back it up with examples is staggering to contemplate. No writers in the 20th century come even close to developing such a theory so well, although the authors readily admit that the seminal concepts for such a theory were suggested by half-a-dozen or so writers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

They use tables and figures to very good effect at appropriate places, and have extensive appendices and a helpful glossary to help you try to keep the nomenclature they use straight. Find the glossary and refer to it often after you begin reading.

At the very end of the book they pull summarize their theory in a comprehensive one-page table that can be used as a check list of the concrete supporting facts and characterizations they develop in the rest of the book.

The Appendices explain the why and how of developing their theory. Source material is extensively documented in Endnotes, with an extensive list of additional reading, as well as a Name index. The Table of Contents is very helpful for going directly to material and sections. It reflects their organized, methodical approach to their explication of the theory.

It is a great piece of scholarship that I wish I had known about when it was first published. I was halfway through it, and ordered several more to send to friends and relatives. Of the generations of which I have personal knowledge, they seem to be dead-on with their descriptions, finding something good and bad in characteristics of each of them. It is timeless as to those generations which have passed completely away, and time will tell about their objective assessment of the endowments that current generations will leave for the future.

Be forewarned that the authors' objective assessment of the personality characteristics of the "Boomers" (the cohorts from 1943-1960) do not paint a very nice picture of them from their "rising adult" phase through "midlife" through "elderhood". Arrogant, self-centered, self-absorbed, self-righteous, intolerant. As I said: dead-on. They still have a chance to redeem themselves as Elders (but I'm not holding my breath).

Every history book I read from now on will be with the benefit of the insights I gained from this book. The Iliad and the Odyssey are worth a re-read from point of view of the concepts in this book.

As another reviewer said, buy two, and keep one on hand to give to someone you like who you think will benefit from it.

I think Strauss and Howe are on to something. Remember we are in the realm of social sciences, and no analytical model is ever 100% correct; if you reach 60% that's good. I think Howe and Strauss cleared this hurdle by a wide margin. I support my opinion on the following considerations.

First, based on all the different generations I have met so far the Strauss and Howe model fits well. The G.I., Boomers, Thirteenth (Generation X), and Millennials (Generation Y) are well captured. The principal callings of various generations as described on page 367 and principal endowment activities on page 371 seem accurate.

Second, this book was first published 16 years ago. And, the analysis has held up well with the passage of time. Part III of the book describes the future (post 1991). You obviously can pick errors. But, overall they got it right. Some of their calls are prescient. Such as: "... by the year 2000, midlife women will surge into boardrooms, media anchor booths, university presidencies, and Congress-and will begin making plausible runs for the White House." And, "... the Boom may split along geographical lines-for example, with urban, bicoastal New Agers squaring off against heartland evangelicals." Also, "... to elder Boomers, `retirement' will... be of little consequence. The very concept of a fixed retirement age will blur, late-in-life career changes will be encouraged." And, "Great peril might arise if Boomers find themselves confronting religious fundamentalists whose inner zeal matches their own... Make no mistake: faced with crisis, this generation [Boomer] of onetime draft resisters will not hesitate, as elder warrior-priests, to conscript young soldiers to fight and die for righteous purpose... As Boomers begin endorsing global crusades, the 13ers [Gen X] will turn toward isolationism." Remember all these statements were written in 1991. They demonstrate foresight that is way beyond luck.

Third, their generational cycle model has several well established precedents ranging from Homer to contemporary social scientists including one nearly identical one by Samuel Huntington, my favorite political scientist, who wrote the equally seminal The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

I liked this book for many other reasons too. Appendix A that describes in much detail their whole theory of generational-historical cycle is fascinating. Additionally, as a byproduct I have learned a whole lot about American history. Their model does a good job of explaining Americans ability for self-renewal that is way more pronounced than for Europeans and Asians. The authors state this is because other cultures are much more constrained by the weight of tradition. Having lived in both Europe and the U.S., I do agree.

If you enjoy this book, I also recommend Carroll Quigley Evolution of Civilizations. This author shows that entire civilizations follow a defined life cycle.

This is a cultural history of the United States, that tells America's story in a fresh entertaining way. Not really a book for scholars. It shows generation by generation how each group arose to impact & be impacted by the steadily accelerating & expanding world they lived in. I got the impression that generations of young people were thrust into certain crisis in our history & dealt with or failed to deal with them. This gives a certain antagonsim & lack of faith between generations. The fate of the nation hung on the next generation being able to adapt. Examples of this are plentiful. The differences between the revolutinary generation & the next one destined to hold the new nation together were essential. The generation that failed to address the problems that led to the Civil War & the generation that had to fight & die in it cannot be ignored. Maybe the most important differences in suceeding generations that still impacts our lives today is the generation that created the conditions for the Great Depression & ultimately our entry into World War II and the generation that grew up in the depression, fought & won the war & then proceeded to dominate the world for the next 20 years. The flip side is the commonality of alternate generations. The GI generation, the generation that Tom Brogaw refers to as the "Greatest Generation", has much more in common with the Boomer generation that it does with the the Silent generation that immediately follows it, or the Lost generation that preceeded it. They were an agressive, sucessful, globally important group as I believe Boomers are. But as nuturing caring parents both genrations leave somthing to be desired. They were loved & desired as children. The Millenial generation, still being born seems to be the same. The Silent Generation, was was more inwardly directed, more nuturing & trying to find a place out of the shadows of the GI's. No member of the Silent generation will ever be president. The X generation seems to have some of the same problems & assets as the Silent. A continuing expanding economy will help them the most. The book is already dated but some of its assumptions are pretty close. Of course they haven't accounted for the vast changes in just the last eight years such as in communication, the internet ("the information super highway) & the global village concept. But then nobody could.

Generations is brilliant for the most part because evidence of it is littered all over America's pop culture. From song lyrics to dress styles, this book hits the nail on the head. The only reason I took off a star is because he hammers the point home too hard and he tries to stretch it. Yes, it may seem implausible at first, but it will convince you. It explains so many things. For one, it explains why the average fighting man of the civil war is never considered as heroic as a revolutionary fighter or a WWII soldier. Generations also explains completely the cynical and depressed nature of Generation X or the 13er Generation as Strauss and Howe call it.

Reading this book in 2007, the accuracy of the predictions covering the past decade and a half, since it was written, is amazing and scary. Asimov's "psychohistory" came to mind, but that reference is a mere tangent to the importance of this book and theory. Strauss and Howe have organized human history into a recurring predictable cycle. The way I read it, they predict the next rendezvous with destiny to be in about fifteen years, give or take a few years. That means the current and next president should be well out of power. Thank God, because in their hands will be the fortune of an entire generational history. Be forewarned, reading this book may completely reorganize your previous concepts of history. What will be the impact of this knowlege on their theory itself and history? Time will tell.

After reading this book, I am reminded of the Fugees' (or Roberta Flack's, depending on your age and taste) "Killing Me Softly." The authors of Generations appear to be extremely perceptive and insightful, "telling my whole life with his words." And they may be. But in fact, they came to their conclusions based on mounds and mounds of historical and psychographic data.

My sister and I are 9 years apart, and I've often wondered how we turned out so different. I'm a Gen Xer (what Strauss and Howe call a 13er) born in 1980; she's a Millennial born in 1989. There was a huge sea change in popular psychology, parenting, and policy in between those years. When the authors describe each of our generations, I see ourselves (and our parents).

I have to say that I like this book mostly because it resonates personally with me. There are some parts that are a bit tedious (my advice? Skip or skim them). But on the whole it is well written and well researched. The first chapters on how Strauss and Howe delineate between generations is very interesting.

If you're an armchair sociologist like me, read this book.

While reading this book, I kept feeling like I was reading astrology. Like horoscopes, the authors of this book describe different generations in ways that are vague and easily applied (and nearly impossible to verify empirically). There did seem to be patterns, but I'm not completely convinced. I think the most important thing that can be taken away from this book is that of context - social events are experienced differently depending on where one is in his/her life stage. This is an important point - just like social events are experienced differently depending on race, class, and gender. However, the patterns the authors see, as well as the predictions they make, are somewhat flimsy. This is just one more lens by which to analyze history, along with race, class, gender, etc.

Many of the predictions the authors make have not come true, though they do propose that they are explaining what should happen in the future so that the next social crisis is dealt with successfully, rather than what will, without a doubt, happen. Unfortunately, if what these authors say is true, the future does not bode well for us. According to the authors, the Silent generation is supposed to begin to give up some entitlements installed by the GI generation. The recent uprising of seniors against government meddling with THEIR MEDICARE shows that this has not happened. I wonder if the boomers will continue this trend when they age. Also, they say that the Millennial generation will succeed in math and science and surpass Asian countries in academic accomplishments. As the test scores of the past 10 years have shown, these improvements have not happened, and the prediction that this new generation will be the next great civic one looks unlikely.

As a Gen Xer (I can't stomach their "13er" name), I think their description of my generation and how society views us is pretty accurate. But, sometimes when I read a description of my astrological sign, I feel like I'm being completely understood. For that reason, I think this book should be looked upon very skeptically.