Aging in America. Lawrence R. Samuel

Besides offering valuable, counterintuitive insights into an underresearched segment of the population, the study helped to illustrate the cultural bias against aging in this country. Americans in general “[have] an irrational fear of aging and, as a result, maintain a psychological distance from older persons,” the coauthors perceptively wrote; their findings showed that seventysomethings were a lot more like the rest of us than we liked to believe.¹⁷

      Aging as a whole was often viewed in the United States as something that happened to other people when, of course, it was, like birth and death, a universal experience. The aversion to, even hatred of, older persons was all the more peculiar given that everyone would become one of them if he or she lived long enough. (The same could not be true of racism or sexism, as people did not change color or, with few exceptions, gender.)¹⁸ Other ways in which Americans distanced themselves from aging was to think that individuals turned into different people when they got older, or that the process took place quite suddenly. A person was young and then boom! he or she was old, this notion went, a completely inaccurate reading of how humans actually (that is, gradually) age. (Also, from a biological standpoint, each body part aged at a different rate, depending on the individual, meaning there was no single physical process of aging.) Grouping people into an anonymous mass of “old people” was equally silly but not uncommon; seventy-year-olds were just as individualistic as thirty-year-olds (if not more so given they had had more time to develop their unique personalities). Finally, older people did not remain in a constant state of “oldness” but continually changed, another fact that anyone younger than middle-aged might find hard to believe or accept.¹⁹

      No one agreed more with such thinking than Sharon R. Curtin, who was downright angry about the way older people were treated in America. In her 1972 book Nobody Ever Died of Old Age, which was based on an article she had written for the Atlantic, Curtin looked at how seniors were deliberately separated from the rest of the “productive” population. Whether placed in nursing homes, retirement communities, or what were called at the time “geriatric wards,” she argued, those in the third act of their lives were now regarded as outsiders. Things were not much better for those simply left on their own to collect their meager Social Security checks and to fend for themselves as best they could. “We live in a culture that worships youth and denigrates the aged, no matter how honorable their past contributions,” Curtin wrote, like others labeling this a shameful aspect of American society. As she pointed out, however, this was a relatively recent phenomenon, with grandparents much more likely to be welcomed into an extended family setting up to the 1950s. Even spinster aunts could often be found living with their families before the Second World War, a situation that would be viewed as quite odd in the 1970s, when households had shrunk considerably. With no responsibilities assigned to them or expectations of them, older relatives were now often seen as burdens to their families, a sad situation for all parties. Although things were rapidly changing in Europe and Asia, grandparents were still typically welcomed into the homes of younger relatives in foreign countries, a reflection of the greater recognition and respect given to older generations.²⁰

      Although the discarding of a large segment of the population was very real, older Americans could be said to have had, in public relations terms, an image problem. Eric Pfeiffer, another Duke psychiatrist, believed aging in the United States had received a bad press, meaning the media had been unfairly critical of older people. Aging was popularly perceived as a “hopeless, unremitting downward drift, an image of despair, deprivation, disease, poverty, and social isolation,” he claimed, not at all reflective of reality. Instead, he suggested, Americans should look to the many “successful agers” for inspiration, people like comedian Jack Benny (aged eighty in 1974), Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (aged seventy-five), and Senator Strom Thurmond (aged seventy-one). Thousands of ordinary people were living similarly active and productive lives, he maintained, not at all the impression one would get from reading newspapers and magazines or watching television.²¹

      Arthur Flemming no doubt thought similarly when he told a congressional subcommittee a few years later that forcing people sixty-five years old to retire was a clear act of discrimination. “We should never deny anyone the opportunity for employment simply because of age,” the seventy-one-year-old head of the U.S. Commission on the Aging declared, comparing mandatory retirement to illegal biases of sexism and racism. (Despite new legal statutes, it should be noted, there are more litigations today based on the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 than on women’s charges of employment inequities.) Making people stop working when they reached a certain age was reflective of America’s attitude that older folks should be placed “on the shelf,” Flemming stated, a view that often resulted in real psychological damage to new retirees. (A full quarter of suicides in the nation were among those sixty-five and older, in fact.) Flemming, who had served as the secretary of HEW from 1958 to 1961 during the Eisenhower administration, linked this high number to the “traumatic experience” of mandatory retirement. Almost one-third of retired people over sixty-five would indeed prefer to be working, according to a 1974 Harris poll, more evidence that current labor policies were out of sync with the wishes of a sizable percentage of older Americans.²²

      Flemming’s vigorous appeal appeared to work. Following the passage of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Congress lifted the mandatory retirement age to seventy in 1978. (Congress’s decision to bump up the age by five years was not completely altruistic, as the move lessened Social Security payouts, at least in the short term.) Moving back the mandatory retirement age made even more sense given that many older people had to continue working beyond age sixty-five whether they wanted to or not. By the late 1970s, galloping inflation had effectively shrunk the value of savings and pensions, forcing those who had planned to retire to keep their jobs for a few more years. Inflation was also making older people rely more on Social Security as their personal nest egg lost value, increasing the burden on younger people to support them. Experts were forecasting that the number of Americans aged sixty-five or older would balloon from 18 percent to 30 percent of the nation’s adult population by 2025, early signs that the baby boomer age wave could perhaps crash the economic system. Older people continuing to work was one of the best things that could happen to the economy, in fact, making federal policies encouraging early retirement contrary to the nation’s long-term interests.²³

       A Revolution in Our Thinking

      Lessening discrimination against older people in the workplace through legislation can be seen as one outcome from a process that had begun in earnest about a decade and half earlier. History was made on April 1, 1965, when, by a vote of 394 to 1, the House passed a bill to create an administration on aging within HEW. The bill still had to go to the Senate for approval, but with the nearly unanimous vote (the sole nay was from Representative Dave Martin, a Republican from Nebraska) it seemed clear that Washington intended to improve life for those sixty-five years or older (10 percent of the population). An initial $17.5 million over two years would go toward providing retirement income, health care, housing, and job opportunities for this group of Americans; the agency would coordinate current such efforts that were scattered across many departments.²⁴

      With the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, however, much of the enthusiasm behind LBJ’s Great Society began to seriously fade. As part of his ambitious tax-cutting measures, Nixon pared back some of the domestic programs created during the Johnson administration, including those earmarked for older citizens. Over the course of his first term, however, he frequently mentioned in speeches his commitment to improving the lives of older Americans, giving seniors hope that the federal government would direct much needed funding their way. Much excitement thus revolved round the third White House Conference on Aging as it approached in late 1971. The first such conference, initiated by President Truman, was held in 1950; the second was hosted by President Eisenhower in 1961, out of which ultimately came Medicare, Medicaid, and the Older Americans Act of 1965. The Nixon administration had previously held official conferences on hunger (1969), children (1970), and youth (1971), and it realized that much work still needed to be done regarding the nation’s large and growing aging population. This conference was considered important enough for the U.S. Postal Service to issue an eight-cent stamped envelope to commemorate the event.²⁵

      Although critics correctly noted at the