Reviews of New Books
By Michael Barone and Brandon Bosworth
Permanent Adolescents
By Michael Barone
The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy
Leonard Steinhorn
St. Martin's Press, 336 pages, $24.95
When I was a law clerk to a federal judge in 1970, I often engaged him in discussions about current affairs. I remember arguing that the Vietnam War, then ongoing amid great controversy, was a uniquely unjustified and therefore evil war. The judge, a veteran of World War II, said that all wars were horrible and tragic. Then I countered by saying that the college students and other young people of the Baby Boom generation then demonstrating against the war were acting out of idealism. The judge thought not; he predicted that once the draft was abolished, the demonstrations would end. I disagreed and predicted that the demonstrations would go on. As was often the case, the judge was right and I was wrong. What looked to me like principled action on the part of Baby Boomers now seems more like an effort to delegitimize a war they did not want to fight.
This brings us to Leonard Steinhorn's The Greater Generation, an encomium to the Baby Boom cohort--or, more specifically, to the liberal half of the Baby Boomers. "What gives this generation its identity, what makes it cohere, what makes it more than just another age cohort," he writes, "is a shared sensibility, a unique worldview, a series of historical memories, and from these common touchpoints a set of norms and ideals to which most of its members generally subscribe."
Most? Maybe, but by only a small margin, and maybe not even that: voters 45 to 59, a category that includes most Boomers, went 51 to 48 percent for Bush in 2004. While Bill Clinton (b. 1946) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1948) are Baby Boomers (generally considered those born between 1946 and 1964), so are George Bush (b. 1946) and Dan Quayle (b. 1947). The Baby Boom generation produced a lot of liberal law professors (many of them overlapped with me at Yale Law School from 1966 to 1969) but it also produced Chief Justice John Roberts (b. 1955) and Justice Samuel Alito (b. 1950), who in his confirmation hearing unfavorably compared the privileged students he encountered at Princeton with the ordinary middle-class folks he had grown up with in Hamilton Township, New Jersey.
Still, Steinhorn is on to something. The Boomers were born into an America characterized by conformism, by a universally acceptable popular culture ("Farewell, Donna Reed" is one of Steinhorn's chapter titles), by the "organization man" mentality so memorably described by William Whyte. And yet as adults they have been a generation of diversity, partaking of niche popular cultures, many of them scathingly critical of each other, in an economy whose growth has been generated not by giant organizations but by individual entrepreneurs and small, agile firms that satisfy desires the big corporations never understood. Steinhorn notes that the Berkeley student rebellions of 1964 were a revolt against giant organizations. The sons and daughters of conformist America proved to be (in different ways, as the examples of Clinton and Bush suggest) nonconformists, or rather catalysts in creating an America where conformism to one universal culture is no longer the norm.
It's also true that the liberal Boomers Steinhorn celebrates played a role in changing some features of American life that most people took for granted in the 1950s, but which almost none of us would like to see return today--features like racial segregation, enforced by law and local terror. But it wasn't primarily Boomers, but rather their elders, who persuaded Americans to tear that system down: civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King (b. 1929) and Rosa Parks (b. 1913), politicians like Hubert Humphrey (b. 1911) and Jacob Javits (b. 1904).
Steinhorn also celebrates "women's liberation" as a great Boomer cause. However, leaders like Betty Friedan (b. 1921) and Gloria Steinem (b. 1934) were not Boomers. It is true that Boomer women have been much more likely than their mothers to work outside the home, achieve professional success, and attain leadership positions. But while most of us believe it's an advance that women are taken seriously and given equal opportunity in the workplace, many of us wonder whether it's good for society for small children to grow up without a mother at home. Recently there has been a rise in the percentage of mothers of children under five who stay out of the workplace to concentrate on their kids; presumably they're at least a little ambivalent about "women's liberation."
The sexual revolution--the rise in unwed births, divorce rates, and people living together without getting married--is another controversial Boomer legacy. And here again, America's latest crop of young adults seems to be behaving in a less liberated manner than some of their Boomer elders. The Boomers' sexual experiments may have resulted less from deliberate decision than from simple opportunity: the birth control pill came on the market when the oldest Boomers turned 14, just in time for them to test the waters. I share Steinhorn's approval of Americans' increasing acceptance of homosexuality, but I note with profound sadness that many young Boomers, including some of my friends, fell victim to AIDS because they engaged in behaviors celebrated by sexual liberators which, alas, turned out to be deadly.
Steinhorn sees Boomers as the great progenitors of social change, almost all of it good. I consider the results more mixed, and see the causes of the changes he describes somewhat differently. The Boomers came of age at a time of burgeoning prosperity and economic growth. And they arrived just as the cultural uniformity fostered by the unusual experiences of the depression 1930s and the wartime 1940s was about to break. The default condition of American life, over the long run, has not been cultural uniformity but cultural diversity. When a generation (the Boomers) came along that was not shaped by want and war, America was set to move in a much less conformist direction. Boomer liberals, with their self-righteous (in most cases) avoidance of military service and their happy assumption that all economic problems had been solved and affluence was guaranteed (a notion central to Charles Reich's astonishingly wrongheaded The Greening of America), just happened to be in place to move that process along.
Steinhorn ends his book by asking what Boomers can do now. His answers: make a cleaner environment, celebrate rather than deny the nation's diversity, and continue to stand for women's rights. And "as a generation that spoke truth to power, Boomers now must make power speak to truth." (Here Steinhorn fires off a few cheap left-wing talking points against the Bush administration.) Pretty flimsy stuff.
Missing from Steinhorn's call to action is protecting our nation, values, and institutions from those who want to destroy us. Just as the liberal Boomers Steinhorn celebrates tended to shirk military service in 1965-72, and to downplay the dangers of communism and terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, so in this book he has little or nothing to say about the threat posed by Islamofascism. In his happy Boomer nation, September 11 just didn't happen.
Like adolescents who rebel against their parents and disobey their rules even as they rely on the economic and physical security they provide, Steinhorn's aging liberal Boomers rely for protection on those they scorn. Yes, the liberal Boomers have made some positive contributions. But, as my judge noted, Boomers have acted not so much out of blazing idealism as out of their selfish pursuit of happiness in a society whose strengths they--like adolescents in every age--take for granted.
Michael Barone (b. 1944) is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and co-author of the Almanac of American Politics.
Literant
We are already halfway through 2006, the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The culture took brief heed, and then marched on unchanged. The operatic pimps-and-hos of Mozart's "The Abduction from the Seraglio" have hardly led Tupac fans to embrace real music and start buying pants that actually fit. Proponents of "historically informed performances" still battle fans of "living tradition performances" on catty classical-music discussion boards. Makers of atonal, minimalist, and other avant-garde music haven't come clean and admitted their work is mostly tripe. Tom Hulce, Oscar-nominated for his starring portrayal in Amadeus, still could probably use some new acting gigs.
To be sure, some good things have come out of Mozart's big anniversary. Many of the big record labels re-released some older CDs at lower prices. And there have been some good books published to mark the occasion. Two of the best are Mozart by Julian Rushton, and Mozart: The Early Years 1756-1781 by Stanley Sadie.
Rushton's book is for people smarter than me. An early warning sign was the number of musical notation charts it featured (I read music about as well as I read Sanskrit). The focus here is clearly on Mozart's work, not Mozart himself. Yet Rushton, a professor at the University of Leeds, does an admirable job of making his very detailed analysis of Mozart's music more or less understandable, even to those of us who couldn't learn the recorder in grammar school.
Right away I knew Sadie's book was more up my alley: less musical notation, more pictures. Don't get the wrong idea, though. This isn't some fluffy bio meant to be read at airports, but a 600-plus-page bit of fantastic scholarship by one of the greatest music writers of all time. The late Stanley Sadie, the man responsible for the magisterial New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, originally intended to write about Mozart's entire life. Alas, his own life ended before he could complete the task. Thus we are left with a book covering Mozart's first 25 years, carrying the subtitle "The Early Years," which is a bit odd considering Mozart died at 35. (No doubt Mozart: The First Five-Sevenths just didn't have the right ring to it.)
Reading Sadie allows one to come as close as possible to experiencing Mozart's era without the aid of a time machine. He covers everything from the Mozart family tree, to life in old Salzburg, to the inns in which the composer stayed. Sadie also resists the urge to interpret the eighteenth century through a modern prism.
Though both of these books are, of course, primarily about Mozart, another composer's presence is felt in each. Johann Christian Bach was famous in his day, and both authors acknowledge his profound influence on Mozart's work. Today he is completely overshadowed by his father, Johann Sebastian. Ironically, while the elder Bach's gifts are universally recognized today, Mozart probably wasn't very familiar with his work until later in life. Yet Wolfie was clearly influenced by the younger Bach. Born to one genius, and a source of inspiration to another, poor J.C. Bach is now forgotten by nearly all.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, however, is not forgotten, though in our era of gangsta rappers, teenage pop tarts, and would-be American idols, one could be fooled into thinking otherwise. Yet as long as there are excellent Mozart recordings to be had for mere dollars, as well as fine books such as those by Rushton and Sadie, there will remain a flicker of hope that true art and culture can still survive in our coarsened era.
--Brandon Bosworth
