Americans who worked on farms and in factories once had little choice but to work until death. As the nation prospered, a new idea was born: the right to a dignified and secure old age. The fight to deliver that right has been enormously successful, but it is still unfinished: Today, millions of older people lack the resources to live with dignity and security. Historian James Chappel explains how we got here and what the future might bring for an aging America.
Chappel shows how old age emerged as a distinct stage of life in the United States and how it evolved over the last century, shaped by politicians’ choices, activists’ demands, medical advances, and cultural models from utopian novels to “The Golden Girls.” Only after World War II did government subsidies and employer pensions allow people to retire en masse. Just one generation later, this model crumbled. Older people streamed back into the workforce, Chappel says, and free-market policymakers pushed the burdens of aging back onto older Americans and their families.
Americans now confront an old age mired in the contradictions of ever longer lifespans along with spiraling health-care costs and 401(k)s along with economic precariousness. Chappel suggests looking to the past to more thoroughly understand old age today and how it could be better tomorrow.
His new book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age (Hachette), is available for purchase.
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