From the Impoverished to the Entitled: The Experience and Meaning of Old Age in America since the 1950s

Abstract

With more than seventy million individuals, the baby boom generation is rapidly approaching traditional retirement age and threatening to strain America's public and private resources. Within the context of Social Security and Medicare, the subject of later life has become one of the most pressing issues of our time. But these potential fiscal problems are not just the result of natural aging; rather, they were caused by historic developments that encouraged most individuals to retire in their mid-sixties, regardless of their personal financial status, physical health, or career ambitions. This project argues that these assumptions about retirement emerged from political and social developments that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to those decades, a majority of Americans over the age of sixty-five continued to work as long as they were physically able and could find employment. For the first time in the 1950s, retirement for the middle-class began to emerge as a common experience, centering more heavily on leisure, consumerism, and self-fulfillment. Middle-class retirement developed out of a confluence of events, including the widespread adoption of mandatory retirement policies in the workplace, growing Social Security payments that provided supplemental income for leisurely retirements, marketer's efforts to promote the retirement industry, the emergence of a "senior lobby" led by AARP, and the creation of Medicare in 1965, which greatly relieved the financial burden of health issues in later life. In short, retirement transformed from something enjoyed by economic elites into an institution that a majority of middle-class Americans could experience and quite possibly enjoy. A final point of analysis that permeates this project is the concept of entitlement, or a social insurance or earned benefits model. Politicians could justify expansion of programs benefiting the aged middle-class because the recipients themselves had paid into trust funds in their younger working years, thereby earning their benefits. I argue that this entitlement ideology explains the enduring public approval for Social Security and Medicare in the face of politically conservative attacks, especially when compared with less popular welfare programs that in the popular mind are associated with minorities rather than middle-class white recipients.