20 October 2020
It started with the Boomers, the naming of the generations. Yes, the term Lost Generation came first, but the idea that demographic groupings of people born in a span of years should have a particular name really caught on with the post-WWII generation. The idea that people born around the same time have commonalities is both trivial (e.g., taste in music) and wildly incorrect (e.g., share the same moral values). And the schema we use is entirely U.S.-centric, although people in other countries often apply the naming scheme, or parts of it, to themselves, yet we keep trying to classify people by the year in which they were born.
William Strauss and Neil Howe did not invent the idea of a generational schema, but they popularized it. In 1991, they published a book touting the idea that there were cyclical patterns in U.S. history based on generational differences. As history and sociology, their idea is bunk, but it proved to be popular. Strauss and Howe’s names for the generations, however, were different than those most commonly used today, and of course, given a 1991 publication date, their scheme stopped in the 1980s. Their names for the groups born in particular spans of years were:
1901–24: G.I.
1925–42: Silent
1943–60: Boomer
1961–81: 13er
1981–: Millennial
The generally accepted names today are as follows. The years that define the groups vary somewhat depending on whom you ask—only the Baby Boomers have a period that can be objectively defined by a clear demographic trend, and even there the years aren’t predictive of cultural proclivities. For example, I was born in 1963, technically a boomer, but I have much more in common with Gen Xers. (I prefer Talking Heads to the Beatles and my economic prospects have been narrower like a Gen Xer’s.) Anyway, here is the schema as it commonly appears:
1883–1900: The Lost Generation
1901–27: The Greatest Generation (The G.I. Generation)
1928–45: The Silent Generation
1946–64: Baby Boomers
1965–80: Generation X (Gen X)
1981–96: Millennials (Generation Y)
1997–2012: Generation Z
2013–: Generation Alpha
But where do these names come from?
Lost Generation (1883–1900)
The name for the generation that fought in the First World War has a literary origin. The name is both literal and metaphorical. It is literal in sheer numbers of young men who died in the war, although this is more true for Britain and the European countries than for the United States. It is also metaphorical in that it represents a rootlessness and destruction of moral purpose as a result of the war.
The term Lost Generation first appears in one of the epigraphs in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. In the book, Hemingway attributed the phrase to Gertrude Stein:
“You are all a lost generation.”—Gertrude Stein in conversation.
Four decades later, Hemingway described that conversation:
It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein's Ford. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein's protest. The patron had said to him, "You are all a génération perdue."'
"That's what you are. That's what you all are," Miss Stein said. "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."
Greatest Generation / G.I. Generation (1901–27)
The name Greatest Generation gained popularity with the 1998 publication of television news anchor Tom Brokaw’s book of that title about the men and women who served in the Second World War, both in the military and on the home front. But Brokaw did not coin the term; it had been around for decades.
The earliest use of Greatest Generation that I’m aware of is by Democratic Congressman Hatton Sumners of Dallas, Texas in 1940, before the United States was even in the war. Sumners used the term in a series of speeches, or the same stump speech, given multiple times that year. Sumners uses the term in an aspirational, rather than a descriptive sense, arguing that this generation must rise from the devastation of the Great Depression to fight fascism and right the world. From the first instance to the young people of the Dallas Junior Chamber of Commerce on 3 July 1940:
It is up to your generation to set this government on a sound basis. My generation has failed. You must not dodge but prove yourselves the greatest generation on earth by do the work before you and righting the wrongs done in the last twenty-five years.
But Sumners was not the only one using the phrase around that time. W. Arthur Simpson, director of old age assistance for Vermont, used in in a speech to Burlington Lions Club on 28 July 1941:
It is given to any individual to participate only the tiniest fraction in the great upward struggle of the human race, but we have each a responsibility as a part of this generation, which if it is to survive must be the greatest generation that ever stood on this earth.
The other name for this particular generation is more prosaic: the G.I. Generation. It simply acknowledges the vast number of men of that cohort who served in uniform during the war. This name appears shortly after the war. From an 18 December 1946 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about how, while their service was great, the returning vets can’t expect to run things:
“Nor does that go for the G.I. Generation alone. You’ll find it in every walk of life. The newspaper world, which is filled with such lively “modern” chatter, is also the product of countless worldly wise old wart hogs, male and female.
Silent Generation (1928–45)
Bracketed by the war generation and the boomers and often overlooked, the Silent Generation would seem to be aptly named. The name first appears in the Detroit Free Press of 1 November 1951, but this is in an excerpt from a Time magazine piece of 5 November. The Time piece reads:
Youth today is waiting for the hand of fate to fall on its shoulders, meanwhile working fairly hard and saying almost nothing. The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the "Silent Generation." But what does the silence mean? What, if anything, does it hide? Or are youth's elders merely hard of hearing?
Baby Boomers (1945–64)
Generic use of baby boom is much older than any of these generational names. It’s an Americanism dating to at least the 1870s to mark any uptick in births. Here’s a local example from the Cincinnati Daily Gazette of 22 November 1879 detailing a spate of births among the families of the crew of a riverboat:
Madison Courier: The baby boom has struck the Gen. Pike’s crew. “A few weeks ago Mate Lon Noble first experienced the feelings of a father: a little later Engineer Charlie Marshall modestly confessed his paternal pride, and now Pilot Henry Thomas claims the red ribbon for a beautiful ten-pound boy, arrived last night.
The application of the term to the then-expected increase in births following the Second World War dates, as one might expect, to 1945. There had been a short increase in the birth rate following the U.S. entry into the war, but on 4 February 1945 the U.S. Department of Commerce reported this mini-boom was over and to expect a larger one in the year to come:
The Commerce Department reported Saturday night that the Nation’s birth rate, which rose 30 per cent above prewar levels in the year after Pearl Harbor, now is declining and will stay that way until the end of hostilities precipitates another baby boom.
And the term Baby Boomer for a member of this cohort appears by 1963 as the oldest members of that cohort reached adulthood. From the Philadelphia Inquirer of 1 February 1963:
These are the elements that make the present baby boomer problem more difficult:
The flood of students will be without the Federal aid provided for the GIs.
The new applicants will be younger and less determined.
They will lack experience.
They will lack the clearly defined goals of the more mature GI students.
Generation X (1965–80)
Generation X did not originally apply to the post-Boomer cohort. In its first instance, it applied to the silent generation and then more generally to any rootless or lost generation. The term first appears in December 1952 issue of Holiday magazine, touting an upcoming photo-essay by photographer Robert Capa, although the term would not appear in the photo-essay itself:
What, you may well ask, is Generation X? [...] Our tag for what we believe to be the most important group of people in the world today—the boys and girls who are just turning 21. These are the youngsters who have seen and felt the agonies of the past two decades, often firsthand, who are trying to keep their balance in the swirling pressures of today, and who will have the biggest say in the course of history for the next 50 years.
Capa was later quoted as saying:
We intended to present the problem of a generation which has as its main problem “going to war or not.”
In 1964, a British book by Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett with the title Generation X would play an indirect role in the naming of the post-boomer generation. Positing that they were another rootless generation, the book featured interviews with teenagers, that is to say boomers, and said:
The ultimate responsibility of Generation X is to guide the human race through the final and crucial decades of this explosive century into the enlightenment of the next one.
A copy of the book happened to be owned by the mother of William Broad, a.k.a. Billy Idol, and Idol’s memory of the book was the inspiration for the name of the punk rock band that Idol fronted. The band released their eponymous album Generation X in 1977. Punk, New Wave, and Grunge music would be the anthems of the next generation, and the name Generation X began to be applied to that cohort. An article in the Toronto Star on 24 February 1989 used the term in just this way:
"Throughout their lives," says Landon Y. Jones in Great Expectations: America And The Baby Boom Generation, "they will face the prospect of salaries that were not quite as large as they hoped, devalued education and difficult promotions."
As kids, their big brothers and sisters got the attention for doing all the wrong, rebellious things.
As teenagers, they missed the big Beatlemania and Woodstock-style love-ins, but boy did they hear about them.
And now, as young adults, they're banging their heads on a top-heavy job market crammed with thirtysomething career folk who don't plan to budge.
The boomers above them—10 to 12 years' worth—have sucked up all the nice jobs and good apartments, then rammed the real estate market skyward.
These folks don't even have a moniker. Some call them afterboomers; others, like Decima pollster Allan Gregg, label them Generation X.
Their very nonentity is their identity.
And:
The other possibility, adds Gregg, is that the Generation X-ers will cope by changing their goals or changing their behavior.
Two years later, Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, perhaps inspired by the Toronto newspaper article, would publish his 1991 novel Generation X, and the name for the cohort became cemented in the public consciousness.
Strauss and Howe named this cohort 13er because it is the thirteenth cohort in their schema of American history. That name does not seem to have gained currency outside of their book.
Millennials / Generation Y (1981–96)
More successful was Strauss and Howe’s naming of the Millennial generation. From their 1991 book:
At Burrville Elementary, 13ers in older grades found the uniforms slightly humiliating, but the younger kids hardly seemed to mind. These kids in green coats and yellow blouses are the vanguard of America’s MILLENNIAL GENERATION. Cute. Cheerful. Scoutlike. Wanted. Not since the 1910s, when midlife Missionaries dressed child G.I.s in Boy Scout brown, have adults seen such advantage in making kids look alike and work together. Not since the early 1900s have older generations moved so quickly to assert greater adult dominion over the world of childhood—and to implant civic virtue in a new crop of youngsters.
(In their schema, Missionary is the generation that precedes the Lost Generation, and were the parents of the G.I. Generation.)
Millennials have also gone by the rather unimaginative Generation Y, as they are the cohort that follows the Gen Xers. This name seems to have faded as Millennial gained in popularity, but it came about shortly after Generation X caught on. From the Montreal Gazette of 7 August 1992:
Generation X was the generation that hit the job market during the 1982-83 recession. Now another generation is being told to lower its expectations and prepare for a tough and maybe disappointing lifestyle. Generation X is only now beginning to emerge in the economy and the media.
Is the new generation going to take it lying down?
"No" is one of the first words this generation heard. No to drugs, no to sunlight, no to sex and no to jobs.
Call them Generation Y, because Y comes after X, and maybe because they're coming of age with the big questions laid out before them.
• Y can't we go out in the sun?
• Y can't the AIDS epidemic be stopped?
• Y is the environment in the state it is?
• Y is Canada in the state it is?
• Y are racism and sexism still going strong when everyone knows there's no reason for it?
• Y can't I get decent work?
Will Generation Y rise to challenge to these Olympian dilemmas?
Generation Z (1997–2012)
And of course, Generation Y led to Generation Z, which appears by 2010:
After "Generation Y," and likely due to a lack of a more creative term, comes "Generation Z." Some refer to this generation as "iGen" since they have never known a world without the Internet. Martha Irvine of the Associated Press states, "they are the tech-savviest generation of all time... even toddlers can maneuver their way through YouTube and some first-graders are able to put together a PowerPoint presentation for class." A teacher's most complicated struggle with Generation Z is not necessarily how to relate lessons to them, but rather how to prepare these students for careers and jobs that don't even exist yet.
Generation Alpha (2013– )
And having run out of letters in the Latin alphabet, we turn to Greek for the name of the next cohort. From the Australian newspaper Northern Star of 12 March 2011:
They are smart, cashed-up, career driven and are making their way to a place near you.
It's the newest addition to society's demographic categorisation—Generation Alpha.
Babies born from 2010 are part of this demographic, coming after the digital-native Generation Z and the want-want-want Generation Y.
The Generation Alphas will be some of the first beneficiaries of government-funded paid parental leave.
If the population continues to age at the current rate, they will have countless job opportunities.
You may note that the same critiques and notes of despair are sounded whenever a new generation comes of age. The “problem with kids these days” has always been and presumably always will be.
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