The sun himself is weak when he first rises; and gathers strength and courage as the day goes on.” 
           —Charles Dickens

James Chappel’s exhaustively researched and enlightening book Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age is part of a long tradition. Humans have been inventing and reinventing their understanding of aging since Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden of Eden and introduced to clothing, cold, and the sagging flesh of their once-unblemished, unwrinkled prelapsarian bodies. First-century philosopher Seneca the Stoic, living the life of privilege enjoyed by the nobility and the wealthy, saw old age through Rome-colored glasses: “Let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness and await the morrow without apprehension. When a man has said: ‘I have lived!’ And every morning he arises he receives a bonus.” Living in an age when fire and plague regularly ravaged London and carried away large segments of the population, Shakespeare offered a grim assessment of the final act in life’s “seven ages”: 

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Chappel avoids both Shakespearian gloom and Senecan sunlight to render a balanced, in-depth picture of aging in American society. In the early years, the Grim Reaper wielded a sharp and unsparing scythe. Death was inflicted by a host of incurable diseases, cures that fell in the category of quackery, the unstoppable onslaught of deadly epidemics, and accidents or injuries that today could be easily treated or prevented. In 1850, the average lifespan was about fifty years for white people, and significantly less for Black slaves. The census of that year reported that only one-half of one percent of the population was over eighty. The elderly depended on relatives and families for support and care. Some spent their final years in wretched almshouses.

In the wake of the Civil War, informed by Lincoln’s injunction “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan,” the federal government created a pension system for veterans and their families. The Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association worked to gain public support for the former slaves who spent their lives in fields and mills, as grooms and cooks, who were instrumental in building the national economy but were left after emancipation without resources or recompense. Its efforts were scuttled by racist resistance and indifference.

Chappel credits the Depression with pushing the issue of pensions to the forefront. Huey Long, the demagogic governor of Louisiana, proposed pensions of thirty dollars a month (seven hundred dollars in today’s money) for everyone over sixty. Upton Sinclair, the socialist candidate for governor of California, proposed fifty dollars a month. 

Little remembered today, California physician Francis Townsend inspired one of the “largest and most active social movements in the first half of the twentieth century.” His idea was to distribute two hundred dollars per month (almost five thousand dollars today) to every American over sixty regardless of race, gender, or marital status. He sought to save the elderly from turning for help to family, charity, or, as Blanche DuBois lamented, “the kindness of strangers.” The one condition was that recipients spend all their allotment by the end of the month. Townsend “wanted older people to spend money and have fun doing it; he envisioned older people driving cars and hitting the town,” Chappel writes. His vision of old age flew in the face of time-honored Puritan notions of the end of life as a time of sober reflection and repentance in preparation for the final judgment. Though the Townsend Plan never came to be, it was, understandably, wildly popular. Despite the scorn and derision directed at it by professional economists, Chappel credits it as the first movement in America “to conceive of a vision for modern aging—one that sought to fundamentally rethink the place of the elderly in an industrial society.”

Fail though it did, the Townsend Plan influenced provisions of the 1935 Social Security Bill and helped make old-age pensions a priority. Beginning with FDR, the government led a movement that reflected a broad consensus to improve the lives of older Americans, allowing the old to live with a modicum of self-sufficiency.

Social Security was the first piece. The original intent was to follow it with national health insurance. That possibility was floated by the Truman administration but was sunk by the American Medical Association, and eventually also by the United Auto Workers, which didn’t want to endanger its own generous medical plan. 

Decades later, in pursuit of his Great Society, LBJ made Medicare happen. The most significant and sweeping piece of social legislation since FDR, it added the missing piece to Social Security by protecting those over sixty-five from ruinous medical bills. It also capped the era of liberal social reform and legislative innovation that began with the New Deal and continued under Republican as well as Democratic administrations.

“If policymakers in the New Deal era were trying to relieve the family of traditional burdens like eldercare,” Chappell writes, “their successors in the 1980s and 1990s were trying to reverse that effort, placing responsibility back on the family unit.”

Ronald Reagan led the charge. He began his political career with a speech describing Social Security as subverting personal responsibility and Medicare as another step down the slippery slope to socialism. He and the mounting conservative movement he served “praised the family precisely because they were asking the family to do and be so very much.” 

“Government,” Reagan famously said, “is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” According to Chappel, “The captains of the ship were no longer the elected officials or representatives of activist movements, but titans of industry, notably insurance and medicine…and, of course, the American Association of Retired Persons, AARP.” The organization adopted the acronym AARP as its formal title in 1999—the word “retirement” had become fusty and out of date. The age requirement to join dropped to fifty. Members need not be retirees; over 40 percent of AARP members are still working. Chappel describes today’s AARP as an organization of “late-middle-age and active seniors seeking life-style advice and discount programs.” More important, it is “a massively powerful lobbying group” that unites people across party lines to oppose all forms of “ageism,” especially any attempt by business or government to prevent people over a certain age from holding a job.

A glance at AARP’s publications confirms that its conversation about age remains primarily among and about white people. Celebrities successfully handling aging (it helps to be rich) are regularly featured; questions of equality and poverty that would allow the marginalized and poor to have a chance of comfortable retirement are avoided.

From the days of the Ex-Slave Pension Association, little policy attention has been paid to the unique needs of the Black aged. Social Security originally excluded people in agriculture and service jobs, two main areas of Black employment. “As Blacks,” one woman put it, “we were born into America with one strike against us. And now that we’re old and poor, we have three strikes against us.” Their story remains, at best, a footnote. Racism remains oblivious to age.

In the 1980s, the notion of “compressing morbidity” became the mark of aging well. The idea was to reduce ill health to ever-briefer periods at the end of life, which could be done through self-help. Whether Donald Trump’s bestselling The Art of the Deal or Jane Fonda’s hugely popular workout videos, from finances to fitness, rugged individualism ruled the day. Chappel quotes from physician Dr. John Rowe’s influential book Successful Aging: “Successful aging is dependent upon individual choices and behaviors. It can be obtained through individual choices and effort.”

Chappel makes extensive use of the popular TV series The Golden Girls to explore aging from women’s point of view. On the plus side, the series depicted senior women not as widows or old maids but as independent individuals, “a switch from the focus on men which had been the usual center of discussion of age.”

“Obsessed with bodies; with sickness and health, with exercise and breast implants, and above all with sex,” the Golden Girls allowed old age to be seen not as a decline into sickness and impotence but as “fun.” On the other hand, Chappel sees the series as presenting old age as an individual rather than a political or communal matter, reinforcing the idea of the “AARP Nation” that older people were meant to take care of themselves.

The same was true in financing old age. The switch from fixed-benefit pensions to 401(k)s and IRAs put the fiscal responsibility for retirement on the worker, relieved corporations of future financial commitments, and provided Wall Street a massive windfall. People came to monitor their personal investment accounts as if checking their blood pressure. One often tracked the other.

The shape of things to come, as Chappel makes clear, will be defined by the needs of those born between 1946 and 1964—the Baby Boomer generation. The oldest are now on the edge of eighty, the youngest in their early sixties. The graph of their huge demographic impact has often been compared to a python swallowing a pig. As they’ve moved through the chronological version of the serpentine intestines, from the 1950s to today, Boomers have had a huge impact on every aspect of American life. Those aging into life’s end zone will weigh heavily on familial and professional caregivers. 

But Chappel remains optimistic. He maintains that history is on the side of progressivism. This “does not have to be a crisis, for us as individuals or us as a nation.” Today, advocacy groups are proliferating to the point where we could be “on the cusp of a new old-age movement that could redefine, for us and our children, what it means to age and age well into the twenty-first century.” But no amount of volunteerism or well-intentioned community involvement can adequately address the obstacles to providing care, dignity, and security for America’s aging.

Individual choice and effort are undoubtedly part of health and longevity. Those choices and efforts, however, most often depend on the advantages conferred by income. Wealth and health remain inextricably connected. Longevity is tied to levels of education and access to college. The richest men live fifteen years longer than the poorest men; the richest women live ten years longer than the poorest women. Among the nation’s fast-expanding, sprawling retirement communities, where overwhelmingly white retirees enjoy life in child-free, age-segregated communities, and where living to eighty-five is commonplace, there are significantly more golf courses than funeral homes.

Outside the golden circle, among white lower-class men without a college degree, the opioid crisis, workplace accidents, environmental toxins, suicides, smoking, and poor diets were largely responsible for reducing average life expectancy from 74.2 to 73.5 years—the lowest it has been since 1998 and well below the high-water mark in 2019, when the average life expectancy was 76.3 years. 

As Chappel sees it, “Population aging as a phenomenon can only be managed through enormous expenditures and a complicated regulatory apparatus. It will involve the state and the entire organization of our economy.” In view of the country’s progress from Scroogian almshouses and dependency on overburdened families and private charities to the support and services now available, Chappel is sanguine that the country can rise to the challenge.

“We are aging into a world where aging will matter more than ever,” Chappel writes. “Sometime in the 2030s, the number of Americans over age sixty-five will surpass those under eighteen.” At the same time, according to demographers, falling birth rates mean the U.S. population will peak at 370 million in the second part of this century and then decline.

To one degree or another, in Chappel’s view, we are an aging society in denial, and the blinders go beyond birth rates and actuarial tables. It’s an axiom of AARP that there’s “a difference between aging and getting old.” But at some point, aging and old age converge in a reckoning with death.

Religion gets scant notice in Chappel’s book except in the context of the insistence by Evangelicals that care of the elderly belongs to the family. This turns out to mean the women of the family, an arrangement replicated across lines of religion and class that relies on “the uncompensated and undervalued labor of women.”

But millions of Americans look to their faith or spiritual searching—whether in informal, experimental, or traditional settings—to make sense of aging and death’s inevitable arrival. For many, faith provides meaning and context beyond the walls of the secular world. 

Death seems to be the final taboo in the discussion of aging. Over the years, wakes went from the front parlor to the funeral parlor. Now it seems, in many instances, the final obsequies have abandoned churches for catering halls and auditoriums, where speakers offer reminiscences and humorous anecdotes about the deceased, a favorite song is played, and refreshments are served. Any sense of the sacredness of human life—of the mystery of final meanings and the eternity in which we all play our part, of something beyond mere oblivion—falls by the wayside. The possibility is passed over that despite our minute place in the universe’s immensity, our individual lives have meaning greater than the ending we’re fated to suffer. “How but in custom and in ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?” Yeats asked. The ritual aridity and spiritual poverty of secular culture, which has become more and more the rule, offer no answer.

Chappel has written a thoughtful, engaging, and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of aging in America. It is a useful guide for those of us of advanced age to understand how we got where we are and, for those still advancing, to consider where they might arrive. It offers important insights into the sometimes successful, often frustrating efforts to turn old age from an ordeal into an opportunity for enjoyment and reflection.

Contrary to Shakespeare, we need no longer play our last act sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Science and medicine continue to soften the slings and arrows of aging. Thanks to adequate nutrition, healthy lifestyles, and pharmaceuticals—sometimes thanks alone to genetic good fortune—more people than ever lead active, productive lives well into old age.

What remains unanswered is not the invention or reinventing of aging, but the ability and willingness of the living—old and young alike—to reinvent a world that has turned away from the habitat-destroying, resource-squandering, violence-addicted course it is now on. 

Golden Years
How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age
James Chappel
Basic Books
$32 | 368 pp.

To hear more, listen to Commonweal associate editor Regina Munch’s conversation with James Chappel here on the Commonweal Podcast: