Aging Out

Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel; Basic Books, 368 pp., $32

Americans used to train for aging and mortality. Mary Moody Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts, practiced death for decades, wearing her burial shroud by day, then climbing into a coffin-shaped bed. Her nephew Ralph Waldo opened tombs to watch decay conquer the bodies he loved: his young first wife, his five-year-old son. In family plots everywhere, gravestones cautioned: As I am now, so you must be.

Contemporary America segregates debility and death, and it’s costing us, body and soul, writes Duke University historian James Chappel. We all go into the dark, but too many of us suffer dreadfully in the process. The arc of modernity, Chappel contends, can be read as a struggle between insecurity and security—as material reality, as subjective state. We crave security for ourselves but not necessarily for others, and as we age, these tensions ratchet.

Golden Years, a pellucid, unsparing account of the ends of life, anatomizes why a particular vision of old age was constructed in the 20th century, why it fell apart 40 years ago, and what may come next. Chappel believes that the system is worth repairing, if only for its utopian heart: the argument that we all deserve a life of dignity and public support once we become old or disabled. If not for Social Security, nearly 40 percent of older Americans would be living in poverty. Every part of the aging process is shaped by history, he warns, and as we decide how to handle a hot gray future, “it might help to understand a good deal more about the gray past.”

Histories of pension legislation rarely thrill, but Chappel is excellent on the radical, doomed attempts, in the 1880s and after, to repair lives damaged by war and chattel slavery. The long discourse on old-age support was sophisticated, the politics deadlocked. Social Security offered a moderate New Deal compromise, the least worst solution. “Beginning with the 1935 passage of the Social Security Act,” Chappel writes, “Americans were sold an idea of old age.” Yet millions were sidelined from the start, Black people especially, since agricultural and domestic workers were ineligible. Social Security was designed for the industrial working class, firmly aimed at white men with few needs and plenty of family (meaning female) help, and framed as a way to keep younger relatives off the hook. The model, always, was a three-legged stool: government stipend, private savings, employer pensions. Dignified old age was an agreeable byproduct. Yet once checks flowed, recipients grew restless. Chappel writes,

They wanted full participation in the life of the nation. They would need health, and they would need things to do: senior centers, golf courses, and more. And they didn’t want to be called “the aged” anymore either. That term was stigmatizing by design. They wanted a name that would signal their desire to belong to the American experiment in the fullest sense. The aged were no more. Now they were senior citizens.

And from the ’40s to the ’70s, they ruled. Old-age security, next to military might, became public policy’s central preoccupation, capped by the 1965 passage of Medicare and Medicaid. As free-market government and employers briskly offloaded responsibility, the IRA and the 401(k) appeared, and retirement was marketed, aggressively, as a genuine stage of life.

Now the term of art is “older people,” a designation so baggy, it’s meaningless: Over 65? Over 55? Over 50? And the answer to “who speaks for the old?” is, increasingly, no one. Even the vaunted AARP, Chappel tartly notes, is more interested in selling private sector products than pressuring government. The idea of independent old age is fully accepted—hospice, senior clubs, senior transport, a bubble of protection—but in practice, retirement age is rising and the policy effort backsliding, even as other countries enjoy coherent frameworks of care.

Some victories persist. Elder poverty has plummeted. Elder health is vastly improved. Older Americans are the only ones with guaranteed access to a functioning welfare state. But there is no workaround for the merciless math of aging. A spike in people over 80, many of them frail, plus the pandemic plus inflation equals a genuine crisis of care, as Social Security’s traditional recipients scramble back to the workplace, and those who never had access to full security despair: the disabled, the divorced, the widowed, the immigrants, the queer.

Chappel’s tone throughout is mild and rational, but his findings are disturbing in the extreme, and by the close of the book, his disgust is barely contained. This is at heart a book about care, he writes, and the wrongheaded questions we ask about age and aging. “This is also a book about family—about what it means, and what it could mean, and the ways that families have been asked to do too much.” It is beyond time, he says, to fight fire with fire. Golden Years is most compelling when it walks right up to the line between scholarly distance and social justice and offers, if not solutions, then goals: much higher pay for home health aides; safe, regulated nonprofit nursing facilities; decent senior housing; better pensions all around. His examples of programs that do work are a welcome revelation. The long-running On Lok program in the San Francisco Bay Area offers a coordinated suite of health care and social services to allow independent aging in the community. Third Act, a climate-activism organization, engages people over 60 based on their experience and sense of responsibility; they see all too clearly the tie between climate shift and economic precarity. As organizer Bill McKibben says, older citizens “may have a deeper sense almost of anyone of how much change has come.”

Under the ordered surface of Golden Years, another book pulses with artesian force: personal, impassioned, twisty. A memoir, maybe. Chappell, a parent and professor living in the South, has described himself elsewhere as a white moderate. “There is a lot of your dad in this book,” he tells his daughter on the very last page. Would there were even more. In the meantime, he reminds us to watch the clock. Live to 80 and that’s nearly 4,200 weeks, a span absurdly brief and with no guarantees, none at all, if our nation fails to reinvent, yet again, old age.

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