Aging in America

A Cultural History

Lawrence R. Samuel

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780812293654
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Aging is a preoccupation shared by beauty bloggers, serious journalists, scientists, doctors, celebrities—arguably all of adult America, given the pervasiveness of the crusade against it in popular culture and the media. We take our youth-oriented culture as a given but, as Lawrence R. Samuel argues, this was not always the case. Old age was revered in early America, in part because it was so rare. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s, according to Samuel, that the story of aging in America became the one we are most familiar with today: aging is a disease that science will one day cure, and in the meantime, signs of aging should be prevented, masked, and treated as a source of shame.By tracing the story of aging in the United States over the course of the last half century, Samuel vividly demonstrates the ways in which getting older tangibly contradicts the prevailing social values and attitudes of our youth-obsessed culture. As a result, tens of millions of adults approaching their sixties and seventies in this decade do not know how to age, as they were never prepared to do so.Despite recent trends that suggest a more positive outlook, getting old is still viewed in terms of physical and cognitive decline, resulting in discrimination in the workplace and marginalization in social life. Samuels concludes Aging in America by exhorting his fellow baby boomers to use their economic clout and sheer numbers to change the narrative of aging in America.

1

Old in the Country of the Young

America today faces a great paradox: It is an aging nation which worships the culture, values, and appearance of youth.

—American Catholic Bishops, 1976

In August 1976, just a month or so after the nation celebrated its bicentennial, the American Catholic bishops released a statement that revealed a key insight into one of the country’s most important issues. Rather than view aging as “an achievement and a natural stage of life with its own merits, wisdom, and beauty,” the religious organization’s statement read, Americans preferred to look to the carefree lifestyle and rebellious ways of young people as inspiration. “Our culture appears to be unhappy and uncomfortable with old age,” said Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, a retired bishop from Washington, D.C., noting that negative attitudes toward anyone who was not young had intensified over the past decade.¹

This sentiment, perhaps best captured by the popular counterculture phrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” was reflective of the country’s rather recent aversion to aging. To be “old in the country of the young,” as Time magazine expressed it in 1970, was to feel like an outsider in one’s own home, an ironic state of affairs given that older citizens had of course been Americans longer than younger ones. Born around the turn of the twentieth century, the nation’s current crop of seniors had served on the front lines of the Depression and World War II, even more reason why their treatment could be considered unfair and even immoral. From a social sense, at least, the so-called generation gap was decidedly in favor of those on the younger side of the fence; those on the older side were typically cast as not in tune with where the country was and was heading. People over sixty-five (the mandatory retirement age at the time) were deemed as having little or nothing to contribute, making many Americans loathe the very idea of aging. (The famous line “Hope I die before I get old” from the 1965 song “My Generation” by the Who could be considered an anthem of the times.) Over the course of the late 1960s and 1970s, aging began to be seen as nothing less than an enemy, something that should be kept at bay or, if at all possible, be wiped out entirely.

Against this backdrop, it was not surprising that science launched a full-scale attack on aging, with some of the country’s best and brightest dedicating themselves to making old age a thing of the past. Defenders of America’s increasing older population pointed out, however, that aging was a social problem rather than a biological one, and they urged seniors to fight for equal rights just as other marginalized groups had recently done with considerable success. Politicians of the time, including President Nixon, recognized the clout older citizens held and appealed to them as an important voting bloc. While legislation to help seniors live better lives would certainly be helpful, it was proving to be difficult or impossible to change Americans’ feelings toward aging in general. Only the gradual recognition that a large older population would in the future become a major economic problem seemed to capture people’s attention during this era, as aging in America took a historic turn for the worse.

The Curious Property

Consistent with the thinking in the mid-1960s that social ills could be eliminated if Americans set their collective mind to it, many concluded that the best way to solve the problem of aging was simply to make it go away. Scientists enlisted in the cause of aging in considerable numbers, seeing it as a frontier that could first be discovered and then conquered. In 1966, for example, the president of the American Chemical Society challenged fellow scientists to join him in what promised to be one of humankind’s greatest pursuits. A “fountain of youth” was just waiting to be discovered, William J. Sparks announced at the annual meeting of the society, with chemistry the means by which to realize this long-sought dream. More specifically, he explained, it was the kind of chemistry that created plastics and synthetic rubber, firmly convinced that human aging was caused by molecules not unlike those manipulated to produce these scientific wonders. While admittedly a controversial idea, Sparks’s molecular theory was representative of the sort of bold approach that needed to be taken if science was to achieve the very real possibility of humans living much longer and much healthier lives. The study of aging as a whole was vastly underfunded and underresearched, he and others at the conference agreed, urging the federal government to devote much more money and effort to solve what was perhaps our most enigmatic puzzle.²

Unless or until the United States Government launched a full-scale war against aging, however, it was up to individual scientists, most of them industry personnel or university professors, to try to crack the code of how and why humans became older. Extending the human life span was tricky enough, but some researchers in the field were interested only in lengthening the period of life that preceded old age, a view the fountain of youth had engrained in the popular imagination. The Human Genome Project was decades in the future, but already a few scientists theorized that more knowledge about the structure of DNA could lead to the ability to manipulate cellular processes, including those having to do with aging. Others were focused on environmental factors that perhaps caused the body to eventually become, in layman’s terms, allergic to itself. What we interpret as the signs of old age were actually the physical wreckage left by antibodies that had attacked their host, researchers such as Roy L. Walford of the UCLA Medical School suggested. Preventing, reducing the number of, or repairing these mutations was the means by which to prolong the prime of life, Walford held, one of a growing number of scientists investing a good deal of time in unraveling this especially complex riddle.³

With Cold War rhetoric lingering in the mid-1960s, it was not surprising to hear antiaging efforts expressed in aggressive, sometimes militaristic language. Also in 1966, Bernard L. Strehler of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences called “The New Medical and Scientific Attack Against Aging and Death”—a fair representation of the kind of approach that was seen as needed to achieve victory. “An understanding of the biology of aging is within reach of this generation,” Strehler told the scientists, quite typical of the self-assured, rather audacious thinking of the time, where anything seemed possible. Breaking the current life span barrier of seventy to eighty years could be seen as analogous to other contemporary great scientific and technological feats like landing on the moon or harnessing atomic energy, with two things—good brains and loads of money—required to get it done.⁴ At the very least, many scientists agreed, the human life span could and should be extended by a few decades. Scientists at the California Medical Association, for instance, believed that we all should be living a hundred to 120 years, barring the onset of a rare disease or an accident that prematurely cut life short.⁵

Even if it was almost entirely speculation at this point, such theories seemed feasible and promising to journalists covering the scientific beat. “It is not inconceivable that scientists someday may be able to control human life to the extent that old age and senility are all but eliminated,” wrote Harry Nelson, medical editor of the Los Angeles Times in 1966. Nelson envisioned a normal period of childhood followed by “a 60- to 70-year-long plateau of maturity, health, and high performance,” cutting out the two decades or so of old age. (He did not explain how and why death would suddenly occur after so many years of wellness.)⁶ Other scientists were meanwhile focusing on a single aspect of physical aging, hoping that it would lead to an understanding of the overall process. Arthur Veis of Northwestern University’s medical school was intent on discovering the cause of skin wrinkles, for example, thinking that wrinkles could possibly point the way to why the human body chose to get older in general.⁷ Scientists were frankly perplexed by the whole notion of aging because it contradicted what was widely recognized as nature’s most powerful instinct: to survive.

While individual scientists at corporations and universities pursued their particular line of research, the NIH, an agency of the federal government, stepped up its efforts to combat aging. In 1968 (nearly three decades after Nathan Shock, a pioneering gerontologist, began his intramural lab in the Baltimore City Hospitals), the NIH swung open the doors of its brand new Gerontology Research Center in Baltimore, the largest federal facility for aging research in the United States. The goal of the center, which had been founded by Shock and others in 1941, was to uncover “the mysteries and problems of aging that have perplexed our philosophers and scientists over the years,” said William J. Cohen, secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), who dedicated the new building.⁸ Millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money were going toward winning the war against aging, locating the initiative within the public arena. Indeed, the dream of solving the aging problem went far beyond the halls of science, crossing over into popular culture in the late 1960s. A 1968 episode of The 21st Century, a television series hosted by Walter Cronkite, for example, explored the phenomenon of aging and the possibilities of prolonging human life. “Can we live to be one hundred?” Cronkite asked, visiting the NIH and the Institute of Gerontology in Kiev in the Soviet Union, to try to determine the likelihood of most of us reaching the century mark. (Cronkite himself would make it to ninety-two.) Organ banks would be one way to keep people alive longer, the scientists told Cronkite, as would germ-free “life islands.” By enclosing hospital beds in plastic packages, patients would be protected from infection, a not uncommon cause of death.⁹

Saving lives through such interventions would of course extend longevity but did not directly address the actual aging process. Slowing or stopping the body from getting older in a biological sense required something truly miraculous, but that did not prevent scientists and physicians from trying to make such an amazing discovery. Like today, many medications designed to treat a particular condition were considered to also possibly have antiaging properties, each one (briefly) entertained as perhaps the much sought after wonder drug. One such drug was sodium warfarin, which was commonly used to keep blood from clotting in veins and arteries. After prescribing that medication to a number of older people, a physician, Arthur G. Walsh, noticed that his patients’ mental and physical conditions improved, cause enough for him to report his findings in a 1969 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The narrowing and hardening of arteries in the brain played a significant part in the aging process, Walsh proposed, meaning anticlotting drugs like sodium warfarin might be a way to dramatically extend the human life span.¹⁰ Although in hindsight this could be seen as much too big of a leap to make based on the limited evidence, it was a prime example of the race to find a cure for aging muddying scientists’ normally clear thinking.

With aging now a highly visible issue, notable scientists from around the world made their voices heard on the subject. One of the leading advocates of antiaging in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the British scientist and physician Alex Comfort. Just a year before he published his hugely successful Joy of Sex, in fact, Comfort was considered in academic circles quite the expert on aging. While he often served as a much needed voice of reason, Comfort did firmly believe that scientists would soon figure out a way to extend the human life span by another fifteen years. (He had actually been researching and writing about aging since the early 1950s and was the author of a pair of books on the subject, Aging: The Biology of Senescence and The Process of Aging.) Over the past century, he explained in a 1971 issue of the scientific journal Impact of Science on Society, great strides had been made in preventing premature death. Little or no progress had been made in getting already old people to live longer; this was the next logical frontier. The “clock” of aging needed to be first found and then adjusted, Comfort proposed, with scientists’ determination to do just that increasing over the previous few decades. Extending the lives of mice through calorie reduction had already been achieved, he pointed out, making this approach the sensible one to explore with humans. Science would solve the aging problem before it found a cure for cancer, he felt, although preventing aging could very well lead to preventing cancer.¹¹

While as knowledgeable as anyone about aging, Comfort freely admitted how little scientists like him really knew about the process. Aging was “the curious property that makes us more likely to die the older we become,” he wrote in 1972, as vague a definition as one could put forth. Eliminating some causes of premature death was a piece of cake compared to extending the human life span beyond a hundred years old, he explained; it was becoming increasingly apparent that science had hit a kind of biological wall that prevented this next leap. But space travel too had until recently been just a farfetched dream, a good way of justifying all the effort that was going into what seemed like the stuff of science fiction. The most challenging piece of the puzzle would be to increase the average human life span without lengthening the period of old age, something that even the most ardent of antiagers admitted would test the limits of science. Modern medicine (and, even more so, public health measures) had already added a few decades of old age to the human life span, and the consensus was that tacking on a few more decades was a very unpalatable prospect indeed.¹²

A Bad Press

The aggressive effort to discover the cause of aging and then try to delay it as much as possible was directly correlated with the rise of youth culture in the late 1960s. Younger people in America gained social status at the expense of older people during the counterculture years, a fact that did not go unnoticed by leading gerontologists of the time. “How much youth fixation can a culture allow?” asked Bernard Coughlin in 1969, his question perhaps influenced by the media frenzy surrounding the recent Woodstock Festival. Coughlin, dean of the St. Louis University School of Social Services, was attending the International Congress of Gerontology, a group of researchers from forty nations who studied some aspect of aging. (Practicing gerontologists had little interest in the scientific effort to extend the human life span; rather, they focused on improving the lives of people in their later years.) Some kind of “generation gap” could be expected in any society, Coughlin noted, but the current one in the United States was excessive. Youth was being overvalued and age undervalued, he felt, keenly recognizing the historic shift that was taking place. Another attendee at the conference, Walter Walker of the University of Chicago, argued that older people in the country now made up a “minority group,” their social status analogous to that of people of color and other oppressed groups. Unlike African Americans, women, and even farmworkers, however, seniors had no movement to support their civil rights, reason enough for Walker to urge them to organize in order to gain political and economic power.¹³

Walker’s wishes were answered the following year in Philadelphia with the formation of the Gray Panthers. The mission of the organization (whose name was inspired by the militant Black Panthers) was to dispel stereotypes about older people and to influence legislature affecting them. There were about eight thousand Gray Panthers in the United States by the nation’s Bicentennial, each member committed to fighting prejudice against older people and to bringing attention to their cause. Activism centered around the “three H’s”—health, hunger, and housing—with much of it directed at the Ford administration’s budget cutting as it dismantled a good part of LBJ’s Great Society programs.¹⁴ The so-called medi-gap in health insurance was a particular problem, with Medicare covering fewer medical expenses than when the program began a decade earlier.

The marginalization of older Americans could be seen as the result of many different factors. One was the medical approach of treating aging as if it were a disease, popularizing the idea that all older people were somehow chronically ill. Such a view helped to turn age into a social problem, and served as a wellspring of negative attitudes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Old in the Country of the Young
• 2. The De-Aging of America
• 3. The Aging of Aquarius
• 4. The Perpetual Adolescent
• 5. The Silver Tsunami
• 6. Raging Against Aging
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index