Old Age in the Wake of the American Revolution

What did people think of old age and its possibilities?

My study shows that early Americans never embraced old age and became increasingly frightened of it as Enlightenment ideals permeated eighteenth-century society. The familiar baby boomer sentiment, “Never trust anyone over thirty,” is one the Revolutionary generation would have embraced. The American Revolution cemented new emphasis on youth as the true source of creativity and democratic virtue, and therefore denigrated old age and aged people as never before. Our contemporary cultural orientation towards youth as a source of vitality has its roots in the world of the American Revolution.

Contemporary Dilemmas are not new

Retirement is expensive and hard to achieve. People often get bored. Early fun retirement on the golf course can give way to incapacitating health issues. Who provides the vital care for aging people? Who ensures they have independence whenever possible? What if they suffer from dementia—should you take away the car keys? How do we fairly balance the needs of everyone young and old in families and in society-at-large? See how the Founders struggled with these same dilemmas.

They were obsessed with us remembering them.

We like to pretend the Founders left a legacy because of their greatness, not because they worked at making sure we would see them the way they wanted us to. But the Founders very much cultivated their legacies assiduously. I explore the ways in which they did this—from planning for public mausoleums to commissioning biographers to creating their own presidential archives.