Demography: The Command Generation

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The U.S. has a ruling class. It is cloaked in a conspiracy of silence. It is a generation that dares not, or prefers not, to speak its name—middle age. Yet it is that one-fifth of the nation between the ages of 40 and 60 (42,800,000) who occupy the seats of power, foot the bills, and make the decisions that profoundly affect how the other four-fifths live. The halls of Congress ring with the medicares of the aged. Every anatomical twitch or psychedelic escapade of the teen-agers scares up worry wart headlines. Ironically, even the revolt of the teen-aged is subsidized by middle-agers. Those tiny secessionist principalities of the disdainful young that span the U.S. from the La Jolla, Calif., surfing set to the hobohemians of Greenwich Village could scarcely be sustained without the checkbooks of indulgent fathers.

In a perceptive commencement address delivered at N.Y.U. last month, Assistant Dean Milton R. Stern noted: "The young seem always to be in the public prints and on TV, but that doesn't mean that they control things. To the extent that young people wearing their hair longer or skirts shorter dominate the mass media, they are frequently being exploited for commercial reasons. Youth is used to sell—perfumes, cars, cigarettes, and everything else. Youth, indeed, learns to sell itself. What happens to the young people these days is the opposite of commercialized vice—it might be called commercialized innocence." The middle-agers attract little attention, inspire few learned treatises as to the state of their being—good, bad, or indifferent. Paradoxically, middle-agers are the invisible Indispensables.

Steps Steeper, Print Smaller. No one has had time to study middle age very much, since it is practically a modern invention, as well as a distinctly American one. Prehistoric man lived about 18 years. The life span of an ancient Greek or Roman averaged out to 33. When friends attempted to dissuade Cato the Younger from committing suicide at 48, he argued that he had already outlived most of his contemporaries. Even as recently as 1900, U.S. life expectancy was less than 50. Thanks to medical advances and high-protein diets, life has lengthened, and it has grown in the middle.

As to where the middle starts, medical theory is very sketchy, and any age grouping is arbitrary, more of a social and psychological norm than a physiological fact.

When does middle age begin?

"When all the policemen look young," says Leo Rosten, 58, creator of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. "And to me they're mere children."

"When the steps get steeper and the print gets smaller," says Whitney Young Jr., 45, executive director of the National Urban League.

"I'll let you know when I get there," snaps New York's Mayor Lindsay, 44.