Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> W
> In fact, I don't remember the word Boomer being used until about the
> mid-Seventies and early Eighties with any common currency. If you
> look closely at the various events of the late Fifties and early
> Sixties you will see that actually the generation between about
> 1930-1945 comprised most of the active participants, so in the lexicon
> of popular culture the political, social, and cultural upheavals from
> say 1955-1970 were pushed by the Depression and War babies who were in
> their mid-twenties during the period.
>
Chuck, I agree pretty completely with your overall argument, but your
arithmetic is a little off here. I met very few people my own age (I was
born in 1930) in movement activity. Most were younger, and quite a few
were older, but few from among those who came of age 1945-1955. The gap
were those conditioned by the beginnings of the Cold War, and very few
of my "generation" escaped that conditioning. I was still pretty
anti-communist as late as 1966 -- I was more or less anti-war, but my
"arguments," such as they were, included contrasting the Vietnam War
with the Korean War, which at that time I still regarded as legitimate.
:-< On the other hand, my father never did really fall for the anti-red
hysteria, and had he not been in a TB san for most of the '30s might
well have become a red himself.
Remember those who blamed the anti-war movement on the permissive doctrines supposedly preached by Spock. I was one of the parents who used the book, not one of the children raised by it.
Time magazine invented a lot of these labels. It popularized "Beat Generation" if I remember correctly.
Carrol