In Our Prime (16 page)

Many businesses forthrightly denigrated the middle decades, knowing that consumers in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who worried about aging were more likely to buy products to slow its effects. From cornflakes to beauty creams to laundry detergents, the goal of looking youthful, or escaping the burden of midlife and old age, was the inspiration.

Advertisers reiterated the message preached by self-help authors like Orison Swett Marden that one's physical appearance could mean the difference between success and failure. In 1927, the term “inferiority complex” began to circulate. It was coined by the influential psychologist Alfred Adler, a onetime disciple of Freud's, to refer to a crippling lack of self-worth.
William Esty, an account representative
at the advertising giant J. Walter Thompson, noted in 1930 that the inferiority complex was “a valuable thing in advertising.” Could it be, he wondered, “that this standardized age has made people feel inferior?”

Advertising was both a cause and beneficiary. Activate insecurities about middle age and you create a lifelong customer. As soon as one imperfection is eliminated or repaired, another inevitably pops up to take its place.

During the twenties, more and more advertisers shifted their message from a product's qualities to consumers' dreams and anxieties. Unspoken or half-formed fears about becoming outdated or devalued in an industrial society were articulated and confirmed in advertisements.
The Laundry Owners Association inflamed
women's disquiet that husbands,
now enmeshed in the sophisticated world of modern business and away from home all day, would grow tired of their aging spouses. The 1924 ad promised that with the free time generated by sending out laundry, a wife could make herself more attractive to her husband by setting on a course of self-improvement to keep her “young-minded, fresh and radiant.”

A 1920s ad for Gillette blue blades
provided the perfect visualization of these anxieties: a worried man with noticeable stubble is surrounded by a half dozen accusing eyes. The copy read: “I was never so embarrassed in my life!” An ad for Williams Shaving Cream warned: “Critical eyes are sizing you up right now.”
Alfred Adler's term even
showed up in the advertising copy for Lux soap: “No Woman need have an Inferiority Complex.”

Ads reinforced the same sort of age-related separations and classifications that were instituted in schools, civic organizations, factories, and governmental institutions. Christine Frederick, the columnist, marketing consultant, and Taylor disciple, was a forerunner of the sophisticated strategists who advocated market segmentation in the 1960s.
In the teens and twenties, she
advised businesses to divide consumers into three age-related groups: young, middle-aged, and old. She then further sliced the youth category into nine parts. Focus on the youngest tier, she suggested, because middle-aged women are too set in their ways to alter their buying habits.

The J. Walter Thompson agency organized consumers into different social and generational groupings.
An internal newsletter circulated in 1924
reminded account executives that female customers fell into different categories: housewives, young girls and flappers, businesswomen, and the newest type, the “club woman,” the middle-aged member of social and volunteer organizations.

Pollsters soon joined the cadres
of experts who arranged the population into classifiable categories. George Gallup and Elmo Roper described their work as scientific and used statistics to split the population into subgroups based on education, class, age, and more. Their characterizations of consumers were distilled from national survey responses and treated like drops of rose absolute reduced from thousands of petals.
Replacing God
and Nature, the “typical American”—as filtered through the pollster's art—was considered a norm to which people aspired. Members of the public wanted to know what the “typical” middle-aged American was eating, wearing, and driving so that they could eat, wear, and drive it as well.

By the thirties, the very acceptance of surveys was considered to be a marker of youth and modernity. It was “difficult for many oldsters to adjust their thinking to this new instrument,” Gallup remarked, but “few persons under the age of forty (mentally or chronologically) fail to see the value of polls.” As for those over 40? Well, they are middle age.

Noël Coward captured how substantially attitudes toward middle age had shifted in his hit 1924 play
The Vortex
. The plot involves a middle-aged socialite who fancies younger men and her cocaine-addicted son Nicky (originally played by the 24-year-old Coward).
Nicky and his fiancée, Bunty
, comment on the reversal in attitudes toward aging:

 

Bunty: You're getting older

Nicky: God, yes, isn't it foul?

Bunty: Hell, my dear.

Nicky: It's funny how mother's generation always longed to be old when they were young, and we strain every nerve to keep young.

By consistently using the body
as the frame of reference in which to discuss middle age, capitalists, scientists, filmmakers, writers, and admen reinforced the idea that youth was an object of desire and middle age an object of scorn. “
In Europe, a woman at forty
is just getting to the age where important men take a serious interest in her. But here, she's a grandmother,” wails Fran, the youth-obsessed 41-year-old wife in Sinclair Lewis's 1929 novel
Dodsworth
.

Amid the nightmarish realities of the Depression, anxieties about middle age deepened.
In 1932, a letter writer to
the
New York Times
evoked the “despair and utter hopelessness of many middle aged” who visit the city's Department of Public Welfare because they had “passed the forty-year deadline.” These men and women are “thrust upon the industrial scrapheap,” he lamented, echoing the worries expressed by
laborers in Muncie nearly a decade earlier. “This question ‘After forty—what?' is without doubt America's greatest problem.”

Walter Pitkin, a journalism professor at Columbia, defended midlife using an argument similar to one G. Stanley Hall had made in
Senescence
to a much smaller readership a decade earlier. In his 1932 bestselling book
Life Begins at 40,
Pitkin blamed the Depression on the premature advancement of young and inexperienced men in business: “
How little even our brightest
college graduates know about anything in their late twenties and thirties! . . . And this, I feel sure, is one of the chief reasons for our shocking economic collapse. . . . Study the inside records of some of the most tragic bankruptcies and ruined fortunes; you will find a startling number of men under forty at the helm of the derelicts.” The complexities of the modern world require the experience and judgment of the middle-aged. “At forty, in brief, most men have not yet arrived and have not yet found themselves fully. The ablest are just coming into power and self-understanding. But even for them, the peak of achievement is still more than seven years away.”

His arguments did little to ease the discrimination against the middle-aged that continued through the decade.
In 1939, the Social Science Research
Council put both the middle-aged and physically handicapped in the category of “hard to place” workers, warning that they would remain on permanent relief unless the government employment service did more to find them jobs.
Four months after the report appeared
, President Roosevelt gave a nationwide address against “an unfounded prejudice based on age alone,” which was preventing men above 40 from participating in the nation's economic recovery. Mentioning World War I veterans in particular—whose average age was 46—Roosevelt declared April 30 Employment Sunday and the kickoff to Employment Week to highlight the importance of hiring these workers. The unusual proclamation, which the
New York Times
displayed on the front page, acknowledged widespread discrimination against those in midlife: “It is particularly important that those men and women who have reached the age where their family responsibilities are at the peak receive their fair share of the new jobs and are at least allowed to compete for those openings on the basis of their actual qualifications, freed from the handicap of an
unfounded prejudice against age alone.” He noted that a panel of labor and industry leaders had conducted a study and concluded that there was no justification for the bias against workers over 40.

The president appealed to employers, social agencies, labor organizations, and the public to give “special consideration to this problem of the middle-aged worker.” Ministers did their part by extolling the virtues of middle age from the pulpit. “
It is glorious to be middle-aged
,” the Reverend Elmore M. McKee told his congregation at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan on a winter Sunday in 1939, because “we are in a position to consolidate gain and even to make gains out of all losses and mistakes of the first forty years.”

Fears of middle-aged superfluity
nonetheless continued after World War II, when younger GIs returned home and entered the competition for jobs. “How Old Is Old?”
Business Week
asked in 1945, referring to a surplus of aging workers. Resuscitating the rhetoric of the 1930s, Conard Miller Gilbert issued a call to arms in 1948 titled
We Over Forty: America's Human Scrap Pile
. “Now is the time to fight. . . . There are millions, yes, millions of men and women past forty who are seeking employment and who are barred on account of their age. These folks are the tragic figures of this era,” he wrote. “The purpose of this book is to arouse the interest of every man and woman over forty so that they will join with their fellows in a nationwide movement to aid in the fight to earn an honest living.”

Again, a federal commission reported that bias against these workers was not based on any diminution in work quality, but the perception that middle-aged workers were not as valuable stuck. Fictional portrayals of the middle-aged reflected the negative sentiments. Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
premiered on Broadway in 1949 and presented an aching portrait of Willy Loman, a man who in midlife discovers he is no longer of any consequence in mid-century America.

How much the nation's attitudes toward middle age shifted since its emergence is starkly illustrated by Martin Martel's comparison of magazine fiction published in 1890 and in 1955.
After carefully analyzing the differing narratives
, the sociologist discovered that nineteenth-century stories regularly portrayed “mature middle age” as the prime of life, whereas the later ones clearly depicted young adulthood as the best.
“Age changes its meaning,” Martel observed, “from the connotations of ‘experience,' ‘wisdom' and ‘seasoning' to those of ‘past the prime,' partly ‘out of it,' and perhaps to some degree of being ‘not with it.'” For men, “the change applies most of all to work roles where age progressively becomes a negative factor in open-competition with youth,” he wrote. For women, “age becomes associated with loss of glamour and function.”

The obsession with the physiological aspects of midlife never waned, a constant reminder of the middle-aged body's deterioration, but in the fifties a fresh interest in midlife developed in a wholly different sphere. A small group of researchers provided a new lens through which to view middle age: as a stage of psychological development.

Erik Erikson, 1969

We cannot live the afternoon
of life according to the program of life's morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.