By 1964, when the U. S. population stood at nearly 192 million, four out of every 10 Americans were under 20 years old. More people were 17 than any other age. And there were more children under 14 than the nation’s entire population in 1881. Our country had gotten literally younger because of a mammoth post-World War II surge in procreation: a baby boom that dramatically transformed our demographic landscape.
Abruptly reversing the nation’s long declining birthrate, which had been falling for two hundred years, this generation forced the country to accommodate its unprecedented, and largely unanticipated, size at virtually every turn. Indeed, the boom’s asymmetry, bookended by smaller generations before and after, gave it the distinctive “pig in a python” metaphor still used to describe their movement through the decades.
So, OK boomer. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
Despite quibbling on the exact parameters, between 1946 and 1964, some 76,441,000 Americans were born. May 1946 marks the beginning of the boom in earnest, not coincidently nine months exactly after V-J Day. Almost three-and-one half million babies arrived in 1946 – one every nine seconds – a fertility record at the time which gave the country its biggest one-year population gain to date. Unlike Europe, where the surge of pent-up war babies quickly evaporated, Americans pressed on, and in fact, accelerated, with the birthrate outpacing India for a time. Eventually reaching four million newborns a year in 1954, annual births did not dip below that staggering number until 1964 – peaking in 1957 at 4.3 million.
Euphoric in military triumph, postwar Americans shook off two decades worth of disruption, dislocation, and uncertainty, embracing the broadest economic expansion in the nation’s history. Statistically the best decade in the twentieth century by almost every economic standard, the 1950s brought nearly full employment and no inflation to a nation starving for a long overdue taste of the good life.
And for Americans of virtually every race, ethnicity, religion, class, and educational level, that good life was predicated on family and children. As young couples wed with a new sense of urgency and purpose, a boom in marriages reverberated in advance of the boom in babies. Almost 95% of all Americans of marriageable age reached the altar in the 1950s. Not only were more Americans getting married, but they were also marrying younger, during their most fertile childbearing years, thus the boom’s fundamental arithmetic.
By the end of the boom in 1964, fully half of all first-time brides were teenagers with half of those giving birth to their first child before they turned 20 years old. The average American family grew by a full child in one generation, from 2.27 kids per family in the early twentieth century to 3.2.
Like that proverbial “pig in a python,” their dimensions have always stretched our economy, institutions, politics, society and culture, nearly beyond capacity. Initially the U. S. had to regear itself in order to feed, clothe, educate, and house them. Not enough diapers, baby food, or toys to go around. Schools and teachers were in short supply when first wave of boomers entered kindergarten in 1951. And then college classrooms, professors, and dorms were in short supply by 1964. Now its healthcare and social security.
Virtually every statistical strain in modern America – unemployment, divorce, housing, social security – can be explained in part by their demographic girth.
