Americans, myself included, have a contradictory relationship with retirement. The whole thing is supposed to be relaxing. It’s a decade or two of well-deserved leisure time at life’s end, devoted to family, friends, and voluntary pursuits. It’s an actual right: one of the few that we have as Americans, and one guaranteed by Social Security, our most popular and well-functioning social program. And yet the popular discussion about retirement is not relaxing at all. For younger people, the constant drumbeat is that they are not saving enough. Retirees are either pilloried as a drain on the state while those evading retirement, presidential candidates included, are viewed as out-of-touch geezers who need to make way for the young.
The problem is that these anxieties are taking the place of rational conversation. It was not always so. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, when the idea and reality of mass retirement came into being, Americans thought hard about retirement, and what it was for. They concluded that, paradoxically, retirement required work. Some of this work was political: Medicare, along with the expansion of Social Security payments, made retirement possible. But it was not just political, or even financial. Older people needed help to plan their time, and find their purpose, just as younger ones do. And many institutions, from employers to the state, were helping them to do so.
Retirement, as a new and publicly-funded stage of the life course, was at the center of public discussion. And it ought to be so today: the population is continuing to age, and the doomsayers are right that the policy apparatus we have in place is not going to cut it for the next generation of older people. Today, though, the conversation has been privatized—defined above all by individuals, families, and for-profit corporations. The consequences are dire. Aging is something that happens to all of us, and the conversation about it ought to be democratic, too.
Retirement, strange as it might seem, had to be sold to American workers. In the early decades of the 20th century, many were decidedly ambivalent about it. Labor unions, and the workers they represented, were more interested in creating good and humane workplaces than they were in securing benefits for those who were no longer working.
In part this is because pensions were only available in a few professions: mass retirement was not yet on the table. That did not happen until the passage of Social Security in 1935, which for the first time gave working-class Americans a legitimate expectation of a dignified retirement.
Payments were low at first. In 1950, the average retired worker received about $400 per month in contemporary dollars. This was not much of an incentive, and few older workers actually retired at age 65. Within 25 years, though, this changed. Payments were much higher: more than $1000 per month, in today’s money, and going up all the time since they were now indexed to inflation.
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Millions of workers were also now covered by private pension schemes that had been a major demand, and victory, of the labor movement after World War II. Then came Medicare. Passed in 1965 as an amendment to Social Security, it removed a major source of insecurity by promising older Americans that much of their healthcare costs would be covered by the state.
Unsurprisingly, in this new environment, people began to actually retire. As late as 1950, a full 60% of men in their late 60s were still working—a number that plummeted to 29% by 1980. This was not just for white men, either. Women were retiring, too, as were people of color (while it’s widely known that Social Security, as originally designed, did little for Black workers, it is less well known that these issues were largely rectified in the 1950s).
But even then, when material benefits for millions of workers were secured, many remained anxious about retirement. Social Security and other programs were designed to save older people from poverty and dependence, but it had been left unclear what they were supposed to do with their time and lives.
A sociologist in 1951 asked workers at Inland Steel about their views on retirement. Less than half of workers age 62-64 wanted to retire, and almost 90% believed that there should be no compulsory retirement at 65. More than half, too, thought that retirement was “only for people physically unable to work.” Social scientists worried about what they called a “retirement neurosis”: a period of depression and substance abuse that often followed retirement. After all, for most people the workplace was not just a place to make money. It was a place for purpose and camaraderie and fellowship, and at the time, often a place of union activism.
And so, during these three postwar decades many people, from entrepreneurs to Congressmen, thought hard about what retirement was supposed to be and they created a positive image of “old age” and its potential purposes in the process. For many people, retirement planning took the form of actual courses of instruction, provided by employers. According to one study, only about one in ten firms offered such courses in 1950, but by 1970, about two in three did. Those courses would teach aging employees about finances, healthcare, family relations, and productive ways to spend time after retirement.
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Some firms even adopted gradual retirement programs to help workers acclimate to this new reality. In the 1950s, for instance, the Wrigley Corporation gave retiring workers a month off without pay, and then welcomed them back to work. The next year, the employee would take two months off, and so on, until the worker was ready to retire.
A range of institutions, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, were vying to play a similar role for older people. To take just a few examples, trade unions and churches helped to set up senior centers, which served as hubs of communal living for retirees. Along with providing opportunities to socialize, senior centers were also hubs for older people to access social services and to learn about volunteer opportunities. As luxurious settings sprung up across the Sun Belt, a positive image of what retired living could be circulated, even if most people didn’t live in one of these lush communities.
Since the 1980s, this energy has tapered off, and the image of “successful aging” has become defined as a denial of aging. What seems stodgier, now, than “senior centers” or “retirement planning”? Once indices of social progress, they can now feel like relics of the past. Energy flowed from employers and the state, and towards corporations that were hawking rejuvenation products, age-friendly tech, and fitness gadgets.
This happened for many reasons. In the political arena, the juggernaut of old-age policy came to a halt, and there has been no major expansion since the Nixon Administration, and no major reform of any sort since Reagan. Dignified retirement started to seem less like a right and more like a burden on the body politic. And in the cultural arena, many older people wanted to shed the stodgy identity of the “senior citizen” and prove to themselves and the world that they could do anything younger people could (have sex, for instance, or stay in the workforce). This cultural movement was important, but it had the unfortunate consequence of draining “old age” of meaning and content.
The meaning of “retirement,” therefore, has evolved. Once a public and democratic good, it has become something crisis-ridden, private, and even shameful. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people are wary of it? Many readers are probably like me: middle-aged, in jobs that they more or less enjoy, saving for retirement but a little unsure that we actually want to retire. And many of us won’t, or at least not for a long time. But we deserve a real choice around age 65, and we can only have one if “retirement” seems like something more than precariously-funded leisure and social exclusion. Retirement could be, like childhood, socially valued, and meaningful, and pleasurable in the deepest sense. But just as children need thoughtful recreation and education to flourish, so too do older people need massive investments of time and reflection and education to make it worth it.
James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. The author of the recently published Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic. He lives in Durham, N.C.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
