Ruthless Mothers: Money, Values and the Gimme Decade

Each Friday Afternoon During the fall of 1970, just after the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State—at a time when only 18 percent of the republic's 9,000,000 college students said that money was important to them—a freshman I'll call Steven Shine would put on a wide tie and take the subway to New York's Pennsylvania Station to pick up women. He would stroll over the terrazzo toward a pretty woman standing in a ticket line near the Long Island Railroad platforms and extract a fat wallet all but groaning from the strain of a thick ream of $50 bills. Then, "accidentally on purpose," as he used to say, he would spill his father's loot all over the young woman's shoes like a deck of cards and then ask her for a date.

Most of his fellow students considered Shine to be a freak, an embarrassing anachronism—little but a passing distraction from the serious business of ending a war and stamping out racism. It was pitiful that the poor kid's sense of self was so underdeveloped that he believed a gesture of such extravagance would endear him to women. It didn't make sense. Most of us didn't even carry wallets at the time, such was our collective contempt for cash and all that it symbolized. Young people mutilated money by shoving it into jeans pockets. And here was this fellow, noted only for his lack of wit, his absence of charm and his complete innocence of the abiding political intelligence of the moment, defying every reasonable attitude toward money by returning from the train station each Friday night with another beautiful commuter who'd missed her train.

We all tried to explain to him that money simply was no longer the issue—at least it wasn't our issue. Affluence had suffused the land and spread money over everything outside the ghettos like the muck that it was, because America in 1970 was still whirling with the most dazzling economic performance in the world's history. Much of the strength of the alternative thinking of the time was based on our belief that all the establishment's affluence and its attendant power still hadn't made a dent in crime, war, poverty, or even unhappiness. Steven Shine could have been America, we thought, with his ludicrous displays of abundance. He seemed so deluded as to the important things in life. We tried to tell him that he was part of a generation destined to rise above the great national impediment, the all-American love of money.

"Come on, guys," he would say. "What's wrong with money? I don't understand it, either, but it gets me laid."

"Damn it, Steve," I remember saying, "the Depression was a long time ago. You weren't a poor kid. Besides, flashing money in public like that is crude."

"Look," he said, "I don't play the guitar; I'm not in SDS; I'm not intodrugs—I'm into taking $50 bills to the train station and picking up girls."

If someone had tried to tell me at the time that I would someday gaze back at Shine as a man ahead of his time, I probably would have thought it about as likely as that student-bashing governor out in California becoming President of the United States.

•

Could it have been only 11 years ago? Didn't polls at the time announce that fully 76 percent of us wanted far less emphasis on money in the culture? Incredibly, a survey conducted for a Rockefeller fund in 1970 found that six out of ten students said they harbored "no doubts about their ability to make as much money as they might want to." For the first time in modern Western history, I used to tell Shine, money was the least of the worries of a huge middle-class generation.

But then the sky fell. The most efficient economy ever began to trip all over itself and was beset by energy crises, unemployment, rampant inflation, scarcity, re-trenchment and a whole world of people who didn't know the value of a dollar—because it was almost always in some sort of violent decline.

By 1976, four out of ten Americans said they had lost their faith in the American dream. Increases in crime, divorce and suicide were all soon laid to money problems, and psychologists began to see that the subtle violence of inflation was leading to racial strife, problem drinking, reduced fertility rates, impotence, child abuse and even rape. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that troubles concerning money had become the fourth most prevalent reason that Americans seek psychological counseling. It was ninth or tenth only a few years ago.

Ironically, the group most devastated by the economic upheaval is the very group that believed money to be the least of its problems—the "baby-boom generation," generally defined as those born between 1947 and 1960, with 1957 being the peak year. If you remember World War Two, you're too old to be a member; if you and your peers are on this end of that bulge—too young to have protested Vietnam—you're in the path of the economic steam roller that demographers say won't fully lay into the baby-boom kids until the end of the Eighties.

In all probability, the baby-boomers will be the first generation in American history to be less well off than the parents whose wealth they so recently found unimportant. Since the early 19th Century, one of the things that have made America different—special, many would (continued overleaf) say—is our expectation that fathers would be economically surpassed by their sons. "We've always had a faith," Jimmy Carter said in 1979, "that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith."

Ten years ago, only 17 percent of the members of this biggest of any American generation said that they would even accept the same kind of life their parents had. It wasn't that they meant that they wanted lives with more money. They just wanted things to be better. The kids, as John Stuart Mill had instructed, were going to be "improving the art of living" because their minds had "ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on." But at the end of a time when so many of them have watched other old and noble dreams fall away, when many of them have begun to look back toward suburban homes with lawns, the chances are no longer there.

Thirty million people entered the job market over the past 15 years, carting their expectations; but by the mid-Seventies, the gap between the earnings of young people just out of college and those of their college-educated fathers had increased to 39 percent from 28 percent in the mid-Sixties.

"The baby-boom generation is completely blocked from above. The people who entered the job market ahead of them are going to be there for a long time," says economic demographer Stephen Dresch. Held down from above, they are also being maniacally chased from below by what appears to be a new breed of rather streamlined young person, one who has been gearing for this battle from the time he was in grade school. He never dawdled along the way by marching in the streets or bumming through Europe.

Not surprisingly, the situation is taking its toll on the solidity of a generation that once sought to even look alike so as to trumpet the fact that they thought and acted alike. But after dancing together through the mine fields of politics, war, educational upheaval, generational conflict and numerous other dissipated assumptions of its age, the baby-boom generation finds itself at the edge of an economic cliff. It is fight-or-flight time, and the irony is that it's that old green devil money that is finally atomizing this most coherent of American generations. Some of them are dancing back into the mine fields and digging in; some of them are buying their way out in different ways; some of them have decided to fight, some jump, and some of them just stand there in awe of the fact that they have spent 20 years paying dues to a defunct fraternity.

The most far-ranging studies of the troubled baby-boom kids have been done by Daniel Yankelovich of Stamford, Connecticut's Yankelovich, Skelly and White organization. Yankelovich has spent a good many of the past few years trying to define what he calls "new values" workers—those college-educated, once-politicized children who, he says, still carry with them, sometimes like an albatross, their old ideal of getting more out of life than money.

Both pollster Louis Harris and the late Dr. Angus Campbell of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research basically agree with Yankelovich that the upscale youth who spearheaded the social-values revolution of the Sixties have, in Dr. Campbell's words, "broadened their horizons, cultivated their humanistic needs and raised their appetite for challenge and new experience."

As a Playboy promotional campaign announced a few years ago, "Sure they burned draft cards and tore up the campus and smoked funny cigarettes and never cut their hair and made us despair.... They haven't lost one iota of that intensity. They've just totally redirected it. They've traded the SDS for IBM and G.M...."

But the intensity, we're finding, is usually tempered with some measure of ambivalence. "I see highly successful young businessmen who are always talking about someday doing something worth while or putting down their jobs," says Dr. William Brownlee, a well-known New York psychiatrist. "They're almost embarrassed by the work they do."

A 33-year-old stockbroker, who specializes in selling financial securities to young ex-Sixties types, is a typical example. "The people I know in my business sit around and talk about how they can't believe they're here," says Nick Cooper (not his real name). "Everyone I'm friendly with here is an ex-Sixties type, and if they aren't, they aren't my friends."

Or take a young real-estate broker in Chicago. "The biggest decision I ever had to make," he says, "was whether or not to go to my tenth high school reunion a few years ago. I knew I'd eventually end up apologizing for my life, and I was afraid to see what had become of everybody. I decided not to go. I just couldn't look. I didn't want to talk about the old days and I didn't want to talk about money. I see enough of my old friends becoming ruthless mothers as it is."

Ruthless mothers? "I'll tell you why these kids are better off than our generation," one of those inimitable New Yorker business executives says to another. "They're not value-ridden."

•

Here, then, is that most awesome of gaps within the gap. Even Yankelovich, who sings the songs of the new-values worker who will soon run America and its institutions, noted recently that considerable numbers of baby-boom people afflicted by an attitude he calls the "psychology of entitlement" say to themselves, "If I'm not doing something meaningful or fulfilling, the least I can get is money."

As a Chicago psychologist told a seminar recently, "It's just amazing to see time and again how money and profit can temporarily fill the holes."

Somehow that old contempt for the established system, mixed well with a bit of Sixties-style, turn-back-on-yourself guilt—plus the impending feeling of being economically crushed in a narrowing spire—has caused a significant segment of the baby-boom kids not only to adopt the very money values they used to reject but to leap to a level of boundless, cloying, often criminal greed such as this society hasn't known since the days of Jay Gould.

In the face of money, values seem to slide off the new ruthless mothers far more easily than religion slid away from robber barons who equivocated about making money in the past. If you feel guilt, hate guilt. Blow out all that smarmy Sixties shit. Use all those Seventies "how-to-be-open, step-on-people's-faces-and-not-feel-guilty" rationalizations you can borrow from books and go. Hardly anyone between 25 and 40 doesn't know at least two people who have turned on their heels and gone after it like a bat out of hell. A recent poll indicates that 84 percent of Americans feel a "certain social resentment," because they've come to believe that those who work hard and live by the rules end up with the short end of the stick—and those who don't play by the rules seem to make out all right. "Nothing I thought turned out to be true," they say, "so give me money."

You can observe the most benign of the ruthless mothers at the California-style pyramid parties so popular last year, those trendy games in which you give $1000 or so to someone in order to get back $4000—or even $72,000—in a matter of days. The mothers are the ones organizing the party at someone else's house.

But at their most dangerous, you don't see the mothers at all. Just as the poorest members of the society decided long ago that the only way out of their situation was through playing the game outside of laws or acceptable conduct, the baby-boom money chasers are often outlaws. They run what economists call "the underground economy," where cash is collected beyond the reaches of taxes and rules at a rate unprecedented in a market-based economy. Ruthless mothers like commission money, cash payments, offshore bank accounts. Those sons and daughters of middle-class professionals are going after money in ways their once-decadent-seeming families would still consider rather seedy.

"It's really extraordinary to watch the coming apart of that baby-boom generation," economist Robert Heilbroner says. "The descent to the lowest kind of money-making. They don't like to administer anything; they don't invent anything. They just go for it."

And where they go for it has changed, too. The traditional crossroad outposts at the corner of fear and greed—places like the stock market and the race track—pale before the new something-for-nothing fast tracks such as real-estate speculation and commodities-futures trading.

I sat in a Chicago café with a 29-year-old speculator I'll call Peter Collins as he stared into his coffee. Collins had recently made himself very rich. "I realized a few years after I got out of school that things were not as easy as I thought," he said, "and I found that taking care of myself was a major proposition. Now I see that the economy could go down the tubes any minute, and the money I have can protect me so I can buy things like canned goods and an island."

I started to laugh.

"It's not funny," he snapped. "I'm very serious." Collins lives in a small apartment adorned only by a mattress. He doesn't own a car and doesn't even have a reliable television. "It's not physical possessions that mean security," he explained, "it's money. Materialism has hurt this country a lot if you look at the economics...."

Ruthless mothers. They're less little Horatio Algers than little Spiro Agnews of the changin' times. The idea is not even "If I can be rich, I can be happy." It's really "If I can't be happy, I might as well be rich."

For them, being rich has become inextricably bound up in being safe. But the question of how much money makes you safe in today's world involves the more open-ended question of what is enough.

"What the hell's enough nowadays?" The 32-year-old multimillionaire commodities trader threw the question back at me as we gazed out at the swimming pool next to the ten-bedroom house he inhabits all by himself. "You tell me your opinion, since you're so interested."

He pulled on his beard for a while, before an answer came to me.

"Given the most comfortable lifestyle you can imagine," I said, "you have enough money when your capital kicks out all the money you need to support it."

"That's a pretty good answer," the young mother said, "but with inflation and the depression coming, you just never know anymore. You can't tell anything at all these days."

Everyone from the most antimaterialistic Sixties kid who has opted for "voluntary simplicity" in the face of the coming decade to the most self-obsessed, slimy and ruthless mother radiating greed in some personal and private bunker seems to employ the awful cliché of survival. "I'm a survivor," the ones outside hospitals or therapy programs tell one another. Survivors, after all, never have to say they're sorry—it's like being poor during the Depression. They read books about how to survive. Even the "how-to-make-a-million" books are being eclipsed in sales by the "how-to-survive-the-awful-threats-to-the-meager-things-you-have" books. Self-proclaimed mothers/survivors aren't necessarily committed Republicans, but they sure voted for Ronald Reagan and his tax cuts.

Of course, it's easier to understand the ruthless mothers' instinct for survival when you take a look at the group nipping at their heels.

The people younger than those on the Vietnam war side of the gap are only now beginning to demonstrate their wondrous gyrations of mind and style that have geared them more appropriately to win some of the shrinking pieces of pie. Evolution does work. They've never had to unload a lot of moralistic, affluence-based misconceptions, because they never appear to have had them to carry around in the first place.

I recently commented to a young Atlanta sales representative that I was amazed by one recent study reporting that most American consumers still believe inflation will soon fall to nine percent.

"What's wrong with that?" the young man said, vibrating on the edge of his chair. "What's wrong with that? I'm bullish on America, aren't you?"

"Well, I——"

"I mean, I own two houses in Atlanta and I'm only 24."

"How did you get them?" I asked.

"Well, a friend of mine's father is on the board of directors of all these corporations that he tells us to buy stocks in before they are taken over. You just can't lose that way," he said, smiling.

I suggested that it was illegal to buy and sell common stocks using inside information.

"Of course it's illegal," he said. "It's illegal as hell; but so what? I love money, you know. I'm really bullish on America."

Although there are certainly wide chasms between the manners in which young people inside the middle-class baby-boom group are dealing with money, those young brothers and sisters have apparently come to see the American rat-race as a great popular movement—like Christianity in Jerusalem or socialism in China—that was designed for their benefit.

One Sunday, the traditional day of rest for several cultures, I found Bob Smith at his office at a prestigious investment-banking house in New York City that is widely considered to be the fastest track going. "You don't really hit the big time here until you're a partner after putting in about seven or eight years," Smith said. "But once you become a partner, you're sure to be a millionaire.

"What's happened to people's ideas about money?" he went on. "Well, some people grew up with these massive expectations that were rooted in our faith in great American institutions; but then we saw those institutions in the late Sixties and Seventies just hung by the balls—nobody believed in them, so there was a breakdown in respect. But I never frankly understood why anyone could dislike money. I really never understood that.

"Now, my brother Jim is an example of someone who was permanently disabled psychologically by the Sixties. He has no ambition at all. He has a one-man computer consulting firm in Houston and he makes $50,000 in a few months and then packs it in. He thinks he has enough to live on for the rest of the year. He says to me, 'What am I gonna do with all the money?' "

"And that makes him psychologically disabled to you?"

"Absolutely. He was one of those people directly confronted by the specter of dying over in Vietnam, of opting out and going to Canada and all that. It made that group re-evaluate their whole lives, but now they can't ever get back on track. They can't get their shit together. My brother could really go for it if he developed his firm. The ultimate result of his effort could be real freedom."

I found Bob's brother Jim, who is 33, (continued on page 210) Ruthless Mothers (continued from page 100) just after he returned from a fishing trip late on a Wednesday afternoon. "I know Bob thinks I have a fatal flaw," Jim said. "He always asks me why I don't just forge ahead. Bob really worries me. It doesn't surprise me that he was working on Sunday. His apartment is just like the water cooler at work, an extension to his real world of making money.

"I just can't relate to those bright-young-men-with-a-future types—or even to my old friends who have decided to play out the script. I really envy people who are making a living doing what they love, but somehow I keep getting caught in the money trap. What I want to do doesn't produce any money, and what I hate doing is financially rewarding. The only way out will be to dump the need for money. I have actually walked around my house periodically and stared at the video-tape machine and tried to feel what it would be like to take a sledge hammer to it. To destroy it, to violently and cathartically let go.

"I'm very aware of how money fills psychological gaps," Jim said wistfully. "When I'm most lonely, unsatisfied and isolated is when I want to make and spend money. I'm afraid to let go of the cushion. And my brother thinks I'm permanently disabled. That's heavy."

•

Is it possible that in the land that has been redefining the modes of material acquisition and glorifying personal success ever since it (the nation, not money love) was invented—after the era of conspicuous consumption, after the postwar boom, when every American dreamed only of automobiles and babies, after the flight to the lush suburbs, and now after the war and Watergate, the Sixties and the great re-examination of the past ten years—the most materialistic time in American history is now? That's what a recent report of The Roper Organization says. It says that a car has edged out a child on the "What I Want" list, which is vintage materialism in any man's decade.

From the time of the nation's birth through the dark days of the Great Depression, the ethic powering American money love rested easily on the never-ending search for God's will. Americans who made themselves rich and died before the Thirties rarely perceived a conflict between the drive to make money and the public good. Everyone was a puritan when it came to accumulating wealth.

Because of the obvious deprivations that scarred people who lived through the Depression, most members of the baby-boom generation grew up regarding their parents' and grandparents' psychoses and ardent maxims concerning money as a product of that most money-obsessed period in American history. But a comparison of the psychological underpinnings of that anxious moment and those at the headwaters of this new decade may help explain ruthless mothers and psychological cripples.

For one thing, the boom that defined the material assumptions of the baby-boom kids—despite the grinding poverty that continued to exist underneath that boom in the inner cities—was far more widely disseminated to an ever-richer populace than was the pre-Depression boom.

Another big difference is that the people most affected by the Depression didn't really believe it would last. It was an aberration, and few people were looking into a long, bleak, cone-shaped future such as has been presented to the baby-boomers. And those who did view the Depression and its attendant financial obsessions as indices of society's flaws still had comparatively unsullied social theories such as New Deal liberalism and socialism (and even communism and fascism, for that matter) to lean on; at the moment, there aren't too many great ideas around, which tends to put a shoulder into hope.

People were greedy as hell again after World War Two. They stoked up a consumer society such as the world had never seen so they could "build a better world together" and drive around in convertibles. But they also gave a lot of the national income away to people in Europe. They agreed as a society to do things that were grounded in compassion. They could afford it, too. They had saved an incredible 140 billion dollars through war bonds and savings accounts. They'd won a big war. They built nice homes. They had children who would never have to worry.

Everyone remembers money's problems in the Sixties; but in looking at the new view of money facing the Eighties, we can't skip the Seventies. As Tom Wolfe has pointed out, many Americans spent that decade learning to separate themselves from the mainstream of things that made them nervous. They were thus aided in working on new ways to relate to cash—to covet it, lust for it. The young people lucky enough to have a lot of money even discovered a brand-new status symbol they could honk up through rolled-up money—and the best part about that powdery symbol of wealth and taste was that it made them feel like things were fine. Out in California, one man made himself a bundle running a clinic where people chewed on money to overcome the guilt of loving it so; and, better than that, the Eighties has provided another Californian whose political movement argues that unfettered self-interest is nothing less noble than a reincarnation of our lost entrepreneurialism, some hybrid of Puritan and Emersonian thinking. The supply-side magicians even seem to believe that envy and greed are the very fuel of the economy.

But the expanding capacity of the baby-boomers for no-holds-barred, fuck-you selfishness still, in fact, most clearly separates this new genre of money love from its original roots in this culture. The Puritan ethic, which lined the souls and purses of Americans for well over 200 years, was based on hard work, thrift, acumen and shrewdness, sacrifice and basic fairness all teaming up to eventually reward a good American with a pile of cash he could enjoy later on.

The bulk of the working public locked inside today's narrowing spire will experience the whole package upside down. They have started with affluence and will work up to sacrifice, deferred material gratification, debt and thrift. In inflationary economies, debtors win and creditors lose, as Paul Blumberg points out in his recently published Inequality in an Age of Decline. And selfishness? The old Puritans couldn't stand a person who was selfish. They thought it the worst of earthly sins.

But why all the gloom? Dr. Richard Easterlin of the University of Pennsylvania says that the future will soon be rosy—except for the baby-boom generation, which "carries its fortunes, good or bad, throughout its life cycle." Dr. Easterlin contends that its money troubles are aggravated by the sheer size of the baby boom and that the people in their early 20s should brighten up, they'll be richer, happier and more productive than their older brothers and sisters.

"The payoff for this generation won't come until the Nineties," says Tom Hayden. "That's when the Sixties people will be running things. Until then, everyone's battle will be squaring the need for money with a personal and moral position."

•

But for the baby-boomers, that's the hardest fight of all. If it were simply a process of growing up into the desire for new luxuries, the personal problems wouldn't loom so large, even for the most committed moral bounty hunters in the pack. If it were just a question of learning to live with telling your friends at a reunion how you "get money," the stylistic adjustment would be a lot easier. After all, money was always an enigma to people who had come to respect a life predicated on actions that weren't self-interested—people who had also come to believe from their own experience that human happiness was not necessarily derived from prosperity. The big generation never really did decide what to think about money. The consensus was never for scientifically redistributing it; money was just a commodity possessed of such magical powers of corruption that it was worth ignoring—so it was ignored. It's like we used to tell Steven Shine; it wasn't our problem.

Now it is. But the problem is the spire itself in conjunction with all of the other things that haven't worked out. During my research for this article, I decided to seek out one of my college friends who had been heavily involved in the college SDS chapter and was one of the most eloquent and passionate social critics of our circle. Members of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom on campus used to run into the toilet stalls and hide when he came into the cafeteria. He was what we used to call serious.

Today he's an insurance salesman taking night courses toward his C.L.U. I picked him up after class.

It seems that around 1972, he divined that the rug was being pulled, because he suddenly dove out of politics into the underground economy ahead of the pack and began to sell drugs. He kept a two-bedroom apartment, one bedroom of which was packed tight with 200-pound bales of marijuana. He dressed like a pimp for a while, and after making a bundle of cash, he cleaned up the money and started a small business of his own selling jewelry. That was just a year or two before business schools all over the country began to offer entrepreneurial and venture-capital courses because the hippest of the baby-boom people briefly hoped that doing your own thing in business was the way to work things out with money.

But as with so many who tried it, the banks didn't come through for my old classmate. Inflation ate away at his capital base, he couldn't get help, the recession made people stop buying and taxes ran his profits down to nothing. So he went bankrupt a few times before throwing in the towel and turning to insurance.

He still uses the term bourgeois, but now it is to describe his own lifestyle. He's married, and his wife will soon have their first child. "I decided to try to vote for President this time," he said over dinner. "After all the problems I had with taxes with the business and all, I thought I'd vote for Reagan. Then I saw Bill Moyers do a profile of Reagan on television. It showed how he made over $500,000 in 1979 and gave $4000 of it to charity. It showed him shouting down the deans back at Berkeley; and it became quite clear that this was a man who didn't give a damn about people without his opportunities.

"I thought, My God, what's happened to me? I've changed, but not enough to help this guy—and everything he stands for—into the Presidency. With all the changes since the Sixties, I ask myself every once in a while if I've sold out. I've decided that selling out is when you lie to yourself instead of to others—when you convince yourself that people are poor because of something in themselves.

"But money? I still haven't figured it out. Damned if I ever will."

A car has edged out a child on the 'What I Want' list, which is vintage materialism in any man's decade."