A review of James Chappel’s Golden Years
Pick up a copy of James Chappel’s recent book Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age (Basic Books, 2024), and its aqua-blue cover may convince you that a world of sunshine and swimming pools lies within. But readers who press on will find that Golden Years offers something much more nuanced: an urgent, thoughtful analysis of what old age has meant in the 20th-century United States, and what it could mean—or must mean—in the future.
Golden Years marks a dramatic shift for Chappel, a professor of history at Duke University whose previous work centered on Catholic intellectuals in postwar Europe.1 Readers of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter may wonder what motivated a scholar of religion and continental politics to write a history of old age in America. As Chappel writes in the introduction, this move was years in the making, a product of his long-standing personal interest in old age as well as public neglect of the topic. How is it possible, Chappel muses, that the elderly are so invisible in American politics, even as they die so frequently in environmental and public health disasters—and even as they wield so much power in American government?
Americans lack compelling stories about old age—stories that link the personal to the political.
Chappel wagers that part of the problem is our lack of usable histories. Americans do not talk about old age, he reasons, because they do not have compelling stories to tell about it—stories that link the personal to the political. The goal of Golden Years is to bridge that gap by showing how ideas about old age changed across the 20th century and how the lives of elderly Americans changed as well. To achieve this, Chappel assumes an eclectic scope, pairing familiar topics like Social Security and retirement homes with fresh perspectives on intersectionality, old age activism, and popular media such as The Golden Girls. Chappel’s sources are similarly broad, including books, newspapers, policy reports, popular media, secondary literature, and select archival records, though the COVID-19 pandemic prevented him from conducting a comprehensive documentary sweep.
In Golden Years, Chappel periodizes American thinking about old age into three stages: Part I, “The Aged, 1900–1940,” Part II, “Senior Citizens, 1940–1975,” and Part III, “Older People, 1975–2000.” Throughout, Chappel emphasizes the contingency of his narrative, drawing attention to “roads not taken” in an effort to depict history as a series of cascading possibilities rather than as fixed events.
Part I, for instance, begins with a survey of two social movements with competing visions of pensions in the early 1900s: the Ex-Slave Pension Association, which lobbied for retroactive pensions for Black workers whose wages were stolen from them during slavery, and the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a men’s society that advocated for payouts to older, predominantly white laborers seemingly threatened by industrial manufacturing. While neither group’s vision was fully realized, Chappel argues in Chapter 2 that the ideology of the Fraternal Order of Eagles lived on in Social Security, which maintained a strict labor hierarchy by excluding agricultural and domestic workers (the majority of whom were Black, Latino, or Asian American) and emphasizing contributory payments, which many women and racial minorities could not make. Conversely, groups like the Ex-Slave Pension Association and the Townsend Plan—a utopian movement that supported universal payouts to the elderly and promoted an idea of old age as a time of leisure—are labeled by Chappel as “roads not taken.”
Midcentury suburbanization made intergenerational living difficult. Independence became a ‘cultural mandate’ amid fears of communal living and the politics it implied.
In Part II of Golden Years, “roads not taken” seem to fade from view as midcentury experts homed in on the elderly (or senior citizens, as they came to be called in the 1940s). “Never before,” writes Chappel, “had aging been such an obsession in the cultural and political conversation as it was in the postwar decades” (77). The overwhelming consensus during this period was that American seniors must be independent. Independence, Chappel notes in Chapter 3, dominated the national conversation for several reasons. For one, the ideal of old age as leisure gradually gained acceptance among intellectuals and social workers. Much more powerful, however, were the United States’ ideological and infrastructural commitments to the nuclear family during the dawn of the Cold War. Sociologists and psychologists in the 1950s worried that older people would harm the “normal” development of the nuclear family unit, and the influx of suburban homes and cars made it difficult or even impossible for older Americans to live in intergenerational households. In this way, independence—be it economic, residential, ideological—had become a “cultural mandate” for older people as fears of communal living and the politics it implied took hold (71).
Chapter 4 examines how the laser focus on independence in the 1950s evolved into hyper-consumerism by the 1960s and 1970s. These decades marked the first time Americans entering their 60s could fully access their Social Security and Medicare benefits. Having also spent their working years during the prosperous postwar era, these senior citizens had enough economic privilege to pursue not just independence, but retirement. By Chappel’s account, the idea of retirement coalesced during the late 1960s and early 1970s around the principle of consumption. “A consumer society for older Americans,” he writes, “emerged parallel to . . . the youth centric consumer culture” characteristic of the period (99). A major feature of this new consumer economy for elders was congregate housing, the most famous of which was the age-restricted community—the precursor to what is called “assisted living” today. Designed and marketed with the able-bodied, upper-middle-class American in mind, these housing communities—with names like Leisure World or Sun City—boasted accessible living spaces and convenient amenities such as garden landscapes, recreation centers, and security forces, making them key sites in the idealization of old age in space as well as time.
Very few Americans could actually afford the fees that age-restricted communities required, leaving them to realize their retirement ideals at senior centers, at home, or in nursing homes. Most of the nation’s long term care infrastructure, notes Chappel in Chapter 4, was not equipped to handle the job. Nursing homes’ conditions were particularly sobering, and despite dramatic exposés throughout the 1970s, reforms were not forthcoming. Chappel attributes such inertia to a combination of corporate greed, racial and gender inequality in the caregiving workforce, and policy changes that rewarded nursing homes for becoming more like hospitals. Even so, Chappel does not lose hope, describing retirement in the 1970s as “a serviceable but leaky building, constructed piecemeal” and continuing to serve its purpose (120).
Many felt that this “serviceable but leaky building” needed major renovations, and Chapter 5 profiles one of them. Jacquelyne Johnson Jackson was a Black sociologist at Duke University who dedicated her career to researching and advocating for Black elders. From the mid-1960s onwards, Jackson rejected colorblind approaches to old age policy, challenging the gerontological establishment to properly confront the effects of racism, sexism, and poverty on America’s elders. She criticized the consumer ideal of aging as exclusionary by design and proposed reparative measures such as affirmative action for Social Security or the institution of national health insurance. Though many of Jackson’s critiques were never seriously considered, Chappel refuses to interpret the outcome as defeat. “The point is not that Jacquelyne Jackson failed,” he writes, “but that history presents us with an example of what a more intersectional approach to aging might look like” (143). Jackson represents a road not taken, but also a “hero” in Chappel’s story. “If America is going to grapple with the issues surrounding its diverse elder population, we need stories to tell about it,” Chappel insists (123). “And we need heroes too” (ibid).
Such optimism vanishes in Chapter 6, which marks a definitive turning point in Golden Years. Whereas midcentury interest in old age was high, by the end of the 1970s “the horizons of aging policy had shrunk, and the boundless future had come to an end” (147). Chappel posits several reasons why. For one, the 1973 economic downturn and the accompanying inflation crisis made defending Social Security a difficult and unrewarding task for progressive politicians. Nursing home scandals and unsympathetic media portrayals of old age on television and film led to a growing skepticism over whether an “active” old age was medically or financially possible. And while activist groups like the Gray Panthers sought to address structural issues and form alliances with other minority networks, the voices clamoring for Social Security privatization grew ever louder, eventually eclipsing all others to become the “only coherent vision for major old age reform” (165).
In Part III, stagnation and individualism replace growth and solidarity as era-defining themes. In the 1980s and 1990s, Chappel argues, both politics and popular culture encouraged older Americans to define themselves as individuals, rather than part of a politicized interest group. Leading the charge in this effort was the AARP, the focus of Chapter 7. Founded during the postwar years as a civic organization for retired teachers, by the 1980s the AARP had undergone a sea change in priorities. No longer concerned with building community among retirees, the AARP focused instead on fighting a form of age discrimination known as “ageism,” a term coined by Dr. Robert Butler in 1969. Chappel deems the AARP’s efforts shallow at best. Despite modeling their arguments after activists in the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, anti-ageism advocates often exhibited “a blindness to other, more powerful dynamics of discrimination” (187). The AARP also made little effort to ally with other minoritized groups, a move Chappel labels as politically devastating. “The hegemony of AARP,” he writes, “comes at a steep cost” (200). Rather than an issue that compelled state and society, old age “was increasingly understood to be a private journey . . . in AARP nation, older people were meant to take care of themselves” (ibid).
Chapters 8, 9, and 10 round out Chappel’s portrait of the self-care era in full, focusing on health and sexuality, finances, and long-term care respectively. Each uses the hit TV show The Golden Girls as a framing device, comparing the show’s larger-than-life depictions with the realities of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chappel finds the frank discussions of sex, personal health, and finances on The Golden Girls to be fairly countercultural for its time. The show’s protagonists—four older women living together—had sex, worked jobs, made jokes, and supported one another in a way that had never before been seen in American television. Yet in other ways, The Golden Girls fell in line with the status quo, celebrating self-care as a replacement for medical care and omitting any discussion of Social Security or potential disability.
By the end of Golden Years, Chappel returns to his “road not taken” conceit in order to imagine a different future for America. In Chapter 10, for instance, he considers what the United States could have done about its woefully inadequate long-term care system—a system that was overwhelmed in the 1990s by an influx of frail elderly and that will, with the aging of the Baby Boomer generation, be overwhelmed again. Writes Chappel:
The American government could have responded to the new crisis the way it had responded in the past: through the creation of massive new social programs. It could have created a network of licensed, well-regulated care facilities, staffed with well-trained, well-paid employees. That is not what happened, and instead the problem was swept under the rug. (253)
In his conclusion, Chappel speculates that old age will be part of the “two most important challenges of the 21st century: the crisis of the environment and the crisis of care” (281). In this “hot, gray future,” the individualist model of aging created in the 1950s and perfected in the 1980s will not ease the burden of caregiving or lessen the threat of floods, pandemics, or heat waves. So what are readers to do? Chappel has three suggestions. First, the long-term care industry has to change, with better regulations, higher wages, and opportunities for career advancement. Second, older people need to once again identify as “old” in order to mobilize politically. They also need to be more inclusive, not only of racial minorities but also of queer elders, elders with disabilities, and caregivers. And finally, Chappel entreats all Americans to remember that “the stories we tell about old age matter so much” (295).
With Golden Years, Chappel has certainly succeeded in giving readers a story to tell about old age in the modern United States. As a fellow historian of aging and American healthcare, I was impressed by Chappel’s command of the secondary literature and elated by his decision to elevate figures like Jacquelyne Jackson. I also appreciated his ability to weave together well-trodden episodes in American political history with new accounts of social movements—all while maintaining his focus on historical contingencies and progressive solutions.
At times, however, I wanted Chappel to further justify his historiographical conclusions. How, for example, was the independent-consumer ideal of old age different from the self-care ideal of old age? By what standards was Chappel measuring the influence—or lack thereof—of figures like Jackson or the Gray Panthers? Did old age simply ride the political wave of every period, or did it affect any social fields on its own? Would it be accurate to say, for instance, that old age was an example—or even a catalyst—of what theorist Wendy Brown calls the “responsibilization” of American life?2 As a religious studies scholar, I remain puzzled by Chappel’s decision to portray religion either as an archaic source of tradition or as a “typical midcentury institution” on the decline, even as he insists that Americans need a story-based ethical framework—a theology, even?—to help them confront the challenges of climate change and a graying population (190).
Theoretical quibbles aside, I can say with confidence that Golden Years is a book I will turn to again and again, not only to contextualize health policy for students or enrich my own research, but to show people who have aging parents or who are entering elderhood themselves that they are not alone. For if we are to survive the “hot, gray future” that Chappel foretells, we must first travel the roads that made—or could have made—our present.
Angela Xia is a postdoctoral research associate at Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center. She received her Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. in American studies from Columbia University. Her research examines interactions between religion and biomedicine in the late 20th century.
This review appears in the fall 2025 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.
1 See, for instance, James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
2 See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015).