Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The general transformation of old age lies beyond the scope of this book. Two facilitating forces, however, deserve special attention in order to understand the ascendance of active ageing. The first involved a shift in cultural and medical attitudes and can be illustrated by comparing two canonical texts written thirty years apart: Hall’s Senescence, written in 1922, and Havighurst and Albrecht’s Older People, published in 1953.

  After devoting his professional career to the study of childhood, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall retired and added a book on Senescence. It is a depressing read from start to finish. The book opens with a personal confession of how press notices of his own retirement left him with a sense of ‘anticipatory death’, and ends with a chapter devoted to death proper. In between, life in old age is portrayed as a series of unflattering defects. The old smell, they have problems with the toilet, they are fussy, pedantic, always moody and uniquely sensitive to changes in the weather; the association between old age and disease had tightened in the late nineteenth century with the invention of ‘senility’ and age-related pathologies such as senile pneumonia. Being old in these pages was no fun, and where it might be, it ought not to be. Sex did not stop with the ‘closed season’, Hall acknowledged. Yet it was not to be indulged in either. To do so would just lead to ‘follies’ and sap the little ‘vitality’ old people had left. Hall’s advice was to ‘rigorously ignore and suppress all such manifestations in this field’: ‘complete chastity, psychic and somatic, should be the ideal of the old’. ‘Just living’ and ‘contemplating nature’ was pleasure enough. All this did not mean that the elderly should withdraw from society completely, simply that their true mission was to be a conservative, quiet force that spread wisdom and restrained youth. Old and young were opposite poles, and the task of the former was to balance the latter, or as Hall put it, the morning and evening of life were not alike. It was only childhood that was active and buoyant.46

  By the 1930s, more cheerful voices could be heard. Who Says Old!, Elmer Ferris, a retired New York professor, challenged his contemporaries in 1933. Age was an opportunity, no less than youth. Ferris’s advice was to stay fit by walking five miles a day to build up an appetite, indulging in nice meals and a daily cigar, watching baseball and becoming more ‘extrovert’. Above all, he recommended investing in the latest fashions, for ‘to be dressed in style means that one is in the swim’. One gained ‘a daily sense of refreshment by dressing for every occasion’.47 Notwithstanding such advice books, however, scholarly opinion largely remained of the view that old age involved a progressive withdrawal from the world of action.

  It was in the 1950s that social gerontology took off and psychologists began to replace this model of disengagement with an active conception of ‘successful ageing’. In Older People, R. J. Havighurst and Ruth Albrecht offered a strikingly new, upbeat portrait. ‘To some readers’, they confessed, their book ‘will seem too optimistic, with its reports of the happiness and economic security of the majority of older people’. But this was the truth. ‘The old-age group is as much to be envied as to be pitied.’48 The elderly they had studied in Prairie City were neither intrinsically passive, nor bored and miserable. It was a mistake to presume that there was a biological break between an active and a passive lifestyle. True, a third of their elderly sample were passive and the overall level of leisure activity declined in age, but, importantly, their sample also revealed large variation. People’s sense of play and fun was a personality trait they largely took with them from middle age into retirement. In part, it was a function of social status; people of lower status tended to be less active, travel less, read less and rarely went to the movies. Older people included the ‘well-adjusted’ retired professional who travelled with his wife to Florida in the winter and enjoyed a range of hobbies and entertainment as well as the farmer whose whole identity had been defined by work and who, on retirement, found himself worthless and cut off. The elderly, in other words, were just as inclined to leisure as their juniors, at least those able to enjoy their golden years in reasonably good health.

  One reason for the continuing interest in leisure in old age, the authors argued, was that society as a whole was increasingly happy to see itself as a leisure society. Play was no longer defined negatively – as a relief from work – but raised to a positive level alongside work; indeed, sometimes above it. ‘The person who makes a hobby of woodworking or pottery making, or plays golf or bridge “just for the fun of it”, or travels during vacations,’ Havighurst and Albrecht wrote, ‘is getting the same values from his play as if he was doing work for the sheer enjoyment of the work itself.’49 Leisure brought entertainment, curiosity, self-esteem and social prestige. Havighurst and Albrecht dubbed it ‘the principle of equivalence of work and play’. Many of the elderly people interviewed by the authors were energetic and fun-loving. For some, leisure more than compensated for the loss of work. What was the point of making a living, one retired man wondered, if one did not have a chance to enjoy its riches?

  Havighurst and Albrecht were not naïve. They were all too aware that for many elderly people leisure was no paradise. ‘What passes for recreation is too often just sitting’ and many seniors ‘run the danger of being mentally passive’.50 Still, their attention to stories of successful ageing and their link between levels of active leisure and states of happiness was a revelation. Retirement no longer had to mean social death. Recreation gave it purpose and meaning. The task now was to prepare people to make more and better use of it. Although the theory of disengagement continued to have its advocates, the future of social gerontology belonged to active ageing.51

  The second force which encouraged recognition of the active old was politics, and emerged out of the mid-twentieth-century crisis, with its concerns over the future of democracy. The first Golden Age Club in Chicago was founded in 1940 by Oskar Schulze, an émigré from Germany who had witnessed the appeal of extreme doctrines to the elderly after the hyper-inflation of 1923 wiped out their pensions. Poor, lonely and disaffected seniors were easy prey for the enemies of democracy. A rich cultural programme, Schulze said, helped to keep ‘their interest alive in community and national affairs so that they do not feel out of it’.52 The club offered Chinese checkers and cards, picnics and boating trips, and special celebrations on birthdays and golden-wedding anniversaries. By 1946, there was a whole network, with sixteen clubs in Cleveland alone. Similar clubs sprang up across the country. Recreation for the elderly was essential in a democratic society, binding together generations in a reciprocal spirit of trust and community. ‘In his life-time, the older person has made his contribution,’ Harry Levine, the founder of the Hodson centres, explained in 1952. ‘We owe him the opportunity to prolong his usefulness . . . to the life around him.’ In New York City, twelve day centres opened their doors to local seniors, with a pool, dancing, costume making and even wedding parties. In this democratic vision, choice and a ‘motivation to do’ took the place of charity and dependence. For Levine, it was ‘fundamental’ that the centres offered choice. It was choice that nourished ‘experience and growth’. Instead of drifting into numb isolation, seniors were stimulated to be creative and play their part in the community.53 The golden-age club movement was yet another manifestation of the influence of John Dewey’s blend of pragmatism, democracy and choice.54

  In Washington, too, the Second World War and the Korean War five years later made senior citizens more valuable than ever before. The first National Conference on the Aging [sic] met between May 1950 and August 1951, at President Truman’s request. Oscar Ewing, the Administrator of the Federal Security Agency, explained that America was ‘no longer a nation of young people’. Almost 12 million Americans were aged sixty-five or older; this happened to include Truman, who had just turned sixty-six. Those who reached sixty-five, on average lived to seventy-eight. Rather than looking at this age group as a burden, Ewing said, they should be recognized as ‘great national assets’. Their well-being was ev
eryone’s business and essential to the strength of ‘the local community and the Nation as a whole’. The idea that older people ought to avoid exertion had been discredited. Senior citizens played softball and went camping, Ewing pointed out. They had plenty of vitality left. There was a ‘spark of genius’ in each and every one of them. Recreation had the ability to foster new talents and rekindle the ‘will to do’. And it was the ‘impulse to do’ which led the individual into new activities and relationships. Active leisure, in this view, made for democratic as well as personal growth. With the young serving in the Korean War, the United States could not possibly afford to waste the potential of its older citizens at home.55

  These were words. What was the relation between rhetoric and reality? Which came first: the language of active ageing or the lifestyle itself? On the one hand, the stereotype of the elderly as smelly, bored and senile did obscure the many healthy and vigorous members in their midst. ‘Old’ tends to be used to describe others, rarely oneself. In that sense, Havighurst and like-minded researchers made visible the many retired people who already led an active life, who travelled for pleasure, played sport and socialized. On the other, the new discourse of active ageing clearly widened the opportunities for leisure and strengthened the desire and compulsion to remain active in old age.

  In 1929, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found idleness to be a serious problem in old people’s homes. Many ‘inmates’ resisted doing even light duties. Some homes took a lesson from occupational therapy, which had been shown to improve the health of wounded soldiers after the First World War. Still, men, in particular, were reluctant participants. They had come to rest, not to work, they said.

  In the course of the twentieth century, the room for rest and idleness progressively shrank. Leisure was energized. Golden-age and sunshine clubs, ‘old-timers’ and ‘Live Long and Like It’ groups mushroomed in the 1940s and ’50s and outdid each other with parties and excursions. These were the years that gave birth to the Golden Age Hobby Show. The first, in Cleveland in 1945, attracted 200 exhibitors and 4,000 visitors. In addition to demonstrations of weaving and toy-making, there was live entertainment by the old for the old. In Chicago and New York, seniors put on variety shows and comedy acts.56 Nurses started to take note. In 1955, the American Journal of Nursing praised the ABC Groups (Always Be Cheerful), which organized parties, trips and resident rhythm bands. Entertainment, ‘a pretty dress’, and ‘nurses’ knowledge of a resident’s personal wishes’ were recognized as a central part of therapy, as important as comfort and security. Age might have reduced their physical capacity but not their ability and right to enjoy their favourite pastimes.57

  Of course, not all the activities were about fun. There were talks for the elderly, too, on the concentration camps, and other serious topics. Still, the overall number and sheer variety of leisure programmes shot up exponentially. A survey of thirty-four homes in Cook County, Illinois, found that most offered musicals, holiday celebrations and organized shopping trips and visits to the movies; a third had their own auditoriums for showing films. With one exception, these homes were privately run. Half had hobby and sewing rooms. The calendar at the Home for Aged Jews was especially full, with festivities on birthdays and holidays, bingo parties and pinochle (a trick-taking card game) tournaments. Each room had its own radio. ‘They have parties in their own rooms whenever they desire them.’58 Not all groups were so fortunate. Four homes in Cook County had nothing to offer but a chapel. and people barely ever left their rooms. African-Americans had only three small homes to turn to. Nonetheless, few groups were entirely bypassed by the general drive for recreation. After the Second World War, cities opened summer camps for elderly African-Americans. Baltimore started one in 1953, 25 miles outside the city. A welfare officer who had worked with golden-age clubs recruited the first party of forty-six campers: their average age was seventy-three; one was a hundred and five years old. In addition to hymn singing, there was fishing and hiking, checker contests, parties and, for the men, a shooting match. ‘The senior citizens,’ a staff member noted, ‘actually proved to be much less frail than we had expected.’ The only illness that occurred was from ‘overeating’.59

  Before pursuing the advance of leisure in old age further, let us briefly pause and make two general observations. Chronologically, the interest in recreation for the elderly coincided with the rise of the teenager. It has been difficult to see this, for the simple reason that the teenager has been given great prominence in cultural studies whereas the elderly ended up in the pages of gerontology journals. Putting them alongside each other suggests that, rather than being a solitary pioneer, the teenage consumer was part of a bigger historical moment in which recreation redefined generations. Secondly, the turn to active leisure further illuminates one of the forces behind the cult of busyness we have discussed earlier. It is too simple to lay the blame for hurriedness exclusively at the feet of advertisers, corporations and materialist shoppers. Active leisure had support, too, from doctors, civic leaders, welfare officers and pension advisers. It played no small part in raising the status and well-being of retired people. Whatever the strain of hurriedness, it is naïve to treat ‘slow’ life as a panacea for all. Idleness, the elderly remind us, has costs, too.

  For older Europeans wanting a bit of fun and action, there were few places to turn to after the Second World War. A social survey of Merseyside painted a grim picture of old age in England’s north-west. There were few concessions for the elderly – in Bootle, bowls were free but, 4 miles south in Liverpool, had to pay 2½d, almost the full rate. Holidays were effectively unknown – a mere fifty applicants had been treated to a trip to the Hoylake hostel before the war. There were only two regular clubs; one, the Rendezvous, had a few easy chairs but no canteen, although the atmosphere was reported to be ‘cheerful and friendly’. The Old Age Pensions Association offered talks, lantern shows, weekly entertainment and tea, though the tea only materialized ‘sometimes’.60 Only 2 per cent of the elderly were in a retirement home. In London, most lived in small, overcrowded flats or unfurnished rooms. Pastimes were almost exclusively home-bound and solitary. A study of one hundred people over seventy years of age in Hammersmith in 1954 discovered that almost half had no activities outside the home at all; only one in eight regularly visited the pub, a cinema or church. Only a handful belonged to a club. Couples, in general, tended to read more and have more pets but, for many, life was pinched, monotonous and cold. It is not easy to engage with the world, without the money to pay for a radio, buy a ticket for the cinema, or go out, decently dressed, to meet others in a pub.

  By the 1950s, the seeds for a richer, more consumer-oriented and diverting lifestyle for the elderly had been planted. Yet, across the world, the soil varied greatly, with different levels of wealth, welfare systems and attitudes to the elderly. The progress of the elderly consumer was consequently piecemeal and uneven. A comparison of Europe and North America in 1960 concluded that in ‘all the countries an active, creative use of leisure time by older people is respected,’ but in reality ‘it is expected that older people will be happy if they can “take things easy”.’61 The situation differed considerably from country to country. In the United States, Great Britain and Scandinavia, active leisure pursuits were most pronounced. In Sweden, welfare boards had hobby rooms; here, an impressive 40 per cent of men and women aged between sixty-eight and seventy-three spent more time on hobbies than they had in middle age. In France and the Netherlands, by contrast, elderly people lived a more passive life. In The Hague, the Catholic Union of Diocesan Associations of Old People ran over twenty clubs and tried to introduce seniors to cultural activities, ‘but mostly the members are not much interested. They like to say, “We are here for our pleasure, not to learn anything or to be really active.” ’ They might dress up for Carnival but classical music and cultural films were ‘not much liked’.62 Members preferred to chat or play cards. A few liked knitting. In Germany, a survey concluded that ‘it
is not expected . . . that older people will discover or develop new leisure activities or that they will be strenuously active in such things.’ In the Ruhr, retired miners kept a goat or two and did some gardening, but that was about it. Culture and entertainment were all but absent. Even reading and listening to the radio were minority pursuits.63

  By the end of the 1980s, later life had been transformed beyond recognition. Admittedly, some still did not pursue any leisure activities and were depressed, but they were now in a minority. Most Britons in their sixties, seventies and eighties, researchers found, were intensely active and happy; only one in five of those over eighty-five needed care. Dancing and gardening were especially popular. Many, including widows, went to clubs and enjoyed socializing. The majority were happy with how they looked – what was important was to keep ‘smart’ and ‘proper’. Most felt in good health. Disability and disease were not central to how they saw themselves. In their own self-image, they were active, energetic, even youthful, just like other members of society. If they disliked one thing, it was being patronized.64 A study of five hundred elderly Berliners in the 1990s similarly captured the remarkably high levels of activity. More than half the seventy- to eighty-four-year-olds enjoyed travel, excursions and eating out. Among those over eighty-five, it was still a third. Not surprisingly, those living on their own were the most active but, strikingly, even a quarter of those living in old-age homes now went on excursions or visited restaurants.65 Ageing involved a gradual change in the kinds of activity and engagement undertaken, not a sudden disengagement all-round. As French women moved into their mid-seventies, some stopped getting on their bicycles and ceased to do gymnastics, but more played Scrabble and did crosswords. Interestingly, most seventy-five-year-olds listened to music and visited museums and cinemas as often as they had when they were sixty.66