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The Missing Link

by Robert B. Carson

418 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-1226; ISBN 1-4120-6315-9; US$32.99, C$41.24, EUR26.80, £18.58

A critical examination of America's "Depression Babies" (born 1929-1941) -- the luckiest but least remembered generation of twentieth-century Americans -- and their highly successful quest for the "American Dream".

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

The Missing Link examines the life and times of a mostly forgotten generation of aging Americans. Born between 1929 and 1941, they were once known as the "Depression Babies," named at the end of their arrival in commemoration of the nation's existing economic realities. The Depression Babies, however, were soon forgotten -- pushed aside by the GI Generation (Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation") and then overrun by the Baby Boomer mob.

Yet, forgotten or not, the Depression Babies were a uniquely lucky lot. Mostly too young to remember the Great Depression, impressionable kids during the "most moral" of America's wars (and usually with fathers too old for combat), generally not quite old enough to be combatants in the Korean War, teenagers and young adults during the nation's greatest economic expansion, parents with children too young to be sacrificed in Vietnam, and exiting middle age with the largest per capita accumulation of real wealth ever assembled by any generation, the Depression Babies are perhaps the luckiest generation of Americans that ever lived... or perhaps ever will.

Curiously, and with much irony, the Depression Babies' saga through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first almost exactly parallels the rise and flourishing of that present-day American compass for personal and national life: the American Dream. Indeed, they might have been "The American Dream Generation" had not events and the Boomers consigned them to anonymity.

The Depression Babies' disappearance, though scarcely noticed, was not without consequences. They were the nation's last generation to have personal contact with an increasingly distant past. Their inability to assume a transitional role between the greatest and the Boomers is the source of an enduring sense of national uncertainty -- particularily with respect to the "NOW" emphasis on everyday life and the resulting failure to see American roots and history as a potential steadying force in creating national self-awareness and direction.

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About the Author

Robert Carson has been Professor Emeritus of Economics at State University of New York, College at Oneonta since 1993. A specialist in Economic and Business History, he retired that year, after 33 years in the classroom, when it became painfully evident his students no longer cared about history.

Professor Carson received his A.B. degree from Hamilton College (1956). After completing his military service, he obtained his M.A. (1960) and his Ph.D. (1976) from Syracuse University's Maxwell School. Over the course of his academic career, he received several awards for his efforts in the classroom, including the SUNY-Oneonta Alumni Award for Teaching and the George Washington Medal for accomplishments in econonmic education. Professor Carson has authored, co-authored, and edited a dozen books, written several dozen articles and reviews for professional journals and popular magazines, served as a newspaper columnist and as a contributing editor of World Book Encyclopedia, has been an invited expert witness (on railroad transportation matters) before a U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee and the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, and has seen one of his books What Economists Know (1990) published overseas in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic editions.

In the end, however, none of these experiences qualified him as an expert on the "Depression Babies" and their chase after the American Dream. That claim to expertise was provided by his parents at his birth a couple of days after the Fourth of July, 1934.

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Excerpts

Coming Soon!

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Catalogue Information

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