History had come to be seen as a succession of decades and also as a succession of generations, each replacing the last at approximately ten‐ year intervals. This way of thinking about the past had the effect of reducing history to fluctuations in public taste, to a progression of cultural fashions in which the daring advances achieved by one generation become the accepted norms of the next, only to be discarded in their turn by a new set of styles. The concept of the decade may have commended itself, as the basic unit of historical time, for the same reason the annual model change commended itself to Detroit: it was guaranteed not to last. Every ten years it had to be traded in for a new model, and this rapid turnover gave employment to scholars and journalists specializing in the detection and analysis of cultural trends.

As the communications industry expanded its influence over both scholarship and popular taste, the closely related concepts of decades and generations came more and more fully under the sway of fashion. Thus in I950, Life magazine—a publication best understood not as a news magazine but as a fashion magazine, one of the first to show how news could be sold as a form of fashion—published a mid-century issue reviewing the entire period since 1900. Two long editorials, one by the historian Allan Nevins, the other by the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, exploited the generational theme. In "The Audacious Americans," Nevins wrote, "Bold experimentalism gave us five decades of dazzling achievement. That was our adolescence; now we have come to responsible maturity." From now on, the country would have to rely less on amateurism and experimentation and more on professionally organized expertise. Mauldin's editorial, which brought the issue to a close, defended the younger generation—the "scared rabbit generation"—against the charge that it was obsessed with security. The editorial ended with a cartoon bearing the caption, "Every generation has its doubts about the 'younger generation.' " The one thing that is certain in a world of flux, in other words, is that today's styles, today's attitudes, today's ideas will be outmoded tomorrow and that the older generation will regret their passing without being able to do anything about it.

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