Welcome to the Jungle

Part One
THE GENERATION THAT RAISED ITSELF
1
RECONSIDERING CHILDHOOD
Magazines that ran articles in 1970 concerning coerced population control: Science, Life, Reader's Digest, The New Republic, Discussion, Parents, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, Newsweek, Time, Science Digest, Look, Mademoiselle, The New York Times Magazine




Fertility Rate of American Women (Expressed as the average number of children born per woman)


1957: 3.8


1977: 1.8


SOURCE: VITAL STATISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES
HOME SWEET HOME
Lois and Stephen Wolfson welcomed the birth of their first child in September, 1975--a son they named Adam. They brought their infant home to the Marina Del Rey, California, apartment where they had resided for a year and a half and where they had planned to keep on living. But not long after this happy occasion, they were informed by the manager of the apartment complex that they would be unable to renew their lease. The reason? Adam.
A year before Adam's birth, in October of 1974, Marina Point Apartments had changed its rental policy to exclude all families with children. Although they did allow those children who currently resided in the complex to remain, they would no longer rent to new families with children, nor to pregnant women. Although the Wolfsons had lived at Marina Point since February of that year, before the policy was adopted, the arrival of their son apparently rendered them ineligible to remain in their home. Because they were having a difficult time finding a new place to live, the apartment manager granted them a short extensionbefore they would be forced to vacate. But soon after this, the manager took the Wolfsons to court to evict them.
The new parents, feeling that they were being unlawfully discriminated against--as the sole reason for their eviction was the presence of their son--decided to defend their position in court. In the municipal court trial, the manager justified her no-children policy on the grounds that the apartment complex had no facilities for children or any place suitable for them to play. The fact that there were sixty-six families with children living in the complex at the time the new policy was adopted didn't seem to enter into the case. "Expert" evidence was presented to argue that children generally cause more wear and tear on property than do adults. Therefore, the argument went, the increased maintenance costs associated with children justified excluding them.
Lois and Stephen Wolfson offered testimony from both their upstairs and next-door neighbors that Adam's presence was in no way annoying to them. Furthermore, the manager presented no evidence whatsoever that the little boy had been disruptive or had damaged property in any way. During the trial, the judge conceded that, from the evidence, the court was satisfied that Adam had created no problems on the apartment premises. His ruling? The Wolfsons would have to move. Whatever the evidence, there were simply no laws protecting the rights of children against discrimination in rental properties. The couple appealed the decision to the California court of appeals, and the ruling was upheld. The presence of the infant justified eviction.


The Wolfsons were not alone in their predicament. In the seventies and early eighties, 70 to 90 percent of all newly constructed apartments in large cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Denver were strictly adults-only. In Dallas's case, a 1978 study showed that more than half of all apartment complexes, new and old, flat-out refused to accept children. Another 12 percent only accepted them with certain restrictions (not above or below a certain age, no more than one child per household, etc.). Thus a family with children in Dallas, the nation's ninth-largest city, had only a third of the available apartments from which to choose.
The situation in the fast-growing Los Angeles area, where the Wolfsons resided, was even worse. A study conducted in 1979 showed that seven apartment complexes in ten excluded children. An additional 15 percent allowed children only within certain age ranges. That left only one apartment in eight available to families with children of any age in the Los Angeles area. To add to the predicament, the problems were even more acute in newly constructed complexes. Across the nation, apartments constructed during the seventies were 60 percent more likely to exclude children than older units. Newer units alsotended to be of higher quality and located in better neighborhoods than older ones, shutting families out of much of the more desirable housing in our cities.
The California study also showed that median rents for apartments that allowed children were higher than for equivalent units that excluded them. So not only were parents forbidden from seven out of eight Los Angeles apartments, they had to pay more for the paltry choices given them. This price premium might illustrate nothing more than supply and demand, but the driving force was certainly a lack of supply, with parents paying the penalty. The judges in the Wolfson case even recognized that families with children have a more difficult time finding housing. Yet they justified their decision by noting that, after all, not all apartments have no-child policies.
Nationwide, the policies regarding apartment availability to families with children were similarly hostile. Only about one rental unit in four was available with no restrictions. In larger complexes, fewer than one unit in five was available unconditionally to parents with children. While some apartment managers have always excluded children for a variety of reasons, the number who decided these reasons were justifiable rose by 50 percent during the seventies. And these managers were not out of line with public sentiment. A 1980 study by the University of Michigan for HUD found that 40 percent of renters in buildings that maintain explicit no-children policies chose to live there specifically because of those policies. Even with single-family detached homes, one in five rentals was strictly off-limits to children.
Would not the building frenzy of that time, combined with lower birth rates, still have left families with adequate choices for good housing? Unfortunately not. The Michigan survey showed that nearly half of the respondents with children reported that when last looking for a place to live, they had found a suitable apartment but were forbidden to rent it because of the policies regarding children. This dilemma crossed all boundaries of race, income, gender of the head of household, and size of the apartment in question. This was not a problem of the poor or of minorities. It was simply a problem for all those who decided to raise a family. The obstacles faced by these parents included limited access to quality schools and day-care centers because they could not rent in their preferred area. Other families in the Michigan investigation reported having to choose apartments without convenient access to public transportation or in areas that forced them to make an undesirably long commute to work--a restriction that put strains on the family by making the time available for parents to spend with their children more limited than they would have liked.
Forbidding children wasn't a policy that was limited to cantankerous landlords. In fact, many communities, eager to tap the growing expendable income of single yuppies and increasingly wealthy senior citizens, actively encouragedadult-only construction by offering a variety of incentives to builders. The growth of one- and two-person households during these years insured that there would be a big enough market for such developments. Cities allowed developers to build higher-density complexes in exchange for no-children restrictions. The rationale was that not only would higher-income adults, paying higher taxes as well, be attracted to their area, but the cities could also avoid providing expensive municipal services for children, such as schools and parks. It was a win-win situation for all involved. Except for children and their parents, who weren't involved at all.
One might think that such exclusionary policies would be considered a blatant disregard for the law. This is America--you can live wherever you want. The Fair Housing Act, passed by Congress in 1968 and amended in 1974, prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Other legislation protected the rights of the elderly. These acts, however, as the Wolfsons discovered, did not address child discrimination. Perhaps as a result of the fact that children can't vote, and are unlikely to form political action committees to pump funds into the treasuries of congressmen, they simply hadn't received the protection that other groups had.
The problem became acute enough in the West that nine different bills concerning the topic were introduced to the California state legislature between 1975 and 1981. All failed. Before 1980 only eight states had any regulations specifically prohibiting bias against renting to families with children, and only Massachusetts enforced them. San Francisco was the only large city that truly protected tenants with children.
This was a new problem. Never before had families suffered widely from discrimination in housing, and this predicament is just one manifestation of society's sea-change in its attitude toward the newest generation.1
THE POPULATION BOMB EXPLODES
The experiences of families trying to find a place to live with their children were not the only indicators of a transformation in national mood. Nor was this situation merely a rare aberration from America's general love affair with its children. Whereas historian Richard Hofstadter commented in the fifties that the United States was becoming the land of the "overvalued child," now, in the1960s, after twenty years of escalating birth rates known as the "baby boom," America began to reevaluate its attitudes toward children. The pendulum had begun to swing wildly in the opposite direction.
The British biologist Thomas Malthus wrote in 1798 that "population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio." It's interesting to note that Malthus used the explosive population growth in the American colonies in researching his thesis, because 160 years later his concept was heartily embraced across the Atlantic. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a biologist from Stanford University, looked up from his petri dishes, decided there were too many people around, and wrote a small book called The Population Bomb. An instant best-seller, it gave readers a somewhat scientific confirmation of the growing belief that our planet and our nation were bursting at the seams.
In the book, Ehrlich presents a number of overpopulation-induced scenarios. In the first, he depicts a riot-torn U.S. in the early eighties, with citizens starving to death because of food shortages and beef an unattainable luxury at twelve dollars a pound (in 1970 dollars!). The second scenario is filled with imaginary doomsday headlines of the near future with a resulting one and a half billion people perishing worldwide from disease, starvation, and pandemic-related "civil disorder." All this by 1974. In the third, he foresees a 1980 UN mandated "International Survival Tax" of 8 percent of America's GNP (about 90 billion 1970 dollars). To prevent these dire projections, Ehrlich suggests a number of baby-prevention measures: luxury taxes on cribs, diapers, and expensive toys; "responsibility prizes" awarded to each couple for every five years they remain childless; and a "special lottery" with tickets going only to the childless.
How seriously were these premonitions taken? As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in a 1960s reprinting of Malthus's work, "The 'Population Bomb' is beginning to usurp the place of the H-Bomb in the public imagination and conscience." Each child born was supposedly akin to a tiny nuclear explosion, with a devastating cumulative effect. Young-adult Boomers in particular embraced this idea, and a year after publishing his book, Ehrlich founded an organization for them, Zero Population Growth, Inc. (ZPG), dedicated to the idea that we absolutely must stem the rate at which men and women have children. Our very existence depended on it. ZPG grew rapidly, with its membership reaching over 700,000 by the eighties. The Population Bomb spawned a host of imitators all signaling the same dire alarms: Too Many Americans; Famine, 1975!; The Hungry Future; Breeding Ourselves to Death; The Case for Compulsory Birth Control--all these, among myriad other books, painted a gloomy picture of the near future unless extreme, often outrageous, measures were taken.
Although Ehrlich's work achieved the most widespread notoriety, it wasn'tthe first, or most dramatic, to address overpopulation concerns. A scientist in Rockville, Maryland, John Calhoun, decided to test Malthus's original premise by allowing rats to breed out of control in a pen in 1963. What ensued was a nightmarish vision of hell in the land of Rodentia. The rats became severely pathological, with some turning aggressive and cannibalistic while others became bisexual and sadistic; female rats were unable to carry pregnancies, and the rearing of their young was disrupted (certainly sounds like America in the 1970s, doesn't it?). Calhoun called the breakdown of all social order a "behavioral sink" and tied his conclusions to the future of humanity, citing "analogous problems confronting the human species." The future sounded like a David Lynch movie.
Surprisingly, only a few years earlier, Life magazine ran an article proclaiming that children were the answer to all our economic ills, because of their inherent need for more housing, more appliances, and more jobs. KIDS: BUILT-IN RECESSION CURE, headlined the 1958 cover story in the nation's most popular magazine. "The four-year-olds shown trying out the swings on the cover of this issue represent a backlog of business orders that will take two decades to fill!" excitedly proclaimed the article. A decade later, though, children represented only a worsening of our social ills. They signified a drain on our already overtaxed supply of food and energy, on our tax funds, and on our employment resources. They denoted a compounding of the problems of pollution, crowded cities, and environmental degradation. Life responded to this dire viewpoint by launching the new decade with the cover story "Squeezing into the Seventies," commenting that, lest anybody mistakenly believe that the affluent United States could handle a growing populace even if third-world nations could not, "each American baby represents fifty times as great a threat to the planet as each Indian baby."
To illuminate the universal nature of the population problem, biologist Garret Hardin developed the allegory of "The Tragedy of the Commons" in a 1968 Science magazine essay. In this parable, a village has made a patch of grazing ground available to all members of the community. The parcel has enough grazing for one cow per household, but Hardin anticipates that a few people will send two cows to the area in order to increase their yield. As more and more follow suit, the commons becomes overgrazed, and all the cattle die. The implied message is that the earth was becoming "overgrazed" by other people's children.
As historian John Sommerville described the sentiment of the times, "Babies are the enemy. Not your baby or mine, of course. Individually they are all cute. But together they are a menace." In what was called the "more mouths to feed" argument, it was asserted that many of the costs of rearing children, especially the costs associated with education, are social rather than private costs.They are costs borne by society rather than by the parents alone. We "bind individuals to pay for the education of other people's children," complained demographer Judith Blake Davis. Parents who chose to have children, went the belief, were not only selfish; they were a threat to society and, more specifically, to "me." A Columbia University sociologist, Lincoln Day, put the point succinctly. In America, he said, "we must inevitably be faced with a choice between quantity and quality: vast numbers of people living poorly at necessarily low levels of living, or fewer people, but with those fewer living well." Day added that "the couple with more than three [children] is contributing to the population disaster. It is, in this sense, socially irresponsible, the more so the more numerous the children." Newsweek ran an article titled "Make Love, Not Babies." The general spirit of the times was captured in the popular slogan "The Population Explosion Is Everybody's Baby."
Observing this sentiment, a wave of popular films showed children in a most unchildlike light. In Paper Moon (1973), The Bad News Bears (1976), Bugsy Malone (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), and Pretty Baby (1978), kids were foulmouthed, devilish little con artists, criminals, and whores. In Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), It's Alive! (1974), Demon Seed (1977), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and The Omen parts I (1976), II (1978), and III (1981), they were literally the devil (or at least der Fuehrer). Not only were movies about children centered on such degenerate themes; movies for children all but disappeared. The percentage of G-rated movies fell by 70 percent from the late sixties to the late seventies.
The Germans have a word for this prevailing anti-child sentiment: Kinderfeindlichkeit, meaning "hostility to children." An American term was given to the problem--"popullution." A 1971 survey indicated that two thirds of the general public agreed that it was a serious problem in the U.S. As the authors of one book put it, babies were looked upon "like headaches, things you take pills not to have."
DEFUSING THE BOMB
So how to deal with this predicament? How could we keep people from having so many darn kids? A variety of solutions were proposed in addition to Ehrlich's. Kenneth Bouling, an economist, suggested government licensing of children as the only solution offering a "maximum of individual liberty and ethical choice." Childbearing permits, he recommended, should be issued like housing permits. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist even checked in with an article called "Licensing: For Cars and Babies." Senator Robert Packwood proposed removing the tax exemption for any child beyond the second. This particular measure wasactually enacted to a certain degree (see chapter four). Others wanted to deny college loans to those with large families. Possibly the most extreme measure discussed (fortunately never enacted) was a Tufts Medical School professor's idea of putting fertility-depressing chemicals in municipal water supplies. (Perhaps they could have just mixed it in with the flouride?)
The Nixon administration responded to society's concerns in 1970 by forming the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The commission concluded, after two years of deliberation, that "population growth is one of the major factors affecting the demand for resources and the deterioration of the environment in the United States." The final report added that "there are no advantages from further growth of the population beyond the level to which our past rapid growth has already committed us. Indeed we would be considerably better off over the next thirty to fifty years if there were a prompt reduction in our population growth rate." Want to be patriotic? Don't have any children.
The media joined the fray with their own rash of publications and articles on how to get out of this predicament. A number of new books--The Case Against Having Children, Life Without Birth, The Baby Trap--espoused the benefits of childlessness. A group of voluntarily childless couples was formed in 1971: NON, the National Organization for Non-Parents, offered support for those who decided to live childless. People wore buttons bearing the slogans "None Is Fun" and "Jesus Was an Only Child." Betty Rollin summed up the arguments neatly in her 1970 Look magazine article "Motherhood: Who Needs It?"
Into this environment a somewhat unheralded generation was born.2
THE END OF THE BOOM?
What is perhaps the most intriguing element of all this consternation about U.S. overpopulation is that by the time the Nixon commission was formed, the birth rate had already been falling precipitously for a dozen years.
Even though the rate of fertility--the number of children the average woman could expect to have during her lifetime--was cut in half from the late fifties to the midseventies, the average annual number of babies born during the Free's birth years was only 6 percent lower than during the Baby Boom, when the "procreation ethic" prevailed. So the term "baby-buster" is somewhat of a misnomer. While the rate of births by the early seventies was much lower, thenumber of women of childbearing age was much higher. The bust wasn't so much a drop in numbers of births as in percentages. Of course, as a proportion of the population as a whole, the Boomers in their youth filled a much larger share than do the Free.
For many of the institutions that deal with children, from maternity wards to schools, having expanded to meet the numbers of births during the peak years meant that even a 6 percent decrease in real numbers was dramatic. Thus, the drop appeared bigger than it actually was, furnishing the idea of a "baby bust." The news was full of stories on plummeting school enrollments. The Cupertino, California, school district saw its student population fall from 23,000 in 1970 to 10,300 in 1986. New York City closed sixty schools between 1975 and 1980. Although the overall numbers of students did decline, of course, the drop wasn't as universal or as steep as such examples would have one believe. After all, eight states in the South and West saw an increase of children under the age of five in the early seventies. In Utah, the gain was 36 percent over the baby-boom days. Added to this overreporting of the issue was the psychological effect of a generaldecline in births from year to year rather than a rising trend as was seen during the boom. As the vociferous Boomer youth gave way to quieter kids, it simply seemed as if there were a lot fewer children than there actually were.
So why was there not an even bigger baby boom than the original, with so many Boomers reaching peak childbearing years during the sixties and seventies? Fueled by the hostile environment toward children, the number of young couples who remained childless during these years swelled by 75 percent (the term actually mutated from "childless" to "child-free"). During this period, despite the huge increase of young Boomer adults, the number of couples with children increased by only 8 percent. Among those parents who did risk public disapproval by bringing into the world another mouth to be fed, one or two children was usually the limit. In only fifteen years, the odds that a woman with two children would have a third declined by 50 percent. At the same time, the proportion of married women with fewer than two children rose by 40 percent.
Also contributing to the unwelcomeness of children was the birth of the "swinging single." Record numbers of adults simply chose to postpone or forgo marriage. They certainly weren't sticking around Mom and Dad's house though; they were setting out on their own and having fun. Encouraged by a flourishing economy, they were leaving home at an unprecedented young age. The average male in 1970 left the house at nineteen. But this was the generation that came of age during the child-loving fifties, and despite leaving home early, they weren't in any hurry to grow up. Bob Dylan promised them they would stay "Forever Young," and they believed it (Jerry Rubin seconded the idea with his somewhat less eloquent assertion that "we ain't never, never gonna grow up!"). From singles' bars to singles' magazines to the singles' apartment complexes noted at the beginning of chapter one, Boomers were not about to ruin a good thing by having a bunch of kids around. The cult of the child had become the cult of the young adult. Having a kid would spoil all the fun.

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE. Copyright © 1995 by Geoffrey T. Holtz. All rights reserved.