For anyone old enough to remember the 1980s, the term "young urban professional" and its shorthand "Yuppie" may conjure up a prototypical BMW-driving, suspenders-wearing investment banker who personified the notion of a certain kind of frenetic careerist striving. But as former Philadelphia magazine editor-in-chief Tom McGrath explains in his lively popular history Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation, the short-lived flourishing of this archetype signaled more than a passing assortment of fads. Instead, he argues, it represented a major shift in economic and social values whose persistence helped lay the foundation for some of the United States' current inequality and polarization.
In the 1970s, the postwar consensus built around rising living standards and the projection of international power by the United States began to crumble under the weight of long lines at the gas pump, stagflation, and foreign debacles like the 1979 Iran hostage crisis that doomed Jimmy Carter's presidency. With the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of Reaganomics (claiming that tax cuts tilting decidedly toward the wealthy somehow would benefit all), McGrath contends the country was launched irrevocably on the path of increasing economic stratification. Yuppies--highly educated and pouring into knowledge-driven professions like finance and law--were determined to be among the "haves" in what they saw as a zero-sum game. He also traces the evolution of a segment of the 75-million-member Baby Boomer generation from idealism to conspicuous, but in their minds discerning, consumption.
McGrath neatly integrates his comprehensive research with brief, magazine-style profiles. He focuses on well-known characters of the era including 1960s antiwar activist turned unlikely 1980s entrepreneurial capitalist Jerry Rubin; controversial junk bond investment pioneer Michael Milken; and hard-nosed General Electric CEO Jack Welch. Additionally, he introduces boomers like Robin Palley, who chose with her physician husband to renovate a shell of a home in Philadelphia's Fairmount urban neighborhood, only to question that decision when it came time to educate their children. Those who lived through the time will find themselves nodding (and perhaps smiling) in recognition at McGrath's concise evocations of shared cultural touchstones like the TV series Dallas, the Jane Fonda-inspired workout craze, and the rise of MTV.
Triumph of the Yuppies concludes with the stock market crash of October 19, 1987. That event may have marked what for many was the welcome demise of the Yuppies as a social phenomenon, but it was, at most, a temporary setback for the larger trends unleashed in what some have called the "Decade of Greed." In a short span of years animated by a spirit that glorified unbridled acquisitiveness, McGrath writes, "the country had created a new economic and social order that couldn't easily be undone." ---Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Journalist Tom McGrath offers a lively popular history of the 1980s centered on the rise and the eclipse of the Yuppies.