Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

The notion of retirement was evangelized in early twentieth-century America by William Osler, a celebrated and outspoken physician who helped found the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Workers peaked at forty, he argued in a 1905 speech, then went downhill until they hit their sixties—at which point, he prankishly suggested, they might as well be chloroformed. These remarks came to be known as the “chloroform speech” and they provoked a national scandal. The New York Times’ editorial board likened his position to that of “savage tribes whose custom it is to knock their elders over the head whenever the juniors find their elders in their own way.” Meanwhile, “Oslerize” enjoyed a brief heyday as a popular verb. (That coinage wasn’t entirely fair, however, since the plan for compulsory euthanasia had been borrowed from Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period, a dystopian tale that was quite possibly that author’s least popular work, selling just 877 copies.) The pension advocate Lee Welling Squier expressed a similar sentiment in 1912, in considerably less comic terms: After the age of sixty has been reached, the transition from non-dependence to dependence is an easy stage—property gone, friends passed away or removed, relatives become few, ambition collapsed, only a few short years left to live, with death a final and welcome end to it all—such conclusions inevitably sweep the wage-earner from hopeful independent citizen into that of the helpless poor.