Maggie Kuhn, the formidable founder of the Gray Panthers, was often photographed with half-moon glasses, her wispy white hair pinned atop her head, and one arthritic hand raised in a defiant fist. Even as Kuhn emphasized the physical features of her aging body, she also mirrored the attitudes and poses made famous by radical young people. This was her goal. She took a similar approach in describing the organization’s origins, regularly recounting the outrage she had felt as her sixty-fifth birthday neared in 1970 and she realized that mandatory retirement would end her lengthy and fulfilling career within the social justice arm of the United Presbyterian Church. It was a fiery story, one in which she and her comrades came to theorize their experiences as a form of “ageism.” Then, taking action, they banded together to begin fighting the myriad injustices faced by the elderly and to champion the particular contributions that elderly people could make to powerful social movements of the era. The Gray Panthers, who would eventually count thousands of members with chapters in 43 states—and who still exist today—developed a bold and expansive agenda, ranging from opposition to the Vietnam War, to support of women’s liberation, to the creation of a national health service.
Rarely featured in this dramatic retelling, however, was the set of straitlaced administrative skills that Kuhn and her colleagues used to catalyze this visionary project. Though formal bureaucracy was seen as stodgy at best, and a reactionary impediment to progress at worst, the Gray Panthers knew how to make complex systems work for them. This strategy led to meaningful victories that improved institutional services, increased transparency, and galvanized elderly activists in their continued efforts to build power and achieve broader societal changes.
As the first handful of participants began discussing their nascent organization, Kuhn recalled winkingly, “Being the good bureaucrats we were, we decided to call another meeting…My office at work was right next to a Xerox machine, so it was easy to slip over there and whip out copies of a notice for a meeting…The topic of the evening: ‘Older Persons and the Issues of the Seventies.’” The Xerox flyers were effective; one hundred people attended that open meeting. Even as they fashioned themselves as radicals, the Gray Panthers remained the same “good bureaucrats” they had always been. This seeming paradox reflected many of Kuhn’s particular privileges—as a middle-class white woman able to retire in the first place, she felt newly disenfranchised by age discrimination—and this contributed to a broader sense within the Gray Panthers movement that their efforts were intended to re-gain these rights of citizenship and representation, rather than to achieve them for the first time. Though the Gray Panthers eschewed many visible forms of hierarchy in their organizational structure, they nonetheless carried extensive knowledge of bureaucratic practice that they could wield in strategic ways.