Flunking the Labor Department, saying ''Huh?'' to Bush, growing up sensibly, and other matters. HURRAY FOR YUPPIES
By DANIEL SELIGMAN REPORTER ASSOCIATE Patty de Llosa

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your correspondent has not pinpointed the recent epiphanic moment when he suddenly got it all together in his head about yuppies and realized that he was feeling quite affirmative about them. And has had it up to Ronald Reagan's keister with yuppie-bashing. Warning: You are about to read a dithyramb, or at least a few kind words, about the controversial species in question. The bashers are out in force. The term ''yuppie,'' first used by syndicated columnist Bob Greene in 1983, started out being morally neutral -- a mere acronym for young urban professionals. But now it comes at you with a built-in indictment. Main count: that a whole generation of well-off college-educated Americans is unconcerned about the poor and homeless and excessively absorbed in its own well-being. Typical characterization (from the Washington Post editorial section): ''vacuous, egocentric materialists who care not one iota for the truly finer things in life.'' Just as we knew he would, Christopher Lasch stamped the Eighties an era of ''yuppie greed.'' Some of the bashing invites you to see the species as truly evil: devils for the Eighties. The Charles Stuart case -- about the Bostonian who apparently shot his wife and tried to blame her death on black muggers -- was repeatedly identified as a story about yuppies. The defendants in one insider-trading case are routinely called the Yuppie Five. If a 40-year-old accountant saved a child from drowning, he would not be identified in the news stories as a yuppie. To be sure, we do not have a documented case history to support this intuition. At this point, our analysis requires a flashback -- to the late Sixties and early Seventies. This is a time of troubles in which something called ''youth'' is terrorizing the country. Authority is collapsing everywhere. The New Left has hundreds of college presidents under siege. Student activists take over the president's office at Columbia and smoke Grayson Kirk's cigars. Hundreds of thousands of protesters against the Vietnam war, not to mention business, capitalism, and society in general, pandemoniacally converge on Washington in successive rallies. Life runs a series on revolution. Will ''the system'' hold? That is actually the question.

In 1969, FORTUNE addressed the question in a special issue on youth and proffered a number of critical distinctions. The pandemonium, we reported, was basically being generated by a minority. Our Yankelovich Poll suggested that college students, themselves about one-third of the young, were still - predominantly (60%) ''practical,'' i.e., careerist in their orientation. The noise was being made by the other 40%, whom Yankelovich called the ''forerunners.'' But this minority had to be taken seriously. It centered on students at the elite colleges. Their attitudes assumed a need for great social change. Forerunners were mostly not activists, but many were passive supporters and fellow travelers of the tumult. About half agreed with the thought that America was a ''sick society.'' Eyeing the callow elitists, America's establishment was basically scared stiff -- a fact you could sense in the avalanche of propitiatory sweet talk it directed at the forerunners, endlessly acclaimed for their idealism and moral vision. Here is John D. Rockefeller III: ''Instead of worrying about how to suppress the youth revolution, we of the older generation should be worrying about how to sustain it.'' Behind the sweet talk was genuine uncertainty about whether educated youth would stay with the revolution or settle down sensibly with the democratic capitalist order. Predictably, the group divided. A fair number of the forerunners ended up adapting New Left doctrine to the missions of universities, foundations, and government agencies, where they get to attack the privilege, racism, sexism, and generalized rottenness they claim to see all around them in a still-sick society. Nobody except a few cranky conservatives ever speaks of them unkindly. Taking all the flak are the ''practical'' group and the sensible forerunners -- the ones who opted for business careers, getting ahead, and having as much fun as seems affordable. The background thought behind the attack on their yuppie ''greed and materialism'' is that it is abnormal, if not immoral, to be a nonprotester in a capitalist world.

Don't say we didn't warn you.