Members of the adaptive Silent Generation, which include some of our kin, were born between 1925 and 1942; there will probably be members of this generation playing on the world's stage at least until about 2032.1
Their parents were either the last wave of the reactive Lost Generation or the first wave of the heroic, civic-minded Greatest Generation, who nurtured them in an overprotective, sometimes smothering, way.
Generations in the past whose peer personality closely resembled that of the Silent Generation include:
The Silent Generation (of the Artist archtype in the Great Power Saeculum, or Cycle) grew up as overprotected youths during a secular crisis, matured into risk-averse, conforming rising adults, produced indecisive midlife arbitrator-leaders during the Boomer spiritual awakening of the 1960s and 1970s, and maintained influence (but not so much respect) as sensitive elders. They had been the suffocated children of the Great Depression and World War II. They came of age just too late to be war heroes and just too early to be youthful free spirits. Instead, this early marrying Lonely Crowd became the risk-averse technicians and professionals as well as the sensitive rock 'n' rollers and civil rights advocates of a postcrisis era in which conformity seemed to be a sure ticket to success. Midlife was an anxious "passage" for a generation torn between stolid elders and passionate juniors. Their surge to power coincided with fragmenting families, cultural diversity, institutional complexity, and prolific litigation. They have entered elderhood with unprecedented affluence, a hip style, and a reputation for indecision.2
"Forty-nine is taking no chances," Fortune Magazine's editors wrote of the "gray flannel mentality" of that year's class of college graduates, the first to consist mainly of Americans born after 1924. "They are interested in the system rather than individual enterprise." Only 2 percent wished to be self-employed. Most of the rest wanted to work in big corporations offering job security. "Never had American youth been so withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous--and silent," Greatest Generation historian William Manchester later quipped.3
The Silent Generation was a name these young people didn't especially like, but they knew it fit. "We had no leaders, no program, no sense of our own power, and no culture exclusively our own," admitted Frank Conroy. "Our clothing, manners, and lifestyle were unoriginal--scaled-down versions of what we saw in the adults." Like Robert Morse in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, these young grads put on their "sincere" ties, looked in the mirror--and didn't see the Greatest Generation. Instead, they saw the date-and-mate romantics of Peggy Sue Got Married, sober young adults chided by one older professor as "a generation with strongly middle-aged values." Greatest David Riesman and Nathan Glazer labeled them the "Lonely Crowd," possessing an "outer-directed" personality and taking cues from others.4
Other generations first knew them as Shirley Temple and Jerry Lewis, Roy Cohn and Charles Van Doren, Ralph Nader and Bobby Kennedy--and younger generations met them as Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Seven. In the decades since, they have aged into America's late-Twentieth Century and early-Twenty-first Century facilitators and technocrats, the Walter Mondales and Geraldine Ferraros, the Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelds--a consummate helpmate generation which has so far produced four decades of top Presidential aides--Pierre Salinger (for Kennedy), Bill Moyers (Johnson), John Erlichman (Nixon), Dick Cheney (Ford, Bush [41], Bush [43]), Stuart Eizenstat (Carter), James Baker III (Reagan), John Sununu (Bush [41]), Colin Powell (Bush [41] and Bush [43]), and John Ashcroft (Bush [43]). And three First Ladies (Jackie Kennedy, Rosalynn Carter, and Barbara Bush). But no Presidents.
Jeane Kirkpatrick describes hers as a generation "born twenty years too soon." Or twenty years too late. Admiral William Crowe calls his peers a "transitional generation," Rose Franzblau a "Middle Generation," the one she says is forever "betwixt and between." The Silent boundaries are fixed less by what they did than by what those older and younger did--and what the Silent themselves just missed.5
The first wave came of age just too late for war-era heroism, but in time to encounter a powerful national consensus--against which young rebels, such as James Dean, found themselves "without a cause." The last wave graduated from college just ahead of what Benita Eisler termed the "great divide" before the fiery Boomer Class of 1965. Unlike the first Boomers, the last of the Silent can remember World War II from their childhood, and many of them look upon the Peace Corps as a generational bond in a way Boomers never have. Sixteen percent of Harvard's Class of '64 joined the Peace Corps, Harvard's top postgraduate destination for that year--whereas the next year's graduates began criticizing the Peace Corps amid the early stirrings of the Boom's antiestablishment rebellion.6
The Silent widely realize they are the generational stuffings of a sandwich between the get-it-done Greatest and the self-absorbed Boom. Well into their rising adulthood, they looked to the Greatest for role models--and pursued what then looked to be a lifetime mission of refining and humanizing the Greatest-built world. Come the mid-1960s, the Silent found themselves "grown up just as the world's gone teen-age" (as Howard Junker put it at the time) and fell under the trance of their free-spirited next-juniors, the Boomers. As songwriters, graduate students, and young attorneys, they mentored the Boom Awakening, founded several of the organizations of political dissent their next-juniors would radicalize.7
"During the ferment of the 1960s, a period of the famous 'generation gap,' we occupied, unnoticed as usual, the gap itself," Wade Greene later recounted. "When nobody over thirty was to be trusted, our age was thirty-something."8
During the 1970s, the sexual revolution hit the Silent when most of them were passing forty, decades after their natural adolescence. Such awkward timing caused immense problems in their family lives and transformed them, said Franzblau in 1971, into "a generation of jealousies and role reversals." Through the 1970s, the Silent completed the shift from an elder-focused rising adulthood to a youth-focused midlife--feeling, as in the Dylan lyric:
Ah, but I was so much older thenAs women turned to feminism, men assembled a mix-and-match masculinity out of fragments from Greatest and Boom.9
I'm younger than that now.
The Silent lifecycle has been an outer blessing but inner curse. In Birth and Fortune, demographer Richard Esterlin labeled his own peer group "the fortunate ones" whose relatively small size (per birthyear) has supposedly given them an edge on life. Yes, the Silent have enjoyed a lifetime of steadily rising affluence, have suffered relatively few war casualties, and have shown the Twentieth Century's lowest rates for almost every social pathology of youth (crime, suicide, illegitimate births, and teen unemployment). Apart from a significant number of divorced women who never remarried, the Silent lifecycle has been an escalator of prosperity, offering the maximum reward for the minimum initiative. No other living generation could half-believe in what Ellen Goodman terms "the Woody Allen school of philosophy: 80 percent of life is showing up."10
But the outward good fortune of their lifecycle has denied them a clear personal connection to the banner headlines that they see, at times enviously, so well connected to others. However much they try, the Silent have never succeeded in experiencing the snap of catharsis felt by Greatest or Boomers. Where the Greatest did great things and felt one with history, where Boomers found ravishment within themselves, the Silent have taken great things for granted and looked beyond themselves--while worrying that, somehow, the larger challenges of life are passing them by.
And so they have been keen on manufacturing points of lifecycle reference around personal (rather than historical) markers. Whatever phase of life they occupy is fraught with what various Silent authors have labeled "passages," "seasons," "turning points," or other transitions bearing little or no relation to the larger flow of public events.
Well aware of their own deficiencies, the Silent have spent a lifetime plumbing inner wellsprings older Greatest seldom felt while maintaining a sense of social obligation Boomers haven't shared. Their solutions--fairness, openness, due process, expertise--reflect a lack of surefootedness, but also a keen sense of how and why humans fall short of grand civic plans or ideal moral standards. Silent appeals for change have seldom arisen from power or fury, but rather through a self-conscious humanity and tender social conscience:
Deep in my heart, I do believeLacking an independent voice, they have adopted the moral relativism of the skilled arbitrator, mediating arguments between others--and reaching out to people of all cultures, races, ages, and handicaps.
We shall overcome someday
"We don't arrive with ready-made answers so much as as honed capacity to ask and to listen," says Greene, touting his generation's ability "to continue to bridge gaps, at a time of immense, extraordinarily complicated and potentially divisive changes." The tensions the Silent have felt in adapting to a Greatest-and-Boom-dominated society while preserving their own sensitivity have helped them appreciate the crazy twists of life--and become America's greatest generation of comedians, psychiatrists, and songwriters.
Yet this very malleability has left the Silent with badly checkered family lives. "If anything has changed in the last generation," admits Ellen Goodman, "it is the erosion of confidence" among parents "openly uncertain about how we are doing."11
In Private Lives, Benita Eisler labels hers the generation with "a corpse in the trunk"--and the biggest of those corpses is the R-rated decade of the 1970s. That era in which so much seemed to go wrong in America coincided precisely with the Silent urge to influence over national life. In Future Shock, the book that keynoted that decade, Alvin Toffler foresaw a forthcoming "historic crisis of adaptation"--and called for "the moderation and regulation of change" with "exact scientific knowledge, expertly applied to the crucial, most sensitive points of social control."12
But as Toffler's peers began applying this cult of expertise, they encountered their turbulent passage to midlife--and what Toffler labeled the "transience index" began exploding upward. As the Silent broke and remade relationships, families splintered, substance abuse moved past euphoria to social damage, and American society lost its Greatest-era sense of cohesion. As a generation of Daniel Ellsbergs pushed to get secrets out (and take clothes off), their Phil Donahues and Ted Koppels aimed microphones everywhere, hoping more dialog would somehow build a better society.
Meanwhile, productivity stagnated, the economy sputtered, and the nation endured a series of global humiliations. In Zero-Sum Society, Lester Thurow suggested that, increasingly, improvement in the condition of any one group came at the expense of another. What Jerry Brown called "the age of limits" became (in William Schneider's words) "the Zeitgeist theme of his generation." By the time the 1970s ended, an elder Greatest won the Presidency in part by ridiculing this midlife mind-set.13
Even with Reagan at the helm, the America of the 1980s did in many ways become a Silent-era Tofflerian "ad hocracy" stressing expertise over simplicity, participation over authority, process over result. Corporations began directing more attention to organization and financing than to the products they made. Public over- and under-regulation became hot political issues, prompting Time Magazine to play off memories of Greatest muscle by making "The Can't Do Government" the subject of a 1989 cover story.14
Where the word liberal had once referred to a Greatest-style energizer with a constructive national agenda, its meaning transformed into a Silent-style enervator attuned to multitudinous special interests. ("Beware of liberals who came of age politically in the 1950s," warns George Will.) Likewise, the definition of conservative evolved from a Lost Generation--style cautious stewardship to the faintly hip, high-rolling optimism of the Silent's new supply-side school--which calls upon the nation to undergo the economic equivalent of a liberating midlife passage, full of zest and swagger and dare.15
As Mike Dukakis and Jack Kemp defined these two new Silent credos in politics, Alan Alda and Clint Eastwood (the latter dubbed by one reviewer the "supply-side star") defined them in popular culture. Neoliberal to Neoconservative, racial quotas to Laffer curves, this generation lacks a cohesive core--and fears it may be presiding over (in William Raspberry's words) "the unraveling of America."16
In 1949, Fortune closed its report on the new crop of college graduates by asking whether they will be "so tractable and harmonious as to be incapable, twenty or thirty years hence, of making provocative decisions?" Today, more than half a century has passed, and many have since rephrased that question in the present tense. The nation still looks to what Greene terms "sixtysomethings" to comment and mediate, but not to lead. Americans of all ages, Silent included, have repeatedly turned back to the Greatest for a steady hand, and forward to Boomers for new values.17
And so the Silent have entered elderhood--still feeling "out of it," observes Benita Eisler, "sitting ducks for having our bluff called." Although they continue to wait for a turn at the top, they notice how younger leaders have appropriated their call to "conscience" and older leaders their "kinder and gentler" rhetoric. Having given so much to others, the Silent are beginning to wonder whether their own generation may yet have something new to offer. Or whether instead their greatest contributions have already been made.18
Here is a table of contents for a deeper exploration of the Silent Generation's lifecycle:
Birthyears for the Silent Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation