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- Early life for the Silent Generation was influenced by the events and aftermath of both World War II and the Great Depression, harrowing chapters in American history that informed their feelings about domestic life and financial security. Because of this, the Silent Generation typically deals very well with handling adversity.
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Feb 8, 2024 · The Silent Generation consists of people born before 1946 and who have been formed and shaped by a unique set of circumstances. Early life for the Silent Generation was influenced by the events ...
Feb 18, 2022 · History. How Did The Silent Generation Get Its Name? Olena Yakobchuk/Shutterstock. By Kimberly Smith / Feb. 18, 2022 3:57 pm EST. You might know what generation you belong to, but have you ever wondered why it earned the name it did? According to Pew Charitable Trusts, the naming of generations is not an official process.
- Overview
- Childhood in crisis
- The Lucky Few
- Big business
- Taking no chances
- Home and family
- Conformity and McCarthyism
- Quiet desperation
- The Lonely Crowd
- The Organization Man
Silent Generation, generation of people sandwiched between the “Greatest Generation,” which fought World War II, and the “baby boomers,” the generation born during the surge in births in the United States and other countries in the years immediately following the war. The range of birth years ascribed to the Silent Generation varies slightly according to the generational scheme employed, beginning with either 1925, 1928, or 1929 and ending with either 1942 or 1945. In the early 2020s the Silents were mostly in their 80s and 90s.
Constituting roughly 50 million individuals in the United States, this generation was both less populous (owing to diminished birth rates in the 1930s and ’40s) and, at first blush, seemingly less dynamic than the larger-than-life generations that bookended it. Sometimes also called “Traditionalists,” the members of this cohort are generally characterized as cautious conformists who sought stability, worked hard, and thrived by not rocking the boat in an era of booming postwar economic prosperity. But a closer look reveals a rebellious tendency that slowly emerged across the social, political, and cultural landscape during the years in which they came of age—roughly the late 1940s to the early 1960s—even if it was rebellion more grounded in reforming the system rather than in tearing it down.
Childhood for the Silent Generation came in a time of crisis. The youngest Silents grew up with both the extreme economic deprivation of the Great Depression (including, for some, Dust Bowl dislocation) and the terrifying upheaval of World War II. Scarcity was ubiquitous, first as a consequence of widespread unemployment and lack of income, then as...
Yet, as the Silents came of age, the U.S. economy not only rebounded but also went into overdrive, entering a period of tremendous expansion and prosperity. Indeed, another of the sobriquets bestowed upon the Silents is the “Lucky Few,” because at almost every stage of their lives they have been well positioned to take advantage of the economic opp...
The Silents entered the job market in an era of institutional growth. Ever-expanding corporations were at the centre of American economic life, and manufacturing was booming. Big business was king. From most indications, the Silents enthusiastically embraced the stability offered by corporate employment, whether behind a desk or on the assembly lin...
Twenty-first century depictions of the Silent Generation frequently reference a pair of magazine articles from the era that characterized the worldview of the Silents and established the received understanding of them. Often evoked is a Fortune article, “College Class of ’49,” which found that most “Forty-Niners” aspired to a happy family, a comfortable home, and two automobiles. Even more frequently cited is a Time essay from November 1951, “The Younger Generation,” which popularized the term “Silent Generation”:
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Youth today is waiting for the hand of fate to fall on its shoulders, meanwhile working fairly hard and saying almost nothing. The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today’s younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the “Silent Generation.”…Almost of itself, it has picked up the right instincts from an American tradition older than its parents: it wants to marry, have children, found homes, and if necessary, defend them.
The desire to build families was central to the zeitgeist of the Silents. On average they married younger and had children younger than any generation to date. Their aspiration to homeownership was indirectly aided by the G.I. Bill (Service Readjustment Act of 1944). While they were largely unable to capitalize on the no-money-down low-interest loa...
The Time article also emphasized Silents’ tendency to conform:
There is also the feeling that it is neither desirable nor practical to do things that are different from what the next fellow is doing.
Yet for all the commitment to straight-and-narrow meritocratic striving and the supposed contentment with the relatively staid lifestyle to which it gave rise, there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the Silents, a sense of lives being lived in the “quiet desperation” Henry David Thoreau identified a century earlier. Among those to call ...
Even before the Time article hit the newsstands, in 1950 sociologist David Riesman and collaborators Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published The Lonely Crowd. In it they argued that the bureaucratized society of big business and big institutions was fostering the replacement of the inventive, “inner-directed” individuals of earlier generations wit...
William H. Whyte, a business writer for Fortune, made similar observations in his book The Organization Man (1956). In evaluating contemporary corporate culture, Whyte concluded that the rugged individualism, creativity, and entrepreneurship that he believed had long been pivotal to American achievement was losing out to the notion that organizations were better able to solve problems than individuals were and thus were better suited to steer society:
Once people liked to think, at least, that they were in control of their destinies, but few of the younger organization people cherish such notions. Most see themselves as objects more acted upon than acting—and their future, therefore, determined as much by the system as by themselves.
The Silent Generation, also known as the Traditionalist Generation, is the Western demographic cohort following the Greatest Generation and preceding the baby boomers. The generation is generally defined as people born from 1928 to 1945. By this definition and U.S. Census data, there were 23 million Silents in the United States as of 2019.
Oct 11, 2021 · The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time—and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded.
- Louis Menand
Although members of this generation are sometimes said to be quiet and traditional, plenty of them have been outspoken too, especially in initiating the American civil rights movement. Learn more about the world of the Silent Generation below.
Nov 21, 2023 · What was the Silent Generation? Why is it called the Silent Generation? Learn about the characteristics, history, and time period of the Silent Generation. Updated: 11/21/2023.
