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Biden became his generation’s first U.S. president: The presidency skipped over the Silent generation in the 1990s when George H. W. Bush (b. 1924), a Greatest generation member, lost to Boomer Bill Clinton (b. 1946), the first in a line of four Boomer presidents.
They are the last American generation to remember the years of the Great Depression, and the last to know a time before the end of World War II.
Yet these two cataclysmic events of the mid-20th century still had a profound influence on Silents, who spent their formative years during times when prosperity and peace could not be taken for granted.
Although the decade seems quaint now, at the time the technology of the 1950s felt breathtaking, with the Silent generation witnessing the exciting modern era of jet travel and astronauts—not to mention more everyday but impactful innovations like refrigerators, televisions, early computers, and interstate highways.
“During the ferment of the ’60s, a period of the famous ‘generation gap,’ we occupied, unnoticed as usual, the gap itself: When nobody over 30 was to be trusted, our age was thirtysomething.”
The Black kids couldn’t use the town pool, he noted. There were separate bathrooms, separate water fountains, separate waiting rooms at the doctor’s office, separate seating on the bus (WHITES TO FRONT, COLOREDS TO REAR, the sign read).
The waitress came over to them, looking unhappy, and said, “We don’t serve n———s here.” One of John’s friends replied, “Ma’am, we don’t want one of those—we want a cheeseburger.” (A line so good it would have surely gone viral if social media had existed at the time.)
In the popular imagination, the countercultural shift from 1963 to 1970 was driven by Boomers. In fact, most of it was led by Silents.
The musicians most associated with hippie culture were mostly Silents, like Jimi Hendrix (b. 1942) and Janis Joplin (b. 1943). Even the Beatles, whose music traveled the trajectory of the ’60s from upbeat early in the decade to psychedelic later on, were all Silents.
As the technological leaps of the postwar era accelerated, individualism grew: TV allowed people to see others’ perspectives and experiences, jet and space travel made the rest of the world seem closer, and the shift away from manual labor opened up more job opportunities for women.
Currently, more than a third oppose interracial marriage. Like most big shifts in public opinion, some in the older generations retained the views of an earlier era, but others changed along with the times.
Virtually every civil rights activist and Black trailblazer who rose to prominence in the 1960s was a member of the Silent generation.
This was the world of young women at the time—yes, you can get a job, but it will probably be in the typing pool. And forget about being paid well. That was the job market Silent women entered and sometimes experienced for decades: In 1968, the youngest Silents were 23, the oldest 43.
Despite rampant gender discrimination, the number of working women increased steadily after World War II, even after many were laid off from their Rosie the Riveter factory jobs and 1950s culture seemed to expect women to stay at home.
In 1941, just before the U.S. entered the war, 43% of four-year college degrees went to women. Yet in 1952, after nearly all men on the GI Bill had finished their degrees, only 32% of college degrees went to women.
Some young women and their families believed women should go to college not to prepare for a career but to get their “MRS” degree (as in Mrs.).
Author Erica Jong (b. 1942) calls Silents the “whiplash generation.” “Caught between our mothers (who stayed home) and the next generation (who took the right to achieve for granted), we suffered all the transitions of women’s history inside our skulls,” she wrote in 1994.
Clubs and bars where LGBT people gathered were also routinely raided, with patrons arrested for disorderly conduct and other charges.
Friedan was onto something: Americans married younger in the 1950s than in the 1930s, with the result that Silents married younger than any other generation born in the 20th century.
For Silents, it was important to do what everyone else was doing, and everyone else was getting married young. Raised in the more communal 1950s, Silents felt the pressure of conformity in a way later generations struggle to understand.
Thus, the stereotype of Boomer “free love” and singleton casual sex in the 1960s was the fringe rather than the norm: Most first-wave Boomers married in their early 20s, continuing the trend started by their Silent older siblings.
The Silents, often the products of two-child families themselves, commonly had families of three or four children—or more.
No one has ever quite figured out why the baby boom lasted so much longer than anyone thought it would. One reason is sheer optimism: The U.S. had won the war and the economy was chugging throughout the era. Another possibility is technology, specifically the proliferation of labor-saving devices during the postwar era, which made having children and keeping a home a little less onerous.
the ethos of the 1950s and 1960s prized “doing it yourself” when it came to child rearing, without the expectation of the intergenerational and paid help common in families just a few decades before. It was perhaps a precursor of the increasing individualism that would come later, but with the Silent twist that it was individualism of a nuclear family.
This was exacerbated by the fertility patterns of the time, which encouraged having children close together—Eisler found that thirteen months was common—to “get it over with” so women could go back to work or could look forward to decades of couplehood once the children were gone.
Why did divorce become so much more common? When divorce was skyrocketing in the 1960s and 1970s, many pointed to social changes related to a rise in individualism: more focus on personal choice, more equality for women, less emphasis on family.
There was another cause, however: early marriage. People who marry before age 25 are more likely to get divorced than those who marry later. With Silents marrying younger than the generations before them, they were also more likely to get divorced.
Silents broke norms by getting divorced, but kept true to their traditional outlook by then getting married again. Larry King once said he got married so many times because he came from a generation where you didn’t live together—you got married.
They lived their young adulthood in a more collectivistic, family-oriented time in American history, yet also helped give birth to the more individualistic, equality-focused country it would become.
The current version of teen life—high school, friends, homework, parties—is a relatively recent invention, and the Silent generation was the first to experience it in substantial numbers.
In 1940, when the Greatests were young adults, the average 25- to 29-year-old had not earned a high school degree, because when Greatests were young, most teens did not graduate from high school.
So although the Silent generation got married younger than those before them—a sign of faster development—they fell on the side of the slow-life strategy for their education, staying in school longer and thus postponing adulthood.
With low college tuition in the 1950s and 1960s, it was possible to work your way through college. Silents were the last full generation to benefit from education policies that are now difficult to believe: For example, the University of California was tuition-free for state residents until the late 1960s.
Advertisements during the 1950s and early 1960s pulsed with progress, urging consumers to leave the old ways behind and embrace the new—televisions, automatic washing machines, electric ranges, cars with all the bells and whistles.
Partially as a function of time period and partially as a function of their generational personality, Silents were the last generation to build true bipartisan coalitions.
Perhaps due to spending their adolescence and early adulthood in the more trusting and lower-crime era of the 1950s and early 1960s, they have a less hardened view of life than the Boomers who came of age during the chaotic late 1960s and 1970s, when crime was higher and traditional ideas of duty and honor were fading.
The link between ideology and age is due to the association of a liberal orientation with progressive policies (meaning pushing for change) and the association of conservatism with the status quo (keeping things as they are).
Only Silents identifying as Black, Hispanic, or another race/ethnicity followed the traditional path of increasing in conservativism as they got older; White Silents were already conservative even in middle adulthood.
In the 20th century, political ideology and party were not as tightly linked: Some Democrats were conservative and some Republicans were liberal.
In families, grandparents and grandchildren more often find themselves at odds over political issues. Political party warfare is increasingly generational warfare.
Those born in the 1930s in particular have the lowest number of people with mental distress of anyone born in the first half of the 20th century. Any rise in mental health issues seems to have begun after the Silents, and not with them.
Silents likely experienced less mental distress due to their position in history: Most were born during the years of the Great Depression and World War II, so they did not experience the stress of those events as adults the way the Greatest generation did.
The length and size of the postwar baby boom defied every demographic expectation. Just before this population bomb went off, the country’s birth rate had been declining for more than two hundred years.
Early on, the unexpectedly high birth rate meant everything was crowded: first maternity wards, and then schools.
The other result of this demographic bowling ball was Boomers dominating American culture at every stage of their life cycle.
By the 2000s, well-off Boomers in their 50s and 60s were melding hippie instincts with yuppie ones, finding moral meaning in what they consumed.
Known as the “reminiscence bump,” it means we remember the events of our adolescence and young adulthood more strongly than other times of our lives.
As P. J. O’Rourke (b. 1947) wrote, “You’re not a baby boomer if you don’t have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.”
Silents changed laws and rules, but Boomers changed hearts and minds toward not just equality but its real-world outcomes, from the entry of more Black students into universities to the societal approval of women as professionals and leaders.
Boomers rejected the idea that citizens can be required to serve against their wishes, a contravening of individual choice. (The muddled reasoning behind the Vietnam War was also a factor, but it’s notable that no substantial draft protests accompanied the Korean War, which was fought for similar anticommunist reasons.)
