"I hated the war ending," Russell Baker later admitted, acknowledging that the A-bomb may have saved his skin. "I wanted desperately to become a death-dealing hero. I wanted the war to go on and on." While a number of first-wave Silent served in World War II, few saw any action before VJ-Day sent them home as might-have-beens rather than as heroes. Just as Herbert T. Gillis lorded it over young Dobie (and Maynard G. Krebs, who ran when he heard the word work), Greatest and Silent knew who had fought "the big one" and how hadn't. After Hiroshima, they also knew who had built "the big one" and who hadn't.27
A few years later, the Silent had their own war to fight in Korea, but their most memorable troop movements were retreats rather than advances. Where George H. W. Bush [41]'s Greatest peers had conquered large portions of Europe, Africa, and the Pacific, Mike Dukakis's fought to a tie on one small peninsula.
Through the late 1940s, meanwhile, young college freshmen found Greatest veterans everywhere, running the clubs, getting more financial aid (and, by most accounts, better grades), and the pick among marriageable women. The first Silent TV stars were goofballs (Jerry Lewis) or daffy sweethearts (Debbie Reynolds) cast alongside confident Greatest "straight men." As young women watched Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Bouvier abandon their careers for life with an older prince, their male peers watched the reputations and careers of prewar Greatest leftists getting chewed to pieces by Nixon and McCarthy. Youths of both sexes avoided the unorthodox and safeguarded their "permanent records" by applying the motto "Don't say, don't write, don't join."28
While Silent males outpaced the Greatest in educational achievement, Silent females showed no gain. Through the 1950s, new women entrants virtually disappeared from fields such as engineering and architecture, where Greatest women had made important war-era advances at like age. Two decades later, Silent women accounted for nearly all the nation's prominent feminists, however.29
Postwar Silent youths came of age feeling an inner-world tension amid the outer-world calm--not growing up angry (explained the older Paul Goodman), just Growing Up Absurd. Older generations didn't expect them to achieve anything great, just to calibrate, to become expert at what Greatest economist Walter Heller called "fine tuning" of the hydraulic Greatest wealth machine. Young adults in the 1950s, recalls Manchester, were "content to tinker with techniques and technicalities" and believed that "progress lay in something called problem-solving meetings."30
The aspiring youth elite compensated for their lack of aggressiveness with a budding intellectualism. In 1951, William Buckley's God and Man at Yale sounded the first erudite challenge against Greatest secularism. In 1955, the "Beat Generation" drew first notice, wrote Bruce Cook, at "that famous reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco when Allen Ginsberg first proclaimed 'Howl' to an astonished, wine-bibbing multitude." As self-proclaimed "nonconformists" led a "bohemian" coffeehouse cult, goateed 20-year-olds sampled foreign cuisines, listened to "offbeat" music, read "hip" poetry, told "sick" jokes, and lampooned the Greatest "Squaresville." In 1958, the Greatest Herb Caen tagged them "beatniks."31
If the Silent couldn't match Caen's peers in power and virility, then they'd be William Gaines's Alfred E. Neuman. "What, me worry?" You bet they worried--and came of age, like Elvis, All Shook Up:
Well, bless my soul, what's wrong with me,As they danced to their new rock and roll, Silent youths put up false fronts and used early marriage as a fortress against adult doubts about their maturity. Making babies quickly and frequently, millions of young householders merged unnoticeably into surburban Greatest culture.32
I'm itchin' like a man on a fuzzy tree.
The Silent were the earliest-marrying and earliest-babying generation in American history. Men married at an average age of 23, women at 20. The 1931-1935 female cohorts (birthyears) were the most fertile of the Twentieth Century; 94 percent of them became mothers, who bore an average of 3.3 children (versus 81 percent of Greatest born a quarter century earlier, who bore an average of 2.3 children). This was the only American generation whose college-educated women were more fertile than those who did not complete secondary school.33
Their children were either the idealistic Boom Generation or the reactive Generation X, and they tended to nurture them in an underprotective, sometimes even neglectful, way.
This page was last modified on 08/16/2025 02:06:14