In Passages, Gail Sheehy refers to the 20-to-30 age bracket as the Silent lifecycle's "transient decade"--a time when her peers felt a need to build the firm, safe, "merger self" while exploring a more adventuresome "seeker self." Sensing that although the Greatest had the power, thirtyish Silent adults realized that they themselves brought compassion and refinement to an age short on both.34
Starting with the Soviets' 1957 Sputnik space shot, the Silent started questioning American exceptionalism. "Hip" ways of thinking moved beyond coffeehouses into the suburbs with a new style John Updike called "half Door Store, half Design Research." Rising theologians challenged the Catholic orthodoxy in Daniel Callahan's "Generation of the Third Eye" (which "looks constantly into itself," and from which "nothing, or almost nothing, is safe from scrutiny"). As Updike and Philip Roth wrote risqué novels with self-doubting heroes, Tom Lehrer and Stan Freberg brought sophistication to satire, and Andy Warhol found "art" in the Greatest soup-can culture. New musical strains slyly shocked elders (Ray Charles's What'd I Say?) while reflecting an appetite for "crossover" pluralism.35
The other-directedness gradually asserted itself in the modern civil rights movement. Led by the young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Silent "agitators" adhered to a rule of nonviolence and appealed to the Greatest's sense of fairness. The Silent Generation has produced virtually every major figure in the modern civil rights movement--from the Little Rock children to the youths at the Greensboro lunch counter, from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X, from Cesar Chavez's farmworkers' union to Russell Means's American Indian Movement.36
In 1962, when Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby, and other Silent founded the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--a vehicle for campus dissent yet to be radicalized by Boomers--they affirmed that "in social change, or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent." From Michael Harrington's The Other America to Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom, rising authors probed flaws in the Greatest-built order. At the "right wing" of the spectrum, "Young Americans for Freedom" challenged the big-government centrism personified by the Greatest Nelson Rockefeller. Whatever their politics, the rising Silent differed from Boomers in their implicit acceptance of the permanence of the Greatest institutions (booing Rockefeller from the inside of the arena--not outside, as at Chicago in 1968).37
So too did the Silent acknowledge the greater strength of those next-elders. Peter, Paul, and Mary sang "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer out justice," as if to admit that the Greatest had the hammers--and were busy hammering out interstate highways and ballistic missiles. And cars, those Greatest-friendly machines that Ralph Nader declared Unsafe at Any Speed, having brought "death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people."38
Among the rising elite, young specialists lent their compliant expertise to the institutional order. With Pierre Salinger and Bill Moyers advising Greatest Presidents, legions of jobs opened up in public service. A budding intelligentsia lingered in universities, shepherding creative young Boomers. Silent athletes manned the last clean-cut sports dynasties (Yankees, Packers, Celtics) and provided the lonely precursors of athletes' rights (Curt Flood, John Mackey). Silent professionals account for the 1960s surge in the "helping professions" (teaching, medicine, ministry, government) and the 1970s explosion in "public interest" advocacy groups. From 1969 to 1979, the number of public interest law centers in America grew from 23 to 111; during the 1980s, only nine new centers were established. The era of Silent-dominated juries (1972 through 1989) roughly coincided with the rise of huge damage awards in personal injury cases.39
In business, a wave of smart, trainable entry-level workers helped set records for growth and productivity. What Silent workers put in, they got back. Whatever their professional field--management, law, civil service, or teaching--Silent men could count on acquiring a house and car, and on raising a family comfortably. The Silent lifecycle has been a straight line from a cashless childhood to the cusp of affluent elderhood--the smoothest and fastest-rising path of any generation for which income data are available. From age 20 to 40, Silent households showed this century's steepest rise in real per-capita income and per-household wealth.40
Silent women began to resent being trapped at home, and Silent men prepared to break free of the claustrophobia they knew their elders had never felt. Noted William Stryon as early as 1988: "I think that the best of my generation--those in their late thirties or early forties--have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older--a disconcerting but healthy sign."41
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