For more than four decades after end of the Korean War, no national monument existed for its veterans, prompting one fund-raiser to complain how they were being treated "as if they have never lived, never ennobled their time and place, never contributed to destiny." Though their own generation was an easy touch for other people's charities, Silent veterans were slow to assemble funds to build this one commemoration to themselves. Their memorial, when it was finally finished in 1995, had no Iwo Jima giants doing great deeds, nor did it make any moral statement like the dark walls of the Vietnam Memorial. Instead, it depicted thirty-eight life-size soldiers in two slightly crooked columns, walking through a forest to nowhere in particular.67
"The Silent Generation Is Clearing Its Throat," proclaimed Florida newspaper editor Tom Kelly as the 1990s dawned. "All together now, let's hear it (softly, please, but with feeling) for the Silent Generation, those overridiculed and underappreciated people." This modesty is disarming in a generation two of whose members (Neil Armstrong and Martin Luther King, Jr.) will likely remain, in some distant epoch, among the most celebrated Americans. The peers of Armstrong and King may someday be credited as the generation that opened up the dusty closets of contemporary history, diversified the culture, made democracy work for the disadvantaged, and--as one friend eulogized of Jim Henson--struck a Muppet-like balance "between the sacred and the silly."68
Above all, the generation that took America from grinding bulldozers to user-friendly computers, from the circa-1960 "Nuclear Age" into the circa-1990 "Information Age," has excelled at personal communication. The Silent have constantly tried, and often succeeded, in defusing conflict by encouraging people to talk to each other--from therapeutic T-groups on family problems to Nightline-style "global town meetings" on issues of major importance. They have thus lent flexibility to a Greatest-built world that otherwise might have split to pieces under Boomer attack--and have helped mollify, and ultimately cool, the Boom's coming-of-age passions.
Indeed, the Silent have been pathbreakers for much of the 1960s-era "consciousness" (from music to film, civil rights to Vietnam resistance) for which Boomers too often claim credit. From youth forward, this most considerate of living generations has specialized not in grand constructions or lofty ideals, but rather in people, life-size people like the statues in the Korean War Memorial. Barbra Streisand's agemates would like to believe that "people who need people are the luckiest people in the world." But, true to form, they have their doubts.69
Much of this doubt might be resolved if America can someday inaugurate just one President who wore that 1950s-era ducktail or ponytail, who served in the Peace Corps, who maybe spent a summer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi, and who cried as only 30-year-olds did when Martin and Bobby died. The Silent are virtually guaranteed of reaching 2005--80 years after their first birthyear--without producing a President. That's 24 years later than the average and 19 years later than any other generation from the Republicans on. This "I Go Pogo" generation has shown a lifelong bipartisan attraction to Presidential underdogs. It gave Adlai Stevenson his strongest generational percentage and supported the losing candidate in every close modern election: Nixon over Kennedy, Humphrey over Nixon, Ford over Carter, Gore over Bush [43].70
In 1990, when the mostly Silent U.S. Congress wildly cheered the Czech playwright-dissident President Vaclav Havel, many were no doubt recalling those old coffeehouse days and thinking: Here is exactly the sort of avant-garde President we thought we'd someday give the world. Until they do, the story of their own generation will read, to them, like the middle pages of a book written mostly about somebody else.
This page was last modified on 10/13/2025 06:51:37