Silent Generation

The Silent Generation is the designation given by Strauss and Howe[?] in their book Generations to that generation in the United States of America born from 1925 to 1942. According to Strauss and Howes's interpretation, the typical grandparents were of the Missionary Generation; their parents were of the Lost Generation and G.I. Generation. Their children are Baby boomers and Generation X; their typical grandchildren are of the Generation Y.

Silent cebrities include the following:

• 1925 William F. Buckley, Jr.[?]
• 1925 Gore Vidal
• 1926 Marilyn Monroe (died 1962)
• 1927 Andy Warhol (died 1987)
• 1928 T. Boone Pickens, Jr.[?]
• 1929 Martin Luther King, Jr. (died 1968)
• 1930 James A. Baker III[?]
• 1930 Sandra Day O'Connor
• 1930 Clint Eastwood
• 1931 James Dean (died 1955)
• 1932 Andrew Young
• 1935 Elvis Presley (died 1977)
• 1935 Geraldine Ferraro
• 1935 Woody Allen
• 1935 Phil Donahue[?]
• 1936 Abbie Hoffman (died 1989)
• 1937 Jack Nicholson
• 1940 Ted Koppel (immigrant)
• 1940 Pat Schroeder[?]
• 1942 Barbra Streisand
• 1942 Jimi Hendrix (died 1970)

Prominent foreign-born peers include Fidel Castro, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, and John Lennon (died 1980).

Cultural endowments of the Silent Generation include:

• The Other America[?] (Michael Harrington[?])
• Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey, later a movie)
• Unsafe at Any Speed[?] (Ralph Nader)
• Cosmos (TV series, Carl Sagan)
• Heartburn (Nora Ephron)
• Ms.[?] (magazine, Gloria Steinem[?])
• Playboy (magazine, Hugh Hefner)
• Future Shock (Alvin Toffler)
• Megatrends[?] (John Naisbitt[?])
• Fatherhood[?] (Bill Cosby)
• Sesame Street (children's television, Joan Ganz Cooney[?])

The Silent generation has produced America's late twentieth-century facilitators and technocrats. They produced four decades of Presidential aides -- Pierre Salinger[?] (Kennedy), Bill Moyers (L. B. Johnson), John Ehrlichman[?] (Nixon), Richard Cheney (Ford and G. W. Bush), Stuart Eizenstat[?] (Carter), James A. Baker III (Reagan and G.H.W. Bush), and John H. Sununu (G.H.W. Bush). And three First Ladies. But no Presidents.

The Silent are the generational stuffings of a sandwich between the get-it-done G.I.s and the self-absorbed Boom. Well into their rising adulthood, they looked to the G.I.s for role models and pursued what then looked to be a lifetime of refining, humanizing, and ameliorating a G.I.-built world. Come the mid-1960s, the Silent fell under the trance of their free-spirited next-juniors, the Boomers. As songwriters, graduate students, and young attorneys, they mentored the Consciousness Revolution, founding several of the organizations of political dissent the Boom would later radicalize.

The Silent grew up as the suffocated children of war and depression. They came of age too late to be war heroes (they fought in Korea to a tie) and just too early to be youthful free spirits. Instead, this early-marrying Lonely Crowd became the risk-averse technicians, sensitive rock-n-rollers ("Why must I be a teenager in love?") and civil rights advocates of a post-Crisis era in which conformity seemed a sure ticket to success. Midlife was an anxious "passage" for a generation torn between stolid elders and passionate juniors. Their surge to power coincided with fragmenting families, cultural diversity, institutional complexity, and prolific litigation. In 2003, they are entering elderhood with unprecedented affluence, a hip style, and a reputation for indecision.