The Silent Generation
January 16 2011
“I think,” Snowy said, “that our generation is ‘the disappeared.’ We’ve dropped out of sight between our parents’ generation and the baby boomers. Remember how we were called ‘The Silent Generation’? Nobody knows about us.”
Dudley said, “Then I’d better make sure I’m heard.”
—from HENRIETTA SNOW
The adjective “silent” was given to my generation by Tom Watson, Jr., president of IBM, when addressing the DePauw University class of 1957. Or so the story goes. The term caught the fancy of LIFE magazine, and from there became the label for the members of this era of conformity. Our parents had coped with the Depression, and they taught us the importance of security. We wanted to be safe from poverty, even from scrimping and “making do.” We married young and had children young, settling down to domestic bliss and Tupperware parties—until we read THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE.
Our fathers fought in the Second World War, or they and sometimes our mothers worked in defense plants. Thus we were automatically patriotic—until Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities made us stop and question what the government was up to. A lot of us were too scared to question. In my home, with liberal parents, I luckily learned what wasn’t taught in schools. Blacklisting? I was utterly shocked that this could happen in America.
When we rebelled it seemed that like James Dean we were rebels without a cause—until some became involved in civil rights and the Peace Corps. In matters political we never won the biggest prize; as Snowy comments after the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, “...our generation was skipped over. From George Bush to Bill Clinton. We’re missing in between; we’re ‘the disappeared’ again.”
Now we are—eek!—senior citizens, looking back, and it seems that we are mostly happy to have grown up in the 1950s. Whenever I get together with friends from high school, the Gang, we sure aren’t silent; we’re making a spectacle of ourselves in restaurants, reminisicing and laughing and laughing.
Remember the first time we heard Elvis?
Remember when gasoline was twenty cents a gallon?
Remember circle skirts and crinolines?
Remember?
Remember?
© 2010 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved
