The Silent Generation Revisited

Reader Anita Landis of the GlynnDevins ad agency in Overland Park, Kansas sent me the URL to an article on the Silent Generation that ran in the June 29, 1970 issue of Time. I found the article by Time Associate Editor Gerald Clarke fascinating from several perspectives.

First, it was written by a member of the Silent Generation who had bought into the idea that it was every bit as different as the first article on the subject claimed. That was Time’s cover story on November 5, 1951.

Second, the 1970 article cited a number of ways in which the Silent Generation was different contained a number of that are also being used today to show how Generation Y or Millenials are different from previous generations.

For example, Clarke who was 32 (three years year older than I was then) at the time wrote:

• We were incapable of hero worship. Those we most admired, in fact, were not real heroes but the anti-heroes of fiction or film: the Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises or the Humphrey Bogart of Casablanca.
• For us, coolness was all. Like Holden Caulfield, the confused but knowing teen-age protagonist of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye —the novel that became the decade's literary touchstone — we detested anything that we felt was phony.
• Only today, in our 30s, do we know that we were different—fundamentally different. When the generation lines began to form, we discovered, to our own surprise, that we did not automatically side with our parents.
• We may be the only ones left in American society who can see what's great and what's bull," says Frank Conroy, 34, the author of Stop-Time.

Cannot those descriptions be applied to Gen Y’ers?

Yes, the so-called Silent Generation was different. But is was also the same. When doing a comparative analysis of generational differences, it is wise to separate true differences from apparent differences which aren’t differences after all.

Aside from citing apparent differences as real differences, Clarke did do a worthy job of capturing the behavioral essence of the last generation to come of age before television became a ubiquitous fact of life in America. I know. I was there as a fellow Silent Generation type trying to resolve the great moral gap between my parent’s generation and the incoming boomer generation.

Interesting read, Clarke’s piece, when you get a moment.

 

 

 

 

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