“Few young people,” Murray Ross wrote in 1950, “share deeply in the life of a group dedicated, and actively devoted, to the highest goals of mankind.” To find out what did stir youth, Life that year asked it for its heroes and heroines. Back like a straight arrow came the answers: Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio, MacArthur, Babe Ruth, and Roy Rogers; Clara Barton, Vera-Ellen, Florence Nightingale, Doris Day, and Sister Elizabeth Kenny. Parental opinions could scarcely have been much different. Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of the new decade was the degree to which young Americans adopted the values of the older generation. The “dedication of bourgeois America to personal security,” wrote William O’Neill of the University of Wisconsin, had produced “a generation with strongly middle-aged values.” In the past it had been a safe assumption that a young man’s politics would crystallize on the left and then move slowly to the right as he grew older. No more; college youth in the 1950s started in dead center and stayed there.
Of course, a majority in any student generation is silent; it is the articulate minority which win it its label. Not many undergraduates in the 1920s wore raccoon coats and only a few drove Stutz Bearcats; a handful in the 1930s joined the Young Communist League or struck for peace. But in the 1950s it was hard to find any who were articulate, any who could be called leaders. Typically, varsity football teams elected cocaptains, or revolving captains, and Phi Beta Kappa keys were quietly pocketed. Undergraduates seemed to spurn the very concept of leadership, preferring someone they called “the well-rounded man,” who under close scrutiny resembled a faceless blob. Of this apotheosis William H. Whyte Jr. wrote in The Organization Man that it was “obtrusive in no particular, excessive in no zeal.” Believing that leadership came from the group, that progress lay in something called problem-solving meetings, the well-rounded campus men had no use for drive and imagination. Above all, they distrusted individualism. The individual sought prestige and achievement at the expense of others. He was abrasive; he rocked the boat; he threatened the corporate One, and they wanted no part of him.
In their mystique the deadliest sin was to be controversial. The silent generation shunned commitments of any sort, and it was above all politically illiterate. Its members could not be disillusioned because they had no illusions. They kept their mouths shut, avoided serious discussions, and eschewed reformers as “bleeding hearts.” In the conflict between independence and the system, they came down hard on the side of the system. They sought not fame, but the approval of others. Eager to collaborate in group actions, they deliberately suppressed traits which might set them apart. It was in these years that wealthy students began to cultivate shabby appearances, wearing denim to discourage any suggestion that they were different from others. Riesman was approached by a varsity swimmer who said, “I get sore at the guys I’m competing against. Something’s wrong with me. I wish I could be like—, who really cooperates with the other fellows. He doesn’t care so much about winning.” Whyte observed that students no longer dreamed of going into business for themselves. They wanted to work for someone else, and the bigger the firm, the more they trusted it. They were not much interested in becoming salesmen, however, or in rising to be key executives. Salesmen were contenders; executives sometimes had to be tough. Seniors more frequently told company recruiters that they wanted to be in personnel, because they liked people, or in public relations, where, Whyte dryly noted, they could “be nice to everybody on company time.”
Protest was clearly alien to such an outlook. For professors, hostility to McCarthyism was the great passion of the time, but students weren’t much interested. The senator won few recruits on campuses, but he didn’t stir up much resentment, either; most undergraduates found the issue boring. This indifference was noticeable in all fields—including theology, journalism, and law—although it is significant that the occupational preferences of students had sharply changed. The great thing now was business administration. Between 1940 and 1950 the primacy of the humanities had declined, until fewer than three undergraduates in ten were majoring in a fundamental discipline. Vocational training had the allegiance of the young, and business was the most popular vocation because it offered the highest return on their investment of choice. At the end of the 1940s business majors had accounted for 19.4 percent of all college students in the United States. By 1955 they had come to constitute the largest undergraduate group.
If they had a paradigm, he was Tom Rath, Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. At the beginning of the novel, Wilson’s hero has a wife named Betsy, three children, a six-room house in Westport, a 1939 Ford, $10,000 in GI life insurance, and a $7,000-a-year job at a charitable foundation, where his duties are negligible. Life is pleasant, but rather austere; he needs a new car, the kitchen linoleum is starting to go, etc. Then Tom gets what looks like a break. He is offered a public relations job paying $9,000. He takes it and finds there is a hitch. In his new career he is expected to work. No more three-hour lunches, no long coffee breaks, being nice on company time; he has to produce now, and sometimes he has to stay at his desk after five o’clock or even come in on Saturdays, cutting into his time with Betsy and the kids. That incenses him. He tells the boss where to get off. Tom doesn’t mind getting rich, but if in exchange he has to curtail his roles as husband, father, and all-around good fellow, he wants no part of it. This is the climax of the story, and the denouement is extraordinary. The boss backs down.
“Of course,” Hopkins said kindly, getting up and pouring himself another drink. “There are plenty of good positions where its not necessary to put in an unusual amount of work. Now it’s just a matter of finding the right spot for you.”
The silent generation really believed that. Beneath its ersatz camaraderie lay an essential innocence, a Hans Christian Andersen belief that clock watchers, for some supernatural reason, would be rewarded with what was variously called “the good life,” the “good, sensible life,” and “the right, full life.” Hopkins says defensively; “Somebody has to do the work,” and Tom replies sympathetically, “I know.” Somebody, but not him. No driven neurotic he:
“I don’t want to give up the time. I’m trying to be honest about this. I want the money. Nobody likes money better than I do. But I’m just the kind of guy who can’t work evenings and weekends and all the rest of it forever. I guess there’s even more to it than that. I’m not the kind of person who can get all wrapped up in a job—I can’t get myself convinced that my work is the most important thing in the world.”
Convinced that all great discoveries had been made, all great dreams realized, and all great fortunes amassed, the Toms of the 1950s were content to tinker with techniques and technicalities from nine to five, five days a week, while devoting the bulk of their energies to nonvocational interests—the church, civic activities, “getting to know” the kids, golf, Little Leagues, leading a rewarding life with Betsy and laying pipe with her. All this was to be theirs once they had signed up with the right recruiters before commencement, entered their names in the rat race, and roistered away down the superhighways of consumption. It was significant, as one social critic pointed out, that college students no longer spoke of “playing the game.” Instead they “knew the score.” They were aware that the score would change from time to time, but when that happened, they felt sure, somebody would tell them what to do.
There was no longer much talk of selling out. It was unnecessary. They were in bondage from the outset, as committed to the American way as any medieval youth off for the monastery. To them the world that awaited them after commencement was neither cold nor cruel, and certainly not hostile. Writing in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, one academician reported, “A dominant characteristic of students in the current generation is that they are gloriously contented both in regard to their present day-to-day activity and their outlook for the future. Few of them are worried—about their health, their prospective careers, their family relations, the
state of national or international society or the likelihood of their enjoying secure and happy lives.” Graduating seniors were prepared to embrace—and if need be, to defend—the status quo; they would obey the law, pay taxes, fulfill their military obligations, and vote, though thereafter politics would be none of their concern. They would conform to the dictates of society in their dress, speech, worship, choice of friends, length of hair, and above all, in their thought. In exchange they would receive all the rights and privileges of the good life; viz., economic security.
That was the deal, and it shocked their teachers. Having survived the challenges of poverty and fascism, it seemed, the national legacy was to be betrayed by puerile hobbledehoys who preferred mink-handled beer can openers and fourteen-karat gold charge plates to ideals, and who accepted General Eisenhower’s definition of an intellectual: “a man who takes more words than is necessary to say more than he knows.”
In New York’s Temple Rodeph Sholom, Rabbi Lewis I. Newman blamed panty expeditions on McCarthyism. By making “serious discussion and dissent on major issues dangerous,” he argued, the Wisconsin senator had made it necessary for students to “find an expression for their bottled-up energies in foolish and unseemly ‘raids’ upon dormitories.” This was stretching things; yet there was a seed of truth in it. If thoughtful discussion was not downright risky, it was certainly being discouraged on almost every level of organized society. A jet propulsion engineer was arrested, apparently on no other ground than that he had been a friend of the Rosenbergs. Owen Lattimore was indicted on seven counts of perjury before a congressional investigating committee.2 The State Department banned travel in Communist countries. The dismissal of American employees at the U.N. as “security risks” had begun, and passage of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act all but guaranteed the public humiliation of European scholars arriving to lecture on American campuses.
Now that McCarthy was at his height, nearly every week brought news of some fresh outrage against free thought, and pensive students could hardly avoid the conclusion that conformists were rewarded and heretics punished. Washington was the great battleground for the senator and his foes, but colorful skirmishes were being fought in almost every community of any size. San Antonio, Texas, for example, was going through agonies over a proposal that the public library brand books whose authors had been called Communists or were suspected of Communist sympathies with a red stamp. The advocates were led by Myrtle Glasscock Hance, a local housewife. Mrs. Hance, the New York Times reported, “has never made any pretense to literary attainments or wide acquaintance with books.” But that didn’t mean that she didn’t have a pretty good idea of the hanky-pank inside. She produced a list of suspected authors and said she wanted something done about their books. She didn’t demand that the books be actually burned. The stamp would satisfy her, provided it was bright red and “large enough to be seen immediately.” Affixed to the inside front cover, it would specify the writer’s Communist affiliations and sympathies, together with the number of his “citations.” “The reader,” Mrs. Hance said, “will then realize that in many instances he is reading Communist propaganda.” San Antonio’s mayor, whose own wife was a member of the Minute Women, thought Mrs. Hance’s suggestion an excellent one. Then it developed that there was more to it than met the eye. Watchers were to take note of people who consulted the branded books. Their names were then to be turned over to the FBI or, alternately, published in the San Antonio News. That aroused the city’s powerful Maverick family, civil libertarians to the man. Before the clamor ended in the triumph of the antibranders, households had been divided and friendships torn asunder.
In Indiana another housewife, Mrs. Thomas J. White, a member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, offered a novel interpretation of Anglo-Saxon folklore. She declared: “There is a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood. They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave to the poor. That’s the Communist line. It’s just a smearing of law and order.” The Republican governor declined to take a stand, for Robin Hood or against him. In England William Cox, sheriff of Nottingham, told a reporter that in his opinion Hood (1160-?) had not been a Communist, but Wilbur Young, Indiana’s superintendent of education, called a press conference to announce that he was rereading the tales of Robin Hood just the same. Nothing was above suspicion in the early 1950s, and in some quarters to be suspect was tantamount to guilt. As though blacklisting was not enough, Samuel French, the country’s leading publisher of drama, announced a playwriting contest in which it reserved “the right to declare ineligible any author who is, or becomes publicly involved, in a scholastic, literary, political, or moral controversy.”
With FBI agents openly conducting security checks on campuses and trustee demands for loyalty oaths, it would have been surprising if undergraduates had not held their tongues. Almost everyone else did. Paul G. Hoffman, chairman of the board at Studebaker-Packard and a liberal Republican, was an exception. His views on freedom would scarcely have seemed daring in any other era, but holding any opinion strongly was unusual then. After he had spoken at a large southwestern university a student asked, “Do you think there ought to be any study of Communism in a school such as this?” Hoffman answered, “Yes, I think we ought to teach what Communism is, so that the new and most important generation of Americans can know exactly why it is such a menace to our way of life.” The student said, “I think so, too, but it’s dangerous to say that around here now.” In fact it wasn’t entirely safe for Hoffman to say it. He was being watched, and when he sought to speak in Indianapolis again under the auspices of the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Legion saw to it that he was denied the use of the city’s War Memorial. His topic this time was to have been free enterprise.
Vigilante persecution, horror of the new thermonuclear weapons, and parental tales of the Depression were all formative forces in the making of the silent generation. It was not without defenders. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Princeton’s Otto Butz held that its elders misjudged it. His own students, he wrote, were merely prudent. He thought it wrong to condemn them for their lack of political militance: “The future, indeed, may show that they are precisely the kind of realistic idealists which this country, in both its domestic and international life, has long been badly in need of.” It was faint praise, found no echo, and has not been justified by the passage of time. A more eminent educator, Philip E. Jacob of the University of Pennsylvania, held that the values of the silent generation represented a departure from American tradition. Although students spoke well of sincerity, honesty, and loyalty, he wrote, their own standards were “generally low in regard to academic honesty, systematic cheating being a common practice rather than the exception at many major institutions.” Their hedonism and anti-intellectualism seemed to him to represent an abandonment of their Puritan heritage, and he suggested that “Perhaps these students are the forerunners of a major cultural and ethical revolution,” the unconscious ushers of an essentially secular (though nominally religious), self-oriented (though group-forming) society.”
If others saw the specter of revolution in the wings, they were keeping it to themselves. But Dr. Jacob had sketched an outline, and in time others would flesh it out. It is fascinating to speculate on how they felt about the voluntary gags worn then, for although they were too young to assess it, the mystique of the silent generation must have had an impact upon them in some dark place of the mind back beyond memory and below the level of speech. In the high summer of 1951, when the decade was just getting under way, Mark Rudd was a three-year-old in Maplewood, New Jersey; Mario Savio was eight and Kathy Boudin seven in Manhattan; Huey Newton ten in Oakland, California; Linda Sue Evans eight in Fort Dodge, Iowa; Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson six in New York; and Diana Oughton nine in Dwight, Illinois.
Early in the 1960s, when the silent generation had passed into history, a group of undergraduates at Wesleyan University, feeling a pang of nostalgia between
periods in a basketball game, spontaneously burst into lyrics all had retained in their collective memory. They sang:
Winky Dink and you,
Winky Dink and you,
Always have a lot of fun
To-geth-er!
Then:
It’s Howdy Doody time,
It’s Howdy Doody time,
Bob Smith and Howdy too
Say Howdy-Do to you!3
And then:
Mickey Mouse! Mickey Mouse!
Forever let us raise our banners high!
M-I-C
—See you real soon!
K-E-Y
—Why? Because we like you!
M-O-U-S-E!
The chanting students shared bonds which had been unknown to their parents. They were members of the first television generation, reared in a time when public relations men had begun speaking of “images” and psychologists of “roles”—when “the public” in advertising jargon was being superseded by “the mass audience.” In the 1930s the radio children’s hour had been forty-five minutes. At other idle times its young admirers had either listened to adult programs or, if they were small and belonged to the great middle class, to parents reading fragments from a juvenile literature unchanged since their own childhoods: Mother Goose, Grimms’ fairy tales, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Little Women, The Wizard of Oz. All that began to recede in the late Truman years. Unless enshrined by Disney (Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty) or a popular entertainer (Peter Pan, Oz), tales once told at mothers’ knees were to become progressively less familiar, until allusions to them were lost upon all but a select few from homes where children who read and were read to were not thought peculiar.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 87