On the Silent Generation
What of today's youth? Some are smoking marijuana; some are dying in Korea. Some are going to college with their wives; some are making $400 a week in television. Some are sure they will be blown to bits by the atom bomb. Some pray. Some are raising the highest towers and running the fastest machines in the world. Some wear blue jeans; some wear Dior gowns. Some want to vote the straight Republican ticket. Some want to fly to the moon.
-”The Younger Generation.” Time Magazine, November 5, 1951
Happy Mardi Gras! (and Presidents Day and Valentines Day and Chinese New Year). I hope you’ve had plenty of King Cakes and mooncakes, and that you managed to get away in December for the much anticipated end to 2020. The Banks family laid low; holiday plans to go to Germany became plans to go to Vermont became plans to binge-watch Netflix in the basement. . .
It has been a while since my last note: I’ve been so busy forming SPACs and trading meme stocks and angling to get invited to Clubhouse (you can find me @georgebanks). But the recent passing of hometown hero Hank Aaron prompted me to finish a note I started over the holidays. Fair warning: this note isn’t about real estate, and it’s a bit longer than usual.
[For new subscribers, prior notes can be found here. For those who missed our Multifamily Retail Webinar with Katie Bucklew of Avalon Bay, Michael Skena of Toll Brothers and Emily Wickey of AIG: you can find that recording here]
What a badass. Someone call the Braves and tell them to bring back these sweet retro unis for the entire ‘21 season in Mr. Aaron’s honor.
As happens every year, we lost a lot of notable people in 2020. Bill Withers, Christo, Jerry Jeff Walker, John LeCarre, Little Richard, Ruth Bader Ginsberg: the list goes on. The baseball greats alone we lost in 2020 (not even including Hammerin’ Hank!) would easily comprise the best team to ever play.
The common trait of the people I’ve mentioned is not the year of their passing. Rather it is the era of their birth: they were all members of the Silent Generation. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to spend the bulk of this note talking about them.
The concept of a generation— the idea that the people born within a certain period of time share common traits— is not terribly scientific. No one can concisely define when one begins or ends (in Europe and America a generation is considered to last roughly twenty years, while in China only five). But if you’ve ever complained about a Millennial, read a Gen Z consumer report, or nodded knowingly at “OK Boomer” then, at least for a moment, you’ve bought in to the notion. On one level it makes sense: growing up during the Great Depression would certainly impact everyone’s outlook on life.
The Census Bureau only recognizes one generation: the Baby Boomers. Named because the birth rate “boomed” after World War II, the 76 million Americans of this generation were born between 1946 and 1964. The other most discussed American generations have been the Millennials (1983-2001) and the GI (“Greatest”) Generation (1905-1925).
Sandwiched in between are two smaller cohorts that don’t get much attention: my own, Gen X, and the Silent Generation. I understand why no one is writing about my generation. But let’s take a minute to talk about the Silents.
No one writes about Gen X but there’s a reason the lead character in every zombie movie is one: no other generation is equipped to survive.
The Americans born roughly from 1926 to 1945— amidst the Great Depression and World War II — were the first generation ever to be smaller than the ones before it. Named ‘Silent” by Time Magazine because observers thought they were crowded out of college and the workforce by older GIs, the Silents were actually anything but. Too young to fight in World War II and too old to sit in on campus, many of the most important undertakings of the last century nevertheless belonged to them.
They supplied the soundtracks that fueled the movements of the 1960’s. The Beatles, the Stones and the rest of the British Invasion? Silents. The brightest stars at Motown and the entire lineup at Woodstock? Mostly Silents, too.
Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Diane Nash and Julian Bond? Silents. SCLC and SNCC were founded and run by members of the Silent Generation, and the Civil Rights movement was fundamentally of and by that cohort. John Lewis passed away in 2020. It was a tough year for Atlanta’s heroes.
The Yippies, the Chicago Seven, the Berkeley Free Speechers and many of the Beats? Silents. Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P Newton and the Black Panthers? Not- so-silent Silents.
Boomers, quick quiz: name your favorite baseball team as a kid. The ‘69 Mets? The ‘67 Cardinals? The ‘63 Dodgers? All those Yankees teams? You guessed it. Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Don Larson and Whitey Ford passed last year. They were all Silents.
The Apollo astronauts? Yup; everyone down at mission control in Houston was, too. Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, Joan Didion and the other New Journalists? You bet. Willie, Waylon and the boys? Them too.
Shel Silverstein.
Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Sean Connery died last year: he and Roger Moore were both Silents. The Graduate may be the defining movie of the Boomer generation, but Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katherine Ross and director Mike Nichols were all Silents. Buck Henry had a small role in that movie. He too died in 2020.
Despite their indelible mark on modern American history, the Silents have been truly silent when it comes to one major institution: no member has been President. Until now.
If a generation lasts twenty years then each ought to fill five presidential terms. But funny things happen when you’re stuck between the largest and loudest generations of the century. Starting with JFK in 1960 the GIs held the White House for thirty-two years. If demographics really were destiny then at some point in the ‘80s we would have started electing Silent presidents: Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Pat Buchanan, Jack Kemp. And Joe Biden.
But the GIs held on and in 1992 voters skipped over Silents entirely and handed presidential power to the Boomers who served as Presidents until 2020. This makes the election of Joe Biden statistically unique: he is the only President in American history from an older generation to replace one from a younger generation. And in theory he is serving about twenty years past schedule.
Okay so maybe not electing Ralph Nader wasn’t an oversight.
This brings me to one last comment. Sociologists like to assign important dates to the beginnings and ends of generations: the end of World War II, the assassination of Kennedy. 9/11 marked the beginning of Generation Z, and the events of 2020 will undoubtedly mark its end.
Gen Z will emerge with characteristics born from the global war on terror, the Great Recession, the splintering of domestic politics and the global pandemic. It sounds a lot like being raised during the Great Depression and World War II. If my Gen Z daughters and their generation are half as resilient as my Silent Generation parents and their cohort, we’ll all be in fine shape.
Five books worth reading by and about the Silent Generation
Has anyone had more success as a director than Mike Nichols?? I mean his first movie was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf! He was the original EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar & Tony winner). He was intensely loved and adored by those who knew him (they had to have a strict invitation list to the funeral), and Life Isn’t Everything is a wonderful trip full of stories told by “150 of his closest friends.”
It would be hard to pick a single David Halberstam book to recommend. You should read them all. From US history (The Best & The Brightest, The Children) to basketball (Breaks Of The Game, Playing For Keeps) to the Korean War (Coldest Winter) and plenty about baseball. While Summer of ‘49 gets all the attention, October 1964 is my fave: aging Yankees playing their last Mantle-era World Series against the younger and heavily integrated St. Louis Cardinals.
I’ve read A Rumor of War many times since assigned in high school.
“So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.”
The Fourth Turning is a little contrived, but I’ll admit it sucked me in. The authors are noted demographers. Their thesis is there are only four generational “personality types” that follow in order, which explains why American history repeats on an 80-year cycle (the Revolution was 85 years before the Civil War, which was 80 years before World War II, which started 82 years ag0. . .)
Have you seen the movie Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas? DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE. It is terrible. It is not like the book. The book is a delight. It is an American Classic. A Vegas blackjack dealer summed up the difference to me nicely: “the movie is like going on a bad vacation, but the book. . . the book is like a great story about someone else’s bad vacation. Skip the movie. Read the book.
I appreciate you letting the armchair historian in me write about a group of Americans that don’t get their collective due. Starting next month we’ll get back to predicting the future of real estate development (your guess is as good as mine). Along the way we’ll get into ghost kitchens, office space, advertising, movies, the aspiration economy, signaling (this entire email was one giant History Major flex) and customer acquisition costs.
Thanks for reading. I run a retail development and consulting company in Atlanta and write (semi-) regularly on issues facing the retail real estate industry. If you’ve enjoyed this, please forward to a friend. If you’re getting this for the first time and want to sign up, just click here.
Cheers,
G