Sold -Thornton Wilder Defends the Silent Generation, Predicting How It Would

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and playwright, author of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In 1953 the editor of the Yale Daily News assembled a series of articles for publication; he handled obtaining the articles and dealt with the authors. The editor was James C. Thomson, who went on to a very distinguished career in government service in the State Department and the National Security Council, and as a journalist and university professor.

One of the contributing authors was Yale alumnus Thornton Wilder, who took on the topic of contempory youth as a silent generation. He defended the youth in an article entitled “Exploration and Explanation,” which was published and attracted a great deal of attention.

We have obtained the original Autograph Manuscript of the article, four pages 4to, with the Autograph Letter Signed that sent it, directly from Dr. Thomson’s estate. Here, in part, is what Wilder had to say: “A younger generation has been calling attention to itself again. These crises in the public appraisal of the young used to occur at longer intervals; now, with the acceleration of social changes, they appear with increasing frequency. Some of us remember the Jazz Age; this was followed by the Lost Generation; now we are in a state of alarm about the Silent Generation. I have been given an article on the younger generation which appeared in Time magazine on November 5, 1951 and have been asked to comment upon it. There I read these young people Ôdo not issue manifestoes, make speeches, or carry posters…They do not want to go into the army…Their ambitions have shrunk…They want a good secure job…Either through fear, passivity or conviction, they are ready to conform…They are looking for a faith.’ All this I recognize. I propose that we read the manifestations differently. The Jazz Age preceded and accompanied the First World War. There was a breaking of windows and great scandal. It was evident to all that the American home or the patriarchal pattern had come to an end…The Lost Generation was the generation that did not know what to do with its new liberties. The younger generation of today is facing the too-long delayed task of consolidating its liberty and impressing upon it a design, a meaning and a focus. No wonder they strike us as silent. An even greater task rests on their shoulders: they are fashioning the 20th century man…In the accelerated tempo of these war-punctuated years a man or woman of 45 is out of date. He does not respect or despise the same institutions as an intelligent person in the middle 20’s, does not read the same books, admire the same art, nor agree on the same social or cultural premises. The Silent Generation…holds its tongue because it cannot both explore itself and explain itself. The first charge against these young people is apathy…guardedness is not apathy. In all my reading I have discovered no age in which there was so great a gulf between parent and child…Father, mother and children have had to daily improvise their roles. This led to a constant emotional racket in the air. The child either learned a silent self-containment or fell into neurosis. The second charge is that they Ôaim low’…they look forward to a Ôsuburban idyll.’ What they want, at all cost, is not to find themselves in false situations. Life is full of false situations, especially American life today. The most frequent and glaring of them is incompetence in high places. My generation saw a great deal of this in government, in the Army, in culture, and in education. We exercised our wit upon it, but we were ourselves…still vaguely respectful of rank and office and status. This generation is not impressed by any vested authority whatever…Their caution reposes upon their unwillingness to exercise any authority or responsibility for which they do not feel themselves to be solidly prepared and adequate. They hate the false and they shrink from those conspicuous roles which all but inevitably require a certain amount of it. I find this trait very promising. Plato was the first to say that high place is best in the hands of those who are reluctant to assume it. I have said that the Silent Generation is fashioning the 20th century man. It is not only suffering and bearing forward a time of transition, it is figuring forth a new mentality. In the first place, these young people will be the first truly international men and women…At last it has ceased to be a meer phrase that the world is one…Their experience and their reading…have impressed upon them that the things which all men hold in common are more important and more productive than the things which separate them…The individual has been driven to probe more deeply within himself to find the basis for a legitimate assertion of the claim of self. This conviction is new and its consequences are far reaching- in international relations, in religion, in social reform, in art, and in the personal life…Some of us in the previous generations hurled ourselves into social reform and social revolution; we did it with a personal passion that left little room for deliberation and long term planning. To correct one abuse we were ready to upset many a benefit…The emerging international man will move less feverishly in his enlarged thought-world. This generation is silent because these changes call not for argument but for rumination. The mistakes of the previous generations are writ large over the public prints. These young people are setting new patterns for the relation of the individual to the society about him. The condition of being unimpressed by authorities and elders has thrown them back more resolutely on themselves. They are similarly unimpressed by time-honored conventions…Members of this generation exhibit a singular insistence on wishing to be appraised for themselves alone. How often I have known them to conceal the fact that they come of privileged family. This insistence on being accepted as an individual produces an unprecedented candor…These paragraphs have been part description, part explanation, part testimony of faith…The traits I have been describing reappear constantly. They have two orientations well in hand, to themselves and to the larger ranges of experience. It is toward those middle relationships that they are indifferent – current opinion and social usage and the imperatives of traditional religion, patriotism and morality. Their parents wring their hands over them; their professors find them lukewarm or cool; the army grows anxious; we older friends are often exasperated. These impatiences are provoked by the fact that they wish to live correctly by their lights and not by ours. In proportion as we are free we must accord them that.”

The cover letter to Thomson apologizes “Terribly sorry about the delay. I was hemmed in by one obligation after another. If it comes too late, throw it away.” Wilder sees a generation not in any sense lost, but rather one rightly questioning the validity of traditional attitudes. Moreover, through quiet integrity, thoughtfulness, and an iconoclastic attitude, it is creating a silence that is louder than words. There is a strong undercurrent of morally-based protest in the so-called Silent Generation, believes Wilder, though it may not be often articulated. Few at the time seem to have placed the same interpretation on conversations with the young as he did. Yet the future would bear Wilder out, and quickly too.

Just a year down the road would come rock and roll, with its explosive rebellion, as well as dedication to civil rights and the rise to the surface of a “beatnik” protest movement. And these would set the course for all that was to come.