the Silent Generation: the generation that came of age in the 1950s

This term was popularized in a November 5, 1951 Time magazine cover article titled "The New Generation," which analyzes the teens and twenty-somethings of the era. Although Time is sometimes given credit for coining the phrase, the article actually states, "It has been called 'the Silent Generation'," suggesting that the term was already known. Silent describes the reputed cautiousness, conventionality, and apolitical bent of the generation that fell between the G.I.'s of the 1940s and the antiwar protesters of the 1960s. Of course the fifties were also the decade of James Dean, rock and roll, the Beats, and the Montgomery bus boycott, so maybe they weren't as quiet as they seemed.