Gertrude Stein notwithstanding, there has been only one truly "lost generation" this century. That is the generation of the 1950s: the American men and women, now in their 30s, who graduated from college in the Eisenhower era—the so-called "Silent Generation." A member of that age group, TIME Associate Editor Gerald Clarke, 32, reflects on the collective experience of his contemporaries:
To be in your 30s is, by popular definition, to be in the middle—the middle of your career, the middle of your marriage, the middle of your life. Medicine has not yet been able to nudge upward the biblical allotment of threescore years and ten, and we are already halfway there. But we are in the middle in another sense as well. We stand between the two angry lines of what has become a war of the generations. The middle in any war is seldom safe ground, but when we look at today's angry, frustrated youth and their equally angry, frustrated parents, the middle—what Journalist Renata Adler, 31, calls the "radical middle"—is where we would elect to be.
It is in fact where we have always been. The term Silent Generation may have been unflattering, but it was not inaccurate. By the standards of today's aware youth, we were, with few exceptions, still, quiet and serenely uninvolved. Interested primarily in ourselves and our own destinies, we tended to be bored by politics and self-removed from social issues. In the '50s, America seemed both workable and working. It allowed us the luxury of growing up in peace and security: Unlike those who preceded or those who followed us, we were not expected to fight or die for our country. The grievances of poverty, race and inequality were no less valid than they are today, but we were largely unaware of them. And so, for most of us they did not exist. Hypocritical? Yes. Smug? That too —insufferably so. But then so was the country. If the decade of the '50s had the suffocating "smell of the middle class," as Gloria Steinem, 34, says with distaste, then it was an odor that most Americans seemed to like.
Our aloofness stemmed from an early skepticism. As youngsters during World War II, we collected paper, stomped on tin cans and weeded victory gardens to help the heroic Russians and defeat the hated Nazis and Japs. Before most of us were in our teens, we were taught that the Germans (no longer Nazis) and the Japanese (no longer Japs) were our allies and the once heroic Russians our enemies. Small wonder that in our college years we learned to be wary of ideologies or political passions. Political involvement, as Joe McCarthy showed us too, could bring disgrace in middle age. His lesson did not necessarily make us cowards—many college students openly denounced McCarthy—but it did teach us the value of prudence. We were constitutional questioners, pragmatists to the bone, and today many of us still are.