From the Narrow Desert

In the previous post I noted that there never has been -- and, barring a win by Biden or Sanders this November, never will be -- a U.S. president from the "Silent Generation" (i.e., born in the 1925-1945 period). However, there have only been 11 presidents born in the 20th century, too small a population for any apparent patterns to be statistically significant.

Following up a hunch that it was, nevertheless, a genuine pattern, I looked at the birthdates of U.S. governors born in the 20th century (excluding Alaska and Hawaii because they could not have had governors born before 1929). Of course there have thus far only been a few governors from Generation X since that cohort is still relatively young, so I focused on the 559 governors born in the 1901-1960 period, comprising three generations. Not all researchers define the generations in the same way, so I excluded from consideration those gray areas (1925-1927, 1943-1945, and 1961-1964) that are sometimes assigned to one generation and sometimes to another. Here are the results:

Average number of U.S. governors born per year

I haven't bothered to calculate a p-value or anything like that, but just eyeballing it, it seems pretty obvious that the Silent Generation is indeed different, producing only 8 governors per year as opposed to 10 for both the Greatest Generation and the Boomers.


The chart below (click to enlarge) shows the raw data, presented without "generational" assumptions, for presidential and gubernatorial births in the 1901-1960 period.

U.S. presidents and governors born per year, 1901-1960

No very obvious three-generation pattern immediately jumps out from this chart, but what does immediately jump out is that fact that, of the 10 presidents born in this time period, not a single one of them was born in a year that produced a below-median number of governors (the median being 9 governors).

Of the 60 years under consideration, 32 of them produced at least 9 governors. The chance that 10 out of 10 presidents would just happen to be born in one such year is (32/60)¹⁰ = 0.186%, or 1 in 537. This strongly suggests that there is some real sense in which some years produce more executive-branch material than others.


The chart below shows the same data, plotted for 5-year periods (lustra) rather than for individual years.


Plotted thus, the two-decade flatline of the Silent Generation, bookended by the twin towers of the early '20s and late '40s, is immediately apparent. It is also apparent that the Boomers, unlike the Silents, do not really cohere as a generation as far as gubernatorial potential goes. The highest bar on the graph (late '40s) is immediately followed by the lowest (early '50s), both representing parts of the Baby Boom generation. And again we see that presidents were born only in lustra which also produced an above-median number of governors.

This is about as close to a "topical" post as you'll ever see on this blog.

Donald Trump, born in 1946 (the same year as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush), was the oldest president ever to be inaugurated -- but it's looking like his nominal challenger this year will be even older, either Joe Biden (b. 1942) or Bernie Sanders (b. 1941). Not that either of them has a cat in hell's chance of winning.

Though there have been two presidents born in 1924 (Jimmy Carter and Bush père) and three born in 1946, not a single person born in the 21 years between those two dates has ever been elected president. Of the 12 generations (as identified by Strauss and Howe) from George Washington to Barack Obama, every one has produced presidents with the single exception of the "Silent Generation" of Biden and Sanders.

The graph below shows, for each Strauss-Howe generation, how many years it held the presidency vs. how many years of birth the generation spans. For example, Strauss and Howe define the Greatest Generation (actually they call it the "G.I. Generation") as those born in a 24-year period (1901-1924), but members of that generation held the presidency from Kennedy to Bush père, for a total of 32 years, for a ratio of 32:24 or 1.33. (The graph assumes that Trump will be reelected, giving the Boomers -- actually, giving people born in 1946 -- 24 years in office.)


Why did the presidency skip that entire generation? I have no idea. There is a similar gap in British PM birth years between Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925) and John Major (b. 1943), though Mrs. Thatcher does just barely qualify as a member of the Silent Generation according to Strauss and Howe's dates. However, Silents dominated the U.S. Senate for just as long as any other generation, so it's not as if there was a shortage of political talent.