… he joined the majority! Too many doctors did away with him, or rather, his time had come, for a doctor’s not good for anything except for a consolation to your mind!
The Satyricon, Petronius Arbiter, ch 42
For centuries writers have referred to dying as “joining the majority” or “joining the silent majority”, the rationale being that the dead outnumber the living. The emperor Nero’s decadent friend Petronius is usually credited as our first written reference.
While there is an 1831 reference to “the despotism of a silent majority” of members of Congress, the first reference I have found to “the silent majority” in its modern sense is in an 1861 edition of the National Republican:
The Union is the evil complained of. This is the rationale of secession. But in distempered times, the “cruel and violent have sway.” I verily believe that even there, there is now a silent majority in whom the love of Union, with its precious freight of security, peace, happiness, glory and greatness, with rich traditions and auspicious hopes, is not yet expired, and that this majority will, in good time, reclaim them from revolution and bring them home.
Which didn’t mean the other sense died out. In 1890, Elko, Nevada’s Daily Independent opined:
It would be a good plan to send these hostile red skins to join their great chief Sitting Bull in the land of the silent majority.
On 3 November 1969, President Nixon famously invoked the expression in his address to the nation on the Vietnam war. The war had become very divisive internally, and Nixon masterfully set up the options:
My fellow Americans, I am sure you can recognize from what I have said that we really only have two choices open to us if we want to end this war.
– I can order an immediate, precipitate withdrawal of all Americans from Vietnam without regard to the effects of that action.
– Or we can persist in our search for a just peace through a negotiated settlement if possible, or through continued implementation of our plan for Vietnamization if necessary – a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom.
I have chosen this second course.
…
And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans – I ask for your support.
The speech was a resounding success and Nixon’s approval ratings moved from the 50s to the 80s. When Time magazine came to choose its Man of the Year for 1969, it chose an anonymous man and woman and editorialised:
But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were ‘discovered’ first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves… It was their interpretation of patriotism that bought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and thus began to shape the course of the nation and the nation’s course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans…”
The two uses of the expression have, I think, a commonality in the idea that the dead form part of a collective wisdom, an idea tending to resonate with older people more readily than younger people. Edmund Burke, one of the fathers of modern conservatism, famously summed things up when he said:
[Society] is a partnership… not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
But there remains the question, who is permitted to be part of “society” and therefore enabled to choose or not to be part of the majority? In November 1790, Burke was in London publishing his enduring work Reflections on the Revolution in France. Within a year, Olympe de Gourge in Paris was publishing her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. The soi disant radicals of the revolution including Robespierre were not impressed and increasingly less so with her continued criticism of revolutionary excesses. She was guillotined on 3 November 1793.
