President Franklin Roosevelt spoke repeatedly, just after Pearl Harbor and later during World War II, of a dangerous minority opposed to the conflict. Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois spoke in 1967 of a "silent center." In the spring of 1969, the prominent campaign chronicler Theodore H. White spoke of America's "mute masses," saying that the challenge for President Richard M. Nixon was to "interpret what the silent think, and govern the country against the grain of what its more important thinkers think."
And so in that context, Nixon's Silent Majority speech, delivered from the Oval Office exactly 50 years ago, is less a fresh departure from American tradition than an address squarely in the American tradition.
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