The Voice of Generation Jones

There are times when perhaps we should retitle our blog just that.

Members of Generation Jones, including myself, in about 1965.

I hadn't realized that what I've been calling "the Gap Generation" has actually been defined as "Generation Jones" and that it's actually pretty well-defined.  Indeed, according to Wikipedia:

Generation Jones is the social cohort^[ of the latter half of the Baby Boomer Generation to the first years of Generation X.  The term Generation Jones was first coined by the cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, who identified the cohort as those born from 1954 to 1965 in the U.S. who were children during Watergate, the oil crisis, and stagflation rather than during the 1960s, but slightly before Gen X.

Yup, that's about right.

And so is this:

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

Many came of age during the 70s and early 80s. They shared similar pop culture and MTV with Gen X'ers. They were young adults navigating the workforce in the 80s and 90s, but still felt the 2008 economic crisis. This hit them hard because they had to help and advise their older Millennial children while also providing for their younger Gen Z kids.

* * * 

Key characteristics assigned to members are pessimism, distrust of government, and general cynicism.

Yup, again.

And of potential interest: 

Though there are few studies on voting behavior with respect to Gen Jonesers during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles in the U.S., a general distrust of the government and cynical voting behavior tracks well with this cohort's majority support for Donald Trump, who was seen as a boisterous political outsider, in 2016. However, the cohort shifted left 2020: (Mr. Pontell says) Mr. Trump’s fumbling response to the Covid-19 crisis ... hurt him with Jonesers, who are part of the demographic most at risk from the disease ... And ... Mr. Trump’s cruel mocking of Joe Biden’s senior moments (offended them). “There are lots of seniors out there that also have senior moments,” Mr. Pontell says. “They don’t really like the president mocking those one bit.”

If I were to quibble, and indeed I'm inclined to do so, I'd not put the floor in 54, as those folks came of age in 72, when the Vietnam War was still on.  Indeed, I'd put the floor in 56.

Having said that, it's interesting to read this short synopsis, and frankly it has a lot of merit to it.  Taking a look deeper, I'd add a few things, and then I'll expand on that.  Indeed, I think it explains a lot why those of us in this generational cohort bristle at the thought that we're part of the Boomers.

Let's look again.

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was a few months old. I have no personal memory, rather obviously, of him at all, and the phrase "everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot" might as well be stated about James A. Garfield in so far as my personal memory goes.  And, while it might surprise people who are old enough to remember him, for those of us in my generation he supplies no sort of inspiration at all.  

My mother, I'll note, really admired Kennedy, and continued to admire Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she followed.  My father, however, was never particularly impressed with Kennedy, although a Mass card was among the collection of things in his dresser drawer.  If I heard about a President that my parents both admired at home, it was most likely to be Truman.  What I was left with, regarding Kennedy, is that he was Catholic like us (which my mother would bring up), that he came from a family that my father regarded as a bit dicey in some ways, that he had questionable personal morals, and that he was responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was stupid.  Lyndon Johnson got better overall marks.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was another matter.  Everyone admired him, but he seemed like a character from the distant past.  Even with King, however, I'm pretty sure all my memories about King came from learning about him in the 1970s, probably starting with junior high or high school, and from the cultural background after he'd been killed.  When he was living, I didn't know of his existence.  Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, at which time I was five, and I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than that I can remember riots being on television from 67 or 68, and these may have been the 68 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King.

Indeed, the Civil Right Era, which was in full swing when I was born, seemed like something that had happened within recent American history, but far enough back it was very removed from our modern lives.  That I recall that shows my very early recollections of the times, times that "Baby Boomers" were supposedly living.  The civil rights movement wasn't something I participated in, in any fashion.  Nor was the "Camelot" atmosphere of the Kennedy Administration.

The same thing could be said about the Vietnam War, sort of, modified by the fact that it was really long.  I have some very early recollections of the war, including that a son of the couple who lived across the street was a paratrooper who was serving in Vietnam.  I mostly recall that as he had been dating, literally, the girl next door, and when he went on leave during the war he went to Hawaii, and she flew out to visit him, which was a topic of conversation in my parents home.  I also recall a sign on a door that stated "War is harmful to children and other living things", which I recall as it was such an odd thing to see in a place where nobody outwardly opposed the war.  I was in school at the time, so that may have been actually observed in the 1970s, however.  By the early 70s, and maybe even the late 60s, the background of the war was constant and so even the young were fully aware it was going on.  But it was the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 that I really recall, although POWs returning in 1973 or so is pretty vivid as well.

The earliest thing of the "60s" I really directly participated in was the July 20, 1969, moon landing, which we watched on television.  Kids were fascinated with space at the time, and we all participated in that.  For me, personally, the next thing I really recall was the televised scenes of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock.  But you really have to get into the 1970s, with the US invasion of Cambodia, that I was old enough to be aware of what was going on in the world and the culture.

That in turn means that it was really all the way into the 1970s before people like me were aware of what was up, and had a feeling about it, and that came with the backdrop of the 1970s.  Indeed, the experience is depicted really well in the television series The Wonder Years, which is specifically set from 1968 to 1973.  That means that it involved children who were older than I was, but the setting was pretty accurate.  And keep in mind, that I'd place the high school graduating class of Generation Jones as starting at 1976, whereas The Wonder Years is dealing with the class of 1974.   I debated where to put that line, but 74, the year after the active participation in the Vietnam War for the US ended, would be another good place to put it.  All in all, it has the feeling right, and the characters would have a little more of the late stages of the Vietnam War whereas folks in my line would have a little more of the rampant inflation of the 70s.

In any event, The Wonder Years does a really good job of showing how the "60s Generation", the real Boomers, were observed from Generation Jones from the outside.  We didn't participate in the events of the 60s, but they were background.  I've touched on this in a way, in a long thread regarding my early years, Growing up in the 1960s.  Indeed, in that I noted:

The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the (American portion of the) Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, two Kennedy assassinations, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. . . all of these are things that remain fresh in the nation's memory and as long as there is a member of the Baby Boom generation still with us, they will continue to.  Youth rebellion in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany and France, combined with a rejection of conventional morality by some of that demographic combined with the introduction of "the pill" also reach back as long influential developments.  Finally, in our list, the Second Vatican Council concluded making changes of debated nature to the practices of the Catholic Church, impacting the 2,000 year old foundational Christian religion in ways that are still being sorted out and which are still hotly debated as to their merits.

So that all must have really been something growing up, right?

Well, that's another topic, isn't it?

We're all impacted by the years in which we grow up. It cannot be denied. I've often noted here that a person's personality is basically fixed by the time they're five, and they're going back to that personality, one way or another, sooner or later.  And part of what influences that personality is the era in which we are young.

But only part, and perhaps not in the way we might imagine.

In really real ways, the central events for the Baby Boom Generation, that defined that generation and its view of the world, were like a hand grenade thrown by that generation and its events into a room we were in.  It blew up on us.

We didn't fight in Vietnam, but might have known somebody who had a family member who did.  The impact of the war on us wasn't the lost cause in Vietnam, but an ineptitude and uncertainty about the American place in the world that followed it.  If it was more direct, it was the Laotian kids at school who showed up and kept to themselves, strangers in a very strange land, guest of the nation that had helped wreck their nation.  Experimentation with drugs wasn't something cool and enlightening, but a cancer that had crept into society and was wiping out the minds of the young, including kids who were hauled out of junior high and high school as they were them.  The revolution of the 60s had torn things down, but it didn't build up anything in its place.  We hadn't participated in the counter culture, but by our early teens we were aware of it, and it had its remnants in the girls who still wore elephant bells after their time had passed.

And we didn't participate in an American economy that was the strongest in the world as the world was still recovering from World War Two. By the time we were young enough to be aware of the economy, it was suffering from inflation 

And all of that gets back to something noted above.  General skepticism.

Like the entry noted, we have memories of Watergate, the Nixon resignation, the failed Carter Administration, the fall of Vietnam, the withdrawal from Saigon, boat people, the Iranian hostage crisis, and rampant inflation.

We're not looking back on that with nostalgia.

We also have memories of lives wrecked with drugs and a drug culture that never went away.  We watched the 60s promise of a "counter culture" kill its members and then continue on to the present day and keep on killing.  We heard of the "sexual revolution" and then grew up to watch it continue to corrode society and carry on to the modern era in which all that some think about is their glands.

And we graduated into an economy with no jobs.  Unlike our older Baby Boomer predecessors, we never enjoyed an economy in which simply holding a college degree meant that a "good job".  We had to scramble to find work, and going to college, in our era, involved none of the revelry that the college experience supposedly had come to mean in the 1960s and 1970s, but a landing approach on an economic carrier in stormy seas . . . maybe you were going to make it, or maybe you were going to wreck.

Indeed, we ended up resembling The Silent Generation more than any other.  That generation came after the "Greatest" Generation that fought World War Two, and experienced that horror, and the Great Depression, as background to their childhood, like we experienced Vietnam, the Counterculture, and the like.  And we were focused, like they were, on getting by.

Also, like the Silent Generation, we didn't have a sense of rebellion against anything. We'd seen that, and it didn't work out, and we bore the brunt of its failures.  The Silent Generation hadn't rebelled against the Greatest Generation or the Lost Generation, the two generations that its parents were drawn from. Generation Jones didn't rebel against the Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, which its parents were drawn from.  We mostly hoped just to get by, and were very much aware of what had been lost.

We still are.

Prior Threads:

Growing up in the 1960s

Father Arne and the Greatest Failure of the Greatest Generation

I'd never heard of Father Arne Panula.

Apparently he was well known in intellectual circles, but as The National Review noted upon his passing last year, holy priests often don't make headlines.  Indeed, holy people largely do not.

I ran across something more or less at the time of his passing, copied and pasted it with the intent to later built on it, and I am only now getting back around to it.  The reason I'm just getting back to it is that I just posted something on Millennial's which brought it back to mind.  The reason that I copied and posted it in a draft thread in the first place, however, is that he said something that I've crept up on posting here, but that I generally haven't (although I may have cut and pasted this into another earlier thread. . . we do repeat on occasion).

Marines on Tarawa, which was one, but only one, of the islands where my wife's grandfather served during World War Two.  All World War Two infantry actions were tough actions, but the fighting in the Pacific was uniquely horrific.

Father Arne was an intellectual born in 1946.  That birth date, the year following the end of the Second World War. . .the year following the dropping of two Atomic bombs on Japan. . . the year following the full revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust. . .and the year, significant here, that millions of servicemen started to return home to their pre war homes and to their post war lives, is a significant one.  That put him in year zero of the Baby Boom Generation and meant that he lived his entire life in the cusp of its developments and impacts, until his death of cancer in 2018.

Soldiers of the 20th Armored Division arrive in New York, August 6, 1945, the same day that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.   This unit was formed in 1943 and was committed to action in April, 1945, extremely late in the war.  It isn't emblematic of units, therefore like the 3d Infantry Division that had gone into action in 1942, let alone Marine Corps units that fought from the onset of the war until the end in a series of Pacific campaigns.

He was born in Duluth and was a Harvard graduate.  He was ordained a priest in 1973.  He was, as noted, an intellectual.

And he apparently thought Tom Brokaw was flat out wrong.

Mushroom clouds from Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki, August 9, 1945.

And I agree, at least partially, with him.

Arne, prior to his passing, wrote a book entitled The Last Homily, The Final Conversations of a Dying Priest.  I have not read it (and I'm unlikely to), but have only read a review of it, of sorts, that was on the net and reprinted from Crisis Magazine, a conservative Catholic journal that I don't normally read either.  The book is well respected.

The review is interesting in general, but it contains this interesting comment:

Read the book to know his insights and his turn of mind. He says Tom Brokaw is wrong about the Greatest Generation, that those brave soldiers came home to be “model citizens.” Father Arne says they came home “as ruptured sons” and never learned to be fathers and that at least a part of the ’60s rage grew from boys and girls with fathers who may have been present but still failed. The Greatest Generation failed at their most important task. Who has the guts to say something like that? 

There's a lot to unpack in that.

It does take guts to say that, but all the best evidence is that Father Arne was at least partially on the mark, assuming, and I think it is safe to say that, that this was his opinion.  I don't think he was fully on the mark, but there's a lot there.

Now that takes us in some ways to our posts on 1968 and 1969.  Really obviously, something was going on in the late 1960s, and it was earth shattering.  Those years were pivotal in the altering of western society and . . . we'd argue. . . not in a good way.*

But how did that happen?  Generations like to pretend that they're sui generis, but they never are. They're always the product of what came before them, and all people are, in some ways at least, the products of their childhood.  So those 20 year olds, more or less, of 1968 were the children of 1948. They were in kindergarten in 1953, the last year of active fighting in the Korean War.  They were in sixth grade in 1960 and they graduated from high school in 1966.  When people imagine the clean scrubbed kids of the 50s (a false memory, but none the less a seemingly common one) it's these kids they're remembering, who are the same long haired unwashed ones of 1968, if you want to reduce this to stereotypes, which isn't really a safe or accurate thing to do.**

Now, to be fair, the proposition that what went wrong in the 1960s and 1970s, which has lead to problems that we retain today, is due to parenting failures of the "Greatest Generation" is only partially true at best.  There were a lot of other things going on.  Bear with me, but it's now been revealed, for example, that the famous Kinsey report which so promoted the evolution of the pornographic modern culture was actually based on the study, by its author, of the sexual appetites and practises of criminals, not the majority of Americans, as the majority of American males were the service or vital war work at the time it was authored.  Beyond that, it appears pretty clear now that Kinsey himself procured illegal male on juvenile male opportunities for his subjects, making Kinsey some sort of real pervert.  Reliable data of the time shows that going into the 1950s most Americans retained very traditional views and practises in the arena of their domestic lives.  The point there being that Kinsey lead directly to Heffner and Heffner lead to the normalization of pornography, partially, during a decline in moral standards that really became evident during the 1950s (contrary to the way that we remember that decade).

Young couple, 1939.  Contrary to what Kinsey reported, the young were very traditional and conservative in regards to their relationships with each other all the way through the 1940s and into the 1950s.

But something clearly went wrong sometime post war, something we've touched a bit on already.  And part of that something very clearly had to do with World War Two.

And indeed, if World War Two is considered, that conclusion is not only inescapable, it had to be that way.  World War Two cannot be avoided.

According to another book I haven't read, I Hear You Paint Houses, Frank Sheeran, Jimmy Hoffa's assassin, became acclimated to being a killer during World War Two when service as a combat solider in the U.S. Army took him from not only being able to kill Germans, but to being comfortable with killing them outside of the law of war. Sheeran served a remarkable 411 days in combat in Europe.  George McGovern detailed post war witnessing a B-24 drop a string of bombs on an Alpine farm house just for sport.  At least one famous post war American pilot noted that he recoiled at the thought of what would have happened had Americans been subject to war crime trials, as he witnessed fighter pilots strafe German farmers.  I myself heard a second had story from a World War Two B-25 pilot of a P-38 pilot killing an Italian farmer and his oxen, just because.

U.S. soldier in Italy, mimicking the pose of an Italian statute.  Probably more men experienced the war somewhat in the model of those in this statue than that of Sheeran, but any soldier serving in Italy saw a destroyed land of a deep traditional culture that was in ruins and turmoil during the war.  FWIW, its a little difficult to determine what sort of role this soldier had in the war, as he's armed with an M1 carbine which was a very unusual weapon for a front line soldier to be equipped with.

All of this is not to say that our war in Europe wasn't just.  But the common American view of the war being fought by the exclusively innocent and untainted is flat out wrong.  Most American servicemen in who served in North Africa and Europe, including those who were combat soldiers, would not have committed atrocities such as those noted, but some did, and many more would have known of such things occurring, and some would have become acclimated to them, while many more would have become numb to them.  This is not to suggest that all of them experienced that by any means, however.***   In the Pacific the situation was frankly much worse as the war took on a racist character which, combined with a Japanese reluctance to surrender, and their own brutal treatment of everyone, to mean that the war took on a "to the death" character it didn't elsewhere.

Heavily laden infantrymen in the Philippines.  Most men who went through something like this were more likely to come out of it pacifist rather than killers, but escaping it with no psychological impact at all would be tough.

In addition to that, the ancillary vice that a war promotes is vast and soldiers of all nations were vastly more exposed to it, as were the cultures that unwillingly hosted it.  We've spent a lot of time here dealing with World War One in which this was not nearly the case to the same extent, but which certainly occurred. World War Two, which was much more fluid, was much worse in this regard.  In some areas of traditional western Europe, including Germany and Italy, things were simply destroyed to such a degree that for a time all rules of normal conduct were simply abandoned by large percentages of the population.  Prostitution, theft and any number of things, spread to epic levels for a time.  Even in societies which didn't suffer this, vice spread enormously.

Compounding this in varying degrees were the impacts of the First World War and the following Great Depression.  In many societies the impact of the Great War was not as vast, even if they'd been hard fighting combatants.  No society escaped some impact, but if we look at the UK, France or Italy, the impact on the culture does not seem to have been deep.  While post war writers liked to maintain, for some time, the contrary, the impact on the United States, which was only in the war briefly, seems to have been particularly muted.  The impact, on the other hand, on the defeated Germans and the ruined Russians was gigantic, and ultimately changes in those societies would spill out over the globe in ways that are still deeply being felt.

Brodie illustration of the Malmady Massacre.  Contrary to the way that their apologist would like to portray them, the Germans began to act in this fashion as early as World War One.  Atrocities by German soldiers in World War Two were essentially an amplification of what they'd already started in World War One, with racist genocide as an added element.   This might be argued in some ways for the point that the horrors of the Great War had acclimated the Germans already to societal and military violence.  The Western Allies (but not the Soviets) never approved of such actions and largely did not engage in them, but some American units, after this event, were reluctant to easily take SS troops as prisoners.  One Canadian unit that had men taken prisoner and abused by the Germans at Dieppe was notoriously unwilling to take German prisoners in general.  For the most part, however, the Western Allies were remarkably good about taking prisoners in the ETO.

Missed in Father Arne's point here (at least missed in the summation of it) is that a lot of men and women from the same generation had already been scared by the Great Depression.  A major impact of the Depression was to create a large population of rootless men.  Modern commentators who like to look towards a supposed imminent economic disaster now, like James Howard Kunstler, like to imagine that the out of work during the Depression were simply able to return home to family farms, which is why, they like to imagine, the next big economic disaster they are waiting (and sort of hoping) for will be worse.  What they miss is that the 1930s were passed the point at which every family had a farm to return to, for one thing.  In reality, with no established social services at all, many men, including many very young men, just hit the bricks and drifted for years.

Middle age hobo making turtle soup in Minnesota, 1939.  By this same time the next year, assuming that he hadn't been permanently acclimated to a rootless life, this same individual would likely have been working given the massive expansion of employment in 1939 through 1945.

Indeed, I learned after my father's death that a brother of my grandfather had done just that until he happened into Denver, riding the rails, and my grandfather found him a job in the packing house where my grandfather had an office job.  That great uncle remained in the packing industry for the rest of his life, as did my grandfather.  The point here is that my grandfather and his siblings were from a solidly well to do Midwestern family that had done pretty well in the town they hailed from, Dyersville Iowa, and that things were so bad in the 30s that one of them was riding the rails says a lot.  My mother, for her part, was taken out of school during the later parts of the Depression and sent to work so that there was money to support the family.****

Bread line, Brooklyn New York, early 1930s.

I note all of this as you can't send thousands of young people out on their own and away from their families without some negative consequences, and you can't take the same group of people and then send them off to the worst war in modern times without doing the same. When you combine both, there's going to be some negative impacts.

Anyhow, back to Father Arne's point, thousands upon thousands of men were absent from their homes during World War Two and were exposed to things that had deep impacts upon many of them..  Quite a few of them had been somewhat rootless prior to the war.  Most of them endured all of this remarkably well, but it's a simple fact that a huge number of people were exposed to situations that were damaging upon their psyches in varying degrees.   Some of that damage was acclimation to war time vices that they may not have approved of, but which was there none the less.

Sergeant, U.S. Army. The caption information indicates that this NCO was as truck driver in civilian life, but that he'd also run a filling station and spent two years with the Civilian Conservation Corps.

By way once again of examples, the World War Two B-25 veteran noted above once told me about getting into a fist fight involving himself and his friends and a group of National Guardsmen. This was right after the war.  His explanation reduced to "of course we all drank".  Likewise a person I'd work with on occasion related to me that his World War Two veteran father basically drank himself to death over a period of decades.  An uncle of mine, a Canadian soldier during the war, never married and came home with a pronounced drinking problem he never overcame.  

Along a different line, Bill Mauldin, who came from a very rough troubled rural background in New Mexico, but who was presented, in part due to his appearance, as somewhat in the nature of Rockwell's boy next home soldier, Willie Gillis (whom Mauldin strongly resembled) but in fact was badly damaged by his wartime female relationships as he himself would later admit.  Mauldin was married in a rush prior to deploying overseas, something fairly common during the war, but far from loyal to his wife while deployed.  She likewise had an affair (singular, as opposed to Mauldin's many strayings) during the war.  Mauldin would go on to a divorce and participate to a degree in the moral failings of the 1970s, prior to a second divorce and third divorce.  Typical of many people, he reverted very much to his roots in his declining years, returning to New Mexico and, during his final illness, being nursed by his first wife who returned to take care of him.*****

Bill Mauldin in 1945.  The diminutive Mauldin appeared a little younger than he actually was, being 24 years old at the time of this photograph.  Indeed, Mauldin strongly resembled, oddly enought, Rockwell's Will Gillis depiction of an average GI.  Mauldin's appearance contributed to a public view of the cartoonist that fit very much in with the public's image of "fresh faced American boys" in general, but he'd already lived a hard life by the time he entered the service.  She son of New Mexican farmer/ranchers who were partially native American, Mauldin's early life had been somewhat chaotic and his teenage years were more so, being somewhat on his own by that time and living a somewhat odd life by the time he was in high school.  While Mauldin is associated with the typical GI, his status as a member of the staff of two separate Army newspapers lead to an atypical existence including have a teenage Italian mistress when he was in Italy.  In some ways Mauldin reflects the best and the worst of Army life in his cartoons and for that matter in actual service life.

The latter example, which again isn't meant to suggest that every World War Two serviceman went off the domestic rails as far as Mauldin, is none the less illustrative.  Mauldin married three times and had children by at least two of his wives, one of whom was considerably younger than Mauldin.  At least two of his children were by his first wife. This creates a parenting scenario that's rather obviously far less than ideal.  Gene Shepard, the famous radio, literary and television personality whose best remembered for the heartwarming A Christmas Story, likewise had a hard Great Depression upbringing followed by World War Two service, although his was in the United States, to be followed again by a complicated later domestic life that featured the estrangement of his children.  Even one post war family stalwart that I'm vaguely familiar with, who was married for decades following the war and who was very close to his children by that wife, had a wartime marriage that resulted in one daughter who was known to exist by the other children but whom was not known personally by them, showing that the post war breach was so complete that there was virtually no connection there.

A highly detailed, but highly romanticized, depiction of the average GI was presented by Norman Rockwell in a series of illustrations depicting "Willie Gillis".  Gillis, shown here, is a short boyish soldier who, in some instances, affects an older man, such as in this case in which Gillis, depicted as a Private First Class, is smoking a pipe.  He also wears a rabbits foot around his neck for good luck.  Depictions such as this were remarkably acute by Rockwell, showing a real advance over his World War One illustrations, which were good at the time, with a very high degree of material accuracy. But they were also very idealistic, showing wartime soldiers as perpetual boys next door.  Gillis is apparently riding into battle in the back of an Army truck (which appears to be one of the early World War Two Dodge 4x4 patterns, which would have been in common use in the states but which didn't go overseas) clean shaven and fairly innocent, and not like one of Mauldin's weary dogfaces.  The assembly of depictions is interesting and revealing however as none of the soldiers appear to be wrecked by their experience in the war even though a couple of them appear to be potentially fairly experienced soldiers.  The soldier eating an apple, fwiw, is wearing a M1943 field jacket (again showing Rockwell's attention to detail) and the scene apparently is in the fall, given the leaves.

If these problems existed in the United States, they were repeated to greater or lesser degrees, and in interesting ways, in other nations.  The impact was unequal but real.

Germany had been undergoing massive social strife of every type well before World War Two and was not surprisingly greatly impacted by the war itself.  Large scale disruption of German culture dated back to the mid 19th Century and expressed itself first in the revolutions of 1848, which France also participated in.  It's no surprise that The Communist Manifesto was a German publication of that era.  By the 20th Century Germany was strongly divided between urban and rural, and north and south, with urban areas containing large numbers of radicalized working class residents.  The lid was kept on the boiling pot of German politics and radicalism by the weighted structure of the pre World War One German constitution which operated to insure that the monarchy retained control of the government, but the war stripped that away and German urban radicalism broke out in the form of the German civil war, which yielded to the barely semi stable Weimar Republic before collapsing into Nazi rule in the early 1930s.  The Nazis were extraordinarily radical and extraordinarily weird which makes the common cause that the conservative German military made with them all the odder.  During their reign they enforced their notions of German social conservatism while at the same time making war on the churches where they could, all while preparing for and then waging a genocidal war in the name of German ethnicity.

Given the nature of the German cause from 1939 to 1945, it's probably not too surprising that as Germany collapsed much of its social order collapsed with it.  Huge numbers of people who had lived very regional lives took the roads and a shocking number left their pre war identities behind them completely.  All the social ills that plagued the Allies also plagued the Germans but perhaps more so, given that the German military and Nazi ethos was so brutal and dehumanizing.  The immediate post war nation was divided into two and the horrible conditions that prevailed in much of the destroyed nation gave rise to all the classic vices.  When the BDR and DDR were created out of the ruins, both set about to enforce a type of social conservatism which was much different in the two Germanys. In the west, it was created by pre war German politicians who had fled the Nazis but who were forced to make common cause with remaining Nazi elements.  With so much in ruins perhaps its not surprising that Germany would experience a social revolution in 1968, when so much of the rest of the western world also did.

If that's the case for the northern tip of the Axis, it oddly wasn't for the southern tip, Italy.  Italy descended into desperation that was as severe as any nation experienced anywhere and by 1944 was completely given over to all types of vice.  None the less, the Italian culture wasn't greatly impacted and Catholic Italy, which had never been keen on the war, seemingly forgave itself and returned to much of what it had been before.  This lack of deep impact was seemingly also experienced by the most primitive of the combatants, Japan, which fought the war with a population that remained very traditional and even pre industrial in many ways.  Japanese culture seemingly rolled through the war without much disruption, save for a brief and odd post war flurry of Japanese women marrying American men, the only time in the country's history where cross cultural marriages were common.

The point here isn't that everyone came out of World War Two a moral wreck.  Examples to the contrary abound.  Both of the World War Two veterans I worked with were not only combat vets (Air Corps and Navy), but were married to one spouse their entire lives and lived model lives at that. They were literally models of proper living in every fashion, which shows the real danger of making any generational portrait too broad.  Nothing that I've said above applies to them in any negative fashion.  And their examples are likely the majority of examples.

But by the same token, it's impossible not to say that the global experience of the Second World War didn't have a major impact on society, including American society.  Some of the impacts were in fact good ones, even though we're not supposed to admit that anything good comes out of war.  Still, it's true. World War Two required a military so large that it was really the first instance in American history in which people from all regions of the country were routinely mixed.  Even World War One had seen very little of that.  And World War Two, accompanied by the onset of a new massive stage of the Great Migration, brought black Americans into areas they hadn't been before, including into military service in a way that they could not be ignored.  It was the Second World War that really made the civil rights advancements of the 1950s and 1960s inevitable.  And the GI Bill following the war brought entire groups of Americans into colleges and universities for the first time, including entire demographics that had largely not experienced them beforehand.

But at the same time wars always result in strong negatives and the bigger the war the bigger the negatives. This is also true of big economic recessions and big events that are social disrupters.  Combine at least two out of the three, which is the case for the generation that fought the Second World War, and there has to be some major disruption in society and culture as a whole, and individuals in general.

Indeed, this has always been the case and other examples, even in the U.S.'s short history, abound.  The post Civil War expansion in the West didn't feature lawless violence merely because it was the West.  If that's the case, the co-incident expansion north of the American border would have been much more violent than it was.  The Civil War provides the ready reason.  Likewise, the Civil War explains the rise of the Baptist and related Protestant denominations in the South, at the expense of the Episcopal Church which had been dominant before the war and which had become associated with the Southern cause and an expectation of victory.

In the case of World War Two, the expose on a massive scale to violence, death, and a certain sort of libertine vice couldn't help but have some impact.  And the societal impulse to attempt to have a normal life immediately before going off into normality had one as well.  It's no wonder that divorce entered the American mainstream immediately following World War Two, even receiving a sympathetic treatment in the great post war film The Best Time Of Our Lives.  Drinking likewise entered the mainstream in a way in which it had not been since prior to Prohibition.  Examples of acceptance of conduct that would have been looked down on before became common, perhaps best symbolized by the 1953 introduction of Playboy magazine.  Playboy normalized what had been acknowledged as a vice prior to its introduction and advanced a view of women that was exploitative in the way that mimicked the exploitation of foreign women by occupying armies, to a degree.******  It also can't help but be noted that the Playboy depiction of women strongly resembled the over endowed depiction of them that had been features on hundreds of American bombers of the Second World War and that his shortly gave rise to the big boobed 1950s in which the cinematic vision of American women was that they were dim witted and enormous chested, again mimicking the stylized depiction of women that was common to the United States Army Air Corps bomber wings.

Okay, well so what? What on early, if does this have to do with:

* * * they came home “as ruptured sons” and never learned to be fathers and that at least a part of the ’60s rage grew from boys and girls with fathers who may have been present but still failed. The Greatest Generation failed at their most important task. 

Well probably quite a lot.

When returning servicemen came home to the U.S. their first priority, to a large degree, was trying to build a normal life.  For a lot of them that came with a new opportunity, that being the opportunity to go to university. But for those who were already married, that option wasn't there.  For many, the immediate goal was to start to try to capture a life that was conceived of as having been lost.

That created an emphasis on work, at least in the case of men, in a fashion that hadn't been there before.  A lack of work starting in 1929, combined with forced work for a war from 1940 through 1946, if the overall scope of it is taken into account, meant that work was the focus of things in a way that it hadn't been prior to 1929 and which it has only ceased to be with Millennials recently.  Work was a focus for many people over anything else, something that the children of the Greatest Generation picked up on pretty strongly and then recoiled against.  It's no accident that the catchword defining the World War Two generation in The Graduate would be "plastics".  But that emphasis had been noted prior that time and criticized a bit already by that generation itself.  In The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit the central character is shown as a hard working war veteran who is struggling to rise on the corporate ladder in a company that's a thinly veiled IBM.  By the movie's end his wartime tryst and its results are revealed and he takes another path, something that was an overt criticism of a rising consumer culture of the time and which met with criticism when the film was released in 1956.^

And of course it wasn't just this.  Divorce became common post war in a way that it never had been before, and the concept of divorce without fault was introduced.  First introduced by a modern nation in 1917 in Russia, and codified by the Communist in 1926, it was introduced into the United States in California in 1969 where it was signed into law by the divorced (1949) and remarried (1952) Governor Ronald Reagan.



Final scene in The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946.  It's emblematic that the film concludes with a recently divorced central character proposing, over the objection of her father, to a young woman who had vowed to break up that characters marriage (she doesn't).

The point isn't that the war occurred and no fault divorce came in around 1969 and marriage went down the tubes.  In fact no fault divorce really reflected what had been the increasingly fraudulent nature of divorce pleadings in the first place in which somebody, nearly always the husband, plead an element of fault somehow, usually choosing between mental cruelty or infidelity, irrespective of whether he was a bad dude at home or unfaithful.  A lot of the move towards no fault divorce was simply a recognition of that as apart of a desire not to have people lying in their pleadings.

But rather what we're noting is that the final scene in The Best Years of Our Lives was revolutionary in that divorce was depicted as normal and even one woman scheming to wreck an unhappy marriage wasn't condemned.  That reflected the times, but the times were impacting society in unseen ways.  In 1945 it was still the universal Christian norm that divorce was disallowed by the faith.  By the 1960s this was changing and by the 1970s Protestant faiths had given up any pretext to having an opinion on the morality of divorce and really only Catholicism has held the line. Even at that, however, annulments in the Catholic faith have expanded enormously in the United States, leaving some to really question the process.

So with all of this is it really the case:

that at least a part of the ’60s rage grew from boys and girls with fathers who may have been present but still failed. The Greatest Generation failed at their most important task.

I think that argument can be made, and indeed, while I don't know how Father Arne presented it, you can make a pretty good case that a significant percentage of the Greatest Generation lost some of their moorings to home during the Great Depression, and were exposed to a world gone made and all that meant during World War Two. When they came home, they strove for a normal life, but that struggle was focused, on the part of men, mostly on an extreme dedication to work.  Accompanied with that it's known that the 1950s in particular certain shifts in society and views that that disrupted normal life.  As wealth grew, populations formally that were socially isolated broke out into the American mainstream, which was an overall good thing but which came with the rejection of values formerly associated with those enclaves.  Divorce increased.

By the time the first of the boomers graduated high school, 1964, a youth rebellion had already been underway for some time, although it didn't reflect the majority views of young people (arguably the radical aspect of the boomer generation never did).  As they aged into their early work and college years, not to surprisingly the hard core focus on work and the problems associated with the looser family structures of the post war era broke out, and the ethos of the generation developed into one rejecting long held values of all types.  Almost every major change, both temporary and long lasting, of the 1960s and 1970s can be viewed in this fashion.

Of course, not all of these changes were permanent among the generation that brought them on.  Some very much were and are still with us. Prominent examples of both are work and family structures.  Rejecting their parents hard dedication to work at all costs in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the late 1970s the boomer generation was at least as fanatically dedicated as their parents had been.  In family structures, however, they embraced divorce and then a lack of marriage entirely, with a plethora of predictable and predicated problems then developing accordingly.

How a person views this, of course, is truly a matter of personal perception.  It's very easy to believe, and many people commonly do, that their own era is a mess and that prior ones were better.  It's even common to believe in a golden age of some sort, and interestingly both people of the social left and the social right do that, looking back on prior eras as an imagined Golden Era, if not back on the same era.  In both instances they're widely off the mark, as there never was a Golden Era.

Indeed, one thing that moderns like to forget is that there is much about the modern world that's much easier, and better, than prior eras.  Medicine has advanced enormously.  In spite of the view to the contrary, race based and culture based bigotry has been enormously reduced.  This is the least violent era in the history of the world.

But some things aren't right, and those things are significant.  Indeed, some have even suggested that as a species, maybe we aren't really made for good times. Certainly for most of human history the times have been much, much harder.  But they haven't always been.  Indeed, looking both out and back, it's pretty clear that in some ways, at our basic core, when we were very rural, even aboriginal, we were a happier group of folks.

Which takes me back to our point. Something went off the rails after World War Two, which is not to say that a lot of things didn't improve.  But some things went very amiss, and a lot of those have to do with rootedness, reality and our psyches.  There are a lot f things that are amiss, and a lot of those have to do with having lost who we really are and why.

And a lot of those things seem to have started to go astray after the Second World War.  And Father Arne has about as good of point as to why that occurred as any I've seen.
_________________________________________________________________________________

*I realize that statement will be controversial in and of itself, among some people.  The 60s Generation, or the Baby Boomers, have a section of their demographic that's proud of what it conceives of as its societal altering accomplishments while others in the same demographic feel very much the other way around.

While its really controversial to says something of this type, the better evidence at this point, several generations past their point of of being in their prime, is that the changes is society that were worked in the 60s and 70s were overall were more negative and destructive rather than positive.  We can't lay everything that's currently wrong with the world on something that happened in the 1960s, or perhaps early 1970s, but frankly a large number of things that are currently working out very poorly i society stem from that time.

Not all do.  The huge advances in civil rights for blacks in particular, which started in the late 1940s actually, were a major societal triumph of the period that was long overdue. But we have to note there, that story, the real ushering in of the Civil Rights Era, actually starts in about 1968 and carried through the 1970s, so it's less of a 60s thing than imagined, although the thick of it is in the 60s.

**We can't help noting, once again, the oddity of generations and decades in this context.  The 1940s are really basically 1940-45, the 1950s are really 1954 to 1964.  The period of 46 through 53 is something else entirely.  The 60s, for their part, are really 1965 to 1973.  At least this is the case in the way those decades are remembered when they're commonly remembered.

And indeed, why wouldn't this be the case?  There's nothing magic about a ten year period starting with a year ending in "0".

***One thing to keep in mind about American combat troops in World War Two is that American ground troops were not fighting in west until November 1942, when the Allies landed troops in North Africa in Operation Torch. The American contingent to Torch was the first substantial body of American ground troops to fight in the war.  The American contingent was large but it wasn't until 1944 when American troops outnumbered British ground troops.  Of course, if this is kept in scale, it must be remembered that World War Two operations grossly exceeded the number of men committed in later wars.

In contrast to this, American troops were directly engaged against the Japanese in the Pacific from December 1941 until the end of the war, but in fewer numbers than would come to be the case in Europe, which is not to say that the commitment wasn't enormous.

Additionally, and contrary to the way the war is generally remembered, all of the Western Allies deployed far more men in supply and logistics roles than combat roles.  There were tens of thousands of ground combat troops in all of the armies, but there were far more men in the rear in support roles.

****She was a Canadian, and the Depression was actually worse in Canada than the United States.

*****They never remarried and she returned to fill that role after he was already critically ill.

******There is a lot more to this than that, however.  Coupled with this depiction was the portrayal of the "girl next door" as enormous breasted and ready, willing and able to have sex, with no implications of any kind, a view of women that was co-incident too or perhaps inspired by Kinsey's writings. As is now known, Kinsey was completely off the mark about his reporting of Americans habits and practises in this area, which were in fact highly conservative going into the late 1940s and early 1950s, something that Kinsey should have known, assuming that he in fact did not.  The report, much like the Army's Men Under Fire, was assumed to be valid when in fact was not and had the impact of tragically informing people and their behavior.

^The entire "Greatest Generation" concept is now so ingrained in people that if you look at the Youtube reviews for this film you'll see all sorts of praise for how the film reflects the values of that generation heroically.  It doesn't.

The protagonist has cheated on his wife. She's had a baby, unbeknownst to him, alone in Italy.  He's married and trying to climb the corporate ladder.

In the end, he rejects the corporate ladder and he and his wife decide to support his Italian child, but in doing that, they're rejecting going with the flow.  If he had stayed true, in the movie maker's view, to the values of the time, he'd have just denied that the Italian child was his and kept on keeping on with big corporate.  Modern viewers don't get that point as they don't want to.  Viewers of the time did which is why the movie was controversial.

Crappy but predictable career advice

From the ABA list serve:

Michelle Obama got this advice after confiding to her mother that she hated being a lawyer

And what, pray tell, was that advice:

“You know, my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made,” Obama said. “She was live-and-let-live. So one day she’s driving me from the airport after I was doing document production in Washington, D.C., and I was like, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I can’t sit in a room and look at documents.’ I won’t get into what that is, but it’s deadly. Deadly. Document production. So I shared with her in the car: I’m just not happy. I don’t feel my passion. And my mother—my uninvolved, live-and-let-live mother—said, ‘Make the money, worry about being happy later.’ “

Let's look at that again.

Make the money, worry about being happy later.

Michelle Obama was born in 1964, one year later than me.  Her mother, Wikipedia reports, was born in 1937.  So at the time this advice was given, her mother was at least 50, maybe older (we aren't really informed when this advice was given, only that it was give prior to Mrs. Obama meeting her husband. . . we know that Michele Obama graduated from Harvard Law School (of course) in 1988 (she's a Princeton undergrad by the way) and met her future husband in 1989 (their first date was to see "Do The Right Thing").  So, this conversation must have occurred in 1988 or 1989.

Michelle Obama is a really smart person.  And extremely well-educated, to say the least. So if she was relating to her mother that she hated being a lawyer and wanted to hang it up. . . well that really says something either about the law as a profession (and the propaganda surrounding it) or maybe the place she was working, or maybe her personality.  Any of those could be true.

But it also says something huge about that generation that her mother was part of.

Now, Her mother was born late enough that she's not really part of that Depression era generation that Tom Brokaw has grossly mischaracterized as being "The Greatest Generation".  The generation she would have been born into is the "Silent Generation", which according to the generational theorists Strauss and Howe, we've written about before, has the following characteristics:

• Silent Generation (1925–1942) (Artist) 

Again, this is a commonly used term for this generation.  I can't say much about them other than that both of my parents would have fit into it.  According to Strauss and Howe that would mean: 

Artists grow up overprotected by adults preoccupied with the Crisis, come of age as the socialized and conformist young adults of a post-Crisis world, break out as process-oriented midlife leaders during an Awakening, and age into thoughtful post-Awakening elders.

I definitely don't see that in my parents generation.  Indeed, I really think that there was very little difference between the World War Two generation and them, other than they were born at an age where they were either serving very late in the war, or in the next one.  In other words, if the artist category describes people born in the late 1920s, anyhow, this doesn't seem right to me at all. And indeed, perhaps the generational years assigned to this cohort are flat out wrong.  It wouldn't strike me, for example, that kids born in the Jazz Age year of 1925, who would have been eligible for military service in 1943, would share that much in common with people born in 1945.

Well, what I noted there, I'd note again.  I don't think there's a colossal difference between the World War Two generation and those born in the late 1920s and the 1930s.  Indeed, my guess is that the overarching nature of the twin global crises of World War Two and the Great Depression had a big generational leveling effect. To add to that, my mother, who was slightly older than my father, was actually old enough to have joined the Canadian armed forces, which she inquired about doing, if she had wanted to (she realized right off that her genteel upbringing made her singularly unsuitable for service life, and so she didn't pursue it).  My father was too young to serve in World War Two, but that generation that came close to fighting in it always looked to it and their late teen experiences such that it was a looming event in their life. . . in some ways even a larger event than the one that many of them did serve in (including my father), the Korean War.

I do think the name the "Silent Generation" is apt, however, as something in what appeared in the ABA article did really strike me, that being" my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made".  My parents, and in particular my father, didn't either. I sure wish he had, quite frankly, as he had a wealth of personal experience and had lived a really hard young life (he worked in his father's packing house in the 1940s as a teen, he became the head of the family in his late teens when his own father died, he had effectively become the father to his youngest brother when he was that age and on into his own twenties. He'd started off in manual work and then had been sent to college at his mother's command and had acquired a dental degree which he worked at until he died at age 62).  I would have liked his insights, but he didn't really provide them.

But when he did, they were basically of the same nature as Michelle Obama's mother.  He never told me "Make the money, worry about being happy later.“ but I recall that he did tell me, when I was thinking of becoming a game warden and majoring in Wildlife Management "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees and no jobs" and when I was thinking of going to law school "a law degree is something you can use for a lot of things".

He was flat out wrong on the last comment in spite of being truly a quiet genius.  He was probably right in his first observation, however, FWIW.

So what's my point?

Well my point is that this advice is both in error in objective fact (there's no guaranty that you are going to rake in piles of bucks as a lawyer), and in what it suggests on a larger scale.  But it's also common to generations that grew up in financial distress.

Indeed, it's frankly a common view for my own generation if they grew up around here.  People like me were born into a local economic depression and in some ways most of us never got over it, just like our parents that grew up in the Great Depression also didn't get over it.  Having a job, in and of itself, was absolutely paramount in people's minds, given that so many of us (myself included) at least at one time didn't have one.

This view, we're now told, is common to "Generation Z", the generation that is just coming into the workforce.  Some new studies relate that in terms of employment, they look a lot like the generation that came of age in the wake of the Great Depression.  They seem to value job stability above all else, and they don't worry about climbing to the top of the economic ladder.  Indeed, it's reported at least right now that they'd rather get a job in an established entity owned by somebody else, rather than try starting one up, which makes a great deal of sense if their personal youthful experience with that effort is watching things fail.

Maybe generational traits truly are cyclical.  If so, maybe we can hope for an abatement in some other trends that have come on post 1960.

But was Michelle Obama's mother right?  Well I don't think so.  I grasp what she was saying, but that can be a recipe for long term bitter disappointment.

Indeed, I frequently note that people who give these recollections in the public sphere often had their lives take a really dramatic turn that makes the value of their recollection questionable.  In fairness to Michelle Obama, she's not really conveying this recollection as advice.   More telling is that the Harvard Law graduate (and as I've noted in the past, while I think it's singularly unfair and a bit absurd, Harvard Law graduates pretty much get to write their own ticket) only briefly practiced law and put her license on inactive status in 1993.  She was admitted to the bar in 1988. So, in fact, she basically rejected her mother's advice.

Probably wisely.  Things worked out, and her career, while it probably wasn't as lucrative as the one she started to pursue in 1988, turned out no doubt to be more interesting.

The "Greatest Generation". Maybe they weren't the greatest, but they were different, and pretty darned amazing. Generations Part Two of Three

The other day I was sorting through some of my mother's papers and found her passport from the late 1940s.  It was a Canadian, not an American, passport, as my mother was from Quebec.  She was just in her twenties at the time.  The photograph was a shock, she looked so young. And she looked that way, because she was young at the time.

Her funeral, as those who stop in here know, was in April.  Last week, I went to the funeral of an uncle by marriage.

I've knew him for my entire life, but I didn't really know his life story.  One of his sons gave that story beautifully in the eulogy.

What do these things have to do with each other?

Well, quite a lot.

In my last entry here I frankly slammed the Boomer generation. I rewrote it several times and it still came out that way.  I fully agree, it should be noted, that a generation may define an era, but it doesn't define any one individual within it, so that was unfair, to be sure, on an individual level.  And this one will be, accordingly, undeserving praise for many as well.   And going further, I'll also note that I've never liked that tag, The Greatest Generation, applied by the Boomer generation to their parents as they discovered years later what a praiseworthy generation the generation they tortured really was.  As most corrections of that type, that tag went too far. "Greatest" is quite a claim.  Greater than the generation that fought the Revolution, or the Civil War?  Well, I'm not willing to go that far.

Indeed, I'm willing to state that many of the things that make the "Greatest Generation" great are attributes that they shared with prior generations. Somehow that was lost. And it isn't that they fought World War Two and endured the Great Depression, but rather the way they endured those things and had it not impact their personalities, which is something that would have been true, and was true, of earlier generations as well.  In this era, when it seems society can't even tell that there are two generations in our species, and every human attribute is regarded as some sort of debilitating disease, I don't think that's true.

Because the following is what struck me.

Perhaps the single most interesting feature of that generation, which they share with earlier generations, is the extent to which they entered adult life earlier than other generations, accepted that, and moved through adversity without loosing their morals, character and faith.

Take, for example, the uncle I mention above.  I didn't know his life story well, but it turns out that he was a first generation American. His parents were from Croatia.  He grew up in poverty, but in a household that was deeply Catholic.  He served as a combat NCO in World War Two, and was able to go to college because of the GI Bill.  He did that, moved to town from Cheyenne, and married and raised a family here.  He went blind in middle age.  Throughout all of this, he never lost his morals, his personality, or his faith.

Or take the example of my mother.  She was pulled out of school, due to the  Great Depression, as a teenager in order to work.  She did that for several years before moving, still very young, to western Canada and then down to the United States.  Now, a teenager in her mid teens working in this fashion, out of school, would be abnormal and we'd fear for the girls future.  But here again, from a strong Catholic family, she never lost her way.

And these examples from this generation and the prior ones aren't unusual. Fred Goodstein, now long gone but well remembered even though he was gone, when I first started practicing law, left school to work in his teens, finding industrial employment in Denver.  Moving to Casper and establishing an oil field supply business here in town that ultimately made him a wealthy man, he was the definition of businessman when I was young.  He was also legendary for his generosity and kindness. So, the Jewish boy who left school early to work never lost his way, and became wealthy in the process.

From a generation prior, my father's faher provides another example.  He left home at age 13 to work, moving across the country to do it. But here too, a 13 year old on his own did not become a lost soul, but remained loyal to his faith and upbringing his entire life.

That's the difference, I think, between current generations and the ones that seems to have closed out at the end of World War Two.  They had many fewer advantages. They were much less educated. They often started working very young. But something about how they were raised caused, in large numbers, for the same individuals to have very solid characters by the time they were mid teenagers.  If we are sometimes shocked by how young some married, or how young some were on their own, we should perhaps recall that they were much more adult by their mid teens than many people are today in their thirties of forties.  Most of them didn't fall into vice. They weren't confused about who they were or what they were.  Their faiths were rocked by tremendous adversity.  

We might well ask what it was that made them that way, and how we lost it. Somehow we really did, and not just in the United States, but in the entire western world.  Something occurred.  In some fashion people lost their cultures in very detrimental ways which create for a longing and confusion that is at the epic level.

We cannot say that prior generations, or the generation that preceded the Boomer generation, got everything right. Certainly not.  Indeed, to the extent that I've complained about the Boomers, we should recall that it was their parents that essentially created the world that Boomers redefined when they were  young, by conferring every advantage upon them so that their children were not faced with the same levels of adversity that they were.  And the idea makers of the late 50s and the 60s were, as a rule, the World War Two generation, at least at first, not the Boomers.  

But still, there's something about them which really does set them, and earlier generations, fully apart from the later ones.  They were tougher, and frankly, they were often better, than the ones that came later.  And they were that, with a lot less.  Indeed, in some ways the "lot less" may have influenced why they were better.

Anyhow, something certainly to think upon.

The "Greatest Generation". Admiring the generation while disliking that monkier.

WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here
    But one ten thousand of those men in England
    That do no work to-day!
 
KING. What's he that wishes so?
    My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
    If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
    To do our country loss; and if to live,
    The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
    God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
    By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
    Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
    It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
    Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
    But if it be a sin to covet honour,
    I am the most offending soul alive.
    No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
    God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
    As one man more methinks would share from me
    For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
    Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
    That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
    Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
    And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
    We would not die in that man's company
    That fears his fellowship to die with us.
    This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
    He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
    And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
    He that shall live this day, and see old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
    And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
    Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
    And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
    Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
    But he'll remember, with advantages,
    What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
    Familiar in his mouth as household words-
    Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
    Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
    Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

 From Henry V.

 Members of the 4442nd Regimental Combat Team in action in Italy. The 4442nd's enlisted ranks were entirely made up of Japanese Americans, largely recruited from internment camps.  It is the most decorated unit in the American Army of World War Two.

The recent anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, which commenced on June 6, 1944, and which started the nine month period in which the Allies in the west marched towards Germany, and into it (while of course the Soviets marched  in from the east at the same time) has caused a lot of public recollection of the nation's World War Two veterans. And that's a good thing.  But one of the things we hear a lot in such recollections, not by the veterans themselves, but by those recalling them, is the term applied to them by Tom Brokaw in his book about their generations; i.e., "The Greatest Generation".

It may be a minor thing, but the term has long bothered me to a certain extent.  I was surprised recently when author Rick Atkinson, who wrote the phenomenal three volume series on  the American Army in the ETO during World War Two, The Liberation Trilogy, stated the same thing, in much blunter terms, in an interview on the occasion of the release of his third volume, The Guns At Last Light.  He flatly stated that they aren't the "greatest" generation and was slightly condescending regarding the term.

I don't mean to suggest that the American generation that fought World War Two isn't highly admirable, I think they were, but I am glad to hear at least Atkinson make that comment.  Here's why.

For those with long memories, or perhaps just for those who grew up in the 60s and 70s, "the war" meant World War Two.  We all knew a lot of World War Two veterans.  So, "the war" was World War Two.  Even when Korean War veterans like my father spoke of "the war", they meant World War Two.

A soldier comforts a comrade grieving over the death of a wounded comrade.  Fought using a mix of new and World War Two weapons, the Korean War caught the American Army off guard when it featured conventional combat recalling World War Two and World War One.  It never achieved the status in the public's mind that World War Two had, and it quickly seemed to be forgotten by the nation during the booming 1950s.

Unless people were speaking in the present tense.  In that case, the "war" was the Vietnam War, which the country fought actively from 1965 to 1973, and which came to its final end the year before the nation's bicentennial, in 1975.

 

American soldiers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.  Fairly significantly younger on average than their World War Two counterparts, they were also better educated and more ethnically diverse.  In spite of the common myths about them, they had volunteered for service in Southeast Asia in fairly significant numbers and their desertion rate was one of the absolute lowest of all time for a U.S. War (the Mexican War has the highest) up until the wars following 1990.

It's important to remember that life went on for the survivors of World War Two, who remained active in public life well into the 1980s, and in many instances well into the 1990s.  And they resumed, or in many instances sort of started their lives, after World War Two.  Indeed, one of the greatest films of all time, for those who like to follow movies, is 1946's The Best Years Of Our Lives, which dealt with the subject of restarting a life while that topic was still a bleeding wound in American society.  It's stunning, watching it, to realize the war had just ended when the film was made.

When I was a young, it was common to call this generation "The Depression Era Generation", and in some ways that term is a better one than "The Greatest Generation", as it includes the larger population of men and women  and it stretches the generation out a bit on both ends, including people whose age or occupation exempted them from service in World War Two, or who were a little to young to serve in it.  Be that as it may, a feature of this generation is that they'd grown up in an era of economic strain and deprivation that's nearly unimaginable now and went on to fight a war that was so Titanic we frankly can't imagine it now.

Food line, 1937.

None of that is  news, nor is it news that a "baby boom" followed the war as that generation returned home and made up for nearly 15 years of lost time.  

It's Holscher's Fourth Law of History that "war changes everything." and this is certainly true of World War Two and the generation that fought it as enlisted men (it's often forgotten that the oldest American commander in the war had been in the Army during the Spanish American War, and that there were plenty of old soldiers in World War Two in every army).  The war opened up education and opportunity, following the war, for the survivors of it in a way that had not existed before. Very often missed by current commentators, the war and the Depression produced a political outlook in that generation that was quite Liberal in political orientation, while remaining socially conservative.  That expressed itself in a definite comfort with the Federal government being active in funding and expanding education, with education otherwise remaining traditional in its structure.

The net result was that the fortunes of those who fought World War Two were fairly good following the war, although for a variety of reasons, and by the 1950s this was expressing itself to even a greater extent in the fortunes of that generation's children, who were reaching university age.  For the first time in American history a university education went on from being a privileged to a middle class expectation.

And its here were, I think, we return to the term "The Greatest Generation."  The Depression Era Generation was a great one, and suffered and rebuilt in ways we can hardly imagine, but pretty early on, as a generational characteristic, that was lost on their children.

This is a broad statement, of course, and nothing that can be said about any one generation is true of everyone in the generations, which is extremely important to remember. But it is also the case that people grow up in an environment and accustom themselves to it, unless they are aware its abnormal.  The Depression Era Generation regarded the Depression and World War Two as abnormal, which it certainly was, and they reminded their children of that quite a bit.  Their children grew up in a time of economic plenty and educational opportunity, and regarded that as normal.

In our society, we're accustomed to speak of youthful rebellion as a norm, and something that repeats itself every generation.  But there's no good evidence of that whatsoever. By and large, that doesn't occur, and quite often the difference between one generation and another is thin indeed.  But the difference between the youth of the Boomers and the lives of their parents was vastly different.  And this seems to have at least contributed to the massive social upheaval in the western world in the 1960s and 1970s.

During that period, it was pretty common for those in their early adulthood to hold the World War Two generation in contempt, and those holding that contempt were their children's generation.  Individuals certainly admired the lives of their individual parents, but there was a pretty widespread contempt as a generational aspect.  Frequently the World War Two or Depression Era generations were regarded as "squares" or the like, with their children probably not even grasping the extent to which their parents lives had been transformational.  Contempt tends to be returned, and to some extent in this case it was, but with not much of an effect.  A person can't take this too far, of course, but that it was a feature of the climate of that times can't be really denied.

This really began to change in the 1990s.  By that time the aging Boomers had abandoned revolution themselves and were looking back to an imagined more conservative time for  guidance.  In doing that, the generation began to redress some things had felt guilty about from its youth.  In regards to the Vietnam War, it's interesting how the Boomers who fought that war, and who had been vilified to some extent for doing so, were suddenly regarded as heroes.  And shortly thereafter, the same generation rediscovered their parents and were awestruck by the ordeals that their parents had endured.  With a short view of history, they went from regarding their parents as squares to their being "The Greatest Generation".

But are they?  Well, that's a pretty long claim, and a person has to look at it pretty carefully. For one thing, if that claim is a valid one, does it apply to those in that generation form any of the Allied nations of World War Two?  The Great Depression, for example, was even worse in Canada than the United States, and Canada entered the war in 1939.  Shouldn't the term apply to them as well?  And certainly it must to the generation of British youth who served in the war.

 

The Winnipeg  Rifles land in Normandy, June 6, 1944.  Up until late war, Canadian solders serving overseas, including my Uncle Terry who participated in Operation Overlord, were all volunteers for overseas service.

Those British youth, it should be noted, if university educated (which only a tiny minority were) had infamously declared in the early 1930s that they'd never serve in another war, turning their back on the sacrifices of the UK during World War One. But when the time came, they more than rose to the occasion.

What about Soviet youth?  No European nation had suffered more in the first half of the 20th Century than the Russians, although often at their own hands. Those who fought as young men in the Red Army had grown up in a period of horrifying oppression and deprivation, and they died in droves during World War Two.  Over 80% of all German battlefield deaths were due to the Red Army, and yet at the same time, but at the same time the Red Army served a political leadership that was as evil as any that the world has ever produced.

Taking it out further, however, is The Greatest Generation greater than the generation that fought the Civil War?  That seems a pretty tall order.  Or what about the generation that fought in the Revolution?  For those men, who signed up to fight on the side of the Continental Congress, they were taking a step which arguably made them criminals for a crime punishable by death. And even if the British did not take that view, at the time they engaged to serve the new nation, the volunteers did not know that and could not be assured that the view of Parliament would not change. 

Union cavalry, Civil War.  By the second year of the Civil War those entering the service had no illusions about winning quickly, but they showed up anyhow.

And what of the generation that fought World War One?  Recently I've heard a couple of interviews of authors who wrote on that generation of Americans and their findings are shocking by modern standards.  That generations seemed to have regarded the war as one more hard bad thing in a hard life, not expecting much going in, and not expecting much going out.  If they aren't perceived as great it might be because they expected nothing much out of life other than hard work, and World War One was just one more example of it.

First Division Victory Parade, Washington D. C.  The sign nearby is still urging the public to "Save Food".

Sometimes the term The Greatest Generation is used ironically by those now in the Boomer generation to castigate the youth of today.  No doubt the world and our nation has changed enormously since 1945, but much of the change that commentators now complain about came about due to the "revolution" that that very generation brought about.  If the youth of today do not seem to have the values and views of the generation that fought World War Two, and which we now so admire, perhaps the generation that brought so many changes about and created the world that the youth of today are living in should take stock of that, and no doubt many do.

But also, that just sells the youth of today short.  There are plenty of reasons to worry about things, including culture and society, but to assume that people would not rise to the occasion is to assume a lot without much evidence.  What we have seen is that today's youth has volunteered to fight in three wars in 25 years and it has done so without compulsion.  No draft exists today, as it had for every American War since the Spanish American War leading up to the first Gulf War. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan is the first American war that has ever been fought in which the combatants were 100% free of some sort of compulsory service at some point.  There has not been a draft since 1973, but the last soldier brought into the Army via conscription retired only last year, that being a long serving NCO who had first come into the Army as a conscript.  Up until 1865 every American male had some sort of compulsory militia duty and there were still men who had entered service in that fashion, or through Civil War conscription, serving as late as the Spanish American War. This current generation of servicemen is therefore really unique.

Solder of the 1st Infantry Division, with M14 rifle, in Afghanistan.

All that goes to say, I suppose, that some generations rise to their times, and some sink.  The World War Two generation certainly rose to theirs, but then the one that immediately followed and served in Korea did as well. The one that had fought World War One also had, and certainly the Civil War generation did as well. The current generation lives in the richest times the country has ever known, in spite of a widespread assumption to the contrary, and while it faces a lot of challenges, those challenges aren't of its making.  All in all, they're doing well. 

Epilog

Recently the Federal Court interviewed some of the seventy (that's right, seventy) World War Two veterans who are still serving on the Federal Bench.  I'll comment on that elsewhere, but one of the questions the interviewer asked is whether they thought they were the Greatest Generation.  The answers were interesting.

Federal Judge Tom Stagg, a Nixon appointee who plans on serving on the bench until he dies, sure thought so:

Q. Do you consider yourself to be part of a “Greatest Generation”?
A. Compared to what I see today, yes. I think you get duty pounded into you, or did in those days, and you learn it as boy, as a Boy Scout, as a member of a military unit. You have assigned duty and you have to do it. You even want to do it. I would no more have stayed home during World War II. I can’t imagine doing that. This is my country. I’m proud of it.

They didn't all feel that way, however.  Here's the quote from another serving Federal Judge who is a World War Two veteran:

Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest Generation”?
A. I don’t like it. I think it glosses over the imperfections of the American society in that time. They forget that we were terribly racially biased in the Army. Black troops were treated miserably. … This is part of the Greatest Generation that isn’t mentioned, and I’ve seen terrible things that the military did. That inevitably will happen. I think it’s overblowing the character of the people who were in the Army, were in the Navy, in the Air Force. Which is not to diminish what they did, or in any way detract from their contributions, but I think to blow up any particular generation as the Greatest Generation is a mistake.

Judge Leonard Wexler, however, also agreed with the Greatest Genreation tag:

Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest generation”?
A. Yes, I like it. I think it fits. We were the greatest generation. I mean, everybody was united. Everybody stood together. I’ll give you an example. When I got home and I would take the train, a Brooklyn kid, I had a cane, everybody would stand up to give me a seat. Everybody was so nice. I really felt good that we were a great country at one time, united.

Judge Jack Weinstein sure didn't, however:

Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest Generation”?
A. It’s nonsensical. Every generation is great. We responded to difficulties of the depression and the war, and people I see today are responding to other problems. Every generation has greatness, and it has despair and has things that it should be ashamed of doing. For us, it was no different. I remember seeing things that were absolutely disgraceful—the way African Americans were treated and the way women were treated. Ours was not the greatest generation.

Judge Arthur Spatt agreed with the term, but had a more nuanced view:

Q. Do you feel you were part of a “Greatest Generation”?
I think the greatest generation was this country as a whole. It was united. Everybody worked toward one goal, whether it was giving up your food, rationing, or becoming an air raid warden on the block to make sure the lights were out at night. Everybody participated, with a full heart and no dissent. So, when in the history of this country does this ever happen?