A Memorial Day Reflection on the Second World War. Changes: The impact of World War Two.

Rifleman in training, April 1942.

I'm a member of an email list serve that discusses the Second World War.  It's  populated by academics and writers.  Often the threads are pretty active around this time of year because of the holiday that, this year, falls on this date.

Normally I won't quote from there here, and I'm not going to do so directly now, as its a private list. But a member just posted the news that the new Tom Hanks movie Greyhound is going to be released on Apple TV, which I lack.

I was really looking forward to the film. 

Anyhow, that lead to a thread discussing things that are changing due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, and then I posted an item, after I commented on that, noting I should link it back to World War Two, as I was off topic.

An interesting thread developed, which I posing on here, editing some of it so as to keep folks anonymous.

Cornell freshmen, 1919.

It started with one noting the demise of the college beanie, attributing that to returning servicemen being older and not wanting to put up with that sort of foolishness.

I replied to that noting:

Indeed, I've looked through old university newspapers and the beanies were a big deal.  I've wondered what killed them off.

On university, I've heard it claimed and I think it correct that not only did the GI bill bring a lot of people into universities after the war that never would have gone to university otherwise, that had a major impact on the demographics of student bodies.  Demographics that were poorly represented in universities started to be fairly well represented in them for the first time.  For example, the number of Catholics attending university jumped quite a bit.

As that happened the diversity of student bodies in universities of all types increased and that changed their nature.  Some Ivy League universities, for example, still had chapel requirements as late as the 1960s, reflecting a fairly uniform Protestant student body. That started to go away by that time as a result of the change in the student makeup following WWII.

I have in fact posted on this odd, old, now gone custom a couple of times here.  Here's the threads for that:

Freshman Caps? The Wyoming Student, November 2, 1917.

Blog Mirror: Beanies, Brooms and Bother: UW Freshmen Get the Initiation Treatment (and Lex Anteinternet: Freshman Caps? The Wyoming Student, November 2, 1917.)

I'd forgotten that this odd custom lasted this long, and another participant noted that his university was still wearing them as late as 1970.  

Apparently beanies are still a thing at the South Dakota School of Mines, but they're optional.

This would suggest that this is another one of those odd things that we tend to associate with World War Two that isn't, although there are more significant ones to come. 

Soldier reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn of the Armed Services Edition.

One that I only recently learned of, from one of my children, is the spread of the popularity of paperback books due to the war, which was brought up by one of the replies which noted the Armed Forces Expeditions of various novels.  Another participant expanded on that and noted a scene of a soldier reading just such a book is included in Sam Fuller's movie, The Big Red One, with the thinly disguised Fuller character commenting on a new recruit reading his book.  Fuller actually had written some novels prior to the war.

That scene is one of the better ones from The Big Red One, in my opinion.  That movie turns out to be one of the several World War Two movies referenced here which I find that I haven't reviewed yet, and I need to.

One of the comments had to do with a variety of ways the US was in a different position coming out of the war compared to when it went in it, noting that we came out of the war having 16,000,000 veterans and a fairly unified, disciplined, society, which translated into their being able to go on to higher education and train for careers.  After thinking about this, I added:

Another thing that it seems to have done that's sort of related to this is that it relocated quite a few people permanently.

California seems to have received a big influx of workers due to the war and a lot of them stayed there after the war, as an example.  As another odd example, I've read that returning Navajo servicemen tended to return to communities near where they had entered the service, but off reservation rather than on, as the economic opportunities were better.

In local agriculture, a big change occurred in that the start of World War Two came in an era in which ranches here still employed a lot of cowboys with a lot of them being career, usually single, cowboys. They didn't return to those occupations after the war.  At the same time, the war normalized the production of the 4x4 truck and that meant that they weren't actually needed for a lot of the winter time jobs they'd formally been necessary for.

Like a lot of things here, I've touched on these topics before.  I think the comment about the 16,000,000 disciplined veterans, mostly men, going into civilian life is correct, but we shouldn't forget that some of those men had lives that were significantly negatively impacted by what they experienced.  People don't like to touch on it, but alcoholism was very common in the World War Two generation and at least part, but not all, of that was due to the war.

The impact of the 4x4 truck has been covered here before in this extensive thread, among others:

A Revolution In Rural Transportation

A somewhat related topic came up which addressed Residential Building Codes, something I'd frankly never thought of.  The commenter noted that the Farmers Home Administration's guides for housing contracts were issued as a result of the war in 1942.  I had no idea. They noted the guides are still with us.

Regarding this item, I noted:

Sort of along these lines, there was an expansion of employer provided employee benefits during World War Two in the U.S.

Wages were frozen at some point to keep labor shortages from spurring inflation, so companies took up competing with benefits, like health insurance.  It can be argued that the employer provided health insurance system in the US was a byproduct of World War Two.  I guess a person's view on that may depend on what they think of that system, but it did work for a fair amount of time following the war.

Other benefits along these lines, like retirement benefits, etc., also received a boost.

This doesn't mean that they didn't exist at all before the war, but they were greatly expanded during the war and became the norm for a long period of time, and are still with us in an evolved form today.  

Another was the expansion of the calculating machine, which no doubt did occur, but which is something I never would have thought of.  It's modern descendant, the electronic calculator, is everywhere. For that matter, the modern home computer in some ways is a descendant of the calculating machine.*

An addition to this from a university history resulted in this, regarding changes in higher education, which were massive.  I've noted some of those here before, particularly the expansion of the student body to include demographics, such as Catholics, which previously rarely went to university.  As noted here earlier, Catholic students were basically barred from Ivy League universities as they had protestant chapel requirements.  Indeed, that didn't change until the 1960s for some.

He also noted the inclusion of refugee academics, which is something that would not have occured to me.

The massive expansion of education due to the GI Bill was a huge economic boon to the US in the late 40s, 50s, and the 60s, but like many things, there's a downside to it.  Breaking the doors to university wide open helped the first two or three generations of new university students, but they were also stepping into a university system that well predated World War Two in its focus.  As student bodies swelled, standards started to lower, something that was already notable by the 1970s  As that occured simply having an degree went from an advantage to a necessity for many occupations, reaching the nature of an absolute for some.  Entire occupations that never required a degree of any kind ultimately required a college degree and, quite frankly, for no real reason.  Universities themselves became addicted to public funding, something that they first started to really receive during World War Two, and it oddly has operated in recent years to drive up the cost of education.  And as universities offered more and more degree programs that conveyed upon their recipients no real advantage, a sort of radicalization of some elements of university faculty, which was something that had already started as far back as the 1920s, accelerated and became institutionalized.

One poster noted that much expanded airline travel resulted from the war, and that certainly is the case.

Just prior to the war airliners were beginning to take on a recognizable form, with the DC-3 being a recognizable commercial aircraft that went on to do yeoman's service during the war as the C-47.

C-47 that went on to post war commercial use being restored at the Pacific Aviation Museum.

After the war, however, things really changed. Four engined wartime aircraft made four engined commercial aircraft inevitable.  By the 60s they were yielding to jets and modern air travel was around the corner.  It really took airline deregulation, however, which came in during the 1980s, to make air travel cheap.

A  need for an Interstate Highway System, by which is meant a good one, was also noted.

This is one of those things where I'd disagree.  It's often stated that Eisenhower was really impressed with the German Autobahn, which was really a massive German public works project during the pre war Nazi years there, and he may have really been. But I think it was the ongoing evolution of the automobile that made the Interstate Highway System come in.  It was billed a defense program but that was, quite frankly, a funding charade.

What that does bring up, however, is the massive expansion of government that started with the Great Depression and which kept on keeping on during World War Two and which never went away thereafter.  It wasn't until the Reagan administration of the 1980s that contraction of any kind started, and its never contracted to its pre 1932 level.  Prior to the Great Depression the nation would never have undertaken a highway construction project on a national level, and not until World War Two would the country thought of trying to pass it off as a defense measure.

Rio Grande terminal in a less than nifty part of Salt Lake City.

That act, of course, lead to the demise of passenger rail in US, so its another thing that had a mixed result.

Women in industry came up, as it usually does.

I've become pretty convinced that the women in the workplace story is, frankly, heavily mythologized.  I've written on that here before in this thread:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

I replied here, with the following:

Women in the workplace is a really complicated and I think poorly understood topic however.

I've looked at it before for other reasons over the course of the 20th Century and the increase in women working overall as a rising percentage is almost imperceptible in terms of its post WWII make up. Rather, women in the workforce started to climb starting around 1900 and continually climbed almost year by year up into some point in, I think the 1980s or 1990s, when it actually slightly declined.   There were big jumps during World War One and World War Two, with the jump in WWI rivaling WWII, and then after both wars the wartime jump declined and the rise went back to the prewar curve.

Having said that, following World War Two the type of work women were doing changed a lot, but that's also true following World War One.  Prior to World War One a massive number of working women were employed as domestic servants. That was still true all the way through the mid-50s, but women started to enter offices prior to WWI and then they did in large numbers during WWII.  So the type, and pay, of women working really changed and part of that was due to WWII.  Women in middle class occupations were greatly impacted by that.

The other big change, and I'd argue it was more significant than the impact of either war, however, was the introduction of domestic machinery, and that correlates really well with the rise in employed women.  Domestic machinery, such as washing machines, vacuums, modern stoves, etc., are a 20th Century deal and they really started to start reaching their modern form in the 1920s.  Prior to that domestic labor was so overwhelming that people basically couldn't "live on their own".  How many of us, for example, have lived in a boarding house, like so many men did prior to World War Two?  Men had to do that as there was no instant anything, and they simply couldn't live on their own, work and still wash their clothes and cook their meals routinely.  A lot of men never left home until they married.

Indeed, that  explains why a common aspiration for women was to marry and have their own homes.  They were already engaged in heavy domestic labor as it was for the families they grew up in.  Daily shopping, long slow cooking, washing clothes more primitively, etc., etc., was a huge chore that a lot of them looked up as something they'd rather do for households of their own as opposed to their parents.

Anyhow, once good domestic machinery came in the hours and hours of work that women had to do at home greatly declined and their labor became surplus to the household.  A lot of that would have occurred in the 1930s as domestic machinery continued to develop in that period, but the Great Depression kept it from being spread more widely, much like a lot of farms kept using horse implements in the same period.  After the war, however, ramped up domestic production rapidly changed that.  You can see that in late WWII advertisements in which all sorts of companies engaged in war production are promising to make washing machines, stoves, etc.

All of this is stuff we don't think of much on Memorial Day, nor perhaps should we that much.  Memorial Day is a day to remember war dead.  But sometimes we should remember the lives of the living as well, and, in terms of demise, the demise of things, practices and norms that came before a war.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*May 25, 1970, mark the first orders, fwiw, of the stand alone desk top computer.  Primitive by today's standards, as anemic, they were also extremely expensive.

The Pandemic and Change

Are pandemics like wars?

Holscher's Fourth Law of History.  War changes everything

This is something that somehow is repeatedly forgotten by those who advocate wars.  I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it should be remembered that wars change absolutely everything, about everything.  No nation goes into a war and comes back out the same nation.  People's views about various things change radically due to war, entire economies are dramatically changed, and of course the people who fight the war are permanently changed.

We've discussed this here from time to time in regards to specific topics, but this law is so overarching that the impact of it can hardly be exaggerated.  Every time a nation enters a war, it proposes, in essence, to permanently alter everything about itself.

War, we have said, changes everything.

Yes, war does.  But do pandemics?

Note that in our laws of history, we have nothing claiming that pandemics change everything.  And in pondering it, for good reason.

They don't.

But this one might change quite a bit.

First the comparison to war.

Gen. George S. Patton talking with Lt. Col. Lyle Bernard in Sicily.  When I was in basic training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, one of the barracks had painted on it another phrase of Patton's, that being "Prepare for war. . . all else is bullshit."

George Patton claimed that "Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink in insignificance", and sadly, history has shown that view to largely correct.   That isn't to praise war, but its to note that war is the only thing that peoples and nations engage in that has, at least heretofore brought about a national and international level of dedication on the society wide level that it has exhibited.  Only the Space Race, in the case of the US and USSR, compares, although it fairness it does compare.

The small memorial left to fallen astronauts and cosmonauts by Apollo 15's mission to the moon. We may have been the Soviet's rival to get to the moon, but notably, we remembered their individual sacrifices when we got their.  Another lesson, perhaps, we should take to heart here.

Because the amount of dedication nations exhibit to fighting wars is so vast, it's also the case that wars have worked enormous societal changes.  As with war itself, nothing else really compares to it.  Even pandemics have not. . . usually.

There are exceptions.

The Great Plague provides a set of example. The plague raged across the globe, and indeed by some measure that pandemic is still in progress, but the real hard hitting impact of it was in Europe from 1347 to 1351.  It killed about 30% of the European population in that time frame.  Bizarrely, and ironically, for those who survived it, it actually had the impact of making the remainder of their lives, and that of their immediate descendants, better than they had been, which is not an endorsement of the plague in some sort of sick Malthusian way. Rather, most people were peasants and the plague caused a labor shortage, with the labor being filled by peasants, the laboring class.

The same is true, fwiw, with Russian serfs in regards to World War One.  Stories of the 1914-1918 horror, when they deal with Russia, are full of tales of how bad the life of serfs was, but in fact their condition had been steadily improving since the 1890s and World War One notably improved it in part because the bulk of the Russian army was made up of serfs. With so many men drafted, there was a labor shortage that benefited those who remained at home, which actually was, in economic terms, most people as Russian peasants lived a largely communal community existence at the time.

The same is not true, however, of the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919.  It just killed people.  As the population of the globe was really busy killing each other anyhow, it just added more death to what was already a massively bloody few years.  It didn't advance anyone's condition, and it didn't retard any either.  It didn't bring about societal changes.  It may have advanced medicine a bit, but then the Great War was doing that anyhow.

Now, most certainly, I'm sure you would be able to find scholarly articles maintaining the opposite. But none the less, I'll maintain that the Spanish Flu was a horror, but it really didn't change much in the world other than making the entire world's population miserable in a time of global misery.  If we attribute anything to it, what we might note is that its impact on the German Army's Spring Offensive of 1918 is probable, but undocumented.  The 1918-19 flu took the Australian Army out of the war in Europe in the fall of 1918, which shows to a degree how bad it was, but the German Army kept on fighting until the German Navy had enough.

Indeed, we might note, the Imperial War Museum keeps a list of women who died young in its collection of photographs from this period, and we can tell from that sad list that the 18-19 flu raged throughout female nurses and relief workers everywhere, killing them wherever they were.  This includes not only France, but those assigned to far off missions in Russia as well. And if they were getting sick in their youth's and dying in Russia, that means that Allied soldiers in Russia also were, as were Russian soldiers and civilians as well  We don't hear, however, anything about the Spanish Flu in Russia.  It's horrors in the this period and for decades thereafter were too horrific otherwise and too horrifically man made.

So, anyhow, what about this event?

Well, it will change things. It came at a time, and its impacting in such a way, in part because there are no big wars going on, that it can't be ignored and it is being acted and over overacted upon.  Seventy Years of peace and prosperity, for one thing, are something that people get used to and society isn't going to let a virus destroy that. And coming at the pinnacle of a technological revolution, it's going to push things over the edge in lots of ways.

Humans are, I'd note, bad prognosticators, but my record is better than most.  Here's what I think will occur.

1. This is the last pandemic

President Trump was right when he said that these things had always happened. But he's wrong when he said they'll happen again. They won't.

Indeed, pandemics themselves have changed over the decades, centuries and millennia.  That points towards this one being the last one.

All pandemics have to spread somehow to obtain that status.  It's how they travel that makes them a pandemic.

Plague infected flea.

The Black Death, i.e, the bubonic plague, was and is carried by fleas. It's disgusting, but it's also pretty slow, all things being considered.

The bubonic plague (and I actually have an uncle who had it, caught in the docks in Montreal) is a bacteria, not a virus.  It's pretty bad, but that's the first thing about its that's notable. Bacteria, not a virus.  

You also have to be bit by a flea that's carrying it.  

Given this, while people still get it, and it's still a horrible disease, we know how to manage it. And we know how to treat it.  It's spread around the globe, to be sure, but as we don't live in huddled extraordinarily dirty conditions packed with mice and rats as a rule anymore, we don't have to worry all that much about the plague, although hunters and those who work in areas infested with mice and rats should be concerned about it. The last person in this region I'm aware of to get it, and he died from it, got it from a flea from a bobcat.  I've read of hunters in states to the south of here getting it as well.  I've also read of people just getting it by walking through areas infested with rabbits, which is a good reason that communities, like the one I live in, should be concerned about letting rabbits run all over everything.

Indeed, it's of note that the bubonic plague actually took from 541 to 1666 to really run its course, assuming it has now.  It'd endemic, as already noted, in may places.  We hear about the Black Death and think of it as the plague, but the plague really got rolling in 541 in what's called the Plague of Justinian, which tells us a lot about how it gets around.  That plague lasted from 541 to 542 and hit Anatolia and the coastal regions of the Mediterranean.  In short, places that fleas can pack a ride to on rats.  The Black Death was the second phase of the global bubonic plague pandemic, and ended with the Great Plague of London.

Interestingly, by some accounts the bubonic plague really got rolling in China in 1331, but that discounts the Plague of Justinian.  It really started in Europe around 1360 in its second phases, although those weren't the high death years.

The reason I note this pandemic here is that it did travel around the globe, but not at lightning speed.  If it were a new contagon today, it wouldn't make it around the globe.  As it was, it was a really long running menace, but it took it nearly 1,000 years to really break out in its most horrific expression.

That's one way in which the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu is a lot more like COVID 19.  Indeed, all of the recent scary viruses have the 18/19 Flu as their model.

Influenza is of course a virus, and like a lot of viruses it has a strange cycle it goes through before it gets to human beings.

Influenza

The flu virus mutates constantly which is why its constantly around.  It's cycle is bizarrely dependant to some degree on the weather and it always involves transmission and evolution through some animal hosts.  Birds are the most common ones, but pigs play that role as well.  By some accounts the 1918/19 flu had been through both birds and pigs before it got to us.

That's a pretty complicated life cycle, if we call it that, which perhaps we should not, as there's real debate on whether or not influenza is alive.  It's bizarre. At any rate, when it gets to us, it's an airborne disease that we pick up from other people.  

This makes it a less efficient contagion than the plague, which saddles up with fleas and hops around the world that way.  But for more modern transportation, it'd rarely be the case that a flu outbreak would be just that, an outbreak.

Flu would still be deadly, but it'd be deadly mostly by region.  By 1918, however, that was no longer the case as global transportation was pretty fast, even if we wouldn't recognize it that way now.  Ships don't' take that long to cross oceans and once a person with the flu boards a train, he can take it pretty far pretty quickly, all while giving it to everyone in his train car.

World War One presented the ideal environment for something like that, for obvious reasons.  By some accounts the disease had its origin at Camp Funston, Kansas. By others, it was in Kansas prior to the Ft. Riley outbreak.  By yet still others it came in to the US with Chinese workers who were transported to the U.S. from China, across China by train, and then on to Europe (I really have my doubts about this theory).  At any rate, once it was a mass outbreak at Camp Funston it was off and rolling, literally by troop train and troop transport ships.  Indeed, ships played a major role in getting it everywhere.

Nothing like that has happened since, and for good reason. By World War Two we had a better and better handle on infectious disease and the Second World War advanced medicine, as wars will do.  In the late 1970s AIDS first entered the scene as a new virus, widely believed to have gone through other simeans in Africa first and then on to humans, but the disease not airborne and therefore, in spite of widespread fears about it, it never posed the wider threat to all humans the way airborne viruses do.

Nonetheless, people have been struck by flus out of Asia continually and the memory of the 18/19 pandemic remains.  SARS, another coronavirus, threatened to break out twice, once as SARS and then as SARS 2, both time seemingly having had bats as the animal host prior to humans.  Given that, it was only a matter of time.  With COVID 19 we ran out of time.  And with aircraft now the quick means of global transport, a global pandemic was inevitable.

But at the same time, non viruses is as scary or lethal as they once were, COVID 19 notwithstanding.  It's a bad disease, but we have anti virals, which we didn't in 18/19,  and the knowledge on viruses is vastly superior to what it was even as recently as the early 1970s, thanks to the tragedy of AIDS.  Indeed, at one time physicians believed that the AIDS virus, due to research on it, would result in the end of the "common cold", the Coronavirus.

AIDS didn't', but the Coronavirus will help do so.  People won't want to ever repeat this and, moreover, the study taps and money taps are rolling along.

This will be it.

2.  The declining value of office space.

One of the things about big changes that occur during war is that they were often trends prior them.

Not always, by any means, but quote often.

It'd be usual here to give the example of women in the workplace, which is commonly cited to have come about due to World War Two. We don't accept that thesis here, however, as long term readers know and, moreover, sa the statistics demonstrate.  So we'll eschew that example other that to note that both World War One and World War Two saw women in manufacturing and industrial roles that they didn't occupy, only to have those roles return to normal after the war.  If anything, we can argue that the examples of both wars acclimated people to women in the workplace, but it's a poor example.

Health insurance would be a better example.

Health insurance was a thing a century ago, but very few Americans as a rule had it, and if they did, it was unlikely to have been provided through their employer.  Indeed, it was a lot more likely, if they received any kind of health benefit from their employer, and few did, that they worked for a company that had a company doctor.  Many mining companies, for example, employed a company doctor.

This changed during World War Two when the government froze wages.  The government's goal, sensibly enough, was to deter inflation in an overheated job market.  But as benefits were not frozen, and health insurance could be purchased by manufacturers as a benefit for employees, employers began to do that in order to entice employees to move from one company to another.  And hence, the era of government sponsored health insurance arrived.  And it's been with us every since, although to a declining level in recent years.

This is, of course, an example of Fifth Law of History, as well as the law of unintended results. That is, this is one of the things the Second World War changed forever (and it changed health care, we might note, in the UK as well, but in a different manner), as well as being an unintended result of a law designed to achieve something else. The government wanted to freeze wages in wartime as a hedge against inflation, employers wanted to lure employees from other firms to theirs, and nobody had thought of health insurance much before that.

That may not be the best example, but it is an example, and there are many other such things we could point to.  World War One and World War Two, for example, accelerated blag migration from the South to the North, as jobs opened up, changing the demographic landscape of the country forever.  The Second World War, as we've explored before, brought 4x4 trucks to the showroom floor, and that in turn brought them out to the ranches, and that in turn meant that fewer year around cowboys were needed.  You get the picture.

Indeed, the last example might be the best one for our purposes here.  Prior to the Second World War ranches had already evolved into largely family run businesses, but most ranches of any size continued to employ a few cowhands year around.  Usually one or two of those hands lived in remote camps, in the Rocky Mountain Region, all winter long, to maintain operations, as needed, and watch for stray cattle, in the high country.

It isn't as if there were no 4x4 vehicles before the war.  Indeed, they were coming on during the 1930s in a recognizable, but very specialized, form.  The war changed that, and that in turn changed how people, including ranchers, but certainly not just them, went to the backcountry. And for quite a few people, that changed how they were employed.

There's something like that going on now.  For at least twenty years there's been a move toward telecommuting and in some industries its very advanced.  In the insurance industry, for example it is, and normally commercial insurance adjusters work out of their homes and cover regions distant from where they live.  It's gone seamlessly.  The companies have headquarters, but most people who work for the company don't work in them.

While exactly how it will develop cannot be really accurately foreseen now, what does seem to me to be clear is that a lot of office managers are looking at companies that are largely keeping on keeping on right now in spite of most of their key employees working from home.  Those managers are now wondering why they're leasing an expensive floor in a downtown office building in, let's say, Denver, when they could reduce that space by a tenth, keep their server there, and maybe have a few employees and a conference room instead.

It's already been noted in this crisis that companies save money when workers can (effectively) telecommute.  If that proves to be the case, the longer this matter goes on, the larger the percentage of the workforce that will never come back downtown to the office will be. And as that occurs, the smaller the need for large office spaces will be.

View of my office, through my computer's webcam, with me not there and elsewhere.

And the offshoots and consequences of this are too vast to be really be fully grasped, but may only be hinted at, now.

If firms that occupy, for example, entire floors of downtown Denver high rises determine that they can get by with just a meeting room and a computer server room, and maybe a few other feet of office space, what does that do for the rental of that office space, other than to drive the price down? And if two hundred people on one floor from one firm became ten, what does that do to the restaurants, bars and the like downtown?

And what does it do for working conditions for those who make this shift?  Already we live in a world of increasing social isolation, as books like Bowling Alone have pointed out.  This shift really began in the 1950s when television kept quite a few people in their homes who previously socialized somewhat more, and often a lot more, outside of their homes prior to that. An entire nation effectively started becoming a nation of "home bodies".  Now a big part of it is becoming a nation of hermits.

3.  The New and Old Patterns of Life Reverse

As this occurs, some interesting and old patterns of life are suddenly reemerging.  Prior to industrialization, a lot of people lived and worked at home.  Indeed, almost everyone did, save for those who were employed in some outside enterprise for somebody else, who were generally relatively few in number.

Today we tend to think of only family farms like that, but that pattern of living was once very broad.  Skilled tradesmen operated out of shops that were part of their homes.  Doctors often practiced out of a part of their room dedicated to that purpose.  Lawyers often did the same.  Clergymen almost always lived in a house that was ancillary to their church, if they were full time clergymen.  Most people lived and worked with their families, and the modern lifestyle of having a home life and a separate work life, and trying to achieve a "work life balance" didn't exist. . . there was only life.

Now, due to the evolution of telecommuting, which has now been much reinforced by quarantines, a lot of people are getting an exposure to the old pattern of living.  Those making work calls today can often hear children in the background, or cats and dogs for that matter.  Those logging into work conferences via Skype, Zoom and the like are seeing the background of a person's apartment or house, rather than their office.  And spouses and pets are likely to wonder through the scene.

Of course, that doesn't apply to everyone equally and indeed its not equal among all by any means.  Those people who are single and who have perhaps relished that status, or more likely accommodated themselves to the rootless modern pattern of singleness, now find themselves profoundly alone.  There's no workplace social action, no workplace or singles hangouts after work, no . . . well no anything.  And therefore suddenly the old reasons for some things existing are amplified and resurgent.  People who formerly took a break from their desks and went out to the water cooler or coffee machine, if they're married, likely go upstairs or downstairs to the coffee maker or refrigerator.  Those formerly glorified singles might do the same, but there's nobody there when they go there. That now looms as potentially permanent.

4. We're all in Rear Window Now

On top of that, in an odd sort of way, certain social relationships are rapidly changing, and perhaps for the good in some ways, and in others whose positives and negatives are yet to be seen, but which are none the less there.

In other words, we're all in Rear Window now.

Rear Window, for those who haven't seen it, and if you haven't' seen it you should, involves an international news photographer who has a badly broken leg and who is therefore spending a hot, pre air conditioning, 1954 New York summer confined to his apartment. While we're lead to believe that the photographer is well known in his field and a success. . he's dating a glamorous socialite played by Grace Kelly, he none the less lives in an apartment that's small and fairly spartan.

Just like a lot of fairly successful middle class people do right now.

Coming in 1954, the film came before television caused the massive social isolation that we have now.  Indeed, while the entire film takes place in the protagonist's apartment, he lacks a television.  And as he spends a lot of time looking out hsi "rear window" into the apartments of his neighbors, we know that they do as well.  Radios play a role, but that's it, home entertainment wise.

Now, the point here isn't that we're all cooped up now like Jimmy Stewart's L. B. Jefferies, even though that would be a good point. No, the point is that the social leveling of our individual status is pretty obvious now, and its having a big impact.

For the first time in a long time, and indeed maybe since there were silent movie stars, the public is disgusted by being lectured or even cheered by celebrities.  After quarantines were imposed a lot of stars took to the net to show how they were sharing our burdens. . . but they aren't, and that's obvious.  One extremely well known and well liked entertainment figure posted scenes from backyard home quarantine, in a palatial backyard, and received a comment back "We hate you" from a viewer, something that the New York Times picked up on a article on the topic. And for the first time ever people have lined up to trash Ellen Degeneres, who has had a sort of protected star status, with claims that she's rude to common servants that she employs in one way or another.

Is Ellen rude?  I have no idea and I don't even care, but the fact is that the common people now know that they're common and they're sick to death of celebrity twits.

Will this feeling last?  I don't know, but I hope it does.  If average Americans started falling back into themselves and approached their culture in that fashion, rather than being told how to act, and that's largely badly, by celebrities, that'd be a massively good thing coming out of a really horrific thing.

Along these lines, the differences between the haves and the have nots has been sharpened, and that is almost certain to cause developments in American life and society going forward.

A massive number of Americans who were doing fine a month ago are now out of work.  At the same time, leaders in society of one kind or another who are well off, are urging the country to shut down.  Perhaps their urgings are correct, but when Bill Gates, who has no expertise in infectious disease argues the country to go home, who doesn't have to worry about paying his mortgage.  Lots of other people do.

That doesn't make Bill a bad guy by any means, but what is very noticable is that a sharp social divide is opening up between those who have guaranteed incomes and those who do not, and most people don't.  The country is enduring lectures from those wanting everything shut in when many of those same people could spend the entire quarantine period still drawing their income, still getting their income direct deposited, and not really have to do anything for the duration.  People who are living paycheck to paycheck, however, and who are now not getting paychecks, look at things differently.

This divide was already pretty wide before this happened, but it's going to be huge now.  It oddly breaks as an issue right and left, including with some of the same people who look to the right and the left for answers.  Concerns of this type are what helped propel Donald Trump into the Oval Office and are also what nearly made Bernie Sanders the Democratic nominee (assuming he doesn't become that) twice.   And it also helps explain why a guy who lives in that world doesn't care that much about what the "liberal elite", as they imagine it, have to say.

At this point how these issues develop is an unknown.  People who right now are angered by celebrities might resume following the escapades and taking the advice of Pop Tarts as soon as this is over.  And it might not impact long term social views much.  But it might.  People who cared a few weeks ago about what some thin morally bankrupt chanteuse might have to say about something might never care again, and might instead listen a lot more to standbys and locals whom they respect.  And those who vote for the extremes might be more interested in doing so now than ever, irrespective of what their self designated demographic leaders might have to tell them about anything.

5. Trusting science?

One of the people you haven't been hearing from recently is dirty magazine model Jenny McCarthy, who managed to parlay a career based on prostituting her image into a campaign against vaccinations.

That people followed a twit like McCarthy in the first place is astounding.  You wouldn't walk into a local "massage parlor" for medical advice, but McCarthy's fame in the first instance was based on something that's basically in the same neighborhood. But, in fairness, she was only a well known large chested voice in a crowd of people who eschewed science.

All of a sudden real scientists are really being listened to.  On the national level, diminutive Dr. Anthony Fauci towers over every other figure in the government and is listed to more than anyone.  In local regions around the country, local medical experts are now listed to very closely.

It's easy to forget that public attitudes on certain professions can and do change very quickly.  Prior to World War Two, for example, soldiers were looked down upon in American society for being lazy.  When the war came, in converted the public image of soldiers into common men heroes, epitomized by Rockwell's Doby Gillis.  In the latter stages of the Vietnam War that view changed again and soldiers were again despised, perhaps best summed up by the late 1960s song Universal Soldier, which blamed soldiers themselves for war. Veterans of the Vietnam War were looked upon as dangerous drug addicts and many keep their service secret.  But then again, suddenly it changed, and they became heroes once again.

That's an extreme example, but something sort of like it has happened to science and scientists.  During the 1960s scientists were societal heroes, a view fueled in no small part due to the Cold War, but not exclusively due to that.  Medical advances during the Great Depression, when the Public Health Service had been very active, and during World War Two, combined to lead to great leaps in fighting infectious disease that were admired and adopted society wide.  The very few people who didn't receive vaccinations as children, in school, at the time didn't receive them for religious regions and were frankly regarded with deep suspicion.

Then something happened in the 1990s and science became suspect.  This seems to have come about due to the latter stages of regulations on health, safety and the environment, all of which were deeply and widely supported at first. And then in some fields science made some gaffs, which of course is common in every field of human endeavor.  In recent years one of the things that has lead to is the wide practice of folk medicine and the adoption of dubious medical advice and beliefs from people who aren't qualified to render advice on anything. That's unfortunately been supported by some popular figures with actual medical training who have given fringe advice.

Suddenly, now, that's over.  People are listening to real doctors again and even one of the popular fringe ones was basically told to shut the @#$@#$ up in print by a national news outlet the other day.

Science is back.

6.  A more rational approach on politicians?

Huey Long addressing the Senate.

People have always had a love/hate relationship with politicians but in recent years, as things have become more polarized, the degree to which people are manic fans of a politician or manic opponents of one has become extreme. That seems to have suddenly died down.

Right now everyone pretty much is aware that Trump can't waive a magic wand and make Coronavirus go away and for that matter Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders can't either.  That doesn't make anyone's handling of the situation or their suggested approach perfect.  Both Biden and Sanders spent some time early in the pandemic suggesting that had they been President, things would have gone differently, but by now, nobody with a grasp on the situation believes that in any substantive form.  He could make it worse, of course, but nobody is even really sure of the parameters of that right now other than that he could flat out ignore the recommendations of his advisors which so far he hasn't done.  Trump, for the first time, seems to be really following what his advisors recommend, even while sending out conflicting messages.  In the meantime, real fan boys from New York are busy giving Governor Cuomo the thumbs up and praising him, but to outsiders he's just another loud New York politician in a field seemingly full of them.

Again, we don't want to suggest that this make the Coronavirus a good thing.  It doesn't. But it does seem to be waking up some realization that none of these guys is perfect and expecting them to solve everything is asking a bit much.

Indeed, while there's been little note of it, the fact that state Governors have stepped up to the plate is interesting and in fact means that things are basically operating, federalism wise, exactly how they are supposed to be.

7.  Big Government

At the same time that local governments have been stepping up to the plate, suddenly everyone is okay with really huge government.  Indeed, it's been stunning to see how quickly do people not only accept it, but demand it.

The size of the U.S. government grew continually in the first half of the 20th Century with very little to impede it other than custom and, briefly, the United States Supreme Court.  Theodore Roosevelt expanded it by fiat, believing strongly in a big government, and then World War One expanded it, followed by the Red Scare. Following the Great Depression and World War Two ballooned it in ways never before imagined, and that was followed by the Cold War which made it seem necessary to keep on keeping on with a very large Federal government.

Starting in the 1980s there came to be a lot of questions about this, however, and Ronald Reagan campaigned on scaling the government back. That became the successful Republican mantra for years thereafter, right up to the election of Donald Trump, who promised to dismantle massive portions of the Federal government.  And in fact a lot has indeed been taken down since the 1980s.

Now its roaring back and nobody is protesting it.

The thing about an expansion of the government's role is that, while it can later deflate again, it never does completely, so there's never a return to the status quo ante.  When government gets bigger, it stays bigger than it had been before the event triggering that, even if it doesn't remain as large as it became.

But another way, the role of the Federal Government did decrease after World War Two, but it never returned to its pre October 1929 level.  We're seeing an enormous expansion of the government's role right now. When this crisis is over, that role will decrease again, but it won't decrease to January 2019 levels, most likely.


7.  The Bloom is off of the Chinese Red Rose

For an extremely long time, indeed dating back well over a century, there's been a cultural rule that China is not to be criticized.  Indeed, even when there was really deep concerns about Chinese Communism and what that might mean in the Cold War, generally people were reluctant to really criticize China too directly.

There's no reason for this but the Chinese have picked up on it and have routinely used it, going into snits when any one or any government points any kind of accusatory finger at them.  To make matters more pronounced, the Chinese have occasionally drawn out their role as recent history victim to quiet some opposition occasionally, as in pointing out Imperial Japan's brutality against Nationalist China or the steadfast American opposition to China during the Cold War.  In the meantime China's Communist thugocracy has sponsored the theft of technology around the world, engaged in unfair trade practices, practiced a type of industrial slavery at home, and generally acted like we'd expect a surprisingly efficient, but brutal, dictatorship to act.

The Coronavirus Pandemic has changed something in this and people feel really free to criticize the Chinese regime and the practices it engaged in and allows at home for the first time.  The Chinese themselves are reeling from it.  Critics have pointed out that Chinese market practices gave rise to the pandemic and the typical Chinese response of "how dare you criticize us" has fallen dead flat.  People are criticizing them and criticizing their inability to take criticism, and it doesn't stop there.

In Australia politicians are calling for a reassessment of the Australian economic and political relationship with China.  In the U.S. the long claims that the American economy would fail without China have proven to be false. The American economy is faltering, but it's not due to China, unless we go into the Chinese wet market origins of the virus.  American manufacturing, long thought more or less dead, has suddenly shown itself to be a lot more capable of responding to a crisis than anyone would have imagined.

When this is over China is not going to hold its old special status of a nation whose culture is protected from criticism and its government not to be strongly criticized.  The Chinese people, for their part, would like a lot more leeway ind criticizing their government themselves and its really not clear what the virus means for the Chinese Communist Party.  That party has claimed success in combating the virus but there's good reason to doubt its veracity on about anything and the methods it used were brutal.  This may turn out to be a watershed moment for the Chinese government itself, and it will be one in terms of how outsiders engage China.

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.