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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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*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.
