We've all heard the phrase 'The Greatest Generation'. That was popularized by Tom Brokaw by way of his book titled The Greatest Generation. It applied to the generation that fought in World War II. It specifically applied to the men in the trenches, more than the older generations who were the high ranking officers, commanders and world leaders of the war. Though I don't recall actual WW2 veterans referring to themselves that way, the phrase took off and was elevated by Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and that brief wave of patriotism following the 9/11 attacks.
But I'd like us to consider the Worst Generation. If we have the greatest, then we must have the worst. And I don't mean those rascally Baby Boomers who get blamed for everything. Or Generation X, Y, Z, or whatever.
By Worst Generation I mean - you probably guessed it - the WW2 Generation. Yep, the same one labeled the Greatest and cheered by many, including most to the right of center, has some explaining to do, as far as I'm concerned. Oh sure, they won the battle of WW2. Even the most sympathetic appraisal, however, suggests they turned right around and lost the war for the civilization that they fought WW2 to preserve.
Why? What went wrong? How could such a storied, celebrated, successful, courageous, and beloved generation fail so miserably after winning so decisively? I don't know. I'm sure it would take more than a blog post or even entire blog to unpack what went so horribly wrong. But it is impossible not to see that, within their lifetime and under their watch, the civilization they inherited is well on its way to oblivion, thanks in part to the time under their watch.
Again, I have my hunches. But it would take a book at least, not merely a post or two. Nonetheless, it's time to be honest. They failed and failed miserably at the main task of any generation, and that's preserving their inheritance to be passed on to their posterity. Long before those eager Boomers took over in the 80s (and have yet to let go), you could see the foundations crumbling and the barbarians climbing the gates.
I'm certainly open to suggestion about how and why they dropped the ball. But it's time to admit these problems didn't just begin with Vatican II, or the arrival of The Beatles, or even those rascally Marxist Communists In the latter case, their goals were merely aided by what developed in the years and decades following the WWII generation's greatest, yet brief, accomplishment.
(Tom New Poster)
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of them thought things would just "go back to normal" after 1945, forgetting how radically society changed after WWI (more evident in more secular, urbanized and devastated Europe than in more religious, rural and untouched America of the 1920s). The Depression and WWII froze some of those changes and restored a veneer of "conservatism", but peacetime and unparalleled prosperity let them loose again. I think a lot of war-weary and formerly hungry folks just got tired and didn't pay attention to things like the degradation of entertainment, the hypnotic power of television and such. They were too busy rebuilding lives after 15 years of hard times that they were determined to spare their own children. If everything seems "normal" to you and you're working for a living you miss stuff. The rot began in the universities (as it had in Europe) and if you had no such education how would you know the first signs?
For Catholics I blame our clergy, for they had the education to recognize things the average Joe would not see so easily. They were too complacent with the material success of parishes and schools in those days and failed to see the creeping rot in their seminaries and rise in divorce rates among lay people, and many who did respond used the tone of old episcopal autocrats of another era, rather than grapple the issues with a mastery of modern language and ideas the way Fulton Sheen managed.
I think those are excellent points. Ironically, those rascally Boomers had a point. I've read many over the years from that period who said they were rejecting the hyper-materialism that had emerged. That suddenly happiness was all about the biggest house and car and vacation rang hollow with them. Their problem was that they recognized the issue, then ran in the worst direction with the reaction. But I heard more than one WW2 vet over the years say their biggest mistake was spoiling their kids. I fear that is the legacy.
DeleteI agree.
ReplyDeleteThey simply failed to pass on the faith. To be pro-active in leading the domestic church and teaching their children the good, the true, and the beautiful. They went on "cruise-control", not caring that they believed nothing more was needed of them. Most importantly, they thought winning the war was enough, when raising children fortified of their inheritance was by far exceedingly more important than "beating the Nazis", as important that it was, it paled in comparison to the raising of children.
Reading the book "Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America" by Steve Kellmeyer, was really eye opening to me. It makes the case Catholics in America were essentially trained by the Church here to assimilate to the culture and to leave the religious education to the "professionals." And they did! My MIL (daughter of the above mentioned generation) just commented recently, after an extended family gathering, how they never did anything faith wise in the home. No praying the rosary, no night prayers... nothing. And this would be considered a relatively "faithful" family that produced nuns! (Although, of the four girl cousins that went into the convent, 2 eventually came out of it.)
DeleteThat, too, is a good point. Though you look back at the 1920s and before, you wonder just how strong the Faith was by that point. Yes,, we all know that unlike Europe, when the Depression hit, Americans rushed back to church and you had this idea of what some back in the day called America's last Great Awakening. But it seemed one of necessity, and once the crisis was over in 1945, it was back to sleeping in on Sundays and working to get that bigger home.
DeleteYes, my understanding was that the faith was already weaking by the 1920s, i.e., just see the decadence in the "Roaring Twenties" crowd. This may well have started in the 1870s, but I have still to finish, or even start, reading on that era and their faith. WWI sure did wipe out a whole generation of French and German Catholics that had an outsized effect of the rising nihilism in the aftermath.
DeleteHeck, just look at the nose art on some of those planes in the war. Not exactly Bible study level artwork. And not only the racy cultural developments, I remember seeing a blog post some years ago featuring that famous Norman Rockwell painting of the dad slouched in his armchair with the newspaper while his well dressed family goes to church. Apparently, 'dad skips church' was a subject for editorials well back to the early 1900s and before. That post had several magazine covers showing similar things well before WW1. So it was a long time in the building, it just seems to have boiled over after WW2. Perhaps because, as my son says, the whole world suffered from a sort of global PTSD after the war that we have yet to grasp, and that instability just made what happened all the easier.
DeleteI sometimes wonder how much of it was a functional nihilism due to the experience of modern warfare and the use of the atom bomb. WWI did Europe in first, but I think WWII brought it to the States in a more real and widespread way.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of those nasty unspokens. We sometimes think all the criticism and attacks on the US and how it waged the war came from those Boomer war protester types. It didn't. When you see the books, movies, TV shows and others that really rip into our government, military, how we won the war and all, it's as often as not from guys who stormed the beaches. I read an article years ago that touched on what you said. The sheer scope and heartless nature of mass industrialized warfare had a chilling effect on those who survived. As if they looked back and realized they were expendable. They were less important than the battleships, B-17s and tanks they were in. Though that's not necessarily fair, it was wondered if that nonethelss became a belief that shaped that generation's willingness to accept the worst of hte country they fought so hard to preserve.
DeleteI mused on John Wright's page the other day that you could look at both world wars as massive evolutionary events we probably can't begin to grasp still. I also recall Jordan B Peterson once saying that in his experience, the worst sufferers of PTSD are those men who were forced to do evil they never thought they were capable of.
DeleteThis is certainly not to speak ill of my grandparents who I think did as good a job as can be expected to raise my parents (and then help them raise us grand kids), but I am saying there are probably multiple factors that we can look at it and see... well a generation who wondered what they were fighting or dying for. Maybe a generation that saw the horrors and began to question if the West was worth saving.
(Tom New Poster)
DeleteIn all this talk about the price of the wars and "whether the West is worth saving", could we cast an eye to the death camps, gulags and lao gai and consider what it would have meant to lose to cold, vicious totalitarian governments?
Oh I quite agree with you, Tom. I'm just speculating on their feelings. Given what we did see communism put the places it controlled through, I am very grateful every day that my grandfathers fought.
Delete(Tom New Poster)
DeleteNate: I just don't like to see folks start down the path of some 60-70s progressives who tried to see the US and USSR as "equivalent" and said as late as the mid-80s that we could learn from "some aspects" of Soviet socialism. Fascism too had its admirers in the 20-30s (an attraction even Chesterton could understand as late as 1929, though he never fell for it). I could call it a sort of Bonapartism: our society is so messy and bad, and here's this real charismatic tough guy and he's got new ideas and way-cool uniforms and stuff, etc. So we compare the evil we see in front of us with a theoretical society that does not exist or a real society hidden behind barbed wire and a fawning and ignorant mass media.
My sons said that in college, it isn't a stretch to say about 1/3 of their peers believe the Soviet Union was the good guy in the Cold War. They even ran into students who believe WW2 was just a giant conspiracy by America's military industrial complex. Not that Hitler was some American agent (though a recent documentary by Ken Burns apparently draws some pretty thick lines to America where responsibility for the Holocaust is concerned). But America made sure Hitler could Hitler, and Japan could Japan, so we would sweep in and make bank off military industrial production and set ourselves up to rule the world. Whatever the WW2 generation believed would happen due to their own postwar actions and lack of actions, I doubt it was that a few generations down the road would see them, and not Imperial Japan or the SS, as the true bad guys on the block.
DeleteI don't think they were thinking about civilization. They knew they did something righteous and worthwhile, at least in Europe, and that their society was better than Communism. I think it was more a collapse of faith. After witnessing such horror I think many guys wondered where God was in all of that, just like Europe experienced in WWI. And when you remove belief in God, the fallout of that... well, that's what we are all seeing the fruits of.
DeleteAs we said above, it isn't difficult to notice that much of what was coming out of our culture by time was Bible study fare. I had a professor who called the 1930s America's last Great Awakening. While Europe gave up on itself after the carnage of WW1, America hadn't experienced that. When the Great Depression hit, it was back to church. In an odd twist, our homicide rates also began to decline and would remain relatively low until the mid-1960s. But this was just a calm before the storm. Once WW2 was over, it seems the whole world was hit with that PTSD. And part of that included America jumping in with where Europe had already been.
Deleteforgetting how radically society changed after WWI
ReplyDelete==
There was some new technology (commercial radio broadcasting), some extant technology more prevalent (telephones, refrigerators, automobiles), the beginnings of an absolute decline in the census of people making a living from farming (rather than just a decline in the proportion of people making such a living), an increase in the ratio of divorces to extant marriages (a process which had been ongoing for decades at that point), a certain coarsening of the culture (tabloid newspapers), the advent of jazz as the preferred mode of popular music, the advent of crappy contemporary art, and changes in styles of women's dress. This last was about the only thing that was both common and radical. (Some modifications in women's clothing were desirable). There were two elements operating in the other direction: reduced use of intoxicants and reduced social disruption from immigration.
Those are some great points. I've thought on some of them. It's interesting the mention of jazz. I wonder how you're connecting that one. Not that I would disagree that it's significant, but I'd be interested to see how you're unpacking that one. But the points are made, that this is something a long time coming. We're just getting to the final act I fear.
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