Members of the civic-minded Greatest Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1901 and 1924; the youngest of that generation could be expected to play a part on the world's stage until about 2004.1 Their parents were either the last wave of the idealist Missionary Generation or the first wave of the reactive Lost Generation, who nurtured them in a tightening way.
They grew up as increasingly protected youths after a spiritual awakening (the Missionary Awakening at the end of the Nineteenth Century), came of age overcoming a secular crisis (the Great Depression and World War II), united into a heroic and achieving cadre of rising adults, sustained that image while building institutions as powerful midlifers, and emerged as busy elders attacked by the next spiritual awakening (the Boom Awakening of the 1960s and 1970s). The Greatest Generation (of the Hero archtype in the Great Power Saeculum, or Cycle) developed a special and good-kid reputation as the beneficiares of new playgrounds, scouting clubs, vitamins, and child-labor restrictions. They came of age with the sharpest rise in schooling ever recorded. As young adults, their uniformed corps patiently endured the Great Depression and heroically conquered foreign enemies in World War II. In a midlife subsidized by the G.I. Bill, they built gleaming suburbs and interstate highways, invented miracle vaccines, plugged missile gaps, and launched moon rockets. Their unprecedented grip on the Presidency began with a New Frontier, a Great Society, and Model Cities, but wore down through Vietnam, Watergate, deficits, and problems with "the vision thing." As senior citizens, they safeguarded their own "entitlements" but had little influence over culture and values.2
With his triumphant transatlantic flight in 1927, 25-year-old Charles Lindburgh heralded the arrival of a new and very special crop of young adults. Landing in Paris, the adopted home of exiled Lost Generation intellectuals, "Lucky Lindy" didn't seem one bit alienated or debauched. President Coolidge dispatched a naval cruiser to bring home the young pilot--to 18,000 tons of confetti, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and the first-ever designation as an "all-American hero." Dutifully modest about his exploits, he startled (and pleased) elders by turning down lucrative movie offers. A decade later, Lindy's Depression-era peers were busy planting trees and building dams and bridges--and, a few years after that, Missionary General George Marshall praised the Greatest Generation as "the best damned kids in the world."3
When these "kids" became America's first astronauts, younger generations hailed their "right stuff," U.S. News and World Report their "fearless but not reckless" manner. John Kennedy declared his generation's commitment to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. And they did, in what Eric Hoffer proclaimed "the triumph of the squares."4
Throughout their lives, these Greatest were America's confident and rational problem solvers: victorious soldiers and Rosie the Riveters; Nobel laureates; makers of Minuteman missiles, interstate highways, Apollo rockets, battleships, and miracle vaccines; the creators of Disney's Tomorrowland; "men's men" who have known how to get things done. Whatever they accomplished--whether organizing "big bands," swarming ashore in Normandy, or making "Bible Epic" movies, they always seemed to do it big, to do it together. Among Greatest G.I.s, says the inscription on their Iwo Jima shrine, "uncommon valor was a common virtue."
From first wave to last, the Greatest were a generation of trends--always in directions most people (certainly their Missionary elders) thought for the better: lower rates of suicide and crime, higher aptitudes, greater educational attainment, increased voter participation, and rising confidence in government.5
In his inaugural address, President Kennedy crisply defined his peers as "born in this century"--and, among this history-absorbed generation, many did perceive the Twentieth as "their" century. The Greatest first wave (Walt Disney, Arthur Godfrey, Ronald Reagan) had more of the jaunty optimists, the last wave (Lee Iacocca, George H.W. Bush [41], Lloyd Bentsen) more of the clean-cut rationalists.6
Several scholars have suggested that the 1900 birthyear represents what Leonard Cain calls a "generational watershed." Cain documents how the children born just after 1900 were much more "favored" than those born just before--in families, schools, and jobs--and how that favored treatment led to important personality differences that lasted a lifetime.7
First-wave Greatest were truly "special" kids who grew up in the most carefully shaped of Twentieth Century childhoods, thanks to Missionary parents determined to produce kids as good as the Lost Generation had been bad. From youth to old age, the babies of the century's first decade commanded the admiration (and generosity) of older and younger generations. They became America's first Boy and Girl Scouts--and, a half-century later, America's first "senior citizens."8
At the other boundary, the babies of 1923 and 1924 were just old enough to be drafted, trained, and shipped to Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima in time to join in the heaviest fighting; those born a year or two later (the first wave of the Silent Generation) were in line to fight battles that never came. That too produced personality differences that lasted a lifetime. World War II provided last-wave Greatest with a coming-of-age slingshot, a catharsis more heroic and empowering than any since the American Revolution. Where World War I had cheated the optimism of youth, this war rewarded it--and implanted an enduring sense of civic virtue and entitlement.
The combination of "good-kid" first-wavers and heroic last-wavers produced a generation of enormous economic and political power, what Henry Malcolm describes as a generation of "Prometheus and Adam"--a generation, as one admirer said of James Reston, that always shared an "implicit belief in progress and in the central role of great men."9
The unstoppable energy of the Greatest is well characterized in their most enduring comic strip character: Superman. Conceived by two thirtyish cartoonists, Superman became famous just before their Greatest peers entered World War II and themselves began showing "powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men." Everything about the Superman story reads like a parable of Greatest on the move--the special child, the corrupt older (Lost Generation) Lex Luthor, the rocklike manliness and Formica-like blandness, the unvarying success of Supermannish strength used for community good.10
Can poverty be eradicated, Model Cities built, business cycles tamed, Nazis and Communists beaten? Step aside, this is a job for Superpower America--and a generation willing, in Kennedy's words, to "bear any burden, pay any price" to accomplish whatever goal it sets. No other generation in the Twentieth Century felt (or was) so Promethean, so godlike in its collective, world-bending power.11
Nor was any so adept in its aptitude for science and engineering. The Greatest invented, perfected, and stockpiled the atomic bomb, a weapon so muscular it changed history forever. This intensely left-brained generation looked upon their Apollo 11 moon landing as (in Ayn Rand's words) "an embodied concretization of a single faculty of man: his rationality." Rand's peers became the consummate mid-Twentieth Century "technocrats" (a word then connoting unrivaled American competence).12
So too did they become the nation's greatest-ever economists, social engineers, and community planners, producing what Seymore Martin Lipset in 1960 termed "the shift away from ideology toward sociology." "What we need is a technology of behavior," urged B. F. Skinner, whose fictive utopia, Walden Two, epitomized his peers' lifelong (and entirely unThoreaulike) confidence that they could design and build their way to social bliss.13
Such a generation had little thirst for spiritual conversion, no need for transcending to a new consciousness. Their most influential new religion was L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology. Their most popular definition of God was the Deity of Isaac Singer who "speaks in deeds, in events." And their most enduring images of prophecy featured Billy Graham, America's first televangelist, or Chalton Heston throwing bolts of lightning before a cast of thousands. "We do not need American philosophers," remarked Daniel Boorstin in the late 1960s; to Greatest such as Boorstin, the ideology of America was "implicit in the American way of life."14
Valuing outer life over inner, the Greatest came of age preferring crisp sex-role definitions. Raised under the influence of the strongly pro-feminist Missionaries, the Greatest matured into a father-worshipping and heavily male-fixated generation. As rising adults, they came to disdain womanish influences on public life. "Gentlemen, mom is a jerk," wrote Philip Wylie in his best-selling Generation of Vipers, a book published in the same year (1942) that Army psychiatrists were themselves complaining how badly Army recruits had been overmothered in the years before the war.15
"It was suddenly discovered that the mother could be blamed for everything," Betty Friedan later recalled. After the war, Greatest-authored books such as Modern Woman: The Lost Sex and Educating Our Daughters launched what historian Carl Degler terms "a frontal assault on all feminist assumptions." Before Friedan defrocked the (mostly Greatest) "Feminine Mystique" in 1963, her male peers had succeeded in creating a Father Knows Best culture and a political vocabulary whose greatest "witchhunt" insults ("simpering," "cringing," "slobbering") were challenges against virility.16
The Greatest's rift with their own children arose, in substantial part, from the refusal of Boomer youths to accept the exaggerated masculinity of Greatest fathers. Even through the social calm of the 1980s, Greatest maleness rankled younger women, provoking a political "gender gap" that was more generational than partisan. Like Ronald Reagan, the classic Greatest man felt little guilt--and like John Kennedy, he believed that "a man does what he must."17
Consider their Hollywood honor roll: Bob Hope, John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Sidney Poitier, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck. Turn on the camera, let a Greatest be a Greatest, and--like Robert Mitchum's "Pug Henry" in Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance--he'll get the job done.
The alias for the Greatest Generation is G.I. Generation. The initials "G.I." can stand for two things--"general issue" and "government issue"--and this generation's lifecycle stood squarely for both. All their lives, the Greatest placed a high priority on being "general" or "regular" (as in "he's a regular guy"), since regularity is a prerequisite for being effective "team players." They developed this instinct young, building in high school and college what historian Paula Fass labels a "peer society"--a harmonious community of group-enforced virtue.18
As children, they were nurtured to believe that anything standardized and prepackaged was more likely to be wholesome. When they came of age, President Roosevelt remarked with delight how "the very objectives of young people have changed"; away from "the dream of the golden ladder--each individual for himself" and toward the dream of "a broad highway on which thousands of your fellow men and women are advancing with you."19
Later, Greatest collegialism energized America's V-for-victory wartime mood. Highways that had once teemed with frivolous auto traffic now channeled mile-long convoys of powerful, identical-looking military vehicles. After the war, the peer society reached its pinnacle in the postwar suburban society, with its "Wonder Bread" blandness, its "Spic and Span" kitchens, and its borrow-a-mower neighborliness.
While the Ozzies and Harriets were busy constructing the most conformist culture of the Twentieth Century, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy launched a purge of Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, and other Greatest who had earlier espoused a conformist ideology of the wrong (Soviet) variety. "Anticommunism" thus became a post--World War II bugaboo among a generation that, within itself, always had a strong collectivist reflex. Even during the McCarthy hearings, the Greatest on both sides of the table dressed in the same gray suits--and after each day's adjournment, no doubt went home to watch the same TV shows in houses Malvina Reynolds memorialized as "little boxes . . . made out of ticky-tacky/ And they all look just the same."20
Likewise, their personality carried a strong "government issue" flavor. The Greatest lifecycle showed an extraordinary association with the growth of modern government activity, much of it directed toward whatever phase of life they occupied. When the Greatest were young, government protected them from people that could hurt them. When they were coming of age, government gave them jobs. When they were rising adults, government provided them with numerous preferential advantages in education, employment, and family formation. When they were in midlife, they benefited from tax cuts and an economy run full throttle. When they reached elderhood, they received newly generous pensions and subsidized medical care--and gained more than others from deficit-laden financing schemes that pushed costs far into the future.
Not surprisingly, the Greatest always regarded government as their benefactor, almost like a buddy who has grown up right alongside them. They were what historian Joseph Goulden describes as "a generation content to put its trust in government and authority," a generation that instinctively abided by the will of the "community," what President Bush [41] described as "a beautiful word with big meaning." People of other ages always saw civic virtue in this generation--and, as a consequence, the Greatest were the beneficiary of an unmatched flow of payments and other kindnesses from people older and younger than they.21
Throughout the Greatest lifecycle, the federal government has directed its attention to whatever age bracket the Greatest have occupied. The childhood years of first-wave Greatest were marked by the first White House Conference on Children (1909), the creation of the U.S. Children's Bureau (1912), and the first federal child labor law (1916). The elder years of first-wave Greatest were marked by the first White House Conference on Aging (1967), the first federal age-discrimination law (1967), and the creation of the National Institute on Aging (1974). The entire modern growth in government spending has coincided with the duration of their adult lifecycle. When a Greatest born in 1910 turned 19, the federal government consumed less than 3 percent of the nation's economic product; when he reached 70, it consumed over 22 percent.22
The Greatest regarded their own civic-mindedness as proof of American exceptionalism, a belief (in the words of Daniel Bell) that "having been born free, America would in the trials of history get off scot free." Even in old age, this great generation of "doers" believed (like 73-year-old Ronald Reagan in 1985) that America always stood "on the threshold of a great ability to produce more, do more, be more."23
Whatever the Greatest together accomplished in the exercise of citizenship, they thought, must by definition be good for all generations. In this hubris came more than a little miscalculation and disappointment, in both public and family lives. But the Greatest never stopped trying to make things work. From "Lucky Lindy" to "Joltin' Joe," "Happy Hubert" to "the Teflon President," this generation spent a lifetime personifying the irrepressibility of modern America. "Despair comes hard to us," said Eda LeShan, "for it was unfamiliar in our growing."24
None can match the Greatest for knowing how to Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive--for better or worse. In 1988, when 80-year-old physicist Edward Teller testified in support of the Strategic Defense Initiative, younger congressmen asked him whether "Star Wars" would in fact work as intended. This Greatest father of the H-bomb testily answered the nitpickers: "Let me plead guilty to the great crime of optimism."25
Here is a table of contents for a deeper exploration of the Greatest Generation's lifecycle:
Birthyears for the Greatest Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation