"Ours was the best generation," Gene Shuford said of the late 1920s, contrasting his circle with Lost Generation Malcolm Cowley's. "Underneath we really thought we were all right; that man in general was all right." Within a few years, Shuford's "best" found themselves part of what Harper's Magazine described as the "Locked-Out Generation" of the Great Depression, "all dressed up with no place to go."36
Even so, the youth spirit stayed high. With its emphasis on planning, optimism, and collective action, Roosevelt's New Deal perfectly suited the mind-set of twentyish men and women. The National Youth Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps kept them busy (2.5 million wore the CCC forest green uniform): marching in formation, never complaining, getting things done, building things that worked, things that have lasted to this day.37
When President Roosevelt reshuffled the economic deck in favor of the aggressive young over the positioned old, polls showed God running behind FDR in popularity among youths. "I promise as a good American citizen to do my part for the NRA," chanted 100,000 young people on Boston Common in 1933 (at the urging of James Curley, the city's Missionary mayor). "I will help President Roosevelt bring back good times." (By the way,NRA stands for National Recovery Administration, not National Rifle Association.)38
But the sluggish economy deferred many a career and marriage, prompting rising student interest in an "apple-pie radicalism" more economic than cultural or moral. Even the most committed ideologues agreed with their FDR-backing peers that the main argument was over what system "worked" best. One young communist bulletin defended its members as "no different from other people except that we believe in dialectical materialism."39
Collective action flourished, especially among unionizing young workers in assembly-line industries. In the winter and spring of 1936-1937, nearly half a million engaged in sit-down strikes, prodded by the new Greatest-dominated Congress of Industrial Organizations.40
The Greatest's adult height rose over that of their next-elders by over one inch. Raised on pasteurized milk, safely packaged foods, and "vitamins," coming-of-age Greatest did indeed appear to Missionary and Lost elders as the brawny, world-moving youths shown in WPA (Works Progress Administration) murals.41
From Charles Lindbergh's autobiographical We to Mary McCarthy's The Group, the 1930s became, for budding writers and artists, what historian Warren Susman labeled "the decade of participation and belonging." While the best-known Lost Generation heroes were individuals (Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle), the enduring Greatest heroes have been collective (the flag raisers at Iwo Jima, the Boys of D-Day, the Seabees). Knute Rockne and George Gipp were Lost, the "Four Horsemen" Greatest. Young novelists such as John Steinbeck (in Grapes of Wrath) shunned the Lost Generation cynicism and instead looked forward to solving problems, especially with the aid of big government. In 1938, 37-year-old Walt Disney released a smash box-office hit, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which featured innocent maidenhood and cheerful male teamwork ("whistle while you work") defeating the designs of a brooding witch. Lost critic Westbrook Pegler praised the film as "the happiest thing that has happened in this world since the Armistice." But another Lost writer, Sinclair Lewis, suggested in It Can't Happen Here how fascism could indeed "happen here" if this new youth mood ever burst its harness.42
So, we enter World War II. The movie From Here to Eternity portrays prewar soldiers evolving into the selfish "lone wolves" despised by most 20-year-olds. Then Japan attacks--and, instantly, the soldiers forget their personal feuds and rally together into machinelike action. That is indeed what Pearl Harbor did for this generation, galvanizing "good kid" ingot into G.I. steel. While Greatest scientists in their late thirties designed the atomic bomb, marines in their twenties swarmed ashore, soon followed by the bulldozers of the Seabees. (Their motto: "The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer.") Nearly half of all Greatest men wore a military uniform in wartime--the highest proportion for any American generation. Like-aged Rosie the Riveters comprised the only mostly female industrial workforce in the nation's history.43
The young generation repeatedly expressed admiration for the elders who were leading them to victory. Roosevelt was "the man we had grown up under," said Yank Magazine of the Missionary "Commander in Chief, not only of the armed forces, but of our generation." While Mary Martin sang My Heart Belongs to Daddy, Bing Crosby marched with his combat buddies to the tune of "We'll follow the old man wherever he wants to go."44
In the public eye, these kids in khaki could do no wrong. The Lost Generation General Patton's famous slap of a younger soldier caused a huge fuss back home largely because of disbelief that a G.I. might have had it coming.
World War II killed 1.5 percent of Greatest men; among the 97 percent who emerged from the war years without serious injury, the experience gave men the chance (as Margaret Mead later put it) to "experience dangers that would test their mettle . . . among their peers." Many would never again know such responsibility, excitement, or triumph. Emerging as world conquerors, they laid claim to a heroism that, later in life, would blossom into a sense of entitlement.45