"A good job, a mild future, and a little house big enough for me and my wife." That was the ambition of a homecoming G.I. in The Best Years of Our Lives. Not since the Revolution had war veterans enjoyed such praise and tangible reward from appreciative elders. Thanks to the "G.I. Bill," two of every five 1950-era dollars of outstanding housing debt were covered by taxpayers, many of them older and living in housing worse than what young veterans would buy. Capital spending and real wages for young men boomed--while payroll deductions to support Social Security retirees remained miniscule.46
The Greatest experienced the "American Dream" of upward mobility and rising home ownership more than any other generation in the Twentieth Century, and perhaps ever. Six in seven Greatest reported having fared better financially than their parents, the highest proportion ever recorded. In 1940, 46 percent of American houses were owner-occupied; by 1960, the proportion had risen to 64 percent--roughly where it has remained ever since. New houses were never more affordable than in the early 1950s, when the typical 35-year-old's income was $3,000 per year (more than $20,000 in 2002 dollars), mortgage rates were 4 percent, and a new Levittown home sold for $7,000 (about $50,000 in current dollars)--$350 down and $30 per month.47
Returning war heroes brought a mature, no-nonsense attitude wherever they went--to campuses, to workplaces, to politics. Polls showed young adults more stern-minded than elders on such topics as Japanese occupation, the use of poison gas, and corporal punishment. Those who entered politics in the late 1930s and 1940s felt a scout leader's sense of duty (like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) to clean up a greasy Lost Generation world and energize the nation. By 1950, one Greatest (Dewey) had twice run for President, two others (Clark Clifford, George Kennan) had become President Truman's top advisers, and several more (John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford) had launched promising political careers.48
From the 1930s forward, the Greatest have been the only generation to support the winning candidate in every election. In all three close elections (1948, 1960, and 1968), the Greatest tipped the outcome to their preferred candidate. Surveys show that 80 percent of all first-wave Greatest voters opted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and 85 percent in 1936, the largest single-generation mandates ever recorded. Last-wave Greatest congealed into the core of the postwar New Deal coalition; by midlife and elderhood, 65 percent of them confirmed an allegiance to the Democratic Party (though they often voted for Republican Greatest Presidents). The Greatest also included the first generation of blacks to abandon the Party of Lincoln: In 1944, 82 percent of Harlem blacks under age 44 voted for FDR, versus only 59 percent over that age.49
In business, their peers brought their wartime confidence and "high hopes" into the nation's economic life. Everything they made seemed to be the best (and biggest) in the world. Stephen Bechtel's company erected Hoover Dam and the San Francisco--Oakland Bay Bridge, Robert Moses built massive public housing projects, and William Levitt laid down one gleaming suburban tract after another. Bell & Howell's dynamic young president, Charles Percy, symbolized then new breed of smart, get-things-done industrialists, while two brilliant fortyish executives (Bob McNamara, Lee Iacocca) prodded the American auto industry to produce more functional autos. From Fortune writers to the Committee on Economic Development, 40-year-olds of both political parties agreed that big government and big business could both "pitch in" and work together just fine.50
The children of the Greatest Generation were the adaptive Silent Generation or the idealist Boom Generation, who were nurtured in a generally indulgent though protective way.
In The Organization Man, William Whyte catalogued the suburban Greatest "social ethic" that produced neighborhoods noteworthy mainly for their "friendliness." Like Sloan Wilson's hero in Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the ideal male was at once hard-striving and selfless, the ideal female the devoted mother of a flock of Boom Generation kids.51
Soon no suburban house was complete without television, a new technology that perfectly expressed the Greatest culture: science tamed for man's benefit, unremittingly upbeat, nurturing children, helping adults keep abreast of collegial tastes. A memorable collection of fortyish entertainers--Lucille Ball, Phil Silvers, Jack Paar, Jackie Gleason, Art Linkletter--showed an unrehearsed, on-air comfort that other TV generations have never quite matched. From Hollywood to Levittown, the Greatest were hard at work institutionalizing the most wholesome American culture of the Twentieth Century.
"We do not engage in loose talk about the 'ideals' of the situation and all the other stuff," observed C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite. "We get right down to the problem." Declaring the End to Ideology (a phrase coined by the Greatest in 1955), Daniel Bell noted how his peers wanted to overcome differences in fundamental values. George Gallup defined the "average man" in a society more eager to celebrate sameness than differences among people. The rising black intelligentsia (Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright) lent a cool rationalism to race relations; blacks began arguing (and whites agreeing) that "segregation" was economically inefficient.52
Whatever his color, a Greatest generally considered the "what to do's" well-settled; only the "how to do's" were open to discussion. In 1958, as John Kenneth Galbraith bemoaned "public squalor" amid "private opulence," his generation began its surge to power in a Democratic landslide. As the 1960s approached, the Greatest waited impatiently for their chance to bring the same friendliness, energy, and competence to public life that they had already brought to the economy and family. Their only worry, admitted Lipset in 1960, was "the problem of conformity which troubles so many Americans today"--a Greatest trait already drawing barbs from the younger Silent Generation.53