G.I. Generation

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The G.I. Generation is the generation of Americans that fought and won World War II, later to become the Establishment and the parents who had a generation gap with their Boomer children. The generation is also known as the Greatest Generation (after Tom Brokaw's book), the World War II Generation, the Veteran Generation, the Depression Generation, Builders, and the Traditional Generation or Traditionalists. The name "G.I. Generation" was coined by William Strauss and Neil Howe for their book Generations, who put its birthdates from 1901 to 1924, although some, including Brokaw, confine it to approximately the later-born half of this segment, the earlier half sometimes being re ferred to by an alternate label, the Interbellum Generation. The term G.I. refers to an enlisted person in or a veteran of any of the U.S. armed forces, especially a person enlisted in the army.

Their typical grandparents were of the Progressive Generation. Their parents were of the Missionary Generation and Lost Generation. Their children were of the Silent Generation and Baby boomers. Their typical grandchildren were of Generation X and Generation Y. Their Great Grand Children are Generation Z.

A sample list of famous G.I.s with birth and death dates include:

A list of cultural endowments of the G.I.s includes the following:

The G.I.s held a plurality in the House from 1953 to 1975, a plurality in the Senate from 1959 to 1979, and a majority in the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.

There have been seven G.I. Presidents. Here are their birth dates (and death dates for those that have died):

From youth to old age, the babies of the twentieth century's first decade commanded the admiration a nd generosity of older and younger generations. They became America's first Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and half a century later, America's first senior citizens. At the other boundary, the babies of 1923 and 1924 were just old enough to be dr afted, trained, and shipped to Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima in time to join in the heaviest fighting; those born a year or two later were in line to fight battles that never came. George H. W. Bush was among the youngest fighter pilots of World War II; he was only 20 when he and his Grumman Avenger fighter plane were shot down over ChiChi Jima. The next President, Bill Clinton, only saw World War II through history books and film clips.

The unstoppable energy of the G.I.s is well characterize d in their most enduring comic book character: Superman. Superman became famous just before World War II occurred and the G.I.s themselves began showing "powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men". Do you need to era dicate poverty, build model cities, tame business cycles, or beat Nazis and Communists at their own game? 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 w hatever goal it sets.

After the war, G.I.s built suburban tract housing. In the early 1950s, when the typical 35-year-old's income was $3,000 per year, mortgage rates were 4 percent, and a new Levittown home sold for $7,000 ($350 down and $30 per mo nth).

No generation born before or since has felt or been so Promethean, so godlike in its collective, world-bending power. G.I.s invented, perfected, and stockpiled the atomic bomb, a weapon so muscular and deadly that it changed world history forever.

G.I.s also broke the most of the old ethnic connection to social class, in part due to the GI Bill intended to reward young war heroes with business opportunities (cheap loans) and education available almost exclusively to the WASP �lite before the Second World War. They are the generation in which most Americans of south and east European origin entered the great middle class, and include the first large contingent of the black and Hispanic middle class. They include the first blacks to make the su ccessful assaults upon Jim Crow practices in the American South and the first blacks to achieve upper ranks in the American Armed Services.

But even this generation had its weaknesses. It too had its villains, the gutter racists, some gangsters, the McCarthyite exploiters of the Red Scare, and traitors including Axis Sally and the Rosenberg spy ring. Overseas, contemporaries of American GIs include the almost-innumerable British, French, Polish, and Russian heroes of the Second World War, but also many of the pathological types (major and minor war criminals, jack-booted thugs, and kamikaze pilots) of the Axis Powers who ensured the great human cost of the Second World War. Finally, some of the contemporaries of American GIs became vile dictators like Ne Win, [[Fran�ois Duvalier]], Ferdinand Marcos and Agosto Pinochet, and especially the rigid apparatchiks of most Communist states before those became brittle targets for revolutions in central and southeastern Europe in the late 1980s.

For all their rationality and success in other areas, GI achievements in literature (especially poetry) in the creation of art are comparatively slight. GIs created a bland, accessible, conformist, commercial culture that would itself face a reaction among youth. Despite their long tenure in power, GIs produced no charismatic leaders capable of inspiring others to achieve as they did as youth. GIs, upon achieving great bureaucratic and political power, were vulnerable to groupthink that allowed the military quagmire that was the Vietnam War. All in all, they have more changed the course of American history since the American Revolution. They were the bulk of the soldiers on both sides of World War II; they created prosperity in both victors and vanquished countries after the war; they kept the Cold War from becoming a nuclear war; they presided over the de-colonization of the Third World and the weakening of institutional racism in America and South Africa as well as the almost complete demise of Marxism-Leninism. They also created a firm basis of progress in scientific achievements and in entrepreneurial success.

No generation has ever been so well rewarded for its achievements -- and none has so deserved its rewards.


Foreign Peers



Preceded by
Lost Generation 		G.I. Generation
1901�1924 		Succeeded by
Silent Generation


References

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