More 1950s-60s Analysis: Rebels Without Much Cause?

Kay S. Hymowitz, author of a Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, reviews at the Wall Street Journal a book about the 1950s and the Sixties by Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. Has anyone ever written about the disruption caused by World War II itself in the transmission from fathers to sons of the aspects of manhood? This question is prompted by another question: how do men who became men, so to speak, through the process of military boot camp, military service, combat, battle trauma, and so on, pass on the process of becoming men to their sons? They can't repeat the process they went through for their own sons. Does that matter? And does the answer have anything to do with path society traveled in the 1950s and 60s and beyond?

Comments

[sdf]

A related question: Did the fact that nearly an entire generation of men was forced into the State's version of manhood through the unnatural and demonic process described above so poison true manhood that the next generation's rebellion was inevitable?

[Jim Kushiner]

From Stuart Koehl: You asked about whether anyone has written about the disruption caused by World War II in the transmission from fathers to sons of the aspects of manhood. The answer is yes, though not directly. The most prominent author was Paul Fussell (see especially his The Boys' Crusade), and I've written an article or two about how the rebellion of the Baby Boomers was instilled by their parents--the so-called Greatest Generation. These men came back from the war filled with inchoate rage against all authority, particularly the authority that had robbed them of their youth and innocence. But that same institution also instilled in them the principle of subordination--one does what one is told, one lives up to expectations, one conforms to the norms set by authority. Hence, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Incapable of outright rebellion, they resorted to passive aggression and covertly subversive behavior (most of the sexual adventurism that characterized the sixties actually began in the fifties). When they had children, they were determined that their offspring would never have to sacrifice as they sacrificed; and they also transmitted, perhaps subliminally, the contempt for authority they harbored but could not outwardly manifest. So, one can look at the rebellion of the sixties either as a case of unintended consequences, or as a case of "Be careful what you wish for". In either case, the phenomena have been there for all to see, and a number of writers have commented on it.
--Stuart Koehl

[A Mere Observer]

Fussell's polemic should be taken with more than a grain of salt. A blanket assertion that the men of the Greatest Generation "came back from the war filled with inchoate rage against all authority" is a sweeping generalization with no more proof for it than a claim that e.g. conservative Evangelical Christian men believe insubordination of women because circumstances of their upbringings have made them insecure about their masculine identities. It's simply cheap psychologizing. Read Fussell's autobiography, and you will see that he simply engaged in the psychological fallacy of projection -- he took his own psychological trauma and depression from his WWII experience, universalized it, and attributed it to everyone else.

[Dan Allison]

Hard to see how "boot camp" and "battle trauma" make one a "man." That's quite a slander against anyone who hasn't been in combat, and I can't for the life of me understand what forcing these kinds of bourgeois prejudices and myths on others has to do with the grace and love Christ offers us. Sounds like someone needs to get a life.

[Orthodoxdj]

Jim,

Will you post links to the articles you've written about these issues? I would like to read them.

Dan,

While I might agree with your overall conclusions and convictions, I'm seriously troubled by what your use of labeling ("bourgeious"). Marxist rhetoric isn't very appealing to most Christians.

[Jim Kushiner]

Dan wrote: "Hard to see how "boot camp" and "battle trauma" make one a "man." That's quite a slander against anyone who hasn't been in combat,"

Reply: I wrote, "so to speak," which is hardly prescriptive and certainly qualified, referring to the commonplace saying that so and so joined the navy and that really helped make of man of him. In many cases the experience of war broke some men, crippled others. The whole point of the question was to ask what men would do when their personal growing up occurred during military training and combat, which replaced the normal peacetime transmission from father to son and older men to younger men of the ways of manhood.

[John L]

What proportion of servicemen actually saw combat in the Second World War? A substantial one, but a minority; a smaller minority than in the First World War, where military service was more likely to involve being an infantryman, the toughest and most dangerous combat arm, and where higher casualties led a greater proportion of military manpower to be involved in combat. So the idea that military service traumatised the generation that underwent it in the Second World War - for some reason, more severely than the worse combat of World War II traumatised their fathers' generation - is not plausible. And the idea that military discipline will traumatise people is itself implausible - believable only to those who think that restriction of the imperial ego is damaging.