The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II by David Nasaw; Penguin Press, 496 pp., $35
David Nasaw’s book is a welcome addition to the history of the generation of Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II. As Nasaw makes clear, many in uniform—whether they saw combat or not—brought home from their military service a variety of pathologies (including substance abuse and “battle fatigue,” now known as PTSD) that strained their relationships with spouses and children and consigned veterans to lasting social and emotional instability. The wholesome narrative that has attached itself to that generation in recent decades is a distortion, and Nasaw’s book offers an important corrective.
And yet, his work is painfully dated—not because it focuses on the social disruptions consequent to a war that ended 80 years ago, but because it has all the markings of scholarship that grew out of the culture wars of the past decade. Nasaw, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, reminds readers early and often that the GI Bill benefited a group that was more than 90 percent white, which sounds damning until you consider that the United States in 1940 was 90 percent white and in 1970 was still 87 percent white. Had the nation pursued a universal postwar welfare program instead of limiting the program to military veterans, the benefits still would have accrued, unavoidably, to a population that was overwhelmingly white.
Nasaw also puts too fine a point on differences in American attitudes toward the Japanese and the Germans. Whereas the former were caricatured in propaganda as monkeys and rats and even considered a demonic force, the latter were viewed, per Nasaw, in far more chivalric terms, almost as if we saw them as nothing worse than misguided Lutherans with whom we were heartsick to find ourselves in conflict. This is ahistorical hogwash. Germany, too, was portrayed in dehumanizing terms in American propaganda, likened not only to rats and monkeys but also to snakes, pigs, spiders, vultures, and yes, the devil. Furthermore, the Manhattan Project pursued the Bomb for the express purpose of dropping it on those “blue-eyed, blond, white Christian Germans.” Its use against Japan—to risk being distastefully euphemistic—was “off-label,” a source of enduring controversy.
A main thrust of the book is that systemic American racism (e.g., the GI Bill) prevented returning Black veterans from using any of the skills acquired during their military service to advance themselves socially in the postwar period, while sexism kept female veterans who had served, for instance, as auxiliary and transport pilots from finding work flying after the war. However, another pilot stymied after the war was a man known to this reviewer as Babe, who flew 34 missions as a B-17 pilot over Europe and then trained in the B-29. When Babe returned stateside with a passion for flying, he—despite his white maleness—couldn’t get so much as an interview with the airlines, let alone a job, because he lacked a college education. A married man with a young family, he took what work he could, as a functionary in local government. True, even that was more than the average Black or female veteran could have hoped for, but Babe’s surrendering of dreams and expectations to postwar social constraints was typical of veterans of every stripe. Conversely, veterans who used the GI Bill to get ahead socially and professionally included those of every stripe (Black, white, female, male).
Nasaw notes a lack of reformist spirit among the returning veterans, ascribing that attitude among Black veterans to a sense of futility in the face of entrenched racism, and among white veterans to a sense of complacency within that same system—in a word, privilege. That racism blighted midcentury American society has long been a matter of consensus. Yet many whites who accepted the world as it was were not so much complacent as resigned. This was a generation that came of age in a time of economic calamity, political tension, and war, and that witnessed the unprecedented expansion of both government and industry—a vast machine into whose maw, for good and ill, they were fed. This perspective peppers the writing of that period, showing up, for instance, in Randall Jarrell’s poetry (“From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State”), in Milo Minderbinder’s syndicate in Catch-22, and in James Jones’s characterization of the American effort as “corporation war.” The epithet G.I. (“general issue” or “government issue”) was an ironic, even rueful acknowledgment that the individual was but an interchangeable part in a great and complex whole. It was out of this milieu that came, a decade after the war, both The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, both of which acknowledged an evolution in American society, one toward individual risk aversion and an attendant submission to bureaucratic systems writ large.
This trend was being dissected in the early postwar years by everyone from cartoonist and veteran Bill Mauldin to philosopher and University of Chicago President Robert M. Hutchins. In a 1950 issue of Life, the former defended the so-called “scared-rabbit” generation, of which he was a member. And in a 1958 Esquire article titled “The Age of the Interchangeable Man,” the latter quoted Aristotle: “Men do not deliberate about things that are beyond their power.” This sense of powerlessness transcended matters of race and gender. Things are rarely so black and white.
