G.I. Generation

The G.I. Generation is the cohort 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 term "GI Generation" has been in common use since the 1970s.Camarillo, Alberto M. "Research note on Chicano community leaders: the GI generation" Aztlán, Vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall, 1971), p. 145-150.

Some authors, including Brokaw, confine it to approximately the later-born half of this segment.

The derivation of "GI/G.I." is disputed. By 1943, the term became indellibly linked to the hundreds of thousands of men called into military service (the idea of G.I. Jane came later). Everything a serviceman had back in the day was government issued or general issue. Many of these new soldiers were also draftees, with the press calling them "Government Inductees" or GIs for short, especially focused on the mass of soldiers entering the United States Army and United States Army Air Forces. The Army became the epitome of melting pot America. Soldiers were celebrated in the mass media. The term "GI Joe" was immortalized by reporter Ernie Pyle who drew from frontline stories to write his 1943 book, Here Is Your War: Story of G.I. Joe. After that the idealized "G.I. Joe" became everything that was good about the country, celebrated as a popular comic book hero and toy action figurine.
Typical grandparents of those who came of age in the early World War II years 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.

This generation became America's first Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the babies of 1923 and 1924 were just old enough to be drafted, 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. This was the generation that invented, perfected, and stockpiled the atomic bomb, a weapon so muscular and deadly that it changed world history forever.

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 month). With the GI Bill young war veterans were offered cheap loans to pursue business opportunities and education that before the Second World War would have been out of their reach. 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 successful 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, François Duvalier, Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto 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.

G.I. celebrities (with death dates in brackets)

*1901 Louis Armstrong (1971)
*1901 Walt Disney (1966)
*1902 Ray Kroc (1984)
*1902 Meyer Lansky (immigrant) (1983)
*1902 John Steinbeck (1968)
*1902 Langston Hughes (1967)
*1902 Strom Thurmond (2003)
*1903 Lou Gehrig (1941)
*1903 Bob Hope (immigrant) (2003)
*1904 Cary Grant (immigrant) (1986)
*1904 Robert Oppenheimer (1967)
*1904 Willem de Kooning (immigrant) (1997)
*1904 Glenn Miller (1944)
*1905 Howard Hughes (1976)
*1906 Josephine Baker (emigrant) (1975)
*1906 William J. Brennan (1997)
*1906 Philip Cortelyou Johnson (2005)
*1906 Billy Wilder (immigrant) (2002)
*1907 John Wayne (1979)
*1907 Warren E. Burger (1995)
*1907 Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (1998)
*1907 Katharine Hepburn (2003)
*1907 William Levitt (1994)
*1908 John Kenneth Galbraith (immigrant) (2006)
*1908 Arthur Goldberg (1990)
*1908 Thurgood Marshall (1993)
*1908 Harry Blackmun (1999)
*1908 Joseph R. McCarthy (1957)
*1908 Jimmy Stewart (1997)
*1910 Czesław Miłosz (immigrant) (2004)
*1910 John Wooden
*1911 Lucille Ball (1989)
*1911 Vincent Price (1993)
*1911 Raphael Robinson (1995)
*1912 Milton Friedman
*1912 Thomas P. O'Neill ("Tip") (1994)
*1912 Jackson Pollock (1954)
*1913 Rosa Parks (2005)
*1914 Sammy Baugh
*1914 Joe DiMaggio (1999)
*1914 William Westmoreland (2005)
*1914 William S. Burroughs (1997)
*1914 Jonas Salk (1995)
*1915 Frank Sinatra (1998)
*1915 Billie Holliday (1959)
*1916 Robert McNamara
*1917 Zsa Zsa Gabor
*1917 Kirk Kerkorian
*1918 Richard Feynman (1988)
*1918 Billy Graham
*1918 Ann Landers (2002)
*1918 Sam Walton (1992)
*1918 Ted Williams (2002)
*1919 Jackie Robinson (1972)
*1920 Mario Puzo (1999)
*1920 John Cardinal O'Connor (2000)
*1920 John Paul Stevens
*1921 John Glenn
*1921 Marija Gimbutas (immigrant) (1994)
*1922 Judy Garland (1969)
*1922 Jack Kerouac (1969)
*1922 Kurt Vonnegut
*1923 Chuck Yeager
*1923 Jack Kilby (2005)
*1923 Henry Kissinger (immigrant)
*1924 Lloyd Alexander
*1924 Lee Iacocca
*1924 Tom Landry (2000)
*1924 Marlon Brando (2004)
*1924 George Mikan (2005)
*1924 William Rehnquist (2005)

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):
*1908 Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-1969 (1973)
*1911 Ronald Reagan, 1981-1989 (2004) - Reagan did not serve overseas in the military during WWII; all other G.I. Presidents did.
*1913 Richard Nixon, 1969-1974 (1994)
*1913 Gerald Ford, 1974-1977
*1917 John F. Kennedy, 1961-1963 (1963)
*1924 Jimmy Carter, 1977-1981
*1924 George H. W. Bush, 1989-1993

Cultural endowments

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (film, Walt Disney)
Casablanca, screenplay, Julius Epstein and Philip Epstein
* Citizen Kane (directed by and starringOrson Welles)
*"In the Mood" (song, Glenn Miller)
The Honeymooners (TV show, Jackie Gleason)
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt)
A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams)
Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
West Side Story (Broadway show and movie, Leonard Bernstein)
The Making of the President: 1960 (Theodore White)
Modern Economic Growth (Simon Kuznets)
Roots (book and TV miniseries, Alex Haley)
Peanuts (comic strip, Charles M. Schulz)
Profiles in Courage, (John F. Kennedy)
The Feminine Mystique, (Betty Friedan)
War and Remembrance, (Herman Wouk)
Star Trek (TV series and movie spin-offs), Gene Roddenberry
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, and Practices, Peter F. Drucker
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls

Foreign Peers

* Hirohito (1901-1989)
* Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)
* Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer (1902-1975)
* Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
* Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
* Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942)
* Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997)
* Greta Garbo (1905-1990)
* Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
* Adolf Eichmann (1905-1962)
* Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966)
* Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
* Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982)
* Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
* Claus von Stauffenberg (1907-1944)
* Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
* Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005)
* Donald Bradman (1908-2001)
* Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
* Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996)
* Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
* Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)
* Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997)
* Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995)
* Todor Zhivkov (1911-1998)
* Kim il Sung (1912-1994)
* Alan Turing (1912-1954)
* Pope John Paul I (Albino Luciani) (1912-1978)
* King Khalid of Saudi Arabia (1912-1982)
* Willy Brandt (1913-1992)
* Benjamin Britten (1913-1978)
* Yuri Andropov (1914-1984)
* Alec Guinness (1914-2000)
* Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982)
* Edith Piaf (1915-1963)
* Francis Crick (1916-2004)
* Indira Gandhi (1917-1984)
* Arthur C. Clarke (1917-)
* Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918-1989)
* Anwar Sadat (1918-1981)
* Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-)
* Nelson Mandela (1918-)
* Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980)
* Federico Fellini (1920-1993)
* Pope John Paul II (1920-2005)
* Alexander Dubček (1921-1992)
* King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (1921-2005)
* Akio Morita (1921-1999)
* Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989)
* Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995)
* Christiaan Barnard (1922-2001)