One of my 25 cent books from the Friends of the Library sale grabbed my attention and imagination last week and ended up to be an engrossing read. Goodbye, Darkness is a memoir of the Pacific campaign during WWII by William Manchester, an author I had grown to admire for his biography of Douglas MacArthur. In the 1970’s, Manchester revisited the places he had gone ashore in battle against the Japanese as a young Marine. It was on Tarawa, known to many as “Terrible Tarawa,” that he pondered as to where the courage, dedication, and steely discipline came from as he recounted how wave after wave of U.S.Marines suffered terrible casualties in taking that small but well fortified island. His conclusions staggered me especially as they came from a man who was not naturally inclined to patriotic flag waving or righteous grandstanding.
He had to admit that the America of WWII was different from that of today, and there was no way of understanding the way its sons threw down their lives so willingly and almost carelessly without understanding the culture of that time. He describes the United States of pre-WWII as a tightly disciplined society with rigid standards and where “counterculture” did not exist as either a word or a concept. And here is the lengthy quote which came so unexpectedly:
“The bastion of social stability was the family. Children were guided, not by radar beams picking up trends and directions from other children, but by gyroscopes built into their superegos at home. Parents had a tremendous influence on them. If adolescents wanted to read pulp magazines, or smoke, or listen to Ben Bernie or the Lucky Strike Hit Parade on the radio, they needed parental permission; if they wanted to see ‘The Philadelphia Story,’ their fathers decided whether or not it would be bad for their morals; if they made money shoveling snow or cutting lawns, their fathers, again, told them whether they should save it for college, or, if it was to be spent, what they could buy. There was no teenage ethos; indeed ‘teenage’ meant ‘brushwood used for fences and hedges.’ Young people were called ‘youngsters,’ and since the brooding omnipotence of the peer group had not yet arrived, children rarely felt any conflict between their friends and their families. No youngster would dream of discussing familial conflicts with other youngsters. An insult to either parent had to be avenged. …Fathers had always ruled like sultans, but the Depression had increased all family activities over which patresfamilias reigned; a study of over a hundred families in Pittsburgh discovered that a majority had increased family recreation – Ping Pong, jigsaw puzzles, checkers, bridge, and parlor games, notably Monopoly. There was also plenty of time for the householders, the doughboys of 1918, to explain to their sons the indissoluble relationship between virility and valor.” (p. 247, copyright 1979; Little, Brown & Co.)
There; a long quote but one which so many of you should find encouraging. I see you doing these very things today; instilling those “gyroscopes,” attempting to shield your children from the “brooding omnipotence” of modern teen culture, instilling “absolute” notions of truth and morality, and keeping your families together at all costs. Some of you may have thought you were alone and bordering on the bizarre. Take heart. You stand in the grand tradition of those who raised what Tom Brokaw has labeled “The Greatest Generation.” I grow increasingly impressed with what those young men did who pushed back the forces of evil in WWII at such great expense. I have high hopes for our young people, as well, in standing against the Evil One who comes to kill, to steal, and to destroy. Keep up your good work.
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