Believe me, I am starting to recognize that more and more. I'm a Gen Xer so I'm inclined to blame the Boomers for everything going wrong in the 60s, but I also know they were too young to have actually started it.
I knew there HAD to be something off about the "Greatest Generation" that caused this, and thanks to this discussion with you I am starting to see what.
I actually am in agreement with your main thesis about the War and the Sexual Revolution. Where I differ is that far from liberating us from Puritanism, I think it has destroyed our country.
“The Greatest Generation” was raised during the Great Depression. The fact that they didn’t grow up and lead a socialist revolution is a testament to the idea that they did deserve a lot of the praise they received.
At the same time, they came of age in a world without a safety net and then received the greatest “big government” benefit ever in the GI Bill. So, make that what you will.
As for those who served, they were young men in their teens and early twenties who were in a life and death situation....and who also may have had money for the first time in their lives.
I knew a WWII vet who was everything the Greatest Generation was supposed to be. Raised kids that went to elite colleges. Volunteer Fire Chief. Rotary club. Volunteer. Deacon in the Church. All that jazz.
And if you got three beers in him, he would talk for hours about what French girls would do in a barn for some cigarettes and chocolate bars.
I think ultimately, debauchery is always a class issue. Richard Pryor didn’t grew up in a whorehouse because of WWII. Richard Pryor grew up in a whorehouse because he was poor. There was always illegitimacy and divorce and such among the poor.
Educated Americans still understand that the best way to build financial success and a happy life is to get married and stay married. And when you remove the very poor and those people with multiple divorces from the statistics, we get and stayed married as much as we ever did.
The difference, I think, is that the experience of WWII taught a generation that everything can end in an instant. So, the idea of waiting until your wedding night to experience that one thing suddenly seemed a fool’s errand.
And they couldn’t really hold their sons to a different standard (they could their daughters of course).
Americans who succeed have generally come to believe that the time to get married is your late 20s or early 30s. Expecting people to keep their pants on for that length of time is unreasonable. My grandmother was married at 17. I was married at 34. Was I supposed to wait two of her lifetimes?