March 26, 2024

Dear Friends and Family,
 
From Reconstruction to the Gay Nineties followed by the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition with two World Wars and the Great Depression, the Great Power Cycle experienced huge tragedy and suffering, but in the process  America went from a minor player on the world stage to the world’s only superpower replacing England. This transpired over a mere 82 years. Terming it as the great power cycles is a well-deserved name.
 
Its four generations were substantially different from one another as we have seen in other generational cycles preceding them. The first – Missionaries – demonstrated how a youthful generation of muckrakers, evangelicals, and bomb-throwers could mature into revered and principled elders – wise old men and women capable of leading the young through grave peril to a better world beyond.  The second – the Lost – grew up unsupervised by their parents or government and learned how to survive on their own. Scrambling away from grand public crusades they balked at lofty ideals and hesitated to approve of anything too bold, too daring, or too dangerous. They did history’s dirty work dropping A-bombs, attacking Belleau Wood, and containing Stalinism half expecting history to someday blame them. The third – G.I.s – with the combination of “good kid” first wavers and heroic last wavers produced a generation of enormous economic and political power tackling the job of Superpower America following the war they had just won. The fourth – Silent – as youth were withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous, and silent. They grew up having no leaders, no program, no sense of their own power, and not culture exclusively their own. Lacking an independent voice, they adopted the moral relativism of the skilled arbitrator, mediating arguments among others.
 
Happy Learning,
Harley

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THE STUDY OF AMERICAN GENERATIONS – SEGMENT 4
THE GREAT POWER CYCLE -- EXCERPTS

The morning of July 15th, 1945, President Harry Truman, prepared to order two bombs dropped on Japan. The whirlwind weeks marked the dawn of “Superpower America” the climactic moment of the GREAT POWER CYCLE. At the beginning of this ninety-year epoch, the Old World still regarded the United States as a frontier society, at best a minor player in world affairs. But its end, the United States had emerged as a great global power, fueled by the world’s most productive economy and armed with the world’s most formidable defense establishment.

• The visionary MISSIONARY GENERATION (Idealist, then age 63 to 85) had originally ordered the A-bomb’s development. These were the patriarchs of the national struggle, the dark figures in newsreel footages, the stern elder leaders who provided guidance for what seemed to be the very defense of Christian civilization. If the use of atomic weapons raised any moral questions, Americans of all ages trusted this generation to answer them.
• Harry Truman’ get-it-done LOST GENERATION (Reactive, age 45 to 62) provided the war effort’s pragmatic midlife generals. The war’s over said Leslie Groves, who managed the Manhattan Project, after a glance at the test blast. “One or two of those things and Japan will be finished.” Truman delighted that America had “spent two billion dollars on the biggest scientific gamble in history – and won.” Unlike his elders, President Truman knew from personal experience what human slaughter might accompany a year-by-year conquest of the Japanese mainland. So, he “let the buck stop” with him—and ordered Hiroshima bombed.
• The dutiful G.I. GENERATION (Civic, age 21 to 44) provided the team of scientists responsible for this “Mighty One.” Here stood the greatest power man has ever possessed – and they had created it. Without their heroism, the use of the bomb and the subsequent elevation of America to superpower status would not have been possible. Over the past three years, swarms of uniformed young men (average age 26) had conquered the entire Pacific. Rosie the Riveter women had assembled bombers and battleships to arm them. Seabees had built bases out of jungles and barren reefs, including Tinian, where the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima. Later in life, the G.I.’s would harness their collective might and labor to fulfill their elders’ vision by building a gleaming “Great Society” of peace, prosperity, and friendliness – only to hear their own children attack its spiritual emptiness.
• The eldest among the aspiring SILENT GENERATION (Adaptive, age 3 to 20) knew the A-bomb blasts had spared them from harm – and equally from any chance to match their next elders in glory and heroism. It would become the Silent’s own “department” to worry about what happens when powerful things “come down” on people – from Carl Sagan warning against “nuclear winter” to Michael Harrington and Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing that money spent on bombs should be spent instead on the poor.

The Great Power Cycle contained two social moments:

• The Missionary Awakening (1886 – 1903) or the “Third Great Awakening” began in 1886 with the Haymarket riot and the launching of the global student missionary movement. By 1893, a combination of agrarian protests and urban labor violence sparked the tumultuous 1890s, considered a “cultural watershed” in American history. The awakening pushed a young, exited cadre of “muckraking” writers and reformers into the public eye just after the turn of the century. During Theodore Roosevelt’s first term, these youth movements crested, and the awakening ended. As the rising generation lost interest in “progressive” reforms, and especially after the financial panic of 1907, the national mood sobered. Meanwhile, the awakening had given birth to the Bible Belt, to Christian socialism, to Greenwich Village, and to renascent labor, temperance, and women’s suffrage movements.
• The Great Depression – World War II Crisis (1932 – 1945) reached from the economic trough of 1932 through the triumph of VJ-Day in 1945, roughly spanning the thirteen-year Presidential reign of Franklin Roosevelt. It began in a mood of despair and pessimism about the future, stretched through the New Deal, climaxed in total war against totalitarianism, and ended at the dawn of a new era of power, affluence, and global leadership.

THE FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE GREAT POWER CYCLE
Missionary Generation: Born 1860 – 1882; Type: Idealistic; Population 45,000,000 Percent immigrant 23% Percent slave 1%. Significant History and Lifecycle:

• 1886 Haymarket Riot: student missionaries organize. (Age: 0 – 16)
• 1920 Palmer raids; women’s suffrage; Prohibition begins (Age: 38 – 60)
• 1933 Roosevelt launches new Deal; Prohibition ends (Age: 51 – 73)
• 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor; US enters World War II (Age: 59 – 81)
• 1945 Roosevelt dies; Axis powers surrender (Age: 63 – 85)
• 1951 Peak foreign aid under Marshall Plan; MacArthur fired by Truman (Age: 69 – 91)

In 1896 – as the aging Gilded elite reeled from labor violence, student evangelism, and agrarian revivals – 36-year-old William Jenning Bryan swept to the Democratic presidential nomination with an exhortation that was as generational as it was partisan. Bryan’s coming-of-age MISSIONARY GENERATION pushed to a climax its passionate attack on the soulless Darwinism of Gilded elders. As some youths summoned forth a “Kingdom of God,” others shouted anarchist slogans, threw bombs, lynched blacks, and called for the conquering of heathen lands. The aspiring youth elite simply absorbed the mood, enjoying “the bright college days” of a noisy decade they would afterward remember as the “Gay Nineties.”
Their tumultuous awakening defined the Missionaries for life as a generation of moral pathfinders, men and women to whom any opinion was a religion once they decided it was right. Whatever their causes, the Missionary mental approach remained a generational constant: a fierce desire to make the world perfect according to standards that welled up from within – the vindication of social good over social evil. This is the first generation to which many living Americans feel a personal connection. Today’s elders recall Missionaries as history saw them last, as the visionary leaders who guided America through the Great Depression and World War II.

Missionary Facts:

• After steadily rising from 1880 on, per capita alcohol and drug consumption peaked around 1905. Moving into midlife, Missionaries launched their memorable drive to eradicate all forms of substance abuse and by the mid-1920s they succeeded in pushing alcohol consumption to its lowest level in American history. (Note: Prohibition began in 1920 and ended in 1933)
• Having been born the first generation never to know slavery, Missionary blacks came of age just a southern Jim Crow laws were stripping them of their rights as citizens. At least 60 blacks were reported lynched each year between 1885 and 1904 (peaking at 161 in 1892). This generation of American black – women especially – became legendary for its principled racial leadership.

The Missionaries demonstrated how a youthful generation of muckrakers, evangelicals, and bomb-throwers could mature into revered and principles elders – wise old men and women capable of leading the young through grave peril to a better world beyond. From the 1880s through the 1940s, the Missionary hand can be seen pushing American ideals an history forward. Just as we today honor the reforms of the Progressive Era as a testament to fair process, we remember Prohibition, the New Deal, World War II and the Marshall Plan as a testament to the imperative that “good” must triumph over “bad.” Without question, Americans today have the Missionaries to thank for lifting America to its present-day status as a great global power. America still lives by the visions they glimpsed. In foreign policy, the very term “foreign aid” was invented by elder Missionaries (Herbert Hoover).

Lost Generation:  Born 1883 – 1900; Type: Reactive; Population 45,000,000 Percent immigrant 21%. Significant History and Lifecycle:

• 1892 Ellis Island quarantine for new flood of poor immigrants (Age: 0 – 9)
• 1918 Doughboys come home to crackdown on drinking, drugs, and crime (Age: 18-35)
• 1929 Black Thursday stock crash; Valentine’s Day gangland massacre (Age: 29 – 46)
• 1932 Soup lines and Hoovervilles multiply (Age 32 – 49)
• 1935 “Okies” flee dust bowl (Age 35 - 52)
• 1941 Congress follows FDR to war (Age: 41 – 58)
• 1945 Truman becomes President, orders atomic bombs dropped (Age: 45 – 62)

The Lost lifecycle was divided roughly into thirds by two world wars. They were a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all the gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. They led America through a dazzling decade, waiting for Hemingway’s bell to toll for them.  When it did – with the stock crash and depression – they fell back exhausted at first, and then stepped forward as clear-eyed managers for their elders and as selfless protectors of their juniors. The Great Depression dealt them its cruelest blow, robbing them of what should have been their peak income years and ushering in public action that ran against their grain.  But lacking confidence in their own moral judgments the Lost joined the national effort lending what they liked to call “brains” – and what was, in effect, a keen realism about human nature. After providing outstanding generalship in World War II, gaining top command by the war’ end, the Lost mellowed into a cautious old age. Their elder survivors presided as social anchors over an era of strengthening families, warm nurture of the young, and sharply improving economic fortunes for the generations behind them.

The Lost entered postwar elderhood without fanfare, making way gracefully for an aggressive new batch of scout-like G.I.’s. Still accepting blame in old age, the Lost preserved their pride by refusing to ask for favors. Few of the Lost made effective reformers or preachers. Instead, they became the most stunningly original generation of artists and writers in American history. From Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitgerald, Mae West to Jimmy Cagney, Pau Tillich to Reinhold Niebuhr, the Lost never expected that anyone would look to them for greatness or goodness. All they asked was the chance to remind their elders and juniors how life really worked and the opportunity to do what needed doing – quickly, effectively – when nobody else would stoop to the task. You couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes. Nor could you make them forget a lifetime brimming with adventure: Ellis Island and sweatshops, sleek Pierce-Arrows and the Battle of the Marne, speakeasies and hangovers, a giddy bull market and a global crash, soup lines and dust-bowl caravans.

Lost Facts:

• Lost youth showed little improvement in rates of illiteracy, absenteeism, dropout, or college entry. From 1880 to 1900, the share of all white children in primary schools dropped from 62 to 54 percent; for black children, from 34 to 31 percent. When Lost young men took the first “I.Q.” tests during World War I, the results showed that half the draftees had a “mental age” of under 12.
• From 1900 to 1920, while the Lost came of age, America’s homicide rate rose by 700%. Just before it peaked in the early 1930s, Lost street hoodlums had matured into America’s biggest-ever crime kingpins. The Lost coined the word “underworld,” as well as “gangster,” “mobster,” “racketeer,” “moll,” and “getaway car.”
• The great influenza of 1918, the deadliest epidemic in American history killed about 250,000 Lost – five times the number who died in combat during World War I.
• The Lost accounted for the first black “Great Migration” out of the rural South and into the urban North. After growing up during the rise of Jim Crow and coming of age during the Wilson-era job boom, about 1.5 million black Americans emigrated out of the South from 1910 to 1930 – nearly three times the prior number of black emigrants since the Civil War.
• With nine million members born abroad, the Lost is (in absolute numbers) America’s largest immigrant generation. An unmatched proportion came from Eastern and Southern Europe, many of them Jewish.

The Lost Lifecycle: YOUTH: The children of the 1890s were America’s most tough-minded ever, growing up fast amid gangs, drugs, saloons, big-city immigration, and an emotional climate raging with evangelical fervor and social reform. Few turn-of-the-century parents know how to protect their nests. Often, they were permissive to the point of near neglect. Unsupervised by parents or governments, children surged into the labor market – girls as piece-rate “homeworkers,” boys as newsies, bootblacks, scavengers, messengers, nonunion cigar-rollers, or ten-hours-a-day coal miners. Lost kids found school irrelevant next to the grim realities of street life. Schools simply didn’t teach you how to be poor and live from day to day. “We children did not shut our eyes. We saw and knew. Some did well, but a large number did badly. Living and dying by their new credo It’s up to you.” These kids were already paying the dues of independence.

​G.I. Generation:  Born 1901 – 1924; Type: Civic; Population: 63,000,000 Percent immigrant 9%. Significant History and Lifecycle:

• 1927 Charles Lindbergh completes first transatlantic flight (Age: 3 – 26)
• 1941 Pearl Harbor Sunday (Age: 17 – 40)
• 1945 VE – and VJ-Day (21 – 44)
• 1954 McCarthy hearings; anticommunist witch hunt (Age: 30 – 53)
• 1965 LBJ plans “Great Society” 89th Congress enacts Medicare (Age: 41 – 64)
• 1969 Apollo 11 puts man on the moon; Vietnam protests peak (Age: 45 – 68)
• 1974 Watergate scandal; stagflation; (Age: 50 – 73)
• 1989 Bush, Reagan hail spread of democracy in Eastern Europe (Age; 65 – 88)

Children born just after 1900 were much more “favored” than those born just before – in families, schools, and jobs – and how that favored treatment led to important personality differences that have lasted a lifetime. First wave G.I.’s were truly “special” kids who grew up in the most carefully shaped of 20th century childhoods, thanks to Missionary parents determined to produce kids as good as the Lost had been bad. From youth to old age, the babies of the century’s first decade commanded the admiration of older and younger generations. They became America’s first Boy and Girl Scouts – and, a half-century later, America’s first “senior citizens.” At the other boundary, the babies of 1923 and 1924 were just old 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. That too produced personality differences that have lasted a lifetime. World War II provided last wave G.I.’s with a coming-of-age slingshot, a catharsis more heroic and empowering than any since the American Revolution. Where World War I had cheated the optimism of youth, this war rewarded it – and implanted an enduring sense of civic virtue and entitlement. The combination of “good kid” first wavers and heroic last wavers produced a generation of enormous economic and political power. The unstoppable energy of G.I.’s is well characterized in their most enduring comic strip character: Superman.

Can poverty be eradicated, Model Cities built, business cycles tamed, Nazis and Communists beaten? Step aside, this is a job for Superpower America – and a generation willing. No other generation this century has felt (or been) so Promethean, so godlike in its collective, world-bending power. Nor has any been so adept in its aptitude for science and engineering. G.I.’s invented perfectly and stockpiled the atomic bomb, a weapon so muscular it changed history forever. So too did they become the nation’s greatest-ever economists, social engineers, and community planners.  

The G.I. lifecycle has shown an extraordinary association with the growth of modern government activity, much of it directed toward whatever phase of life they occupied. When G.I.s were young, government protected them from people and things that could hurt them. When they were coming of age, government gave them jobs. When they were rising adults, government provided them with numerous preferential advantages in education, employment, and family formation. When they were in midlife, they benefited from tax cuts and an economy running full throttle. When they reached elderhood, they received newly generous pensions and subsidized medical care – and gained more than others from deficit laden financing schemes that pushed costs far into the future. Not surprisingly, G.I.s have always regarded government as their benefactor, almost like a buddy who has grown up right alongside them. They have been what historian Joseph Goulden describes as “a generation content to put its trust in government and authority,” a generation that instinctively abides by the will of the “community.”

G.I.s have regarded their own civic mindedness as proof of American exceptionalism. Even in old age, this great generation of “doers” believes that America always stands “on the threshold of a great ability to produce more, do more, and be more. Whatever G.I.s together accomplish in the exercise of citizenship; they think must by definition be good for all generations.

G.I. Facts:

• G.I.s produced by far the largest one-generation jump in educational achievement in American history.
• G.I.s have experienced the “American Dream” of upward mobility and rising homeownership more than any other generation this century, and perhaps ever. Six in seven G.I.s report having fared better financially than their parents, the highest proportion ever recorded. In 1940, 46% of American houses were owner-occupied; by 1960, the proportion had risen to 64% -- roughly where it has remained ever since.

In recent years, news of the retirement or death of G.I. notables has often prompted remarks from Americans of all ages that no one will be able to replace their competence. Yet their final ledger will also include colossal debts; unprecedented public and private liabilities, exported assets, depleted resources, harm to the global environment. The generation that inherited so much excess economic capacity fiscally starved economy unable to afford a new national agenda. Elder G.I. voices distress over the steady loss in the American sense of community in the hands of the young. Back when they ran the “general issue” culture, everything in America seemed to fit together constructively. Now, to their eyes, it doesn’t. And they worry about how they will be remembered.

Silent Generation: Born 1925 – 1942; Type: Adaptive; Population: 49,000,000 Percent immigrants 9%. Significant History and Lifecycle.

• 1945 VE-Day, VJ-Day, atomic bomb dropped; older veteran return (Age: 3 – 20)
• 1950 Korean War (1950 – 1953); anti-Communist fear surges (Age: 8 – 25)
• 1957 Sputnik in orbit, rock and roll popular (Age: 15 – 32)
• 1961 John Kennedy inaugurated; founds Peace Corps (Age: 19 – 36)
• 1963 John Kennedy assassinated (Age: 21 – 38)
• 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinated (Age: 26 – 43)
• 1969 Armstrong lands on moon; divorce epidemic begins (Age: 27 – 44)
• 1974 Watergate scandal (Age: 32 – 49)
• 1979 Peak of Carter “malaise”; energy crisis; hostages taken in Iran (Age 37 – 54)

Fortune magazine’s editors wrote of the “gray flannel mentality” of the 1949 year’s class of college graduates the first to consist mainly of Americans born after 1924. “They are interested in the system rather than individual enterprise.” Only 2% wished to be self-employed. Most of the rest wanted to work in big corporations offering job security. “Never had American youth been so withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous – and silent.” G.I. historian William Manchester later quipped, THE SILENT GENERATION was a name these young people didn’t especially like, but they knew it fit. “We had no leaders, no program, no sense of our own power, and no culture exclusively our own. Our clothing, manners and lifestyle were unoriginal.”

The Silent widely realize they are the generational stuffings of a sandwich between the get-it-done G.I. and the self-absorbed Boom. During the 1970s, the sexual revolution hit the Silent when most of them were passing forty, decades after their natural adolescence. Such awkward timing caused them immense problems in their family lives and transformed them into a “generation of jealousies and role reversals.” Yes, the Silent have enjoyed a lifetime of steadily rising affluence, have suffered relatively few war casualties, and have shown the 20th century’s lowest rates for almost every social pathology of youth (crime, suicide, illegitimate births, and teen unemployment). Apart from a significant number of divorced women who never remarried, the Silent lifecycle has been an escalator of prosperity, offering the maximum reward for the minimum initiative.
Lacking an independent voice, they have adopted the moral relativism of the skilled arbitrator mediating arguments between others – and reaching out to people of all cultures, races, ages, and handicaps. “We don’t arrive with ready-made answers so much as a honed capacity to ask and to listen, to bridge gaps, at a time of immense, extraordinarily complicated and potentially divisive changes. Silent have repeatedly turned back to G.I.s for a steady hand, and forward to Boomers for new values.

Silent Facts:

• Born mostly during an era of depression and war, the Silent were the product of a birthrate trough. They later became the only American generation to have fewer members per cohort than both the generations born just before it (G.I.s) and just after it (Boom). During the 1930s the U.S. population grew by only 7% the lowest decennial growth rate in American history.
• The late-20th century “sexual revolution” and “divorce epidemic” have affected the Silent more than any other generation. From the 1950s to the 1970s, they reported a larger age-bracket increase in their frequency of sexual intercourse than any other generation. Similarly, Silent men and women born between the mid-1930s and early 1940s showed the biggest bracket jump in the divorce rate.

Led by the young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Silent “agitators” adhered to a rule of nonviolence and appealed to the G.I.s sense of fairness. Rising Silent differed from Boomers in their implicit acceptance of the permanence of G.I. institutions. What Silent workers put in; they got back. Whatever their professional field – management, law, civil service, or teaching – Silent men could count on acquiring a house and car, and on raising a family comfortably. Silent women, however, began to resent being trapped at home, and Silent men prepared to break free of a claustrophobia they knew their elders had never felt. “I think the best of my generation – those in their late 30s or early 40s – have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older – a disconcerting, but healthy sign.”
In their hands, America has grown more accustomed to deferring or learning to live with problems than to taking aggressive steps to solve them. Under the Silent elite, America has become a kinder, more communicative place. It has also become culturally fragmented and less globally competitive. Above all, the generation that took America from grinding bulldozers to user-friendly computers, from the circa-1960 “Nuclear Age” into the circa-1990 “Information Age” has excelled at personal communications. The Silent have constantly tried and often succeeded in defusing conflict by encouraging people to talk to each other. Indeed, the Silent have been pathbreakers for much of the 1960s era “consciousness” for which Boomers too often claim credit.
Source: Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991).
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​​​​​The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.

generations_4l_the_great_power_cycle_--_segment_4.pdf
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