OPINION:
If you took a doughboy of the Great War – let’s say not any doughboy, but one of the World War One veterans you might have heard of: Truman, Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Sergeant Alvin York, Eddie Rickenbacker – and dropped him in America today, what would he think of the country he fought to defend?
Despite our prejudices that ours is a high-tech wonderland, he would not be much impressed at our technological progress. From rotary phones to smart phones, from typewriters to home computers (where modern man goes to waste his time), is nothing compared to the progress seen by someone like Douglas MacArthur, who remembered cavalry wagons crossing the West and lived to command an army in the atomic age.
He would also not be much impressed by something else we pride ourselves on: our alleged racial progress. It was his generation that started dismantling segregation (Truman in the Army, Eisenhower in the schools). He would be disappointed, if anything, at the simmering racial animosities that continue to spill over into the news.
No, it’s the little things (which are really big things), that would surprise him. His generation wore proper hats (not baseball caps) and ties to ball games; he would be shocked, as he walked our streets, at the plethora of pasty-faced, obese, t-shirted, sandal-footed, baggy shorts-clad, tattooed and ear-ringed persons of indeterminate sex taking pictures of themselves with their smart phones.
He came from a more aspirational culture, one with common heroes (Robert E. Lee for Truman, Marshall, and Eisenhower); common tastes (Westerns for Marshall, MacArthur, and Ike); and a common, heroic, view of American history, where the fifes and drums of 1776 still sounded: “Lafayette, we are here!” an aide to General John J. Pershing announced when the Americans arrived in Paris in 1917.
He might be forgiven for worrying that the Slobbovian American of 2014 might not have the same ideals. He might worry that absent the “melting pot” culture he remembered (Rickenbacker’s parents were Swiss immigrants), the demographic transformation of the country, which would be strikingly noticeable to him, might mean an unraveling of the mystic chords of memory that tie a nation together.
Other things would shock him. To ask the question – “What would George S. Patton think of homosexual soldiers marching in uniform in gay pride parades?” – is to answer it. The idea that marriage can consist of two wives or two husbands would have been inconceivable to anyone of the Great War generation.
Almost equally shocking to him, as a veteran, would be the idea of women in combat. We sometimes forget, given the profanity for which he’s famous, that Patton thought of the profession of arms as an extension of chivalry; he gave lectures on this, and on the necessity of every officer behaving as a gentleman. While Marshall was an enthusiast for the WACs (the Women’s Army Corps) and opened up billets for them, the idea of putting women into combat was something else entirely. A former pacifist, like Sergeant Alvin York, would have had his pacifism renewed, and his faith in America shattered, if Woodrow Wilson had shoved women into uniforms and in front of the Kaiser’s bayonets, artillery shells, and machine gun fire.
If you can imagine Harry Truman putting a helmet on Bess and ordering her over the top in World War One, you have a better imagination than I do. And if you think that Douglas MacArthur, a great sports fan who liked to watch prize fights in his retirement, could have watched two women pummel each other in the ring without turning away in disgust—well, you’re simply wrong. We like to pride ourselves on being the moral superiors to generations past, but the doughboys would find our entertainment and our culture nihilistic compared to their own; our appearance brutish; our social mores almost beyond belief.
They were, however, optimists who saw this nation win two world wars, surmount the greatest economic depression in American history, contain (and though they didn’t live to see it, defeat) a massive totalitarian threat preaching world revolution. They, like American generations before them, were exemplars of the can-do spirit—as yet untamed by bureaucrats and the welfare state.
Would they have confidence in the America of today? Probably. That was their nature. The American history they grew up with was of heroes who did things: forged a nation like the founders, settled the wild frontier like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, fought bravely in blue or grey. They were raised not to bemoan problems, but to solve them.
And the first step in solving them, they would likely think, as the patriots that they were, would be to shoot some of the old American ideals into the new Americans. One way to find these ideals is to study the lives of these men and what they held sacred. Alvin York and Eddie Rickenbacker, George C. Marshall and George S. Patton, should not be strangers to us, they should be inspirations.
H. W. Crocker III is the author most recently of “The Yanks Are Coming! A Military History of the United States in World War I.”
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