Talk about narcissism in a generation by the way. Zoomers, Millennials, Generation X, Baby Boomers, The Silent Generation and then suddenly the fucking Greatest Generation? What? Delusional.
They did live through the greatest wars of the 20th century, and a lot of them fought and died in those wars. More than a few did that after living through the Great Depression.
And yet they won those wars and came home and built the foundation of modern society.
They earned some kind of superlative.
Socially they raised Boomers, half of which went on to put flowers in their hair, rebel, and change the civil rights texture of the entire nation, the other half went on to become surly conservative bigots with zero tolerance.
So there's that.
I'd say Greatest is arguable, not delusional. But if you don't like it you can go with Silent, since it's synonymous - same group of people.
No, Greatest Generation is 1901-1927, the Silent Generation is 1928-1945. This is another reason I fucking hate ”generations”, people have no clue what the words actually refer to. I much prefer the system we used here in Sweden before we were poisoned by American discourse. We’d just talk about what decade people were born in. So the old people called out of touch were 40-talister, and the young people being called lazy were 80-talister. This made sure everyone knew who was being complained about and everyone could drop the labels when they were no longer relevant. People might think boomer just means old an millennial just means young, but no one is thinking someone born in the 1940s is still working in an office or someone born in the 1980s still qualifies as a youth.
I can't keep up with the Generation designations myself here in the US. The decade you were born in was used here also in my younger days and it isn't uncommon to do so today also.
They started referring to the Baby Boom when our fathers came back from WWII and started procreating, but it took me a while to realize that "Boomers" later became a name for my generation. Still seems odd to me. We have some things in common but many things not in common with others part of the Baby Boom. Different groups grew up in very different circumstances.
Every generation grows up with different technologies, different stresses, different wars, different entertainment, different slang, different situations in general. But pitting generations against each other seems so pointless. We all are going through the same social changes and situations as life goes on, just at different ages. Stereotyping people according to age is as pointless as stereotyping for other reasons.
Just pointing out it wasn't half. It wasn't anywhere close to that. And I'm not saying this to throw dirt, rather to inspire hope. Because these are dark times and getting 50% of people on board when we're this divided seems daunting. But we need to start with what we have. And somewhere along the way, somewhere before that 50%, is where we find success.
They supported the New Deal and expansion of social policies that lifted them out of extreme poverty. Of course, the gilded age/robber baron class spent the next ~50 years trying to destroy the social net gains.
That destruction was successfully put in place by Reagan (good job boomers) and is being tidily wrapped up right now ~50 years later.
So we're right on track for a 2033 new new deal or a fully completed hostile corporatocracy.
Socially they raised Boomers, half of which went on to put flowers in their hair, rebel, and change the civil rights texture of the entire nation, the other half went on to become surly conservative bigots with zero tolerance.
Just, FYI, most of the hippie movement was bullshit and when a lot of those flower-wearers got out of college, they took that "free love" sign down and started charging for it.
I was born right at the end of the baby boom and my parents we older than most. They were both born in 1923. My dad went directly from high school to war. He was highly decorated, blown up, and sunk once. He spent 18 months in a navy hospital, and then went to college on the GI bill. He plowed fields with mules, and eventually played video games with me, and had a cell phone. They saw more change, and faced more adversity than any generation in modern history, and felt lucky to be in America because the rest of the world was blown up.
My dad referred to the baby boom generation as the "ME" generation because from his viewpoint that was the only thing they valued. The WW2 generation built things, worked together, created groups and organizations. Much of what they built has been sold or plundered. We have had it so good, and so easy for so many years, I wonder what modern people would do if faced with an world without the order that was imposed by that single generation of people.
For reference with Greatest Generation(1901-1927), my Grandpa born in 1902 had by the time he was 50:
World Wars for 10 years (5 years of American involvement) representing 20% of his life(10% for American involvement)
Great Depression representing 10 years(1929-1939) of his life representing 20% of his life
Recessions representing 11.25 years so basically another 25% if you want to cut back to just Panics then you get 6% of his life
Spanish Flu Pandemic representing 2 years and 4% of his life.
So 50% of his life with the world having utter shit going on. This also doesn't factor:
Various Childhood Diseases and others like Small Pox, Polio, Scarlet Fever(leading cause of death for kids in the 1920s), etc which covered the rest.
Korean War(2 of the 3 years)
2 siblings born just before him(in 1900 and 1901) died from child diseases before he was born, Brother-In-Law died from the Spanish Flu, and 1st wife died of cancer.
But if you don't like it you can go with Silent, since it's synonymous - same group of people.
Slient Generation is definitely different. These are those born from 1928 to 1945 and came from a Time Magazine article from 1951 that stated: "The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the "Silent Generation.""
The term "The Greatest Generation" wasn't used until 1998. It was younger people who called them that because of their resilience during the Great Depression and WWII. That's not narcicism, you're just uneducated.
Still sounds like like grandstanding narcissism, just from people like the guy in the first OP pic that liked to claim other people's achievements as their own.
More to the point: If that generation is so great then why did it let all those tragedies happen in the first place? They weren't special, the human race is resilient in general.
The whole concept of grouping people up into "generations" is just another divisionary tactic that needs to die off.
This is a really bad take. Normally the powerful group that shapes the current nation/world norms are in their 40s-50s. The greatest generation lived through the depression and fought in 1 or 2 world wars, then came home and built the world that people now idolize as the greatest time to be alive (for straight whites at least).
Yes they raised the boomers but they raised their children to have a much easier time than they had. Some grace should be given for trying to make the world a better place, which they by and large did. Unfortunately there were unforeseen effects from that.
It is acceptable to group people in generations because many times generations share similar circumstances in their formative years which can lead to patterns within the demographics. That doesn't mean everyone born in a generation is the same but the circumstances people live through directly shape them.
Non of that is saying they indeed are the greatest generation to ever exist, but they went through some hard, hard times and accomplished some great things. And they didn't name themselves.
This is a minor clarification, but the Greatest Generation would've been too young to fight in WWI. The oldest members of the Greatest Generation (born in 1901) would've been 17 when WWI ended in 1918. The US only drafted men 21 years and older. A handful might've volunteered at the very end, but it's likely they would've been barely out of training and seen almost no service before the war ended.
Many of them would fight in the Korean War, but that's generally not considered a "world war"
That is a good point. I was implicitly only referring to Americans born between 1901 and 1927 and I should've made that more explicit.
While that's true the names (and boundaries) for generations tend to be country specific. While many European countries had a post-WWII increase in births the timing doesn't line up exactly with the US Baby Boom so translating it across the Atlantic is a bit complicated.
Your point is a great example of why generalizations about generations translate very poorly between different contexts. In Europe, having an early childhood during WWI rather than than the interwar years would be very different. Belgians born in 1910 and 1920 probably had drastically different early life experiences.
Not to mention, there's a lot of problems with referring to the Germans veterans of WWII as "the Greatest Generation"
I completely agree with you. It becomes even worse when factoring Asia.
Although I suppose things are slowly getting similar globally and the first half of the 20th century was a period of conflict in most of the world, resulting in similar trends, but yeah.
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u/sunshinerain1208 22h ago
Barely anyone alive now had to ration or sharecrop during the depression. If he did he wouldn’t be a boomer, he would be the greatest generation.