The not so great greatest generation

Racism was its signature and legacy

NBC’s nightly news anchor and author Tom Brokaw authored a widely heralded book with the triumphant title “The Greatest Generation.” The term refers to American who grew up in the Great Depression and fought or labored to win World War II. Mr. Brokaw effused, “It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.”

But do the facts support Mr. Brokaw’s effusion? Or do they betray a racism unworthy of the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord?

Let’s begin with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—civilian targets that incinerated hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese men, women, and children. Carefully ponder the words of war hero Admiral William D. Leahy:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.

My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children….”

General and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force who directed British and American operations against Hitler, recalled his thinking when informed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that atomic bombs would be dropped on Japanese cities:

“I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and the dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and second because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”

In other words, The Greatest Generation committed stupendous war crimes and crimes against humanity in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—killing civilians for the sake of killing and frightening the Soviet Union against territorial ambitions.

The Greatest Generation at home was racist on an industrial scale. President Franklin Roosevelt, with overwhelming public support from the then battleground states of California, Oregon, and Washington, forced 120,000 innocent Japanese-American into concentration camps to placate hysterical racist voters. There was zero evidence of sabotage or espionage. Even the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover opposed the camps. When military authorities in early 1944 opined the camps were no longer necessary, President Roosevelt held them open nonetheless until after the November elections fearful that an earlier return of Japanese-Americans to the West Coast might cost him votes. The United States, speaking through Chief Justice John Roberts in Hawaii v. Trump (2018) declared the concentration camps unconstitutional in overruling Korematsu v. United States (1944): “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—'has no place in law under the Constitution.’”

The Greatest Generation also compelled black soldiers to fight in segregated units and championed the “separate-but equal” racism of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

The nation still suffers from the poisonous racism of The Greatest Generation from Emmet Till to George Floyd and continuing. As Shakespeare’s Marc Antony elaborated in Julius Caesar, “The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

The Greatest Generation is mythology. The DNA of the species is always the same. Thus, Ecclesiastes recognized long ago, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”