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We had meant to publish something on the Fourth of July this year, but the day passed without a TTALK Quote. So, like a student humbly submitting a late paper, we ask you to consider the following while we are still in the month of the Declaration. This entry, however, is not about the events of 1776. Our focus here is on the work of sustaining the Republic in the 20th Century and beyond. Not all, but most of what follows is from Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester.
William Manchester (1922 - 2004), long a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, is probably best known as an historian - The Death of a President, The Glory and the Dream, A World Lit Only By Fire - and as the author of several first-rate biographies, including biographies of H. L. Menken, Douglas McArthur, and Winston Churchill. In 1944 and '45, he was a U.S. Marine and fought on Guadalcanal and on Okinawa. In 1978 he revisited the Pacific islands the Marines contested and took, and then wrote about their experience in his remarkable memoir Goodbye, Darkness.
What did those Marines experience? What were they fighting for? And how has American society changed since? All are themes in Goodbye, Darkness, examined from different angles. Here is both a short and a long version of the question, how has society changed for the Marines of World War II and those who followed them.
The Short Version. Speaking of the youth of the mid-1970s, presumably his students at Wesleyan, he wrote:
They are bewildered by those waves of relentless young men who plodded patiently on and on toward Betio beach [Tarawa] while their comrades were keeling over on all sides. They ask: Why? They are convinced, they couldn't do it.
And they are right. The United States was a different country then, with half today's population, a lordly father figure in the White House, and a tightly disciplined society.
The Longer, Elegiac Version. The prologue to this is the observation that
Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.
In short, they fight for love. But that statement must be seen in the larger societal context, and without apology for the length of this quotation, here it is:
WILLIAM MANCHESTER:
"To fight World War II you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival - in 1940 two out of every five draftees had been rejected, most of them victims of malnutrition. And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together, that no strings were being pulled for anybody; the four Roosevelt brothers were in uniform, and the sons of both Harry Hopkins, FDR's closest adviser, and Leverett Saltonstall, one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, served in the Marine Corps as enlisted men and were killed in action. But devotion overarched all this. It was a bond woven of many strands. You had to remember your father's stories about the Argonne, and saying your prayers, and Memorial Day, and Scouting, and what Barbara Frietchie said to Stonewall Jackson, and you had to have heard Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge and to have seen Gary Cooper as Sergeant York. And seen how your mother bought day-old bread and cut sheets lengthwise and resewed them to equalize wear while your father sold the family car, both forfeiting what would be considered essentials today so that you could enter college.
"You also needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something. You felt sure that all lands, given our democracy and our know-how, could shine as radiantly as we did. Esteem was personal, too; you assumed that if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity, respected as well as adored by your children. Wickedness was attributed to flaws in individual characters, not to society's shortcomings. To accept unemployment compensation, had it existed, would have been considered humiliating. So would committing a senile aunt to a state mental hospital. Instead, she was kept in the back bedroom, still a member of the family.
"Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue. Mothers were beloved, fathers obeyed. Marriage was a sacrament. Divorce was disgraceful. Pregnancy meant expulsion from school or dismissal from a job. The boys responsible for the crimes of impregnation had to marry the girls. Couples did not keep house before they were married and there could be no wedding until the girl's father had approved. You assumed that gentlemen always stood and removed their hats when a woman entered a room. The suggestion that some of them might resent being called "ladies" would have confounded you. You needed a precise relationship between the sexes, so that no one questioned the duty of boys to cross the seas and fight, while girls wrote them cheerful letters from home, girls you knew were still pure because they had let you touch them here but not there, explaining that they were saving themselves for marriage. All these and 'God Bless America' and Christmas or Hanukkah and the certitude that victory in the war would assure their continuance into perpetuity - all this led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell, and, if it came to that, justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved them.
"Later the rules would change. But we didn't know that then. We didn't know."
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