G.I. Generation

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American Generations This box: view • talk • edit
Term	Period
Awakening Generation	1701–1723
First Great Awakening	1727–1746
Liberty Generation Republican Generation Compromise Generation	1724–1741 1742–1766 1767–1791
Second Great Awakening	1790–1844
Transcendentalist Generation Transcendental Generation Abolitionist Generation Gilded Generation Progressive Generation	1789–1819 1792–1821 1819–1842 1822–1842 1843–1859
Third Great Awakening	1886–1908
Missionary Generation Lost Generation Interbellum Generation G.I. Generation Greatest Generation	1860–1882 1883–1900 1900–1910 1900–1924 1911–1924
Jazz Age	1929–1956
Silent Generation Baby Boomers Beat Generation Generation Jones	1925–1945 1946–1964 1948–1962 1954–1962
Consciousness Revolution	1964–1984
Baby Busters Generation X MTV Generation	1963–1983 1963–1978 1975–1984
Culture Wars	1980s–present
Boomerang Generation Generation Y Internet Generation New Silent Generation	1984–1986 1979–1999 1985–1999 2000–2020

The G.I. Generation is the cohort of Americans born 1900-1925. They fought World War II, and then created the vanguard of the Baby Boom. The generation is also known as the Greatest Generation (after Tom Brokaw's book), the World War II Generation, the Veteran Generation, the Depression Generation, Builders, and the Traditional Generation or Traditionalists. The term "GI Generation" has been in common use since the 1970s.^[1]

Some authors, including Brokaw, confine it to approximately the later-born half of this segment.

The derivation of "G.I." originally comes from the letters stamped on US Army trash cans made from galvanized iron. [1] By 1943, the term became indelibly linked to the millions in military service. The abbreviation was later explained as "government issue" or "general issue." Many of these new soldiers were also draftees, with the press calling them "Government Inductees" or GIs for short, especially focused on the millions of men entering the U.S. Army. The Army became the epitome of melting pot America. Soldiers were celebrated in the media. The term "GI Joe" was immortalized by reporter Ernie Pyle who drew from frontline stories to write his 1943 book, Here Is Your War: Story of G.I. Joe. After that the idealized "G.I. Joe" became everything that was good about the country, celebrated as a popular comic book hero and toy action figurine.

Boys born mostly in 1923 and 1924, along with a few born in 1925, were just old enough to be drafted, trained, and (at age 18 or 19) shipped to Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima in time to join in the heaviest fighting. George H. W. Bush was among the youngest fighter pilots of World War II; he was only 20 when he and his light bomber was shot down over Chichi Jima.

After the war, G.I.s built suburban tract housing. In the early 1950s the typical 35-year-old's income was $3,000 per year, mortgage rates were 4 percent, and a new Levittown home sold for $7,000 ($350 down and $30 per month). With the GI Bill young war veterans were offered cheap loans to pursue business opportunities and education that before the War would have been out of their reach. They are the generation in which most Americans of south and east European origin entered the great middle class, and include the first large contingent of the black middle class. They include the first blacks to make the successful assaults upon Jim Crow practices in the American South and the first blacks to achieve upper ranks in the American Armed Services.

But even this generation had its weaknesses. It too had its villains, the gutter racists, some gangsters, the McCarthyite exploiters of the Red Scare, and traitors including Axis Sally and the Rosenberg spy ring. Overseas, contemporaries of American GIs include the almost-innumerable British, French, Polish, and Russian heroes of the Second World War, but also many of the pathological types (major and minor war criminals, jack-booted thugs, and kamikaze pilots) of the Axis Powers who ensured the great human cost of the Second World War. Finally, some of the contemporaries in other lands became dictators like Ne Win, François Duvalier, Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, and especially the rigid apparatchiks of most Communist states before those became brittle targets for revolutions in central and southeastern Europe in the late 1980s.

For all their rationality and success in other areas, GI achievements in literature (especially poetry) in the creation of art are comparatively slight. GIs created a bland, accessible, conformist, commercial culture that would itself face a reaction among youth.

All in all, they have more changed the course of American history since the American Revolution. They were the bulk of the soldiers on both sides of World War II; they created prosperity in both victors and vanquished countries after the war; they kept the Cold War from becoming a nuclear war; they presided over the de-colonization of the Third World and the weakening of institutional racism in America and South Africa as well as the almost complete demise of Marxism-Leninism. They also created a firm basis of progress in scientific achievements and in entrepreneurial success.

[edit] G.I. celebrities (with death dates in parentheses)

1901 Louis Armstrong (1971)
1901 Walt Disney (1966)
1902 Ray Kroc (1984)
1902 Meyer Lansky (immigrant) (1983)
1902 John Steinbeck (1968)
1902 Langston Hughes (1967)
1902 Strom Thurmond (2003)
1903 Lou Gehrig (1941)
1903 Bob Hope (immigrant) (2003)
1904 Cary Grant (immigrant) (1986)
1904 Robert Oppenheimer (1967)
1904 Willem de Kooning (immigrant) (1997)
1904 Glenn Miller (1944)
1905 Howard Hughes (1976)
1906 Josephine Baker (emigrant) (1975)
1906 William J. Brennan (1997)
1906 Philip Cortelyou Johnson (2005)
1906 Billy Wilder (immigrant) (2002)
1907 John Wayne (1979)
1907 Warren E. Burger (1995)
1907 Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (1998)
1907 Katharine Hepburn (2003)
1907 William Levitt (1994)
1908 John Kenneth Galbraith (immigrant) (2006)
1908 Arthur Goldberg (1990)
1908 Thurgood Marshall (1993)
1908 Harry Blackmun (1999)
1908 Joseph R. McCarthy (1957)
1908 Jimmy Stewart (1997)
1910 Czesław Miłosz (immigrant) (2004)
1910 John Wooden
1911 Lucille Ball (1989)
1911 Vincent Price (1993)
1911 Raphael Robinson (1995)
1912 Milton Friedman
1912 Thomas P. O'Neill ("Tip") (1994)
1912 Jackson Pollock (1954)
1913 Rosa Parks (2005)
1914 Sammy Baugh
1914 Joe DiMaggio (1999)
1914 William Westmoreland (2005)
1914 William S. Burroughs (1997)
1914 Jonas Salk (1995)
1915 Frank Sinatra (1998)
1915 Billie Holiday (1959)
1916 Robert McNamara
1917 Zsa Zsa Gabor
1917 Kirk Kerkorian
1918 Richard Feynman (1988)
1918 Billy Graham
1918 Ann Landers (2002)
1918 Sam Walton (1992)
1918 Ted Williams (2002)
1919 Jackie Robinson (1972)
1920 Mario Puzo (1999)
1920 John Cardinal O'Connor (2000)
1920 John Paul Stevens
1921 John Glenn
1921 Marija Gimbutas (immigrant) (1994)
1922 Judy Garland (1969)
1922 Jack Kerouac (1969)
1922 Kurt Vonnegut
1923 Chuck Yeager
1923 Jack Kilby (2005)
1923 Henry Kissinger (immigrant)
1924 Lloyd Alexander
1924 Lee Iacocca
1924 Tom Landry (2000)
1924 Marlon Brando (2004)
1924 George Mikan (2005)
1924 William Rehnquist (2005)

The G.I.s held a plurality in the House from 1953 to 1975, a plurality in the Senate from 1959 to 1979, and a majority in the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.

There have been seven G.I. Presidents. Here are their birth dates (and death dates for those that have died):

1908 Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-1969 (1973)
1911 Ronald Reagan, 1981-1989 (2004) - Neither Reagan nor Carter served overseas in the military during WWII; all other G.I. Presidents did.
1913 Richard Nixon, 1969-1974 (1994)
1913 Gerald Ford, 1974-1977
1917 John F. Kennedy, 1961-1963 (1963)
1924 Jimmy Carter, 1977-1981 - See note about Ronald Reagan.
1924 George H. W. Bush, 1989-1993