[senecaman]

I am from SC.

I have a thread that was originally titled.

America's First "Greatest" Generation"?



Later I retitled and reposted the thread to be less confusing.

Is the pre World War 2 Generation underappreciated?

Both threads are basically the same. They are not about WW2 or about which generation is the best and they are about how the pre WW2 Generation (parents of those who fought in WW2 ) kept the country together but whose efforts were largely forgotten after the War and the prosperity that followed.


I may be biased lol but I think someone from the South would get the point of the threads and I could use some assistance with some posts on either thread explaining what I was try into get across.



Also if you were born in the South you might think this post just below that's in bold needs an answer. Its post number 11 from the first thread(America's First "Greatest" Generation"?).It's an honest opinion but very harsh if you ask me . Here it is but you need to read some of the thread to get the full context.

(OP, The generation you are talking about is quite small when you subtract the immigrants. They did not really do much in the way of changing our lives. They took care of themselves but that was about it. They did not start the major industries, that was the generation before them. They did not save the world, that was the generation after them. I really don't see where they did much of anything outside of their small circle of family.

I will always give credit to The Greatest Generation. When you compare the world they were born in to the world that they died in there is no comparison to any other generation.)

My response to that post is post number 15 in that same thread. I find what the poster said to me laughable but read the thread (its not too long ) to understand the context.


If you have any stories to add please post them at the 2 links . It would be greatly appreciated
Is the pre World War 2 Generation underappreciated?

America's First "Greatest" Generation"?


Thank you

senecaman

[Rock Climber]

Interesting thread idea. I'll throw a few of my own perspectives out there.

First off, the generational labeling game is a strange idea to me, but for the sake of this discussion, I'll play along.

I'm a late "Generation X" so take my opinions with that in mind.

The "Greatest Generation" is a marketing ploy by a few "Baby Boomers" trying to make a buck, honestly. But lets assume for a second that it defines a real thing, and an important American cohort.

It could just as easily be presumed that The Greatest Generation almost succeeded in handing the world over to Communism as anything else. In fact, the side we fought for in WWII in Europe directly led to the conflicts in Korea an Vietnam and the entire Cold War.

The Greatest Generation also gets credit for the post-war boom times. Americans of that age group like to view the prosperity this nation experienced after WWII as evidence of "God's Providence" and proof that America was the RIGHT side of everything in WWII. In fact, the boom in American manufacturing and the expansion of the American economy after WWII mostly had to do with the fact that the rest of the world's "first world economies" had been bombed to pieces. The U.S. was one of the only parts of the civilized world with any manufacturing capacity.

As a member of a smaller and less ego-centric cohort of Americans, the whole "my generation is the best" game strikes me as absurd for the most part. I've seen Boomers taking credit for everything from the moon landing to the internet, when the generations before and after them had more to do with both.

[Old Fossil]

I fully agree with what Rock Climber Posted, but I'll specifically reply to the title of this Thread "---a good grasp of the South during the Depression?" It all depended on where you lived and what your family depended on for a living. If you were depending on "public works" as it was called then if you worked for someone else; i.e. manufacturing, it was starvation time and the cause of the great migration to California. If you were a farmer, especially a small "hill farmer" as my family was, you really couldn't tell the difference because you were already living from harvest-to-harvest anyway, with lots of bartering in between to survive. We raised our own food and bartered for or used the little cash we had, for other things we needed such as salt and other baking material, and clothes/shoes when they could no longer be patched/repaired.

PS: I was there. The above Posting is first hand experience.