Describing the military or its object, war, as an engine of social change is a kind of truism, certainly so in our century.
It was the poet William Butler Yeats who wrote, amidst the carnage of World War I,
All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.
Another English poet, John Maysfield, made a government-sponsored propaganda lecture tour of the United States in 1918, offering the same judgment.
Whatever this war is, he stated, it is a getting rid of the past. The past has gone into the bonfire.
We are all in the war now, he noted, probably with a certain twinkle in his eye, realizing with more or less surprise and shock and bitterness that the old delights, the old ideals, the old way of life, with all its comfortable loves and hatreds, are gone.
We have to remake our lives, forget our old hatreds, and learn new ones.
The standard argument among historians is that World War II also produced vast social consequences.
As Richard Polenberg summarized in his fairly standard volume, War and Society,
World War II radically altered the character of American society and challenged its most durable values.
The war redefined the relationship of government to the individual and of individuals to each other.
And it posed questions about the relationship between civilians and the military,
and between liberty and security, which continued to perplex Americans.
He added, Pearl Harbor marked more than the passing of a decade.
It signified the end of an old era and the beginning of a new.
of the New. Others, however, have argued that vast social changes through modern war are
more apparent than real, temporary aberrations that roll back towards a kind of normalcy
once the crisis has passed. The British journalist Michael McDonough had that view of the Great
War, concluding, I think no permanent change of importance has been made by the war and
and the character, customs, and habits of the British people.
More recently, feminist historians have made the same argument, or, better put in their
case, complaint.
Dismissing all the stories about Rosie the Riveter and her ilk, these writers argue that
neither World War I nor II produced real, long-term changes in women's lives.
Men were primarily wives and mothers before each of these total wars. Alas, they were
primarily wives and mothers afterwards. As a prominent feminist historian recently put
it, although government propaganda exhorted women to brave, unfamiliar work, these appeals
were contained by nationalist and militarist discourse that reinforced patriarchal, organistic
Notions of Gender Relations.
Sounds like a faculty meeting, I guess, there, doesn't it?
Indeed, I note as an aside that feminist historians
looking at the early 20th century have of late had to go to unusual lengths to
find real heroines.
Some of you, I suspect, are familiar with Rush Limbaugh's term
Feminazis. In truth, there were real feminist nazis in the early German Third Reich, mainly
female professors at several German universities. In 1933, this is a true story, these authentic
feminazis prepared an anthology entitled German Women Address Adolf Hitler. Among other novelties
Lisa contained an article by a Nazi paleoanthropologist who claimed to have discovered skeletons in an excavation of Norway, which proved that prehistoric Nordic males and females had been equal in size and strength.
She theorized that Nordic men had subsequently underfed the women, who shrank in stature.
Nazi culture, she told an undoubtedly perplexed Mr. Hitler, could equalize Nordic men and women again.
Fred let us move beyond such ideological exotica.
When one examines the military's role in stimulating government actions or innovations that later became institutionalized,
the effect of war in driving social revolution grows evident.
To choose just a few examples from this century. In 1917, the U.S. Navy distributed the first
official U.S. government condom. Today, of course, the distribution of condoms to the
citizenry is the principal purpose of government. In 1941, the U.S. government opened the first
The first Lanham Act daycare center to tend the children of mothers working in a defense plant,
marking the first real federal intrusion into the care of infants and small children.
A year later, 1942, the US Army extended military health care services for the first time to
civilian dependents, arguably the first step toward the federalization of American medicine.
And there are other stories to tell.
Relative to sexuality, there is little doubt that the world wars of the twentieth century
accelerated the disintegration of inherited sexual mores.
John Costello's so-called Sexual History of World War II, entitled Virtue Under Fire,
carried this theme.
Amidst the upheaval that uprooted so many lives, the cure for loneliness was discovered
and a changing approach to sexual relations as they adapted to a more dangerous and unorthodox
lifestyle.
A more forceful explanation of sexual adventures among the wartime masses is found in a very
peculiar but illuminating book from the early 1970s entitled The Rape of the Ape, Ape being
The American Puritan Ethic, published by the Playboy Press, subtitled The Official History
of the Sex Revolution and written by humorist Alan Sherman, the book opens with a chapter
on World War II as sex education.
He describes the deployment of American soldiers throughout the world, a fly-opening experience,
he calls it. In Italy, he says, the soldiers found pornography enshrined in stone. In Africa,
in the South Seas, they viewed bare-breast galore. In Paris, the GIs found books we hadn't
dreamed existed, postcards too marvelous to mail, and girls anxious to share their gratitude
for being liberated. In the Verma China Theater, the American boys discovered hashish and a
and a little oriental guidebook called The Perfumed Garden.
Over in India, they run across the Kama Sutra.
Sherman continues,
We went to Scandinavia and the Low Countries and Germany and Japan.
Everywhere there were girls who did things our well-scrubbed sweethearts hadn't yet imagined
and did them for nothing
without a labored seduction routine, without the promise of marriage or eternal love.
The boys came home, Sherman reports, they pondered their experience, and some of them
began to quat the sexual revolution in a very militarized way. As he put it, wherever
there was a strawberry church social, they would search and destroy. They would storm
every bastion of decency, besmirch and defile the enemy on the beaches, in the homes and
in the streets. They would recruit allies among the corrupt to spoil the innocent. They would
experiment with new sex positions, new sex locations, new sex kicks. They would open
new sex fronts. Science, for example. They would give smut respectability by dressing
it in the dignified cloak of science. They would shock and shock again.
I think it's correct, at least in a symbolic sort of way, that Sherman dates the beginning
The beginning of the post-war American sex revolution is November 13, 1945, when Bob Hope, that paragon of World War II Americanism, introduced a new joke to wild laughter on his Tuesday night Pepsodent radio show.
The veteran of the USO extravaganza, who had already discovered the crowd-stimulating value of beefcake, now introduced a new innovation.
On that fateful evening, he told a joke about Sonny Wisecarver, a 14-year-old lethario who had just been hauled into California juvenile court for sleeping with and satisfying a variety of Los Angeles housewives.
Encouraged by the wild response, Mr. Hoppe made Sonny Wise Carver jokes a weekly staple
on his show, and we see here the linear ancestor of David Letterman's contemporary routines.
The common point of both Castello, who is a somewhat serious journalist-historian, and
The chairman, a somewhat honest literary clown, is this. If you find modern sexual ethics at all troubling, don't blame just the Woodstock crowd of the 1960s.
Also blame the fallout from the militarized America of World War II, the so-called Good War.
Among the better known tales of military social engineering can also be counted Harry Truman's use of the armed forces as a race relations laboratory in the late 1940s,
Gerald Ford's and Jimmy Carter's use of West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs as experiment stations for gender role manipulation in the mid-1970s,
and Bill Clinton's contemporary efforts to use the services for a kind of sexual experimentation.
But I would rather look today at two less well-known aspects of wartime aggression, clear wartime aggression, against the American social order.
The campaign against American regionalism and the campaign against the family.
We've all seen those classic World War II films where a new infantry platoon goes into
basic training, containing a drunken Irishman from Chicago, a sensitive Jew from Manhattan,
a cracker from Georgia, a naive farm boy from Iowa, and so on.
The plot, of course, is the manner in which the military tears down these regional biases
and Loyalties, and builds instead a common Americanism, which goes out to vanquish the
fascist foe.
This is in fact a fairly apt metaphor for what took place in America at a much larger
scale during these years, as nation builders worked to crush the regionalisms still existing
on the land.
Driven by military actions, social mobility in the United States reached its highest peak.
Between December 7, 1941 and March 1945, less than three and one-half years, 12 million
men and women entered the armed forces, while another 15,300,000 American adults left their
county of residence and moved to another location.
Never before in the history of our country, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reports, has
Has there been so great a shuffling and redistribution of population in so short a time? Adding to
this was the deliberate substitution of a militia-based war force by a national army,
an army without local ties, without local loyalties. Not surprisingly, the South was
the chief loser in this war-induced migration and leveling. A Dartmouth sociologist, Francis
Thomas Merrill concluded that the war accelerated the pre-war migration of southerners from
rural areas to the rapidly growing industrial areas, with a consequent change in what he
called, with typical New England accent, quote, the extreme cultural isolation which formerly
characterized farm life in the South. He added, at no time since the Civil War has the South
have undergone such a tremendous social ferment.
More broadly, by the mid-1940s, a new America was being forged to replace the regional diversity
of the old. Among the architects of this new American order was Henry Luce, editor-in-chief
of Life, Time, Fortune. Contemptuous of American regionalism, and not coincidentally, he was
was born and raised in China, the child of missionaries.
Luce used his magazines during the war to define and instill a generic Americanism.
In 1946 and 47, at the dawn of the Cold War, Luce crafted a major promotional campaign
for Life magazine under the theme, The New America, built around an innovative picture
The campaign subtly denigrated the isolation of the old American regions and celebrated
instead the vast extension of industry, the growing number of middle class families, the
new suburbs, the spirit of unity and the American military forces stationed around the globe.
The script concluded that the America of the 1930s and this new America forged in World
War II were, quote, almost two different countries. So huge are the changes that have increased
our national stature, unquote.
The Good War also brought to culmination the Federal Government's campaign against the
for the Family as an autonomous institution, with the military serving as the vehicle for
another kind of social engineering.
The effort had been mounting for 30 years. From Theodore Roosevelt's 1909 White House
Conference on Children through Hubert Hoover's 1930 White House Conference on Child Health
and Protection, Washington bureaucrats had been struggling to dissolve parent-child bonds.
As participants of the 1930 assembly noted, the federal government's emphasis had swung
from handicapped and disadvantaged children to all children, the whole family of the nation.
Wherever they lived and whatever their situation, they would be sought out.
Indeed, one book issuing from Hoover's conference described a new being called Uncle Sam's
In truth, a kind of socialist bastard, but in the conference words, a new racial experiment and a citizen of a world predestinely moving toward unity.
But in truth, the Federal Government had so far failed to find a really effective vehicle to bring this so-called new racial experiment to fruition.
The breakthrough came in 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt convened his own White House Conference
on Children and a Democracy in the Shadow of War.
This conference shifted the rhetoric in a new way, claiming to work for the security
of the family.
Indeed, it devoted four of its eleven chapters of the final report, Strategies for Saving
the Family.
In response to the conference, Roosevelt created the Family Security Committee within the aptly
named Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services, Defense, Health and Welfare Services,
think about that for a little while, which claimed to be, quote, safeguarding the values
of family life during the period in which the United States engaged in war.
One must understand, of course, what Roosevelt and his wartime friends meant by family.
They didn't have in mind a freestanding, self-reliant, independent household, the kind that was integral
to the American Republic of old.
Rather, the New Dealers at war embraced what progressive sociologists called the companionate
family.
As practitioner William Ogburn explained in his revealing 1943 book, American Society
in Wartime, the family has lost or is losing its historic functions of economic production
for the market and for home consumption, care of health, education of its members, protective
activities, recreation and religious rights in the home.
Indeed, according to Osborne, the family was left only with the giving and receiving
the bearing of affection by its members, the bearing of children for service to community and state, and a modest role in personality development.
Ogburn went on,
The concept of the family as a companionship embodies the ideals for the preservation of which we are waging this war,
of democracy as the way of life, of the equality of men and women, and of personality as the highest human value."
But of course, as Audburn admitted, the loss by the family of its historic functions has greatly increased its economic insecurity.
The companionship family that they were promoting couldn't feed or clothe itself, couldn't build a house,
couldn't care for its own young, couldn't care for its own sick, couldn't care for its own aged,
it couldn't provide self-protection, it didn't have enough sense to provide recreation or even religious worship.
A democratic, egalitarian, person-centered, companionate family needed, you guessed it, a welfare state
to provide the security and services that families once provided themselves.
And that, according to Ogburn, was what World War II was all about, at least in its social dimensions.
Put another way, the companionate family stood as the ideal consort for the emerging national security state.
The hot war of World War II and the Cold War which followed gave Uncle Sam his experimental fodder.
Between 1941 and 1972, over half of all American males served in the active-duty armed forces for at least some period of their life, an unprecedented generation and a half, who could be shaped, at least to some degree, into the new model social order.
Political and military leaders embraced and institutionalized the companionate family model for their far-flung American garrisons.
Among officers' wives, this meant adapting certain unwritten customs for mass guidance and education,
chronicled in the etiquette books that poured out after 1945.
Inhaling deeply of the spirit of Cold War, Helen Todd Westphalings, Army lady today,
stressed that just as wives esteem, respect and dignify the estate and sanctity of marriage,
So they extended these sentiments of marriage to the integrity and justice of the boundless frontier of democracy our country represents.
In their book, The Navy Wife, Anne Briscoe Pye and Nancy Shea endorsed the production of Navy juniors, or children, as the most important job of your life, the one for which you were designed.
This vision of the family married to the democratic empire and in its service was just what FDR had in mind.
The socialization of the families of enlisted men occurred in more direct or statist fashion.
The services crafted a full welfare system, which turned both the man and his family into military dependents.
Pentagon planners reasoned that adequate welfare benefits would usefully insulate personnel from the outside world,
provide a sense of security, foster morale, and encourage an attitude of solidarity.
All attributes, I need note, of the ideal social democratic order.
In 1942, a Congressional Act extended for the first time special medical benefits to military dependents,
including obstetrical care, post exchanges and commissaries, enjoying a number of hidden subsidies, offered tax-free goods at discounted costs.
Full health benefits for military dependents came through the Dependence Medical Care Act of 1956.
On-base housing construction mushroomed in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, the Army opened a series of daycare centers designed, quote,
In the mid-1960s, Congress expanded again the availability of government-backed medical
care and social services. This uniquely military form of socialism, spurred on, made possible
by the Cold War, encompassed an ever-growing number of Americans. But the companionate
Any family, in fact a weak, fragile, unstable remnant of the institutional family, couldn't
hold together for long, despite the impressive appearance of the Cold War family structure
in the 1950s. By the end of that decade, it is true, 85% of all military officers were
were married, compared to 69% of male civilians. The military divorce rate was significantly
lower than that of civilians. Officers' wives appeared to be more traditional than their
civilian counterparts, and their children appeared to be more numerous. But when a renewed
feminist movement hit the military services with full force after 1970, the whole system
collapsed as a house of cards. The very independence expected of Cold War military wives left them
an easy mark for the new ideology, while the ideologists of the companionate family, such
as Ogborn and Harvard's Talcott Parsons, were pushed aside by a more ruthless breed,
a modern version of the National Socialist Feminists of War.
By 1980, less than one out of five Air Force families could be counted as traditional,
composed of an Air Force father, non-working mother, and at least one child. Single parent
and androgynous families were soaring in prominence, both in military theory and in fact, as were
demands for more day care, more health care, more social services.
By the mid-1980s, the U.S. Army had shifted its definition of family once again, embracing
Having a Collectivist Alternative.
As one official Army statement explained in the year of the Army family, enhanced benefits,
increased family dependence on the State, and more therapeutic counseling would help
merge individual families into the total Army family, a formulation, dare I note, appropriately
The Story here is actually very simple. Modern wars, even cold ones, swell the size and power
of the state, and as the state grows, the family declines. And the lesson is also simple.
It is time for persons on the political right to cast off lingering delusions about the
and conservative traditions of the military, traditions such as the cultivation of the
arts of war, of a sense of duty, of manhood, or defense of one's family and inherited
way of life. Rather, I fear that we face, at the end of the 21st century, something
closer to Carmel's new model army, one being used to re-engineer our society to serve a
a total state, one engaged in a kind of perpetual social and moral revolution.
We've got a few questions here, so I'm happy to try to do that. Yes, sir?
When you were listing those things which the Army, or the military, excuse me, had shed off, you left out one that I prayed our country had shed off, and that word was honor.
Okay. I'll accept that. Any other questions or comments? Yes, Paul?
Can you describe exactly at what point the army ceases to be a defender of more or less traditional family values and embraces the feminist army, Roger's model we discussed in the second half of the paper. Is there any sublimity of watershed?
start to shift. I'm sorry, he asked if there was any significant date, sort of a watershed point at which the sort of traditional looking military family shifted towards a more androgynous, experimental family, and I would say the early 1970s, it was a little delayed from that.
I might note that, as I explained in an article I did not too long ago for policy review,
there is a solution to this and it's a two-part solution.
On the one hand, if we must have a standing army, which I believe we must, at least some form of standing army and navy,
is to go back to the old American model, which was that force would be primarily a bachelor force.
Warriors without dependents, except among senior officers and senior NCOs, supplemented by a large and much better organized and better equipped militia system,
which is again the historic structure of the American military prior to the Cold War.
That's the way out of the dilemma in some ways we've created.
It's a dilemma which has given opportunities to ideologues to apply their trade.
Any other questions?
Yes, sir?
Oh, well, bachelor military force, a better militia.
Or reliance, in fact. I mean, going back to a militia structure.
What is your observation on current trends of women in the military and will that continue?
Certainly, the services under the Clinton administration are planning and recently the Navy announced that they were going to push that even further.
Right now, about 20% of Navy ships are gender-integrated. He says we're going to gender-integrate them all.
So I think it's going to increase. Are there problems with it? There's problems galore.
I think the main problem is that, yes, the military, too, I think function correctly, needs to be a masculine institution.
I say that not out of some lingering patriarchy, as everyone knows, I believe in gender egalitarianism completely, but simply as a functional matter.
A military force needs to have that organization in order to be effective and there was plenty
of evidence coming out of the academies in the 70s and early 80s that the attempts to
gender integrate West Point and Annapolis and Colorado Springs was not going well. It
It was going very badly, and in fact that's what they've done.
I think what's happening is that what we're getting is a managerial force, where increasingly
the officer structure are people who get along in that system, and they resemble the managers
that run the Fortune 500 corporations, and they resemble the managers who run the great
Bureaucracies. What will happen to that force when they face a real war against a worthy
opponent I think is the question. I think it will have trouble winning that war. Yes.
He was asking about Ferdinand Mount's book, The Subversive Family.
Well, scholarship, I don't think it's very good. I think he misinterprets, for example, the Christian view of the family.
I think he takes an extreme view and kind of goes with that.
On the other hand, I think it is true that the family is always self-recreating.
I think Chesterton said that better.
He said it was the one natural anarchist institution in the sense that it is the only institution that is independent of the state
and exists prior to the state and can always be recreated independent of the state.
So he called it the one natural anarchist institution.
Would you tell us about the writing experience with women in the audience?
In this extreme crisis, the Arab armies were pouring in to the newly partitioned Israel, but in fact women were put on the line, and the general experience was that it was a terrible thing, it was quickly stopped.
It was found that it confused authorities, the lines of authority.
It confused the ability of men to obey commands and its demoralization of troops who saw women
being killed and butchered in the manner which I believe you described was just tremendously
demoralizing and they decided to put a stop to it.
Women are still, you know, serving the Israeli force but in non-combatant positions.
It was a few years ago, the Bush administration had a presidential commission on the assignment
of women in the military or something to that effect.
And I guess one of the more interesting moments there is they brought in a ranking senior
Israeli officer to testify.
And he went over this history and how it had been tried and abandoned even at a time of
of Great National Emergency, of Great Crisis.
And he said this, and I said, I want you to know this, too.
The fact that America is contemplating doing this,
in fact is doing it, on a wide-scale basis,
and planning to introduce more women
into more combat roles tells us,
he was an intelligence officer, I believe,
tells us that America is no longer serious
about its military structure.
that in fact it is allowing the force to be transformed into an ideological, he didn't use these words, but an ideological tool as opposed to a war-making tool.
Well, you know, I was asked to testify before that commission and I did. I was, they did a hearing in Chicago and I
and I was asked to give the Midwestern perspective and I had, so I did that, whatever, summer of 92, summer of 92 and opposite me giving the other Midwestern perspective was a female anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin and I did my spiel, anyway she was asked in the session, she says, one of the commissioners asked, can you name a single instance or any instances in history
in the 17th Century, where women warriors actually succeeded.
And she said, well, there is one, and it was, there was a king in West Africa in the 17th
Century who had developed a force of Amazon warriors, fierce women warriors, who she said
won many battles and greater the great empire.
She said, now, it is true that they were forbidden to marry and they were forbidden to have children.
They were, you know, sort of true total Amazons, if you'll have it.
And I was asked what I thought about that.
Well, at first I gave the conventional answer.
Well, that's just an obscure reference to a semi-mythical kingdom.
What do we know about that?
But as I thought about it more, in fact, I think the exception there proved the rule.
They were bachelorettes.
And in fact, if you want a female army composed of fierce bachelorettes,
If you're going to match Loretts, I think it might be relatively effective.
But I don't think you're going to get many recruits.
They're all busy working in Washington right now.
Yes, over here.
In late 1944, with the Third Reich falling down around the years,
it was reduced to having women in combat roles.
He didn't use gas either. He had his experience with that.
And if they aren't fooling you, how is it that these far more ingrained armies are daughters, and who trusted the southerners, and the fools, and I don't like to call this,
you don't end up generating so many more of that kind of mass, relating most to sacred reading?
and the Civil-Conservative Wars.
That's a good question.
Yeah, you're right, there are statistics.
And there's no question that the officer corps was disproportionately southern until recently.
I suspect that figure has changed more recently now that they're very careful about all kinds
of quotas.
But the officer corps, certainly the traditions of the Army, even when I was going through some training 25 years ago, there was still a strong, just sort of a southern connection.
You know, sort of the Army seemed to be right down at Fort Benning. It fit in down there in a way that it didn't fit in up in Illinois. Any other? Okay, sure.
Sorry to get up twice now. If you'd keep talking, I wouldn't talk because you're that good.
But Sledgehammer mentioned Pat Schroeder and Janet Reno being in combat.
I think one thing we could count on there would be no rape.
I did get up for a better purpose than that. You were talking about West Point, Colorado Springs and Annapolis and what had happened.
He was in the presence of a West Point graduate who said, I never go back to reunions anymore.
And he recalled a CBS attack road reporter on a VMI cadet, our sister institution at the Central.
And this freshman was going to be asked, what do you think about women coming to VMI?
And he said, I'm against it.
He said, why are you against it? And he knew it was going to be a great sound bite on TBS News and everything.
And the freshman said, well, we wouldn't want to be another West Point.
I think that's enough said, Lew, okay?