A Noble Generation Of Workers Matured The Hard Way

The question begs, when did the crisis of worker immaturity begin? Or, bluntly, which generation is to blame? Is it the Builders, Tom Brokaw’s so-called Greatest Generation that fought WWII? Is it my generation, the Boomers, who rode the coattails of the Builders to unprecedented material success? Or is it the Busters, the current 20s and 30s generation that places high priority on people over productivity?

This month’s death of my father, Jack Newton, 84, answers the debate in part. It wasn’t his generation that started the bradult movement, thanks to the military and its mission to stop the warlords of Japan and Germany. I came to this conclusion as I belatedly studied my father’s war records.

Gains M. "Jack" Newton was like millions of men – rural in upbringing and simple in values – living out the end of the Great Depression when WWII began. Reared in Oil City, LA, he had no idea that by age 23 he would be dropping bombs on Europe as the bombardier of his B24 Liberator. More farfetched was the thought of participating on secret low altitude drops of resistance fighters and materials behind enemy lines. Yet that was his fate, to become one of the US Army Air Corps secret group called The Carpetbaggers.

Military readiness in his time was rooted in values, particularly the willingness to sacrifice oneself in the name of duty and honor. The act of military preparedness demanded conscription to principles of integrity and teamwork, something every enlisted person of his time learned in basic training. 

When the war was over, his generation brought these principles to the workplace. Building the infrastructure of our post-war cosmopolitan society, like the effort to win the war, required nothing less. Workers were expected to conduct themselves with integrity and to persevere until their job was done.

No, the generation of Jack Newton were not bradults in the workplace, nor did they start the bradult movement. Their values, thanks to their military preparedness, did not allow it.