GI's Letters To Donna Reed: When Did We Become So Coarse
This Times piece makes wonderful Memorial Day reading.
Donna Reed was a beautiful and famous actress in the 1940's. She was the mom in "It's A Wonderful Life" and, for boomers like me, Jeff and Mary's mom on "The Donna Reed Show in the 1960's."
But, apparently, for Yanks overseas during the war, she was one of the biggest pin-up stars.
And they wrote her letters, thousands of letters of which she saved a few hundred. Her family did us all a favor by releasing them to the Times for Memorial Day. They serve as a reminder of what young American boys were like two generations ago. Their innocence seems both lovely and incredible.
"All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant Palmer method cursive script rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that 'we think you're swell' and mean it in something other than an ironic sense."The boys in our outfit," Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea "think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!" On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Ms. Reed, then 23, that he wanted her "to be the girl back home that I am fighting for."
Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in "The Human Comedy" made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing "I could see my Mom." He added: "I don't know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another."
Can you imagine anyone in their late teens and twenties writing like that today. What happened?
My guess: my generation, the 60-70's's kids, coarsed up America big time. Am I wrong? I hope so.
Read the article. Worth noting. The wonderfully patriotic Reed became a leading anti-Vietnam war activist in the late 1960's. Naturally! She was just swell. Really.
Nope. You are dead on, the only time that's happened.
May 25, 2009 9:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
watergate, vietnam, late stage jim crow, three political assassinations, and more, were a shock to the collective psyche. these shocks started a process of disillusionment from the family fairy tales encapsulated in such tv shows as 'leave it to beaver' and 'my three sons'. it is out of this disillusionment that society became coarser.
May 25, 2009 1:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Somehow I think a devastating depression and a world war - actually being part of those calmamities, not viewing them from the lens of a lecture hall and spewing second-hand indoctination - were shocks to the system, as well.
May 25, 2009 7:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, don't be so hard on today's boys.
Here's the blog of Rachel Smith, former Miss USA, about her experiences doing a USO tour of Iraq. Ms. Smith seems a bit sweet and naive herself, but you don't get the impression that she was at all treated coarsely.
http://rachelsmith.com/blog/index.php?paged=2
May 25, 2009 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
The origins of contemporary coarseness?
How about including the bi-partisan acceptance of trash TV and junk cinema based on formulaic "plots" and the false equations of
gratuituous flesh = sensuality
gratuituous violence = excitement
vulgarity = humor
bone-shattered decibel levels = drama
Next time your teenage niece says she wishes she could mutilate her body with piercings or the nephew raves on about the latest computer game based on mass killing, you can suggest this little article on Donna Reed as an alternative. An interesting touch is that the letters were extracted from the attic only after one of her children lost its Wall Street job and thus had time to go through them.
May 25, 2009 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sheesh. As a reminder:
What's interesting about these "kids got no respect" arguments is that the obvious point isn't mentioned: the generation complaining about them created the living conditions that the children are brought up in.
Fart jokes are as old as time immemorial -- and still funny. That's why children love them... and we never out grow them.
May 25, 2009 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for this bit of wisdom. Every generation thinks the generation after it has no manners.
An interesting perspective on this came to me recently when I was flipping through the 200 cable channels I now have thanks to having recently subscribed to digital cable. I stumbled on a documentary on the Independent Film Channel called Indie Sex, a sort of potted history of sex in cinema. One of the points was that if you go back to the early days of film - in the silent era - there was pornography galore. I had heard about this vaguely, but I never really knew much about it. They showed some brief clips and it is clear that modern porn has nothing on these early films. It's essentially the same stuff (except without sound which, if you think about it, might actually be an advantage).
The lesson here is that while society's norms may change, human nature really doesn't. I'm quite sure that all the polite GIs who wrote to Donna Reed were capably of making the crudest of jokes about her when they were talking among themselves. I'm also convinced that today's soldiers are also capable of writing a polite letter.
May 25, 2009 11:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Movies in the 70s equated blue-collar with prodigious use of the F word. Blue-collar relatives of mine were outraged. I've always assumed that these profanity-laden scripts were written by middle-class graduates of ivy league schools who wouldn't know blue-collar if it was someone working on their car.
At this point, I consider HBO a joke, no-one can finish a sentence without using the F word.
OTOH I thought Battlestar Galactica was fracking great.
May 25, 2009 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Donna Reed's story should be made into The Movie of the Week. Researching the Hollywood stars that enlisted and fought in WWII can be enlightening.
Rita Hayworth was my favorite. Being young and unsophisticated at the time my favorite movie back then was "The Strawberry Blonde" with James Cagney. Later she was Gilda, yum.
The word "swell" was used often in the old days; its seems to have fallen by the wayside over the years.
May 26, 2009 6:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Even today, fan letters are typically pretty polite. But remember what the pinups were there for in the first place.
May 26, 2009 9:02 PM | Reply | Permalink