 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 Yates, 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. 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 McDonald had that view of the Great War concluding, I think no permanent change of importance has been made by the war 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. Women 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, organic 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, femenazis. 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 femenazis prepared an anthology entitled German Women Address Adolf Hitler. Among other novelties, it contained an article by a Nazi paleoanthropologist who claimed to have discovered skeletons and 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 shrink and stature. Nazi culture, she told an undoubtedly perplexed Mr. Hitler, could equalize Nordic men and women again. But 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 US Navy distributed the first official US government condom. Today, of course, the distribution of condoms to the citizenry is the principal purpose of government. In 1941, the US government opened 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 dependence, 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 20th 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 in 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 founded pornography enshrined in stone. In Africa and the South Seas, they viewed bare-breasts 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 Burma China Theater, the American boys discovered hashish and a little Oriental guidebook called The Perfumed Garden. Over in India, they run across the Kamasutra. Sherman continues, we went to Scandinavia and the Low Countries in 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 promised marriage or eternal love. When the boys came home, Sherman reports, they pondered their experience. And some of them began to plot 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 of the post-war American sex revolution as November 13th, 1945. When Bob Hope, that paragon of World War II Americanism, introduced a new joke to Wild Laughter on his Tuesday night, Pepsident radio show. This veteran of the USO extravaganza who had already discovered the crowd stimulating value of beef cake, now introduced a new innovation. On that fateful evening, he told a joke about Sunny Wise Carver, a 14 year old Lothario 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. Hope made Sunny Wise Carver jokes a weekly staple on his show. And we see here the linearal ancestor of David Letterman's contemporary routines. The common point of both Costello, who's a somewhat serious journalist historian, and Sherman, 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 war time aggression, clear war time 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. A plot, of course, is the matter 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 7th, 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 US Bureau of the Census reports, 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, 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 Merrill, concluded that the war accelerated pre-war migration of Southerners from rural areas to the rapidly growing industrial areas with a consequent change in what he called, the 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 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 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 a innovative picture-rama presentation shown to invited audiences in major cities across the country, 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 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 Herbert Hoover's 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, Washington bureaucrats had been struggling to dissolve parent-child bonds. As participants at 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 Child. In truth, the 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 11 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. His practitioner William Ogburn explained in his revealing 1943 book, American Society and 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 Was born, the family was left only with the giving and receiving 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, unquote. But of course, as Ogburn 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. The 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 been 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 was failing, 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 and Brisco Pie 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 Dependents Medical Care Act of 1956. On base housing construction mushroomed in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the army opened a series of daycare centers designed, quote, to enhance the morale of servicemen and their families. 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 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 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 daycare, more healthcare, more social services. By the mid 1980s, the U.S. Army had shifted its definition of family once again, embracing 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 dated 1984. 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 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, an inherited way of life. Rather, I fear that we face at the end of the 21st century, something closer to Cromwell's new model, Army. One being used to re-engineer our society to serve a total state, one engaged in a kind of perpetual social and moral revolution.