RateItAll: The Opinion Network

This is the decade in which I was born, so I gotta give it a fiver! Lot's happened that decade besides GTH!

Good movies,Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak,Witty music,the start of TV.Oh,by the way,we won WWII.Only downside:Stalin became a dominant force in the world.

Good for America; tragic for the world.

This decade produced the Greatest Generation. It had WWII which helped make the USA a Superpower and started a baby boom that has had a ripple effect to this day.

Wow, a time where there was actually a need for a war, not just some president (no names) unofficially declaring it. The people on here who mentioned the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany forgot one thing -- it was also in the 40s that Nazi Germany fell and the surviving Jews were liberated. France was freed from German control. Hitler killed himself. The Nuremberg Trials were completed. Big band music ruled. Soldiers were considered brave and their home-comings were celebrated, not scorned. World War II lasted for 2,174 days and claimed one death every 3 seconds. It was a long, bloody war, but we should be damn proud that we were the victors. The 40s, put simply, ruled.

Not a good time to be black. Hardware stores sold a lot of rope.

well america was at an alltime high in terms of pride we had won a great war people tend to forget that war is not always ta bad thing you have to fight back if you want to survive im not saying its a good thing either but you want to know what would have happened if we had not fought back we would be speaking German and i dont mean that in a good way the economy boomed in the late 40's and guess what baseball was finally integrated yes i know it was overglamorized some and yes racism was bad but man its bad now and americans loved being american they had courage which the baby boomers just didnt have

Hitler killed 6 million Jews. People forget that.

Nazism, Hitler, Auschwitz and other concentration camps, prosecution of the Jews, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War 2...do I have to go any further?

Two words: Concentration camps.

The period of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt: Their activities included incest. How wholesome! Just picture the greatest generation of all time! Picture Franklin's wrinkly microscopic penis and Eleanor's saggy cucumber breasts. This is what inbreeding does. There was a lot of incest in the 1940's! That jerk Roosevelt made people believe it was acceptable! They finally found out worse when they started giving birth to Little Mongo, Downie, Corky, and Chromosomey.

Totally overrated. Nothing good came out of this decade. NOTHING!

I've seen some of the propaganda films from the W.W.2 era. Were they trying to raise fear and paranoia? Racism was at an all time high. After stuffing all of the asian-americans into concentration camps you have to admit that Americans back then were very racist. But on the bright side our camps were nothing compared to Germany's.

It was not a glorious period. The holocaust happened in this period. Millions of people were brutally slaughtered in this decade under terrible facist dictator leaders like Stalin and Hitler. Not to mention the fact that it was an extremely racist period. You were hated if you were black, asian, or hispanic.

My perception of this decade can only be gleaned from the stories I heard from my parents and grandparents. It was because these often told family tales – that were no doubt embellished by sentiment over the years - as well as the many Hollywood WWII propaganda films I cut my teeth on as a child, that this decade still retains a certain golden glow for me. All things considered, it’s pretty hard not to romanticize such a turbulent era, filled with the drama of war, the feeling of righteous anger, lively fashion, imaginative radio shows, the golden era of Hollywood and all of it seemingly scored with the exhilarating tunes of the Big Bands. This was the decade that my parents came of age; when my mother worked as a waitress in one of the only fine restaurants that existed in our city at the time. She told tales of waiting on bandleaders and actors who were in town for shows and bond rallies. Her accounts of these events still play in my memory like scenes from a Frank Capra film. It was also the decade when my father, barely out of high school and like so many other young men his age, happily joined the service to do his part. He chose the Navy and became a gunner’s mate on surveillance/search rescue planes (one of the guys in the glass bubble attached to the plane). I think of his small town, youthful innocence and honest bravery as he sat through lonely night watches on far away Pacific islands and my heart fills with love and appreciation to have been able to call such a decent and kind hearted soul my father. It was also the era when my then middle aged grandparents – looking much older and worn than their now middle aged grandchildren – whose lives had seemingly been strung together by one turbulent time to another - had barely come to the end of the great depression only to be met with the stress of yet another world war. But they faced the new challenge with few complaints - planting victory gardens, using their ration books with care, worrying for their children under fire in far off lands all while waiting intently for news of the progress of the war. Whatever the 1940’s were or were not – they were definitely a time of intensity and change. I won’t try to speak for the entire world. But I will suggest that for my country and possibly the other allied forces, what began as a rude realization of and determination to stop a growing monstrosity ended with victory and a sense of hope. However fleeting that hope might prove to be, it can’t be denied that it gave birth to a new era of confidence that would last for almost two decades to follow.

America becomes the leader and savoir of the world.

A period of victory for the United States, but a period of tragedy for much of the oppressed minority in Europe. The 40s did serve as a relief from the economic depression of the 30s, but it also marked the true beginnings of the Cold War, a struggle not put to rest until 1989. The 40s marked the beginning of a dark period in world history, with the invention and experimentation of the nuclear weapon, and both the superpowers (U.S. and U.S.S.R.) began their nuclear buildup. The Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cold War, which caused turmoil and instability throughout the world, can be traced back to the 40s.