Manhattan's janus children, transitional era boomers born 1940-1956

I am a member of the transitional era boomer generation (born 1940-1956) : we historical few who experienced both the waning of modernity and the dawning of postmodernity during our crucial - plastic - formative years.

Very few of us were born in Manhattan (very few people ever are) but we were all Manhattan's janus children in a very real sense : the healthiest and most frightened generation of children ever born.

Manhattan '45 : Janus year (on the Janus campus) in the Janus city

Ah, yes the year 1945 : it was the best of times , it was the worst of times.

It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.

When they stopped making noirs, they stopped making babies : the Noir & Baby Boom, 1940-1959

Why I don't know.

Maybe I got it completely backwards , maybe when they stopped making babies they stopped making Noirs.

I just don't know.

Perhaps it is all just a big coincidence.

Or a giant conspiracy - up there or way down here.

I really don't know ....

Nothing links new Baby Boomers to the old : its always about content , not container

A new , relatively little known , baby boom is underway - in terms of babies produced per family of baby-makers , one that is far far bigger than the better known and older Baby Boom.

By the conventional measure of 'Baby Boomer' impact, this then should be big news.

But the conventional explanation for the importance of the post WWII Baby Boom is wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

It was not our sheer massive size that made Noir's Children, (those of us born between 1940 and 1956) so important in historical terms.

But size does matter for today's baby boom, despite it being smaller in absolute size than the post war boom.

Confused ?

Noir's Children : the teenagers who MADE Mo go Po

Noir's Children (my particular birth cohort of 1940-1956) those of us born 'after the Fall of France but before the Rise of Elvis' - were virtually unique in being perfectly comfortable living inside TWO whales .

WWII to be a war of physics, all ELEGANCE and PARSIMONY ; instead it was a war of history, multi-causal, protracted, all plentitude and fecundity

Remember how quick WWII was supposed to be?

Within hours of war's declaration, all those deadly accurate surgical strikes with poison gas by massed fleets of heavy bombers ('that always get through') upon civilian cities (who 'always panic and surrender') ?

One can't be postmodernist (or religious) and still believe in Golden Age Superheroes

The era of Modernity (1875-1965) was the Golden Age of Superheroes almost by definition : the fictional kids' comics simply mirrored the grownups' view of how the world really worked.

But eventually most of even the grownups really grew up and saw that the world's problems couldn't be solved by simplistic violent solutions - and Silver Age comic book heroes evolved in lock step at the same time.

1945 was a triumph for modernity AND postmodernity

And that can't possibly be !

It would be as if Matter and Anti-Matter went through a revolving door together and yet both emerged equally triumphant.

Manhattan Natural : green Life-Saving , from the concrete jungle ...

The urban jungle that is Manhattan, with all its concrete skyscrapers, should be the very last place on earth where one might expect to see the start of a turning away from the Modern obsession with the artificial and the synthetic and a turn to the Postmodernity's renewed relationship with Nature.

But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of  natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .

Fiction's drive for the smooth closure of all narrative lines demands that penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming (in his brand new 1931 hospital factory) should have been the first one to grow the green stuff in amounts sufficient to begin to save the world's fatally infected - but he didn't.

Manhattan Natural -- fermenting a life-saving revolution from the concrete jungle

Instead it was Columbia's Martin Henry Dawson and Pfizer's John L Smith that rose to World War Two's moral challenges.

And very soon it was postmodern natural penicillin from Manhattan's concrete jungle that was radiating hope all around a war-shattered world --- while Fleming and Florey's modern artificial penicillin from leafy-green Oxford University never even got off the drawing board.

natural from concrete --- artificial from greenery

The natural from concrete and the artificial from green : life is filled with ironies isn't it ?

So why should I ever think of writing 'mere fiction' ?

No novel-writing for me - not when the extraordinary truth is so much stranger than any fantasied fiction....

Other than as victims, does a successful WWII book actually NEED women, blacks, Jews, the handicapped, the poor, gays, civilians ?

The Fox News-ization of WWII : history as re-written by talk radio ...

To answer my title's question : of course not.

The most prominent woman leader in WWII - almost the only one - was Eleanor Roosevelt - and her little bit of influence came mostly from her nation-wide newspaper column, not from being inside the corridors of actual decision making.

Ditto goes almost all of the small/weak/unfits/misfits I earlier mentioned.

Sure Jews and gays were plentiful in corridors of power in most Allied nations - but powerful acting as representatives of the Jews and of the gays --- no, no ,no , a thousand times not.

If you want to distort history, satisfy your aging male writer's ego and make lots and lots of money, you can happily focus on the WWII that was all about Modernity and the good old days when male middle class still dominated the lesser breeds and genders.

But 1945 did not just mark the Apogee of Modernity, Big Science and the hegemony of the big Western Powers - it also is taken - by general academic consensus - to be the year that marks the start of the Nadir of Modernity and the rise of our present Postmodern era.

Because, underneath the Boy's Own World of virtually all of today's most popular WWII books , there were an awfully lot of unfits taking FDR's Four Freedoms and the Allied Atlantic Charter very seriously indeed.

Which is to say, a lot more seriously than did the guys who originally wrote them ...

Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"

We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's  Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.

(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .

And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.

This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)

Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.


P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.

It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.

Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.

So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.


And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.

But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.

And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.

We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.

But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?

I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....

WWII: the battle for inclusive medicine over exclusive medicine

In 1940, Big Pharma only wants to sell its profitable-expensive (patented drugs) to those who could afford to pay for them directly : just as the AMA only wanted doctors to heal those who could afford to pay directly for its members profitably-expensive services.

Against this, some doctors like Henry Dawson believed that all life dined at a common table and that all life deserved a chance to live , all life deserved medical care, including penicillin.

He did not believe in dividing the world into "life worthy of wartime penicillin" and "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".


When the AMA and Big Pharma, working together at the OSRD and the NAS , thought and acted differently , he promoted among his fellow doctors the idea of hospital-made inclusive penicillin.

Inclusive Penicillin  was that hospital made by individual doctors , without thought of patents or personal gain, to save the lives of all those regarded by the government's medical establishment as being "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".

The movement consisted of just Dawson's team at first, then people he directly convinced to follow his ideals.

It then spread all around the world as more and more doctors , encouraged by an awakened and angered laity, urged them on.

All the dramatic new stories, on young mothers and young children snatched from certain death at the last minute by minute amounts of penicillin flown around the world by seconded heavy bombers, seemed to have had an unexpected secondary affect.

Suddenly many of the modern era's population rediscovered feelings of compassion and empathy they thought they had successfully exorcised under the rationalism and utilitarianism
of modern culture.

Their hearts softened at the sight of all those saved babies, children of strangers, and they looked at all their neighbours and all strangers in a new, kindlier light .

An post-modern light ...

The irony of 1945's twin triumphs ...

1945 was , on any account, an extraordinary year, not the least for its twin scientific triumphs.

At the time, it was almost universally held that the Man-made Bomb was the way of an atomic future so bright we'd have to wear shades .

By contrast, 1945's new Microbe-made medicine (natural penicillin) was viewed as but a temporary anomaly, a dusty throw back to the outdated caldron practises of medieval midwives.

But more than a half century later we are no longer so sure of all of this.

Atomic energy has not at all fulfilled its early promise.

Meanwhile, microbiology and biotechnology (descendants of 1945's natural-produced penicillin) have far outshot their 1945 rival, synthetic chemistry.

So today, with 20/20 hindsight, while 1945 can still feel like the apogee of the Modern age,it is also revealed as its very nadir.

Because 1945 is now seen as the birthday of our present post-Modern age.

In which case, Henry Dawson's twin follies of advocating on behalf of small individuals and on behalf of small microbes can be seen as promoting a distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity.

For few of us, under the age of eighty, devote much energy these days to replacing our current rainbow of many small cultures with a return to yesterday's dreary unitary monoculture of constipated WASP-dom.....

Social Darwinism turns Peace into Undeclared War...

The attributes of the Age of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk I) makes the idea of contrasting it with the concept of the War of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk II) a moot point.

This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.

It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would  inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .

By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.

But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.

But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up,  while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.

Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.

He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .

Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing  of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.

But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.

In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...

Are the small just a tiny part of the Modern past or a vital part of the Postmodern future ?

Two hundred years from the event, historians will be telling classrooms that when it comes to exam time, they should remember that WWII boiled down to just one issue.

One - scientific - issue.

Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?

In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.

On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.

By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.

But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.

For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.

But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.

That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...

Modern "Bigger is Better" vs Post-modern "Small is Beautiful"

Kiddies, don't agonize about the complex differences between modernity and postmodernity when your prof poses the question at your next final exam ( trust me on this one - they will).

Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....

1945 : Triumph of the Weak ; Mite is Right

If the triumph of post-1945 postmodernity over pre-1945 modernity means anything , it means the unexpected triumph of the mite-y over the mighty and the triumph of the weak over the wise.

And yes, the survival of the fittest (to a particular place and point in time) over those all-weather, all-terrain, all-the-time "fit" so beloved by modernists.

Ain't life grand ? And ironic ...

Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma

Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.

This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.

But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.

In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.

But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.

Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.

But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.

Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.

(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure :  pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)

It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin  poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.

We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.

He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .

His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."

"Living better chemically ?"

Today, in this postmodern age,  this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.

At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.

Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....

Big but Simple, Small but Complex, the paradoxes of PO-MO Science refutes central tenet of MODERNITY

   Modernity was birthed in the late 19th century ,when Darwinian Biology saw a definite, if meandering, directionality to progress, leading through random activity into self organization - onward to ever bigger and hence ever more "complex" beings .
  This metaphor was extended to all things : Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Unions ,Big Bridges, Big Dams, Big Battleships , ever onwards.
  Bigger was Better,Law of the Jungle, Might Makes Right: Darwin our God was definitely on the side of the Biggest Battalions.
  But quantum physics and molecular biology in the 1930s put a question mark on these certitudes.

     Or should have - if Science works like it claims it does.
 For example, the alchemists' claim of transmutation of  atoms turned out to be possible after all - the hundred plus elements were not just a given at the birth of the Universe.
   So some physicists in the 1930s were speculating that in the seconds after the Big Bang, its immense heat and pressure fused subatomic particles into ever bigger subatomic particles and ultimately produced the lightest element hydrogen and a few of its lightest cousins.
   What what could have given the truly tremendous energy and pressure needed, by quantum theory, to fuse the heaviest elements into being ?
   A mystery.
   But with the 1930s discovery of Super Novas, we now had a source for the immense energy needed.
   It came from explosions of the biggest discrete objects in the Universe .
   But there was a real paradox here : there is nothing bigger or more energetic than a Super Nova exploding, but all it could produce for all its labour was the tiny - and relatively simple - atom.
    Yes, the simple atom : For by the 1930s, the new sciences of Polymer Chemistry and Bio Chemistry were coming to the conclusion that true complexity lay in the giant biological-created molecules.
   These were a mixture of thousands of different atoms, but arranged in such complex three dimensional shapes that each enzyme or protein molecule to be an incredibly tiny but precise factory or robot.
   Ironically, some claimed that it was Life's smallest beings, the microbes, who designed and used these giant molecules the best.
   Martin Henry Dawson called this bacterial transmutation of biological molecules (like DNA) via HGT (horizontal gene transfers) "Transformation", but many others simply called it biological transmutation a la the alchemists and the elements .
    So now ,big Super Novas produced small and simple atoms , while tiny microbes produced big and complex molecules.
   But in fact, these discoveries made by Quantum Physics and Molecular Biology between 1890s to the 1930s seemed to hold
little 'real world' relevance to politicians and businessmen, until WWII  (Modernity's War) exposed Modernity' weaknesses.
   Martin Henry Dawson's friends, Floyd Odlum and Jackie Cochrane, were in turn close friends with the most influential advocate of air power in WWII : General Hap Arnold, US Army Air Force.
    Arnold felt that Carl Norden had the war-winner in his bombsight, so deadly accurate there would be no need to use old-fashioned infantrymen like Dawson.
   However, Newtonian Physics/ Norden Physics totally failed to get its promised bombs into the proverbial pickle barrel from 15,000 feet up.
 The military were forced to go back to the ancient method used by the armies of tens of thousands of years earlier : firing up of entire cities.
   (That and calling in those low tech/old fashioned infantrymen to once again close the deal.)
   The fire came from the atomic bomb with such force that aiming accurately was rendered irrelevant -- even a miss still wiped out the entire city.
   Suddenly, after August 1945, that long-haired Quantum-whatever physics stuff that had produced the a-bomb seemed to be something politicians, generals and newspaper editors would have to take seriously.     Newton - and Norden - would have to go to the museum.
    The revelation of Auschwitz's medical experiments in November 1945 had already made everyone question just what evil alley Galtonian Biology was leading humanity up.
    Dr Joseph Mengele's 'research' (via photographs and measures of people's external bodies) leading to crude carving and sewing up of people to make the perfect race suddenly seemed irredeemably old-fashioned.
   The future of genetics seemed to lie instead in tiny objects inside those bodies - lie inside the molecules of life.
   Dawson's former colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute might just hold the new key to biology - via a sudden interest in researching  Dawson's old DNA stuff.
   Not that any politician or businessmen actually said that - not for 50 more years.
    But the ambitious young at the leading edge of science sure did --- they moved into molecular biology from all branches of science after 1945, from physics and chemistry and geology as well  from zoology and botany.
  Daltonian Chemistry was in no better shape - its traditional method of choice - huge factory vats to heat up and heat down, under tremendous pressure, to create a few simple chemicals - also seemed suddenly irremediably old fashioned by 1945.
   A tiny - invisible - fungus factory, as advocated by Martin Henry Dawson, could gracefully produce the Life-saving penicillin at normal temperature and pressures while the huge chemical plants just spun their wheels, failing to produce any synthetic penicillin.
   The weak, as it turned out,  might inherit the universe after all, just as the Bible claimed many eons ago....