The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Celebration of the Allied triumph ending the Second World War 75 years ago often overlooks the fact that one of the war’s greatest victories occurred without firing a shot.
Passage of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — popularly known as the GI Bill of Rights — influenced the lives of millions of Americans and where they lived, worked, schooled for the rest of the century. The final, and arguably most consequential New Deal reform, began life as a narrowly crafted pension bill that ultimately transformed America.
In his 1944 State of the Union speech, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a “Second Bill of Rights … an economic bill of rights” to guarantee every American a job at a living wage, decent housing, medical care, educational opportunity, and protection against unemployment.
Roosevelt recalled how disgruntled Italian and German WWI veterans had powered the rise of fascism and Nazism. At home, the suppression of the so-called Bonus March of unemployed veterans in 1932 had doomed the Hoover administration. But Congress, dominated by a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans ignored FDR’s appeal.
New Dealers then adopted a “stealth strategy,” working with sympathetic legislators to attach an ambitious social program to a modest veteran’s pension bill. They cultivated otherwise conservative organizations such as the American Legion, realtors’ associations, and the formidable Hearst newspaper chain — the Fox News of its era — to support the proposal.
The bill signed by FDR in June 1944 included provisions for up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits for returning soldiers, lifetime medical coverage, small-business startup loans, civil service hiring preferences, home mortgage guarantees, and support for college and vocational education.
Public discourse highlighted the offer of short-term financial assistance to veterans rather than the more consequential provisions.
Because most of the 16 million men (and 350,000 women volunteers) who had served quickly married and had children, the benefits effectively flowed to millions of families. (Full disclosure: my parents, both veterans, bought their first home with a GI Bill-guaranteed mortgage and the law paid for my dad to attend college.) The two most innovative elements of the GI Bill, educational and housing benefits, had elicited little debate but probably had the greatest impact.
Before World War II, home ownership in the U.S. was limited. Typically, mortgages required a 50% down payment and full payment within a few years. Only the wealthy could afford this. The GI Bill did not provide government mortgages. Rather, it guaranteed repayment to private lenders in case of borrower default.
Given the postwar baby boom and huge pent-up demand for housing, this provided a virtual license for the private sector to make money. Builders and lenders rushed to supply the needs of millions of veterans who previously would not have qualified for private loans.
By the late 1940s, banks offered GI mortgages to veterans with a nominal down payment (5 dollars in my parents’ case!) at about 3% interest payable over 30 years. In many markets, monthly mortgage payments were less than rent for an equivalent apartment. A construction boom of vast proportions created suburban America, symbolized by new subdivisions such as Levittown on Long Island, New York, where nearly 18,000 homes sprang up on a former potato field. Suburbs spurred automobile sales and highway construction.
Education similarly boomed. Before the war, barely 10% of Americans, mostly from wealthy families or teachers in training, attended college. The GI Bill opened new pathways for veterans by paying for tuition, books, and even housing. By 1950, around 15% of Americans attended college and over half of all veterans — 8 million — had enrolled in higher education or vocational training programs, becoming skilled plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and technicians able to repair the nation’s favorite new appliance, the television.
Homeownership, higher educations, and technical training became ladders of social and economic mobility for the GI generation. The experience of Jack Short of Poughkeepsie, New York, was typical. Landing in France as a 20-year-old in June 1944, he and his “band of brothers” fought toward Berlin. Upon liberating the Nordhausen concentration camp, Short recalled in an oral history, he encountered thousands of bodies “stacked up like cordwood.”
Despite this horror, the war transformed his life. For generations, his family had labored in factories and none went beyond high school. But the GI Bill paid for almost all of his college tuition and gave him “money to live on.” Graduating in 1950, Jack found a well-paying job with an innovative tech company, IBM.
Unfortunately, not all veterans shared this experience. As with their treatment in wartime, over a million Black veterans were relegated to second-class status.
Despite nominal eligibility for benefits, rigid segregation constrained their options. For example, federal housing regulators, mortgage bankers, and the Levittown developers conspired openly and covertly to deny mortgages to Black veterans seeking homes in white neighborhoods or the emerging suburbs.
When the first Black family moved into Levittown in 1957, they were greeted by riots and burning crosses. Relegating Black families to crowded inner-city housing perpetuated segregated residential and school patterns.
Similarly, although Blacks qualified for GI education benefits, they were often hard-pressed to find schools to accept them. Half the Black population remained in the South where most private and public colleges remained segregated until the 1960s.
Blacks who used their benefits to acquire advanced vocational skills were often barred by segregated craft unions from membership and access to well-paying jobs.
The GI Bill was replicated after the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Although the provisions were not as generous as in the original, the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s gradually opened greater housing and educational opportunity to veterans of color.
The creation of an all-volunteer military since the 1970s, along with growing recruiting needs since 9/11, prompted Congress to increase the benefits package to nearly its original value.
This is a powerful recruiting tool, especially for volunteers from working class and minority backgrounds. As true since World War II, the GI Bill eases veterans’ return to civilian life while promoting upward mobility.
And all this with nary a “sucker” or “loser” among them.
