Readjusting the American Dream
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Often forgotten in the romanticized stories of World War II and the rise of the Greatest Generation are the 11 years of the Great Depression that preceded them. The veterans, most in their 20s when discharged, were largely uneducated. Many had never held a job and lived in rented substandard housing. Within a few years, thanks to the G.I. Bill, the country made a massive shift toward an increasingly educated population, living in their own mortgaged homes, promoting and reflecting the nation’s rise to world leadership.
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, brilliantly labeled the G.I. Bill of Rights, was clearly one of the great tipping points of American history. Congress adopted the bill to forestall a postwar economic and social crisis threatened by the demobilization of 16 million service men and women to civilian life.
This is the story told by Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of several books of narrative nonfiction. Using the examples of several veterans whose lives were changed by the G.I. Bill, his new book “Over Here” (Harcourt, 319 pages, $26) describes the development, operations, and consequences of the bill, the major provisions of which guaranteed a free education (collegiate or vocational) and a guaranteed home loan to all qualified veterans.
News of the passage of the legislation in June 1944 was hidden in the excitement of the Normandy invasion, but the discussions and political players in Congress mirrored the economic, social, and racial undertones of American history. Humes’s synopsis of those Congressional hearings is enlightening. Similarly, he demonstrates how much of postwar living and career choices were conditioned by the advent of the Cold War and the containment of communism
The G.I. Bill had a profound influence upon higher education in America, transforming it in just a few years from a group of private, elitist, white institutions to one of the major democratic forces in American life, open to people of all ages and status. About 2.2 million World War II veterans took advantage of this unbelievable, totally free opportunity, dependent only upon length of service with no tests, tax credits, nor hardly any bureaucratic barriers. Campus life was irretrievably altered in terms of size, curricula, student body, residential life and physical plant, thanks to an amazing response from the higher education community. Funding was provided directly to the student by the Veterans Administration, not via grants to institutions. Humes’s account of these events in terms of social and individual consequences provides important insights into the growth and increasingly important role of higher education.
Barely noted by Humes were the 3.5 million veterans who attended vocational schools, the 1.5 million who were involved in on-the-job training, and the 700,000 who took farm training under the same terms as those in colleges. This part of the educational impact of the G.I. Bill remains to be told.
“Over Here” is particularly strong in its chapters on the short-changing of women and blacks in the administration of G.I. Bill benefits. Though reflective of the time (including a racially segregated military), it is the dark side of the G.I. Bill. Despite the enormous contributions women made to the war effort, including 350,000 military veterans, it was clearly presumed that school and job preferences would be granted to men and that women would and should return to their “place” as homemakers and parents. It was left to their daughters to foster the women’s liberation movement.
Through deliberate design by Congress, most decision-making for individual veterans benefits were left to local Veterans Administration agents, which did not bode well for blacks. Though the G.I. Bill was race neutral, southern blacks were relegated to historically black educational institutions. The North and South steered blacks towards vocational training. Housing remained segregated through essentially universal discrimination by developers and banks. Nevertheless, the G.I. Bill is credited with establishing a black middle class from the World War II generation.
Two elements mar this otherwise important book. The individual profiles of veterans are interesting, but overly detailed, playing on the dubious assumption that everything positive in their lives they owed to the G.I. Bill experience.
More questionable, toward the end of the book, Humes turns partisan, critical of the World War II veterans who reaped the benefits of the G.I. Bill but then became part of the Republican Party conservative core (Reagan, Bush et al.) that opposed taxes and social programs and made subsequent veterans benefits much less generous. He longs for the return of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose long-range plans called for the extension of G.I. Bill-type benefits to all Americans in exchange for public service.
Many students of the G.I. Bill reflect upon how we might repeat the G.I. Bill experience of 1944 in America today, but recognize that it was a special program for a special time, growing out of a prolonged depression and a special war that gave the nation a shared sense of great national purpose.
Mr. Greenberg is a professor emeritus of government at American University, where he served as provost and interim president. He is the author of “The G.I. Bill: The Law That Changed America.” (Lickle Publishing Inc., 1997), a companion book to a PBS television production.