Unintended benefits

LIKE so many other pieces of New Deal legislation, the GI Bill is often taken for granted today. People forget that college education and home ownership were once perquisites of the wealthy, just as they forget that there was a time when someone who lost a job was quite literally in danger of starving and the elderly were consistently among the poorest members of society. But while Social Security and unemployment insurance still provide benefits to millions of Americans, the GI Bill of Rights made its greatest impact on a single generation, that which served in the military during World War II. It’s one of those ironies of history that the New Deal legislation with the narrowest scope may well have had the broadest impact.

Ironies abound in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes’ vivid account of the GI Bill’s largely unintended results. The American Legion lobbyists who crafted it in 1944, Humes notes, hoped “to put things back to where they were before the war.” Their plan for a modest package of government-subsidized loans, tuition assistance and unemployment benefits stood in stark contrast to President Roosevelt’s expansive vision of aid to veterans as “part of a larger strategy to lift up all Americans” with comprehensive social programs paid for by taxing the “unreasonable” profits of corporations and individuals. Although FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights” died with him, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (as it was officially known) that he did sign came very close to fulfilling his dream of cradle-to-grave security -- only not for everyone.

Veterans alone got a hand up from the government, mostly because Congress expected another depression like the one that followed World War I and wanted to avoid the grim social and political consequences of dumping millions of returning soldiers into a contracting economy. But the post-World War II economy didn’t contract; it expanded, stoked by the fear of communism that kept the military budget growing long after hostilities in Europe and Asia had ended. Humes profiles Bob Booth, who helped develop the B-52 bomber and the Polaris submarine-launched missile, one of countless veterans who got high-paying jobs at companies such as Boeing and Lockheed thanks to their government-financed engineering degrees. Getting those degrees kept them from flooding the labor market during the transitional years of the late 1940s.

Employing the same lively narrative techniques that made such books as “School of Dreams” so readable, Humes illuminates various aspects of the GI Bill through individual veterans’ experiences. Booth’s story enables the author to highlight the Cold War’s decisive role in the postwar economic boom and to wonder wistfully what might have happened if the talent funneled via the GI Bill into the defense industry “had been channeled instead into inventing new sources of energy, new medical treatments, new educational reforms.” Actually, the chapter focused on Richard Koch, a bombardier who went on to medical school and pioneered new treatments for developmentally disabled children, demonstrates that the more than 60,000 GI Bill-educated doctors had a huge impact on postwar medicine. Though well-argued and intelligent, “Over Here” isn’t always faultlessly consistent; instead, Humes’ rich tapestry captures the complexity and contradictions of American society in the midst of dramatic change.

This is particularly evident in his assessment of the GI Bill’s two most important benefits: tuition assistance and guaranteed mortgages. The vast expansion of home ownership in the United States was “launched, underwritten, and paid for by the G.I. Bill,” Humes reminds us, and he brings that to life in the words of vet Bill Thomas, who in 1950, at age 26, phoned his bride-to-be to proudly tell her he’d bought a house under construction in the brand-new Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood: “no down payment, just 4 percent interest, only sixty-four dollars a month.” Before the GI Bill, a typical mortgage required a 50% down payment and repayment in full within a fairly short period. Now, developers could make huge profits risk-free by selling new homes to veterans with access to federally guaranteed mortgages. The economy of scale created by 5 million veterans buying houses in the decade after the war encouraged more favorable mortgage terms for nonveterans as well; America became a nation where most homes are occupied by owners, not renters.

It also became a nation of college graduates. Higher education was completely transformed by the almost 8 million vets who flooded into dorms and classrooms after the war. By 1947, when Bill and Vivian Kingsley arrived at the University of Denver with their baby son in tow, fully 49% of all U.S. college students were enrolled through the GI Bill. No one had expected it, and the elite schools opposed it, arguing that the vets would lower standards. On the contrary, couples like the Kingsleys outperformed their younger classmates while holding down part-time jobs and rearing children. They “raised standards, democratized education, shattered myths about the academic abilities of low-income students and married students,” Humes writes. “College was not for a privileged few anymore.”

The chapters centered on Bill Thomas and the Kingsleys are deeply moving, alive with the thrill of people from modest backgrounds discovering that the opportunities available to them were far greater than anything they had dreamed of before the war. Moving on to profile Josette Dermody, who joined the Navy WAVES, and pilot-in-training Monte Posey, Humes paints a darker picture. In theory, female and African American veterans were entitled to the same benefits as everyone else. But Rep. John Rankin, the segregationist Mississippi Democrat who shepherded the bill through Congress, made sure that it was administered locally, rather than by the federal government. Southern Veterans Administration officials steered blacks to vocational schools or denied tuition assistance outright; banks continued to discriminate against women and African Americans trying to buy homes. Dermody and Posey forced a hostile bureaucracy to fulfill the bill’s promise of equal treatment, but Humes never lets us forget that not all their peers were so tenacious or successful. “It was a great law that did good things for the country,” Dermody says. “But like a lot of things, it could have been better.”

A sense of unfinished business permeates “Over Here.” The vast middle class and relative equality of income that Americans like to boast about did not exist in the United States before World War II, Humes points out, and he convincingly argues that they didn’t just happen afterward. It was the GI Bill, “the greatest social welfare program the country has ever seen,” that created the broadly prosperous postwar society. Once that society was established, we seem to have assumed that it could stand on its own without the benefits that built it. After a quarter-century of federal budget cuts, our shrinking middle class and growing disparity of income suggest otherwise. “Could there be a new GI Bill with the same sort of reach and transformative power ...?” asks the author. It’s highly unlikely in the current political climate. Although there have been subsequent, watered-down versions of the bill, perhaps someday we will again feel confident and generous enough to similarly extend the government’s helping hand to a new generation of Americans. Then they too could offer the same touching stories of personal achievement fostered by supportive legislation that Humes retells with such warmth and enthusiasm in his inspiring book. *