By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 5.1.07]
After WWI, the veterans coming home were forgotten about. There were promises made, but not kept, years of delays (for some, until 1946, 26 years after war’s end!). These frustrations led to the march and consequent live-in at Washington during the Hoover Presidency. This “insurrection” was put down by General MacArthur, but it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, including incoming President Franklin Roosevelt.
So, when the time came to take care of returning veterans of WWII, the GI Bill was passed. This turned out to be the single most important decision in history for the American middle class and our society in general, yet now it seems forgotten as was the plight of the veterans of WWI so long ago.
In light of what’s happening to the veterans of the gulf wars and the decimation of the middle class over the past several decades, as well as all the right-winger talk about “doing it for yourself,” take a look at Taylor Branch’s review of 3 recently released books on this topic.
The GI Bill was seen for years as a historic jackpot, spilling opportunity upon survivors, bystanders, and clueless progeny alike, but then vanished so completely from public discourse that perplexed scholars now search a cold trail.
For her book Soldiers to Citizens, political scientist Suzanne Mettler sent an extensive questionnaire to two thousand World War II veterans. Hoping for the usual return rate of fifteen percent, Mettler was astonished to receive completed forms from nearly three quarters of the veterans, many of whom volunteered life-changing narratives from six decades ago.
She applied her data to the difficult task of isolating the effect of government benefits from other factors, such as the broadening experience of World War II duty itself, and her results confirm estimates by social scientists that the GI Bill added nearly three years to the average veteran’s education.
“My central finding,” she writes, “…is that the GI Bill’s education and training provisions had an overwhelmingly positive effect on male veterans’ civic involvement.” [B]ut she openly regrets that the democratic surge dissipated within the working lives of GIs themselves. “Beginning in the 1970s,” Mettler concludes, “Americans began to vote less, to trust each other less, to trust government less, and to disengage from political parties and other forms of political action.”
In Over Here, journalist Edward Humes explores the subject anecdotally.
Humes describes Richard Koch, one of nine dirt-poor siblings on an immigrant sheep farm in North Dakota, who became a bombardier, German POW, then GI student, and now is called “Dr. PKU” for his pioneer medical treatment of children born with the insidious disease phenylketonuria.
The book follows Bob Booth, a young carpenter and submarine chaser mired in odd jobs until he stumbled upon the GI Bill and came to invent a silicone substance that made possible the first reentry spacecraft by enduring 6,000-degree heat.
Humes summarizes the careers of more familiar people launched from the GI Bill, such as the filmmaker Arthur Penn and senators George McGovern and Bob Dole.
Penn, the son of a Lithuanian watch repairer from Philadelphia, came home from infantry service in the Battle of the Bulge to meet ex-Marine Robert Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College with colleagues Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, and Jacob Lawrence, then created films spanning sensibility from The Miracle Worker on Helen Keller to the visionary portrait of violence Bonnie and Clyde. “I have a deep and abiding affection for the GI Bill,” Penn told Humes. “I can’t imagine what my life would have been without it.”
Both Mettler and Humes state that veterans’ benefits have been lowered steadily alongside a national decline in political optimism.
Each revision of the GI Bill since World War II has raised eligibility requirements while constricting assistance. The Vietnam law of 1967 tightened modifications from the Korean War. Recently, the Bush administration has sent the least favored military units to endure more than half of all US casualties in Iraq. “Members of the National Guard receive only a third of the GI Bill benefits that regular troops receive,” Humes pointedly notes, “and no benefits at all once they leave the service.”
The books are:
The Bonus Army: An American Epic
by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen
Walker, 370 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation
by Suzanne Mettler
Oxford University Press, 252 pp., $30.00
Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream
by Edward Humes
Harcourt, 319 pp., $26.00
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