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Veterans’ Welfare, the GI Bill and American Demobilization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Laura McEnaney
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Extract

The passage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — or GI Bill — opened up a dialogue about men’s physical and mental health, for it addressed very directly what ordinary men would need to recover from extraordinary violence. Political leaders identified veterans’ “welfare,” by which they meant general well-being, as a top priority of World War II’s recovery, and the GI Bill was the centerpiece of their agenda. The bill’s passage was an impressive legislative triumph, the collective product of massive medical, legal, and social science research, bipartisan politicking, and veterans’ activism. It provided education, housing, and small business assistance, along with mental and physical rehabilitation in government-funded hospitals. All of these programs, whether they served mind, body, or wallet, amounted to welfare — a set of government-sponsored policies and services designed to aid a soldier’s transition from enlisted man to healthy, productive citizen. Thus we have to think about the broad reach of the GI Bill’s welfare provision as one of the health legacies of World War II.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 41 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2011

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References

This essay is indebted to a growing body of scholarly literature on the GI Bill, which examines a wide range of issues, from its educational provisions to its legislative politics to its racial meanings. One of the earliest and best historical treatments comes from Ross, D. R. B., Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). More recent works include: Bennett, M. J., When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, Inc., 1996); Altschuler, G. C. and Blumin, S. M., The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Frydl, K. J., The GI Bill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mettler, S., Soldiers to Citizens: The GI Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On the bill's educational provisions, see Olson, K. W., The GI Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1974). On the GI Bill as a part of the history of the American welfare state, see Skocpol, T., “Delivering for Young Families: The Resonance of the GI Bill,” The American Prospect 7, no. 28 (1996): 66–73; and Skocpol, , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1992); Keene, J. D., Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Ortiz, S., Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era (New York: New York University Press, 2010). On the GI Bill's racial politics and impact, see Brooks, J. E., Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Katznelson, I., When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005): Chapters 4-5; Onkst, D. H., “‘First a Negro…Incidentally a Veteran’: Black World War Two Veterans and the GI Bill of Rights in the Deep South, 1944-1948,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (1998): 517–543.Google Scholar
Elsewhere, I have developed these ideas looking at apartment dwellers and single women. See McEnaney, L., “Nightmares on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945–1953,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1265–1291; “A Women's Peace Dividend: Working-Class Women, Demobilization, and Cold War Liberalism,” in Donohue, K. G., ed., Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America, 1945–1965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming, 2011). My manuscript in progress on this topic is entitled World War II's “Postwar”: A Social and Policy History of Peace, 1944–1953.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Women comprised 2% of those in the armed forces – about 350,000. The issues involved in their access to the GI Bill's benefits are covered nicely in Mettler, supra note 1, at chap. 9, and Gambone, M. D., The Greatest Generation Comes Home: The Veterans in American Society (College Station, Tex.: Texas A & M University Press, 2005). Few works on the GI Bill analyze deeply its gendered dimensions, but L. Cohen's work is suggestive here. See Cohen, , A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003): At 137–144. I posit the GI Bill as the first male breadwinner movement of the postwar era. See McEnaney, , supra note 2.Google Scholar
Works on veterans’ reintegration include Gambone, id; Huebner, A. J., The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008): Chapters 1–3; Rose, K. D., Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II (New York: Routledge, 2008); Francis Saxe, R., Settling Down: World War II Veterans’ Challenge to the Postwar Consensus (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007); Van Ells, M. D., To Hear Only Thunder Again: America's World War II Veterans Come Home (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001). Also, Waller, W., The Veteran Comes Back (New York: The Dryden Press, 1944): At 13–15, 298–299. Many of the scholarly works just mentioned quote Waller and note this fear of the demobilized soldier. On this, see also David Gerber's work on disabled veterans, which finds in American film a “sharply divided consciousness that both honored the veteran and feared his potential to disrupt society.” See Gerber, D., “Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in ‘The Best Years of Our Lives,’” American Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1994): 545–574, at 545.Google Scholar
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Of course, not all workers received social security as it was first designed and implemented. See, for example, Kessler-Harris, A., In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Katznelson, , supra note 1, at chapter 2.Google Scholar
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Scholars are beginning to question the two-track thesis about the American welfare state. See, for example, Willrich, M., “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (2000): 460–489. His work suggests a “third track” and argues that the Progressive Era welfare state heavily regulated men, as well. For now, the best analysis of the two-track and gendered design of early welfare is found in Gordon, L., Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: The Free Press, 1994). Frydl analyzes expertly the issues of federalism and the GI Bill's design in her GI Bill, supra note 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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The report noted that this same practice was done to Japanese-American veterans. See American Council on Race Relations, “Summary,” Records of the FEPC. See Id.Google Scholar
“Stay at homes” as a term comes from World War I veteran and public policy scholar Peel, R. V., “The ‘Separateness’ of the Veteran,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Postwar Jobs for Veterans Issue 238 (1945): 167–173, at 167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kingsley, Donald to Dr.Steelman, John R., September 27, 1946, folder: Retraining and Reemployment, box 173, entry 16, Records of the OWMR.Google Scholar
Donald Kingsley, J. to Mr.Snyder, John W., January 22, 1946, folder: Retraining and Reemployment, box 173, Records of the OWMR.Google Scholar
Altschuler, and Blumin, , supra note 1, at 2. It is debatable, however, how strong this sentiment of antistatism was among working-class citizens. See McEnaney, , “Nightmares on Elm Street,” supra note 2.Google Scholar
For analysis of how women used the Freedmen's Bureau to make postwar claims on the state, see, for example, Schwelm, L. A., A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Keene makes this point, as well, connecting World War I veterans’ demands with the struggle for mothers' pensions in the Progressive era. See Keene, , supra note 1.Google Scholar
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The citizen-worker formulation is from Mettler, , supra note 1, at 19.Google Scholar
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