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Introduction
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Introduc tion For those of us who follow presidential political campaigns, 2008 was a wildly exciting election year, and one without precedent. With no vicepresident awaiting a turn, the presidency was an open seat, and the contest for the Democratic nomination was between—what?—a woman and— what? what?—an African American. I had grown up in a family where intense interest was paid to all political events, no doubt more than some warranted, but we all knew that this one deserved the attention being lavished upon it. My father would have said, “Pay attention, children. Here’s one you’ll tell your grandchildren about.” And yet on one particular 2008 morning I became aware that another story—a totally unexpected one—was seriously beckoning: Congress was debating the GI Bill? I thrust my paper at my husband Jack as we sat at the breakfast table and said, “Look here. Could it be our GI Bill? The GI Bill of World War II?” Jack didn’t look, just kept his nose in his paper, and as one who never let a teachable moment go to waste, said, “Here’s an idea: why don’t you just read the story?” I read the story and was hooked. Despite that the debate in Congress was not about our GI Bill, the 1944 one, but about the current Montgomery bill, the one named for Gillespie V. Montgomery, the Democratic congressman from Mississippi who, in 1984, had revamped our bill, I read every word and wanted more. Our GI Bill may not have been the star of this particular congressional show, but it was a show that became more and more meaningful to me. I learned from newspaper reports of the Senate debates that vast differences existed between the old bill and the Montgomery one. The newer bill seemed to me a coy sweetener designed to encourage enlistments, whereas the GI Bill of World War II had been a straightforward reward for a job well done. It seemed that if, in their quest to reenter civilian life, World War II veterans had been provided a smooth road, current veterans were on a road pocked with potholes. x Introduction In recent years, I had not been thinking of current or past G.I. bills, but when Senator Jim Webb of Virginia introduced the enhanced bill, when he said, “ . . . let’s give them [the recent GIs] the same educational chance that the greatest generation had,” I understood that he was referencing the first GI Bill, and I began to remember, both generally and specifically, our own 1944 GI Bill. As the year 2008 became 2009, certain events, eerily similar to those that had taken place years before that first GI Bill was even a memorandum on President Roosevelt’s desk, were suddenly popping up all around: Again the nation was in a fiscal emergency; again we were harking back to the Great Depression, and in a wry homage to that calamity, we were calling this new crisis the Great Recession. Stock markets were plunging worldwide ; foreclosures were rampant; banks were closing; legendary industrial and commercial giants were imperiled; jobless men and women sought work; college graduates were back living with the folks. Fireside chats were recalled; the old New Deal alphabet soup was recited; our new president was reading up on Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the last president was being compared to Herbert Hoover. Agitation began for a committee to investigate the bankers and Wall Street executives who brought on the financial crisis. Like the Pecora Committee of 1933? Hadn’t I seen this movie? Actually, I had been an on-the-spot witness to it. As had my husband, Jack. As these events resonated, I soon convinced myself that a memoir I had written, When It Was Our War, was asking for a sequel. The original book, published by Algonquin Books, told of how my husband and I had lived our lives during “our” war—World War II—but it had not dwelled on the dark days of the Depression; and it had told nothing of that period in the war’s aftermath when the Depression, having beaten a wartime retreat, was threatening a resurgence; and no mention had been made of our lives as we had lived them under the GI Bill. And, I thought, wouldn’t a book that delved into these matters shed some welcome light? I thought this, in fact, at almost the very moment the proponents of the enhanced bill...