The Creation of the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944: Melding Social and Participatory Citizenship Ideals

The G.I. Bill of Rights, formally known as the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, remains in the public consciousness as one of the most significant social policies ever enacted in the United States.¹ Established for returning veterans of World War II, its terms of coverage were strikingly broad and generous. Fifty-one percent of veterans used the educational provisions: 2.2 million pursued a college education or graduate degree, and 5.6 million attained vocational or on-the-job training. The law also offered extensive unemployment benefits, which were used to the full by 14 percent of veterans. It also offered low-interest loans for the purchase of homes, farms, and businesses, which were used by 29 percent of veterans.²

Some scholars who have analyzed the G.I. Bill recently tend to assume that it was created with the explicit purpose of expanding the middle class and increasing access to advanced education, and they assess the law's accomplishments against such objectives.³ Such treatments overlook policymakers' intentions and the politics of the bill's enactment. The G.I. Bill was passed when the social democratic momentum and spirit of reform that marked the New Deal had already subsided.⁴ By the early 1940s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt focused considerably less on domestic policymaking, concentrating on his role as "Dr. Win the War" rather than as "Dr. New Deal."⁵ Furthermore, Congress had grown increasingly conservative and interest in social legislation had declined sharply.⁶ Certainly widespread support existed among citizens for the enactment of some kind of measures to ease veterans' transitions back to civilian life.⁷ Nonetheless, at that juncture, the creation of what would later become known as landmark social provision, extended on such generous terms and to such a large number of citizens and their families, remained anything but a foregone conclusion.

Although the standard histories of the G.I. Bill's enactment offer valuable descriptions of the political struggles inherent in the process,⁸ they fail to illuminate how the legislation acquired such a magnanimous and inclusive design. Recently, Theda Skocpol pointed out that the Roosevelt administration had offered only a modest and somewhat elitist proposal, one that would have limited education to one year for all but a very few veterans. Rather, it was the American Legion, an organization with a conservative, antistatist reputation, that put forth the sweeping version of the law that Congress affirmed, a proposal that offered up to four years of education, on terms commensurate with the duration of veterans' military service.⁹ Skocpol emphasizes that the organizational capacity of the American Legion generated widespread grassroots support for the G.I. Bill, thus helping to assure its passage. Still puzzling, however, is how the legislation acquired such comprehensive features in the hand of the Legion, and why the Roosevelt administration appeared to be so marginal to its creation.

This article aims to explain the politics through which the G.I. Bill acquired its inclusive design, and to consider the lessons it offers about the possibilities for social policymaking within the United States. It draws on archival materials from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the National Archives, the American Legion headquarters, and numerous government documents. While the American Legion claims to have developed the G.I. Bill itself in a three-week period, with "amazing skill and speed,"¹⁰ its proposal derived from both a decades-old "political learning" process from past veterans' policies in the United States and from ideas developed by others, particularly within the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) of the Roosevelt administration. NRPB members had set their sights on expanded educational access, and even as those hopes dimmed, a committee under the board's auspices hatched plans for education and training for veterans. Yet, by 1943, Congress had stripped the NRPB of its funding and authority and discredited its ideas as "socialist" and "totalitarian"; any proposal associated with it would have been politically untenable. The widespread, federated American Legion stood perfectly poised to present kindred plans in the form of...