The bill was partly intended as a prophylactic measure against prospective discontents: the rise of European fascism had been fueled by the grievances of demobilized servicemen from the First World War. It is not correct to say, as the program does, that hitherto American veterans had been neglected. In 1865 one fifth of Mississippi’s state budget went for artificial limbs to replace limbs left in places like Shiloh and Cold Harbor. And in the 1890s more than 40 percent of the budget went to one entitlement–pensions for Civil War veterans. Still, veterans of the First World War had not been well cared for.
However, for liberals the GI Bill’s primary purpose was to jump-start the social project that the war had interrupted, the completion of the New Deal program of social amelioration. That purpose was different, and better, in decisive ways than the purposes of some social policies in the 1960s. The bill, which subsidized education and home-buying for veterans, employed liberal means and had profoundly conservative consequences. A middle-class form of striving replaced the working-class path to upward mobility.
In 1940 only one in nine Americans was a high school graduate, there were fewer than 1.5 million college students and only one in 20 Americans had a college degree. By the spring of 1947 the 1.6 million veterans enrolled in college were 49 percent of all registered students. Sixty percent of the veterans enrolled in science and engineering programs, including many of the 400 whose dormitory was the ice rink at the University of Illinois. That university had been expecting at most 11,000 students, but 15,000 showed up.
By the time the program ended in 1956, 2.2 million veterans had gone to college, 3.5 million to technical school, and 700,000 had received off-campus agricultural instruction. By 1990 there were 14 million Americans in college and one in five Americans had a degree. The GI Bill contributed mightily to making college a middle-class expectation. And in modern America, expectations mutate into entitlements: under President Clinton’s policies of promiscuous social promotion beyond high school, at least two years of college is becoming a quasi entitlement.
In 1940 two thirds of Americans were renters. By 1949 60 percent of Americans were homeowners, partly because of subsidized loans for veterans. A veteran of the Navy Seabees, Bill Levitt, bought a lot of Long Island farmland and marketed a basic house for $7,990, a bargain at a time when the average family income was about $2,500. A veteran interviewed for the PBS program remembers: ““No money down. I can afford that. And I get four rooms, and there’s a washing machine. In those days people didn’t have washing machines in their houses. They went to the corner to a launderette. But Levitt houses came with a washing machine!Oh, it was unbelievable!’’ Levitt himself saw a political dimension to Levittown: ““No man who owns a house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.’’ (Well, think about it: Would the Winter Palace have been stormed if more Leningraders had had lawns to mow?)
In 1957, the year after the GI Bill programs ended, Sputnik reinforced America’s attention to education, particularly in science, and to the world of white-collar work. Simultaneously, the 1957-58 recession underscored the value of education as insurance against life’s vicissitudes.
The total cost of the GI Bill was $14.5 billion, which was serious money back then. However, the bill was not akin to today’s entitlements. Its benefits were contingent on the recipients’ having rendered service of the most serious sort. And the bill was congruent with the broad social strategy described by Michael Barone in ““Our Country,’’ his history of American politics from FDR to Reagan. It was a strategy of honoring ““those who worked their way up in society’’ and of placing ““society’s stamp of approval on their affluence and success.’’ It was a strategy ““which aimed not at servicing a lower class but at building a middle class.’’ With the GI Bill, social policy sent strong cues to young Americans, telling them to stay in school, grind out good grades, defer marriage past the teenage years, defer children until the family income has begun to rise.
At the end of the war American confidence was at an apogee, in part because American society then was characterized by cultural homogeneity, buttressed by a bourgeois judgmentalism. Social policy reflected a broad consensus about the proper behavior for facilitating socially useful aspirations. But 20 years later liberalism became bifurcated between economic and lifestyle liberals. The latter, despising as ““repressive’’ all social policies that promoted behavior deemed worthy, sought to de-moralize policy. By the late 1960s liberalism’s tone and content were deeply influenced by liberalism’s political base in the so-called ““caring professions.’’ They served ““clients’’ in the urban population disorganized by behavior, particularly involving drugs and sex (illegitimacy), that was an insuperable impediment to the aspiration of economic liberals–greater equality of incomes.
The most important development in social policy since the 1960s has been the recent recasting of welfare policy to reform recipients’ behavior. This stems from renewed appreciation of the behavioral basis of much poverty. Perhaps the judgmentalism of the GI Bill is having useful echoes in the ’90s, as a dose of the 1940s becomes an antidote to the disease of the 1960s.
