I want to start out by telling you a story about a man that I interviewed when I began this project. His name is Luke Laporda. Luke was the son of Italian immigrants and he grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Queens, New York. Luke, like so many, was in a family that struggled to survive the Great Depression. He was an excellent student in high school, but going to college was not something that he could even dream of. It seemed entirely out of the question. And then World War II began and Luke joined the Navy and served his country over the next few years. When the war was over and he came back home, some of his friends were thinking about going to college and they decided to go visit Syracuse University, where I now teach. And he decided to go with them, just as a lark, as a road trip. And while they were there and the friends were talking with University officials about admissions, one of these officials turned to Luke and said, “How about you? You’ve got the G.I. Bill. Why don’t you come to college here?” And it struck him like a revelation. It wasn’t something he had ever conceived of as a possibility for his life. Well to make a long story short, after he went back home with great excitement and told his parents about this possibility and they encouraged him that he just had to go, he ceased the opportunity. He ended up getting a bachelor’s degree on the G.I. Bill, then a Master’s degree, and a Ph.D. And it transformed his life.

Now, not surprisingly, he had an occupational status and career opportunities he never would have dreamed of previously. But besides that, he became be tremendously involved as a citizen in his community. First of all, soon after graduating, he started a little league right in his community that he settled in in upstate New York. It was the first one in New York State. Over the next decade or so, he started sixty of these Little Leagues, all over central New York and then became involved on the Board of Little League International, ultimately becoming its Director. And when I asked Luke before we even talked about the G.I. Bill, and I asked him about turning points in his life, he credited the G.I. Bill as a major one. He said, “It was a hell of a gift, an opportunity and I have never thought of it any other way.” And reflecting back later on, he thought maybe in getting involved in all of those civic activities, maybe I was trying to give back in some sense, for what had been given to me through the G.I. Bill.

Well stepping back from this story for a moment, the primary rationale of our government in the United States is to be, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yet we give surprisingly little attention to how government’s own actions, public policies, affect the well-being of democracy itself. Typically, when policy analysts in schools like mine, assess public policies, they are looking at the social and economic effects. Almost never do we ask how the now immense resources that we spend on public programs affect citizens’ attitudes about government, their interest in public affairs, and most important, the extent to which they actually participate in public life. After benefiting from programs, do individuals withdraw from public life or might they become more active citizens? Might some programs prompt them to become more involved in the activities of self-governance with a net-gain for democracy. Well this is a question that interests me tremendously and for that reason, I set about studying the impact of the G.I. Bill on beneficiaries, subsequent civic and political participation.

Now the G.I. Bill, for those of you who are not members of this great generation, was a whole package of benefits that were enacted in 1944 for the first time for returning veterans of World War II. It included long-term unemployment insurance benefits that were more generous than what people could attain at that point in the states. Low-interest mortgages for buying homes, farms, or businesses, but most popular of all, education and training benefits. Now fifty-one percent of all returning veterans used the education and training benefits. 7.8 million people, which is absolutely remarkable and was far more than policy makers ever dreamed of would use it. Of those, 2.2 million used the benefits to go on for higher education, for college or graduate school, but the majority used the benefits for other kinds of sub-college training, vocational training, on the job training, and the like. It is these programs, the education and training benefits that were the focus of my study. Now among the greatest generation, these benefits have been lauded and they have long believed in their transformative power in people’s lives, but scholars have not studied the bill very much. This came as a surprise to me when I began exploring it about eight years ago. And in recent years, historians have cast doubt on the G.I. Bill’s effects suggesting that perhaps the G.I. Bill only privileged already privileged people and paid the tuition of people who would have gone on for more education anyway. So I was interested in exploring those claims and finding out who was right, the general public or the scholars, but most of all, I wanted to know what was the impact of the G.I. Bill on people’s subsequent civic and political engagement.

Now, going about studying this has been a great adventure in itself. I first explored what could government documents tell me and what could archival resources tell me and I found not enough because they didn’t tell me about veterans’ experiences of the G.I. Bill and they didn’t tell me about their subsequent civic and political participation so for that, I had to turn to veterans themselves and non-veterans of the same generation. I did surveys by mail of over fifteen hundred members of this generation. G.I. Bill users and non-users. Veterans and non-veterans. Men and women. My main data comes from members of military unit organizations, non-black men who were in groups like the 87th Infantry Division. 89th Infantry Division, and a couple of Army, Air Force bond groups. And when I sent out this survey, people told me I’d be lucky if I’d get a twenty percent response rate. Waited about ten days and then I came into my mailbox and it was brimming over with envelopes. The next day, even more so and on and on. Ultimately, I had a response rate of seventy-four percent from these veterans, which was amazing. One colleague said to me, “Well it’s obvious, they’re the greatest generation, case closed!” And then I also did in-depth interviews all over the country where I would meet people in their homes, not knowing whether or not they had used the G.I. Bill and interview them for a couple of hours asking open-ended questions in depth and that was a great adventure as well. So through all of this, to cut to the chase, what did I learn and answer to my question?

What I found was the G.I. Bill’s education and training benefits had a tremendously positive effect on civic engagement and political participation among members of this generation. They became more involved citizens after using the G.I. Bill. Now we know that education in itself is a very important factor in determining who participates. People who have more education tend to participate at higher levels. So you might think this is just an effect of the education, but what’s interesting is that when you control for education, the effect is still there. If you take two non-black veterans of World War II, but one is a G.I. Bill user and one is not, they both have the same level of education, same socioeconomic background from childhood, the person who used the G.I. Bill went on to participate in fifty percent more civic organizations during the post-war era, joined fraternal groups like the Moose, the Elks, the Masons, educational support groups like the PTA, neighborhood organizations, and a whole host of other community organizations. And the G.I. Bill user became involved in thirty percent more political activities during this period of 1950-64, whether contacting elected officials, serving on local boards and committees, working on campaigns, joining political parties and so on. So the question that I grappled with through the book is why, what could explain this strong positive impact of the G.I. Bill on people’s active citizenship?

What I found is that features of the policy’s design, its implementation, and its impact on their socioeconomic well-being all conveyed to beneficiaries strong messages that government was for and about people like them. That they had a stake in it and they responded in return as active citizens. At every stage of their experience of the program, they encountered generosity and fairness and it left a deep impression on them, boosting both their capacity for civic engagement and also their inclination to be involved in public life. First of all, I looked carefully at whether the G.I. Bill was actually inclusive of a broad range of veterans and what I found was that it genuinely was. The scholarly critics have been wrong to think that it only privileged already privileged veterans. For men, it was inclusive across class. Up until this point in time, people who went on for higher education were for the most part those who came from old money, from privileged Americans and they tended to be Anglo-Saxon. They tended to go back several generations in the United States. The G.I. Bill opened things up so that people who had grown up in lower or middle income backgrounds had the opportunity to attain higher education for the first time and also all of these sub-college training provisions. It opened the doors to Catholics and Jews and immigrants and first generation Americans to attain more education.

I think of Richard Werner who I interviewed. He grew up Irish-Catholic. He lived in an cold water flat in New York City during the Depression because his father had lost his job at that point. Richard Werner said, “Growing up I looked upon a college education as about as likely as me owning a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur.” And the only reason why Richard Werner knew about chauffeurs growing up was that his father had been a chauffeur until the Depression came along and he lost his job. So it seemed most unlikely to him that he would be able to go to college, but the G.I. Bill made it possible.

What about the G.I. Bill’s inclusivity across the rigid color line of the post-war era? Now here, I expected to find that there would be real limitations on the inclusivity of the G.I. Bill and to my surprise, that turned out to not be the case. In fact, and this is evidenced by a survey done by the Veterans’ Administration in 1950, African-Americans veterans used the education and training benefits at equal or higher levels than white veterans in all regions of the country. And usage rates of these benefits were the highest in the South, but already by the late 1940s, fifty percent of white veterans in the South had used the education and training benefits, fifty six percent of African-American veterans had used them, which was truly striking. Now they were using them in the South in the context of segregated institutions and black veterans were much more likely to use the sub-college training programs because they were less likely to have completed high school before going into the military in the context of Jim Crow, but nonetheless the G.I. Bill was inclusive and as one veteran said to me after the war, “The only good thing was the G.I. Bill. It was an exception to the rule in terms of its inclusivity.”

Now why did some veterans not use it? Well what I found in my analysis was that veterans who were older were less likely to use the G.I. Bill. They felt that that opportunity had passed them by to go on by for more education; that it was time for them to be working. Many of them were already married. They had to support a family or they had not been encouraged to pursue education while growing up. This turns out to be a really important determinate of who goes on for more education. But it was not biased by class or race or religion or ethnicity. All of those factors that previous to the G.I. Bill had been extremely important determinants of who got more education. Turning to its implementation, veterans found it to be run fairly and for the most part, efficiently. At the higher education level, people crowded into the colleges. Syracuse University, where I teach, grew by six hundred percent in terms of the number of students from prewar levels. Veterans and their families settled into huts that were provided to the universities for extra housing for all these new families that were coming through. There was surplus housing, military surplus housing that was put on campuses for extra classroom space to accommodate all of the crowded conditions, but veterans experienced very positive, administrative routines, they felt that they were treated with dignity and respect and they were tremendously thrilled to be there.

For those who went on for the sub-college training programs, these were schools that the number of them tripled overnight. The United States didn’t have that much by way of vocational training prior to World War II, but there was such a demand for it among the veterans. All kinds of schools opened. They provided veterans with training in such varied fields as pipefitting, masonry, electrical work, auto repair, TV and telephone repair, business school, on and on. Now these programs, because they were brand new, had to be run with some more oversight and Congress took action after a couple of years to make sure that there would be more paperwork done to make sure that there was not abuse of funding in these programs. So veterans said there was some red tape, but as Kermit Pransky said to me, “It was a necessary evil. It was nothing to complain about.” He himself, after using vocational training benefits, then ran a program teaching other veterans how to do electrical work.

I include in my book a photograph of the Culinary Institute of America that which opened under the G.I. Bill as a vocational training program teaching veterans to become chefs. And in all of these instances, veterans not only had their full tuition covered at any university or college or training program in the country, they also obtained subsistence allowances and these were higher for veterans with dependents so if they were married, they had higher benefits which made it possible for them to be there. Richard Collisemo, one veteran I interviewed, he had served in the 89th Infantry Division, told me about liberating concentration camps, truly extraordinary stories. He was also the child of immigrants and had grown up in an urban area and his father said to him, “I am not going to be able to help you attain an education, but if you ever have any opportunity to do it, that’s the important thing - try to seize that opportunity.” Well the G.I. Bill provided that opportunity. So when he came back from the war, first he said to himself, “Well television seems to be a coming thing. Maybe I’ll go to television school.” So he did that in Chicago for a few years, but he found that he was really good at being a student and he wanted something more serious so then he decided to use the higher education benefit for the G.I. Bill and attended the University of Pittsburg. He had, during the war, fallen in love in France with a woman name Colette and she came across the ocean, met him, had to come through Ellis Island so they were married by the time he was a college student. So he said, ”We were able to have our small apartment. I was able to go to college and then obtain a master’s degree, all under the G.I. Bill.” He said, “It was magnanimous.”

What about the socioeconomic effects of the G.I. Bill? Well veterans, as I mentioned, in their interviews, would describe the G.I. Bill as a turning point in their lives. Here’s an interesting question to ask yourself. If you look back over the course of your life, there might have been certain events or opportunities that have changed the subsequent course of your life. What would those be? I ask people this question early on in the interview before they knew I was interested in the G.I. Bill. And many would talk about serving in the military or the Great Depression. They might talk about meeting their spouse of some fifty years or a mentor from childhood, but then several of them also mentioned the G.I. Bill. Now in a country where we don’t speak that positively about government these days, this can make a political scientist fall off her chair, as person after person would say this to me. So in looking at my data, I tired to figure out what was it that they found so transformative about the G.I. Bill.

Well for those who went on for higher education, economists have found that it extended their educational attainment by three years beyond what it would be otherwise. But I also found that the sub-college training provisions were tremendously effective in allowing people in the post-war economy to attain jobs with middle-class salaries and benefits. They tended to attain jobs in managerial and supervisory positions in industry or to become owners of small-scale businesses. I think of Sam Marcasie who I interviewed who had served in the Army in the Philippines. He had dropped out of school after eighth grade because his father died and he had to help support his many younger siblings, but coming back from the war, he went to vocational training and on-the-job training and became a custom builder and had a very successful career. He said, “Thank God the government had the doors open for us.” When you look at those who used the G.I. Bill for the sub-college training programs, what you notice systematically is a couple of leaps up the occupational status ladder. That people had better jobs, more opportunities than their parents. When you look at the higher education beneficiaries, those leaps were even greater and for some, they were truly breathtaking. Here is the son of a coalminer who became a geologist. The son of a window cleaner who becomes a chemist. Son of a Longshoremen who became an attorney. On and on. And lastly, veterans would mention other effects that were harder to quantify such as how the additional education they attained on the G.I. Bill opened their minds and made them look at the world in new ways. The experiences of the G.I. Bill often brought them enduring friendships that still lasted fifty years later and on and on.

Well adding up all of this – the G.I. Bill’s inclusivity, its fairness, and its transformative effects on people’s lives, it led to the subsequent participatory effects. These effects were strongest in the lives of the non-black men who had grown up in low-income or middle-income backgrounds. For them, the G.I. Bill made the biggest difference in their lives and subsequently, they participated in civic and political life at much higher levels than we would have expected otherwise and as a result, the United States became more democratic. So we not only expanded opportunity for more education, but we also expanded democracy, who was involved as an active citizen and to whom would government need to respond.

What about the experience of African-Americans in this regard? I did a survey of the 92nd Infantry Division of African-American men. Of course, the World War II military was segregated so these were separate troops and for these men, their experiences were extraordinary. The G.I. Bill stood apart as a positive experience in the midst of several negative experiences. They had felt stigmatized in the military because they served in separate troops often. These men by the way had been in combat in Italy, but often their deeds in battle had not been recognized in the same way as that of white troops and when they came back, Jim Crow was still in place and labor market discrimination throughout the United States, and yet in the G.I. Bill, they felt fairness and inclusivity. That they were able to use the benefits. But after they attained more education or training on the G.I. Bill, here’s what Henry Hervey told me. He was a Tuskegee Airman who went to Northwestern University in Chicago after the war. He said, “I went to every bank in downtown Chicago and presented my credentials and I got the same job offer I would have gotten if I had not gone to college. It was either a janitor or a mailroom clerk. By that time,” he told me “you learn you can fight City Hall and you have to fight and there are ways you can bring pressure to make changes.” Now Henry Hervey became tremendously involved with other black businessmen in trying to improve opportunities in Chicago for them to do their work. Many black veterans I found became tremendously involved in the Civil Rights Movement. From 1950 until 1964, they were involved in protests of all kinds and among them were such luminaries as Medgar Evers, NAACP leader who was assassinated, Hosiah Williams who led the march for voting rights from Montgomery and many, many others whose names are not well-known. And then once Civil Rights was won, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights of 1965, then over the next fifteen year period, these same men became tremendously involved in seizing formal rights. They participated in running for office or working on campaigns or contacting election officials, and being part of political parties – all of those activities of formal politics.

Policies often, no matter how positive, will have a downside and I would say that the downside of the G.I. Bill comes about in terms of gender. Women made up only two percent of the military, but for them, the G.I. Bill theoretically speaking was equally available in principle. There was no exclusion of female veterans in the G.I. Bill and in fact, forty-one percent of female veterans used the G.I. Bill to go on for education or training compared to fifty-one percent of men. What I found though, once I was able to control for various other factors, was that the women really underutilized the bill. The women, unlike men, were from a small select part of the population. They were volunteers and they tended to have come from families where they had been encouraged to pursue and education and they had attained more education previously. If they had been men, we would had expected that group of people to use the G.I. Bill at much higher rates, higher than the average rate, but they didn’t. What happened? Well, the wrote all over their surveys. By the way, the women I surveyed responded at an eighty-four percent response rate and they wrote all over the surveys, “I didn’t use the G.I. Bill, I went home and had babies.” And that’s what they did after the war, they had children. And then a high percentage of them went on later for more education or training, but if was after their eligibility for the G.I. Bill had expired. The more important problem though was that most women were not veterans and so they were omitted entirely. Women continued to participate at a lower rate in civic organizations and politics than men and I think it’s because they did not have that same experience of inclusion in the political community that men had through the G.I. Bill.

So I take that as a lesson of how we need to approach public policy making in the future, with greater inclusivity. To conclude, the greatest generation was already great when they returned from World War II. They had defended the nation against Nazism and Fachism whether they had done it in the military or on the home front. But the G.I. Bill further strengthened their capacity and inclination to be involved and it prepared them for civic leadership. It truly deserves its hallowed reputation as landmark legislation in the United States, probably they best thing that American government has ever done to help expand access to the American Dream, but even more so, to help make the United States a better and stronger democracy.