80 YEARS AGO TODAY THE UNITED STATES WAS TRANSFORMED INTO THE COUNTRY WE HAVE LIVED IN SINCE

On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, otherwise known as The G.I. Bill. There has never been another piece of legislation as socially and economically transformative. The G.I. Bill literally created the modern American middle class and the lifestyle of a nuclear family - father, mother, children - in a home that they owned, with the father educated for the new economy through the educational benefits offered to anyone who could be admitted to college to obtain a bachelor’s degree. In the ten years following the end of the war, the number of college graduates in teh United States tripled.

Among them were the engineers who created the world’s greatest aviation industy of any country ever, tranformed that to the aerospace industry when they launched Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, not to mention Skylab and the Space Shuttle. Nearly all those guys in their 30s and 40s with crewcuts, short sleeved white shirts and pocket protectors sitting in Mission Control, or working at North American, Lockheed, Grumman and others where the hardware was designed and created, were where they were gratis the G.I. Bill.

Farm families were stabilized with farmers now educated on best practices to maximize agricultural production.

Acres of previous farmland - here in the San Fermando Valley, orange groves - were uprooted to create all the “Leave It To Beaver” communities of the Fifties and Sixties. All because families who could not qualify for a home loan from a bank under the financial conditions before the war were able to now get that loan, with no down payment necessary, because the risk or foreclosure was guaranteed by the federal government.

Today we can look back and see the imperfections of this tranformative legislation. The home loans created urban sprawl when cities had not considerd the possibility of such a stupendous amount of construction. Sadly, the overwhelming number of home loans and educational grants and other benefits went to White veterans at the expense of Black and Latino veterans, the majority of whom were denied access to them. The inequality that FDR hoped to blunt with the G.I. Bill never went away and was compounded by the racism in the administration of the programs.

The G.I. Bill was FDR’s attempt to preserve at least some of what had been known by the planners as The Second New Deal. This would have provided the benefits that were later in the G.I. Bill to everyone - veteran and civilian alike. It would have established a national, government-administered health plan for all.

Unfortunately, the Second New Deal died in November 1942 when voters who were “disappointed” by how the war appeared to be going, voted on November 5, 1942 to throw out many of the Midwestern Republican progressives who had provided the margin of victory for the implementation of the original New Deal, replacing these representatives with conservatives dedicated in opposition to the president and his efforts to take the United States fully into the Twentieth Century.

Had the Invasion of North Africa happened on October 31 or November 1, rather than on November 8 - after the mid-term elections - public sentiment would have been transformed and we would have grown up in a very different country, one oranized to benefit the majority of people as a social democracy.

As it is, with all the imperfections the G.I. Bill was creat ed with, that one piece of legislation is why everyone reading this blog grew up in the society we did.

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