Over Here

How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream

Edward Humes

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781626812574
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Educational Policy
• Index: History

Extraordinary stories of ordinary men and women whose lives were changed forever by landmark legislation—and how they went on to change the country.
 
Inspiring war stories are familiar. But what about after-the-war stories? From a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Over Here is the Greatest Generation's after-the-war story—vivid portraits of how the original G.I. Bill empowered an entire generation and reinvented the nation. The G.I. Bill opened college education to the masses, transformed America from a nation of renters into a nation of homeowners, and enabled an era of prosperity never before seen in the world. Doctors, teachers, engineers, researchers, and Nobel Prize winners who had never considered college an option rewrote the American Dream thanks to this most visionary legislation.
 
"Vivid . . . Deeply moving, alive with the thrill of people from modest backgrounds discovering that the opportunities available to them were far greater than anything they had dreamed of." — Los Angeles Times
 
"Poignant . . . The human dramas scattered throughout the narrative are irresistible." — The Denver Post
 
"Fascinating . . . The book's statistics are eye-opening, but it's the numerous personal vignettes that bring this account to life. . . . At its best, these passages are reminiscent of Studs Terkel's Depression-era and World War II oral histories." — The Plain Dealer

Chapter 8

Monte Posey’s War: Race and the G.I. Bill

Monte Posey sat before the Veterans Administration counselor, his initial disbelief at the words he was hearing slowly turning to comprehension, then a cool, calm rage.

He had walked in ready to go to school, to earn his degree, to start a new life, a better life. That’s why he had waited patiently for hours in this crowded VA office in midtown Chicago. That’s why he had put up with the disappointment of his military career—snatched from elite training as a fighter pilot after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and war’s abrupt end made new aviators superfluous. As the massive, war-bloated Army quickly folded up, a parachute collapsing as its passenger’s feet hit the ground, Posey had been offered two options: a spot in the infantry he certainly didn’t want, or an early discharge if he could produce a college acceptance letter—something he very much did want.

Now he held that letter in his hands: He had been accepted at the University of Illinois’ new Chicago campus, opened on the famous expanse of Navy Pier to accommodate the influx of veterans enrolling under the G.I. Bill. All he needed now was VA approval to cover his tuition and living expenses, and his education could begin. Something he had never expected to afford or attain was just one bureaucratic nod away.

“Well, let me tell you,” the VA counselor said slowly, looking up from the letter, his pale face impassive behind a battered gray desk. “I recommend against this.”

Posey took a moment for this to register. Then he asked, “Why?”

“Well, I think you should sign up for a trade. You’ll be happier.”

Posey knew what the man meant, but he wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Again, he asked, “Why?”

Now the counselor appeared to be getting exasperated. “Look around. There are no opportunities out there for college-educated Negroes. You’ll be wasting your time.”

And there it was: The same white-versus-black calculus that had left Posey in a segregated Army unit in a segregated country, like every other black man in the military during the war. It was the same bitter pill that had led his father to pass as white during the Depression to keep his factory job, swallowing his anger and pain in silence every day at the racist jokes and comments his coworkers casually tossed about. And it was the same bruising discrimination that had ruined his years at the affluent, white high school his parents had chosen, where the other kids had befriended and accepted him but their parents and teachers had not. “We’re having a party and we sure wish you could come, Monte,” his friends would say, their words, intended to be kind, cutting like a knife. “But you know how it is: Our parents won’t let you in the house.”

Now here was this VA man saying, in essence, the same thing, minus the kindly intent: The white veterans were having a party, and Monte Posey, once again, wasn’t invited. Except this time, things were different. This time it was not about the prejudice of white teachers and parents ruling the day, it was about the rule of law and the G.I. Bill of Rights, for nowhere in that legislation, not in its large print or fine, did it draw a distinction on the basis of race. The president had made a point of this when he signed the bill. The black press had celebrated it as history in the making, a national first: a color-blind law in a segregated society, offering the thrilling prospect that finally, through the black veterans, Jim Crow might be throttled into submission for the first time since Reconstruction. Posey had the law on his side, and he knew it. So did the VA man.

“I want a college education, not a trade,” Posey insisted. “A four-year college education. With a degree.”

They argued on for a time, the counselor pretending to be helpful, but Posey saw through him. The counselor wouldn’t have hesitated a moment with a white veteran in an identical situation, he knew. If a college was accredited and a veteran had been accepted, the VA had no choice but to approve. Posey realized his counselor was not well intentioned—just the opposite: A helpful counselor would have said, Yes, this will be hard, you’ll be knocking against barriers, but if anything can change things, the G.I. Bill can. Things will get better down the line, and this is the way to start. This is, in fact, what Posey fervently believed. He had caught glimpses of the possible while in the Army, moments when the question of race had vanished in an environment of respect and camaraderie, and for all the insults and discrimination he had endured at other times, he remained optimistic. To Posey, the G.I. Bill had the potential to jump-start the country’s embryonic civil rights movement then and there, a decade before Rosa Parks said no to a white bus driver, if only the VA—which in 1946 still segregated its veterans’ hospitals—would use its counselors and clout to empower black veterans rather than become their obstacles. How many black men in Posey’s place would have doubted themselves and their country enough to take the counselor’s advice that day? Posey had seen it a thousand times in the Army, the constant pressure to defer to white authority, even when you were in the right—especially when you were in the right. All this flashed through Posey’s mind as he sat there, unyielding, silent.

Finally, the counselor considered the line of veterans still waiting to see him, then grudgingly nodded. “Fine. You’re wasting your time, but since it’s what you want to do, I’ll approve it.” A shuffle of papers and it was done.

Posey left that office with what he had come to get, approval to go to college on Uncle Sam’s dime. His future, one year’s worth of it at least, had been secured, to be spent in classrooms filled with other ex-G.I.s rebuilding their lives. But as he walked to the L station, he could not leave behind the anger—the sort of slow, rational fury that does not paralyze, but motivates. Monte Posey decided he wasn’t just going off to college. He was going to find a career that would allow him to do something about the roots of that anger. The counselor, in spite of himself, had done more for Monte Posey—and, ultimately, the cause of equal rights—than he could ever have known or imagined.

There is no question that the G.I. Bill offered unprecedented opportunities for African Americans and other ethnic minorities in an era in which the government and society still practiced a racial discrimination so breathtakingly blatant that those who did not live through the times have trouble comprehending just how awful they truly were—or how hard it could be to turn even genuine opportunity into meaningful gains. In celebrating the G.I. Bill as the first explicitly race-neutral piece of social legislation, it is often forgotten that this was the only race-neutral social program at the time. It operated, literally, in a vacuum.

The military itself remained a bastion of racism throughout the war and for nearly a decade afterward. Consider that a young, black Army lieutenant named John Roosevelt Robinson faced court-martial and a long wartime prison sentence in Texas for simply refusing to give up his seat on a military bus to a white soldier—just two weeks after President Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill into law in 1944. Robinson belonged to the Army’s lone, all-black tank battalion—”Mrs. Roosevelt’s Niggers,” they were commonly called, in reference to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s strong advocacy on behalf of black servicemen. Despite inferior training and equipment and constant abuse, the 761st Tank Battalion went on to achieve a heroic combat record in Europe, nominated six separate times for presidential unit citations—honors that were somehow lost, forgotten, or ignored by the Pentagon until the scandalous slight finally came to light in 1978. As for Lieutenant Robinson, a military trial court acquitted him of all charges. Discrimination on military transport and recreation facilities had been outlawed early in the war, making his arrest and court-martial illegal from the start. He then moved on to an even more difficult battle against racism: He became the first black major league baseball player in America, his name by then shortened to the more familiar Jackie Robinson.

That the G.I. Bill began to alter America’s racial equation seems clear, a conclusion based not on rosy nostalgia and anecdote, but on hard statistical evidence. A long-forgotten 1950 VA survey—unearthed from the National Archives by author and University of California-Santa Cruz politics professor Michael G. Brown—found that when it came to taking advantage of G.I. Bill benefits, a greater proportion of America’s 1.3 million black veterans participated in at least one aspect of the bill’s provisions compared to their white counterparts. In particular, black veterans avidly pursued educational benefits, especially to finance vocational training: By 1950,43 percent of white veterans had used the G.I. Bill for education or training of some sort, while for black veterans, that figure had reached 49 percent. This would seem on its face solid evidence of the egalitarian and color-blind nature of the G.I. Bill—a quality routinely touted in every official paean to the bill since the fifties. Unfortunately, participation in the G.I. Bill program is not the whole story, as it says nothing about whether black (or Asian American, Native American, or Hispanic) veterans received the same quality of benefits with the same life-altering power as the largesse enjoyed by white G.I.s.

Monte Posey was correct that day at the Veterans Administration office in Chicago: The G.I. Bill had the potential to launch a civil rights revolution. How much of that potential was realized, and how much defeated by the larger societal forces of prejudice and discrimination, remains a matter of research and debate more than sixty years after the war. There is scorching criticism from one school of thought, represented by Columbia University’s Ira Katznelson, whose grim findings led him to conclude in When Affirmative Action Was White, “There was no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the G.I. Bill.” Others, however, see a far more positive picture in largely the same data, among them Syracuse University’s Suzanne Mettler, who found evidence that the bill provided a “turning point” in large numbers of black veterans’ lives, and was “relatively inclusive in terms of its reach among African-American veterans” at a time when no other law or program could make such a claim.

Which view is correct? Both, and neither: Once again, the reach and impact of the G.I. Bill, with all its many unintended consequences, is far too complex for absolutist views. The reality, it seems, lies somewhere between the poles, with the added complication that it is almost impossible to separate the pure effects of the G.I. Bill from the fact that its benefits were dispensed and used inside a society expressly designed to cheat, belittle, and oppress black Americans. The rose itself might have been hearty and bountiful, but its roots were planted in poisoned soil.

Because of this poisoned soil, when it came to the key benefits of home loans and college education—where the power to change the world was the greatest, as evidenced by the rapid creation of a new white middle class after the war—black veterans clearly fell behind, a squandering of potential on a grand scale that continues to have ripple effects on contemporary America. Many black veterans, like Monte Posey, demanded and received their full due of these benefits, and these veterans formed the backbone not only of an emerging black middle class, but of a far more politically active African American community, providing one of the driving forces behind the civil rights battles of the fifties and sixties. But those full benefits were enjoyed by proportionately fewer numbers of black veterans than a truly color-blind law should have delivered. And that meant black veterans and their families were denied their fair share of the multigenerational, enriching impact of home ownership and economic security that the G.I. Bill conferred on a majority of white veterans, their children, and their grandchildren.

Shamefully, this lost opportunity was both deliberate and well planned, an example of the power of the Southern Democratic voting bloc during and after the war, with its continual threat (eventually carried out) to fracture the then-ruling Democratic Party if segregation was attacked. Even such progressive legislation as the G.I. Bill ended up twisted to serve, or at the very least leave undisturbed, the government-enforced segregation and poor working conditions many African Americans had to endure upon their triumphant return from war.

Representative John Elliott Rankin and his segregationist allies in Congress had been devious and clever in constructing a G.I. Bill that, on its face, was free of discrimination, promising equality of benefits and opportunity to all. Their genius, however, was in making certain the practical administration of those benefits and opportunities remained in “safe” hands—hands that wouldn’t rock the boat of Jim Crow. Rankin worked feverishly in the House, as did his allies in the Senate, to defeat alternative versions of the bill that would have provided far more federal controls and monitoring of the dispensation of benefits. Rankin insisted that distribution of college aid, employment counseling, home loan approvals, and all the other benefits of the G.I. Bill should be a matter of local control and states’ rights—the age-old argument, which continues to this day, suggesting that local communities know better than the big and distant federal government when it comes to passing out grants and benefits.

The states’ rights argument, at least in the case of the G.I. Bill, was a sham: It was this very local control that allowed a VA counselor in Chicago to do his best to discourage a black man named Monte Posey from going to a major university. In other parts of the country, particularly the Deep South in the years immediately after the war, the counselors didn’t merely discourage black veterans. They just said no. No to home loans. No to job placement, except for the most menial positions. And no to college, except for historically black colleges, maintaining the sham of “separate but equal” that was in no way remotely equal except in the Supreme Court’s cruel fantasy world of Plessy v. Ferguson.

For years, Rankin and his allies used the same arguments to defeat all sorts of legislation that would have benefited minorities, most dramatically an antilynching law in 1948 that President Truman sought after a series of brutal murders of black men in Mississippi and Georgia. The lynching victims had been jailed for such petty crimes as disturbing the peace (by simply walking through a white neighborhood) and “hogging the road,” after which mobs removed them from jail and hung them from trees while other white citizens watched them die without comment or intervention. Because the local police had been unable or unwilling to protect the victims or bring the killers to justice, Truman wanted a law establishing federal jurisdiction over lynchings. Rankin, in leading the successful battle against the law and in favor of letting local communities “take care of their own,” once again bellowed about states’ rights and the Founders’ original intent, extolling the virtues of segregation (“The Negroes have their own schools and they want their own schools”), and then uttering an inadvertent truth, intended as praise but which now reads like an indictment: “Nowhere else under the shining sun—nowhere—has the Negro ever received the treatment at the hands of the white people where he lived in large numbers as he does now among the white people of the South.”

Rankin certainly was correct: With the possible exception of apartheid South Africa, no other place has treated black people so badly in the twentieth century as the states of the former Confederacy. Monte Posey remembers traveling with his mom to visit relatives in Louisiana when he was twelve years old, his first trip to the South, his first time crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, and finding himself shunted by the train conductors to the “colored” cars, the ones up front, where the smoke and soot were the worst. During his visit, he caught a glimpse of the beautiful, modern campus of the all-white Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, then, just a few blocks away, he visited what he remembers as the “ramshackle nothing” that was then the “separate but equal” Southern University campus for blacks—another creation of the states’ rights champions. “I was only twelve, but even I could tell something wasn’t right,” Posey recalls. “It left an impression, let’s just say that: Anyone could see these two schools were not equal. But they sure were separate.”

John Rankin was a racist and a thug, but he was a thug with power, the man who controlled all veterans legislation in the House of Representatives before, during, and after the war, with years of seniority and a strong base of support stemming from his championing of the New Deal rural electrification project and its famous Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. That shining moment was followed by years of racist, anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, Red-baiting demagoguery. Yet, for the most part, Rankin commanded the obedience of the American Legion, with its segregated posts and its willingness to do just about anything to win passage of its G.I. Bill. Rankin also had support from the Veterans Administration, run by General Omar Bradley in the first two years after the war—the same general who would, as Army chief of staff a few years later, respond to Truman’s 1948 executive order ending racial segregation in the military with outright insubordination. “The Army will not put men of different races in the same companies,” he said, defying his commander in chief. “It will change that policy when the nation as a whole changes it.”

To win over Rankin and ensure passage of the G.I. Bill, both the Legion and VA officials publicly supported his demand that locally appointed VA officials control the dispensation of benefits, rather than the centralized federal system the Roosevelt administration sought, thereby ensuring that the G.I. Bill would leave the Jim Crow South undisturbed and fully segregated. Rankin, in return, made certain that in the final bill the VA had sole domain over the G.I. Bill budget (with the exception of the U.S. Employment Service, which would provide job counseling, again through local rather than national auspices, and with VA oversight). The VA as a result greatly expanded its bureaucratic empire and budgetary powers—controlling the G.I. Bill meant, by 1947, it controlled 15 percent of the federal budget. All the agency had to do to acquire this extra power was become a witting vassal of American apartheid. The Veterans Administration then aided the segregationists’ cause further by providing virtually no administrative control or review at the national level over how local G.I. Bill counselors treated black servicemen, and by hiring few black counselors anywhere in the country (and none in Rankin’s state of Mississippi).

The results of this deliberate sabotage of America’s first color-blind social program were predictable: The potential for the bill to jump-start civil rights, as African American activists had hoped it would do, ended up badly crippled.

Home loan benefits showed the most dramatic disparity between black and whites, as the explosion of home ownership in American society largely passed black veterans by. Again, this was part of Rankin’s design—the VA was not allowed to make loans directly, as the Roosevelt administration had suggested, but could serve only as a guarantor, an official cosigner. Nothing compelled banks to make the loans in the first place....

Table of contents

• Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream
• Over Here
• Copyright
• Contents
• Troop Movement Unlike Any Other
• The Greatest Regeneration: The Accidental Remaking of America
• Cold Wars, Hot Rockets, a New American Dream
• Investing in the Future: Bill Thomas and the Rise of Suburbia
• Bill and Vivian Kingsley: G.I. Tech
• Out of the Blue: Medical Miracles
• Nixon and Kennedy, Bonnie and Clyde: The G.I. Bill and the Arts
• Gunnery Mates and Other Invisible Veterans: Women and the G.I. Bill that Wasn’t
• Monte Posey’s War: Race and the G.I. Bill
• What’s inside? Leaders and the G.I. Bill
• Kilroy’s Not Here: The Future and the G.I. Bill
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Sources
• Connect with Diversion Books