Quote of the Day (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Laying the Groundwork for the G.I. Bill of Rights)

“But the members of the armed forces have been compelled to make greater economic sacrifice and every other kind of sacrifice than the rest of us, and they are entitled to definite action to help take care of their special problems.

The least to which they are entitled, it seems to me, is something like this:

First, mustering-out pay to every member of the armed forces and merchant marine when he or she is honorably discharged; mustering-out pay large enough in each case to cover a reasonable period of time between his discharge and the finding of a new job.

Second, in case no job is found after diligent search, then unemployment insurance if the individual registers with the United States Employment Service.

Third, an opportunity for members of the armed services to get further education or trade training at the cost of their Government….”—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” July 28, 1943

FDR’s vision of postwar reintegration of American service personnel was realized 11 months after this radio address, when, on this date, he signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—better known as the G.I. Bill of Rights.

Though conceived to prevent the social disruption and shameful spectacle that occurred with the Bonus March of 1932, this piece of legislation did far more. It did even more than social security or the Wagner Act guaranteeing the right of workers to unionize. It moved America closer to the Lincolnian idea of equal opportunity for all.

In a world growing increasingly white-collar-oriented, the G.I. Bill of Rights gave a generation of returning vets greater access to the middle class, and even higher. Slightly less than a quarter of American military personnel even had high-school diplomas; just 3 percent had college degrees. With the help of the act, 2.2 million veterans pursued undergraduate or graduate degrees, and 5.6 million attained vocational or on-the-job training.

At the same time the act transformed the lives of the veterans, it also transformed the institutions they began to populate. Colleges and universities that were once the province of the economic elite were now increasingly opened to the middle and even lower classes.

As a group, the veterans were older, more mature, and more serious about their work than the average underclassmen to date had been. Having seen much of the world, they were also far readier to challenge professors’ theories if they did not accord with what they had seen while abroad.

Although the act’s provisions set an American precedent for generosity to veterans, all of that paled compared with the great debt that the nation and the world owed to the “Greatest Generation” for liberating countless millions from the yoke of fascist dictatorships.