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Allan Howerton had never seen anything like it -- which was saying a lot.
He had swapped a job hustling White Castle burgers on the graveyard
shift in Rahway, New Jersey, for action in six bloody, crucial battles
in France and Germany, surviving some of World War II's most deadly
months on the ground. By his own calculation, he was one of only
eighteen out of 570 infantrymen in his company to make it through every
one of those battles without being wounded, captured, or killed --
which meant, he would later joke, he was either good, lucky, or
foolish. Or a bit of all three.
Still, Howerton felt nothing he had faced before -- not the deadly and
constant thudding of artillery, not the endless slogging through the
mud of Roer and Rhine, not even the sight of death and hope and fear
mingling on the faces of enemy and friend alike along the Siegfried
Line -- had prepared him for this latest massing of men, for this
unprecedented mission with no guarantees.
Howerton stood on a packed tramcar, thick with the smell of Winston and
Pall Mall and the familiar waiting sounds of shuffling, coughing,
murmuring. The troops had been gathering for weeks, arriving first by
the dozens, then the hundreds, and, finally, they began moving in by
the thousands. Now they streamed toward the city and headed for the
high ground, an emerald hilltop near the urban core with a commanding
view and easy access by road and rail -- idyllic, quiet,
underpopulated, waiting to be taken.
And so the most remarkable, least predictable action of World War II
began to play out, a movement of more Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Corps
forces than has ever been attempted before or since. Howerton's was
just one location in a worldwide endeavor -- a coordinated effort of
such magnitude that it would shape the future of America and the world
in a way that would eclipse almost every battle of the war, even the
Normandy landing and the decimation of Hiroshima. The men in Washington
who had conceived this audacious plan virtually as an afterthought,
almost killing it a half-dozen times before finally setting it in
motion shortly after D-Day, had in no way foreseen what this moment
would look like -- nor did they envision the long reach of its impact,
still resonating to this day. In time, all America would feel its
effects, from city to suburb to farm, from classroom to boardroom,
doctor's office to Oval Office -- an unintended juggernaut.
The tram doors creaked open and the men rushed into the thin morning
sunlight, freed from the coffinlike confines of the old trolley.
Howerton, his thick brow knitted in momentary confusion, struggled in
the jostling crowd to get his bearings on this unfamiliar turf, this
grassy knoll with its old brick and granite buildings stretching out
before him, gnarled trees, singed by autumn, obscuring the horizon.
Then he heard someone say, "This way" and Howerton turned and saw the
sign pointing to their objective:
University of Denver: Office of the Registrar
He took a deep breath and headed off to sign up for his freshman
classes, a nervous eagerness roiling his stomach, a far different
unease from the sort he came to know during his time in war-torn
Germany. The fears no longer involved bullets and bleeding and death,
but professors and textbooks and midterms -- and contemplation of a
future that was no longer simply about surviving to see the next day,
but about envisioning a new century, building a career, a life, a
country.
On that creaky trolley car in Denver, in a moment replayed in cities
and towns throughout the nation, the age of the G.I. had drawn to an
end. And the age of the G.I. Bill had just begun.
The Accidental Remaking of America
Although he had no idea at the time, Allan Howerton's journey to Denver
began two years earlier, on January 11, 1944, when two very distinct
road maps to postwar America landed on Congress's doorstep.
One vision for "winning the peace" came wrapped in the pomp and ritual
of the president's annual State of the Union address. The other was
scrawled by lobbyists a mile from the Capitol, on hotel stationery,
then hastily typed up for public consumption.
One represented nothing less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
plan to expand the Founding Fathers' original vision of a just America:
giving every citizen the right to a rewarding job, a living wage, a
decent home, health care, education, and a pension -- not as
opportunities, not as privileges, not as goods to which everyone (who
could afford them) had access, but rights, guaranteed to every
American, from cradle to grave. He called it a "Second Bill of Rights."
The other plan, courtesy of the era's most powerful veterans
organization, the American Legion, advanced a more modest goal, or so
it seemed: to compensate the servicemen of World War II for their lost
time and opportunities, offering 16 million veterans a small array of
government-subsidized loans, unemployment benefits, and a year of
school or technical training for those whose educations had been
interrupted by the draft or enlistment. The Legion called this a "Bill
of Rights for G.I. Joe and Jane."
The first plan promised to reinvent America after the war.
The second offered to put things back to where they were before the war.
As it turned out, neither plan's promises could be kept. FDR never got the chance to remake America. Instead, the G.I. Bill did.
This was not by grand design, but quite by accident, as much a creation
of petty partisans as of political visionaries. Yet the forces set in
motion that day in January 1944 would power an unprecedented and
far-reaching transformation -- of education, of cities and a new
suburbia, of the social, cultural, and physical geography of America,
of science, medicine, and the arts. And just as importantly, the
blandly and bureaucratically named Servicemen's Readjustment Act of
1944, forever remembered as the G.I. Bill of Rights, would alter both
the aspirations and the expectations of all Americans, veterans and
nonveterans alike.
A nation of renters would become a nation of homeowners. College would
be transformed from an elite bastion to a middleclass entitlement.
Suburbia would be born amid the clatter of bulldozers and the smell of
new asphalt linking it all together. Inner cities would collapse. The
Cold War would find its warriors -- not in the trenches or the
barracks, but at the laboratory and the wind tunnel and the drafting
table. Educations would be made possible for fourteen future Nobel
Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, a dozen
senators, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000
scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants,
17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists -- along with a million lawyers,
nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers, pilots, and others. All
would owe their careers not to FDR's grand vision, but to that one
modest proposal that was supposed to put the country back to where it
had been before the war.
There was never anything like it before.
There is nothing like it on the horizon.
It began with a simple question: Now what?
Copyright © 2006 Edward Humes Over Here : How the G.I. Bill Transformed
the American Dream By Edward Humes Published by Harcourt October
2006;$26.00US; 0-15-100710-1
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