Opportunities of G.I. Bill pay dividends

By RUSS MINICK
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
History quiz:
Question: What is the origin of the modern American middle class?
Question: What was the driving force in the creation of the American suburbs?
Question: What does this group have in common: "14 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"?
Answer: The G.I. Bill.
The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I Bill, is a case study in what happens when we look at programs as investments that pay dividends instead of some sort of wasteful spending, when opportunity is created where it did not exist before. The question today is, why have we forgotten that?
It is an unlikely and fascinating story, well told in the recent book, "Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream," by Edward Humes (Harcourt). That's where you'll find the list of overachievers in the third question above.
Few expected the bill to have the impact it did -- and it might never have gotten off the ground if some proponents had guessed what was coming.
The bill offered a number of benefits. The two most important were grants for education and training, and guaranteed loans for the purchase of homes, farms or businesses.
The first had college presidents across the country aghast. Universities of pre-war America were elite institutions, and shuddered at the notion of coarsened former warriors overrunning their pristine campuses. No less august a presence than the legendary Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of Chicago University, warned the G.I. Bill would flood the campuses with "educational hobos."
In fact, the returning veterans blew the doors off younger, non-veteran students, outperforming them by every statistical measure. (Hutchins, to his credit, recanted his slander when the grades starting coming in.)
Some 16 million men and women served in uniform in World War II. Congressmen and others involved in the bill's passage expected that perhaps as many as 400,000 would take advantage of the education benefits. Instead, nearly 8 million did so, about 2.3 million attending college and the others opting for a range of training and vocational programs -- all paid for by the government.
Economic engine
Thus the "greatest generation" didn't simply save the world from tyranny -- though we owe them eternal thanks for that -- but they also fueled the extraordinary economic engine that propelled the United States to superpower status.
The home loan guarantees changed the way Americans live forever. Prior to the G.I. Bill, few families owned their own homes. Buying a house usually required coming up with a down payment of as much as 50 percent, out of reach for most. Homes were built a few at a time by small builders. With mortgages guaranteed, down payments could be set far lower. The modern development industry was born when it became possible -- desirable, in fact, given the flood of men returning from war and starting families -- to build large numbers of homes all at once, in assembly-line fashion. The suburbs were born.
That wasn't entirely a blessing, as we pay now for sprawl with traffic congestion and bad air. But at the time it was revolutionary.
In the end, the money spent on the G.I. Bill benefits was returned to the government treasury many times over, as better educated veterans earned better wages, started millions of new businesses and sparked consumer demand that created entire new industries.
It is difficult to imagine the United States now without the G.I Bill. But the lesson it taught us -- that fueling opportunity for as many people as possible pays enormous dividends for us all -- is largely lost.
We argue over pennies in spending for health care, education and economic opportunity, ignoring the riches such investments will produce for the future. That shortsightedness costs us dearly.
Russ Minick is The Fresno Bee's deputy editorial page editor. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.