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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
About the Author
Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist who has contributed to Talk, the Los Angeles Times
Sunday Magazine, Los Angeles magazine, and others. Humes's
numerous books include School of Dreams and the bestselling
Mississippi Mud, Mean Justice, and No Matter How Loud I Shout. A
graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Southern California. For
more information, visit www.edwardhumes.com
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