In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly called the G.I. Bill. The bill made provision for a variety of economic and educational benefits for almost all veterans of World War II. Among other provisions, the bill provided tuition and a living stipend for veterans returning to school, unemployment benefits for veterans unable to secure employment, and subsidized loans for home building and business ownership. 

The World War II American military was largely a volunteer force, not a long-term professional one, and huge swaths of people serving would be rotating out of their military careers in short order as the war reached its end. The American people and the policymakers representing them were rightly concerned about how those former servicemembers might best be integrated back into civilian life. In short, the bill was designed to secure the educational and economic well-being of millions of veterans at a pivotal juncture in American history broadly and American military history specifically. 

The G.I. Bill in its original form was conceived of as a payment of a debt owed to servicemembers whose civic virtue was exemplary and admirable. In his signing statement in 1944, FDR declared that the bill and associated legislation “provide the special benefits which are due to the members of our armed forces—for they have been compelled to make greater economic sacrifice and every other kind of sacrifice than the rest of us and are entitled to definite action to help take care of their special problems.” That those same servicemembers who made those definite sacrifices should have the opportunity to receive a suitable education, pursue entrepreneurship, or own a home seemed like common sense at the time and has seemed so to multiple generations of legislators who have passed subsequent bills providing similar benefits to veterans. 

READ MORE