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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Over Here: How
the G.I. Bill Transformed the American
Dream
by Edward Humes
Harcourt - October
2006
Troop
Movement Unlike Any
Other
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
Greatest Regeneration:
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. Reprinted here
by permission.
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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