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Why did the World War II and Korea transition go so smoothly? One key reason: the veterans found the way home paved with every comeback aid the nation could provide. The G.I. Bill of Rights and related laws offered what one vet calls a "bonus in advance," the most lavish assistance program in history (total Veterans Administration spending since 1946: $72 billion). Most important, the aid was given when and where it could help a man re-enter competitive society. U.S. Employment Service set up a nationwide job hunt. The VA guaranteed $50 billion worth of low-interest loans to help buy 5,700,000 homes, 73,000 farms, 237,000 small businesses. Riding a gravy train, 8,500,000 joined the "52-20 Club," by 1949 spent up to 52 weeks (average: 19) drawing $20 a week in special unemployment pay. Says Seattle Teacher Otto N. Larsen, 34, onetime B-29 instructor: "I think a lot of us got embarrassed over the loot we got from the Government."
No fewer than 7,800,000 World War II vets took on-job or school training, 2,200,000 of them in college. There they built no Hutchins "hobo jungles" but Quonset villages whence hard-working married vets set new high standards of academic achievement. "They knew how to move," says a Harvard dean, "and they moved." They more than doubled the number who, by prewar standards, would have been trained for the professions: 168,000 doctors and dentists, 105,000 lawyers, 93,000 social scientists and economists, 238,000 teachers, 440,000 engineers, 112,000 scientists.
"The veterans produced explosions of creative effort," says James F. Mathias, a 79th Division infantryman commissioned on the battlefield in Normandy, who came back to screen Yale's returning G.I.s and now helps screen candidates for the Guggenheim Foundation's annual awards. "The new talents are obvious in the sciences, but they are just as great in painting, music, writing and scholarship." In routine matters, they did still better. Veterans and their wives settled down and became the generation to cut the wartime divorce rate in half, raise the birth rate 26.2% in a decade, demand that schools teach their Johnnies how to read. Because unexpected millions of vets got to college, a college education became a near-necessity for their youngsters.
Great Leaps Forward
Aided by financing and free education, veterans quickly overtook nonvets their own age in earning power (from 15% behind in 1946 to 19.5% ahead in 1956). G.I. education boosted incomes enough, reckons the VA, to pay back its $14.5 billion cost in extra income taxes by 1970. Vets not only caught up on the old standard of U.S. living but became a mighty force in kicking off the postwar boom in consumer durables by founding the new suburbs, filling them with TV sets, home dryers, cars. Cartoonist Bill (Up Front) Mauldin, like many of his lesser-paid buddies, now treats himself to an air-conditioned car. "A few years of physical discomfort," he explains, "are a memorable experience." In final proof of their economic stability, veterans defaulted on only 0.8% of their Government-insured loans.