Servicemen's Readjustment Act(1944) The law, which was later amended to include all veterans, originally guaranteed a year of college or trade education to ex-World War II servicemen with at least 90 days in the armed forces. CLIP: Eugene Sledge on campus
It also mandated that they receive up to $500 a year for tuition, books, and supplies. Of the nearly 8 million veterans who took advantage of this first G.I. bill, 450,000 became engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 67,000 doctors, and 22,000 dentists, while thousands more chose other professional careers. Veterans also made use of the bill’s guaranteed mortgages and low interest rates to buy new homes in the suburbs, kicking off a development boom.
GI Bill Case Study: Eugene Sledge enrolls in Auburn University (1945)
"As I strolled the streets of Mobile, civilian life seemed so strange. People rushed around in a hurry about seemingly insignificant things. Few seemed to realize how blessed they were to be free and untouched by the horrors of war. To them, a veteran was a veteran – all were the same, whether one man had survived the deadliest combat or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform."
When he enrolled at Auburn University, the clerk at the Registrar's office asked him if the Marine Corps had taught him anything useful. Sledge replied: "Lady, there was a killing war. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill Japs and try to survive. Now, if that don't fit into any academic course, I'm sorry. But some of us had to do the killing — and most of my buddies got killed or wounded."
GI BILL POST SCRIPT: Some of this improved—and suddenly—after the war. A key to the change was passage of the GI Bill of Rights in 1944. 22 This was a remarkably broad piece of legislation, which not only offered veterans aid in purchasing housing, and loans to start businesses, but also provided monthly stipends for veterans who wanted help with educational costs. These stipends were not huge: $65 per month at first for single veterans, $90 for those with dependents, and a maximum of $500 per year for tuition and books. But they were a real inducement, especially for veterans with savings, and millions jumped at the opportunity.
By 1956, when the programs ended, 7.8 million veterans, approximately 50 percent of all who had served, had taken part. A total of 2.2 million (97.1 percent of them men) went to colleges, 3.5 million to technical schools below the college level, and 700,000 to agricultural instruction on farms. The GI Bill spent $14.5 billion, a huge sum in those years, for educational benefits between 1944 and 1956. 23 The GI Bill indeed promoted an educational boom. Colleges and universities were nearly swamped by the change; almost 497,000 Americans (329,000 of them men) received university degrees in the academic year 1949–50, compared to 216,500 in 1940. T
he influx jolted faculty and administrators, who had to reach out beyond the predominantly upper-middle-class young people whom they previously had served, to deal with older students, to offer married housing, to accelerate instruction, and to provide a range of more practical, career-oriented courses. The GI Bill was almost certainly worth it economically, helping millions of Americans to acquire skills and technical training, to move ahead in life, and therefore to return in income taxes the money advanced to them by the government. It was the most significant development in the modern history of American education.
Ballston Spa's U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Frank Darling Darling grew up in Warrensburg, and moved to his aunt’s house Ballston Spa to attend the last three years of high school. He worked as a forester and construction worker in his youth, and was drafted into the Army in 1942. After the war, he used GI Bill benefits to get schooling as a draftsman, and worked in Albany for the bridge bureau in the state Department of Transportation.
GI BILL POST SCRIPT: Some of this improved—and suddenly—after the war. A key to the change was passage of the GI Bill of Rights in 1944. 22 This was a remarkably broad piece of legislation, which not only offered veterans aid in purchasing housing, and loans to start businesses, but also provided monthly stipends for veterans who wanted help with educational costs. These stipends were not huge: $65 per month at first for single veterans, $90 for those with dependents, and a maximum of $500 per year for tuition and books. But they were a real inducement, especially for veterans with savings, and millions jumped at the opportunity.
By 1956, when the programs ended, 7.8 million veterans, approximately 50 percent of all who had served, had taken part. A total of 2.2 million (97.1 percent of them men) went to colleges, 3.5 million to technical schools below the college level, and 700,000 to agricultural instruction on farms. The GI Bill spent $14.5 billion, a huge sum in those years, for educational benefits between 1944 and 1956. The GI Bill indeed promoted an educational boom. Colleges and universities were nearly swamped by the change; almost 497,000 Americans (329,000 of them men) received university degrees in the academic year 1949–50, compared to 216,500 in 1940. The influx jolted faculty and administrators, who had to reach out beyond the predominantly upper-middle-class young people whom they previously had served, to deal with older students, to offer married housing, to accelerate instruction, and to provide a range of more practical, career-oriented courses. The GI Bill was almost certainly worth it economically, helping millions of Americans to acquire skills and technical training, to move ahead in life, and therefore to return in income taxes the money advanced to them by the government. It was the most significant development in the modern history of American education.
Creation of the United Nations (1945) : Established to promote international co-operation. A replacement for the ineffective League of Nations, the organization was created following the Second World War to prevent another such conflict. Similar to the League of Nations, the United Nations consisted of over 50 nations with the goal maintaining international peace and security
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