Imagine telling an entire generation they could receive a free college education at any school that would accept them — Texas A&M, Harvard University, the Sorbonne — anywhere. Throw in a monthly stipend for living expenses, plus more money for books. And when you graduate, there's a government-backed home loan waiting, no money down and no credit checks — buy a house cheaper than renting an apartment. Throw in subsidized farm loans, business loans, free job training, free medical care, free job placement, and up to a year’s worth of weekly paychecks until you find work. What insane congressman, senator or president would ever approve such a costly boondoggle? It could never pass today, for it would be the most enormous, far-reaching, life-changing government program in the history of the world.

And so it was: the post-World War II G.I. Bill. It revolutionized higher education, created suburbia, brought us the scientists, engineers, doctors, artists and teachers who built most of what is good in America today. My new book, Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream, recounts this sometimes surprising history and its lasting legacy. Consider it a book not of war stories, but of after-the-war stories, and in them you’ll meet film and theater director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, The Miracle Worker, the Nixon-Kennedy debates), Nobelist Leon Lederman (helped invent modern particle physics), civil rights crusader Monte Posey, George McGovern, Bob Dole, Josette Dermody Wingo and many others.

“Over Here's... rich tapestry captures the complexity and contradictions of American society in the midst of dramatic change, (which) Humes retells with such warmth and enthusiasm in this inspiring book. Deeply moving, alive with the thrill of people from modest backgrounds discovering that the opportunities available to them were far greater than anything they had dreamed of.”

— The Los Angeles Times

“Poignant... The human dramas scattered throughout the narrative are irresistible. The book will provide nostalgia for the World War II generation, and a well-rounded education for readers born later.”

— Denver Post

“A profound book… brilliant at explaining world–changing events in simple terms that any reader can understand. Humes… tells stories of global consequence through the eyes of individual people.”

— Long Beach Press-Telegram

“What Mr. Humes has done especially well is to capture... the “accidental greatness” of the G.I. Bill.”

— Washington Times

“Fascinating... The book's statistics are eye-opening, but it's the numerous personal vignettes that bring this account to life. OVER HERE shows how the G.I. Bill opened doors for millions. At its best, these passages are reminiscent of Studs Terkel's Depression-era and World War II oral histories.”

— Cleveland Plain Dealer

“An immensely readable account of one of the smartest, most workable projects our government ever thought up.”

— Carolyn See

“A superb description of one of the marvels of American history.”

— George McGovern

“A wonderful, personal, and important reminder of how a single law enabled millions of highly motivated and grateful Americans to transform our country.”

— Bob Kerrey

“Humes has a wonderful knack for finding a big story in the little stories of everyday life.”

— D.J. Waldie

“The G.I. Bill changed the course of millions of American lives and gave America the chance for ‘the pursuit of happiness’ long promised and long delayed.”

— Arthur Penn

“Over Here — the great untold story that needs to be told all the younger generations.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“The author is at his best explaining the bill's unanticipated, transformative effect on American society…. Careful and colorful reporting renders this seldom-told part of the Greatest Generation's story every bit as inspiring as those recounting its survival of the Depression and triumph in war.”

— Kirkus Reviews

Prologue

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 infantry men who served 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 sound 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 thousand. 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, under-populated, 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 most 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 of America would feel its effects, from city to suburb to farm, from classroom to boardroom, doctor’s office to Oval Office ­ an unintended juggernaut leaving nothing in its path unaltered.

The tram doors creaked open and the men rushed into the thin morning sunlight, freed from the coffin-like 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, 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.

Chapter 1

The Greatest Re-generation: 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 roadmaps to post-war 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 stationary, 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 every American, 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 sixteen million veterans a small array of government-subsidized loans, unemployment benefits, and a year of school or technical training for those whose education 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 promise would 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. And 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, it would alter both the aspirations and the expectations of all Americans, veterans and non-veterans alike.

A nation of renters would become a nation of homeowners. College would be transformed from an elite bastion to a middle class 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 board. 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 was.

There was never anything like it before.

There is nothing like it on the horizon.

It began with a simple question: Now what?

For every dollar spent on education under the original GI Bill, $7 returned to the national economy.

Women in World War II

World War II GI Pamphlets

House Veterans Affairs Committee GI Bill History Page