Homecoming
When war ended, the troops came flooding home. Seventy thousand soldiers and sailors per month were demobilized and reintroduced to American society. For many veterans, the war had left physical, emotional, and psychological scars, as portrayed in the 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives. Yet, however high the cost, whether America’s soldiers returned injured or not, they were returning home as victorious heroes.
As early as 1943, economists started planning how veterans would reenter the work force. In an economic manual of 1944, J. Douglas Brown said, "The men returning from the armed services, will … constitute the finest body of manpower the world has ever seen." True enough, but how to employ it in a peacetime economy? And what would happen to the millions of women and African-Americans their reemployment threatened to displace? And where, with a severe housing shortage, would they all live? The joy of victory rapidly gave way to apprehension as these economic uncertainties loomed.
The GI Bill of Rights
The government’s answer to these questions was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or the GI Bill of Rights. The bill provided low-cost home mortgages to veterans, setting off a boom in construction and its related industries. Between 1948 and 1958, a total of thirteen million new homes were built. (Obviously, not all of them were built with GI Bill money alone.)
The suburbs flourished as people escaped overcrowded cities for the paradise of their own home and a plot of land. Entire prefabricated suburban towns such as Levittown, Long Island, the brainchild of developer William J. Levitt, sprang up. Each house in this tract housing project (a housing development on a large tract of land, built by a real estate developer) had its own amenities, yet was comforting in its similarity to its neighbors. It was a housing recipe that was much copied from then on.
The construction boom set off a domino effect in the home appliance and furnishing industries. Shopping centers sprang up to cater to the new suburbs, creating a boom in the auto industry as people had to drive greater distances to shop. This, in turn, spurred the industries related to the auto, including fuel, rubber, parts, tools, and plastics. The suburbs had become the new frontier.
The GI Bill also paid for several years of college and provided low-cost business loans. For the young men who had put their families, careers, and lives on hold to serve their country, the GI Bill was their key to reestablishing themselves. Millions of young men went to college on the GI Bill. Higher education, a rarity before the war, was now available to many, not just to the rich and privileged few. The GI Bill increased the percentage of Americans attending college over two generations and led to the expansion of America’s entire education system. In 1940, for example, 109,000 men and 77,000 women graduated from college with B.A. degrees. By 1949, that number almost tripled to 328,000 men, and 103,000 women.
