Veterans’
Welfare, the
GI Bill and
American
Demobilization
Laura McEnaney
T
he passage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment
Act of 1944 — or GI Bill — opened up a dialogue about men’s physical and mental health,
for it addressed very directly what ordinary men would
need to recover from extraordinary violence. Political
leaders identified veterans’ “welfare,” by which they
meant general well-being, as a top priority of World
War II’s recovery, and the GI Bill was the centerpiece
of their agenda. The bill’s passage was an impressive
legislative triumph, the collective product of massive
medical, legal, and social science research, bipartisan politicking, and veterans’ activism. It provided
education, housing, and small business assistance,
along with mental and physical rehabilitation in
government-funded hospitals. All of these programs,
whether they served mind, body, or wallet, amounted
to welfare — a set of government-sponsored policies
and services designed to aid a soldier’s transition from
enlisted man to healthy, productive citizen. Thus we
have to think about the broad reach of the GI Bill’s
welfare provision as one of the health legacies of World
War II.
The United States has gone to war many times, and
so the problem of providing for returning soldiers has
a long history, dating from even before the American
Revolution. The scale of World War II, however (16
million Americans in uniform around the world), and
its timing (coming on the heels of the Great Depression) challenged policymakers to write a comprehensive bill that could address the many layers of a veteran’s experience, from lost income to lost limbs. This
essay focuses not on the bill’s legislative aspects but
rather on the policy conversations that surrounded its
enactment. Even though the GI Bill was drafted and
passed during the war, I want to frame it as a postwar
conversation about welfare, a conversation that resuscitated much older debates about the American welfare state’s most thorny dilemmas: who deserves the
state’s help and how should assistance be delivered?1
These debates become visible only if we frame the
GI Bill as part of a larger story of the United States’
demobilization from World War II. Peace did not just
happen to Americans, they had to make it — just as
they had made war. My larger project traces this conversion to peace from working-class neighborhoods in
Chicago to elite policy arenas in Washington, D.C., to
understand how people confronted war’s messy aftermath — a period of both great promise and uncertainty.
Laura McEnaney, Ph.D., is the Nadine Austin Wood Chair
in American History at Whittier College, Whittier, California. She is the author of Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties, and is currently at
work on a book manuscript entitled World War II’s “Postwar”: A Social and Policy History of Peace, 1944-1953. health legacies: militarization, health and society • spring 2011
41
SYMPO SIUM
As a national experience, demobilization reintroduced
an array of questions about the rights of citizenship
and the scope of the modern state. Now that the obvious home front sacrifices were no longer necessary,
what were the state’s expectations of engaged citizenship in a post-conflict — but still unstable — world situation? And more urgently, what, if anything, did the
government now owe its citizens after enlisting them
in a long war?
At the grassroots, citizens’ answers to these questions varied widely, depending on military status,
region, race, gender, and the remaining money in one’s
pocket at war’s end. At higher levels, presidential and
congressional debates focused on the role of government in the wake of a war that had reached deeply into
everyday life. Liberal hopes that an activist, regulatory
Back, a widely consulted study of G.I. reintegration,
grimly called veterans “America’s Gravest Social Problem” in 1944. As he framed the dilemma, “We know
how to turn the civilian into a soldier…But we do not
know how to turn the soldier into a civilian again.” A
Columbia University social work professor, he focused
on the myriad social problems veterans might present,
saying “we have made them what they are, we have
used them for war and war has put its curse on them…
We must somehow find the way to win them back.”4
The glut of popular and scholarly writings published
from 1944 onward followed roughly Waller’s narrative
arc: the state had turned the civilian into a regimented
warrior, the subsequent soldier-to-civilian transition
was delicate business and had to be managed carefully
by government, community, and family, and the fate of
Well before the war ended, military planners, academics, and the media
considered what a demobilization of 16 million soldiers would require
in terms of legislation, budgets, industrial reconversion, and from
family members, nuclear and extended.
state could spread widely peace’s economic rewards
clashed with conservative plans to restore free enterprise as the core of a new peacetime economy. This
partisan debate over government’s peacetime reach
had profound implications for every proposed expansion of the American welfare state after World War II.
One of the central questions of my research is how war
— especially a total war — shapes popular expectations of government after the battle concludes. War is
violence, loss, and sacrifice, but I argue it is also an act
of governance that can reconfigure, tweak, or deepen
people’s worldviews about the state’s operation in their
lives. As I will show, the passage of the GI Bill did not
settle the debate over how much or how little government in war’s aftermath — it revived it.2
Well before the war ended, military planners, academics, and the media considered what a demobilization of 16 million soldiers would require in terms of
legislation, budgets, industrial reconversion, and from
family members, nuclear and extended. Of course,
female enlisted were part of this transition, but the
male soldier, the presumed normative postwar breadwinner, was the actual statistical majority and the
idealized focus of policy discussion.3 As recent work
on veterans has shown, these demobilizing men were
seen more as a problem to be managed than triumphant heroes. Willard Waller’s The Veteran Comes
42
postwar democracy hinged on this successful transformation. The boom in this returning vet literature provoked Bill Mauldin, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist
of GI everymen “Willie and Joe,” to lampoon its dire
forecasts in Back Home, his own chronicle of the shift
to civilian life. He called the genre “trash,” put out by
“hungry authors” who “had paid off the mortgage on
the old homestead by posing as authorities and writing quick-selling books on the subject.”5
Whatever its quality or intent, this literary gush on
veteran reentry continued, even into the 1950s, and it
expressed a genuine anxiety about the grand transition from war to peace shared by all citizens. At the
core of the deliberations was a partisan-philosophical
debate about the functions of government. The 1930s
welfare state and the 1940s warfare state had brought
the federal government into people’s everyday lives
in ways that both rewarded and regulated. By the
end of World War II, the social security card and the
rationing card represented the two poles of that statist
intervention: one stood for government provision, the
other for government regulation.6 How to recalibrate
the size and scope of government now in peacetime
presented an enormously complex policy challenge
for World War II’s managers. Their decisions would
impact all aspects of veterans’ resettlement, from jobs,
to housing, to health care.
journal of law, medicine & ethics
Laura McEnaney
For ordinary veterans, such policy matters were,
at first, eclipsed by the more urgent, local practicalities of coming home. In Chicago, as in the rest of the
nation, a soldier’s reentry began in the train station.
Chicago was the nation’s railroad depot, “the place
where Americans changed trains,” whether civilian
or soldier. Migrating workers, military recruits, and
the families that followed comprised a mass migration to and through the city. The soldier’s presence in
the city was especially conspicuous, not only because
so many came through by rail, but because two of the
military’s largest service centers were located just outside of it.7 Those either passing through or returning
to Chicago could rely on organizations like the Travelers Aid Society (TAS) to steer them to a meal and temporary housing. As the self-described first responders
for war’s home front casualties, the TAS — even before
the war ended — worried that cities were not ready to
reabsorb 16 million veterans. Overwhelmed by war’s
human traffic, a TAS worker in May 1945 said, “As I
see the increasing load…the resources seem so small
that there is a feeling of almost panic that comes to me
with each new client…I read of reconversion and the
discharge of thousands of veterans and see only the
beginning of the problem.”8
To address “the problem,” the private and public
welfare agencies that had helped Chicagoans gear up
for war now began to plan for a peacetime urban invasion. The Veterans Administration’s Chicago office
calculated a returning veteran population of 900,000
for the state and three of Indiana’s northern counties.9
Chicago’s housing officials estimated that the city had
sent over 400,000 of its 3.5 million residents to war,
and that roughly the same number would be coming
back to restart their lives (alongside the additional
quarter of a million newcomers). Such statistics motivated the city’s social welfare organizations to ramp
up their activities for the peace in the same spirit they
had mustered for the war. Local branches of government agencies such as the United States Employment
Service (USES), along with city and county relief
agencies, set up new offices or carved out new spaces
in already cramped quarters, all to accommodate the
varied needs of returning vets.
The challenge for demobilizing soldiers was not so
much a lack of services but rather their decentralized
abundance. The combined efforts of government agencies and private organizations formed an unwieldy
system that was hard to know where to enter. As one
confidential report griped, “Almost every conceivable
agency, federal, state, local, professional, civic, and
social, is trying to do something for the veteran.”10 In
Chicago, as in other cities, the Veterans Administration (VA) was the main agency coordinating postwar
benefits, and its local office was supposedly a returning soldier’s first stop. Here, veterans filed for their
benefits and presented claims for medical and vocational rehabilitation if they had received a “serviceconnected” injury. But how to fill out all the forms? A
local chapter of the American Red Cross was responsible to help them do that. For employment, a veteran
had to locate the local USES office, which was not in
the same place as the VA office. For disabled veterans
floundering financially, help was available from the
Red Cross or a local social service agency until a claim
could be adjudicated over at the VA. The Chicago Welfare Administration, a local agency, helped veterans
and their families who needed public assistance (due
to a disability or pending settlement of a claim). Private
agencies — run by staff and volunteers — absorbed the
messy remainders: the emotional and knotty family
troubles that the war had either set in motion or exaggerated. Groups like the Salvation Army, for example,
focused on “family problems” and the “readjustment
of the man back into the community.”11
The creation of a Chicago Veterans Information
Center in late 1945 was designed to deal with this
muddle by providing a one-stop service for all veteran issues. But its own September 1946 report documented continued confusion, citing the plethora of aid
groups (government and private) as the hindrance:
“the veteran has difficulty determining which one of
these agencies is in a position to handle his problem.”12
These frustrations, of course, were rooted in a larger,
intractable design flaw of the American welfare state:
its decentralized and multi-track character. As much as
they were fêted and fussed over, veterans who needed
pensions, vocational and physical rehabilitation, housing, and assistance for dependents still found themselves entangled in a federalist system that divided
the labor of caring for war’s victims among federal,
state, county, and private charity organizations. The
result was a patchwork system that delivered much
to the veteran (certainly more when compared with
programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children), but not without considerable confusion and
complaint.13
National planners were aware of veterans’ local trials, and they worried that such frustrations could lead
to larger, more unwieldy national problems. Memories
of World War I’s troubled aftermath haunted them
and references to avoiding the mistakes of that war’s
demobilization can be found at every layer of postwar
policymaking. In particular, planners agreed that they
wanted to avoid a situation where veterans would be
squeezed by lower wages and higher prices, which
many feared might lead to another national Bonus
March on Washington. Indeed, lingering beneath
health legacies: militarization, health and society • spring 2011
43
SYMPO SIUM
every policy initiative for World War II veterans was
categories of demobilizing citizens. Just two months
a fear that restive veterans, jobless and homeless —
before the passage of the GI Bill, Frank T. Hines, then
or at least, poorly housed — were capable of political
a director in the Veterans Administration, wrote a
mischief, maybe even violence. As Kathleen Frydl puts
lengthy and tortured consideration of the governit, “the GI Bill was born from fear.”14 This was neither
ment’s responsibility and financial capacity to help the
unique to the United States, nor to the time period.
projected millions of jobless citizens, mindful that the
Scholars have documented other examples of veteran
costs, in the long term, “will have to come out of the
provision that were driven by fear of veterans’ potency
National economy.” Hines warned that any proposed
as a destructive political force. A recent comparative
assistance program would be scrutinized heavily for
review of demobilization efforts around the world, for
its fairness to all groups, and that “while the emotional
example, suggests “if former combatants cannot see
appeal on behalf of veterans is particularly strong, it
a role for themselves in the postwar order, they may
must be realized that in any post-war period of unemturn to banditry.”15
ployment, hunger and want is wholly impersonal…
Of course, no one in either the policy or popular litbetween veterans and non-veterans.”19
erature called World War II veterans “bandits,” relying
As much as planners sought to avoid a contest
instead on more polite, therapeutic terms like “malbetween those in uniform and those in overalls, it
adjusted” or “unfulfilled.” As they pondered how to
would be difficult to avoid given how many movminimize the maladjustment, policymakers
grappled with deep and longstanding questions about definitions of citizenship and
Of course, no one in either the policy or
the parameters of welfare provision. Sigpopular literature called World War II
nificantly, it was not a foregone conclusion
that veterans should be treated as a separate
veterans “bandits,” relying instead on more
category of citizen. As Stephen Ortiz has
polite, therapeutic terms like “maladjusted”
shown, President Roosevelt’s 1933 Economy
or “unfulfilled.”
Act, a New Deal budget reduction measure,
cut significantly the benefits for veterans of
World War I. In response to veterans’ vigorous opposition, Roosevelt brazenly told the American
ing parts there were to the massive demobilization.
Legion’s national convention that year, “no person,
In industry, for example, fair hiring practices won
because he wore a uniform must thereafter be placed
through hard fought labor struggles pit union seniority
in a special class of beneficiaries over and above all
against veteran sympathy. A confidential War Producother citizens.”16 Although Roosevelt ultimately signed
tion Board (WPB) report, issued just months after the
the celebrated GI Bill, which recognized exactly the
GI Bill passed, played out a fictional scenario in which
a “G.I. Joe…gets into his civvies” and meets his comopposite, it was nevertheless an important welfare
petition, “Mike, the mainstay of the shipping departpolicy discussion in the forties about how to define
a “veteran” in a total war. Should civilian workers —
ment, who will be fired to make room for him.” Honwhether engaged directly in war production or not
orably discharged and healthy, this “Joe” now needs
— be considered in initiatives to compensate for wara job, but Mike’s story, too, has merit: he may have
related injuries? Certainly, industrial injuries were a
served the company for “the better part of his life” and
thus accrued seniority. Or “he may be a veteran himhealth legacy of World War II. In 1943, for example,
over 2.4 million laborers, most of them in manufacturself — of World War I; he may have a son in service in
ing, were injured at work, with over 100,000 of those
this war, who may have been killed or injured.” As the
injuries defined as partial but permanent.17 Should the
report concluded, “there will be thousands of Joes and
millions of civilian employees working for the muchthousands of Mikes,” each with a compelling need, so
enlarged military and wartime federal government
“Whose job is it?”20
be folded into a veteran entitlement program, even if
Further, the decentralized management of the GI
they had merely performed clerical work during the
Bill’s benefits practically guaranteed a racially rigged
war? In planning its own urban transition to peace,
contest within the community of veteran contendChicago’s City Council claimed that “all work is purers for assistance. The people in charge of dispensposeful and war-connected.”18
ing veteran health care, education, job placement,
High-level planners contemplated how to baland mortgage benefits were all locals, not overseers
ance the competing welfare needs of these differing
from Washington, D.C., so regional race relations
44
journal of law, medicine & ethics
Laura McEnaney
trumped whatever federal law dictated. Thus, almost
a year after the GI Bill went into effect, the American
Council on Race Relations found that officials obligated to help veterans access employment benefits
instead “follow[ed] the pattern of the local community with respect to segregation and discrimination.”
The result was a national pattern wherein “Negroes,
Japanese Americans, and other minority veterans
[were] referred, for the most part, only to menial job
opportunities.”21 Further, local counselors, especially
in the South, advised African-American vets to take
unemployment as a way of steering them away from
jobs – and from an area entirely. This fostered “group
antagonisms” between whites and non-whites, said
the Council, for it sustained a long-held welfare myth
that African-Americans, whenever they could, would
seek the dole rather than hard work.22
The feared tensions between veterans and “stay
at homes” over postwar benefits grew out of an even
larger worry about the GI Bill’s funding into the next
decades.23 In the Office of War Mobilization and
Reconversion (OWMR), staffers warned of long-term
fiscal and political consequences for such generosity to
vets. Over a year after VJ-Day, OWMR planner Donald Kingsley complained that despite the GI Bill’s passage and popularity, no real long-range plan existed
for funding and delivering veterans’ benefits, creating
a policy gap that was “a matter of tremendous consequence to the Nation.” Decentralized planning and
program delivery, the lack of a coherent set of basic
planning principles, and the cost — projected for 1947
as $6.2 billion, or 27% of the (non-defense) federal
budget — meant that yearly enhancements or tweaks
to the GI Bill in Congress would go forward without
rigorous evaluation. With “no effective means of dealing with the extreme pressures that build up behind
veterans’ bills,” Kingsley maintained, there was a “serious probability” that “broad extensions of existing
rights and benefits” would be enacted “with serious
effects upon the whole economy.”24
Further, Kingsley disparaged the federal-statelocal chain of GI Bill service delivery as a harbinger
of renewed efforts to organize other national programs around local control. In a debate over whether
to increase state governors’ responsibilities to run
Veterans Information Centers, such as the one in
Chicago, Kingsley endorsed more and better federal
administration of them, wary of ever more delegation
to the states. The “political implications” of such an
approach, he said, were “extremely serious,” for veterans’ state-run centers served only to offer “the States’
rights advocates some excellent ammunition” to decry
federal management of any program.25 This was an
especially potent charge, given that burgeoning civil
rights movements in the north and south — many of
them filled with World War II veterans — were renewing their attacks on states’ rights politics.
Such warnings about the GI Bill’s long-range consequences reveal that its final passage in 1944 was only
the beginning of a new, postwar conversation about
the size and scope of the welfare state. The bill was
designed to compensate veterans for what the fight
had taken from them — physically, psychologically,
economically. It represented a massive government
outlay to house, educate, employ, and mend returning soldiers, from joyous homecoming to deathly
departure. It was, as Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin put it, “a New Deal for veterans,” an extension of
government activism and welfare provision passed
through bipartisan effort, notably in a climate where
conservatives were more openly criticizing the statism of the thirties.26 Yet, despite the broad consensus
that veterans were “deserving” recipients of the state’s
help, the bill reopened what was essentially a welfare
debate about government’s peacetime functions and
its obligations to the citizens who had just heeded its
calls to war. By following the debates that emerged
after the bill’s passage — as part of a longer process of
this country’s transition from war to peace — we gain
a better perspective on how the GI Bill fits into a larger
history of war-related and highly contested national
welfare policymaking, reaching all the way back to the
Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction.27
Finally, it is worth pondering how deeply intertwined
warfare and welfare have become after World War II,
in ways both narrow and expansive. As the Cold War
took shape, it became difficult to discuss expansions
of government social provision without invoking some
association with communism — unless the proposal
was somehow connected to national security or war.
G.I. benefits during the Korean War grew stingier in
such a climate, but the idea of a sturdy welfare program for deserving veterans remained firmly embedded in Cold War political culture.28 Yet the path to
permanent militarization fostered by a world war and
then a cold war made it difficult for politicians and
citizens alike to decouple citizenship from war. Should
one’s citizenship — and thus welfare — rights flow primarily through military service, with (mostly female)
dependents latching onto such benefits through marriage? What are the larger implications of a welfare
entitlement bound so tightly to military service? If
the New Deal’s legislative agenda advanced the notion
of a noble citizen-worker, then the GI Bill solidified
the notion that it was the citizen-soldier who should
earn a society’s first-class treatment.29 Certainly, many
American veterans have enjoyed this kind of extrastrength citizenship long after World War II. Interest-
health legacies: militarization, health and society • spring 2011
45
SYMPO SIUM
ingly, a lone alternative view to this postwar framework came from a group of veterans themselves, the
American Veterans Committee. Their motto, “citizens
first, veterans second,” suggests a way to think about
citizenship — and thus civic well being through government provision — outside of a martial context. It
was an imaginative and democratic notion then, especially in the context of a Cold War that began so soon
after a declared war ended.30
References
1.This essay is indebted to a growing body of scholarly literature on the GI Bill, which examines a wide range of issues,
from its educational provisions to its legislative politics to its
racial meanings. One of the earliest and best historical treatments comes from D. R. B. Ross, Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans during World War II (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969). More recent works include: M. J. Bennett, When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making
of Modern America (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, Inc., 1996);
G. C. Altschuler and S. M. Blumin, The GI Bill: A New Deal
for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); K.
J. Frydl, The GI Bill (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009); S. Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The GI Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005). On the bill’s educational provisions, see K. W.
Olson, The GI Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1974). On the GI Bill as a part
of the history of the American welfare state, see T. Skocpol,
“Delivering for Young Families: The Resonance of the GI Bill,”
The American Prospect 7, no. 28 (1996): 66-73; and Skocpol,
Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1992); J. D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War,
and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001); S. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and
GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era (New
York: New York University Press, 2010). On the GI Bill’s racial
politics and impact, see J. E. Brooks, Defining the Peace: World
War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004); I. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White:
An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century
America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005): chapters 4-5; D. H. Onkst, “‘First a Negro…Incidentally a Veteran’:
Black World War Two Veterans and the GI Bill of Rights in
the Deep South, 1944-1948,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3
(1998): 517-543.
2.Elsewhere, I have developed these ideas looking at apartment
dwellers and single women. See L. McEnaney, “Nightmares
on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945-1953,” Journal
of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1265-1291; “A Women’s
Peace Dividend: Working-Class Women, Demobilization, and
Cold War Liberalism,” in K. G. Donohue, ed., Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America, 19451965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming, 2011). My manuscript in progress on this topic is entitled
World War II’s “Postwar”: A Social and Policy History of Peace,
1944-1953.
3.Women comprised 2% of those in the armed forces – about
350,000. The issues involved in their access to the GI Bill’s
benefits are covered nicely in Mettler, supra note 1, at chap.
9, and M. D. Gambone, The Greatest Generation Comes Home:
The Veterans in American Society (College Station, Tex.: Texas
A & M University Press, 2005). Few works on the GI Bill analyze deeply its gendered dimensions, but L. Cohen’s work is
suggestive here. See Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics
of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A.
46
Knopf, 2003): at 137-144. I posit the GI Bill as the first male
breadwinner movement of the postwar era. See McEnaney,
supra note 2.
4.Works on veterans’ reintegration include Gambone, id; A. J.
Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture
from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008): chapters 1-3; K.
D. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History
of Americans in World War II (New York: Routledge, 2008);
R. Francis Saxe, Settling Down: World War II Veterans’ Challenge to the Postwar Consensus (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007); M. D. Van Ells, To Hear Only Thunder Again:
America’s World War II Veterans Come Home (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2001). Also, W. Waller, The Veteran Comes
Back (New York: The Dryden Press, 1944): at 13-15, 298-299.
Many of the scholarly works just mentioned quote Waller and
note this fear of the demobilized soldier. On this, see also David
Gerber’s work on disabled veterans, which finds in American
film a “sharply divided consciousness that both honored the
veteran and feared his potential to disrupt society.” See D. Gerber, “Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of
Disabled Veterans in ‘The Best Years of Our Lives,’” American
Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1994): 545-574, at 545.
5.B. Mauldin, Back Home (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1947): 40-41. Notably, one of the contributors to this
“trash” was none other than the American Historical Association, whose 1943-1945 G.I. pamphlet series addressed veterans’
postwar concerns on topics ranging from foreign relations (Can
We Prevent Future Wars?), to economic affairs (Will There Be
Work for All?), to family matters (Can War Marriages Be Made
to Work?). Historians, too, it appears, wanted to be part of the
urgent national conversation about war’s economic and psychic
toll. See American Historical Association, “Constructing a Postwar World: The G.I. Roundtable Series in Context,” available
at <http://www.historians.org/Projects/GIroundtable/index.
html> (last visited December 7, 2010).
6.Of course, not all workers received social security as it was first
designed and implemented. See, for example, A. Kessler-Harris,
In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic
Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Katznelson, supra note 1, at chapter 2.
7.The Chicago’s Travelers Aid Society (TAS) estimated that
between Pearl Harbor and the end of 1945, almost 9 million
people had passed through the city’s six train terminals. Information on wartime Chicago taken from P. Duis and S. LaFrance,
We’ve Got a Job to Do: Chicagoans and World War II (Chicago,
Sewall Co., 1992): at 3, 97, 103. On train station traffic, see Mrs.
A. L. Tidball to Statistical Department, 12 April 1946, Folder
15, Travelers Aid Society of Chicago Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago, The University Library, Department of Special
Collections, Chicago, Illinois.
8.Trend Report, May 23, 1945, folder 406-3, box 406, TAS, 19391949, TAS-Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers
(hereafter WCMC Papers), Chicago History Museum (hereafter
CHM), Chicago, Illinois.
9.Minutes of the meeting of Executive Committee, Division III,
December 19, 1946, folder: 416-1, Veterans Administration,
1946-1965, box 416, Records of the Veterans Administration, in
WCMC Papers, CHM.
10.Frank T. Hines to Colonel Paul S. Lawrence, September 10,
1945, attached report “Veterans’ Services in the Community,”
July 26, 1945, folder: Veterans’ Relations Inter-Office, box
1, entry 66, Records of the Office of the Veterans’ Relations
Adviser, Records of the Office of Price Administration, RG
188 (hereafter Records of the OPA), National Archives and
Records Administration—College Park, Maryland (hereafter
NARA-CP).
11.City of Chicago Welfare Administration to Bureaus and Divisions, March 9, 1944, Official Bulletin No. 1868, Report from
Family Welfare Committee of Council of Social Agencies, “Division of the Family Field in Relation to Problems of Discharged
Veterans,” July 17, 1944, City of Chicago Welfare Administration
journal of law, medicine & ethics
Laura McEnaney
to Bureaus and Divisions, November 13, 1944, Official Bulletin
No. 1946, all in folder: Veterans’ Relief, 1944-1947, Section 2,
Veterans’ Relief, 1934-1966, Papers of Raymond Marcellus Hilliard (hereafter Hilliard Papers), and Joseph L. Moss to President William N. Erickson, May 5, 1954, folder: Veterans’ Relief,
1948-1956, in Hilliard Papers, CHM.
12.Veterans Information Center and Community Referral Service
of Metropolitan Chicago, Report of Activities, September 1946,
folder: 787-12, box 787, Records of the Veterans Information
Center, WCMC Papers, CHM.
13.Scholars are beginning to question the two-track thesis about
the American welfare state. See, for example, M. Willrich,
“Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern
America,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (2000): 460489. His work suggests a “third track” and argues that the Progressive Era welfare state heavily regulated men, as well. For
now, the best analysis of the two-track and gendered design of
early welfare is found in L. Gordon, Pitied but not Entitled:
Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: The Free
Press, 1994). Frydl analyzes expertly the issues of federalism
and the GI Bill’s design in her GI Bill, supra note 1.
14.Frydl, supra note 1, at 14; Altschuler and Blumin, supra note
1, at 42-43, 78-79; Van Ells, supra note 4, at 7-8.
15.M. Knight and A. Özerdem, “Guns, Camps and Cash: Disarmament, Demobilization and Reinsertion of Former Combatants
in Transitions from War to Peace,” Journal of Peace Research
41, no. 4 (2004): 499-516, at 506.
16.Quote taken from S. R. Ortiz, “The ‘New Deal’ for Veterans: The
Economy Act, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Origins
of New Deal Dissent,” Journal of Military History 70, no. 2
(2006): 415-438, at 433. See also his Beyond the Bonus March
and GI Bill. Ortiz smartly argues that this veteran opposition
must be viewed as part of the early New Deal dissent. See also
Altschuler and Blumin, supra note 1, at 31-33, and Mettler,
supra note 1, at chapter 1. Bill Mauldin describes similar sentiments from General Omar N. Bradley, who became the head
of the VA after the war. He argued that veteran leaders from
the American Legion, in particular, were selfishly putting their
own “special interests before the welfare of this nation,” when
they argued for “special privilege” versus “honest opportunity.”
See Mauldin, supra note 5, at 95-98.
17.Statistics on war injuries from “Work Injuries in the United
States During 1944,” Monthly Labor Review 61 (1945): 638643.
18.Journal of the Proceedings of the City Council of the City of
Chicago, Illinois, April 3, 1945, 3189, Harold Washington
Library, Chicago, Illinois. However, this statement was made in
reference to sustaining production after the war had ended—
indeed, during celebrations for VE or VJ Day, not as a proposal
for postwar welfare policy. Frydl offers an excellent analysis of
President Roosevelt’s deliberations on such matters. See Frydl,
supra note 1, at chapter 1.
19.Memorandum for Honorable James F. Byrnes, April 19, 1944,
box 127, folder: Postwar and War Adjustment 4 – Retraining
and Reemployment Administration, entry 14, Records of the
Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, RG 250, NARACP (hereafter Records of the OWMR).
20.War Production Board, reprint of “War Progress,” “When G.I.
Joe Puts on His Civvies,” August 12, 1944, folder: Demobilization, Box 1, entry 133, Records of the Information Service, Records of the News Division, Office Files of Eileen P.
O’Rourke, 1944-1945, Records of the War Manpower Commission, RG 211, NARA-CP (hereafter records of the WMC).
21.American Council on Race Relations, “Summary: Survey of
Community Veteran Information Centers,” March 29, 1946,
folder: Veterans, box 67, entry 8, Office Files of Malcolm Ross,
Records of the FEPC. See also Onkst, supra note 1; Jennifer
E. Brooks covers nicely the racial dynamics for veterans in the
postwar South. See J. E. Brooks, Defining the Peace: World
War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004). For a fascinating parallel between African ex-servicemen in Kenya to African-American veterans in the American
South, see H. Brands, “Wartime Recruiting Practices, Martial
Identity and Post-World War II Demobilization in Colonial
Kenya,” Journal of African History 46, no. 1 (2005): 103-25.
22.The report noted that this same practice was done to JapaneseAmerican veterans. See American Council on Race Relations,
“Summary,” Records of the FEPC. See Id.
23.“Stay at homes” as a term comes from World War I veteran
and public policy scholar R. V. Peel, “The ‘Separateness’ of the
Veteran,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science: Postwar Jobs for Veterans Issue 238 (1945): 167173, at 167.
24.Donald Kingsley to Dr. John R. Steelman, September 27,
1946, folder: Retraining and Reemployment, box 173, entry
16, Records of the OWMR.
25.J. Donald Kingsley to Mr. John W. Snyder, January 22, 1946,
folder: Retraining and Reemployment, box 173, Records of the
OWMR.
26.Altschuler and Blumin, supra note 1, at 2. It is debatable,
however, how strong this sentiment of anti-statism was among
working-class citizens. See McEnaney, “Nightmares on Elm
Street,” supra note 2.
27.For analysis of how women used the Freedmen’s Bureau to
make postwar claims on the state, see, for example, L. A.
Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Keene makes this point, as well, connecting
World War I veterans’ demands with the struggle for mothers’
pensions in the Progressive era. See Keene, supra note 1.
28.On the contradictions and complexities of a postwar but still
Cold War statism, see M. J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S.
Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 19451954 (Cambridge, Mass.; Cambridge University Press, 2000).
29.The citizen-worker formulation is from Mettler, supra note 1,
at 19.
30.On the American Veterans Committee, see R. Francis Saxe,
Settling Down: World War II Veterans’ Challenge to the Postwar Consensus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): chapter 5; R. L. Tyler, “The American Veterans Committee: Out of
a Hot War and Into the Cold,” American Quarterly 18, no. 3
(1966): 419-436.
health legacies: militarization, health and society • spring 2011
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