2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. Find them all under the American Documents tab!
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The “G.I. Bill of Rights” is a nickname for the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 which, you’ll notice, was before World War 2 ended. What did the Act aim to accomplish?
Well, the advantage of having a second World War was that you could hopefully learn a thing or two from the first one. In this case, Roosevelt—who had been part of military command under Wilson—remembered the massive influx of able-bodied men coming home from the war in search of work and struggling to find it. Washington anticipated victory after D-Day and wanted legal/financial infrastructure in place to handle the sudden, rapid reintegration of 15 million men stateside, so the Readjustment Act was necessary.
In looking this up, I found that a lot of WW1 veterans actually got screwed by a combination of deferments in 1924 and the stock market crash in 1929; the government planned to pay the men what was effectively a retirement bonus in 1945, some 25 years after the end of the war, but then the Depression hit, along with WW2, which resulted in many of those veterans getting re-drafted. Some of them had even participated in big unemployment marches in the 1930s.
Roosevelt understandably didn’t want that to happen again. Neither did Congress. The Bill provided things like:
—Tuition for new trades
—Unemployment pay (as long as they were looking for work)
—Housing, farming, and business loans
—Healthcare
A lot of this stuff ended up being the forerunner of the modern VA, and you’ll still hear GWOT veterans talk about using their GI Bills when they got home. While the WW1 vets got a cash bonus, WW2 and beyond got goods and services of varying quality. (You’ll have to ask the serviceman in your life about his experience.)
We’ve lived with this program for so long that we think of it now as a no-brainer, but there was in fact a time when veterans weren’t financially taken care of, not even a little bit. The Founders didn’t build legal infrastructure for a standing military, and for good reason, but the twentieth century saw enough mobilization that such a program became necessary to attract new servicemen to enlist. WW2 was when that happened, and this was the Act that made it so.
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