| In November 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed a committee of educators to frame a program for the postwar education and training of veterans. The committee worked quickly for a presidential commission, and within a year, President Roosevelt's recommendations were ready for Congress. These recommendations, enacted by Congress in 1944, came to be known as the GI Bill of Rights. An examination of the causes and effects of the GI Bill of Rights, officially called the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, demonstrates how this bill drastically reshaped life in the United States after World War II. It is this researcher's contention that the GI Bill served as the catalyst in creation of America's post war middle class society.Chapter one of this dissertation focuses on the forces which shaped the development of the GI Bill and the immediate problems facing postwar America. Chapter two is a history of America's treatment of its veterans and the problems faced by American veterans from the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Chapter three outlines the provisions of the GI Bill, emphasizing the higher educational opportunities given to returning veterans and their impact on America's colleges and universities. Chapter four outlines the provisions of the GI Bill effecting post-war housing, concentrating on how the GI Bill made the American dream of home ownership accessible to 12 million returning veterans, and the innovations in home building developed by William J. Levitt. The fifth and final chapter is a summary of how the GI bill helped shape modern American society, focusing on the differences in how the average American lived before and after World War II. |
