Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #617303 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780151007103
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Humes examines and celebrates the G.I. Bill, the benefit program for veterans signed into law two weeks after D-Day. A remarkably farsighted piece of legislation, the G.I. Bill aimed to reintegrate into American society the 16 million veterans who would return from WWII. To explain how the bill worked, Humes (Mississippi Mud) tells the stories of 10 veterans, showing how G.I. benefits changed their postwar lives and transformed American society. In the five years after V-J Day, eight million returning vets made use of the bill's educational provisions, while the bill's loan guarantees brought home ownership within the reach of five million vets, resulting in the explosive development of suburbia. Humes is alert to the G.I. Bill's failures as well. For example, black vets were shunted into vocational training rather than college and were systematically redlined away from the new suburbs. Humes has a political point to make: the bill, he says, was an enormous giveaway program by big government, one that cost a fortune while reaping an even larger fortune for the country. Yet the WWII vets who benefited from this largesse became the core constituency opposing taxpayer funding of social programs, with the result that only meager benefits await those returning from today's wars. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Humes' reportorial account of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the GI Bill, is full of praise for the education and home ownership its subsidies made available to veterans of World War II. It also fumes over inequities in benefits received by women and black veterans, which Humes blames on the bill's principal legislator, segregationist congressman John Rankin. Seven profiles of veterans form the bulk of Humes' book, relating the subject's prewar life, call to arms with Pearl Harbor, service occupation during the war, and launch of successful postwar careers, which would have been improbable without the GI Bill. Shifting from personal to societal scales, Humes argues that postwar expansions of suburbia, universities, science, and the arts are all consequences of the GI Bill. Ruing that the bill did not pave the way for entitlements such as nationalized health care, Humes closes with his hope for a new GI Bill to promote such programs. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Customer Reviews

A good history book, until the last chapter.
Most high school history teachers will tell their young charges that the most important event of the last century was the Second World War. That's probably an accurate statement, but there's another event that is probably just as important to the United States' rise to super power status. The passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944 would pave the way to a better life for millions of Americans and is an important a piece of legislation as the Civil Rights Act.

The benefits of the G.I. Bill like help with home loans and funds for college are taken for granted by Americans today but in the 1940s it was a revolutionary concept. Edward Humes delivers a solid book, Over Here - How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream, detailing how the G.I. Bill was created. He lays out how politicians of the day were anxious to create some type of package for returning soldiers, but they were not necessarily anxious to craft something that would change America. He carefully spins out the drama behind the creation of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 for modern readers. One of the interesting sub-plots in the book is how the primary sponsor of the Bill, Congressman John Rankin, wanted to give a lesser benefit package to women and blacks so he made sure he was in charge of the Bill's fate.

Humes takes the lives of a handful of veterans and overlays them over the various components of the G.I. Bill to show how individuals were impacted. He does a good job of showing how things like the expansion of the arts in America and the suburbs were unintended side effects of the Bill. It's an interesting approach to take and makes the book feel very personal to the reader.

But towards the end of the book Humes falls into a trap that is becoming all too common in the history books being published over the last couple of years. He spends the last chapter waxing poetic about how the G.I. Bill does not do enough. The agenda being pushed calls for things like national health care and revamping the Bill's education programs. While that may be a good goal in the bigger picture of things I'm getting tired of reading history books that are pushing an agenda. It would be nice to read a straight forward history book again.

Cut out the last chapter and this is a good book on a topic that does not get nearly the attention or credit it deserves.

Learned a lot
I enjoyed the book and learned a lot that I wasn't aware of. Humes did a nice job of weaving the 'human element' of how the GI Bill changed people's lives and changed our country. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that inadvertently the GI Bill was one of the best investments in the United States and its citizens---even though when they wrote the "Serviceman's Readjustment Act" and got it passed through Congress--no one had any idea how powerful it would be.

I'd suggest it is time for another one!

GI Bill
An very important work on a very important if not defining issue of @0th century America.