How a bill for veterans changed our nation

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OVER HERE: HOW THE G.I. BILL TRANSFORMED THE AMERICAN DREAM

By Edward Humes

Harcourt, $26, 311 pages

REVIEWED BY ROGER K. MILLER

When I got out of the U.S. Army in 1969 and enrolled in graduate school on what was called, however laughingly, the G.I. Bill, I received, if I remember correctly, a monthly stipend of $95. I received this princely sum because I was married and had a child; single persons and those without dependents received less.

I open with that fact not to express self-pity (though I know I expressed it at the time), but to highlight a tart irony at the center of Edward Humes' "Over Here": The World War II veterans who benefited handsomely from the G.I Bill of their war became, Mr. Humes writes, "the principal political supporters for opposing the extension of G.I. Bill benefits to a broader segment of American society" -- including veterans of future wars.

And benefit handsomely they did: Twenty-some years before me, for instance, veterans attending higher education received free tuition to any institution of higher education and an allowance for books, in addition to a monthly stipend ($120 if married with children). What is more to the point of Mr. Humes' book, their country benefited handsomely, too.

The G.I. Bill of Rights -- or, to give it its official name, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 -- was, the author says, "the most far-reaching and egalitarian Big Government social program in the history of the nation." It began with a simple question: Now what? What to do with the flood of 16 million returning servicemen (the relative trickle of returning servicewomen was scarcely considered).

Mr. Humes, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of several other books ("School of Dreams," "Mississippi Mud"), covers all relevant aspects of the act's gestation and subsequent influence through the stories of a dozen veterans, famous and not, who benefited from it. Several plans for veterans had been floated, limited in scope and focusing on educational and training opportunities rather than cash payments.