Victory And Beyond From Bullets To Books Roosevelt’s Gi Bill Filled Colleges, Gave Veterans A Shot At Higher Education

Franklin Roosevelt’s voice crackled over the barracks radio. A half-dozen men, just back from chow, stretched out on the floor to listen to the president’s fireside chat.

It was July 28, 1943, but Roosevelt was looking ahead to the war’s end.

World War II veterans, he said, “must not be demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on a bread line or on a corner selling apples.”

Giving the new veterans housing loans and college tuition, FDR said, would prevent a nightmare many Americans experienced when World War I veterans returned.

Glen Ellison, a 19-year-old Navy enlistee and the son of a Swedish immigrant, found the promise hard to believe. His buddies at the San Diego naval repair base agreed.

“It’s just politics,” they said to one another. “Never happen.”

But what if? Ellison thought. What if he made it through the war and Congress did pass this new law? Wouldn’t that be swell?

“This gives us poor people a chance,” he thought.

Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights on June 22, 1944.

Over the next decade, Ellison and 2.2 million other WWII veterans paid for college with $5.5 billion in GI Bill money.

Like half of them, Ellison was the first in his family to go to college. Like one-fourth of them, he would not have attended college without the bill.

The GI Bill, officially known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, changed America. It opened the ivory tower to men and women who came from the wrong side of the tracks.

Veterans saw it as the chance of a lifetime. They surged into classrooms, raising the average age of students and boosting the education level of the nation.

Before the bill, only a select few could afford college. Afterward, college was an entitlement for servicemen.

The law provided a veteran student with $50 a month for living expenses ($75 for married GIs). The government paid for tuition, books and fees of up to $500 a year. Veterans could get up to 48 months of college, essentially for free.

Thousands of men from poor, immigrant backgrounds proved they could out-study and out-think men born with silver spoons in their mouths. An estimated 70,000 African-American veterans swelled traditionally black colleges in the South and other institutions in the North and West.

The GI Bill held off unemployment by keeping a large number of veterans out of the job market. It changed college classes, as vets chose practical engineering and business courses over liberal arts.

In the Inland Northwest, colleges and universities grew up fast, adding buildings and libraries, “Trailervilles” and “Vet Villages” out of surplus military buildings and Quonset huts.

From 1940 to 1948, Whitworth College’s enrollment grew by 265 percent. From 1943 to 1948, Gonzaga University’s grew by 354 percent.

For people like Ellison, who graduated from Whitworth in 1949, the GI Bill fed middle-class dreams.

In the 1946 movie “The Best Years of Our Lives,” a returning veteran flies home, his mind filled with hopes.

“All I want’s a good job, a mild future, a little house big enough for me and my wife. Give me that much and I’ll be rehabilitated,” he says snapping his fingers, “like that!”

The GI Bill’s architects weren’t trying to rehabilitate the soldiers, but they knew history and didn’t want it repeated. They feared veterans would follow in the footsteps of World War I vets, who marched on Washington, D.C., in 1932 to protest their lack of postwar benefits.

In addition, Americans had watched unemployed European veterans contribute to the rise of fascism, according to Keith Olson, University of Maryland history professor and author of a book on the GI Bill.

Instead, GI Bill graduates moved to suburbia, bought washers and dryers, and became mainstream America.

“The GI Bill turned Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish-Americans, as well as other ethnic Americans - all of whom were overwhelmingly poor and working class - into a single people more accurately described by other hyphenated words: college-educated, middle-class, home-owners,” wrote Michael Bennett in Educational Record.

Author Studs Terkel summed up an irony in a recent interview for the Nation magazine.

“There are so many conservatives today because of liberal legislation. It made people more comfortable, and thus more conservative,” Terkel said.

In 1945, most experts predicted thousands, not millions, of veterans would go to college under the bill. No one was prepared for the onslaught.

In 1946, 300 men bunked temporarily in Memorial Gym at University of Idaho. Later, like other area colleges, the school received surplus trailers, buildings and Quonset huts from the military to construct what became known as “Vet Village.”

Meanwhile, Washington State College encouraged Pullman residents to take veterans into their homes. The college crammed bunk beds into dorm rooms and started scheduling classes at noon and in the evening. At one time during 1946, college President Wilson Compton’s household swelled to 27 because of the students, teachers and their families staying temporarily in his home.

The college’s entrance requirements became restrictive for the first time because of limited housing; in-state applicants were required to have a C average, out-of-state a B minus.

Married veterans posed their own housing problem.

During the 1945-46 school year, the number of married students at Washington State College climbed from 90 to 315.

At Eastern, 70 married veterans and their families lived in “Trailerville,” a town made up largely of surplus military units. Trailerville had a mayor, a weekly column in a local newspaper and a day-care center. Students nicknamed the dusty road leading past similar quarters at Whitworth “Ball and Chain Lane.”

Both Gonzaga and Eastern inherited buildings from the Army’s Baxter General Hospital in Spokane and Eastern acquired an old drill hall from Farragut Naval Station north of Coeur d’Alene. The drill hall became the school’s fieldhouse until it burned in the mid-1970s.

At Gonzaga, the student newspaper explained to veterans how to get school supplies. “If a veteran needs a new book or some graph paper, all he has to do is sign for it in the Book Store if his white card is on record,” said an article in the Nov. 9, 1945, Gonzaga Bulletin.

That year, GU freshman made up 64 percent of the student body.

Vets surprised everyone not only with their numbers, but by how well they did in the ivy halls. They shunned frivolity and studied hard.

Ellison recalled non-veterans at Whitworth complaining, “This isn’t fair. These guys are getting all the A’s.”

An editorial in the Gonzaga Bulletin on Nov. 27, 1945, patted the vets on the back: “Our returned veterans are hitting those books with a pent-up, pile-driving force, shelved for the war. Men with spirit such as this are bound to succeed.”

The scene replayed across the country.

Fortune magazine called the Class of 1949 “the best … the most mature … the most responsible … and the most self-disciplined group” of college students in history.

College presidents who predicted a decline in standards ate their words.

Today, educators observe that liberal arts never recovered from the practical emphasis veterans sought from college. They trace the beginnings of huge bureaucracies and counseling services to the postwar period.

The legacy of federal aid to students lives on today with nearly 30 percent of college students receiving some federal money. Tests created for the soldiers evolved into today’s General Educational Development (GED) tests.

Veterans’ world ties were strengthened by the war, bringing increased political expression to campuses. In 1948, for example, Whitworth students produced a radio show entitled “What can we do to win the peace by economic and social rehabilitation in Europe?”

The GI Bill’s impact can be measured in national numbers - 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, 17,000 writers and editors.

Or in an individual life.

When Ellison looks back at his humble childhood he sees an unfinished house in Inglewood, Calif., that leaked when it rained. An aunt and uncle who adopted him when his mother died.

His uncle was an elevator operator, his aunt a homemaker. To help with expenses, Ellison cleaned chicken roosts, sold the Saturday Evening Post and delivered newspapers. When he was 11 he started buying his own clothes.

After two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree from Whitworth, Ellison went to work for Bethlehem Steel’s Pacific Coast operation. Eventually, he became an executive with Leslie Salt Co., working in Australia and San Francisco.

He retired in 1989 and lives with his wife, Dorothy, also a 1949 Whitworth graduate, in an exclusive, gated housing development near Manito Country Club.

“You may have noticed that I’m no longer that poor,” Ellison said. “When I’m cruising in my Cadillac touring sedan, I recognize I’ve come a long way.”

He sees a renewed appreciation for education in his granddaughter who will be a freshman at Whitworth this fall. The girl wants an education that will make her successful as well as expand her mind.

Ellison credited the GI Bill with changing his life. He donates money to Whitworth and volunteers time helping small businesses.

“I’m paying back to society for all I have received.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 Color) Graphic: GI Bill