V E TE R AN S AFFAI R S & M I LITARY M E D I CI N E O UTLO O K
THE G.I. BILL
On the landmark law’s 75th anniversary, a look at the once and future dividend for military service members
n TODAY IT’S HARD TO FIND ANYONE WILLING TO SPEAK against a law often described as one of the most important items of domestic legislation in the history of the United States. But the provisions codified in the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 – the original G.I. Bill of Rights – were far from universally accepted when the country debated how it would reintegrate American military service members who had been sent to fight in World War II and who numbered, by the time war had ended, nearly 15 million. The United States had learned painful lessons from its earlier large-scale military mobilizations. The pension systems
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enacted to compensate Civil War combatants and their survivors proved so complicated, costly, and divisive that when the next big war came around – World War I – the government was more circumspect, scaling back veteran benefits and offering no assistance for non-battle injuries or age-related ailments. Instead, veterans were promised, in 1924, a deferred “bonus,” payable in 20 years. During the Great Depression, of course, World War I veterans, many of whom were standing in bread lines, desperately needed these bonuses, a crisis that eventually led to the debacle known as the “Bonus March,” in which active-duty service members were sent to forcibly remove
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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
By Craig Collins
