The G.I. Bill

Kathleen J. Frydl examines how the GI Bill serves as an instructive example of successful federal power in modern America.

Kathleen J. Frydl (Author)

9780521514248, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 March 2009

396 pages
23.4 x 16 x 2.8 cm, 0.68 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Kathleen Frydl tells the dark side of how racial politics affected the best of legislative good attentions embodied in the G. I. Bill, the most celebrated social policy to emerge out of the Second World War. She takes the reader beyond a simple left-right divide and shows political history at its best - nuanced, carefully balanced, and sobering.' Donald T. Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy: How GOP Made Political History

Scholars have argued about U.S. state development - in particular its laggard social policy and weak institutional capacity - for generations. Neo-institutionalism has informed and enriched these debates, but, as yet, no scholar has reckoned with a very successful and sweeping social policy designed by the federal government: the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, more popularly known as the GI Bill. Kathleen J. Frydl addresses the GI Bill in this study based on systematic and comprehensive use of the records of the Veterans Administration. Frydl's research situates the Bill squarely in debates about institutional development, social policy and citizenship, and political legitimacy. It demonstrates the multiple ways in which the GI Bill advanced federal power and social policy, and, at the very same time, limited its extent and its effects.

1. The roots of the GI Bill
2. The GI Bill
3. Fall from grace
4. Scandal and the GI Bill
5. African-American veterans
6. Housing
7. Higher education.

Subject Areas: Military history: post WW2 conflicts [HBWS], Military history [HBW], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]