Midnight Ride Through Georgia: Passing the GI Bill
From the conception of the "GI Bill of Rights" in late 1943 to its spring passage in the Senate (50 to 0) and House of Representatives (387 to 0), the legislative path seemed too easy; something had to go wrong. That something became the joint House - Senate conference committee. After wrangling over the bill for three weeks trying to make the Senate and House versions mesh, the committee produced a tie vote. The deciding vote belonged to Representative John S. Gibson of Georgia's Eighth District, but he had gone home leaving his proxy vote with Chairman John Rankin. The Chairman refused to cast Gibson's favorable vote, thereby creating a 3-3 tie. With congressional adjournment looming, the bill would die in committee. Someone said "Find Gibson!"
The problem of how to treat American servicemen after the shooting stopped began with General George Washington at the close of the Revolutionary War. The always penniless Continental Congress owed the soldiers large sums of back pay, forcing Washington to quell a mutiny while the men awaited payment. Thirty years later Congress granted a pension to Revolutionary War soldiers, but within another decade fraud was rampant -- more men were collecting pensions than there were living veterans. After the Civil War, Union veterans formed the Grand Army of the Republic(GAR), the country's most effective political lobby. By 1893, GAR vets collected 150 million per year in pensions from a federal budget that totaled $385 million. Many Americans saw the pensions as a raid on the treasury. In the wake of World War I, Congress voted a bonus for the former doughboys payable in 1945. During the Great Depression the First World War vets received half their bonus early and marched on Washington for the other half; they were run out of town.(see July's article)
With the coming of the Second World War, the nations leaders knew that this time they must solve the veteran problem. The huge number of men and women serving in World War II -- 16 million served by war's end -- was unprecedented in American history. What would happen after the the close of hostilities? How could the economy, cooling off from wartime production, absorb these veterans?
Many GIs saw the lurking problem. In her newspaper column "My Day," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote of a letter she received from a young GI who worried not about maiming and death, "but that when he is finally allowed to go home and piece together what he can of life, he will be made to feel he has been a sucker for the sacrifice he has made."
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