Hoover, FDR, Reagan, Bush and Reinhardt

The explosive growth of Dallas suburbs in the fifties has explanations in some larger currents of U.S. history.

When my parents were young adolescents growing up in Tulsa, OK, they likely read in newspapers about the 1932 Bonus Expeditionary Force, a force of 15,000 veterans who marched across the U.S. and encamped in Washington DC to cash in veterans’ bonuses approved by Congress in 1924. General Douglas MacArthur, then Army chief of staff, brought in troops, some led by lower level officers Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, to rout the Hooverville squatters.

Hoover’s hard line toward vets helped bring a new president into office, who took up the need for national support of veterans. In a 1943 fireside chat, FDR pledged that U.S. troops returning from WWII must never come home “into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on a bread line or a corner selling apples. . . We must this time, have plans ready.”

Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights in June 1944, providing returning vets with a goldmine of benefits, including tuition and living expenses for post-secondary education as well as government guarantee of mortgages for homes. In 1945, less than 5 percent of Americans held college degrees and less that two out of five had completed high school. It is estimated that U.S. education support for veterans provided nearly three years to the average vet’s education. Government support also helped finance nearly 90 percent of private homes constructed in the 1950s. The educated workforce was so widely productive that during the fifties the wage gap between social classes reached an all time low.

So my dad, coming out of an impoverished childhood during the depression and wartime military service, was fortunate to have a government which more or less slingshot him into middle class respectability, with a business school education and a new home and car. My family’s trajectory toward affluence was helped again by their use of expanding credit sources in the late fifties and sixties.

The GI bill was offered to all vets, regardless of station or race or creed [Rosie the Riveter got no such benefits], but the absence of government laws against discrimination led to patterns of suburban segregation difficult to overcome. By 1960, not a single black had been able to buy among the 82,000 new homes built in Levittown, New York (or Casa Linda/Casa View).

In 1967, Martin Luther King spoke of the 1932 Bonus Marchers when he called for hundreds of thousands of marchers to again make camp in Washington DC. He reminded Americans that, in emulating the Bonus Marchers, “The stirring lesson of this age is that nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation, Rather it is an historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society.”

Since WWII, each succeeding decade has brought U.S. vets declining benefits. Bush’s National Guard forces in Iraq, as second class military, have taken over half the casualties in the war but are eligible to received only a third of the GI Bill benefits available to regular troops.

It is an irony that “The Greatest Generation” benefited so greatly from a political system that supported their economic growth, but under leadership of men like Reagan and the Bushes has undercut similar levels of support to their new generation of young warriors.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20058