The G.I. Bill

by Kathleen J. Frydl

Overview

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 the first 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521514248
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/23/2009
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Kathleen J. Frydl has been an Assistant Professor in the History department at the University of California, Berkeley, since 2003. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000, she worked at the National Academy of Sciences for three years before moving to the west coast. She has held academic awards from the University of Chicago, the Mellon Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Kathleen Frydl's history of the G.I. Bill illuminates both the legislation itself and the way Congress operated in the mid-1940s. She has also fused her study of the political history of the Act to an examination of its social and cultural origins and effects as it became, in popular parlance, the G.I. Bill of Rights. It is an exceptionally impressive work of scholarship."
Alan Brinkley, Columbia University

"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

"Kathleen J. Frydl’s impressive study of the G.I. Bill of Rights highlights the administrative and political history of a pivotal postwar social policy."
Scott Gelber, Journal of American History

From the Publisher