The G.I. Bill [Paperback]

Kathleen J. Frydl examines how the GI Bill serves as an instructive example of successful federal power in modern America.In the first comprehensive study of the GI Bill to use the records of the Veterans Administration, Kathleen J. Frydl demonstrates the multiple ways in which the GI Bill illustrates important aspects of federal power, including its reach, limits, and effects.In the first comprehensive study of the GI Bill to use the records of the Veterans Administration, Kathleen J. Frydl demonstrates the multiple ways in which the GI Bill illustrates important aspects of federal power, including its reach, limits, and effects.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 Servicemens 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. Frydls 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. 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 l³±