"The only good thing was the G.I. bill": Effects of the education and training provisions on African-American veterans' political participation

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 31-52

  Mettler, Suzanne ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33644614639     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X05000027     Document Type: Review

References (210)

1. e.g., John Bound and Sarah Turner, "Going to War and Going to College: Did World War II and the G.I. Bill Increase Educational Attainment for Returning Veterans?" Journal of Labor Economics 20 (2002): 784-815;
2. Jere Behrman, Robert Pollack, and Paul Taubman, "Family Resources, Family Size, and Access to Financing for College Education,"Journal of Political Economy 97 (1989): 389-419.
3. Suzanne Mettler, "Bringing the State Back in to Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the G.I. Bill for World War II Veterans," American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 351-65.
4. e.g., American Council on Education, "The G.I. Bill's Lasting Legacy," Educational Record 75, (1994);
5. Edwin Kiester.Jr. "The G.I. Bill May Be the Best Deal Ever Made by Uncle Sam," Smithsonian 25 (1994): 129-39.
6. Throughout this article, I use the terms "blacks" and "African Americans" interchangeably, and the terms "nonblacks" or "nonwhites" when referring to specific studies that requested responses to such categories. The important point to underscore is that such terms about race have no intrinsic political or scientific meaning; rather, they are used here in order to illuminate an historical context in which they were assigned substantial significance. See Robert Lieberman, "Social Construction," American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 437-41.
7. Fourteen percent of all veterans used the full year's worth of generous unemployment benefits offered by the program, and 29 percent used low-interest guaranteed mortgages for the purchase of homes, farms, or businesses.
8. The program granted one year of schooling at government expense to any veteran who had served for at. least. 90 days and had an "other than dishonorable" discharge; an additional month of education or training was granted for each additional month of service up to a maximum of 48 months. U.S. President's Commission on Veteran's Pensions, Veteran's Benefits in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 275, 287, 300-304.
9. st sess., Senate Committee Print No. 18 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 20.
10. Reginald Wilson, "G.I. Bill Expands Access for African Americans," Educational Record 75 (1994): 32-39;
11. Ronald Roach, "From Combat to Campus," Black Issues in Higher Education 14 (1997): 26-28.
12. David H. Onkst, "First a Negro Incidentally a Veteran": Black World War II Veterans and the G.I. Bill of Rights in the Deep South, 1944-1948," Journal of Social History (1998): 517-43;
13. Hilary Herbold, "Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill," Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 6 (1994-1995): 104-8;
14. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 3944;
15. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 167-70;
16. Ira Katznelson, "Public Policy and the Middle-class Racial Divide After the Second World War," in Social Contracts Under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe and Japan at the Turn of the Century, ed. Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwateri (New York: Russell Sage, 2002), 157-77.
17. Suzanne Mettler and Joe Soss, 'The Consequences of Public Policy for Democratic Citizenship: Bridging Policy Studies and Mass Publics," Perspectives on Politics 2 (2004) : 55-73.
18. One new groundbreaking study goes furthest to illuminate underlying mechanisms. See Christopher Parker, "Explaining the Political Consciousness of Black Veterans," chapter from book manuscript, "Fighting for Democracy: Race, Service to the State, and Insurgency Under Jim Crow," draft in author's possession. Also see John Modell, Marc Goulden, and Sigurdur Magnussen, "World War II in the Lives of Black Americans: Some Findings and an Interpretation, " Journal of American History (1989): 838-48;
19. Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 24, 30, 6, 04;
20. Neil R. McMillen, "Fighting for What We Didn't Have: How Mississippi's Black Veterans Remember World War II," in Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South, ed. Neil R. McMillen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 93-110;
21. On the broader effects of military service on some forms of political activity among black veterans, see Christopher G. Ellison, "Military Background, Racial Orientations, and Political Participation among Black Adult Males," Social Science Quarterly 73 (1992): 360-78.
22. Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
23. Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 2.
24. This point is made by Paul Pierson, "When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change," World Politics 45 (1993) : 594-628.
25. Examples of work exploring feedback dynamics include: Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)
26. Jacob S. Hacker, "The Historical Logic of National Health Insurance: Structure and Sequence in the Development of British, Canadian, and U.S. Medical Policy," Studies in American Political Development 12 (1998): 57-130.
27. Anne Larason Schneider and Helen Ingram, Policy Design for Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
28. Joe Soss, "Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action," American Political Science Review 93 (1999) 363-80;
29. Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) ;
30. Lawrence R. Jacobs, Fay Lomax Cook, Dukhong Kim, "Trusting What You Know: Information, Knowledge, and Confidence in Social Security," paper presented at Annual Conference of American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, August 30, 2002.
31. Mettler, "Bringing the State Back in to Civic Engagement."
32. This criticism is developed in Virginia Sapiro, "Toward A History of Political Action in the United States," unpublished paper, available at http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/users/sapiro/ research.htm;
33. and in Virginia Sapiro, "Political Socialization During Adulthood: Clarifying the Political Time of Our Lives," Research in Micropolitics 4 (1994): 197-223.
34. For example, see Neal E. Cutler, "Political Socialization Research as Generational Analysis," in Handbook of Political Socialization: Theory and Research, ed. S. A. Renshon (New York: Free Press, 1977);
35. David L. Featherman, "Life-Span Perspectives in Social Science Research," in Life Span Development and Behavior, ed. P. B. Baltes and O. Brim Jr. (New York: Academic, 1983);
36. Richard G. Braungart and Margaret M. Braungart, "Life-Course and Generational Politics," Annual Review of Sociology 12 (1986): 205-31.
37. Suzanne Mettler and Eric Welch, "Civic Generation: Policy Feedback Effects of the GI Bill on Political Involvement, over the Life Course," British Journal of Political Science (2004): 497-518. Several prior approaches wed attention to history with individual analysis;
38. see M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi, Generations and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), chap. 8;
39. Glen H. Elder, Jr., Cynthia Gimbel, and Rachel Ivie, "Turning Points in Life: The Case of Military Service and War" in Military Psychology 3 (1991);
40. Glen H. Elder, Jr., "Military Times and Turning Points in Men's Lives," Developmental Psychology, 22 (1986) : 233-45;
41. Glen H. Elder, History and the Life Course," Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), 77-115.
42. Pierson, Politics in Time, chap. 2.
43. Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 2;
44. Hacker, "Historical Logic of National Health Insurance."
45. e.g., Andrew Abbott, "Sequence Analysis: New Methods for Old Ideas," Annual Review of Sociology 21 (1995): 93-113;
46. Katherine Stovel, "Local Sequential Patterns: The Structure of Lynching in the Deep South, 1882-1930," Social Forces 79 (2001): 843-80.
47. For instance, see Onkst, "First a Negro"; Cohen, A Consumers' Republic, 167-70.
48. Despite formal prohibitions on racial discrimination in the Selective Service Act, males of African descent were underrepresented; they comprised 9.5 percent of all men ages 18 to 40 in the general population, but only 8.5 percent of those in the armed forces. In the early stages of recruitment, 41 percent were disqualified because they failed to pass the physical or literacy requirements, compared to 28 percent of whites - evidence of socioeconomic disparities. Marcus S. Goldstein, "Physical Status of Men Examined through Selective Service in World War II," Public Health Reports 66 (1951): 594, 600;
49. Lawrence M. Hepple, "Selective Service Rejectees in Rural Missouri, 1940- 943," Rural Health Series no. 5, Columbia, Missouri, University of Missouri, College of Agriculture, Agricultural Experiment Station, Research Bulletin 439, April 1949, 6, 18;
50. th Report of the Director of Selective Service (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), 187-96;
51. Ulysses Lee, U.S. Army in World War II, Special Studies: The Employment of Negro Troops, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966).
52. See sources cited in n. 9, esp. Onkst, "First a Negro Incidentally a Veteran," 523-32. Many of these draw on earlier studies that share the same limitations, e.g.,
53. Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975), 115-16;
54. Charles G. Boite and Louis Harris, Our Negro Veterans, Public Affairs Pamphlet no. 128 (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1947).
55. There are several reasons to doubt the representative nature of such data points: veterans could use the benefits at any point across a ten-year period, from 1945 to 1955; use of the benefits for college peaked in 1948 and for vocational training programs, in 1950; and beneficiaries who were less likely to have obtained further education without the G.I. Bill benefits are more likely to have used them at a later date than those who simply used the government assistance to carry out their long-term personal plans
56. (U.S. President's Commission on Veterans' Pensions, Veterans' Benefits in the United States, 288).
57. Sarah E. Turner and John Bound, "Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the G.I. Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper W9044, http://www. nber.org/papers/w9044 (2002).
58. For example, see Cohen, A Consumers' Republic, 156-57, 169-70.
59. Peter Gottschalk, "Inequality, Income Growth, and Mobility: The Basic Facts," Journal of Economic Perspectives 11 (1997): 29-31.
60. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, "The Returns to Skill in the United States across the Twentieth Century," NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 7126 (1999);
61. Claudia Goldin, "Egalitarianism and the Returns to Education during the Great Transformation of American Education, Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999): S65-S92;
62. Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, "The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (1992): 1-34.
63. Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 141.
64. I am indebted to Michael K. Brown for sharing with me the complete report of these data, which he located in his extensive archival research in the records of the Bureau on Budget. See Figure 1 and n. 34.
65. Nationwide, 75 percent of nonwhites and 73 percent of whites used some form of G.I. Bill benefits (whether education or training, loans, unemployment benefits, etc.);
66. though usage ratios varied slightly by region, from 74 to 80 percent among nonwhites compared to 73 to 74 percent among whites, everywhere nonwhite usage surpassed that of whites. U.S. Veterans Administration, Research Division, Coordination Services, "Benefits and Services Received by World War II Veterans Under the Major Veterans Administration Programs," 13, RG 51, ser. 39.20a, box 9, National Archives. These data are based on a survey of approximately 15,000 World War II veterans, selected through a random-sampling technique.
67. U.S. Congress, Committee on Veterans' Affairs, "Readjustment Benefits: General Survey and Appraisal: A Report on Veterans' Benefits in the United States by the President's Commission on Veterans' Pensions," Staff Report IX, pt. A (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 72;
68. Veterans Administration, "Benefits and Services Received by World War II Veterans under the Major Veterans Administration Programs," 13, 20, 27;
69. Michael K. Brown, Race, Money and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 189-90 and Table 11. Another glimpse of G.I. Bill usage by race appeared in a 1953 study of veterans who had served in the Special Training Units, comprised of poorly educated soldiers who had been offered literacy training while in the Army. The Veterans Administration provided the authors, Eli Ginzberg and Douglas W. Bray, with data on the percentage of claimants for G.I. Bill educational benefits from such
70. units. Southern blacks emerged as those most likely to use the benefits, with 68 percent, making a claim, twice the rate of northern whites, among whom only 35 percent did so. They were more likely than whites in the region to use institutional training of some type, whereas whites were more likely to use farm training provisions. See Eli Ginsberg and Douglas W. Bray, The Uneducated (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 126.
71. Veterans Administration, "Benefits and Services Received by World War II Veterans under the Major Veterans Administration Programs," 27. These rates are high despite the fact the blacks were more likely to receive "dishonorable discharges," which meant that they were ineligible for the benefits; or "undesirable discharges" or "blue discharges," which were sometimes used by administrators contrary to the wishes of elected officials - to deny them benefits. See Allan Berube, Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990), 230-35;
72. Margot Canaday, "Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Billu," Journal of American History 90 (2003) : 935-57. Presumably blacks might have used the provisions at even higher rates without such discrimination.
73. Veterans Administradon, National Survey of Veterans, (Washington, DC: Government. Printing Office, 1980). Although it remains outside the focus of their research, Bound and Turner offer a breakdown of these same data that illuminates the high rates of program usage in the World War II cohort group.
74. See Bound and Turner, "Closing the Gap," Table 2, 32. Among those born between 1923 and 1928, black veterans from most birth years were at least as likely, and often more likely, to take advantage of some kind of G.I. Bill education or training benefits, despite having substantially less prior education than white veterans. Only 12 percent, of black G.I. Bill users compared to 28 percent of whites used the benefits for higher education (Bound and Turner, "Closing the Gap," 5, n. 4).
75. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing far Change (New York: Free Press, MacMillan, Inc., 1984);
76. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
77. Nationwide, some organizations besides veterans' organizations engaged in anticommunist activities on their own. Scholars have yet to specify the extent to which such measures - typically promoted by national leadership - actually occurred at the grassroots level. See Jeffrey A. Charles, Service Clubs in American Society: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 141-46;
78. Christopher J. Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882-1982 (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) ;
79. Geoffrey Perrett, A Dream of Greatness: The American People, 1945-1963 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), 180;
80. Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 225.
81. Among the 716 respondents to the survey from these four units, none were African American, Fourteen individuals who claimed identities besides or in addition to "white" - namely Asian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, or American Indian/Native American - have been excluded from this analysis, their numbers being too small to permit meaningful group analysis. As a result, the comparisons here are between 104 black veterans and 702 white veterans.
82. nd Infantry Division.
83. The black G.I. Bill users' mean level of educational attainment, on a 7-poirit scale, was 5.31, with a standard deviation of 2.53; the white users' was 5.49, standard deviation of 2.24. Black nonusers had a mean level of 3.09, standard deviation of 1.34; white nonusers, mean level of 3.26, standard deviation of 1.57.
84. Unfortunately, the one dataset that is, in other regards, the most useful for studying the political socialization of African American veterans of the World War II generation (southerners in particular), does not include a G.I. Bill variable. It is The Negro Political Participation Study, principal investigators Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, Mar.-June 1961, Jan.-Mar. 1962).
85. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 27-37;
86. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 5;
87. Philip A. Klinkner with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chap. 6;
88. Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
89. Maggi M. Morehouse, Fighting in the Jim Crow Army: Black Men and Women Remember World War II (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
90. David R. Segal, Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 9;
91. Kryder, Divided Arsenal.
92. The circumstances of African Americans in the military did not change fundamentally until 1950, when President Harry S. Truman issued the executive order to desegregate the armed forces. Kryder, Divided Arsenal;
93. Richard M. Dalfiume, Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1969).
94. This theme, which emerged in interviews with black veterans, is discussed in McMillen, "Fighting for What We Didn't Have," and Morehouse, Fighting in the Jim Crow Army.
95. Bernard C. Nulty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military (New York: Free Press, 1986).
96. Ulysses Lee, Employment of Negro Troops, 548-52;
97. Nulty, Strength for the Fight, 172.
98. Hondou B. Hargrove, Black Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Col," Inc., 1985);
99. Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 172-74. Some medals have been awarded only recently. In 2000, the Medal of Honor was bestowed posthumously on Lt. John Fox, who died in action after giving a command that put his own life at risk in Sommacolonia on December 26, 1944.
100. Rod Norland, "'As Good as Anybody Else': Honoring the Courage of WWII's 'Buffalo Soldiers'," Newsweek July 24, 2000, 48.
101. Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens, chap. 3.
102. Author's telephone conversation with Celeste Torian, April 9, 2002.
103. Logistic regression analysis was used to examine a model in which the dependent variable is a dummy variable denoting usage of the G.I. Bill for education or training versus nonusage. The independent variables include parents' level of education (measured on a scale from no formal schooling to graduate or professional degree, 1-7), standard of living in childhood (from low to high, 1-5), extent to which education encouraged while growing up (from strongly discouraged to strongly encouraged, 1-5), actual year of birth, and level of education prior to military service (elementary school only to advanced graduate work, 1-9).
104. These effects might have been less than they could have been given a racial bias in dishonorable discharges and blue discharges. This has yet to be documented carefully, but useful analysis appears in studies that focus on servicemembers accused of "homosexual acts or tendencies," in n. 35.
105. Marcia G. Synnott, 'The Admission and Assimilation of Minority Students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900-1970," The Social History of American Education (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 311-32;
106. U.S. President's Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education for Democracy, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947).
107. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 257.
108. Letter, Walter White, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 5, 1944, file "Colored Matters (Negroes), Oct.-Dec. 1944," Box #6, OF 93, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.
109. Telegram, Dr. Alonzo Myers, Donald DuShane, and Ralph McDonald to President Franklin F.D. Roosevelt, February 8, 1945, file "Education 1945," Box 5, OF 107, Roosevelt Library.
110. Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education For Democracy, esp. 1:29-39.
111. On the decisions discussed below and the extent to which they can be attributed to international conflict, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War, Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 90-103.
112. Sipuel v. Board of Regents, 332 U.S. 631 (1948): 585-86.
113. Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).
114. Jean L. Preer, Lawyers v. Educators: Black Colleges and Desegregation in Public Higher Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 103.
115. McLaurin v Oklahoma, 339 U.S. 637 (1950);
116. th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 2:585-87.
117. Brown v Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954);
118. Synnott, "Admission and Assimilation of Minority Students," Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 31-44.
119. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 280-81.
120. Synnott, "Admission and Assimilation of Minority Students," 311-32.
121. Nicholas Lemaun, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1992).
122. Bolte and Harris, "Our Negro Veterans," 4-5.
123. Chas. H. Thompson, "The Critical Situation in Negro Higher and Professional Education, "Journal of Negro Education 25 (1946): 579.
124. Wilson, "G.I. Bill Expands Access for African Americans," 37.
125. Boite and Harris, "Our Negro Veterans," 4.
126. A complete listing appears in "Historically Black College and Universities Program," Dept. of the Treasury, IRS, Publication 1493, 21-25.
127. Roach, "From Combat to Campus," 2.
128. Martin D. Jenkins, "The Availability of Higher Education for Negroes in the Southern States," Journal of Negro Education 26 (1947): 460.
129. During the 1943-1944 academic year, public and private black institutions in the South spent one dollar for every nine dollars in the budgets of the region's white institutions (Martin D. Jenkins, "The Availability of Higher Education for Negroes in the Southern States," Journal of Negro Education 26 (1947), ibid., 468).
130. George N. Redd, "Present Status of Negro Higher and Professional Education: A Critical Summary," Journal of Negro Education 27 (1948): 401-2. Between 1946 and 1947, the peak enrollment period, while enrollment at universities and colleges generally increased by 13 percent, black institutions expanded by 26 percent, growing from 29,000 in 1940 to 58,000 in 1946 and 73,174 in 1947. Accumulated deficiencies resulted in severe space shortages in black institutions. This was the case despite the fact that veterans composed smaller percentages of the student body at black institutions than at white - typically 41 percent, compared to 52 percent in 1947, presumably due to disparities in military service rates and premilitary educational levels.
131. James A. Atkins, "Negro Educational Institutions and the Veterans' Educational Facilities Program," Journal of Negro Education 27 (1948): 144-46;
132. Martin D. Jenkins, "Current Trends and Events of National Importance in Negro Education,"Journal of Negro Education 25 (1946): 239.
133. Officers of the Commissioner on Education estimated new floor-space needs of 80 square feet per veteran at the black southern institutions, more than double the needs they assessed for white institutions in the region (Atkins, "Negro Educational Institutions," 146).
134. Keith W. Olson, The G.I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 74-75.
135. Chas. H. Thompson, "Editorial Comment: The Critical Situation in Negro Higher and Professional Education," Journal of Negro Education 15 (1946): 581.
136. Federal disapproval of such practices is evident in U.S. Cong., Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, "Report on Education and Training under the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, As Amended from the Administrator Of Veterans' Affairs," (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950), app. E.
137. Onkst, "First a Negro," 523-29;
138. Bolte and Harris, "Our Negro Veterans," 13-15.
139. Fass, Outside In, 148-49;
140. Bolte and Harris, "Our Negro Veterans," 14-15;
141. William Caudill, "Negro Veterans Return."
142. Elder, Gimbel, and Ivie, "Turning Points in Life," 215-31.
143. Asked to rank their turning point choices, users of either program type gave the G.I. Bill a mean ranking of third in a list of seven options that included one factor they named themselves.
144. Miller, Income Distribution in the United States, 145-46.
145. Once the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, black family incomes did rise in relation to white family income during the later 1960s and early 1970s. See Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 19;
146. John J. Donohue and James Heckman, "Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks, "Journal of Economic Literature 29 (1990): 1603-43;
147. James J. Heckman and Brook S. Payner, "Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks: A Study of South Carolina," American Economic Review 79 (1989): 138-77.
148. To do this analysis, I used the Hollingshead Two Factor Index of Social Position, which bases scores on a combination of the skill and power associated with each occupational role and the amount of education necessary for it. The scale includes seven levels, from lowest to highest: unskilled employees; machine operators and semi-skilled employees; skilled manual employees; clerical and sales workers, technicians, and owners of little businesses; administrative personnel, small independent business owners, and minor professionals; business managers, proprietors of medium-size businesses, and lesser professionals; higher executives, proprietors of large concerns, and major professionals (August B. Hollirigshead, "Two Factor Index of Social Position," (New Haven, CT, 1957), paper in author's possession. I am indebted to Richard Braungart for advising me on use of occupational scales.
149. Analysis of nonblack veterans' occupational status appears in Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens, chap. 5.
150. This is generally consistent with findings about the postwar era in James A. Geschwender, "Social Structure and the Negro Revolt: An Examination of Some Hypotheses," Social Forces 43 (1964): 251-53, though that analysis does not account for G.I. Bill usage.
151. Klinkner with Smith, The Unsteady March, 191-92.
152. David L. Featherman and Robert M. Hauser, Opportunity and Change (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 481.
153. Two obstacles prevent, us from evaluating these questions through regression analysis. First, the number of African-American veterans among World War II Veterans Survey respondents is too small to permit, analysis involving the relatively large number of independent variables necessary to explain civic engagement. Second, distinct from white veterans, nearly all of the African Americans in the sample who have a high degree of education used the G.I. Bill to attain it, meaning that the control group of highly educated non-G.I. Bill users is almost nonexistent. For analytical purposes, this absence of a "control group" means that we cannot, with any precision, separate the effect of the policy itself from that of the education or training it offered.
154. Theda Skocpol, Ziad Munson, Andrew Karch, and Bayliss Camp, "Patriotic Partnerships: Why Great Wars Nourished American Civic Voluntarism,"in Shaped By War and Trade, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 134-80.
155. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000);
156. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy:From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 128-33.
157. Skocpol, Diminished Democracy, 179-80;
158. Jason Kaufmann, For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 18-19, 27.
159. Frank R. Baumgartner and Jack L. Walker, "Survey Research and Membership in Voluntary Associations," American Journal of Political Science 32 (1988): 908-28;
160. John M. Strate, Charles J. Parrish, and Charles D. Elder, and Coit Ford III, "Life Span Civic Development and Voting Participation," American Political Science Review 83 (1989): 443-64;
161. Steven A. Peterson, "Church Participation and Political Participation: The Spillover Effect," American Politics Quarterly 20 (1992): 123-39.
162. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality;
163. Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
164. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984);
165. McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 125-42;
166. J. Craig Jenkins and David Jacobs, "Political Opportunities and African American Protest, 1948-1997," American Journal of Sociology 109 (2003): 277-303;
167. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom;
168. Matthews and Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics, 234-35;
169. Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, "Political Factors and Negro Voter Registration in the South," American Political Science Review 57 (1963): 363-64;
170. David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 189-91.
171. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 248-49.
172. Suzanne Mettler and Theda Skocpol, "What Made the Civic Generation So Civic? What World War II Veteran Data Can Tell Us," paper presented at. Annual Meeting, Social Science History Association, October 19-22, St. Louis, MO.
173. Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 86;
174. Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Official Website, http://www.oppf.org/about/ history.asp;
175. phone interview with A. William Perry, February 10, 2003.
176. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality.
177. Cathy J. Cohen and Michael C. Dawson, "Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics," American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 286-304.
178. Norman H. Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
179. Katherine Tate, From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections (New York: Russell Sage, 1993), 27-28;
180. Dawson, Behind the Mule, 81-82;
181. Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and Black Prejudice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 42-44.
182. William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), chap. 6.
183. Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens.
184. Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 179-206.
185. Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
186. for an argument that African Americans nonetheless found the New Deal inclusive relative to other instances of governance, see Nancy. J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), chap. 10.
187. Onkst, "First a Negro,"522-23;
188. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 197-215.
189. Christopher Parker offers a complementary explanation of why black veterans became especially interested and active in politics: He argues that black veterans' treatment as citizens stimulated their militancy; other aspects of service solidified their group identity; and enhanced education and status attainment, boosted civic capacity. G.I. Bill usage per se does not figure into his analysis as it was not included in the Mathews-Prothro dataset he uses. See Parker, "Explaining the Political Consciousness of Black Veterans."
190. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 433-37.
191. Matthews and Prothro underscored the relationship between advanced education, an extraordinarily rare community in rural Southern black communities in the postwar era, and leadership. Matthews and Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics, 184-85;
192. Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, "Social and Economic Factors and Negro Voter Registration in the South," American Political Science Review 57 (1963): 32-33.
193. Dernoral Davis, "Medgar Wiley Evers and the Origin of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi," Mississippi History Now http://mshistory.kl 2.ms.us/features/feature45/medgar_evers.
194. htm; "Aaron Henry was an Unsung Hero," African American Registry, http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/978/ Aafon_Henry_was_an_unsong_hero;
195. "W.W. Law (1923-2002)", New Georgia Encyclopedia http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/ nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2553;
196. "Hosea Williams: 1926-2000," part of "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow," Public Broadcasting Service Web site, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ jimcrow/stories_people_will.html;
197. Internet obituary, "Hosea Williams, 1926-2000," http://obits.com/ williamshosea.html. "Well-Known Users of the G.I. Bill," Washington Times June 22, 1944, 10+;
198. Florence Hamlish Levinsohn, Harold Washington: A Political Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 39-72;
199. Donald P. Baker, Wilder: Hold Fast to Dream (Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1989), 52.
200. Consider, for example, that Civil War veterans, incorporated through generous benefits, became especially active in convention activities - veterans' organizations, and party politics while veterans of World War I, who were denied generous benefits, mobilized in a more contentious manner, as manifest in the Bonus Army. See Suzanne Mettler, "Policy Feedback Effects for Collective Action: Lessons from Veterans' Programs,"in Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy in America, ed. Helen Ingram, Valerie Jenness, and David Meyer (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
201. The relevant studies of African-American veterans which epitomize these mutually exclusive aspects of existing data are the Matthew and Prothro, The Negro Political Participation Study, and Veterans Administration, "Benefits and Services Received by World War II Veterans."
202. Questions were drawn from surveys such as the U.S. Census, World Values Survey, General Social Survey, the 1990 Citizen Participation Study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, and various surveys conducted by die U.S. Veterans Administration.
203. Thomas W. Mangione, Mail Surveys: Improving the Quality (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 34-36;
204. Roger Tourangeau, Lance J. Rips, and Kenneth Rasinski, The Psychology of Survey Response (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 67-69.
205. Touranguau, Rips and Rasinski, 67-83.
206. Ibid., 94;
207. Floyd Fowler, Jr., Survey Research Methods (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1984), 92-93.
208. Suzanne Mettler, "Bringing the State Back in to Civic Engagement," App. B, 363-64.
209. Fass, Outside In, 141.
210. Bolte and Harris, "Our Negro Veterans," 4-5.