FDR - Jean Edward Smith [367]
In the months that followed Roosevelt tapped into the support of veterans’ and patriotic organizations to expand benefits for returning servicemen: generous unemployment insurance, job counseling, and enhanced medical care, as well as guaranteed low-cost loans for buying homes and farms and covering business costs. Despite the anti–New Deal complexion of the Seventy-eighth Congress, the G.I. Bill of Rights passed both Houses unanimously. Roosevelt signed it into law June 22, 1944. “While further study and experience may suggest some changes and improvements, Congress is to be congratulated on the prompt action it has taken.”49
The G.I. Bill changed the face of America. Not only did it make colleges and universities accessible, it overturned the states’ rights taboo against federal funding for education. Until World War II, less than 5 percent of the nation’s college-age population attended universities. The cost of a year in college was roughly equal to the average annual wage, and there were few scholarships. Higher education was a privileged enclave for the children of the well-to-do. Under the G.I. Bill more than a million former servicemen and women attended universities at government expense in the immediate postwar years.50 In the peak year of 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of total college enrollment. And of the 15 million who served in the armed forces during World War II, more than half took advantage of the schooling opportunities provided by the G.I. Bill.51 The educational level of the nation rose dramatically. So did the country’s self-esteem. As Stanford historian David Kennedy observed, FDR’s veterans legislation “aimed not at restructuring the economy but at empowering individuals. It roared on after 1945 as a kind of afterburner to the engines of social change and upward mobility that the war had ignited, propelling an entire generation along an ascending curve of achievement and affluence that their parents could not have dreamed.”52
On the evening of Armistice Day, Saturday, November 11, 1943, Roosevelt and his immediate White House staff—Hopkins, Admiral Leahy, Doc McIntire, and Pa Watson—drove to the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia, where they boarded the presidential yacht Potomac on the first leg of the journey to Teheran. The departure was nothing out of the ordinary—another weekend fishing trip like so many in the past. Sunday morning, just off Cherry Point, Virginia, at the confluence of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, the presidential craft pulled alongside the USS Iowa, the latest of a new class of battleships, for the long ocean crossing.53 “Everything is very comfortable,” Franklin wrote Eleanor. “Weather good and warm enough to sit with only a sweater over an old pair of trousers and a fishing shirt.… It is a relief to have no newspapers.”54
In addition to Hopkins and the president’s personal staff, the Iowa’s passengers included General Marshall, Admiral King, General Arnold, and a full complement of military planners. Notably absent was any senior official from the State Department. The long voyage across the Atlantic allowed Roosevelt time to discuss major strategic issues with his military advisers before meeting Churchill and Stalin. The subject of postwar Europe was considered in detail. When General Marshall asked about zones of occupation, FDR reached for a National Geographic Society map of Germany and penciled in demarcation lines. “There is going to be a race for Berlin,” said the president, “and the United States should have Berlin.”55
In Roosevelt’s sketch the American and Russian occupation zones met at Berlin. The large American Zone comprised northwest Germany, including the ports of Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Lübeck, and Rostock; the Russians would hold a smaller zone in the East, and the British were relegated to Bavaria and the Black Forest. The president told Marshall that perhaps a million U.S. troops