IN THE MAIL: Suzanne Mettler’s Soldiers To Citizens: The GI Bill And The Making Of The Greatest Generation. It looks very interesting, and she makes the point that — contrary to what many people think — the GI Bill wasn’t really a New Deal legacy:

The G.I. Bill bore less resemblance to New Deal legislation — which tended to target citizens as workers — than to an older American tradition of social provision geared for citizen soldiers. In the democratic ideals so central to the nation’s identity, military service had long been regarded as the utmost obligation of masculine citizenship, and the protection of the nation by ordinary citizens, as opposed to a standing army, was considered essential to maintaining self-governance.

Roosevelt, in fact, was hostile to “social provision limited to veterans,” she reports, which is something I didn’t realize, and the G.I. Bill was really a product of the American Legion. (Mettler’s no Roosevelt-basher, though, and is also critical, in passing, of welfare reform.)

Her main point, however, is that the G.I. Bill wrought major social improvements (the book revolves around a huge number of interviews of veterans on how it changed their lives), and she suggests we should try something similar now. I’m not sure what that would be, but I suspect we’ll be hearing more along these lines in the next few years.