June 22, 1944: President Franklin D. Roosevelt Signs the G.I. Bill

June 22, 1944, 80 years ago: President Franklin D. Roosevelt takes his 2nd-most important action of the month. Sixteen days after giving the okay for the D-Day invasion, he signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, a.k.a. the G.I. Bill.

FDR was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, and saw how returning servicemen found that their jobs and homes had been given to others, leading to a recession so bad that it has often been called a depression, though it didn't last nearly as long as the one that hit in 1929 and led to his 1st election as President. He also didn't want a repeat of the Bonus Army controversy of 1932. He wanted an easier readjustment for the veterans returning from World War II, and he wanted it in place before they came back.

Benefits included housing loans, low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans to start a business or a farm, one year of unemployment compensation, and free college.

And so, all over America, hundreds of thousands of people went from ghetto apartments (The word "ghetto" was originally applied to the Jewish neighborhood of medieval Rome, so it is not a purely African-American term) to houses in better parts of their cities, or to the suburbs, making the growth of places like Long Island, New Jersey and Southern California possible.

This had 2 downsides: The people who moved into those slums were not veterans, and were not upwardly mobile, and the neighborhoods got worse; and it made it harder for baseball fans to get to the inner-city ballparks, leading to teams moving (Boston, Philadelphia and St. Louis all went from 2 teams to 1 between March 1953 and October 1954, and New York lost the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers 3 years after that) and other teams building new stadiums on the edges of cities (New York's Shea Stadium being an example of this) or in the suburbs (like Metropolitan Stadium outside Minneapolis).

The college access for veterans cannot be underestimated. By 1956, 7.8 million veterans had used the G.I. Bill for educational purposes. As much as the housing boom helped by the G.I. Bill, it created the great postwar middle class.

The Bill applied to black veterans as well as white ones. FDR got that passed in spite of whatever opposition he may have received from Southern Congressmen. Many of those black veterans used the G.I. Bill to go to what are now called "historically black colleges and universities" (HBCUs). Many of them became pivotal figures in the Civil Rights Movement.

FDR gets criticized for not doing enough for civil rights. His greatest contribution to it may have been inadvertent: If not for the G.I. Bill creating black lawyers and other activists, the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s might not have happened for another generation.

The G.I. Bill's college provisions were not limited to American colleges. My grandfather's brother, Aaron Goldberg, stayed in France after the war, and attended the University of Paris, a.k.a. the Sorbonne. While there, he got married. Uncle Aaron and Aunt Catherine came to America, and were married for 44 years.