Veterans Resume a Civilian Life Course

Partly in recognition of the highly structured life course of American young men, serious thought was early given to ways in which veterans would be reincorporated into the national life, their lives put back into right sequence. Remembering vividly the sad experience of the World War I veterans' bonus, the nation devoted considerable wartime planning and postwar programmatic energy to the situation of veterans when peace arrived.^[99] A 1943 poll revealed that provision of immediate postwar income support by the government was overwhelmingly approved by the American people, with the modal period of support envisioned being "about six months." But many favored a year or even more.^[100] The remarkable successes achieved in reincorporating thirteen million veterans into the civilian population bespoke no less the motivation of most of the veterans themselves to resume their life courses than the enormous vibrancy of the economy in supplying normatively appropriate roles to the returnees. Havighurst's study of "Mid-

west's" returned soldiers acutely portrayed the gradual sorting of these men over time into those who threw themselves with striking urgency into peacetime activities—like getting a "real" job—and those who delayed this now-unfamiliar challenge. Some of the latter took advantage of the long-term nonemployment benefits for veterans to form the "52–20 Club," those who through choice or necessity took advantage of part or all of the one-year government-sponsored subsistence-level unemployment at $20 a week. For some, it proved a psychologically difficult transition from army life to a peacetime economy, from a situation in which one's job sought one to a situation in which one had to go out and seek a job in a competitive economy of still-untrusted resilience.^[101]

Most prominent among the policies designed to help the veterans reestablish themselves in American society was the "G.I. Bill of Rights," especially its provision of extended educational benefits.^[102] While many G.I. Bill programs had but occasional takers, such as the policies designed to help soldiers become own-account farmers or small businessmen, the educational benefits were widely used. In no small measure the educational plan fit soldiers' view of the postwar world and seemingly, too, their view of themselves. The strong support of the educational industry contemplating its own conversion to peacetime helped. The number of veterans in school reached its peak of 1.2 million in January 1947, constituting 8.9 percent of all demobilized male World War II veterans. By 1952, 58 percent of the veterans now 25 to 34 years old and 51 percent of those 35 to 44 had achieved a high school graduation, compared with 38 percent among nonveterans of both age groups and of high school graduates. A slightly larger percentage of the veterans went on to college. Proportions taking advantage of G.I. Bill educational benefits included 60 percent of those under 25 at separation from the military, 39 percent of those ten years older, and 21 percent in the oldest category as well as 55 percent of all disabled veterans.^[103]

A superb comparative study of veterans and nonveterans in college in 1946–47 offers insight into the mood of many of the veterans as they found their way back into American society, reconstructing their postponed progress into ordinary adult

roles.^[104] The study of Fredericksen and Schrader sought explicitly to discover what, if anything, the military experience contributed to veterans' well-reported success in college by controlling carefully for socioeconomic selectivity, local conditions, and the initial aptitude that students brought into college with them. Only 13 percent were married at the time they responded to this survey; of the married veterans, three in four were childless. The student-veterans had in fact been less privileged: slightly over one in three came from families where the head's income was over $4,000, as compared with one in two for nonveterans attending the same colleges. Nineteen percent of veterans' fathers, but 29 percent of nonveterans' fathers, were college graduates. Yet although the overwhelming majority of veterans at school had taken advantage of G.I. Bill benefits, perhaps no more than 20 percent of the veterans who attended would definitely not have even had they received no aid. Veterans spent less, not more, time on schoolwork. They were more seriously vocational minded, but this was not closely enough tied to success in college to explain veterans' success there. A number of attitudinal items that were posed to the veterans and the nonveteran comparison groups proved not to be correlated with veterans' superiority in college. Nevertheless, "overachievement" was consistently more common among the veterans than among those who had not served.

The study made some very striking discoveries from a life course perspective. They found, thus, that a standardized test better predicted veterans' performance in college than it did that of the nonveterans. By contrast, high school grades predicted markedly better among the nonveterans than for the veterans. The military experience, that is, had effaced part of those high school attitudes and behaviors that commonly led to achievement at lower levels than capacity would suggest was possible. These were replaced by a set of attitudes that brought attainment closer to potential .^[105]

Both age and recency of separation from the army affected veterans' emergence into the ordinary civilian life. In 1946, for instance, table 26 shows that over one quarter of the very young veterans 18 or 19 years of age—who evidently had been only briefly in the army before demobilization—were still neither in

school nor in the labor force: they were biding their time until they had reoriented themselves to civilian life. This was well above the 10 percent figure for those who had not served in the army. Over time, the young veterans worked their way back into civilian roles. The 18-and 19-year-old veterans were, by 1948, only about as often without clear adult roles as were those of like age who had not served in the armed forces, two years earlier. For older veterans, 1947 was already "normal" in this regard. By 1948, for neither age group did the proportion of veterans who were unemployed exceed that for nonveteran counterparts who shared a school status. In the aggregate, 41 percent of male World War II veterans were not employed in November 1945. By June 1946, this number was down to 21 percent. By June, 1947, it was all the way down to 13 percent.^[106] It was obvious that although some former soldiers were in school, and while some had difficulties entering civilian employment, the great bulk of them found their way into the labor force promptly and surely. Quickly, wartime anxieties on

Figure 17.
Annual Income for Men, by Age and Veteran Status, 1947–1961

the part of planners and men alike of widespread unemployment were overcome both by the success of the government's plans to incorporate the returnees more smoothly than had been the case in the past and by the magnitude of the postwar prosperity—and by the demonstrable competence of most veterans themselves to handle assignments in the peacetime economy.

Veterans suffered an initial income deficit by comparison with nonveterans in the same age groups—but quickly made it up, and then some. Figure 17 examines patterns of annual income for age groups (unfortunately, not age cohorts) of veterans in the decade and a half following the war. The initial deficit for both the younger and the older veterans was rapidly converted to parity and then to an increasing superiority in income, until the mid-1950s, when it leveled off. Fifty-seven percent of spending units with veteran members in them increased their income "much" or "somewhat" in 1946, the same per-

centage again in 1947, and 63 percent in the following year. Comparable figures for other spending units were far lower: 37 percent, 46 percent, and 47 percent, respectively.^[107] The ex-soldiers did not long suffer economically for their having served: if anything, their experience helped to put them on a surer path to economic success, as veterans who attended college similarly succeeded there. Veterans moved smartly toward higher incomes, as newly acquired education and perhaps employer preferment brought them superior jobs, and as the continued prosperity of the postwar period kept employment high enough for them to overcome deficiencies in seniority.

Veterans' ability to marry and to establish families was closely linked to earning capacity—far more so than to such circumstantial considerations as the availability or price of housing in the locality. In a large group of nonsouthern urban areas, only about four in ten employed veterans whose weekly incomes were under $40 were married by 1946, as compared with two in three veterans whose incomes were in the $40 to $60 weekly bracket and five in six of those with higher incomes.^[108] In April 1947, all but 3 percent of male veterans who headed couples were in the labor force. Yet fully 21 percent were living in another family's home. This figure, three times as great as for nonveteran-headed couples, pointed to the only slight ability of physical shortfalls to interrupt the life course of men who were, released from the military and itching to resume their chosen paths as well as to the strongly normative tie of the status of young husband and breadwinner.^[109] Wives, to be sure, continued to work: no doubt, what determined the wife's labor force participation for many veteran families, and what ultimately timed the setting up of a new household, was the arrival of a first child. This explains why the proportion of women above age 35 who were in the labor force in early 1947 was well above the figure for 1940—and almost equal to that for the wartime period—but that women in the prime age for childbirth were markedly less likely to be gainfully employed than before the war.^[110]

The 1950 census recorded that men of the cohort of prime military age during World War II—25 to 29 in 1950—were far more likely to have married than had men of that age a decade

earlier: 76 percent as compared with 64 percent. Examining the nuptiality patterns of men who had not married prior to 1945, presented in table 27, allows us to examine the American veteran "catching up" to his civilian counterpart.^[111] Of the nonveterans in our sample who were unmarried in 1945, 58.5 percent remained single in 1950, whereas only 38.1 percent of the veterans had not married within five years of the war's end. Even at given ages, veterans married in greater proportions than nonveterans in the years following the end of the war.^[112]

The youngest veterans were overall more prone to marry but tended to lag behind more than nonveterans of the same age in the first year or two immediately following the war, catching up shortly, as table 27 indicates. Younger veterans caught up only gradually, in part, because they often had other matters to attend to which generally had to precede marriage, like finishing school and finding a job. Most of the initial difference in

overall proportions married was the far greater proportion of veterans still at school or jobless. In the year following the war, veterans who were in school included a considerably smaller proportion of their numbers at work than did nonveterans who were in school. There was a startling difference, too, between the proportions of veterans who were not in school (at a given age) who had found jobs and like proportions for their civilian counterparts. In 1946, over 85 percent of out-of-school nonveterans had jobs at 18 to 19 years of age, but less than 60 percent of veterans not in school at these ages did. For those 20 to 24, the proportions were 91 percent as compared with 81 percent. In 1947, these disparities began to be reduced, as did also the discrepancy for those in school. By 1948, the veterans had quite caught up to their nonveteran counterparts.^[113] Veterans who were slightly older and had reached their peak marrying years during the war did not exhibit any lag in catching up. Military service had little effect on marriage patterns among the oldest veterans, those in their late thirties and early forties during the war. Black and white veterans fared exactly alike in the advantages in postwar marriage that they enjoyed relative to nonveterans of their own race.

Table 28 shows that both white- and blue-collar veterans, as well as veterans who were farmers, had higher marriage rates than their co-workers who had not served. Veterans at all income levels (as of 1949) had married in greater proportions than their nonveteran counterparts, although the increase in proportion of marriages varied with income level. Those with relatively high incomes ($4,000 and above by 1949) apparently began to catch up almost immediately at war's end, while those with lower incomes seem to have taken about a year before they began to marry in significantly greater proportions. One might argue that these men were waiting to improve their economic situations before marrying, but this may be a spurious association inasmuch as income tended to increase with age.

Veterans were able to marry as promptly as they did in part because the women they married were prepared to accept somewhat nontraditional household arrangements on a temporary basis. The flexibility within marriage that the war had

produced thus continued into the postwar period. The Census Bureau reported that as of June 1946, the proportion of married co-resident couples who were "doubled up" had increased by 100 percent since V-J Day, to a level that was 40 percent above that in 1940.^[114] Such practices were highly concentrated in the veteran population—16 percent compared with 2 percent living as subfamilies, 15 percent compared with 2 percent living with subfamilies in Los Angeles County, 19 percent as subfamilies, 18 percent with subfamilies in Cleveland as compared to 3 percent each for nonveteran couples.^[115]

The deficits in family-building that were so quickly made up by the smooth operation of the marriage market were shortly made up in parenthood too. The data do not bear on first child per se , but the differences between the veterans and the nonveterans are nevertheless so strong that we can have no doubt about what was happening in parenthood. As of June 1946, veterans of any given age who were married and living with their wives had on average only about half as many children under five as their nonveteran age peers had.^[116] The patterns of family-size increase between 1946 and the following year are

most instructive: younger married veterans were prompt to enlarge their families, and older married veterans seemed to be downright assiduous in doing so.^[117]

World War II and its aftermath were, in a sense, paradoxical in their impact on the youthful life course. In some ways—as in luring young people out of the schools and into the labor force—the results seemed retrograde. So, too, did the reinforcement that military service provided for aspects of traditional gender roles. Yet by creating a setting in which marriage might be acceptably (and suitably to institutional context) contracted on a basis that was surely not prudent in the sense ordinarily understood before the war—marriages that moreover were intensely sentimentalized and linked as soon as possible to parenthood as part of their promised fulfillment—the war promoted the emergence of a new organization of the life course. It looked, indeed, to a postwar life course for young Americans that—far better than that of the 1920s and much of the Depression decade—freed the volitions, fulfilled the imperatives, invited the general assent of an increasingly homogeneous, prosperous, and individuated population. The fulfillment of these directions would await the new, but as it developed, oddly impermanent structures that individuals constructed in the baby boom.