Thank You Veterans

Veterans Day is a day set aside for America to remember all military personal who served us, living and dead, and those who continue to serve. The official holiday is tomorrow but Oxford University Press wanted to thank each and every man and woman who has served this country. In honor of their dedication we have excerpted from Soldiers To Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation by Suzanne Mettler. Mettler’s book looks at the social and political aftermath of WWII through the lens of the G.I. Bill, but her introduction looks specifically at the opportunities a military background created:

Civic Generation

When he was young, Luke LaPorta never imagined that he would attend college, let alone obtain a doctorate. The son of an Italian immigrant, LaPorta grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Queens, New York. During the Great Depression, his family, like many during that time, struggled to get by, needing public assistance to make ends meet. Although he had been a good student in high school, college seemed entirely out of the question. Nobody in his family or even in his neighborhood had gone: there wasn’t the money for it, and it was not something that people like them could even consider.

Once LaPorta finished high school, World War II had begun, so he enlisted in the Navy and served aboard a minesweeper that patrolled the Atlantic coast of the United States. Upon his return from the war, LaPorta had an experience that would profoundly change the course of his life. He accompanied friends from the military on a campus visit to Syracuse University, though having no intention of actually going himself. “It was a lark. We were going to have a lot of fun.”

While there, the school official who was assisting his friends turned to LaPorta, asked him about his academic record, and then said, “Why don’t you come to school here, too? You’ve got the G.I. Bill!” The words struck LaPorta like a revelation, and he was thrilled and overwhelmed by the idea. He returned home to tell his parents, who shared his excitement. His mother said, “Luke, you go! You can always work!”

One week before he was to depart for college, LaPorta’s father had an accident and became unable to work. Although LaPorta felt he should stay home and support his parents, they insisted that he seize the opportunity to pursue his education. So, he recalls, “I packed a bag—some shirts and five or six pairs of socks, and that was it. I was one of the first kids to come [to Syracuse University] on the G.I. Bill.”

Over time, LaPorta would earn a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and eventually a doctorate. His education enabled him to attain a standard of living far greater than any his parents might have hoped for. Equally important, LaPorta involved himself to an extraordinary degree in community activities and organizations. He devoted himself to establishing and coaching a vast number of youth sports teams. In 1950, he started the state’s first chartered Little League in his own town; over the next decade, he helped develop more than sixty such organizations throughout the region. Time and again, he served as a delegate to Little League Congresses, the international meetings that brought together representatives of local and regional leagues, and then, for fifteen years, he served as chairman of the board of International Little League Baseball, Inc. He became a well-loved and honored member of his community for his decades of public service to young people. Reflecting back over his life, LaPorta credited the G.I. Bill with getting him started, explaining that he could not have afforded college without it, and even more fundamentally, that he had not even thought of himself as capable of pursuing higher education. “It was a hell of a gift, an opportunity, and I’ve never thought of it any other way,” he commented. “Sometimes I wonder if I really earned what I’ve gotten, to be frank with you.”

In recent years, popular books have celebrated the virtues of the generation of Americans who, like Luke LaPorta, were born in the early twentieth century, especially in the 1910s and the 1920s. The hallmark of this literature—exemplified by Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community—is its power to evoke nostalgia and a keen sense that the United States is losing such with the passing of this generation. Yet none of these books explains why those who came of age around the time of World War II exhibited throughout their lives such remarkable commitment to the principles and practices of democracy. Neither have they considered the significance of the intensive government involvement that was so commonplace in the lives of this renowned group of Americans. There is a story that remains to be told about this generation, and it is a story with profound implications for our lives today.