The post-war soldiers
of World War II received a much better welcome home celebration than the
veterans who returned home the previous world war. Veterans of WWI returned
home to find unemployment and a disconnection with a normal way of living. The
millions of servicemen who returned lead the United States to high unemployment
rates which led to the Great Depression. The Great Depression marked the lowest
economic time period for the United States. The American government did not
wish for another depression and quickly realized measures needed to be taken in
order to stimulate the economy and provide employment for the millions of
returning servicemen.
Congress and the
Roosevelt administration addressed the projected fears by passing into
legislation a series of beneficial legislation for the soldier returning home.
First there was the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1943 that provided for the
training of disabled veterans. Then there was the Mustering-Out Pay Act of 1944
which provided servicemen with a generous bonus at their discharge. Finally,
and most important of all, there was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,
better recognized as the GI Bill.
In his book, A Nation Forged in War, Thomas Bruscino
explained, “the bill provided for temporary readjustment unemployment payments
(twenty dollars a week for up to fifty-two weeks), low-interest mortgage loans
for buying homes, and grants for college or vocational training. Congress spent
nearly fifteen billion dollars on the GI Bill by its first cut-off date in
1956.” He also writes that “over half of the sixteen million veterans of the
war took advantage of the readjustment payments to one extent or another. The
bill provided for over three and half million mortgagees. And roughly eight
million of the veterans used the education and training benefits” (153). The writers
and poets who emerged from rendering services from the GI Bill’s education and
training benefits helped change American Literature.
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut is a prime example of a post-war soldier who benefited from the
GI Bill and became an influential writer in American Literature. Vonnegut was a
prisoner of war captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge on December
19, 1944. Later he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden in February, 1945.
After he was liberated by Soviet troops in April of the same year, he returned
home and was awarded a purple heart. With the help of the GI Bill, he continued
his academic studies by enrolling in a graduate program in anthropology at the
University of Chicago. Five novels and two short story collections later, he wrote
Slaughterhouse Five 1969.
Slaughter House
Five is
a historical and science fiction novel where Vonnegut draws upon his own
personal experiences from being a POW and a witness of the firebombing of
Dresden, Germany. Billy Pilgrim, the main character of the story, travels back
and forth through time reliving traumatic war experiences after he has been
abducted by aliens to the planet Tralfamadore. The overall written format for
the book is complex due to the constant changes in time and also real due to
the explicit details of the horrors Vonnegut describes of the war, not to
mention the firebombing of innocent civilians witnessed in Dresden. Vonnegut’s
work contributed to American Literature because it helped give an accurate
portrait of what it was like to be in the war. More specifically, what it is
like to be a human living in a seemingly random and meaningless universe. This
theme accurately describes the type of American literature produced by post-war
soldiers of WWII.
Citations:
Bruscino, Thomas. A Nation Forged in War. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2010. Print.
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