The GI Bill Abroad: A Postwar Experiment in International Relations

For most Americans, the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill, conjures images of new homeowners in sprawling suburbs, mom-and-pop businesses on Main Street, and state colleges overflowing with recently returned veterans. But for thousands of veterans, the GI Bill also presented an opportunity to study fine arts in Paraguay, theology in China, and agriculture in Mauritius. This paper uncovers the unexplored history of veterans who used their GI Bill stipends to study at Latin American institutions in the years following World War II. While the original intent of the legislation was to ease veterans’ transition back to civilian life in the United States, the educational aspect of the program morphed into an experiment in foreign policy based to a large degree on the experiences and goals of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during the war. Bureaucrats in Washington D.C. and abroad, administrators from a wide variety of educational institutions, and veterans took part in emergent debates over the roles that individual citizens could play as diplomatic emissaries in the postwar world. U.S. government enthusiasm for individuals to participate in foreign relations, including through educational exchange programs, waned after the war, and this paper reveals how that was not a purely ideological shift, but one rooted in challenges posed by such programs on the ground. Although experiments with the GI Bill abroad ultimately failed to achieve the lofty ideals of the government officials who supported them, the lessons learned from the expansion of GI Bill educational subsidies abroad directly influenced the implementation of the Fulbright exchanges and were instrumental in this shift from a celebration of individual cultural diplomacy to top-down Cold War era cultural programs.