The passage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the G.I. Bill, created a boom for college campuses in the United States. Some elite university presidents worried that an influx of veterans would dilute academic standards. Edwin Broun Fred, president of the University of Wisconsin (UW), expected veterans to become good and patient scholars, because he considered adult learners to be mature and experienced. He wanted to maintain academic quality while accepting the maximum number of eligible veterans. He built a well-functioning university administrative structure and expanded student services to accept veterans.

  Fred believed strongly in the Wisconsin Idea, which envisioned new relationships among university, government, and society. He oversaw the growth of university extension centers, which eventually resulted in the opening of the UW-Milwaukee campus in 1956 and the creation of UW System in 1971. He tried to maintain the university as a human institution, where each individual was equally respected. Adult learners gave him the impetus to demonstrate leadership in university reforms when he faced the political and economic challenges in the postwar period.

This paper explores the impact of World War I veterans on the post‒war era. With the end of the war, most doughboys returned to their hometowns. However, unemployment reached serious levels in major cities due to the oversupply of workers and the lack of uniform assistance for ex‒soldiers readjusting to civilian life. Meanwhile, other areas, especially in the South and in Western mountain regions, experienced a worrisome shortage of farm labor, first because most veterans preferred to stay in large industrial cities, and second because of significant migration from rural to urban areas. Ultimately, faced with strong political activism by veterans’ associations and public opinion, Congress enacted the Adjusted Compensation Act (or Bonus Act), which authorized cash payments to veterans in limited cases. This article examines the process by which this Act came into being.

In 1919, officers of the American Legion were reluctant to demand adjusted compensation, adopting a conservative stance toward the post‒war labor movement. Confronted with decreasing membership due to the anti‒union attitude of rank and files members, however, they gradually tried to establish a cooperative relationship with executives of the American Federation of Labor and increasingly expressed a “neutral” attitude toward labor‒capital disputes. Furthermore, in competing with the political efforts of other veterans’ associations that supported social reform policies, they changed their stance on the bonus matter and forced policymakers to alleviate veterans’ discontent about the inequality of economic sacrifice incurred in the First World War.

Some farmers, especially in Midwest states, viewed the adjusted compensation bill as a vehicle for redirecting currency into depressed rural areas. Conservative Congressmen from these districts therefore agreed to passage of the bill. However, other organized farmers represented by the National Grange condemned the reclamation plan attached to the bill, calling it a state intervention that would create an unfair competitive environment in agriculture projects. Moreover, faced with severe attacks from fiscal conservatives who advocated abolition of the wartime progressive tax system, proponents of the bill accepted the 20‒year endowment insurance policy that emerged in the compromise. Finally, in 1924, the Federal Government recognized a limited obligation for postwar compensation of able‒bodied veterans, which established a precedent that led to the creation of a social welfare system tied to military service.