I'll Take My Farm: The GI Bill, Agriculture and Veterans in North Carolina

Abstract

This article examines pivotal components of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 that have largely escaped careful study. The GI Bill of Rights, as the act is familiarly known, established a broad and groundbreaking social safety net of educational and economic benefits and incentives for veterans returning from World War II. Two elements of the legislation – farm loans and on-the-farm training – aimed to advance the nation's agricultural economy, and proved to be especially popular in the South, a region deeply rooted in the agrarian history of the United States. In North Carolina, the wide embrace of the farm aid by veterans is illustrative. It highlighted an abiding desire to own and operate farms, an ambition that had survived the war. Yet, North Carolina's experience ultimately reveals that the agricultural components of the GI Bill contributed more to the capitalist transformation of southern agriculture than to fulfilling landless veterans' hopes for acquiring farms.