June 22 · This Day in America
Sixteen days after the beaches of Normandy, President Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act — the G.I. Bill. The country had seen what it did to veterans after the last war: the Bonus Army, the breadlines, men who fought and came home to nothing. This time it decides differently. Returning servicemen will get tuition for college, low-interest loans for homes and farms and businesses, a year of unemployment pay while they find their feet. Millions who would never have seen a university classroom will sit in one. Whole suburbs will rise on G.I. loans. It is one of the most consequential laws the nation ever passed, and its benefits are not shared equally — Black veterans are too often shut out by local administration and segregation. But the idea endures and widens: that a country owes something real to those who served it, and that opportunity, deliberately built, can lift a generation.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1870
Five years after the Civil War, with the federal government suddenly enforcing civil rights across a defeated South, Congress establishes the Department of Justice and gives the Attorney General a real department to run. Its first great task was prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan. The country had decided that the law would need its own standing army of lawyers to mean anything at all.
Source: www.justice.gov