Margot Canaday

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Margot Canaday | Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill

For more than fifty years now, scholars have celebrated the G.I. Bill of Rights as one of the most important public policy innovations of the post–World War II era. The G.I. Bill is often credited with moving millions of working-class Americans into the middle class by democratizing higher education and home ownership and with ushering in the postwar economic boom. The G.I. Bill deserves celebration—it was one of the most far-reaching pieces of social policy legislation in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet while there is no denying the scope and scale of the G.I. Bill, the celebratory literature has not fully acknowledged the many exclusions built into the program. Some historians have noted that the design and implementation of the legislation made G.I. Bill benefits most accessible to white middle-class men. Much less commonly remarked upon is a 1945 Veterans Administration (VA) ruling that denied G.I. Bill benefits to any soldier with an undesirable discharge "issued because of homosexual acts or tendencies."¹	1
The G.I. Bill deserves consideration by historians because it was the first federal policy that explicitly excluded gays and lesbians from the economic benefits of the welfare state. Feminist historians have already observed that embedded in the G.I. Bill, as in other welfare state social provision, was a heterosexual norm that positioned male heads of households as the most deserving citizens.² But feminist historians have uncovered the heterosexual bias of the G.I. Bill (and welfare state programs more generally) by analyzing how state benefits were filtered through marriage.³ Those historians have focused, in other words, on one-half of an imagined binary (heterosexuality) while leaving the other half (homosexuality) mostly in the shadows. This essay, by contrast, examines the G.I. Bill from the vantage point of those who were excluded from its benefits because of homosexuality. This focus makes clear that soldiers discharged for homosexuality were not just inadvertently excluded from the economic benefits of the G.I. Bill because they did not fit into the normative heterosexual family model through which benefits were primarily channeled. Rather, homosexual exclusion was explicit, built into the very foundation of the welfare state.	2
My concern is not only with the development of the VA policy on homosexuality and its impact on the men and women who were subject to it, but with what the policy reveals about the development of American citizenship more generally. Particularly relevant to my examination of the G.I. Bill is the classic 1950 work by the British sociologist T. H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class." Written during the immediate postwar period that my article chronicles, Marshall's essay remains at the center of contemporary discussions of citizenship and the welfare state. Numerous historians have been influenced by Marshall's concept of social citizenship, the idea that all citizens have a right to a "modicum of economic welfare and security." Marshall argued that citizenship progressed historically through three overlapping stages. Civil citizenship, involving the right to property, liberty, justice, and due process of law, occurred in the eighteenth century. Political citizenship, involving the right to vote and to participate in the political process, was a nineteenth-century development. Citizenship would become truly democratic only when the stage of social citizenship was attained, when citizens' basic economic needs were met so that they could participate to the fullest extent in the social and political life of their nation.⁴ Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Marshall saw in the postwar British welfare state the social programs that would inaugurate the social citizenship stage.⁵	. . .

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