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House Republicans Defy Trump; plus, when WWII Vets Came Home | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: The nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner, later in the show, the Americans who fought in World War II have been called the greatest generation.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: But historian David Nassau argues that it's more appropriate to regard them as the wounded generation.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: He'll explain later in the show.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: But first, House Republicans defied Trump on voting to release the Epstein files, and he conceded defeat John Nichols his hour analysis in a minute.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're still thinking about the House vote on Tuesday to release the Epstein files.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was almost unanimous after nearly a year of Trump doing everything he could to prevent that vote.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: For comment in analysis, we turn to John Nichols, of course he's executive editor of the nation.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: John, welcome back.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: John, it's great to be with you who to thought that we would be devoting our time to talking about this.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well Trump caved on Sunday night after learning that more than a hundred Republican house members were prepared to vote against him and in favor of releasing the files.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Up to that point, House Republicans had done pretty much everything Trump wanted since he took office last January.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've been thinking about what changed over the weekend to bring about this dramatic defeat of Trump, not at the hands of the Democrats, but at the hands of the House Republicans.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it began in the Senate when those eight Democrats joined Republicans and voted to in the government shutdown.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson had been refusing to convene the House for more than a month to avoid taking up the Epstein files, but now the House had to convene
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: to vote for the temporary budget that the Senate was sending them.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And once they came back to work, a couple of Republicans joined Democrats in signing that discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And a lot more Republicans said they would vote yes.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what began as a Democratic surrender,
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: to Trump on the shutdown ended up as a democratic triumph pushing House Republicans to defy their president on the Epstein files.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is this the way you see it in my missing something here?
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you're a very cynical man, John.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, obviously.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: see all these calculations and things going on.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Although I kind of had the same sense you had, but the one thing place where I would disagree with you is that you said, well, Trump found out that a hundred Republicans were going to vote against you.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, that bother him because Donald Trump wants to lead the parade.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if he sees the parade going in other direction, what does Donald Trump do?
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He runs his fast as he can to get in front of it, right?
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't think it was a hundred Republicans.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was one.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was Marjorie Taylor Green doing those interviews, she didn't blink and that's the interesting thing.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He called her a trader, he basically read her out of the party and she went right back on and kept doing more of those interviews, more of those statements.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: After Trump, she may well be the most effective communicator in the Republican Party.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: and she was going against him.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can have all these other Republicans saying things.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think when he saw her going repeatedly on TV, being absolutely unblinking in her stance on the obscene files that I think he felt wow, I've got a problem.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: When Donald Trump is a problem, he tries to get rid of it.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: He initially tried to get rid of it by reading green out of the party when that didn't work.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: He ran to the front of the parade.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I have one simple question about these events, those documents, the Epstein files, are under Trump's control in the Justice Department.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: He could himself order them released and avoid this whole vote.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Isn't it worse for Trump to have every Republican in the House voting the way to get in front of the parade is to get in front of the parade and release the documents it seems to me.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: The question becomes, will these documents be released?
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know what I'm saying?
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: If indeed it becomes a PR problem, right, that you've got bargeratella green, doing what she's doing.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Got other Republicans saying we're going to break with the guy.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's clear you're going to lose a vote.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it better to say, yeah, go ahead, vote.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you vote unanimously to release him, that's fine by me.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm all good with that.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it better to have said that very publicly?
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then,
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: have perhaps, and I don't know what this will happen, but perhaps the Senate run into some common underings in this regard, have perhaps the Attorney General find challenges with releasing everything, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I find myself in a very weird position here, John, of quoting Marjorie Taylor Green.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: She said today at a press conference, where she appeared with many of the people we should be talking about the very courageous young women who came to this issue on the front burner.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: She said, this isn't the end, this is just the beginning.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's still a lot of wrangling on this.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I suspect Donald Trump knows there's going to be a lot of wrangling and felt that this was a good way to get us far ahead of it as he could and yet there's still maybe quite a bit of struggle as regards what comes out.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, this is a challenge for him.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's also a challenge for some Democrats.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, there's a lot of political maneuvering that might yet that might yet be seen on this.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was fascinated to see in the Washington Post they quoted an unnamed White House official who said Trump will survive this storm and they compared it to quote his being shot in the assassination attempt.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I thought, wow, wow, is the house vote on releasing the Epstein files really like an assassination attempt.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: They think there's some people over there, at least think this is really big.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the the Trump White House president and others have tried very, very hard not to have this happen right.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they literally historians are going to look at this period in time and they're going to say you're kidding me right US House representatives went on hiatus for months and very, very critical times in the world apparently because you didn't want to see some newly elected member of the House from Arizona who would tip the balance on the upstream file debate that's bizarre.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Donald Trump since about mid-October has had a really lousy time of it politically.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the no kings demonstrations were huge.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're under, under, covered under understood by much of our media, but the fact is that when people in small towns and small cities and
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: urban areas across this country come out in in the millions to protest against a sitting president.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's not good.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then when you have an election series of elections, as you did on November 4th, across the country in, you know, urban rural, north-south east, west, and every place the Republican Party loses everything.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's not good.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then when you've been working to keep on the issue for rising and taking center stage for a very, very long time, and it arises to take center stage and is literally you know, breathlessly covered by all the networks.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's not good.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: As Barbara Boxer, the former senator from California, said, I think we will see this as the point at which the threads started to come apart is it's not about the whole politics, it's about Trump's control over the Republican party.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, let me point to a couple of other.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: cases that add to that picture, the Senate Republicans also, in addition to the House Republicans defying him on the files, the Senate Republicans on the budget refused repeatedly to do what he was telling them to do, which was abolish the filibuster so you can just vote for the budget.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then there would be a Republican majority and they would have to Trump would hope, they would do whatever he wanted them to do.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Senate Republicans refused to do what Trump told them repeatedly, and in public to do, and instead, you know, recruited a Democrats, and in the state legislatures, there've been some fascinating developments that haven't gotten as much attention over Trump's demands that they continue to
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Texas, of course, created five Missouri created one more Republican seat North Carolina, apparently this week may create one new red district, but Indiana, this to me is mind-boggling.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Indiana State Republican
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: dominated legislature, rejected Trump's demand and has refused to go into a special session to redistrict the state.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Trump said they could create two new Republican districts abolishing every democratic seat in the state of Indiana.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was despite J.D.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Vance himself visiting the state
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: twice to pressure the Republican legislators to do this and trump himself calling on the phone and twisting arms that way.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Indiana has been a deeply red state, you know, our whole lifetime here.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Republicans have a super majority in the Indiana legislature.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is going on in Indiana?
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Can you explain this?
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can explain it all, John.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope I can just keep on top of all the
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: First and foremost, if you're trying to convince Indiana to do anything, don't send a guy from Ohio.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, Jay Ben, the fact that Jay Ben failed to convince Indianaans of anything is not surprising at all.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's number one.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Number two, the Senate on the filibuster.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what point do senators decide that they like the filibuster?
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's on the day when they think they may not be forever in charge.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: earlier this year looked at a circumstance where they thought they were going to just hold the Senate maybe even expand their majority.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're now looking at a much more vulnerable situation.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're looking at polls from places like Alaska, where Democrats are actually showing viability from Ohio, where Democrats share their brownies.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: narrowly ahead, at least in some polling work, from me where you're starting to see evidence that Susan Collins could be beaten from North Carolina where you've got at least a decent chance that a very good chance, I would say.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Very good chance.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what are we talking about here?
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're actually talking about suddenly Republican senators that they can man, you know, we could end up in a situation where we might like to fill about.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's number two.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: But number three, this is the most fascinating thing of all because you bring up the the Jerry Mandarin district line fight and Trump thought that was just a sure route, you know, you're going to come through and you're going to make all these states redraw and everything's going to turn out fine.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are now analyses that suggest that with the California move with potential moves in Maryland and a couple other states and with the fact that in Ohio and in
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: you can petition onto the ballot a challenge to withdraws yes in Missouri you're right in Missouri the Democrats are campaigning right now to qualify they have almost enough signatures yeah they'll have a referendum that will reverse the state legislatures creating of an additional Republican district.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you got all these elements, right?
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you have the element that in some of these redraws, even in Texas, they made Republican seats more vulnerable.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if there is a big enough ship, that could be some political challenges there, what it all adds up to is smart analysts for now saying that everything Trump has done, all of this might yield a seat or so for the Republicans, not some big shift.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if that is the case, John,
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: then what we're really looking at is a situation where if Democrats do well in 2026, all of these efforts by Donald Trump, all these efforts by Donald Trump to kind of shake it up, will not have worked.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: This circle sits around the beginning of our conversation because a really looking at is a situation where Republicans have to start asking themselves how closely do I want to be
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've studied up on one other case in some ways even more amazing than Indiana, Florida is a place where Ronda Santis wants the state legislature following Trump's, of course, demands to Jerry Mandor and create, they say between two and four more Republican districts.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Republican state legislature is very
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: unwilling right now to meet to do this, a poll in September found that only 36% of Florida Republican voters support redistricting now.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the Republican leaders are very worried after what happened in Virginia in New Jersey.
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yep, that indeed they may lose a lot of young people,
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even Florida, polling data shows the Trump Sombra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symbra Symb
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they always understand it as a somewhat of a more dangerous game in such a dynamic state as compared to states where, you know, the lines are pretty stable because people don't move as much Pennsylvania's classic on that.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, and result is I'm not surprised that there is resistance and every time this happens, it's met with a threat from Trump.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says, oh, you know, I'm going to primary the state Senate leader in Indiana, right?
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to try to get this legislature knocked out in Florida.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, maybe he can pull that off, but at the end of the day, if that's where Donald Trump is focused going into 2026.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Democrats might as well start to lay up the champagne because if your opponent is obsessively just trying to punish the people that didn't give in what he wanted to try and shore up a relatively, you know, shaky position anyway, Democrats run on fundamental issues as I think a lot of them did in November 4th, their potential becomes much greater.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what we're looking at now
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a very good chance that there's a chapter on the October November December of 2025 that suggests that this is where it shifted, this is where the pivot came and that the potential, not the certainty by any means these are such volatile times, but the potential for a real pushback and actually electoral accountability for Donald Trump became real.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is where the pushback became real.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: John Nichols, read them at theNation.com.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: John, thanks for talking with us today.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Great honor to be with you, John.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Americans who fought in World War II have been called the Greatest Generation.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: But historian David Nasa thinks it's more appropriate to regard them as the wounded generation.
• 16:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the title of his new book about coming home after World War II.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: David is an award-winning biographer of Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Kennedy, and William Randolph Hearst, and is most recent book, The Last Million.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's about Europe's displaced persons after World War II.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was named the best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, and history today.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's one of my favorites.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: We talked about it here.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: He also writes for The New York Times and The Nation.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Last time he was here,
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: David, welcome back.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Good to be here.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, your book is about coming home after World War II, but the first 150 pages are about the war itself and about waiting to be demobilized.
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was a lot of waiting.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there was 16.4 million servicemen and women for the World War II.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the war, there were more than 12 million, three quarters of them overseas.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It takes a lot of ships, a lot of logistics to get them back to the United States.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it took a long time to get them back.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite parts of my research was about the mother's clubs.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: because the wives of the servicemen, the mothers of the servicemen's children, and mothers of the servicemen were outraged at the delay, and they formed clubs all over the country, and they petitioned in March, front of their congressman's office, they went to Washington, they way laid Eisenhower, who was then chief of staff as he was giving a
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: added a congressional investigation, and they demanded that the men come home right away.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In one of the rare instances where public opinion and protests work, who wanted a big army of occupation immediately after the war, had to pull back and the war department decided that they couldn't withstand public opinion,
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: they wanted to.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you talked about the wives and the mothers wanting their boys home fast, but you also showed there was a certain amount of apprehension on the home front about the return of husbands and sons and boyfriends.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: mixed with the jubilation that the war was over that we had won that the guys were coming home was this foreboding that they had been taught to kill, they had been taught to celebrate violence, they had been in mal-only units for 1, 2, 3, 4 years and the fears were that they were going to bring
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they were going to bring this macho warrior ethos and behaviors back with them.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course we know that some maybe many did, quote, bring the war home with them.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what we now called PTSD Post Traumatic Stress and Disorder.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: How was it to find and how was it treated after World War II?
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: How many millions we don't know, servicemen and women came back, angry, depressed, anxious, filled with sudden rages that they couldn't control, unable to sleep at night, flashbacks.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were told by the military and by the military medical establishment that this was some form of combat fatigue.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you call something fatigued, then the treatment is rest and time, but it didn't work that way.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these men, and again, in some women, including some donor dollars who had served refreshments just off the front line to men in Europe.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They came back with this stress and disorder.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the VA and the military establishment said was, look, if they don't have any wounds on their bodies, you know, we'll do what we can, but you, their loved ones, their mothers, their wives, their girlfriends, you have to take care of these guys.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's up to you to make them feel at home and to help them in the re-adjustment.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for those who were, let's say, severely suffering from combat fatigue, there weren't, quote, medical treatments.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: VA tried to use the latest medical knowledge techniques to treat these men.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were no drugs available at the time.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were no medications.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when rest didn't help, the most severely depressed, the most severely anxious, the recourse was to electro-shock therapy.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Electro-shock therapy 80 years later, you know, can help some people.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But 80 years ago, in the infancy of electro-shock therapy,
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It didn't.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were temporary alleviations of the pain and the suffering, but it didn't last longer.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when the guys could not recover, the next step was what medical science, it's that I'm said, was the last resort, but the one that worked, LeBotemies, and thousands of
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: and I think you should just explain what that is in case a few of our listeners don't know.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The bottom he was to cut away part of the brain.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the beginning was done in surgery and soon afterwards because the number of veterans who were prescribed, the bottom he was too great to have a surgeon available.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: A new technique was discovered and that was
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: right above the eyes and to scrape away part of the brain.
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result was enumming and a loss of speech, a loss of physical and mental ability.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the traumatized were permanently sedated and that's what LeBotomy was supposed to do.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, to change keys here and look at the
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right side, the achievements of the return home.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, the GI bills at the top of the list passed first in June 1944.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Historians teach it as kind of the creation of an American welfare state for veterans notably.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: free lifetime medical care by the Veterans Administration, the VA up to this point had not provided free lifetime medical care.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: They treated war wounds, but now there was really what we have to call socialize medicine.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: The government ran the hospitals, the government hired the doctors, and if you were a vet, you could
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could be treated, of course, there was segregation of VA hospitals, but what in addition to this lifetime medical care did the GI Bill include?
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The GI Bill was the most significant legislation that was passed in the 20th century.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It created the most extensive social welfare system that the world had ever seen, greater than what was the beverage plan what was going on in England, greater than what had existed in
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: in Germany earlier.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was extraordinary.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was for veterans and it was written in such a way that it was for white male veterans only.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: White male veterans got special unemployment insurance
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: tuition and living allowances to go to a vocational school for four years, they got mortgage guarantees.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you get a mortgage from your local bank, it would be guaranteed by the federal government, which meant that the local bank was more than willing to give it to you.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the federal government said put a cap on what the interest rate could be.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The GI Bill created, and this is, I thought it was an exaggeration, but it's not.
• 25:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It created a new middle class.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It expanded the middle class.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the first time in
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: our history that individuals and families could jump a class from working class to middle class.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that included immigrants and the children of immigrants who had been left out of or had to struggle to get into that middle class.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: and there were many who said that this would be the first step towards a social welfare program for all Americans.
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roosevelt repeated himself over and over and over again.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had said, we're all in this war.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Children on the home front, women who go into the factories, this is a war for not simply by the men in New York, but by the whole country.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there was a movement to use the GI Bill as the first step towards a social welfare program.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Never happened.
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was one other limitation you've already mentioned it.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Black people were largely excluded from a lot of the benefits.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Black military veterans could get medical treatment at VA hospitals, but they were segregated and suffered what just politely called disparities in care and staffing.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in some ways it was the housing program that created the greatest wealth gap between white and black veterans.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Veterans when they came back thought that they were going to get mortgages.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, they weren't going to get mortgages.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were going to get mortgage guarantees.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: In order to get a guarantee, you had to get mortgage.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We had to get the mortgage from your local bank.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you're a black veteran in Mississippi, you know, when you go into your local bank.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you say, I want a mortgage to buy a house.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to get it.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're a black veteran in Newark or Minneapolis, chances are you're not going to get that mortgage.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are a woman, a walk or a wave, or someone who would work in the red cross, you're not going to get a mortgage from your local bank.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: What the mortgage guarantees do from 1940s through the 50s is that they provide
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: the capital that is needed to buy private single family homes and in the United States of America.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Outside the top five percent, most Americans, the greatest asset they have is their home.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what the federal government, what the VA did through the GI bill, was to give white mail veterans home.
• 27:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And eventually, that
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: investment, that asset became so valuable that you could send you kids to college, that you could have savings, that you could buy a second card and put in your garage, the income and wealth disparities, gender and racial disparities that had begun to shrink during the world
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: were exacerbated by these gifts given to the white veterans.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that disparity would last for generations to come.
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of my favorite parts of your book for was that the G&I Bill, you write, led to a post-war Renaissance in the American Arts.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because vets could go to not just to college or vacationals school, they could go to art school.
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: They could study painting and music.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And those who did, I mean, the list is mind-boggling.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Saitwambli,
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nora, pure foi here in LA.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nora, pure foi is a big hero.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: He founded the Watts Tower's Art Center.
• 29:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Under the GI Bill he went to Shinnard, Art School, which eventually became Cal Arts.
• 29:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Harry Ballafonte.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, well, to Mouthow and Tony Curtis and Tony Bennett, Paul Newman, on Coltrane, Tito Puente, they brew back.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: what's most remarkable is that a lot of the instructors in the art schools and music schools and dance and acting were German and Eastern European refugees from Hitler.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: American culture changed dramatically.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: because of the GI Bill and the education and the instruction in their arts that the GI's received unreturning from overseas placed.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, one last thing, for those of us who are old, this is a book about our fathers.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: You dedicate your book to the memory of your father,
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: How did this personal element affect your research in your writing and your thinking about this?
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: My father returned from Eritrea.
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a 35-year-old lawyer when he was drafted.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the army didn't know what to do with him.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, you know, a low-residing Brooklyn Jew.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He started out as a driver.
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when Colonel Hutter, who he drove for, was sent to North Africa, Colonel Hutter said, you gotta go to offices, kind of, at school.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is ridiculous.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was shipped off to South Carolina.
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became a second lieutenant in the medical corps.
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the next thing he knows is an erratria.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine this guy goes from Brooklyn and Manhattan to South Carolina to erratria.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something happens in erratria.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's sent it a dismantle a hospital because the American troops had moved on to Sicily after North Africa.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He comes home with a medical discharge full medical disability.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: As an alcoholic, he smokes three to four packs of lucky strikes a day with a heart condition.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I tried to talk to him about the war, but like 95% of the children of veterans that I talked to.
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: His father didn't want to talk about the war, so I didn't know what happened.
• 31:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: My father stopped drinking like other veterans and he pulled himself together, but for the rest of his life he never got a good night's sleep without such strong pills that he had to take more pills to wake up in the morning.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, because I'm a historian, I could try to find out about my father's experience by studying the generation that he belonged to.
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, every day I kick myself for not pushing harder to get my father to talk to me.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and because he didn't talk to me, I had to listen to the voices of a generation of parents.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: David Nassau's new book is the wounded generation coming home after World War II.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: David, thanks for talking with us today.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: My pleasure.
• 32:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
• 33:05
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• 33:10
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• 33:13
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• 33:15
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• 33:19
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• 33:22
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• 33:26
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• 33:30
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• 33:35
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• 33:43
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