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Policy Feedback in the Public–Private Welfare State: Advocacy Groups and Access to Government Homeownership Programs, 1934–1954

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2015

Chloe N. Thurston
Chloe N. Thurston*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
thurston@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

Scholarship on the U.S. public–private welfare state has pointed to the ways in which indirect, market-based channels of social policy provision often obscure the role of the government from many citizens who use these programs. This article argues that the same mechanisms that often depoliticize public–private policies for citizens who already benefit from them may actually politicize them for citizens who are unable to access those benefits. Focusing on the responses of black civil rights and veterans advocacy groups to the shortcomings of the Federal Housing Administration and the early GI Bill, it shows that public–private policies can draw advocacy groups, providers, and the state into conflicts over the terms of access. Despite facing very different challenges and bringing very different political capacities to bear, these two types of groups followed precisely the same processes of political mobilization and contestation in each case: First, they aggregated individual grievances into broader collective problems. Then, they traced those problems not to impersonal market mechanisms but to government policies and state authority. Finally, they pushed for reform across multiple venues to expand access for their members. By explicating these recurrent political dynamics, this article contributes to our understanding of policy feedback in the public–private welfare state and highlights the role of advocacy groups in helping to reshape the state's capacity to govern in a policy arena that is often characterized as dominated by third-party providers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , October 2015 , pp. 250 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1. See, for example, Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Marie Gottschalk, The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Jacob Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Kimberly Morgan and Andrea Campbell, The Delegated Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Morone, James, “American Ways of Welfare,” Perspectives on Politics 1(2003): 137–46Google Scholar.

2. Harry Hopkins, testimony in U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, “National Housing Act” 73rd Cong., 2nd Sess., May 18, 25, 27, 30, 31 and June 1, 2, 4, 1934 (Washington: Government Printing Office), 104.

3. Government mortgage insurance and guarantees have received little attention within the public–private welfare state literature, and only two explicitly place the FHA within the public–private welfare state (see Christopher Howard, The Welfare State Nobody Knows (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 19–20, 60, 26, 52, 59–62, and Howard, The Hidden Welfare State, 5). More, however, have referred to government credit programs (whether for student loans, mortgages, or other forms of credit or loan insurance) as part of the public–private welfare state. See Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 12; Howard, The Hidden Welfare State; Mettler, The Submerged State; Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Morgan and Campbell, The Delegated Welfare State, 21 (Fannie Mae); Paul Starr and Gøsta Esping-Andersen, “Passive Intervention,” Working Papers for a New Society, July/August 1979.

4. See Campbell, Andrea Louise, “Policy Makes Mass Politics” Annual Reviews of Political Science 15(2012): 333–51Google Scholar; Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Pierson, Paul, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45 (1993): 598–651 Google Scholar; Soss, Joe, “Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action,” American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 363–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soss, Joe and Schram, Sanford, “A Public Transformed? Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback,” American Political Science Review 100 (2007): 111–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On the limits of policy feedback, see Patashnik, Eric and Zelitzer, Julian, “The Struggle to Remake Politics: Liberal Reform and the Limits of Policy Feedback in the Contemporary American State,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2013): 1071–87Google Scholar.

5. See, for example, Elisabeth Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Programs, 1900–1940,” in Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State, ed. Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 380–443; Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

6. Richard Titmuss, Essays on “The Welfare State” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), chap. 2. See also Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 12.

7. Howard, The Hidden Welfare State, chap. 5.

8. Morgan and Campbell, The Delegated Welfare State, 190–94. While this was one area of feedback, Morgan and Campbell also note that the delegation of Medicare Part D failed to produce the anticipated feedback effects on other dimensions.

9. Mettler, The Submerged State, 37–40.

10. Ibid., 11.

11. Ibid.,, 11.

12. Mettler, Degrees of Inequality, 61–62.

13. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 50.

14. R. Douglas Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 42–43. One of the main reasons that the public–private welfare state draws disproportionate support from third-party providers may be that unlike for the citizens who use its programs, the role of the government is visible and traceable for the third-party providers. Home builders and real estate agents, student lenders and universities (both for-profit and nonprofit), and other third-party providers can more easily see the impact that removing a public–private policy will have on their industries. Individuals, on the other hand, will have trouble tracing their receipt of benefits to the government, perhaps coming to see them as tied instead to their ability to earn entrance into college, to qualify for a mortgage, or to secure a good job.

15. For instance, student loan subsidies grew out of the problem of getting lenders to lend to a constituency whose characteristics—including a lack of credit history and collateral that could be repossessed—the industry deemed too risky. See Mettler, Degrees of Inequality, 61.

16. See Gary Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Phelps, Edmund, “The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism,” American Economic Review 62 (1972): 659–61Google Scholar.

17. On the imperative for bureaucracies (in particular housing agencies) to maintain legitimacy, see also Christopher Bonastia, Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government's Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), especially p. 12.

18. It is important to highlight that my claim here is not that the public–private welfare state always generates conflict around issues of access or consistently mobilizes all who cannot access it on terms they deem adequate or fair. The aim is to suggest that scholars of the public–private welfare state need to pay more attention to how outsiders (whether chronic or temporary) interact with it. The burden of proof, then, lies in showing that the public–private welfare state has generated responses by citizens groups at all, an expectation that the extent literature does not fully grapple with.

19. Henry Aaron, Shelter and Subsidies: Who Benefits from Federal Housing Policies? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1973); Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 2nd Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010).

20. See, for example, Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 46–58; Lamb, Charles M. and Nye, Adam W., “Do Presidents Control Bureaucracy? The Federal Housing Administration during the Truman-Eisenhower Era” Political Science Quarterly 127, no. 3 (2012): 454 Google Scholar; Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 203; Mark Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), especially pp. 216–22; David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 [Kindle Edition]), chaps. 3–4.

21. Vandell, Kerry, “FHA Restructuring Proposals: Alternatives and Implications,” Housing Policy Debate 6 (1995): 299–392 Google Scholar, 301.

22. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 203.

23. Testifying in front of the House Banking and Currency Committee on behalf of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, attorney Frank Watson asked, “[H]ow much of a shoe string do you want a man to have before he is entitled to home ownership? On that, of course, we are dealing again with a social problem. I think everyone grants that the stability of a system such as ours is dependent, to a large extent, upon the desirability of homeownership, and that it is advisable for the Government to encourage home ownership. We then try to set a figure at a point that people will not get in without any capital of their own, entirely on a shoe string. We try to find out at what point that shoe string should be set.” Frank Watson testimony, in U.S. House, Committee on Banking and Currency, National Housing Act: Hearing before the Committee on Banking and Currency, “National Housing Act,” 51.

24. Vandell, “FHA Restructuring Proposals,” 302.

25. Guy Stuart, Discriminating Risk: The U.S. Mortgage Lending Industry in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 90–93. Quote is from FHA credit report, reprinted in Stuart, Discriminating Risk, 93. See also Freund, Colored Property, loc. 2249.

26. Hyman, Debtor Nation, 63. See also Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, 216–22; James Greer, “The Better Homes Movement and the Origins of Redlining in the United States,” in Statebuilding at the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, ed. Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), chap. 7.

27. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, 213; Greer, “The Better Homes Movement.”

28. In several regards, no indication was needed. The decentralized administration, and the dominance of the FHA by private housing interests, would allow for the continuity of discriminatory private market practices. Moreover, no explicit discussion was needed because many of the creators and defenders of the FHA had already rationalized segregation, creating a racialized housing market. On how historical racial preferences in the private housing industry prior to 1934 shaped the implementation of the National Housing Act, see David Freund, Colored Property, chap. 3; Gotham, Kevin Fox, “Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration,” Sociological Perspectives 43 (2000): 291–317 Google Scholar. On race and the decentralized administration of New Deal programs, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 29–30 and 38–42.

29. “The Housing Loan,” The Chicago Defender, 9/1/34, 14.

30. For examples on African Americans' unrealized hopes that a stronger federal government could counter segregation, see Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the U.S. Federal Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chaps. 1 (esp. pp. 31–33), and 6.

31. See, for example, Letter to Editor from Provident Home Builders, of Astoria, Long Island on “Housing Dilemma,” The Chicago Defender 9/14/35, 16; “Accuse FHA of Jim Crow Home Construction Program,” The Chicago Defender 10/22/38, 2.

32. “Draft Blueprint for Action for the Negro Organization in the Field of Housing,” Attached to letter from Robert Weave to Lester Granger, 6/26/45, 1, in Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Records of the National Urban League I (hereafter NUL I): C2, Folder: Housing Activities Department, General Department File, American Council on Race Relations 1944–1947.

33. American Friends Service Committee, “Equal Opportunity in Housing” Report prepared by the Community Relations Program, March 1955, 7, in NUL I: C2, Folder: American Friends Service Committee.

34. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 162–166; Freund, Colored Property, chaps 3–4; Charles Lamb, Housing Segregation in Suburban America since 1960: Presidential and Judicial Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11–24; Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chap. 2.

35. Freund, Colored Property, chap. 3.

36. See, for example, Freund, Colored Property, loc. 1952.

37. This was not entirely without precedent, as the NAACP had mounted earlier challenges the legality of racial zoning carried out by local governments, culminating in the Supreme Court's Buchanan v. Warley decision in 1917. However, the Buchanan ruling did not extend to other forms of discrimination in the housing market and did not outlaw private practices such as restrictive covenants, racial steering, block busting, and general refusals to lend or sell to African Americans on equal terms. See Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 187–88.

38. Letter to Stewart McDonald (Director, FHA) from Gershon Cohen (American Labor Party, Jamaica South), 12/29/36, in National Archives II, RG 31: Records of the Federal Housing Administration Central Correspondence Subject File (hereafter RG 31 CCSF): Box 6, Folder: Racial Restrictive Covenants, 1938–1948. “Exposes ‘Color Law’ in Federal Housing Plans: Manual on Mortgages Outlines Jim Crow Ruling on Loans.” The Chicago Defender, 12/31/38, 1.

39. Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual: Underwriting Value and Procedure under Title II of the National Housing Act with Revisions to February, 1938 (Washington: GPO, 1938), Part II, Section 9.

40. “Exposes ‘Color Law’ in Federal Housing Plans,” 1.

41. Ibid.

42. Letters from Gershon Cohen to Stewart McDonald, 12/29/38, Frederick Babcock to Stewart McDonald, 1/6/39, to Stewart McDonald from M.R.Y., 1/6/39, and from Thurgood Marshall to Stewart McDonald, 1/30/39, in RG31 CCSF, Folder: Racial Restrictive Covenants 1938–1948.

43. Letter from Frederick Babcock to Stewart McDonald, 1/6/39, in RG 31 CCSF, Box 6, Folder: Racial Restrictive Covenants, 1938–1948. See also Freund, Colored Property, loc. 2419.

44. The letter specifically mentioned the 1939 correspondence. Letter from Walter White (secretary, NAACP) to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 10/28/44. In RG 31 CCSF, Box 5, Racial Restrictive Covenants.

45. Letter from Walter White (secretary, NAACP) to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 10/28/44. In RG 31 CCSF, Box 5, Racial Restrictive Covenants.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Letter to Walter White prepared by Abner Ferguson's office, 12/29/44, in RG 31 CCSF, Box 4A, Folder: Minority Group Housing, 1938–1947.

49. Ibid.

50. Memorandum prepared by the Federal Housing Administration, 12/29/44, in RG 31 CCSF, Box 4A, Folder: Minority Group Housing, 1938–1947.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. For example, see Thurgood Marshall's letter on racially restrictive covenants in the Levittown subdivisions, complaining that the company has continued to thwart new Supreme Court precedent by inserting the information into deeds and leases after the FHA has already approved the mortgage. See, Letter from Thurgood Marshall (special counsel, NAACP) to Franklin D. Richards (FHA Commissioner). 10/28/48 in RG 31, CCSF, Box 6, Folder: Racial Restrictive Covenants, 1938–1948.

54. “Bare Nationwide Plot to Restore Covenants,” Chicago Defender 10/9/48, 1.

55. Letter to Harry Truman, 11/1/48, in RG 31 CCSF, Box 6, Folder: Racial Restrictive Covenants, 1938–1948.

56. Ibid.

57. Letter from Thurgood Marshall to Franklin Richards, 10/28/48, in RG 31 CCSF, Box 6, Folder: Racial Restrictive Covenants, 1938–1948.

58. Ibid.

59. Letter from Franklin D. Richards, FHA Commissioner, to Directors of all FHA Field Offices, “Minority Group Housing,” 11/8/48, in RG 31 CCSF, Box 4A, Folder: Minority Group Housing 1948.

60. Raymond Foley, “An Integrated Approach to Community Housing Problems,” Speech before the Annual Convention of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, 10/16/52, 2–4, in NUL I: C21, National Association of Home Builders. See also Freund, Colored Property, loc. 2608.

61. Draft memo from Lester Granger to Dorothy Roseman et al., 7/25/54, in NUL I: C12, Folder: Housing and Home Finance Agency.

62. Letter from Floyd Covington (FHA Racial Relations Advisor) to Reginald Johnson (Director of Field Services, NUL), 1/10/52, in NUL I: C9, Folder: Federal Housing Administration, Covington Floyd C.

63. National Urban League, Press Release, 9/24/54, in NUL I: C20, Folder: Mortgage Bankers Assn. of America.

64. MBAA, Committee on Financing Minority Housing (report). 10/29/55, 5, 10, in NUL I: C20, Folder: Mortgage Bankers Association of America.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid.

67. Albert Cole, Speech to Annual Conference of National Association of Mutual Savings Banks, 5/12/55, in NUL I: C12, Folder: Housing and Home Finance Agency.

68. Ibid., 9.

69. Ibid., 8.

70. Ibid.

71. Albert Cole (Commissioner, FHA) quoted in “1700 Concerns Join Housing Loan Program,” Los Angeles Times 4/10/55, 21.

72. Arnold Hirsch, “‘The Last and Most Difficult Barrier’: Segregation and Federal Housing Policy in the Eisenhower Administration, 1953–1960,” Report Submitted to the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, March 2005, 57.

73. See King, Separate and Unequal, 192.

74. Robert Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 118.

75. See Robert Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6; King, Desmond and Smith, Rogers, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” The American Political Science Review 99 (2005): 75–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. Subcategories of veterans did find themselves excluded from GI Bill benefits for reasons beyond their ability to pay. On the exclusion of African American and female veterans, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), chap. 3; on sexual orientation and exclusion, see Canady, Margot, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” The Journal of American History 90 (2003): 935–57Google Scholar. Due to the loan programs' requirements on land title, Native Americans wanting to purchase housing on tribal lands (including the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II) also saw the GI provisions out of reach; as of 1992 when revisions were up for discussion in Congress, not a single VA loan guarantee had ever been issued to a Native American on a reservation or trust land. See Navajo Nation Washington Office, “Testimony of the Navajo Nation” in U.S. House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, “Housing Benefits for Native American Veterans and Oversight of Title Insurance,” 102nd Cong., 2nd Sess., Oct. 1, 1992.

77. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 181–82.

78. Unlike the FHA, VA did not adopt FHA's strict criteria for economic soundness and construction standards, which according to the Legion's leadership would have written out two-thirds of the country, particularly rural areas. Taylor, testimony in U.S. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Finance, “Amendments to the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944,” 79th Cong., 1st Sess. Oct. 8–12, 1945, 109.

79. While the GI Bill generated a lot of public attention (in part due to the American Legion's massive publicity campaign), less noise was made over the loan provisions, which were included almost as an afterthought. As Altschuler and Blumin note, there is little evidence that the American Legion paid much attention to the loan provisions in its discussions about postwar veterans benefits, while the National Legionnaire even failed to mention the loan provisions in its January 1944 write-up of the proposed legislation. A 1946 report issued by the American Legion also mentions that during the discussions about the original legislation housing issues were eclipsed by worries of massive postwar unemployment. Altschuler and Blumin, The GI Bill, 184. American Legion, “The American Legion Housing Program,” report published by the American Legion, Indianapolis, IN, 1946, in National Association of Realtors Archives (hereafter NAR), Box: Mortgage Finance Division, Folder: Veterans' Housing, 5–8.

80. Cunningham, in U.S. House Committee on World War Veterans' Legislation, “World War Veterans' Legislation,” 79th Cong. 1st Sess., June 19–21, 28, July 5, 1945, 52. Likewise, the VA described the program's purpose as to “facilitate the extension of credit to young veterans … who as a consequence of long service at military pay had been deprived of a normal ability to garner an accumulation of savings and had not previously established credit and employment records. For these, the Government would supply a practical substitute—it would pledge to own credit by offering to guarantee loans made on terms designed to place World War II veterans on a parity with those who had remained in more lucrative pursuits during the war years.” In Veterans Administration, GI Loans: The First 10 Years (VA Pamphlet 4A-11), June 22, 1954, 2.

81. Veterans Administration, GI Loans, 2.

82. Statement of General Frank Hines, in Senate. Subcommittee on Housing and Redevelopment of the Special Committee on Post-War Economic Policy and Planning, “Post-War Economic Policy and Planning” January 17, 1945, 1838.

83. S. H. Scheibla, “GI Loan Lag,” Wall Street Journal 4/4/45, 1.

84. Ibid., 5.

85. Kenneth A. Snowden, “Home Mortgage Insurance and Guarantee Activity: 1935–1999,” Table Dc1105–1121, in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition Online, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

86. Omar Ketchum, testimony in U.S. House, Committee on World War Veterans' Legislation, “World War Veterans' Legislation,” 79th Cong. 1st Sess., June 19–21, 28, July 5, 1945, 193; Taylor, testimony in same.

87. Statement of Omar Bradley, in U.S. Senate. Subcommittee of the Committee on Finance. “Amendments to the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944,” 79th Cong., 1st Sess., October 8–12, 1945, 30.

88. Letter from Thos. H. Hickey (Loan Guarantee Officer in New York City VA) to F. Y. Pavesich, Chief, Loan Guarantee Division in VA Central Office, 10/16/45, in NARA Archives I RG 15: Records of the Veterans Administration, Policy and General Administration Files, 1917–59, Class 800, Veterans, Box 39, Folder: 1945 May-November.

89. The Truman Administration estimated that 1.2 to 1.5 million new dwelling units would be needed per year for the next decade, but in the months and years immediately after the war, only a fraction of the housing demand was being met. A War Department survey completed in 1945 estimated that 2.9 million veterans would need housing in the immediate future. Wright Patman, testimony in U.S. House. Committee on Banking and Currency, “1945 Housing Stabilization Act” 79th Cong., 1st Sess., December 3–7, 1–14, 17–18, 1945 and January 22, 23, 28–31, 1946, 5.

90. This was according to a National Association of Real Estate Boards survey of 300 cities. See Wright Patman, testimony in House Committee on Banking and Currency, “1945 Housing Stabilization Act,” 5–6.

91. Richard Davies, Housing Reform During the Truman Administration (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 41.

92. “Homes—In Blueprint,” Newsweek, 11/19/45.

93. In October 1944, for instance, the American Bankers Association called to order a conference of its newly formed committee on service for veterans, including bankers, the VA, military representatives, veterans groups, and academics to discuss the issue. The committee also conducted a survey on lending in relation to veterans legislation and was intended to bring together information on the GI Bill's operations across the country. Chester Davis, “Report to Administrative Committee of American Bankers Association on Activities of the Committee on Service for War Veterans,” in House Committee on World War Veterans' Legislation, “World War Veterans' Legislation,” 251–4; L. E. Mahan (of Mortgage Bankers Association of America) statement in Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Redevelopment, “Post-War Economic Policy and Planning,” 1855; 1877–78.

94. Taylor, testimony in “Amendments to the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944,” 113.

95. Ibid.

96. “Legion, VFW Rap Veteran-Aid Delay” New York Times 4/23/45, 18.

97. American Legion, “The American Legion Housing Program,” 10.

98. John Taylor Thomas, “Help for Joe,” The American Legion Magazine, August 1945, 31.

99. See, for example, Veterans Administration, GI Loans, 4–5; Senate, “Amendments to the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944,” 70–76.

100. Thomas, “Help for Joe,” 31.

101. Veterans Administration, GI Loans, 4–5.

102. Scheibla, “GI Loan Lag,” 5. See also Veterans Administration, GI Loans, 5.

103. American Legion. Reports to the Twenty-Seventh Annual National Convention, Chicago, IL, November 18–21, 1945. (Indianapolis: The American Legion, 1945), 241, 275–76.

104. American Legion. Reports to the Twenty-Seventh Annual National Convention.

105. Altschuler and Blumin, The GI Bill, 182.

106. Veterans Administration, GI Loans, 6.

107. American Legion, “The American Legion Housing Program,” 5; See also, Paul Griffith, “Now Let's Build Them,” The American Legion Magazine, April 1947, 24.

108. American Legion, “The American Legion Housing Program,” 5, 8.

109. Kathleen Frydl, The GI Bill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 276.

110. Miles Colean, The Impact of Government on Real Estate Finance in the United States (UMI, 1950), 109. Veterans Administration, GI Loans, 8.

111. Colean, The Impact of Government on Real Estate Finance, 110.

112. Frydl, The GI Bill, 286–7; Altschuler and Blumin, The GI Bill, 183.

113. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “Legislative History of the VA Home Loan Guaranty Program,” at http://www.benefits.va.gov/homeloans/documents/docs/history.pdf. Accessed 28 August 2015, updated 23 August 2006, 6.

114. Snowden, “Home Mortgage Insurance and Guarantee Activity.”

115. Altschuler and Blumin, The GI Bill, 182–83.

116. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “Legislative History,” 5.

117. American Legion, Reports to the Twenty-Ninth National Convention of the American Legion, New York, NY, August 28–31 1947 (Indianapolis: American Legion, 1947), 257.

118. Seawright, Jason and Gerring, John, “Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options” Political Research Quarterly 61 (2008): 294–308 Google Scholar, 299.

119. Quoted from Frydl, The GI Bill, 264–65, but see also discussions by Freund, Colored Property, loc. 2312; and Bonastia, Knocking on the Door, 2. Mettler's research has also found that veterans' experience with the GI Bill home mortgage provisions did not appear to boost civic engagement, in contrast with the education and training provisions. She surmises that this difference may have to do with the less inclusive structure of the loan program and the fact that it still required veterans to first qualify for a loan from a private lender. Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens, loc. 1512–17.

120. See, for example, Beth Stevens, “Blurring the Boundaries: How the Federal Government Has Influenced Welfare Benefits in the Private Sector,” in Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol (eds.), The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), chap. 3, 146–48.