Tal Fortgang is not the only American Jew to believe that his ancestors made it on the strength of their "hard work" and "good values," although he may be the most well publicized right now. Nor is Paul Ryan the only American to believe this about his almost certainly Irish Catholic ancestors. As I said earlier, it's a common narrative for the descendants of "white" ethnic immigrants to tell. I think most people tell it because it's what they've been told--that certainly was the case for me. But as it happens, it's only half the story. It glosses over a little thing called the GI Bill of Rights, or the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944.

Let's go all the way back to America before WWII. At this point, Jews and Catholics are not considered white, and they are almost all working-class. In fact, both groups are treated as minorities--it's rarely mentioned today, but the 1915 Klu Klux Klan is much more concerned with keeping Jews and Catholics in their places than it is about keeping African Americans in theirs.  The "real" whites in America are Protestant, and they're the ones who are doctors, lawyers, stock brokers--i.e., white collar workers. They're the ones who send their kids to college. At this point in American history, if you are a man, your adult occupation closely mirrors your father's.

Then along comes WWII. This is a huge war and the government's need for manpower is enormous. It's the last war in which the class make-up of the US Army really reflects the class make-up of America as a whole. There are no college deferments (which in later wars becomes the way that better-off Americans get out of the draft). Pretty much all young American men go to war unless they are physically or mentally disabled. In the beginning of the war, the call-up age is 21, but later on the need for new soldiers is so big that they lower it to 18.

As the war starts to wind down, FDR and his administration start to freak out a little. It occurs to them that literally millions of young guys are about to flood the US job market and that they don't have jobs to give them. This is particularly scary for them because during the Great Depression, hungry veterans from the WWI army built a huge settlement of shacks and tents in front of Hoover's White House to demand financial help from the government (they were called the Bonus Army). The government ended up looking really bad in that event, and they really don't want a repeat. So they concoct a GI Bill. It's initially not very generous, but the American Legion, which is a veteran's group, gets involved and lobbies hard to make it more substantial. It ends up being one big reason that Jews and Catholics in America become middle-to-upper class, and then white.

The GI Bill has a few parts to it, but the most famous one has to do with post-secondary education. Essentially, any veteran who's served in the army for over 90 days without a dishonorable discharge gets $500 per year for tuition, and living expenses paid. (The living expenses are adjusted based on whether you have dependents). The really amazing thing about this is that it's not means tested in any way, you don't lose it if you fail for a semester, and the tuition is generous enough so that the son of a stock-broker and the son of a basket-weaver are essentially equal. $500 at that point is more than Harvard charges for a year's tuition. In other words, if you can get into Harvard, you can go.

The thing that really makes this a version of affirmative action for Catholics and Jews is the way it changes university admissions. Up until this point, a lot of older private colleges had policies that limited the number of Jewish students (like Harvard). Most colleges also had admissions policies (like the ones we have today) that essentially prevented a lot of working-class students from being accepted because they had received limited education. Because of the GI Bill and the government pressure that came with it, a lot of this changed. A lot of schools founded "vestibule programs" (now we would call them "remedial ed") to help vets who hadn't finished high school (most of them) or who had received substandard educations to catch up so they'd be ready for college. The GED was created. Colleges with anti-Semitic admissions policies or Jewish quotas were pressured to get rid of them, and did. The long standing gap between college education rates of  Protestant and Catholic Americans disappeared in that one generation. (Imagine if that happened to the college education gaps between whites and blacks today!) It was a huge affirmative action program-it just didn't look like one because all soldiers were entitled to it, and there were so many soldiers. And the soldier-students did work hard, but they worked hard in college instead of in factories. And that's how the sons of basket-makers became professors. That is exactly how. It was probably the most effective anti-poverty program the US government has ever run.

And what about African Americans? Hadn't they fought in the army too? Well, yes. And they were entitled to the GI Bill, and were very eager to use it. (At one historically black college, veterans swelled admissions by 620% compared to before the war).  It did not do for them what it did for the Jews, however, for a few reasons. First off, the African Americans had served in segregated units under white officers, and were thus far more likely to be given "blue" discharges. "Blue" discharges were kind of weird-they weren't exactly dishonorable, and the VA ruled that they shouldn't be treated that way when vets applied for benefits, but in reality they were treated that way. They were given to soldiers who were seen as having "undesirable habits or traits of character," among which could be "criminalism," alcoholism, chronic lying (???) and homosexuality. The two groups most likely to be given blue discharges were homosexuals and African Americans. (If you think about it, the prevalent stereotype of African Americans was that they were inherently untruthful and criminal, so obviously a lot of white officers would believe this about them even without evidence). So a lot of African Americans missed out on the GI Bill for that reason. (So, for that matter, did a lot of gay men).

The more concrete issues, though, were that African Americans were still facing segregation. Aside from the issues this caused in terms of where to go to school (colleges in the South did not bow to government pressure to desegregate, unlike Harvard and Yale), it meant that when black vets graduated from college, they couldn't get jobs commensurate with their education. At all. And it didn't matter much if they were in the North or the South-blacks just weren't hired for white collar jobs or even for semi-skilled jobs in most cases. Some of them only got the jobs they were trained for in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Act was passed. Some of them never did. So while Jewish and Catholic vets were lifted out of the working class by the GI Bill, black vets ended up doing mostly the same jobs their father had done. Both groups of veterans were enthusiastic about the benefits they were given, and both worked hard, but one group mostly experienced increased job opportunity and income because of those benefits, and the other mostly didn't.

I was really surprised when I read about this--I had been told the story of how my ancestors became middle class through working hard, and I had believed it. I guess for me the lesson behind the GI Bill is that a-structures don't change because of personal characteristics. The belief that they can is probably one of the most pernicious beliefs that we have. b-government can impact discrimination if there's enough political will involved, and c-race is in some ways just a big roulette wheel. When the GI Bill spun the wheel, Jews and Catholics were in the right place at the right time. It wasn't because we did anything in particular, and it wasn't because the government particularly wanted to help us out as groups-it was just that they didn't want another Bonus Army. They were willing to take on Harvard but not the South, the same way the government remains reluctant to take on the South. We got lucky because the South cared more about racializing blacks than racializing Jews or Catholics. We got privileged.

So when I think about "checking" your privilege, I think that, indeed, privilege deserves checking. Not in terms of just keeping quiet to be polite, but in terms of checking it out, understanding why it happened and how you got it. We owe it to ourselves and each other as actors in the world to understand how things really happen, and to see the world through that lens. So really-if you have a Jewish or Irish or Italian family background, ask your father or grandfather if he got the GI Bill and what happened after that. If you have an African American family background, ask your father or grandfather if he got the GI Bill and what happened after that. And next time some one tells you that it was all about hard work, tell them hard work always happens in a context. You can work hard at McDonald's for years and never make it farther than McDonald's, unless you happen upon something like the GI Bill.

References:
Mettler, Suzanne. 2005. Soldiers to Citizens: The GI Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation.  Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.
Onkst, David H. 1998. "'First a Negro...Incidentally a Veteran': Black World War II Veterans and the GI Bill of Rights in the Deep South, 1944-1948," Journal of Social History 31, 3: 517-543.