Museum program to feature GI Bill
BATESVILLE — During the year, the Old Independence Regional Museum has commemorated the end of World War II, which was 70 years ago. One of the museum’s exhibits calls for visitors to take time to remember those who fought in the war, along with those at home who supported the troops. The museum has hosted five programs related to the subject.
The last program of this series will be presented at 2 p.m. Sunday. It features benefits and changes after the war. Donald Weatherman, president of Lyon College, will speak about veterans benefits and the changes in housing after the war.
“Toward the end of World War II, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,” Weatherman said. “We came to call this simply the GI Bill.
“It established veterans hospitals, provided for occupational rehabilitation and granted stipends to cover tuition and living expenses for veterans attending college or trade schools,” he said.
The GI Bill directly affected local students. During the war, Arkansas College (now Lyon College) had lost most of its male students as a result of their enlistment in the military. With the GI Bill, both the returning soldiers and the college would benefit.
“In January of 1945, Arkansas College received its first GI Bill enrollee — Lowell Southerland from the community of Floral,” Weatherman said. “That bill was largely responsible for a two-thirds increase in the size of the student body between May 1945 and May 1946. By the next year, the enrollment doubled to more than 300 full-time students, and postwar students filled all available dormitories to overflowing.”
According to published historian Brooks Blevins, the GI Bill was one of the most important pieces of social legislation of the 20th century and perhaps the most important higher-education-related congressional act in American history.
Weatherman will also talk about the great suburban explosion after the war. An important provision of the GI Bill was low-interest, zero-down-payment home loans for servicemen. This encouraged millions of American families to move out of urban apartments and into suburban homes.
“Our family benefited from these low-interest suburban houses while we lived in California during my childhood,” Weatherman said. He was originally from Southern California, where he found his passion for academics. He earned a doctorate in American government and political philosophy.
After teaching at California State University, the College of Idaho and the College of St. Catherine in Minnesota, Weatherman came to Lyon College as a professor of political philosophy. In 1988, he spent six months in Washington, D.C., as one of the first Bradley Resident Scholars at the Heritage Foundation. He and his wife, Lynn, later moved to South Carolina, where he served for 10 years as vice president and dean of Erskine College. Weatherman returned to Lyon College to serve as its 17th and current president.
Sunday’s program is free and open to the public.
Normal museum hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is $3 for adults, $2 for seniors and $1 for children. The museum is at 380 S. Ninth St. in Batesville, between Boswell and Vine streets.
Old Independence is a regional museum serving a 12-county area — Baxter, Cleburne, Fulton, Independence, Izard, Jackson, Marion, Poinsett, Sharp, Stone, White and Woodruff. Parts of these present-day counties comprised the original Independence County in 1820s Arkansas territory.