What is the most important arts policy in US history? Nostalgic lefties will vote for the Works Progress Administration, which gave life-saving support to thousands of artists during the Great Depression and helped seed a new spirit of public art and social documentary. Liberals will pay homage to the National Endowment for the Arts, which grew out of the Great Society and Cold War attempts to buff America’s image.

Socialists might make a case, however, for another piece of policy altogether, one whose effects were all the more far-reaching because you don’t think of it as related to art at all: the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, aka the GI Bill.

Sometimes remembered as the last hurrah of the New Deal, the GI Bill’s impact on the texture of American life is hard to overstate. Government benevolence toward returning World War II fighters in the form of the GI Bill’s home loans, school aid, and unemployment insurance, and how it was all repaid in the form of social stability and suburbanized prosperity, has become part of Greatest Generation folklore — though it is important to note that the largesse was born from the collision of contemptuous neglect and radical activism.