An Open Letter to Veterans

As you get nearer to the ways and jobs of peace all of us at home want you to know and appreciate one thing first: we are earnestly determined to help you in every useful way we can. We believe the so-called G I Bill and the Veterans Rehabilitation Act are the most intelligent measures any nation ever drew for the benefit of its returning service personnel. No scale of bonuses in cash could so usefully restore American veterans to the necessities and the opportunities of peace as these provisions for education, reeducation, and rehabilitation. We hope you will avail yourselves of all rights under either or both bills. Your ealiest and fullest profit from these measures will be for our profit too; for you and we have an America which must itself be largely reconverted. We need your best trained help at the earliest. 

But certain things have become perfectly clear. May I list three of 
them. First: as between a veteran and a civilian of equal education, training, 
and experience, the veteran will get the preference in all employment. 
Second: But as between two veterans the one with superior education will 
get the job. And, third: as between an uneducated and untrained veteran and an educated and trained civilian, the civilian will get the job-or keep the job he already has.

That makes sense. It amounts to saying that between veteran and civilian equals a grateful nation will give the preference to the veteran. 
But the veteran will still face two kinds of competition: one from the 
veteran who is higher in the scale of formal education and one from the 
civilian who is higher in the same scale of formal education. There is 
no law which can ever compel American employers to sabotage their 
own businesses by taking uneducated and untrained men when educated 
and trained men are available. Employers are always going to take the 
man who can best do the job. 

You will find these things true when you seek a place or seek a 
higher place in the trades and crafts. You will find them vividly true 
when you enter or return to the professions and when you try to make 
headway in business, industy, engineering, law, medicine, the ministry, 
public school teaching and administration. In the pages which follow 
you will find courses of study which Howard College offers for your immediate as well as your long-range profit. We hope you will find 
interest and promise in them, and we shall be glad to have you call or 
write for further details or explanations. 

Be sure to read at the end of this bulletin a letter from one of yourselves, 
a veteran, a former student in this college whose study was interrupted 
by three years of business and more than three years of honorable 
and heroic service and co1nmand in the Navy. 

Cordially and sincerely yours, 
HARWELL G. DAVIS, 

President.