Washington ? There were four kids in Bob Dole’s family, but only he went to college, with help from the GI Bill of Rights.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 affected American society as no previous legislation had, helping millions of veterans go to college, find jobs and buy homes.

“Once you go to college, you want to make sure your kids go to college, and that your grandkids do, too,” said Dole, the Republican former senator from Kansas and 1996 presidential candidate whose World War II injuries cost him use of his right arm.

Dole, Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi and Rep. Jim Ryun, R-Kan., were among those marking the law’s 58th anniversary Thursday during an American Legion observance at the hotel where it was conceived.

World War II was still raging when the question confronted Congress: What would become of the more than 15 million U.S. soldiers when they came home?

A handful of American Legion members met at the Mayflower Hotel in the nation’s capital, and former national commander Harry Colmery scribbled some ideas on hotel stationery. The pages became the first draft of the GI bill.

“The final legislation paved the path to higher education, better jobs and home ownership for millions of veterans,” Principi said. “They firmly established their generation as the most productive and innovative generation the world has ever known.”

The Mayflower’s Suite 570, where Colmery did his work in December 1943, will bear a commemorative plaque unveiled Thursday by the American Legion.

“Colmery, with a simple idea and a pen in this hotel, set something in motion so huge that even today we cannot fully comprehend its benefits,” said Ryun, who is seeking the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Colmery.

A lawyer and businessman who lived in Topeka, Kan., Colmery died in 1979 during an American Legion convention in Houston.

Many credit the measure with creating a middle-class society and extending the wartime’s boom economy into a permanent expansion. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said the program has contributed 450,000 engineers, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors and 22,000 dentists to the nation’s work force.

Smith said legislation enacted this year raised benefits under the current GI Bill, which is called the Montgomery GI Bill for former Rep. G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery, D-Miss., a leading veterans advocate. Montgomery also was on hand Thursday.

Michael Bennett, author of “When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America,” told the veterans gathered Tuesday about the initial opposition of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wanted an “Economic Bill of Rights” in return for a universal draft for men and women alike.

The nation’s educational elite also were opposed, Bennett said, quoting the University of Chicago’s then-president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, as saying schools would become “educational hobo jungles.” Harvard’s president at the time, James Conant, insisted the bill would benefit “the least qualified of the wartime generation.”

Eventually, even Conant admitted the GIs were the best students Harvard ever had admitted.

That the measure succeeded “is the best proof we have that democracy itself, the wisdom of ordinary people, is what has made us great,” Bennett said.

“This was a bill conceived in democracy and dedicated to the proposition that those called upon to die for their country, if need be, are the best qualified to make it work, if given the opportunity,” Bennett said.