the top, though, the flashbacks came not from the Depression but from World War I, when “the demobilization debacle of 1919” led to massive inflation and labor unrest, an economic calamity President Truman and his planners wanted desperately to avoid. Truman’s staff, however, disagreed about how to head that off. They had to weigh not only economic but electoral factors, for the 1946 congressional elections were on the horizon. Trying to push through a liberal domestic agenda while managing foreign policy as a diplomatic novice, Truman himself remarked: “I’m telling you I find peace is hell.”84
The central dilemma before him was whether to stimulate consumption or production to ensure a healthy reconversion economy. Here, rent control was just one piece of the broader discussion about how much of the wartime state should remain intact in the postwar—and how much it should steer the economy. This was still an open question in 1945.85 In the powerful business community, there was at least some concession that the big state Roosevelt had built did not ruin the economy—that the market could tolerate some dose of government management. But business leaders also saw demobilization as the chance to change course, the moment to turn a big ship around, slowly and carefully, but still purposefully in a direction away from activist government. They had opposed the New Deal, and what they saw in 1945, argues one historian, seemed nothing less than “a landscape of defeat … a newly gargantuan federal government,” created by war, now continued in the postwar because it had worked.86
They saw what they wanted to see, however—a myopia hardly unique to conservatives, but unlike working-class tenants, they had more power to politicize their fears and wants. In fact, it had taken only about 150,000 people, a staff smaller than the U.S. Postal Service, to regulate consumer prices during World War II.87 This was hardly oversized government, but the intrusions were real for building owners, real estate interests, and builders. Ironically, owners often complained about the wait for judgments on their cases, griping that the OPA and OHE offices were too small and understaffed.88
To counter claims about bloated government, OPA chief Chester Bowles fought with numbers. In December 1945, he reported to Congress that wartime rent increases had not surpassed 4 percent. Every OPA speech, report, and brochure was packed with charts and graphs to show that Uncle Sam had put his foot down on price gouging and he had prevailed. Independent measures verified this. From 1945 through 1947, the cost of rent for an average moderate-income family rose just over 5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But for items that had been decontrolled, there was postwar sticker shock. Clothing, for instance, rose a whopping 42 percent.89 These statistics were not an abstraction for consumers. People experienced prices—outrage at an expensive but needed winter coat, frustration with a diet lean on costly dairy products, fear about rent hikes, and relief when good economizing met family needs for the month. It is no wonder, then, that they saw in controls a leveling effect—on both prices and passions.
It was only when controls did not work that consumers turned on them. This was the case for meat prices, as historian Meg Jacobs has found. When Congress, the Truman administration, and the OPA could not find common ground and then delivered a botched program, consumers started to see price regulation as “ineffectual,” resulting in “diminished public support for an activist state.” This misses the staying power of rent control, however. The “transformation of political consciousness” may have happened at the dinner table, but the feeling did not last past dessert.90 As economist Hugh Rockoff has found, “Even after public opinion turned against price regulation as a whole, support for rent controls remained strong.”91 Renters—consumers all—kept the faith because they saw good governance in action.
Yet conservative opposition at the top was more powerful than this support from the bottom. Truman’s own head of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, John Snyder, led the charge from within. He predicted that decontrol would unleash industrial production, creating jobs and restoring both efficiency and investor confidence. And his allies in the business community welcomed this, for they had been waiting for their liberation day: the return of laissez-faire. They met and planned just as energetically as consumer advocates, propelled by a worry that the American economy was drifting toward what the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) called “collectivism.” After months of fierce debate, shaped and paid for, in part, by the NAM and other business groups, Snyder and his influential allies ultimately prevailed, and almost all controls began to disappear following the 1946 conservative electoral triumph in Congress.
Their campaign was effective because it purposely confused things. As items like meat, gasoline, clothing, and furniture were decontrolled, rent control remained, but it was hard to get that message out above the din of the anticontrol lobby. And that was precisely their larger aim—to bungle, to muddy, to deliberately weaken and overly complicate government programs so that consumer-citizens would begin to lose faith in them. It was hard enough for citizens to track which items had become decontrolled right after the war and which were now just scarce, so the inflamed rhetoric about family meals without butter or roast beef enabled the NAM to influence conversations at the kitchen table about what government was really for after the war. Good governance can foster a mood of satisfied expectation for more. Continued grassroots support for price controls could build a broad political culture of tolerance—even desire—for a government that would referee the interests of rich and poor. For conservatives, this was dangerous. They wanted to spoil the mood.92
It is hard to tell how postwar Americans followed this political and economic debate. After food, rent was the second costliest item in an average working-class family budget, so the politics surrounding its price were worth tracking.93 The OPA and OHE spoke to tenants not only in numbers but in narrative, and their impressive public relations operation featured “rent stories” that made their way into local newspapers and radio shows. In the first months after the war, the OPA worked especially hard to keep the rationale for rent control in front of people—and to counter the NAM’s anticontrol publicity blitz. Organized labor, women’s groups, and veterans’ organizations were all targeted for outreach, with “human interest stories” featuring “the war worker’s family saved from eviction by OPA rent control,” or “the expectant wife of an Army or Navy man who was looking for a room because her landlady said she couldn’t have a baby in the place” (an actual case in the Chicago files). The OPA even promoted “Rent Stories Involving Animals,” in which the OPA ruled against a landlord who tried to collect more rent by claiming a little boy’s dog was a “tenant.”94 All of this was to convince citizens that even with some fatigue for wartime controls, an activist state could still deliver for them after the war. It could even save the family pet from landlord greed.
In the end, though, rent regulators believed that public confidence in the postwar state really began at their customer service counter, where a frightened tenant or aggrieved landlord had to share a personal story with a stranger. In the first weeks after VJ Day, Chicago’s OPA thought about what that office visit should convey to landlord and tenant alike as the war receded in memory. “This is a period … in which our population is still highly mobile,” said a manager, so demobilization demanded that officials work even harder to publicize rent control’s benefits. This would be especially important, he said, as some OPA staff left the agency to return to their prewar lives: “It will be easy for the public to believe that the program is slipping if they see a new face every time they come to an Area Rent Office, where for years they have seen the same one.” In a way, he was suggesting that rent control’s preservation depended on kindness and acquaintance—the state as neighbor, not bureaucrat. The “new faces” of postwar rent control, he warned, “must be given the best … in the way of procedures and morale,” or the public would lose faith in the very notion that government could protect them.95
Over a year after VJ Day, an OPA staffer told a radio audience: “Rent control doesn’t just happen to a community. The request must come from the people.”96 The stories from Elm Street and elsewhere show that Chicago’s working class did more than ask; they demanded in
