global hegemony.29 “Postwar,” “peacetime,” “the peace,” or the “aftermath” will generally signal that we are moving through Chicago in the months and years after VE and VJ Day, but at times, the endings people defined as their own “post” will situate us. I will use the terms “demobilization” and “reconversion” interchangeably, although, at the time, reconversion was often more associated with industrial transition and demobilization with cutbacks in defense activity, such as troop reductions. Still, the press used both terms and many people understood them to mean the same thing: undoing the war.
A focus on the urban working class means we will follow people who worked for wages, who rented a room or flat, and who had to strategize to survive or thrive. Before the rise of a more widespread and durable suburban middle class, working-class people tried to make a go of it. They asked for things from more powerful people—on paper and in person—and we must pause to appreciate the ask. That took time and labor and often carried real risk. The cumulative power of those individual asks was not a mass movement but an effort nevertheless to build a postwar society more responsive to the needs of renters and wage workers—the ordinary people who had won the war in some fashion, whether in uniform or out. Their stories reveal both the creativity and constraint of working-class life in war’s wake. Of course, the term “working class” is a blurry vocabulary now and was then, for class is malleable, and race and racism intensified many Chicagoans’ economic struggles. And these city dwellers were more than workers. In fact, this book as a whole stays away from the workplace. It does not follow people to their shop floor, their office, their restaurant shift, or their union hall. It looks for class identity and consciousness in mundane places like train stations and apartment buildings. But there is nothing trivial about what happened there. The sociologist Charles Tilly reminds us that in urban history we find regular people “buffeted by the great winds of economic and demographic transformation” in their “households, shops, and neighborhoods.”30
None of these descriptors for the World War II generation will be laser sharp. But I would argue that language and theory can fail us when we try to name the lingering traumas, conflicts, and paradoxes bred by total war. We are stuck with “postwar” and “peacetime” to describe what came after war, but those are vague—maybe even misleading—terms, perhaps dangerously so for what they hide about war’s violence. But the imprecision of our language for war’s “posts” is precisely my point, and it serves as the departure for the stories that follow. Each chapter explores a different category of wartime citizen and how they navigated their own transition in a city in transition. Renters, newly freed internees, soldiers turned veterans, single and married women, and African American migrants were Chicago’s working class. I listen to their varied definitions of “peacetime” and then track how they made that term real in their daily lives. Their local private struggles were enmeshed in national policy debates about the future of the country after its second world war in just over two decades. Their stories are about rupture and repair, about sacrifice and reward, about the self and the state, and I try to capture the interplay of these moments and moods.
It is important to reflect on their endings because our culture prefers beginnings. Historians talk more about origins, catalysts, and mobilizations. Textbooks hurry us through the end of big events because we must get to the next one. Coverage leaves little time for closure. Sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has found that Americans struggle to think about “exit moments,” that is, the ways in which we take leave of or terminate something. “Exits … are ubiquitous, marking the physical landscapes we inhabit, embedded in our language and metaphors, embroidered into the historical narrative of our country,” she observes, yet it can be awkward or agonizing to examine them. We much prefer to think about starts, where there is hope and a plan, not failure and futility.31 Lawrence-Lightfoot chronicles the exits of mainly personal affairs, but we can apply her insights to the affairs of state. Wars are relationships, after all, between the state and the citizens enjoined to fight, and between the nations that have declared war on one other. In the Broadway hit Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda playfully frames the American Revolution as a breakup story, with King George III as the spurned lover, singing refrains of “You’ll be back” as his lament.32 Underlying this amusing double entendre, though, is a serious reflection on the pain of an exit moment.
This book is an argument to stay in that moment. World War II’s peacetime was neither a smooth nor passive transition. Americans had to make peace—just as they had made war. They saw World War II’s peacetime not as an end but an entrée into something new, a chance to contemplate the terrible costs of violence and the possibility of regeneration. Ideally, this book helps us meditate on the tragic contradictions of war—what it destroys and what can be built from that destruction. War-weary and eager for victory, working-class Americans in 1945 certainly welcomed the truce, but it would be a mistake to assume that peace did not introduce its own set of wrenching changes. Their stories move us closer to a more accurate rendering of war’s history for new generations of warriors and pacifists, alike. It may be an ironic measure of our progress as a nation that we can stand back and assess what we build after we destroy. We should thus dissect our postwars as carefully as we have our wars.
CHAPTER 1
Bathrooms, Bedrooms, and Basements: War Liberalism in the Postwar Apartment
This is a story about the “greatest generation” that has not been told. It is not a story about homeowners in the suburbs but about renters in the city. It is not primarily about male veterans, although they are in here, as they should be. It is about city apartment dwellers as they lived and worked in Chicago in the years following World War II. It is about ordinary people who faced big challenges, like making a decent life for themselves—only one family per apartment now, maybe a television set, and their smaller but still serious trials, like sharing dirty bathrooms off dark hallways. It is a war story, too, but not in the conventional sense. Here, the apartment building is the locus of struggle, cramped with families and singles, old-timers and new wartime migrants, African Americans, white ethnics, and newly freed Japanese Americans, all of them contenders for the long-heralded postwar “good life.” Ultimately, this story is about their high expectations and hard choices as they went from making war to making peace.
In August 1945, Americans experienced military victory most immediately as a housing crisis. The nationwide shortage of decent, affordable housing stressed everyone. In the fall of 1945, over one million families were uncomfortably “doubled up” with relatives or friends, and the Labor Department estimated that by the end of 1946, roughly three and a half million families would be seeking housing in a market with just under one million vacancies. The apartment shortage in Chicago was so bad that officials practically ran out of adjectives to describe the scene at the end of 1945: “critical,” “acute,” “tragic,” “chaotic,” “impossible.”1 The riddle of how to solve this crisis was an early test for the people who lived it and the policymakers who had to fix it. Indeed, the housing dilemma pointed to crucial questions first raised by the mobilization, now relevant and urgent in the demobilization: What did the state owe its citizens after requiring such far-reaching war service? Was it obligated to ease the predicted financial strains of reconversion, or was peacetime synonymous with laissez-faire? With the wartime emergency over, were Americans still obliged to act as a united front, or could they let up on unity and pursue individual interests rather than national ones? These were hard questions, worked out on the ground first, and so the details from inside Chicago’s apartments matter: no hot water, a constant chill, missing toilet paper. These quotidian scenes point to a larger truth about war, something the victor can handily forget: making peace is combative and messy.
We tend to imagine Americans as homeowners, not renters, in the years after 1945. But in this period federal rent control was one of the most important of all wartime housing policies, and the case of rent control is a different way to explore this nation’s housing history. Created just a few months after
