in the postwar city. Most had no telephones, checking accounts, typewriters, or carbon paper, and they still managed to write out complaints in the requisite triplicate. They were afraid, but they still showed up at the downtown office, waited in long lines, and told their stories, risking eviction or the slow, incremental retributions, like waning heat. They invited the state into their flats, throwing open the doors to bedrooms and bathrooms to let federal officials see local greed. As the worker who reported Mrs. Lancaster’s GI slum insisted: “If your office is still on the job, and I hope it is, take a look at this DUMP.”97 But landlords and building managers were “the people,” too, and they rejected the home visits that exposed their rent crimes—which they saw as survival strategies. Rent control was for them antidemocratic, not just a speed bump en route to the good life. Where it cushioned the blows of demobilization for tenants, they claimed it inflicted new ones on them.
The conditions on the Near North Side, or in Lincoln Park and Lakeview, are unique to neither time nor place. Yet the experience of total war had intensified both human need and want. How could it not? World War II’s privations renewed expectations for a minimum standard of living.98 In effect, the war became a stimulus for a postwar stimulus—a mood of anticipation that martial service would reap material reward, sponsored by the government that had summoned them to service. This working-class war liberalism was deployed not just by individuals but by cities, too. American industrial cities were “seething with resentment at the problems that the global struggle had left and vociferous in demanding government help to solve them.” They, too, wanted what one California commission called “war winnings.”99
The history of federal rent control reveals how scrappy and resourceful people could be to get those winnings. It is striking how much the war figured in their arguments for economic fairness, whether owner, manager, or tenant. Everyone wanted something from the war. This is where the consensus ended, though. The city apartment proved to be ground zero for this fight—a deeply intimate space for a very public class struggle. It was a tight squeeze, for demobilization’s pressures brought more than just housing woes. New urban migrants brought their own postwar fantasies and expectations when they arrived in the city. As we shall see, when Japanese Americans moved from prison housing to Chicago’s apartment housing, it forced another set of conversations about what the wartime state could take and what it should give back when the fighting stopped.
CHAPTER 2
Japanese Americans on Parole: The Perils and Promises of a Postwar State
For Japanese Americans, the answer to the question of what the wartime state could ask of its citizens was painfully obvious: everything. Theirs was a forced sacrifice, perpetrated by their own government, so the war liberalism that sprang from that war crime was tinged with a deep ambivalence about the state. Their recovery from compulsory sacrifice, to the surprise of their government captors, introduced the problem of war-related but state-induced dependency: what was the state’s responsibility to care for their jailed charges when the war was over? Government planners had never before faced this kind of welfare dilemma. Indeed, the story of Japanese American demobilization is like no other of the postwar generation. Millions had left home during World War II to find a job, follow family, or serve in the military, but only Japanese Americans were tagged, marched, and warehoused after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. Their recovery, not their internment, is the focus of this chapter.1
This “exit moment” from camp has received less attention, but it is a fascinating story about how an internal “enemy” in wartime tried to reconstitute itself in the postwar. Internment made Japanese Americans conditional citizens. Once freed, they were still on racial probation, under pressure to prove their loyalty and worth as they tried to rebuild from scratch. Approximately twenty thousand to thirty thousand of these “resettlers,” as the government called them, arrived in Chicago from 1942 through 1950, making the city “the primary center of relocation in the United States,” according to the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the agency in charge of internment.2 Refugees from the West, now even farther from their agricultural and coastal homes, newly freed Japanese Americans had to fast become midwestern Asian urbanites. Boarding a bus, finding a flat, locating a friendly grocer, these were all essentially racial experiments, for Chicago’s new Asian migrants had to test their reception with every interaction. For them, demobilization was both a bread-and-butter struggle and a fight for racial redemption and justice.
It was also a welfare problem. Demobilization’s history offers a new opportunity to examine Japanese Americans’ attitudes about the state in the aftermath of an extreme and punitive statism. The government’s power to separate, remove, and imprison represented state authority at its peak, but that overreach created a novel predicament for postwar policymakers. Locking people up as national security risks meant they had to provide for them. When Dillon S. Myer assumed leadership of the WRA in June 1942, he thought of himself not as a prison warden but as the new mayor of “ten abnormal cities” whose needs he thought would mimic “most or all of the problems of the small city.” This was internment as city management, the chore of arranging the basic needs of shelter, food, education, recreation, and health care for over 120,000 people. As Myer put it, the essential challenge of wartime detention was “the problem of caring.”3 His odd but suggestive phrase nudges us to think anew about internment as a welfare dilemma for the wartime and postwar liberal state: how to transition a population from carceral dependence to, as Myer put it, “a normal useful American life with all possible speed”?4 The fear that wartime federal custody could foster postwar federal dependency nagged WRA planners more than any national security issue. Essentially, internment had turned a once productive population into wards of the state, and Myer and his staff worried that wartime “caring” would have to continue well after the war as former prisoners tried to regain their livelihoods. Even more worrisome, internment may have fostered in its detainees a sense of entitlement to that caring.
These national politics played out as local realities in Chicago’s north side neighborhoods. Here, contact with two federal agencies—the WRA and OPA/OHE—shaped resettlers’ understanding of the state in peacetime. They leaned on both, especially the OPA/OHE, but their postwar state was never just the federal government. They built their own welfare organizations, local and national, and when those could not meet their needs, they wandered a little farther from their base into Chicago’s network of settlement houses and aid agencies. Indeed, their war liberalism alternated between an older ethic of racial self-help and a new and evolving sensibility that the federal government bore some liability for their long-term well-being. Older Issei immigrants wanted restored financial security and family reunion; younger Nisei, the Issei’s American-born children, wanted new financial security and family formation. They all wanted to exhale the war and inhale a new normal—to tend to the mundane, to be bothered by the small irritants of a regular day. From certain angles, their demobilization history looks much like everyone else’s—a grand scavenger hunt for the good life. The evidence from Chicago suggests that Japanese Americans emerged from this long process with some of what they wanted, but also with a sharpened sense of the trade-offs and fragilities of citizenship—especially for nonwhites—and a deeper wariness of their government’s power.5
Involuntary Moves
The regional history of Japanese American internment is more varied than we think. The original exclusion area reached from Washington State in the Northwest all the way to the Arizona-Mexico border. The government imprisoned Japanese Americans in western states (California, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado), but also in the Southwest (Arizona) and South (Arkansas). If we include the Department of Justice prisons, which held those identified as “leaders,” internment’s territorial reach expanded to New Mexico, Texas, Montana, and North Dakota. And if we consider when Japanese Americans migrated eastward after their release, then the captivity geography extends even
