metropolises,” such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, whose mayors and business boosters were vying just as eagerly for a military-urban stimulus. When Mayor Kelly went to Washington, he boasted about Chicago’s access to raw materials in the Great Lakes region, its historic nexus between industry and agriculture, its transportation web, and its industrial workforce. He managed to make the case, turning the city’s factories and workers into “shadow combatants,” making Chicago an urban arsenal where fourteen hundred industries had produced $24 billion worth of war-related equipment by the end of World War II, a total bested only by Detroit.25
Mayor Kelly’s Chicago moved as many people as it did products. It was the nation’s central railroad depot, “the place where Americans changed trains,” whether civilian or soldier. Chicago’s Travelers Aid Society estimated that between Pearl Harbor and March 1946, its staff and volunteers had assisted over 9 million migrating workers, military recruits, and their families passing through the city’s seven train terminals. The soldiers’ presence in the city was noticeable, not only because so many came through by train but because two of the military’s largest service centers were located just outside it. The Great Lakes Naval Training Center, for example, was the navy’s biggest training and reception facility. In addition, Chicago became a branch office for many of the civilian managers of the war. Dubbed “Little Washington” by a Chicago newspaper, the city became home for over a dozen nonmilitary wartime agencies.26
Back on Elm Street, we can see something of how these large-scale transformations began to materialize. In the war’s early years, Louis Brugger rented his flats mostly to Italians, probably among the last of the Italian American community that had settled on the Near North Side in the late nineteenth century. He did not endear himself to these Elm Street paesani. Like many wartime owners, Brugger found himself in an enviable position, and he tried to profit from it. There had been little new construction in Chicago (or nationwide) during the Great Depression, and housing stocks would remain low for the duration. What one journalist called the “great defense migration” would only intensify this scarcity.27 This massive population shift was a national phenomenon, of course, as migrants moved to urban cores where they could find the kind of defense work Mayor Kelly had lobbied for. World War II “was a metal-bending, engine-building, gasoline powered, multi-year conflict,” as one historian puts it, a giant stimulus to a recovery already under way in 1938, ultimately creating 17 million jobs, not to mention the 16 million spots in the military.28 Between 1940 and 1942 alone, about 150,000 job-hungry newcomers came to Chicago’s Cook County, and overall, the city’s population increased 6.6 percent between 1940 and 1950, totaling 3.6 million by 1950.29
Landlords like Brugger had none of this data but sensed what they saw around them—that the numbers were in their favor when reconversion began. In fact, Brugger had already been nailed in 1943 for setting rents above the ceiling set on the maximum rent date, and the OPA forced him to refund his tenants. So after VJ Day, he was surely hoping that wartime migrants would stay and rent control would go, allowing him to hike prices without pesky OPA watchdogs. Hired landlords like the La Dolces hoped for the same, because a continued shortage would keep tenants desperate and pliant, more willing to accept increases and lousy conditions, which would increase their own bottom line.
Tenants, on the other hand, were feeling newly vulnerable to the forces of the market. In almost every building, they outnumbered their “bosses,” but they felt alone and exposed. They had the capacity to rebel together, which they did at times, but we cannot romanticize them as a collective. They had to depend on one another to share tight spaces with patience and decency, while retaining the right to report the drunken neighbor, the loud radio player, or the reclusive pack rat whose junk was a fire hazard. Wall to wall, floor to floor, literally on top of one another, they bathed, slept, washed clothes, cooked meals, and did all the other mundane tasks that made a day pass. Often, they had to share rooms, toilets, tubs, and stoves, as well as smells and sounds. Higher rent bought more privacy, but most working Chicagoans could not afford the luxury. City apartment dwellers thus lived private lives in intensely public settings. As long as the housing shortage remained, they would have to live as they did in wartime—cramped, familiar, and conjoined.30
Rent Crimes and Misdemeanors
In this forced intimacy of the postwar apartment building, disparate groups found themselves sharing the same real estate: Washington policymakers, Chicago rent administrators who applied the law, building owners, their managers, and tenants. Sometimes there was synchronicity and harmony, but more often there was conflict. We know more about the conflict because harmony leaves a smaller paper trail. Skirmishes, on the other hand, made their way to the local OPA office during and right after the war, and then to the OHE in 1947. Those with a grievance had to tell their tale by filling out a form, which, depending on the issue, asked them who they lived with and their relation to one another, the room or flat’s basic features (hot water? mechanical refrigerator?), the employment status and income of those in dispute, how they paid their rent (cash or check?), and the history of the building itself. And then there was blank space for storytelling, a rationale for the complaint that could elaborate on the checked boxes and short answers. Here, owners, managers, and, most of all, tenants, poured out personal stories about trying to make it after the war. These case files offer a rare and absorbing glimpse into the everyday hardships of demobilization. The volume of tenant voices in these records makes it tempting to cast these disputes as dramas of greedy landlords exploiting hapless victims, for the records reveal intentional corruption on the part of owners and genuine tenant suffering—made all the more poignant by their handwritten pleas, often in sentence fragments and crooked script, betraying an earnest exertion so as to be heard but with still failing language.31
The story is more complicated than this, however. To understand this triangular economic competition between owners, managers, and tenants—to really grasp what was at stake for each in the conversion to peace—we have to move into an apartment building, circa 1946. Only from the inside can we hear the perspectives of everyone in the rivalry, especially how they perceived what governance was and should be after the war. Starting with property owners, then, the end of the war marked what they hoped would be the start of a prolonged economic recovery for their ilk. They hoped fiscal policies would favor land and building ownership as the bedrock instruments of a national revival. Owners large and small felt the calamities of the last ten years had crippled them. The Depression had broken one leg, wartime regulation broke the other, and now, already on their knees, they could be knocked over completely by postwar controls. Just to stand up again, they felt they had to raise rents to recover long lost revenues. And to profit, to really thrive in the way they thought they deserved, they tried to undercut rent control by outsmarting its rules and cutting corners. As long as federal rent law remained, they were going to sabotage its implementation.
The most common landlord strategy to recoup earnings was simple: overcharge without getting caught. After Brugger’s 1943 attempt, he tried—and got caught—again, just a few weeks after Hiroshima. A tenant complaint summoned an OPA investigator to the premises on August 30, 1945, but he could not verify if anyone was being overcharged because Brugger and the La Dolces had failed to register the property.32 Thousands of owners did not register their flats (the OPA estimated that 15 percent of them were unregistered) so they could charge high above the OPA’s ceilings while flying just under its radar.33 The frequency with which tenants complained about mysterious overcharges suggests that it was owners and managers’ favorite tactic. The records are rife with stories of tenants who asked their landlord to see the registration form and were denied the right—either because it did not exist or because the landlord wanted to hide the price the OPA/OHE had set on the maximum rent date. As Brugger’s proxies, the La Dolces intermittently charged tenants ten dollars above the registered rent from August 1944 through August 1947. They told tenants the extra money was necessary for structural improvements and maintenance, and they craftily hid their price hike by providing receipts with only the legal rent recorded. If the OPA investigated, the La Dolces could open their books and shrug their shoulders.
