Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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roughly on par with their wartime barracks. Mrs. Lancaster promised breakfast and daily maid service to the vets, but O’Toole noticed that at the time of his 4:30 P.M. visit, the beds were still unmade. His observations were confirmed by an anonymous tipster, who identified himself only as “a government worker who is still looking for a room.” After touring the premises, the worker reported what he saw, mocking Mrs. Lancaster’s claim that a space divided “by a sheet of dirty comp-board” could actually be called a “living room.”81
True, Mrs. Lancaster broke her promises of a good first meal and a clean room, and she flagrantly overcharged for both, but there are clues that she was not living the good life either. When O’Toole confronted her about registration violations, she told him: “don’t blame me I have nothing to do with the registering,” adding she was in “no mood” to file the paperwork. Undaunted, O’Toole continued through the house, where he discovered a bunk bed in the basement, another slapdash accommodation that passed for a “room.” But he then spied another bed, which turned out to be Mrs. Lancaster’s. In fact, in order to get to their bunks, the “guests” (as O’Toole wryly called the vets) had to walk right through Mrs. Lancaster’s quarters. The location of Mrs. Lancaster’s bed—in the dank basement of an old building, adjacent to her own lodgers—suggests that her situation was little better than the GI tenants who slept stacked like firewood just a few feet away.82
Cases throughout the Near North Side and elsewhere suggest a precarious comfort for the city’s hired landlords. In one way, they were owners’ accomplices, trying to shift the costs of running a building to those under its roof. On the other hand, they faced real financial predicaments, akin to their tenants, which is why they either squelched or fought renters’ complaints so doggedly. Unlike absentee owners, they lived in the transactional world of the apartment building—fielding tenant demands, calculating their worthiness, and taking people’s cash—so they had an acute sense of how price controls affected the money (and effort) going into and out of a building. They shared their owners’ lament about government excess in the postwar housing market, and they, too, grudgingly accommodated rent control by trying to outsmart or obstruct it. In all three neighborhoods—and around the city—there was a whole world of rooming and apartment house managers who were gaming the system. Some merely tried to raise utility bills to pay for the electricity their tenants used for a new appliance on the scene: the television. Others, such as the La Dolces, were guilty of more egregious rent crimes, left alone by the owners to battle it out with tenants for the same scraps of reconversion. Certainly, Chicago’s building managers had some of the same tools as owners (overcharging or cutting services to the bone), and as we have seen they could and did use those tools to make life pretty miserable for tenants. But without the financial safety net of ownership, many used the modicum of power they had to grab what they could from even less powerful tenants. They occupied the middle floor of the upstairs-downstairs relationship between owners and renters, and this location gave them little financial certainty. In fact, it only gave them a front-row seat to see the instabilities of tenancy and the trials of ownership. Neither looked like the bounty that had been promised during the war.
The Debate in Washington
As tenants, managers, and owners debated controls in their apartment buildings and compliance conferences, a similar conversation was taking place in the hearing rooms and hallways of Washington, DC. Here, the stakes were more ideological than material; none of the wealthy policymakers had to worry about actual prices, but they did worry about the politics of prices—that is, about creating the political atmosphere in which their postwar vision could prevail. Liberal or conservative, they saw demobilization as a window—the window—of opportunity to advance an economic agenda for decades to come. Policy liberals inside the Truman administration, such as OPA staff, believed that an activist, regulatory state could spread the peace dividend widely to American worker-consumers. In the midst of the war, an OPA researcher warned that demobilization would “tax the nation’s ability to the utmost as surely as has the war. We must be ready for it.” At the end of the war, the OPA sounded a full alarm: “There’s danger ahead…. Housing shortages, increasingly severe since the war began, now total 10 million dwelling units…. It will take years for deficiencies to be wiped out.” That danger was described a month after Hiroshima in one of the OPA’s regular radio shows:
The place is Chicago…. The wild cheering has subsided…. The milling throngs that had jammed the Loop have all gone their individual ways…. The city has settled down to normal living again…. All of a sudden pandemonium breaks loose! Moving vans flood the streets. A mass exodus starts. Family belongings are piled up on the sidewalks. Distraught tenants who have been evicted sit glumly on their suitcases … wondering what spot they will next call home…. Discharged war workers are in a frenzy, wondering where they will get the money to pay the exorbitant rents that are being charged. Almost overnight the city has changed from calm serenity to wild confusion … and all because rent controls have been removed!83
These scenarios picked at a fresh scab. They deliberately aimed to evoke painful memories for a nation of poorly housed Great Depression survivors. The wartime OPA and the postwar OHE hoped to sustain rent control by scaring their working-class customers into demanding it from below.
At 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