Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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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 a tone and language that was more political than deferential. They went looking for their federal government 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