Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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Compared with Europe and Asia, the United States had emerged from World War II relatively unscathed. Two oceans had insulated it from the aerial bombings and scorched earth troop movements that had slaughtered so many elsewhere. In defeated Axis countries, British and American bombing targeted urban areas, killing approximately a half million people in Germany and about the same number in Japan. Survivors walked through ruins, “ghost cities,” where it was hard to tell where and how to begin the reconstruction. Starving inhabitants survived on a thin gruel, with barely enough calories to fuel a personal recovery much less a national one. The Japanese called their postwar condition kyodatsu, a word that captured an utter collapse of body and mind in response to so many years of war.1 Although official combat had ended, the situation was far from peaceful. In Europe alone, rubble and ruined farmland, hungry and frightened refugees, revenge assaults, murders, and rape, and political retribution all marked the landscape. In his epic history of postwar Europe, Tony Judt wrote, “Surviving the war was one thing, surviving the peace another.”2
In safety and intact, Americans sat poised for a smooth recovery. Still, World War II had demanded much from them. It is important to count first: sixteen million suited up to serve, and millions of others suited up to work. The human losses totaled over four hundred thousand uniformed dead and almost seven hundred thousand injured, not even close to the numbers in other countries, but trauma and anguish nevertheless. We can add to this count by citing other kinds of wartime “casualties”: skyrocketing injury rates on the job, often-violent racial repression (from internment camps to deadly race riots), an intractable housing crisis in every city, and deep and ongoing family disruption and dislocation. So when President Harry S. Truman announced the peace, first in Europe in May, and then in the Pacific in August, there was a good reason to rejoice—twice.
In the United States, peace started as a noisy street party. The now iconic photos capture Americans jamming into their downtowns, cheering, dancing, and kissing as confetti rained down from office windows. In Chicago, one of the many cities altered deeply by war, officials braced themselves for the revelry. On the cusp of Germany’s surrender, the city council had voted unanimously to ban the retail sale of liquor within city limits for twenty-four hours. Worried that pent-up joy and relief could lapse into short-term mayhem and long-term production declines, council members urged all Chicagoans to stick to their usual routines, “including war work … attending the church of their choice,” and to engage in “sober and thoughtful reflection” on the day’s implications.3 But after Japan surrendered, there was no war work left to do, so people let loose. On August 15, 1945, the Chicago Daily Tribune’s headline read: “Great War Ends!” The celebrating had actually begun the night before when President Truman previewed the news at 6:00 P.M., “central war time,” as the Tribune put it. It was a Tuesday night, rush hour for many workers, but “pent up restraint and anxieties burst,” and Chicagoans poured into the streets. “Joyous Bedlam Loosed in the City,” a headline read, as half a million people crowded into the downtown within just a few hours. “They were noisy. They represented all ages and all classes. Elderly men and women were as numerous as bobby soxers,” reported the Tribune. In a scene unthinkable now, a group of thirty sailors formed a kind of kissing assembly line in which young women were passed from man to man until they smooched their way to the end. People hammed for photographers, holding up newspapers and pointing at the headlines as if to prove to themselves that the fighting had really stopped.4
Not far from this mayhem, Edna Johnston was working her shift as the solo hostess at the American Women’s Voluntary Services lounge in Chicago’s famed Bismarck Hotel. Ordinarily, she would have been busy serving refreshments and solving problems, but tonight, with her regular customers out in the street, she was left alone to ponder the news. She wrote in the daily logbook: “‘VJ’ Day is here in all its glory. Not a soul here to talk over the surrender or even watch the celebration on Randolph St. Well its [sic] all over now.”5 This lonely, even melancholy, moment was a stark contrast to the street carnivals that lasted into the next day and night, bringing the city’s regular business to a happy but temporary halt. Yet it was probably more indicative of the way most Chicagoans experienced World War II’s end. Like Johnston, people wanted to talk about what the surrender would mean for the victors. What did it mean to win? What would “peace” deliver for the weary winners? In other words, now what? As the historian Richard Lingeman has noted, the seeming certainties of war fast became “the ambiguities of peace,” a much murkier collective condition. Building the postwar society was the new national project, but it was not yet clear what that would really require from Americans. It may have been telling, then, according to one Chicago reporter, that on VJ Day “everybody talked of the ‘end of the war,’ not ‘victory.’”6 This fine distinction between war’s end and victory captured the mood in parts of victorious Allied Europe, too. As one Londoner put it, “Victory does not bring with it a sense of triumph—rather a dull numbness of relief that the blood-letting is over.”7
This book tries to make sense of this ambivalence—to scrutinize the limbo when the shelling was over but the peace was ill defined. The United States had won decisively, but that victory has generated some popular amnesia about the turbulent and contentious times that followed in this country. The end of World War II—or any war—is not merely the date when the truce is signed. Rather, we should think about peacetime as process, a set of economic, political, and social transformations that amounted to much more than merely war’s final moment. I examine peacetime as its own complex historical passage from conflict to postconflict, which contained human struggles and policy dilemmas that would shape later decades as fatefully as had the war. In diplomacy, it is often the treaties and settlement terms that define the meaning and impact of a war—more than the war itself. Wars still matter, but it is their tentative and precarious “posts” that redraw the new world survivors will inhabit. This was as true on the home front as it was on the battlefield. Who would write the treaties that defined the peace at home?8
This book explores that question by diving into one city and its neighborhoods. Chicago was the place where World War II had both a beginning and an ending: it was where President Franklin D. Roosevelt made his famous 1937 “quarantine speech,” in which he first warned about U.S. involvement in brewing troubles overseas, and it was the intellectual and scientific headquarters of the atomic bomb that finally ended it all.9 Its location, transportation infrastructure, and diverse manufacturing base attracted defense contracts and job seekers, making it one of the war’s busiest urban industrial hubs. It was peopled with a fascinating mix of European working-class immigrants and their next generation, a large population of African American migrants from the South, and a wholly new community of Japanese Americans who had just come from wartime prison camps in the West and South. Chicago is my “for example” city to focus on peacetime as an experience, not in the halls of Congress or in the White House but on the ground in one place. Its neighborhoods are a laboratory in which to explore bigger questions. What would peacetime mean for people whose private lives had been rearranged to serve the war? What would the peace offer them? What might it take away?
At the core of this story is Chicago’s working class, the ordinary people who lived World War II’s big events as their day to day reality. I follow them during the war’s final years, through the first years of the “postwar,” and into the early 1950s, as the United States became embroiled in another foreign war in Asia. Their experiences are less well known, partly because we historians have a bit of the journalist in us; we can be more attracted to the epic battles, grand personalities, and crises of war than to its less epic aftermath. But real people made war, and thus they had to make the peace, too. Their demobilization, or reconversion as it was also called, was part of a colossal national undertaking, and yet now over seventy years later, we still know only the contours of this story. Scholarly attention to demobilization has been fleeting, in terms of both time and space. Says one historian, we have divided the era awkwardly into categories of “prewar” and “postwar” and have thus “leap-frogged over this war-to-peace transition.”10 Demobilization serves as either a postscript for a book on the war itself or as the hazy preamble for subsequent Cold War dramas. The histories that do linger in these years tend to locate the action in the suburbs, chasing families in their