Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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or constraint. In fact, it was not until the 1970 Census that suburban residents outnumbered central city dwellers, and not by much (37.6 versus 31.4 million). Further, the United States was a nation of renters until 1950, when 55 percent of the housing became owner occupied—again, not a wide majority.11 The view that World War II quickly yielded suburbia triumphant has already changed, thanks to urban historians who have reminded us how cities became the first battlegrounds of the era’s most decisive domestic conflicts. In these works, too, though, the actual transition to peace is still the backstory.12
Into this breach has flowed a string of mainstream histories about the World War II cohort that have gripped the popular imagination. The best known among these, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, tells the stories of both veterans and home front warriors as they tried to rebuild their lives. Brokaw’s genial appellation has stuck, and now the “greatest generation” has become a cottage industry, the shorthand for World War II-era America since its publication twenty years ago. Unlike Studs Terkel’s “the good war,” a term Terkel used introspectively and ironically, Brokaw wielded his phrase audaciously, confident of its historical accuracy. Defending his contention that the thirties and forties spawned “the greatest generation any society has ever produced,” he wrote: “While I am periodically challenged on this premise, I believe I have the facts on my side.”13
It is not my intention to deny this generation its heroics or heritage, nor do I want simply to debunk a popular genre—although as the historian David Kennedy has noted, historians have “got to be ready to commit blasphemy” when it comes to shaping American memory about World War II.14 Rather, this book seeks to relieve this cohort of a burdensome mythology that hides their complexity, humanity, and rather democratic ordinariness. My aim is to freeze the action in the postwar city, to explore the varied meanings of peace to those who had experienced the varied costs of war. Tearing down a war, so to speak, was work. It was a series of personal, often bureaucratic, encounters with global diplomatic currents, federal policy, city politics, and even new neighbors. Americans’ wartime sacrifice had been the down payment on the celebrated postwar “good life,” and now they wanted their reward.
But how to define and secure that reward raised some essential but thorny questions about how sacrifice could be measured and repaid—and by whom? The men in charge of national demobilization quickly got down to the business of shrinking the parts of the government most tied to war; they discharged soldiers, auctioned materiel, and withdrew the defense contracts that had kept so many employed. But they wanted to go even further. Political and corporate conservatives saw an opening in this moment. They had never liked the New Deal, because it represented a break from the privileges they had enjoyed with small government and a relatively free market. In their view, World War II only magnified the New Deal’s excessive reach and authority, which they tolerated to win the war. But now in peacetime, they saw a chance to reverse course—to use a big war to make a small state. For conservatives, then, 1945 was a new beginning. Republicans seized on people’s war fatigue the next election year, using the campaign taunt “Had enough?” to sow discontent about rationing, regulations, and shortages. They won big in Congress, capturing a majority of both chambers in 1946, intent on rolling back not only the 1940s wartime state but also the 1930s welfare state.
Their victory is cited everywhere as the American electorate’s first postwar thumbs down on activist government, but the answer to “Had enough?” was actually “not quite,” if we relocate the conversation more deeply in working-class communities. Reflecting on World War II’s legacy, one worker said: “As a result of the war, the public generally … became more aware of the government’s influence on our everyday life.”15 One of the main inquiries of this study is how war—especially total war—shapes ordinary people’s awareness and expectation of government when the fighting ends. War is violence, sacrifice, and loss, but it is also an experience of governance that can fine-tune, reconfigure, or reaffirm Americans’ worldviews about the state’s operation in their lives. “States make wars; wars make states,” argues one historian, and World War II had, indeed, made the American government bigger, more intrusive. Typical war workers felt their government’s presence first thing in the morning, when they put on their price-controlled clothing and fumbled for their rationed shoes, when they reached for their rationed morning coffee and tried to sweeten it with a tiny amount of sugar—also rationed. The war had even shrunk the size of their afternoon candy bar.16 When it ended, though, that war loomed large as the rationale for their postwar entitlements, the kind detested by conservatives. Even with the Republicans’ winning mantra, and some genuine fatigue with daily regulations, the generation that had survived depression and war still wanted to feel the state’s presence in their daily lives. It had been both rescuer and regulator amid the two national—but very personally experienced—crises of depression and war. As decision makers debated the balance between strong governance and corporate self-rule in order to achieve “economic growthsmanship,” members of the working class had their own theories about what “growth” could look like after the war: vocational training, an education, a job, a pension, a more spacious apartment, more in the refrigerator, more to buy, more in the bank. In short, they wanted a “peace dividend,” and they looked to their governments—federal and local—to help them get it.17
This grassroots perspective on the state crossed gender and racial lines and took varied forms, from single women’s arguments for rent control to Japanese American claims for government restitution. Many in my neighborhoods did not work in unionized industries, so they voiced their wants outside the traditional conveyors of union leadership or labor’s elite liberal allies. Despite their diversity, they held fast to a few common convictions: they liked the idea of unfettered abundance but they feared unregulated markets; weary of wartime regulations, they were also wary of none. They believed their peace dividend should come from a marvelous show of America’s manufacturing might and new economic innovations, but government help was always part of their vision. Chicago’s working class defined this “help” as reparations for wealth lost or delayed by war, or as arbitration to defend or acquire new material gains. Indeed, they understood that the fight over war’s spoils might get contentious, and they wanted their government, when needed, to step in to referee. Theirs was a kind of hybrid liberalism, an ideological creature of New Deal-style safety nets and reinvigorated postwar convictions about the virtues of consumer capitalism.
But it was a war liberalism, too. Indeed, war was their primary language of entitlement, their way into worthiness. This working-class war liberalism emerged from the kitchens, bedrooms, and even bathrooms of the city apartment. It was a darker echo of New Deal liberalism, because war’s ruthless and relentless violence underlay peoples’ suffering and needs. It was also portable: everyone from the waitress to the returning vet could invoke it. War liberalism could sound different, too, depending on who was using it. The veteran had the most powerful claim on it, but as one scholar points out, all “Americans visualized themselves as comrades of the soldier” and so others used it, too.18 Of course, to ask for something in return for a national sacrifice was not new to World War II. But the war liberalism that emerged after 1945 was novel in the sense that its adherents saw a modern welfare state already in place—even if under siege by conservatives. They could see governance, that is, the national and local administration of New Deal programs designed to help families solve their problems, and many were already using them. Even those denied welfare benefits could at least see the promise of them. In short, there was precedent for imagining government provision during a national emergency. The war added even more urgency to that model. War liberalism could often sound like New Deal liberalism repurposed, but sometimes it was simply about the war—what it took from people and what they thought their government should help them replace. We cannot pin down precisely what war liberalism meant because human beings used it. They stretched, bent, and tailored it to their postwar situations; they invented different versions of it. September’s usage might not be December’s. As with any other ideology, a plural is always implied.
Most of us have not lived through the kind of conflict that generates such great expectations. Our current wars are fought by a tiny percentage of the population, and the rest of us are merely obliged to say “thank you for your service.” But total war is invasive. It finds everyone. Survivors in Europe and