Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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felt they had sacrificed more than others, and still, all felt entitled to prosper. As a result, their pursuit of postwar affluence could get contentious. In fact, property owners, building managers, and tenants were class rivals in the quest for postwar abundance. Their battles with each other were often fierce, and they used whatever economic strategies they had—some legal, some not—to capitalize on the financial prospects of peace. To varying degrees and with different leverage, they all called on their better and baser instincts to grab a share of the long-promised peace dividend. This was class struggle, but not where we usually find it.
Federal regulators had umpired this home-based class conflict during the war, and now in the postwar, Chicago’s tenants wanted them to stay on the job. They knew firsthand how price regulation had eased family budgets, and the free market economics of peace seemed to them a free pass for landlords to charge what they wanted. Landlords, of course, saw things differently. They wanted to evict the government from the business of building management, and each renter’s complaint exposed their shrewd efforts to evade the law. In the broadest sense, these quarrels from inside Chicago’s apartment buildings were part of a national debate over the fate of price controls—a political issue not merely about war economics but about the reach and scope of government itself. Tenants’ support for rent control was an endorsement of interventionist government—even in peacetime. The dizzying array of petitions, handwritten letters, and investigative logs from Chicago’s rent control operation offers intimate scenes from the daily grind of demobilization for working-class families; marriage and babies, aging parents, illness, poverty, vulnerability, and indignation are all in here. These are very personal accounts of war’s aftermath, but they are also the early dialogues of war liberalism. They offer a glimpse into local people’s interactions with the official state and its policies, and they make a compelling case that support for activist government did not melt away after World War II.4
Neighborhood Snapshots
The stories we tell about people in any era should meet them where they are. Our postwar history, then, should begin with a reverse commute from the suburbs back into the city, where the majority of Americans had lived since 1920. By 1945, we were a nation of urban dwellers and renters. More Americans were tenants than owners; more were blue collar than white collar. They had more money in their pockets than they did during the Depression, but they still had to live within budgets. This urban working class was a diverse group even within its own class category. Some enjoyed rather high rates of homeownership and the wages that came with unionized work—secured either before or during the war.5 Still, in Chicago, and in cities across the country, tenancy was the majority experience. This made the working class marginal in a way more cultural than material. Since roughly 1900, Americans believed that homeownership signaled a special kind of citizenship—a stability and steadiness that leasing could never bestow. Working-class homeowners commented on feeling very “American,” and reformers and city builders thought one’s owner or renter status told a tale about one’s character and community standing.6 Renters were occupants but not really neighbors, not even fully American. This may be why we keep staring into the picture windows of suburbia—because that seems a more American story, especially a postwar American story.
Yet the city was the most common destination of the war worker and returning soldier. When American GIs departed the European and Asian theaters, they came back to urban centers that had become a different kind of theater, where citizens were already sparring over the meanings and spoils of the war. As historian George Lipsitz has written, these conflicts “turned common and ordinary places like city buses, municipal parks, and housing projects into contested spaces where competing individuals and groups hammered out new ways of living.”7 Apartment buildings were among these crucial contested spaces where people tried to find “normalcy.” Here, economics and physical proximity were intertwined and in play all day, unlike the workplace, where class and closeness could be decoupled at the end of the shift. In apartment housing, tenants lived among their “bosses,” the building owner or a hired manager. And they lived even closer to fellow tenants, dependent on one another to share tight quarters as they had during depression and war.
Which brings us to Elm Street, circa 1945. Here, apartments swelled with transient workers, the unemployed, families and young singles, black, white, and Asian. Those lucky enough to find housing on Elm lived on a street of extremes. Elm ran east to west, from Chicago’s luxurious lakefront to its northern riverbank and railroad corridor, a tangle of train track and smokestack since the late nineteenth century. Elm sat within the city’s Near North Side, a neighborhood of two and a half square miles north of Chicago’s downtown. Concentrated in this area were the elements found in many American cities: light and heavy industry, high and low-end retail, well-appointed apartment residences and ramshackle rooming houses. Walking west on Elm from Lake Michigan, one could go from Chicago’s “gold coast,” an area of three-story mansions and high-rise “apartment homes” that housed the city’s elite, to rooming houses and decaying apartment buildings peopled with a European immigrant working class, African Americans from the South, and Japanese Americans just liberated from internment camps. At the southern tip of the neighborhood flowed the Chicago River, light industry hugging the shore, and at the northern border lay North Avenue, a street that traced its origins to the city’s earliest land surveying in the 1830s. Harvey Zorbaugh, one of the first sociologists to chronicle the Near North Side, described it as a neighborhood of “vivid contrasts … between the old and the new, between the native and the foreign … between wealth and poverty, vice and respectability … luxury and toil.”8
In Chicago’s rental housing, there was mostly toil. In fact, Elm Street is a geography lesson in miniature about the war’s impact on the American city. By 1945, urban areas around the country showed the wear and tear of military annexation, industrial expansion, and population explosion. The Near North Side, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, the three neighborhoods that anchor this study, were largely working-class areas, but they all had the blighted bands and high-income hamlets found on Elm Street. Most of their housing stock had been built before 1920, and little of it was owner occupied. Every morning, working people left these old buildings to do some type of factory or service labor, and they often did not have to commute very far, as all three neighborhoods had some combination of manufacturing and retail. Together, these three were busy “substations” of the central city, among the most populated of Chicago’s seventy-five distinct communities. One of the city’s most important commercial arteries, Lincoln Avenue, ran through Lakeview and Lincoln Park, and the busy North Clark Street sliced through all three neighborhoods. On these streets, war workers could find a room or a flat, places to eat and drink, stores to buy fashions and furnishings, and a wide variety of “cheap amusements.”9
The variation within the eight and a half square miles of these neighborhoods reflects Zorbaugh’s notion of a city of contrasts, but the renters in all three shared much of the same misery. World War II was only the latest population reshuffling for “America’s heartland city,” which had seen its share of racial, ethnic, and labor strife since the nineteenth century. Mapping these neighborhoods racially and ethnically cannot be reduced to “melting pot” metaphors.10 Identities and experiences were far too diverse for that. In fact, in the postwar apartment building, the conflicts were often intragroup as much as they were between people of different races and ethnic histories.
Most diverse was the Near North Side, long an immigrant quarter, populated by Irish, Italians, Germans, and Swedes. During and after World War II, those same groups found themselves living among new African American migrants from the South and Japanese American “resettlers” (as the government called them). The Near North Side, especially, was a neighborhood of renters. Only 8.7 percent of its dwelling units were owner occupied by 1950, and, in general, this was a grittier, more transient region of the city. During the war, the Chicago Housing Authority saw an opportunity to fight some of the area’s blight (one pocket was known as “Little Hell”) by building low-rise apartment housing for the city’s fast increasing population of war workers. The first installment of Cabrini-Green, as it was called, was completed in 1943, and the people who moved in reflected the diversity of the neighborhood.11
This public housing complex was among the shiniest and newest in an