Laura McEnaney. Postwar

In Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago, Laura McEnaney offers us a unique view of mid-twentieth-century Chicago by focusing on the process of demobilization after World War II and the return to “normal life.” She frames “peacetime as process” (3) for Chicago’s veterans, tenants, landlords, workers, resettlers, and homemakers and interrogates the transition from war to the 1950s’ age of American consumerism and prosperity in ways that few historians have done. She also makes readers consider how a vast federal bureaucracy that was tasked with controlling prices, regulating workplaces, serving as prison warden for wartime detainees, and later resettling the incarcerated was supposed to suddenly cease operations at war’s end. Ultimately, she concludes that the shift from military mobilization and heightened government regulation to regular civilian enterprises was a rather complex and tumultuous process. McEnaney begins by revisiting the conflicts between tenants and landlords that she explored in a rather fascinating and celebrated journal article several years ago. Using tenant complaints from federal NARA records over rising rents and lack of repairs, she shows us in detail the varied claims that Chicagoans made in search of quality affordable housing. These previously unmined records also reveal how landlords and building managers responded. Everyone, she argues, was essentially in search of a “peace dividend” after all the years of sacrifice, doubling up, and yearning for independence. This chapter touches upon two broader themes: tensions over the role of the federal government in the “private” domain of the housing market and what McEnaney identifies as “class struggle” beyond the workplace. Both are intriguing topics and give insight into how ordinary life reveals conflicting ideologies about capitalism, the right to housing, and the proper role of government in a democracy.

Bureaucracy · Demobilization · Government (linguistics) · Peacetime · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Prosperity · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies