LITMIR.BIZ

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What is remarkable about the war liberalism of the World War II era is its endurance. In many ways, it is the “post” in the postwar. Well after the fighting stopped, Americans continued to make war-related claims for the state’s help and for some kind of war-related cultural reverence, as well. Arguably, the World War II generation still has this claim on our nation’s conscience, after several more wars, and now in a new century.

      Extending World War II’s history into the postwar, relocating it in city neighborhoods where working-class voices are more amplified, can help us rewrite a national history of postwar liberalism, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it seems scholars have prematurely declared the demise of postwar statism, and, just as importantly, they have missed the centrality of war to liberal discourse. Much of the scholarly narrative traces a “rise and fall,” a tale of postwar possibility dashed by conservative ascendance and corporate power, and a hopeful and demanding electorate depoliticized by the lure of “stuff”—the consumer goods they had been missing since the thirties.²⁰ Scholars earlier identified Americans’ “fear of the state” and their “slow repudiation” of government intervention as an ideological hangover of World War II. As a result, “most … did not think that government could—or should—intervene very far in economic matters.” A coordinated “business assault on labor and liberalism,” reenergized by a new strain of anticommunism, this time related to Cold War aims, all frustrated liberal hopes that the vestiges of the warfare state could be reengaged or reimagined in the postwar. It was the “end of reform,” and the “emergence, or perhaps crystallization, of a powerful postwar rejection of the New Deal project.”²¹

      Much of this was true. Corporate elites, congressional fiscal conservatives, and anti-New Deal ideologues of various stripes had all launched attacks on “big government” well before VJ Day; their creeds and words seeped into the policy discourses of demobilization, and then into the Cold War mobilization.²² Yet despite this antistatist offensive, Chicago’s working-class residents wanted to see government in action. Their fusion of faiths in growth consumerism, social safety nets, and government arbitration was hardly a repudiation of postwar statism. That interpretation may make sense in broad strokes, but I have found a resilient and expectant war liberalism among the urban working class that lasted well into the next war in Korea. It may be more accurate to say that the 1946 election was a vote against inept statism rather than an outright rejection of it. In fact, what seems more plausible is that demobilizing citizens got cranky about government intervention only when it failed to fulfill their high expectations.²³ This means that our relationship with government—with governance—has been cozier than we have thought, a claim conservatives have been refuting since Reagan’s presidency. In fact, Reagan’s own brand of World War II nostalgia circulated widely, and it still has a grip on the part of our politics that uses memory to make policy. The kind of blasphemy I want to commit here is to puncture some of those pieties about the postwar. We can no longer narrate the transition to peace as a straight line to privatization, consumption, domestic cocooning, and Cold War antipathy to the state’s nonmilitary functions. The stories from Chicago’s neighborhoods suggest a slower, more crooked path.

      Our postwar narrative changes, too, if we redefine what we mean by the “state.” Scholars of political history have described the American welfare state as a joint enterprise of public and private, a combination of government-funded and government-administered programs and privately managed provision. Yet the term “private” does not quite capture what we see in the American welfare state, especially after World War II, when federal funds poured into the “family service agencies,” as they were called, to meet the needy where they were. In fact, the “official” national state delegated many functions to these local agencies.²⁴ Working-class Chicagoans could not distinguish between federal, state, municipal, or charitable funding streams when they leaned on local resources, but they used them all. Indeed, they turned to many “states” in the postwar city: the Travelers Aid Society when they arrived at the train station exhausted and disoriented, the Young Women’s Christian Association when they needed a housing referral, the local Office of Price Administration to fight rent hikes, the local outpost of the Veterans Administration to claim GI benefits, and the neighborhood settlement house for almost everything else. Their state was referee, resource, and referral wherever it could be found, wherever it was accessible and seemed safely approachable. Sometimes their neighborhood state helped them hold their national state accountable to get what was promised, playing the role of intermediary. This was especially important for Japanese Americans whose national state had just imprisoned them. In essence, the state was, as historian Linda Gordon puts it, “more than government.”²⁵

      Exploring war’s aftermath as its own historical process means we cannot relax into the familiar time lines and terminologies of war making. This makes my job as writer and your job as reader a bit harder. Trying to historicize peacetime is tricky, for how do we pick a date when the war ended? I put this question to my students when I pivot from World War II to the Cold War, and it always sparks a lively discussion that upends their high school textbook notions of history as start and stop. The fact that World War II was punctuated by Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima makes it tempting to adopt a conventional time line, but we have to be willing to sit with some chronological fuzziness here. Scholars are still debating the Cold War’s time lines, and the “war on terror” continues to defy easy periodization. My focus is not on official declarations, cease-fires, and treaties but on war’s “private times,” the home front recoveries that should also count as “wartime.” World War II held many and varied endings for people—chronological, geographical, material, even emotional: a GI’s premature discharge in 1943 sent him stateside to start his psychological recovery, an early release from internment in 1944 launched a reentry into a life interrupted for a middle-aged Japanese American man, and an African American couple’s hunt for fair housing extended their postwar well into the 1950s.²⁶

      This chronological confusion is aggravated by the policy incoherence of the immediate postwar years. After 1945, we find policymakers rapidly demobilizing but not necessarily demilitarizing—a new “era of war-but-not-war,” as one historian puts it.²⁷ There was simultaneous talk of domestic tranquility and nuclear panic, an emerging cold war and a hot war in Korea, a reverence of U.S. military expansion, but an equally nagging unease about its costs.²⁸ Some groups made passionate claims on their government for new rights, while others lodged equally vigorous arguments for small government and states’ rights. As Americans congratulated themselves on their postwar bounty, they fought each other over war’s spoils. In other words, the postwar United States was a state of contradictions.

      This means, then, that there will be some intentional ambiguity in my war story. We cannot call what comes right after World War II “militarization,” although we see the hints of it. It is too early for that Cold War characterization, especially if we are foregrounding the worldviews of the urban working class instead of national policymakers. The war loomed large, to be sure, but ordinary Chicagoans thought about it in terms of their local recovery, not as the path to global hegemony.²⁹ “Postwar,” “peacetime,” “the peace,” or the “aftermath” will generally signal that we are moving through Chicago in the months and years after VE and VJ Day, but at times, the endings people defined as their own “post” will situate us. I will use the terms “demobilization” and “reconversion” interchangeably, although, at the time, reconversion was often more associated with industrial transition and demobilization with cutbacks in defense activity, such as troop reductions. Still, the press used both terms and many people understood them to mean the same thing: undoing the war.

      A focus on the urban working class means we will follow people who worked for wages, who rented a room or flat, and who had to strategize to survive or thrive. Before the rise of a more widespread and durable suburban middle class, working-class people tried to make a go of it. They asked for things from more powerful people—on paper and in person—and we must pause to appreciate the ask. That took time and labor and often carried real risk. The cumulative power of those individual asks was not a mass movement but an effort nevertheless to build a postwar society more responsive to the needs of renters and wage workers—the ordinary people who had won the war in some fashion, whether in uniform or out. Their stories reveal both the creativity

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