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CHAPTER 1

Bathrooms, Bedrooms, and Basements: War Liberalism in the Postwar Apartment

This is a story about the “greatest generation” that has not been told. It is not a story about homeowners in the suburbs but about renters in the city. It is not primarily about male veterans, although they are in here, as they should be. It is about city apartment dwellers as they lived and worked in Chicago in the years following World War II. It is about ordinary people who faced big challenges, like making a decent life for themselves—only one family per apartment now, maybe a television set, and their smaller but still serious trials, like sharing dirty bathrooms off dark hallways. It is a war story, too, but not in the conventional sense. Here, the apartment building is the locus of struggle, cramped with families and singles, old-timers and new wartime migrants, African Americans, white ethnics, and newly freed Japanese Americans, all of them contenders for the long-heralded postwar “good life.” Ultimately, this story is about their high expectations and hard choices as they went from making war to making peace.

In August 1945, Americans experienced military victory most immediately as a housing crisis. The nationwide shortage of decent, affordable housing stressed everyone. In the fall of 1945, over one million families were uncomfortably “doubled up” with relatives or friends, and the Labor Department estimated that by the end of 1946, roughly three and a half million families would be seeking housing in a market with just under one million vacancies. The apartment shortage in Chicago was so bad that officials practically ran out of adjectives to describe the scene at the end of 1945: “critical,” “acute,” “tragic,” “chaotic,” “impossible.”¹ The riddle of how to solve this crisis was an early test for the people who lived it and the policymakers who had to fix it. Indeed, the housing dilemma pointed to crucial questions first raised by the mobilization, now relevant and urgent in the demobilization: What did the state owe its citizens after requiring such far-reaching war service? Was it obligated to ease the predicted financial strains of reconversion, or was peacetime synonymous with laissez-faire? With the wartime emergency over, were Americans still obliged to act as a united front, or could they let up on unity and pursue individual interests rather than national ones? These were hard questions, worked out on the ground first, and so the details from inside Chicago’s apartments matter: no hot water, a constant chill, missing toilet paper. These quotidian scenes point to a larger truth about war, something the victor can handily forget: making peace is combative and messy.

We tend to imagine Americans as homeowners, not renters, in the years after 1945. But in this period federal rent control was one of the most important of all wartime housing policies, and the case of rent control is a different way to explore this nation’s housing history. Created just a few months after Pearl Harbor, rent control established federal price ceilings for apartments in the cities and towns where war production spiked the demand for affordable housing. It effectively curbed landlords’ ability to artificially and exorbitantly raise the rent on their worker tenants. Its reach was vast—three-quarters of Americans lived in rent-controlled areas by 1946—and enduring, remaining in many parts of the country into the early 1950s.² In Chicago, rent control ended in 1953—at the end of the Korean War. It was the most invasive of all wartime price controls and yet the only measure to survive the aggressive postwar political attacks on the wartime state. Its continuity from one decade to the next, from one war to the next, shows how wartime exceptions can become peacetime policy. It was powered by a combination of federal regulation and local bravery. Mostly one by one, apartment dwellers fought back against what they saw as predatory behavior—increasing rents for decreasing quality. This quieter housing protest was the close cousin of the spectacular labor unrest around the country that started just as World War II ended.³ Yet the rank and file of Chicago’s apartment buildings picketed by petition, not strike, and their targets were not conglomerates but landlords who often had family budgets just as modest as their complainants. Theirs, too, was a grassroots declaration that war’s spoils should be shared.

These stories from the front line of the housing wars feature some of what popular audiences have found so inspiring about the “greatest generation” tales: individual resolve, teamwork, hope, and enterprise—all for a better life after the war. And yet these accounts also show what people did for themselves and to one another as they tried to achieve that better life. Some citizens 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 aging city. Seventy percent of the Near North Side’s single-family and multifamily dwellings had been built before 1920, but that was not much higher than for the city as a whole (63 percent). The difference was in how owners treated their buildings and the people who lived inside them. War migrants who could afford only low-grade worker housing on the Near North Side lived much like European immigrants in American cities at the turn of the century. A notably high percentage of Near North units (40.5 percent) were classified as “dilapidated” and had no bath or sink, a rate over twice as high as that for the city. Not surprisingly, the people who lived in these flats suffered in other ways. They had higher rates of tuberculosis and infant mortality, and 71 percent of them received some type of public assistance, again, more than double the rate for the rest of the city (31.2 percent).¹² Closest to Chicago’s downtown, the Near North Side simply absorbed more of World War II’s disruption and displacement; it was the first stop for working-class migrants trying to find their wartime footing, who would eventually try to settle in somewhat better neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Lakeview.

Lincoln Park’s pre-World War II immigrant population looked similar to the Near North Side’s, with the addition of Poles, Slovaks, and other eastern Europeans. After 1945, European-origin immigrants still predominated, but an increasing number of African Americans and Japanese Americans decided to move north, refugees, of sorts, from the environs of the Near North Side. Still, they were a tiny percentage of a largely white ethnic population. There was just a bit more breathing space in Lincoln Park, its name reflecting the lush and expansive public park along Chicago’s lakefront. The industrial and the residential shared tight quarters, though, and the housing supply was mainly for renters, not aspiring homeowners. The Depression and war had motivated Lincoln Park’s owners to turn big flats into smaller units—and then neglect them. Public housing was in this neighborhood, too, making it some of the best of Lincoln Park’s apartment stock. Completed in 1938, the Julia C. Lathrop Homes was a New Deal Public Works Administration project, but it was open only to the ethnic whites that dominated the area’s population. When the war ended, white residents in some quadrants began to beat back a slide into the “slum” category, an effort almost always tinged by racial fears. They coalesced as something of a protective association to contain the conversions that had been the hallmark of the war and to hold landlords responsible for building upkeep. This brought some hope, mainly for whites, that postwar Lincoln Park could be a place to settle.¹³

Just to the north, Lakeview offered a vision of what working-class prosperity might look like in peacetime, but it was still a neighborhood with the markings of wartime stress, and it would be for some time. Lakeview’s native and foreign-born residents were also largely of European origin and the war did not alter that. Here, Chicago’s war workers could find modest homes and larger apartments, and they could play in their own neighborhood. For sports fans, there was Wrigley Field, for shoppers, there was a busy retail area anchored by a Wieboldt’s department store—which, despite the rationing of wartime, was still a wondrous “palace of consumption” with price points and an attitude hospitable to the working class. Lakeview had a small number of African American and Japanese American residents, likely refugees from the Near North Side who had looked for something in overcrowded Lincoln Park, and then finally found habitable space in Lakeview.¹⁴

City census data identify both Lakeview and Lincoln Park as “essentially” or “technically” residential, even though both had major industrial sections. And renters still predominated in both, with only about 14 percent of the dwelling units owner occupied, almost double that of the Near North Side but still just under half the 30 percent rate for the city. Walking down the street after VJ Day, an apartment seeker in Lakeview or Lincoln Park would see many “for rent” signs in the windows of carved up buildings, but the rooms and flats were in better shape. For example, only 14 percent of Lakeview’s dwelling units were classified as dilapidated and without private sinks or baths, a much lower rate than on the Near North Side and less than half the rate in Lincoln Park (27.5 percent). Still, this was not luxury. Many rented just decently enough to avoid the “dilapidated” category, hardly the gain they were hoping for in the peace.¹⁵

Back on Elm Street, we can see how such conditions bred conflict well before the war ended. On the 400 block of West Elm Street, Peter and Mary La Dolce were the husband and wife managers of a building that stretched over several addresses in the industrial quadrant of the Near North Side. Tenants lived in twenty-two flats, many of which had five rooms—certainly big for the time, considering how many property owners had subdivided large apartments. The building itself, 400–410 West Elm, was an older structure that resembled others in the area. The Chicago Plan Commission surveyed the vicinity in 1948 and found apartments and single-family homes of brick or frame construction, usually three stories tall; more than half were over fifty years old, built around the turn of the century. Scattered throughout were factories and warehouses as old as the housing stock: Montgomery Ward’s mail order operation, a Dr. Scholl’s plant, and an Oscar Mayer meatpacking house anchored the industrial southwestern part of the neighborhood. Large tracts of vacant land lay adjacent to some of these factories and apartments, reminders that financial ruin could move in next door and stay a while. The area’s two parks were something of an oasis, visual counterpoints to the brick and smoke, but even the Plan Commission noted that on this end of the neighborhood, “very little foliage can be observed.” For residents, this left a rather schizophrenic landscape of industrial busy and blighted idle—with little green.¹⁶

Residents living at 400–410 Elm ranged from solidly working class to poor, and their building managers were apparently not much better off. Peter and Mary La Dolce did not own the property, a Mr. Louis Brugger did. But like many owners in the neighborhood, he did not make a home there: he made money there. The La Dolces did not live in the building either. They lived only a few blocks away—a short walk, thankfully, because it was their job to deal with the almost daily needs of people living in close quarters. The La Dolces occupied a curious class position: as Brugger’s building managers or hired landlords, you might say, they had considerable power over tenants through rent collection and the prerogative to either fix a broken window or let a tenant live interminably with a cold draft. On the other hand, they were also Brugger’s employees, a relationship that began in August 1944, when they signed a lease to manage his property. They paid Brugger a flat sum per month, which gave him a steady income and relief from the daily hassles of property management. In return, the La Dolces were to run the building as a business, profiting from collecting rents that exceeded their own monthly payment to Brugger and the maintenance costs to keep things in habitable shape. Although this arrangement put the La Dolces barely a rung above their tenants on the socioeconomic ladder, as we will see, they clashed mightily over the particulars of daily life in the building.¹⁷

Figure 2. 400 West Elm Street, shown in 1966, illustrates the kind of multifamily housing typical of the area during World War II. The Brugger–La Dolce building, located just across the street, was similar but had two storefronts that had been converted to apartments during the war. This apartment building style emerged in Chicago in the 1880s, and the La Dolces’ commercial-residential structure became more common in the early twentieth century. Courtesy Chicago History Museum, ICHi-039051, Sigmund J. Osty.

Price Controls in the Postwar City

The story of how Brugger, the La Dolces, and their disgruntled tenants locked horns over the bread and butter issues of demobilization starts in Washington, DC, at the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The paper trail begins here because World War II effectively put the federal government in the business of apartment management. The need to forge what one historian calls a “connection between the city and the sword” brought the national state deeply into municipal affairs.¹⁸ Well before U.S. forces fired a shot, defense planners pondered how to harness the resources and capacities of American cities for military production. They understood that housing had to be part of their careful calibration of production and consumption. Apartment housing was of particular concern given the potential for rent inflation, a destabilizing factor in any wartime economy. Rising rents would pressure employers to raise wages, and workers would simply hop to the next city if they could not earn enough. Price controls had been tried before in the United States, in a haphazard and decentralized way during the American Revolution, and to a lesser extent during the Civil War. By the outbreak of World War I, a more centralized state was able to administer controls nationally, but the Woodrow Wilson administration kept a small operation, focusing on the production side, as that could be managed with a minimal staff.¹⁹

Familiar with the small state template of World War I, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s planners experimented first with voluntary “fair rent committees,” appointed boards of real estate, labor, civic, and military representatives who were to simply steer landlords’ pricing toward market fairness. Formed in the months before Pearl Harbor, over two hundred committees in thirty-four states tried to contain rent hikes as the country ramped up for war. But they failed to cajole, harass, or even shame owners into voluntary compliance. “Appeals to patriotism, reason, civic pride, and a sense of fair play had their limits,” says one historian, and even with “pressure techniques reminiscent of political machines” (which Chicagoans would have certainly been familiar with), the fair rent committees could not persuade landlords in American cities to hold prices steady.²⁰

After Pearl Harbor, however, what was voluntary became regulatory. “War, that prolific parent of legislation,” as one legal scholar put it, spurred Congress to pass the Emergency Price Control Act in January 1942, vesting the federal government with the power to first stabilize and then regulate prices, including rent.²¹ The act empowered the OPA to set rents at levels before any defense-related stimulus might have artificially inflated them. So, for example, an OPA number cruncher would go to Baltimore to determine a date before which the mobilization started to affect prices in that city and then set a price ceiling pegged to that date. In effect, prewar rates would determine wartime prices. To implement what it called this “maximum rent date,” the OPA created the “defense rental area,” a county (or cluster of counties) where it was evident that war production would have a deep impact on the economic landscape. If a building fell within that boundary, its landlords had sixty days to bring rents into line with rates set on the maximum rent date.

OPA officials hoped for early and easy compliance, but the Emergency Price Control Act ensured they would get it. To monitor landlords’ behavior, the OPA sent them a fairly detailed form that required them to record the size, features, amenities, and pricing history of each unit in a building—even if currently vacant. The landlord had to complete this registration form in triplicate, mail or bring the copies to the local rent control office, and then share a copy with the current tenant. Anytime an apartment changed hands, the law required the landlord to reregister it, show the new tenant the form, and get the new tenant’s signature in two places. This whole process was separate from a regular lease. It may not surprise us, then, that landlords and building managers got crabby. Rent control meant paperwork and more legal accountability, not just to extant city codes but also now to federal law. The number of buildings affected by rent control—and thus the OPA’s own paperwork—mushroomed in the months after Pearl Harbor. In March 1942, the OPA designated 20 defense rental areas in thirteen states, and by the next month, 302 were added to the list. Each “area” included several adjacent counties, so by 1946, a total of 1,232 counties had been placed under rent control, which meant that fully three-quarters of Americans lived in places where rent was controlled. The OPA estimated that rent control had covered more than 85 million people during the war, and even more, the OPA continued to add new defense rental areas as the war ended, eventually exceeding 600 in 1947, two years after VJ Day. This reach is astonishing, but the rationale was simple: to prevent what the OPA called an “inflationary bonfire” on rents and all other consumer prices.²² Sensible controls meant defense contracts fulfilled, owners compensated, workers appeased, and loaded bombers flying east and west.

The OPA itself did not survive past 1947, however, and as we will see, its political demise was embroiled in a larger debate that will sound familiar to today’s readers: how big should government be and what should it do? Rent control, the OPA’s most interventionist program, did endure, partly because everyone across the political spectrum recognized that the housing crisis had outlived the war. It remained, too, because of a desire among all constituencies—whatever their partisan leanings—to cushion the veterans’ reintegration. In fact, it was this concern for veterans’ needs that spawned a new agency that would ultimately absorb the OPA’s rent control service. In May 1946, Congress charged the new Office of the Housing Expediter (OHE) with coordinating reconversion housing programs, especially mortgage assistance for returning GIs. This was, of course, part of the famed GI Bill, the veteran assistance program that helped the (mostly white) “greatest generation” go to school, find jobs, and move to the suburbs.

As the OPA gradually dissolved from 1946 through 1947, the OHE picked up its busy rent control business, effectively lifting a wartime regulation and dropping it into a postwar housing agency. This transfer of functions put rent control back on life support, but now under the auspices of the federal Housing Expediter. The Housing and Rent Act of 1947 (and its yearly renewal) acknowledged that although the war was over, there was still “a housing emergency” that required “certain restrictions on rents” to continue. Thus, the OPA, and then the OHE, stayed on the job from August 1945 to as late as the spring of 1953, charged with determining and enforcing a “fair price” for urban tenants.²³

With rent control the law by mid-1942, the OPA had to set up shop in every defense rental area to fulfill its mandate. In large cities, from Los Angeles to New York, and in smaller outposts, like Fargo, North Dakota, or Peoria, Illinois, the area OPA (and then OHE) remained as the contact point between federal law and local experience. They were the branch offices of regulatory governance, the place where owners, building managers, and tenants would negotiate their conflict. Chicago proved to be one of the OPA/OHE’s most important locations. Although it did not have the sizable ports of East or West Coast cities, Chicago was still the “crossroads city,” a busy national and international interchange where products moved in and out all hours of the day by water, truck, and rail. This commercial bustle was largely due to the efforts of Mayor Edward J. Kelly and Chicago industrialists, who, early in the war, traveled to Washington, DC, to ensure Chicago got its share of defense contracts. Kelly (and the Democratic political machine he built) was a strong supporter of President Roosevelt and his New Deal, and he was valuable to Roosevelt because he had managed to fold more African American voters into the Democratic Party.²⁴ Still, he could not count on easy favors from Congress, and he had to compete with other aspiring “martial metropolises,” such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, whose mayors and business boosters were vying just as eagerly for a military-urban stimulus. When Mayor Kelly went to Washington, he boasted about Chicago’s access to raw materials in the Great Lakes region, its historic nexus between industry and agriculture, its transportation web, and its industrial workforce. He managed to make the case, turning the city’s factories and workers into “shadow combatants,” making Chicago an urban arsenal where fourteen hundred industries had produced $24 billion worth of war-related equipment by the end of World War II, a total bested only by Detroit.²⁵

Mayor Kelly’s Chicago moved as many people as it did products. It was the nation’s central railroad depot, “the place where Americans changed trains,” whether civilian or soldier. Chicago’s Travelers Aid Society estimated that between Pearl Harbor and March 1946, its staff and volunteers had assisted over 9 million migrating workers, military recruits, and their families passing through the city’s seven train terminals. The soldiers’ presence in the city was noticeable, not only because so many came through by train but because two of the military’s largest service centers were located just outside it. The Great Lakes Naval Training Center, for example, was the navy’s biggest training and reception facility. In addition, Chicago became a branch office for many of the civilian managers of the war. Dubbed “Little Washington” by a Chicago newspaper, the city became home for over a dozen nonmilitary wartime agencies.²⁶

Back on Elm Street, we can see something of how these large-scale transformations began to materialize. In the war’s early years, Louis Brugger rented his flats mostly to Italians, probably among the last of the Italian American community that had settled on the Near North Side in the late nineteenth century. He did not endear himself to these Elm Street paesani. Like many wartime owners, Brugger found himself in an enviable position, and he tried to profit from it. There had been little new construction in Chicago (or nationwide) during the Great Depression, and housing stocks would remain low for the duration. What one journalist called the “great defense migration” would only intensify this scarcity.²⁷ This massive population shift was a national phenomenon, of course, as migrants moved to urban cores where they could find the kind of defense work Mayor Kelly had lobbied for. World War II “was a metal-bending, engine-building, gasoline powered, multi-year conflict,” as one historian puts it, a giant stimulus to a recovery already under way in 1938, ultimately creating 17 million jobs, not to mention the 16 million spots in the military.²⁸ Between 1940 and 1942 alone, about 150,000 job-hungry newcomers came to Chicago’s Cook County, and overall, the city’s population increased 6.6 percent between 1940 and 1950, totaling 3.6 million by 1950.²⁹

Landlords like Brugger had none of this data but sensed what they saw around them—that the numbers were in their favor when reconversion began. In fact, Brugger had already been nailed in 1943 for setting rents above the ceiling set on the maximum rent date, and the OPA forced him to refund his tenants. So after VJ Day, he was surely hoping that wartime migrants would stay and rent control would go, allowing him to hike prices without pesky OPA watchdogs. Hired landlords like the La Dolces hoped for the same, because a continued shortage would keep tenants desperate and pliant, more willing to accept increases and lousy conditions, which would increase their own bottom line.

Tenants, on the other hand, were feeling newly vulnerable to the forces of the market. In almost every building, they outnumbered their “bosses,” but they felt alone and exposed. They had the capacity to rebel together, which they did at times, but we cannot romanticize them as a collective. They had to depend on one another to share tight spaces with patience and decency, while retaining the right to report the drunken neighbor, the loud radio player, or the reclusive pack rat whose junk was a fire hazard. Wall to wall, floor to floor, literally on top of one another, they bathed, slept, washed clothes, cooked meals, and did all the other mundane tasks that made a day pass. Often, they had to share rooms, toilets, tubs, and stoves, as well as smells and sounds. Higher rent bought more privacy, but most working Chicagoans could not afford the luxury. City apartment dwellers thus lived private lives in intensely public settings. As long as the housing shortage remained, they would have to live as they did in wartime—cramped, familiar, and conjoined.³⁰

Rent Crimes and Misdemeanors

In this forced intimacy of the postwar apartment building, disparate groups found themselves sharing the same real estate: Washington policymakers, Chicago rent administrators who applied the law, building owners, their managers, and tenants. Sometimes there was synchronicity and harmony, but more often there was conflict. We know more about the conflict because harmony leaves a smaller paper trail. Skirmishes, on the other hand, made their way to the local OPA office during and right after the war, and then to the OHE in 1947. Those with a grievance had to tell their tale by filling out a form, which, depending on the issue, asked them who they lived with and their relation to one another, the room or flat’s basic features (hot water? mechanical refrigerator?), the employment status and income of those in dispute, how they paid their rent (cash or check?), and the history of the building itself. And then there was blank space for storytelling, a rationale for the complaint that could elaborate on the checked boxes and short answers. Here, owners, managers, and, most of all, tenants, poured out personal stories about trying to make it after the war. These case files offer a rare and absorbing glimpse into the everyday hardships of demobilization. The volume of tenant voices in these records makes it tempting to cast these disputes as dramas of greedy landlords exploiting hapless victims, for the records reveal intentional corruption on the part of owners and genuine tenant suffering—made all the more poignant by their handwritten pleas, often in sentence fragments and crooked script, betraying an earnest exertion so as to be heard but with still failing language.³¹

The story is more complicated than this, however. To understand this triangular economic competition between owners, managers, and tenants—to really grasp what was at stake for each in the conversion to peace—we have to move into an apartment building, circa 1946. Only from the inside can we hear the perspectives of everyone in the rivalry, especially how they perceived what governance was and should be after the war. Starting with property owners, then, the end of the war marked what they hoped would be the start of a prolonged economic recovery for their ilk. They hoped fiscal policies would favor land and building ownership as the bedrock instruments of a national revival. Owners large and small felt the calamities of the last ten years had crippled them. The Depression had broken one leg, wartime regulation broke the other, and now, already on their knees, they could be knocked over completely by postwar controls. Just to stand up again, they felt they had to raise rents to recover long lost revenues. And to profit, to really thrive in the way they thought they deserved, they tried to undercut rent control by outsmarting its rules and cutting corners. As long as federal rent law remained, they were going to sabotage its implementation.

The most common landlord strategy to recoup earnings was simple: overcharge without getting caught. After Brugger’s 1943 attempt, he tried—and got caught—again, just a few weeks after Hiroshima. A tenant complaint summoned an OPA investigator to the premises on August 30, 1945, but he could not verify if anyone was being overcharged because Brugger and the La Dolces had failed to register the property.³² Thousands of owners did not register their flats (the OPA estimated that 15 percent of them were unregistered) so they could charge high above the OPA’s ceilings while flying just under its radar.³³ The frequency with which tenants complained about mysterious overcharges suggests that it was owners and managers’ favorite tactic. The records are rife with stories of tenants who asked their landlord to see the registration form and were denied the right—either because it did not exist or because the landlord wanted to hide the price the OPA/OHE had set on the maximum rent date. As Brugger’s proxies, the La Dolces intermittently charged tenants ten dollars above the registered rent from August 1944 through August 1947. They told tenants the extra money was necessary for structural improvements and maintenance, and they craftily hid their price hike by providing receipts with only the legal rent recorded. If the OPA investigated, the La Dolces could open their books and shrug their shoulders.

Figure 3. Example of a form a tenant had to complete to file a grievance against a building manager or owner. OPA/OHE administrators used dozens of such forms to track and process every kind of transaction involved in the administration of rent control. This one, filed by an African American housewife on the Near North Side, shows how much the government could learn about a landlord’s building and a person’s living conditions. Here, we can see how typewritten bureaucracy met handwritten daily life in the small details. Mrs. Goins did not pay by check, for example, there are gaps in information (we do not know why she was locked out), and she attempts to tell her own story at the end. Courtesy National Archives at Chicago (RG 252, entry 110B, box 6, folder: 353-55 West Chicago Avenue).

Just to the north in Lincoln Park, Fred and Ingeborg Lundgren used the same tactic in their small rooming house. They first came to the OPA’s attention in May 1945, when a young woman complained that she could not get the Lundgrens to give her any toilet paper or hot water. “I hope my name isn’t mentioned in reference to all this as I wouldn’t want my Landlady to make it miserable for me. It is hard enough to find a livable place nowadays.” And this is precisely where the Lundgrens’ power resided—in a citywide housing shortage that enabled owners to withhold petty things, like toilet paper, and finagle increases they knew were illegal. The cash economy of tenancy made this easy to do. Most tenants did not pay by check, which meant the only record of their payment was kept by the one who was handed the money. Tenant John Mason described Mr. Lundgren’s shady recordkeeping: “he don’t give receipts as he says he marks it on his books and if you ask again they always say we will slip it under your door, but that has yet to happen.” Whenever Mason had an overnight guest, he had to fork over five extra dollars—again, cash out with no return receipt. Like Brugger, the Lundgrens were repeat offenders. Their case file shows that after they were caught, ordered to pay refunds, and told to register their units, they would try again months later.³⁴ OPA/OHE statistics suggest most landlords held steady in this kind of violate, wait, and repay cycle. They banked on tenants’ resigned or fearful compliance, but they would not fight a judgment in court if discovered. In a typical month in 1948, for example, the OHE ordered refunds to tenants totaling $14,434, of which $11,807 “was gained by voluntary compliance agreements with violating landlords.” Court action retrieved the rest.³⁵

Another common landlord evasion was to charge a “bonus,” a bribe, really. Landlords would ask tenants to pay a one-time charge to either secure the apartment or get something extra, like a fresh coat of paint or some furniture. That charge, though, was actually a monthly rent increase spread across the whole year. The rent records are filled with tales of this creative greed. In Lakeview, Guy Le Pierres charged Effie Smith a $200 bonus just to take possession of the unit. On top of that, when she complained about the obviously dirty walls and scurrying water bugs, he told her that she would have to pay him $250 to remove thirteen layers of wallpaper and get rid of the pests. To be fair, he told her this up front, and, desperate, Smith buckled, telling him she would “take the apartment as it was” and try to adjust. She had just been evicted from a place where she had lived for twenty years because the building was sold and cut up into even smaller units, and she was now seeking another twenty-year arrangement. A widow who ran a small business from her home, Smith understood her vulnerability as a single, aging woman in a city with too many renters. “When one has a few white hairs it is not so easy to find employment and to become re-established in business. Am alone in the city without relatives,” she told the OHE. And as it turned out, Smith was merely one anecdote in a larger story of Le Pierres’s buildingwide malpractice.³⁶

The plain illegality of the bonus did not deter owners and managers from repeatedly trying it, nor did it stop tenants from willingly paying it. This is how Howard Hardy and his wife in the fall of 1947 secured an apartment above the Fireside Lounge on North Clark Street, the busy commercial artery that ran through Lakeview. After seeing a newspaper ad, Mr. Hardy went over to look at the place, but owner John Mertke told him there were lots of other hopefuls. In an affidavit, Hardy recalled that aspiring renters were told to sign a waiting list, with name, phone, and address, along with “anything else they wanted to write.” When Mr. Hardy asked about the “anything else,” Mertke said he “meant money,” and so Hardy signed his name and wrote $200 next to it as bait. But he did not actually have the money. It was a gambit to keep his name at the top of the call list.

Sure enough, Mertke phoned the next day to invite Hardy and his wife to look at the place. After the tour, Mertke asked Mr. Hardy to go out on the back porch where they could talk money man to man. Though he had promised a bribe, Hardy had to stall, but Mertke warned him that if he could not deliver the money by that evening, the apartment would be gone. The Hardys believed him, so they left immediately to see Mr. Hardy’s father for a loan, but the senior Mr. Hardy did not have the cash on hand either. With his bank closed for the day, in a somewhat ironic twist, the senior Mr. Hardy turned to his own landlady for a loan. The $200 bribe would thus travel a twisted path, from landlady to tenant, from father to son, and from anxious wannabe tenant to shrewd landlord.

Before Hardy returned with the cash, he, too, made a clever move: he phoned a friend. Maybe he had read about these schemes in the newspapers, or maybe he just had some business smarts, but he thought if his friend, John Wright, would agree to go with him, he would have an honest witness for a dishonest transaction. He knew the bonus was illegal but, desperate, he was willing to pay it as long as Wright could be a kind of living receipt if Mertke reneged on the deal or later denied receiving it. When Hardy returned, this time not with his wife but with Wright, Mertke was startled, but he quickly grasped what Hardy was up to, telling him he “didn’t like the idea” of an observer. After a long and awkward silence, he finally told Hardy to “put the money in the stove and go out on the back porch” because he did not want Hardy to see him actually take the bribe. Here, Mertke tried to remove the man paying the illegal bonus as a witness to his own bribery crime. “This I refused to do,” said Hardy, and “after a lot of conversation,” Mertke finally relented, took the bonus in full view, and the Hardys moved in.

None of this would have ever been known had it not been for Mertke’s attempt months later to raise the rent, based on what he claimed were increased expenses to maintain the building. Angry that they were being asked to cough up even more money, the Hardys complained about Mertke’s poor service, but they still did not mention the bonus, because that would have exposed their own collaboration with Mertke’s violation. They finally blew the whistle only when the rent increase case made its way through the proper channels and the OHE granted Mertke his request—ignorant about the bonus because its victims had concealed it.³⁷

This case is compelling for many reasons, not the least of which is its time line, which began when Hardy and his wife first looked at the apartment in September 1947, and finally ended in December 1950, when Mertke repaid the couple after a civil judgment against him in the U.S. District Court of Illinois. For Mertke and the Hardys, we might say, World War II’s struggles did not end until that judgment—over five years after Japan’s surrender. Another intriguing element is Mertke’s brazenness, indicative of the kind of (un)civil disobedience toward the rent law from landlords around the city. The OHE summoned Mertke to its downtown office—twice—and presented Hardy’s complaint with sworn affidavits. “It’s a lie,” he said—twice. Yet there is a clue that he may have felt some shame after all, because, after his denial, he stopped coming around to collect the rent, sending his wife instead to look Mr. or Mrs. Hardy in the eye and take their cash.³⁸ In one way, we can marvel at the perseverance of landlords like John Mertke, who tried the same schemes over and over and then invented new ones when those failed. This was at once corruption and creativity! In fact, we see a kind of canny resourcefulness from everyone involved in the bonus racket. The sign-up sheet, the bluff, the friendly witness, the stove—this was an example of owners and tenants working around a war economy’s regulations to get what they wanted. Stories about housewives’ ingenious reliance on “Mr. Black” to circumvent food rationing were part of the comedic lore of World War II, but the black market in rental housing showed the same ingenuity.³⁹

Nevertheless, owners and managers still had the ultimate clout in any standoff: the power to evict. An eviction was a chance to reregister a flat at a higher rent or to remove a perceived troublemaker. Case files from all three neighborhoods contain accounts of scary landlord rants designed to intimidate or the kind of slow drip of neglect intended to drive tenants crazy enough to leave on their own. To be clear, rent control did not prevent owners from kicking people out for all the regular reasons, like missed payments or creating a “nuisance.” Federal law offered a varied menu of legitimate eviction options. For example, owners or members of their immediate family who wanted to live in the building or who wanted to sell to another buyer for occupancy could ask tenants to leave. But when a tenant was ejected as a ploy to raise the rent, that landlord was breaking federal law. Chicago’s own eviction laws worked in tandem, not in conflict, with federal rent control, but the OPA/OHE could seek injunctions against landlords only when their rationale for eviction violated federal, not local, regulations. Administrators had no interest in superseding municipal rent codes or in serving as the local eviction sheriff.

Data kept by Chicago OPA/OHE offices show a mixed record on owners’ and managers’ compliance with eviction law. A petition had to be filled out and submitted to rent officials, and even if approved, a tenant had from thirty to ninety days to leave. Many owners tried to evict the legal way, but more banked on tenants feeling too afraid or too resigned to object to being kicked out illegally. Many evicted without notice but for a particular reason. The La Dolces, for example, used eviction to punish those who griped about their receipt ruse. When Ann Harris found out the actual price ceiling on her apartment, she tried to pay Mr. La Dolce that amount, “but he refused to take it and had me evicted,” she testified. Tenant James Green reported Mr. La Dolce’s aim: to convert his spacious flats into smaller units to collect more rent from each. “La Dolce is making rooms out of these 5 & 6 rooms as fast as he can throw people out of them,” according to Green’s affidavit.⁴⁰

The overcharge, the bonus, the eviction—these were landlords’ postwar bread and butter. It is how they made their money in a controlled market. But in the process, they were committing what I call “rent crimes,” and when confronted by their government, some unleashed their contempt for controls and even governance itself. Tenant and court testimonies capture this fury. According to one Near North Side tenant, when his landlord was ordered to refund overcharges, he shouted “I don’t give a damn for the OPA,” and that he would do what he pleased with his private property. Another in Lincoln Park said “he would not let a bunch of Communist dictators run his affairs, [and] that he would close up his property and give us a taste of [a] housing shortage.”⁴¹ In both brushes with the OPA/OHE in 1945 and 1947, the La Dolces were unrepentant and defiant. Even with their inventive accounting fully exposed before the Cook County Circuit Court in 1945, they lodged a counteraccusation, their vitriol for controls fully unleashed: “all of the tenants … have illegally conspired together to bring whatever harm and trouble they can,” they claimed. They then challenged rent control itself, arguing it was patently “illegal, invalid and unconstitutional.” Rent laws “were enacted as wartime emergencies,” they conceded, but “since this nation is no longer in armed conflict, the original purpose of the regulations have [sic] ceased to exist and therefore … all the people of the United States should not be bound” by such legislation.⁴²

They had a point. World War II was over. But its effects continued. In a 1948 case about the detention of a German citizen, the Supreme Court laid the rhetorical groundwork for what Chicago tenants knew already from experience—that “war does not cease with a cease-fire order.” That same year, in a rent control case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, a landlord argued that “wartime” should be more narrowly defined, otherwise a nation’s war powers could reach too far and last too long. The court disagreed, holding that war legislation “does not necessarily end with the cessation of hostilities,” citing the housing crisis as an example of how “the evils which have arisen from [war’s] rise and progress” could far outlast the war itself.⁴³

But Chicago landlords lived by a different clock: the war was plainly over and any extension of controls was government overreach. As they saw controls on food, tires, and cars disappear, they began to wonder why they were the only ones sacrificing. As one OPA administrator observed, “there is a growing feeling of bitterness that they are being discriminated against.”⁴⁴ This may help us understand why Le Pierres, Mertke, Brugger, and the La Dolces were not only repeated but self-righteous offenders. After all, what was the patriotic rationale for self-sacrifice now that the war was over? Why should they “hold the line on prices!” as the slogan went, when other sellers were jacking them up—and profiting nicely from it?

Owners and managers were far from powerless, however. In fact, in making their claims, they drew on several years of organized and influential resistance to rent control from coalitions of landlords, real estate agents, and builders. At the start of the war, the Chicago Real Estate Board told OPA officials that controls were “unwarranted and will be resisted.” Rents were already “at an unreasonably low level” during the Depression, they griped, and wartime controls would introduce yet another disincentive to build new properties. At the end of the war, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), by now a powerful organization of real estate professionals, spread this message nationwide, dispatching speakers to decry rent control’s continuation. This organizing effort increased NAREB’s membership, as landlords and real estate agents around the country formed local NAREB affiliates to strengthen the organization’s lobbying muscle. In the spring of 1949, as Congress once again debated rent control’s extension, seven hundred Chicago landlords gathered to plan a protest march on Washington. At yet another meeting, Joseph Dixon, president of the National Home and Property Owners Foundation, called rent control “a scheme of Communists and Socialists” who were operating “behind the scenes,” according to the Chicago Daily Tribune. “We are tired of begging [for] crumbs from our own table. We want a fair deal, too,” he said. Dixon’s foundation also published an open letter to Congress, calling the OHE director a “Housing Dictator” whose agency “creates and continues shortages, instead of promoting more housing.”⁴⁵

Such charges were inflammatory but not baseless. In fact, rent control did have a dampening effect on the construction of urban housing because it encouraged developers to look outside city limits for more favorable investment opportunities. World War II had been an industrial boom but a construction bust. Continued shortages of materials and labor, investment in suburban development versus urban renewal, and the devotion to single-family housing kept most working people in the overheated rental market for years after the war—in Chicago and across the nation. The demand nationwide was for low- and middle-cost urban housing, but the low profit margin in this sector did not attract private developers, who were already eyeing more lucrative opportunities in the suburbs. And yet, during the war, rent control did not contract the market for home buying as much as real estate agents and builders had claimed, because home sales were not subject to price control.⁴⁶ We see a rise in homeownership in the forties, then, not because of new construction—the raw materials were simply not there—but because of what the Department of Labor identified as a “drastic shift” of properties from the controlled rental market to the unencumbered home sales market. Homebuilders thus joined real estate officials and landlords to zealously condemn rent control, because if people could remain in affordable rental housing, their profitable postwar building boom was threatened. Chicago’s OPA rent director, John Joseph Ryan, encountered this collective hostility when he attended a 1945 meeting with the Chicago Metropolitan Home Builders Association. Appearing with a host of other federal officials, he alone was “roundly ‘booed’” by the audience.⁴⁷

As much as owners liked to complain about rent control as “big government,” they knew there were perfectly legal ways to collect more money from their tenants. After all, the OPA/OHE was proconsumer, not anticapitalist, and Congress’s rent laws represented limits on, not eviscerations of, the sanctity of property ownership. A few examples from the law make the point. If there was a spike in property taxes or operating costs, or if owners made structural improvements or increased services (such as janitorial), they could claim “substantial hardship” and ask for and receive a rent increase. Landlords or managers could incontestably raise the rent if they discovered more tenants had moved into the apartment than originally agreed upon. To make these or any other cases, though, one had to fill out a petition, submit receipts, and then wait—sometimes for weeks, often for a few months. And if landlords felt columns and boxes could not convey their plight, they had space to write, to frame their balance sheet as a postwar survival narrative.⁴⁸ Thousands of landlords did this in an attempt to grow their income the legal way. In the first five chaotic months of the peace, landlords’ petitions for increases held steady at about 2,300 per month, and thousands more telephoned with questions. In that same five-month period, the OPA tallied an average of 24,565 phone calls per month and administrators calculated that just over half of these came from landlords.⁴⁹

A more sinister read of these calls might suggest that owners sought guidance about the law not to follow it but to flout it. From the start of the war, price control evasion was a serious problem in every category, and it grew worse as the war came to a close. The paradox of evasion for owners was that the more they tried to outsmart the law, the more the government adapted and extended the reach of the despised regulations. As one economist has found, “to suppress evasion the OPA was forced to seek more and more control over the market place,” which was exactly what owners did not want. The OPA/OHE staffs kept trying, though, because they were “frequently frustrated” as they tried to reign in violators. In part, this was due to small staffs having to chase more and more offenders. Enforcement was the bedrock of rent control, as the Roosevelt administration had already learned from the failure of voluntary fair rent committees. Local branches of the OPA/OHE had their own compliance and enforcement units; they were the only muscle to ensure a judgment rendered was carried out. But declining congressional appropriations weakened that muscle. Throughout rent control’s existence, local offices were understaffed and incredibly backlogged. This was especially true in the final stages of the war, as controls lifted on certain commodities and it looked as if all regulation would disappear.⁵⁰

Without enforcement, OPA/OHE staff feared, it would be a market free-for-all in cities across the country. Chicago’s office is but one example. At the start of 1947, chief attorney Milton Gordon told his director that budget cuts and staff resignations now threatened a near collapse of its enforcement operation at a time when the housing crisis seemed to be getting worse. “The word has already gone around in this town,” he said, “that landlords can violate with impunity,” for his tiny legal staff could only bring so many cases to court. “Landlords who are represented by attorneys … know we are just whistling in the dark when we talk about sending the case over to Enforcement for action,” he griped.⁵¹ At the end of that year, the Chicago region’s chief administrator, Oscar Abern, felt frustrated and resigned. “The violators are having a field day and some should be put in jail,” he said, referring to the city’s largest building owners, who were now routinely demanding anywhere from $500 to $2,000 in bonus payments for furniture, decorating, or just because they could. But even the rent crimes of the so-called small violator, like John Mertke, whom Abern blithely described as “the average citizen-landlord possessing the normal avarice,” needed to be checked, for any evasion was corrosive to the entire operation.⁵²

For the “average citizen-landlord,” rent control was an economic burden, not a boon. Landlords were stuck with federal regulation so they had to either work with or around it. One of the tenets of war liberalism—the notion that one is deserving because of a wartime sacrifice—here became a strain of antiliberalism, for owners believed that the state was simply in their way, maybe even conspiring against the little guy trying to run a small business that foundered in wartime but could now prosper in peacetime. Some felt genuinely bewildered and betrayed by their government, because they were providing a scarce commodity in the midst of a crisis. But average violators like Mertke were not in a position to defeat federal rent control, so they tried to undermine it where and when they could. Indeed, they repeatedly gambled that their small violations could be their war reparations.

Tenants Fight Back

To counter owners’ evasions, the OPA/OHE relied on the eyes and ears of tenants, and here we move into the apartment building from their perspective, looking at how they, too, used a federal program to protect their postwar fortunes. Chicago had a long history of owner apathy, tenant activism, and official neglect. The advent of city building codes and their sporadic enforcement had remedied very little before World War II. War-driven migration pushed people into housing that had already deteriorated during the Great Depression, thus fusing the misery of the 1930s with the overcrowding of the 1940s. New construction, what there was of it, offered no relief. In Illinois, the OPA reported at the end of 1946 that “only about ten percent of the houses started this year have been completed and of the units completed very few are offered for rent.”⁵³

Housing officials could not find a bright spot in the economic forecasts. At the end of 1946, one analyst reported: “The housing situation in all areas is as bad as ever.” By March 1947, an OHE memo reported that new construction in the entire region was “almost at a standstill,” with twenty-eight areas reporting continued or intensifying shortages. In the fall of 1948, Chicago Area Rent Office director Norman Shogren tried another way to count. He tracked “apartments wanted” ads for several weeks in his Sunday Chicago Daily Tribune, but here, too, the results were grim; the “wanted” columns were multiplying, not shrinking. He estimated that this was “the greatest amount of advertising” by apartment seekers since the war began. To even place such an ad, seekers had to part with one dollar per line, leaving him to conclude “that people are desperate.”⁵⁴

As we have seen on Elm Street, owners tried to capitalize on this desperation by subdividing apartments, and these conversions then became the architectural inheritance of the postwar generation. The Chicago City Council had regulated some aspects of these conversions, encouraging owners in 1940 to install doors to separate newly divided flats, thus giving tenants a second emergency exit. The council further strengthened the codes in 1949, but the city’s confusing regulations proved baffling for the average tenant or landlord to understand. Chicago’s code enforcement, too, was decentralized and poorly staffed and managed. Most importantly, the 1949 code revision applied only to new construction. Given the old age of so many of Chicago’s buildings, this meant most postwar renters received no protection from their city government.⁵⁵

Federal rent law was grafted onto this system of local ordinances in a way that helped fill the gaps for tenants. Although the OPA/OHE could regulate only price, the agencies nevertheless became embroiled in disputes over codelike issues whenever owners and managers withdrew a promised service, such as heat, in exchange for that price. In some ways, federal officials were doing the kind of enforcement local codes were not. This federal-city interface appears to have worked well in Chicago; throughout the reconversion, the OPA/OHE consulted regularly with city housing officials and consistently reported “splendid cooperation” with municipal judges when taking a landlord to court. OPA/OHE lawyers were careful not to overstep their bounds, navigating a tricky situation in which they had to enforce federal law in a local context. Mayor Kelly’s management of city housing from 1933 through 1947 was plagued with the corruption and political favoritism typical of urban housing operations. In contrast, as part of “Little Washington,” the OPA/OHE was not accountable to Chicago’s patronage system, so legal staff could pursue their work unfettered by provincial systems of rewards and favors. The clarity of these lines enabled cooperation with little irritation. Milton Gordon noted proudly that a Chicago judge “considers us as friends of the court.”⁵⁶

This friendship worked well for tenants. Case files show that after four years of effective wartime regulation, Chicago renters felt it was their federal, not local, government that could better protect them in the postwar. Statistics on tenants are hard to track because the surviving OPA/OHE logs did not record whether a caller was a landlord, building manager, or tenant; they just counted the total number of people who either showed up to or telephoned the downtown office. Still, we can get some good impressions from monthly activity reports, which contained both numbers and stories from the trenches of the apartment regulation business. Rent control staff estimated that owners slightly outnumbered tenants, in part because they had more time and money to pursue their grievance.⁵⁷ Small landlords tended to represent themselves, but owners of larger buildings could hire a lawyer and get repeated postponements of their required visit to the OHE office (or court) to settle the case. Working-class tenants, on the other hand, had to miss work, which meant their time was money, lost on top of the overcharges or bonuses they may have already paid. Even so, if we imagine that tenant queries comprised 40 to 45 percent of the totals, the numbers are impressive. In an average month in 1946, there were 25,000 “personal calls,” that is, office visits, and 23,000 phone calls, which meant the staff was responding to almost 50,000 consumer requests per month.⁵⁸ Indeed, the human traffic was so heavy that rent officials had to assign two policemen full-time to simply manage the crowds.⁵⁹ Through 1947, an average of almost 26,000 (per month) came in person and 33,000 telephoned. If a particular policy change was announced, these already high numbers could spike even higher. In August 1947 alone, for example, 45,000 Chicagoans went to the OHE office looking for guidance on Congress’s new Housing and Rent Act.⁶⁰ Fully four years after VE Day, the OHE was still taking in an average of almost 1,100 tenant complaints per month. Between July 1948 and May 1949, the OHE office handled almost 350,000 office visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence.⁶¹ Even into mid-1950, the Chicago Area Rent Office was still opening new branch stations to help tenants and landlords understand and follow the law.⁶²

Mondays were the worst, with crowds snaking out from the counter to the door and all the way to the elevators down the hall. Office directors wrote detailed monthly reports that routinely lamented their backlogs, staff shortages, and internal inefficiencies. They sounded like interior designers when they puzzled over furniture, traffic flow, and sound, as they tried mightily to improve the public’s experience of coming to the office. Every effort was made to cut down on wait times, improve seating capacity, and give complainants more privacy, both because they genuinely wanted satisfied “customers” and because they thought a short wait might mean that people would “not get a chance to sit around and agitate each other.”⁶³ In fact, they worried a great deal about office mood swings. On any given day, some combination of over eight hundred owners, managers, and tenants showed up in person, a potentially explosive mix if people on different sides of a balance sheet had to sit next to one another until they were called. One OHE attorney saw overcrowding as “a serious psychological hazard,” for if one interviewee were to “raise his voice and attempt to shout down the negotiator, the idea [could] easily spread to all other interviewees. On the rare occasions when some person feels moved to deliver an impassioned address, he has an audience in full view to inspire him.”⁶⁴

Seemingly everyone, from the typist to the most senior administrator, pitched in when crowds grew too large. And it was just hard work—a test of patience and compassion to absorb the urgency, anxiety, or anger of another human being. Almost every person visiting or phoning had a fretful question or gripe, and the volume and pace was wearying. Indeed, reports from 1945 through 1951 offer a portrait of civil servants working long hours in a futile attempt to keep up with the demand. In one of his monthly summaries, Milton Gordon said wryly, “I look forward to the happy prospect of being able to perform my duties during the regular working hours.”⁶⁵ Interestingly, Gordon’s prescient OPA predecessor had predicted this state of affairs for the postwar: “The end of the war and the transition from war to peace will undoubtedly make our job more difficult. It will be complicated by an increasingly unfriendly attitude on the part of landlords, by desertions from our ranks and by the impaired morale of those who are left to carry on the fight. In my judgment, effective rent control is more important now than ever before. Those of us who remain must do everything in our power to maintain morale and to hold the line.”⁶⁶

This is precisely what renters wanted—someone to hold the line, and someone to help them fight when a landlord crossed it. From inside their crowded flats and converted basements, a different attitude about the state materialized. Living conditions after the war ran the gamut from acceptable to marginal, to a new category penned by one of Brugger’s tenants: “ant fit for a dog.”⁶⁷ Tenants’ eagerness for state intervention is easy to understand if we survey the complaints from the Near North Side, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, a catalogue of inadequacy and indignity. Dirt preoccupied many of them. Those whose rent included a weekly supply of fresh linens griped about reusing soiled towels and sheets because of cuts in maid service. Complaints of missing toilet paper popped up with some frequency. Many renters on the Near North Side (41 percent) shared bathrooms, so they did not control how often the supply was replenished. It is easy to imagine the irritation of sitting down to an empty roll and the humiliation of repeatedly asking for such a necessity. Bathing, as well, could feel like an insult when a tenant could not rely on a regular supply of hot water. Many said they received it only in the evening or on weekends; some received a steady stream in the winter but not in summer. Others found it difficult to acquire water itself, because of the labyrinthine way apartments and homes had been carved up. On the 300 block of West Chicago Avenue, for example, in a poor and largely African American quadrant of the neighborhood, all the tenants in the Milton Durchslag Realty Company’s apartments griped about hot water, but some even had trouble getting the cold. George Mangrum had moved to the building in 1944, and he told the OHE in the summer of 1952 that for years he had been carrying hot water from the kitchen to the bathroom because of the way Durchslag’s remodeling had reconfigured the plumbing.⁶⁸

If clean linens, toilet paper, and hot water were often scarce, garbage was plentiful. Especially in the lower-income areas, renters griped about the filth they encountered simply walking through a hallway, using a shared bathroom, or emptying their own trash off a back stairway. In Durchslag’s building, a group of African American tenants complained in 1949 that a mounting pile of garbage was creating a health and fire hazard. According to Raymond Waters, who had been living there since late 1943, “the back stairs is so full of garbarg [sic] you can’t use thems if you drop a match we won’t have no home.”⁶⁹

Figure 4. The OPA/OHE received letters, postcards, and telegrams from both named and anonymous tipsters reporting rent crimes in their neighborhood. Sometimes these were filed by building residents too afraid to identify themselves, and in other cases, a friend or relative of the aggrieved tenant was the whistle-blower. This one came from a worker in one of Chicago’s many branch offices of the federal government (hence the moniker “Little Washington”). He, presumably because the building in question was a men’s boardinghouse, wanted to remain anonymous but nevertheless used his official government stationery, probably a gambit that his tip would get faster attention. Courtesy National Archives at Chicago (RG 252, entry 110B, box 47, folder: 211 E. Superior Street).

Such conditions collided with tenants’ high hopes that the living would get easier after the war, so they became as resourceful and creative as their landlords. They were no angels. Some of their tactics were legitimate, while others were clever violations of the law. On the lawful end, tenants who could not afford a rent might barter with the landlord or building manager, trading a reduced price for cleaning up around the property or stoking the furnace in the morning. Other survival strategies were reminiscent of the turn of the century, when tenants turned their living rooms into workrooms or sublet a room in their own small flats. In fact, many of the landlord-tenant disputes turned on this issue of subleasing. Federal law stipulated that owners had a right to know exactly how many people occupied their building, and even one new resident could justify a rent increase. But many tenants sublet on the sly, for smuggling in a few others to reduce the rent was faster and less confrontational than filling out forms or having a quarrel with the owner. The housing shortage created a seminomadic urban population eager to find shelter, making it easy to find subtenants. All one had to do was put out the word—and not very far, for it was often kin who bunked together. When OPA investigator Elmer Hedin first visited West Elm Street in August 1945, he found people living cheek by jowl: “Practically every tenant in [the] building has roomers,” he observed. Odessa Wallington, for example, sublet with her seven children from Herbie Smith, almost certainly a relative. There may have been close to twenty people living in Smith’s flat, and “only a few are registered,” Hedin noted. This covert arrangement lasted over a year, until the La Dolces discovered it and evicted Wallington and her children as “squatters.” Stories of how people doubled up for the duration are well known, but it is important to recognize, as well, that even into the midfifties, there were about two million married couples or single parents still living with relatives.⁷⁰

Operating on the cheap was not unique to landlords and managers in low-income areas. Owners of high-end properties, too, tried to augment their postwar revenue by cutting services, and wealthy tenants lamented the decline with the same fury as their poorer neighbors. On Chicago’s Gold Coast, elite tenants inhabited luxury “suites” that had been built during the city’s apartment boom of the 1920s. These tony residences were a short bus ride from the La Dolces, but in terms of status and space, they were a world away. While Odessa Wallington squeezed seven children into one room, an ad for a luxury apartment on Lake Shore Drive boasted “the clothes closets, even, are rooms in themselves.”⁷¹ But these pampered tenants, too, found that their postwar dollar did not go very far. Residents of a building on Astor, one of the most exclusive streets in the city, accused their real estate management company of cutting services while raising rents. Dr. John Delph’s letter to the OHE sounded a lot like those from West Elm Street tenants: “Service has fallen consistently,” he protested, citing poorly lit stairwells, general filth, and unreliable heat—bursts of hot air and then nothing. “I most emphatically do not favor another rent increase,” he told officials.⁷²

The majority of Chicago’s tenants, however, earned much less than Dr. Delph. They were working class, and rent control was a simple matter of protecting what they had and reaching one more rung up the ladder. In fact, tenant claims echo the kind of “rights-conscious consumerism” Meg Jacobs found in her study of wartime and postwar meat consumers.⁷³ But controlling the price of rent was different than regulating the price of a hamburger. The regulation of food (or any household item) took place at the store—a public space (although privately owned) where volunteer price checkers could spy inflated prices, invite an OPA inspection, and later see the evidence of their activism. The regulation of rent, however, was a much more invasive kind of state intervention, a point overlooked by scholars of price controls. Most reports of violations could be resolved only by a visit from an investigator, whose job it was to peer into bedrooms and bathrooms and make notes about dirty sinks, peeling paint, and broken furniture. Investigators looked at names on mailboxes and compared that with how many they found inside the apartment. They examined hallways, basements, and trash areas. They looked for rats and bugs. They knocked on doors and asked questions of whoever happened to be home during their inspection, and if no one answered, they walked next door to talk with a neighbor. Violators were summoned to the Chicago OPA/OHE office for a “compliance conference,” a face-to-face encounter where they had to make nice in the company of a government overseer. After that conference, a landlord could still make things unpleasant for a tenant in all kinds of subtle ways—just barely enough heat, a repair job that solved one problem but made another, or a constant scowl that made it a chore to ask for anything. Those who reported a grocer’s price gouging never had to face such nuisances—they could just leave the store and shop elsewhere. Not so for renters amid an enduring shortage. Price control of housing, then, necessitated an cozy clasp with the state’s regulatory arm. For owners and building managers, the reach was too long. For the tenant majority, the state was a welcome houseguest.

A return to Guy Le Pierres’s Lakeview building illustrates just how far in the state could reach. When OHE investigator Robert Sullivan went to the property in the summer of 1951, he found no one at home in any of the fourteen units. This was not unusual, as many tenant queries came from people who worked all day. In fact, one of the letters that brought Sullivan there in the first place was written by a married couple, who hoped a home visit might be an option because their jobs made it “impossible for us to appear at your office personally.”⁷⁴ To learn if Le Pierres had done to others as he had to widow Effie Smith (demanded a bonus), Sullivan entered the building to copy names from the mailboxes, which he then used to send each tenant a complaint form. Normally, if tenants were on site and willing to talk, an investigator would enter their apartment to sketch a layout and record its condition. Although he found none of Le Pierres’s renters at home, Sullivan’s mass mailing yielded a whole paper trail of offenses, including a sad confession from one tenant about an off-the-books sublet from a “chronic alcoholic” brother whom she had to care for.⁷⁵ This kind of candor seemed to pour out freely, as tenants in writing and in person told interviewers about illness, addiction, family stress, and finances. They were willing to share because they had to either plead a case or defend themselves, with both money and living conditions at stake, so we have to read their accounts with some discernment. Moreover, official complaint forms invited this disclosure—even required it—because tenant stories were legal testimonies used to render legal judgments.

Investigators had to determine how much of a complaint was fact or fiction. Yet when they pried, they often found the stuff of social work, not housing regulation. When Louis Klar needed some inside information to finish a 1948 case, he had to find a particular tenant, but his search took him deeper into the man’s life than he anticipated. When he did not find the tenant at home, he knocked on doors and canvassed the block, even peeking into local taverns, hoping that someone might point him out. He finally found a neighbor who explained that the man’s wife had died in that apartment, and so he had moved to another flat nearby, but she did not know exactly where. He asked the neighbor about children (so he could check school transfer records), and work (so he could check Social Security records), but she knew little more than his loss and then a departure. She could only tell Klar that the man “made a living doing odd jobs.” Klar even checked the Post Office, hoping for a forwarding address, again, coming up short. It was a series of legal dead ends for him, but a tale of deeply personal loss and likely economic insecurity for the man, given his sporadic work at “odd jobs.”⁷⁶ The alcoholic brother, financial worry, the lack of options when things got hard, these were the real challenges of demobilization for the urban working class and poor.

Typically, an intrusive investigation like Klar’s was followed by another personal encounter, the compliance conference, where a rent control staffer would bring landlord and tenant together to help them find common ground. Here again, disclosure was part of the deal, because, after all, compromise is built on knowledge of another’s predicament. But in order to share mutual troubles, to tell the kind of stories that invite empathy, not enmity, safety and privacy were required, yet this was hard to find in such a bustling office. We can well imagine the awkwardness of telling a stranger with official power—and the inevitable eavesdroppers in the waiting area—about a personal financial or family problem. And we cannot assume it was only tenants who told tales of woe. As we have seen, small owners and building managers committed rent crimes because they, too, felt squeezed. The tact and steadiness required to hear shared suffering and broker a solution made it one of the harder jobs in the OPA/OHE. And this is why compliance staff kept rethinking the traffic flow and furniture arrangement, for they had a genuine sensitivity to the vulnerability that underlies all conflict resolution. “The lack of even the illusion of privacy lessens the dignity of the interview and decreases the chances of full disclosure by the person interviewed,” lamented one staff attorney.⁷⁷ Compliance conferences usually lasted less than an hour, but they could feel interminable for tenants, and even when a judgment went their way, landlord retaliation back home was always possible.⁷⁸

The case files show that OPA/OHE staffers were idealists and realists about this process. They believed in talk—that face-to-face conversation could bring mutual understanding and fair settlement. But when it did not, they never hesitated to take a landlord to court. Rarely did the compliance meeting become tense beyond what might reasonably be expected, but when it did, it could get weird. Milton Gordon recounted how one landlord snatched the required registration form from an investigator, “tore it in half, put it in his pocket, and made his getaway down the elevator before he could be intercepted.” Of course, they had carbons. One landlady tore up a compliance form that she had just signed, “jammed it in her mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it.” Unfazed, legal staff thought it was “more of an admission of guilt than actual harm to the case.” These were rare and bizarre, of course, but Gordon thought it important to record the crazy, because he thought it captured something of landlords’ hostility to rent control. The accounts “reflect public attitude toward the agency and compliance with the regulations,” he lamented.⁷⁹

The Plight of the Middle Manager

Landlords’ antipathy to state regulation was shared by their building managers, who did the dirty work of apartment management without the financial security of ownership. Their stories take us into the third and final part of the triangular relationship in Chicago’s apartment housing: the economic plight of the hired landlord. Here we can see how a class of custodians, essentially, came to embrace the antiliberalism of their owner-employers. When a rent investigator showed up, the building manager was often the first to run interference for the owner, and if a violation was uncovered, the restitution often took a bite out of the manager’s income. When Mr. La Dolce called Odessa Wallington a squatter, he cared not for the wear and tear of eight people in one room but about his lost income. As historian Paul Groth found for managers earlier in the century, unless an operator owned the building, “its revenue was not substantial.”⁸⁰ Rent records suggest the same was true at midcentury. In working-class Chicago, managers were more like tenants than owners; they just happened to have found something a bit more secure. In times of scarcity and price inflation, it was a shrewd financial move to hire oneself out as a caretaker, for it provided a modest but steady income (one could still hold another job), and, in a time of rampant turnover, it offered lodging with minimal chance for eviction (a safety net no tenant had).

It was not easy work, though. On West Elm, Brugger had outsourced his responsibilities to the La Dolces, insulating himself from the chore of keeping humans suitably sheltered. This way, he could draw a profit without the drudgery. Not so for the La Dolces. As hired hands, situated between ownership and tenancy, they had to interact with Elm Street renters—listen to their complaints, meet their eyes, and weigh their own financial interests against others in their economic tribe. They had a fragile kind of economic security, for, in order to stay on as Brugger’s managers, they had to charge tenants enough to cover both their own rent to Brugger and the building’s operating costs—and then still more to support other needs and wants. And they had to keep tenants quiet while doing that. After all, the luxury of absentee ownership was refuge from the riffraff, so managers had to keep the building profitable without provoking an insurrection.

We can see how building management was more economic drain than windfall if we go just a few blocks south of Elm, to 211 East Superior Street, where OPA investigator R. S. O’Toole found people sleeping in “as many double deck bunks as the room will hold.” Here, the manager, Mrs. Lancaster, had annexed the basement as sleeping territory, trying to squeeze yet more rent from the bowels of the building. According to O’Toole, it was “mostly GI’s” who lived here in the fall of 1946, each paying $10 to $12 per week for the privilege of sleeping in bunks six to a room, accommodations roughly on par with their wartime barracks. Mrs. Lancaster promised breakfast and daily maid service to the vets, but O’Toole noticed that at the time of his 4:30 P.M. visit, the beds were still unmade. His observations were confirmed by an anonymous tipster, who identified himself only as “a government worker who is still looking for a room.” After touring the premises, the worker reported what he saw, mocking Mrs. Lancaster’s claim that a space divided “by a sheet of dirty comp-board” could actually be called a “living room.”⁸¹

True, Mrs. Lancaster broke her promises of a good first meal and a clean room, and she flagrantly overcharged for both, but there are clues that she was not living the good life either. When O’Toole confronted her about registration violations, she told him: “don’t blame me I have nothing to do with the registering,” adding she was in “no mood” to file the paperwork. Undaunted, O’Toole continued through the house, where he discovered a bunk bed in the basement, another slapdash accommodation that passed for a “room.” But he then spied another bed, which turned out to be Mrs. Lancaster’s. In fact, in order to get to their bunks, the “guests” (as O’Toole wryly called the vets) had to walk right through Mrs. Lancaster’s quarters. The location of Mrs. Lancaster’s bed—in the dank basement of an old building, adjacent to her own lodgers—suggests that her situation was little better than the GI tenants who slept stacked like firewood just a few feet away.⁸²

Cases throughout the Near North Side and elsewhere suggest a precarious comfort for the city’s hired landlords. In one way, they were owners’ accomplices, trying to shift the costs of running a building to those under its roof. On the other hand, they faced real financial predicaments, akin to their tenants, which is why they either squelched or fought renters’ complaints so doggedly. Unlike absentee owners, they lived in the transactional world of the apartment building—fielding tenant demands, calculating their worthiness, and taking people’s cash—so they had an acute sense of how price controls affected the money (and effort) going into and out of a building. They shared their owners’ lament about government excess in the postwar housing market, and they, too, grudgingly accommodated rent control by trying to outsmart or obstruct it. In all three neighborhoods—and around the city—there was a whole world of rooming and apartment house managers who were gaming the system. Some merely tried to raise utility bills to pay for the electricity their tenants used for a new appliance on the scene: the television. Others, such as the La Dolces, were guilty of more egregious rent crimes, left alone by the owners to battle it out with tenants for the same scraps of reconversion. Certainly, Chicago’s building managers had some of the same tools as owners (overcharging or cutting services to the bone), and as we have seen they could and did use those tools to make life pretty miserable for tenants. But without the financial safety net of ownership, many used the modicum of power they had to grab what they could from even less powerful tenants. They occupied the middle floor of the upstairs-downstairs relationship between owners and renters, and this location gave them little financial certainty. In fact, it only gave them a front-row seat to see the instabilities of tenancy and the trials of ownership. Neither looked like the bounty that had been promised during the war.

The Debate in Washington

As tenants, managers, and owners debated controls in their apartment buildings and compliance conferences, a similar conversation was taking place in the hearing rooms and hallways of Washington, DC. Here, the stakes were more ideological than material; none of the wealthy policymakers had to worry about actual prices, but they did worry about the politics of prices—that is, about creating the political atmosphere in which their postwar vision could prevail. Liberal or conservative, they saw demobilization as a window—the window—of opportunity to advance an economic agenda for decades to come. Policy liberals inside the Truman administration, such as OPA staff, believed that an activist, regulatory state could spread the peace dividend widely to American worker-consumers. In the midst of the war, an OPA researcher warned that demobilization would “tax the nation’s ability to the utmost as surely as has the war. We must be ready for it.” At the end of the war, the OPA sounded a full alarm: “There’s danger ahead…. Housing shortages, increasingly severe since the war began, now total 10 million dwelling units…. It will take years for deficiencies to be wiped out.” That danger was described a month after Hiroshima in one of the OPA’s regular radio shows:

The place is Chicago…. The wild cheering has subsided…. The milling throngs that had jammed the Loop have all gone their individual ways…. The city has settled down to normal living again…. All of a sudden pandemonium breaks loose! Moving vans flood the streets. A mass exodus starts. Family belongings are piled up on the sidewalks. Distraught tenants who have been evicted sit glumly on their suitcases … wondering what spot they will next call home…. Discharged war workers are in a frenzy, wondering where they will get the money to pay the exorbitant rents that are being charged. Almost overnight the city has changed from calm serenity to wild confusion … and all because rent controls have been removed!⁸³

These scenarios picked at a fresh scab. They deliberately aimed to evoke painful memories for a nation of poorly housed Great Depression survivors. The wartime OPA and the postwar OHE hoped to sustain rent control by scaring their working-class customers into demanding it from below.

At the top, though, the flashbacks came not from the Depression but from World War I, when “the demobilization debacle of 1919” led to massive inflation and labor unrest, an economic calamity President Truman and his planners wanted desperately to avoid. Truman’s staff, however, disagreed about how to head that off. They had to weigh not only economic but electoral factors, for the 1946 congressional elections were on the horizon. Trying to push through a liberal domestic agenda while managing foreign policy as a diplomatic novice, Truman himself remarked: “I’m telling you I find peace is hell.”⁸⁴

The central dilemma before him was whether to stimulate consumption or production to ensure a healthy reconversion economy. Here, rent control was just one piece of the broader discussion about how much of the wartime state should remain intact in the postwar—and how much it should steer the economy. This was still an open question in 1945.⁸⁵ In the powerful business community, there was at least some concession that the big state Roosevelt had built did not ruin the economy—that the market could tolerate some dose of government management. But business leaders also saw demobilization as the chance to change course, the moment to turn a big ship around, slowly and carefully, but still purposefully in a direction away from activist government. They had opposed the New Deal, and what they saw in 1945, argues one historian, seemed nothing less than “a landscape of defeat … a newly gargantuan federal government,” created by war, now continued in the postwar because it had worked.⁸⁶

They saw what they wanted to see, however—a myopia hardly unique to conservatives, but unlike working-class tenants, they had more power to politicize their fears and wants. In fact, it had taken only about 150,000 people, a staff smaller than the U.S. Postal Service, to regulate consumer prices during World War II.⁸⁷ This was hardly oversized government, but the intrusions were real for building owners, real estate interests, and builders. Ironically, owners often complained about the wait for judgments on their cases, griping that the OPA and OHE offices were too small and understaffed.⁸⁸

To counter claims about bloated government, OPA chief Chester Bowles fought with numbers. In December 1945, he reported to Congress that wartime rent increases had not surpassed 4 percent. Every OPA speech, report, and brochure was packed with charts and graphs to show that Uncle Sam had put his foot down on price gouging and he had prevailed. Independent measures verified this. From 1945 through 1947, the cost of rent for an average moderate-income family rose just over 5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But for items that had been decontrolled, there was postwar sticker shock. Clothing, for instance, rose a whopping 42 percent.⁸⁹ These statistics were not an abstraction for consumers. People experienced prices—outrage at an expensive but needed winter coat, frustration with a diet lean on costly dairy products, fear about rent hikes, and relief when good economizing met family needs for the month. It is no wonder, then, that they saw in controls a leveling effect—on both prices and passions.

It was only when controls did not work that consumers turned on them. This was the case for meat prices, as historian Meg Jacobs has found. When Congress, the Truman administration, and the OPA could not find common ground and then delivered a botched program, consumers started to see price regulation as “ineffectual,” resulting in “diminished public support for an activist state.” This misses the staying power of rent control, however. The “transformation of political consciousness” may have happened at the dinner table, but the feeling did not last past dessert.⁹⁰ As economist Hugh Rockoff has found, “Even after public opinion turned against price regulation as a whole, support for rent controls remained strong.”⁹¹ Renters—consumers all—kept the faith because they saw good governance in action.

Yet conservative opposition at the top was more powerful than this support from the bottom. Truman’s own head of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, John Snyder, led the charge from within. He predicted that decontrol would unleash industrial production, creating jobs and restoring both efficiency and investor confidence. And his allies in the business community welcomed this, for they had been waiting for their liberation day: the return of laissez-faire. They met and planned just as energetically as consumer advocates, propelled by a worry that the American economy was drifting toward what the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) called “collectivism.” After months of fierce debate, shaped and paid for, in part, by the NAM and other business groups, Snyder and his influential allies ultimately prevailed, and almost all controls began to disappear following the 1946 conservative electoral triumph in Congress.

Their campaign was effective because it purposely confused things. As items like meat, gasoline, clothing, and furniture were decontrolled, rent control remained, but it was hard to get that message out above the din of the anticontrol lobby. And that was precisely their larger aim—to bungle, to muddy, to deliberately weaken and overly complicate government programs so that consumer-citizens would begin to lose faith in them. It was hard enough for citizens to track which items had become decontrolled right after the war and which were now just scarce, so the inflamed rhetoric about family meals without butter or roast beef enabled the NAM to influence conversations at the kitchen table about what government was really for after the war. Good governance can foster a mood of satisfied expectation for more. Continued grassroots support for price controls could build a broad political culture of tolerance—even desire—for a government that would referee the interests of rich and poor. For conservatives, this was dangerous. They wanted to spoil the mood.⁹²

It is hard to tell how postwar Americans followed this political and economic debate. After food, rent was the second costliest item in an average working-class family budget, so the politics surrounding its price were worth tracking.⁹³ The OPA and OHE spoke to tenants not only in numbers but in narrative, and their impressive public relations operation featured “rent stories” that made their way into local newspapers and radio shows. In the first months after the war, the OPA worked especially hard to keep the rationale for rent control in front of people—and to counter the NAM’s anticontrol publicity blitz. Organized labor, women’s groups, and veterans’ organizations were all targeted for outreach, with “human interest stories” featuring “the war worker’s family saved from eviction by OPA rent control,” or “the expectant wife of an Army or Navy man who was looking for a room because her landlady said she couldn’t have a baby in the place” (an actual case in the Chicago files). The OPA even promoted “Rent Stories Involving Animals,” in which the OPA ruled against a landlord who tried to collect more rent by claiming a little boy’s dog was a “tenant.”⁹⁴ All of this was to convince citizens that even with some fatigue for wartime controls, an activist state could still deliver for them after the war. It could even save the family pet from landlord greed.

In the end, though, rent regulators believed that public confidence in the postwar state really began at their customer service counter, where a frightened tenant or aggrieved landlord had to share a personal story with a stranger. In the first weeks after VJ Day, Chicago’s OPA thought about what that office visit should convey to landlord and tenant alike as the war receded in memory. “This is a period … in which our population is still highly mobile,” said a manager, so demobilization demanded that officials work even harder to publicize rent control’s benefits. This would be especially important, he said, as some OPA staff left the agency to return to their prewar lives: “It will be easy for the public to believe that the program is slipping if they see a new face every time they come to an Area Rent Office, where for years they have seen the same one.” In a way, he was suggesting that rent control’s preservation depended on kindness and acquaintance—the state as neighbor, not bureaucrat. The “new faces” of postwar rent control, he warned, “must be given the best … in the way of procedures and morale,” or the public would lose faith in the very notion that government could protect them.⁹⁵

Over a year after VJ Day, an OPA staffer told a radio audience: “Rent control doesn’t just happen to a community. The request must come from the people.”⁹⁶ The stories from Elm Street and elsewhere show that Chicago’s working class did more than ask; they demanded in a tone and language that was more political than deferential. They went looking for their federal government in the postwar city. Most had no telephones, checking accounts, typewriters, or carbon paper, and they still managed to write out complaints in the requisite triplicate. They were afraid, but they still showed up at the downtown office, waited in long lines, and told their stories, risking eviction or the slow, incremental retributions, like waning heat. They invited the state into their flats, throwing open the doors to bedrooms and bathrooms to let federal officials see local greed. As the worker who reported Mrs. Lancaster’s GI slum insisted: “If your office is still on the job, and I hope it is, take a look at this DUMP.”⁹⁷ But landlords and building managers were “the people,” too, and they rejected the home visits that exposed their rent crimes—which they saw as survival strategies. Rent control was for them antidemocratic, not just a speed bump en route to the good life. Where it cushioned the blows of demobilization for tenants, they claimed it inflicted new ones on them.

The conditions on the Near North Side, or in Lincoln Park and Lakeview, are unique to neither time nor place. Yet the experience of total war had intensified both human need and want. How could it not? World War II’s privations renewed expectations for a minimum standard of living.⁹⁸ In effect, the war became a stimulus for a postwar stimulus—a mood of anticipation that martial service would reap material reward, sponsored by the government that had summoned them to service. This working-class war liberalism was deployed not just by individuals but by cities, too. American industrial cities were “seething with resentment at the problems that the global struggle had left and vociferous in demanding government help to solve them.” They, too, wanted what one California commission called “war winnings.”⁹⁹

The history of federal rent control reveals how scrappy and resourceful people could be to get those winnings. It is striking how much the war figured in their arguments for economic fairness, whether owner, manager, or tenant. Everyone wanted something from the war. This is where the consensus ended, though. The city apartment proved to be ground zero for this fight—a deeply intimate space for a very public class struggle. It was a tight squeeze, for demobilization’s pressures brought more than just housing woes. New urban migrants brought their own postwar fantasies and expectations when they arrived in the city. As we shall see, when Japanese Americans moved from prison housing to Chicago’s apartment housing, it forced another set of conversations about what the wartime state could take and what it should give back when the fighting stopped.