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Nightmares on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945–1953
Laura McEnaney
For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web project at <http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/>.
Great subjects are illuminated best by small dramas.
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| —V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival |
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| 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. This story is about city dwellers as they lived and worked in Chicago in the years following World War II. It is about ordinary people who faced big challenges in making a decent life for themselves—only one family per apartment now, maybe a television set—and their smaller but still serious trials, such as sharing dirty bathrooms off dark hallways. It is about too many people trying to live in spaces too few and too small. It is a war story, too, but not in the conventional sense. Here, the city apartment building is the locus of struggle, cramped with working families and singles, old-timers and new wartime migrants, African Americans and white ethnics, all of them contenders for the long-heralded postwar "good life." Ultimately, this story is about their high expectations, hard choices, and reluctant trade-offs as they went from making war to making peace. |
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These stories are less well known, partly because we historians have a bit of the journalist in us; we can be more attracted to the epic battles, the grand personalities, and the crises of war than to its less epic aftermath. But war is also a process, a long and complicated course of agency building, economic planning, diplomacy, and morale management, activities that both precede and follow the actual battle. Stories about that long ramp up to the fire fight, but even more so the often longer ramp down, can be overlooked by both popular and academic historians. War's totality, however, deserves our careful scrutiny—whatever our subfield—for war reaches deeply into civil society, scrambling some things and strengthening others, long after the fighting stops. Historical reflection on the years following a war can illuminate what people thought they were fighting for, what they gained and lost, and what they expected in return for the sacrifice. For these and other reasons, we should dissect our postwar epochs as carefully as we have our wars.1 |
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The demobilization (or reconversion) from World War II was a colossal national undertaking of policy, politics, and people, and yet now, sixty years later, we know more of the contours than the finer details. Scholarly attention to demobilization has been fleeting, in terms of both time and space. One historian says that we have divided the era awkwardly into categories of prewar and postwar and have thus "leap-frogged over this war-to-peace transition."2 Demobilization generally serves either as a postscript for a book on the war itself or as a hazy backdrop for subsequent Cold War dramas. The histories that actually linger in these years tend to locate the action in the suburbs. We have chased people in their cars, driving from city street to suburban garage, rather than staying with the folks who remained in the city—by either choice or constraint. Newer studies that treat the postwar years "as more than a nondescript interlude of numbing inconsequence," as Arnold Hirsch has wryly remarked, offer a smart urban corrective to this narrative. They remind us of "the way we never were," but in these, too, the transition to peace is still the back story. Where we do find people wrestling with peacetime's challenges, they tend to be policy makers, labor's elite, or organized workers at the point of production. These accounts have yielded important insights about liberal alliances and their push for progressive policies in war's aftermath, but they grow out of a somewhat sterile policy literature and are more attentive to economic planning, corporatism, and workers' control.3 |
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