Nightmares on Elm street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945-1953

Journal of American History

Volumn 92, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 1265-1292

  McEnaney, Laura ^a  

^a WHITTIER COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33751532463     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/4485891     Document Type: Review

References (170)

1. On war as a historical process, see John R. Gillis, ed., The Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick, 1989);
2. and Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, 1995).
3. On war as an urban process, see Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York, 1992).
4. Jack Stokes Ballard, The Shock of Peace: Military and Economic Demobilization after World War II (Washington, 1983), vii.
5. See also Mark D. Van Ells, To Hear Only Thunder Again: America's World War II Veterans Come Home (Lanham, 2001), vi.
6. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago, 1998), viii;
7. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York, 1992).
8. Newer studies on the postwar city include, for example, Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003);
9. and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996).
10. On postwar Chicago, see Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto;
11. Wendy Plotkin, "'Hemmed In': The Struggle against Racial Restrictive Covenants and Deed Restrictions in Post-World War II Chicago," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 94 (Spring 2001), 39-69;
12. and Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side (Chicago, 2005).
13. On demobilization's history, for economic and legislative issues, see Ballard, Shock of Peace; and for veteran issues,
14. see Van Ells, To Hear Only Thunder Again.
15. Lizabeth Cohen discusses reconversion's policy and social history in Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), 100-165;
16. Meg Jacobs, too, covers demobilization's price control politics with some attention to consumers in Meg Jacobs, '"How About Some Meat?': The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941-1946," Journal of American History, 84 (Dec. 1997), 910-41;
17. and Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005), 179-261.
18. On Harry S. Truman's reconversion fiscal policy, see Michael W. Flamm, "Price Controls, Politics, and the Perils of Policy by Analogy: Economic Demobilization after World War II," Journal of Policy History, 8 (1996), 335-55.
19. For treatment of reconversion's economic policy history, see Alan Brinkley, "The New Deal and the Idea of the State," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, 1989), 100-112;
20. on reconversion's labor politics, see Nelson Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era," The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 ibid., 122-52.
21. George Lipsitz is the exception here, offering a social, cultural, and labor history of war's aftermath, but his is not a history of demobilization per se; see George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana, 1994).
22. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York, 1998), xxx.
23. Studs Terkel, "The Good War": An Oral History of World War II (New York, 1984).
24. Works that challenge nostalgic histories of World War II include Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, 1994);
25. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds., The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II (Chicago, 1996);
26. Roger W. Lotchin, ed., The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War (Urbana, 2000);
27. and Richard Polenberg, "The Good War? A Reappraisal of How World War II Affected American Society," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 100 (July 1992), 295-322.
28. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 11, 2001, sec. 14, p. 3.
29. Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 20.
30. This argument challenges an interpretation that can be found in many general histories of the postwar period, but its most recent iteration is in Jacobs, who claims that the postwar failures of the Office of Price Administration (OPA) represented a "transformation of political consciousness," resulting in "diminished public support for an activist state" after the 1946 elections: Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 229-31.
31. Similarly, Alan Brinkley discusses "a fear of the state" in the postwar years: Alan Brinkley, "World War II and American Liberalism," in War in American Culture, ed. Erenberg and Hirsch, 320-21 ;
32. see also James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York, 1996), 59-60.
33. Cohen finds eroding popular support for price controls, but her analysis offers nuances not found in others; see Cohen, Consumers' Republic, 100-109, 129-32, esp. 105n124.
34. Brinkley also traces liberal policy makers' disillusionment with regulatory practices in Brinkley, "New Deal and the Idea of the State," 100-112.
35. See also Flamm, "Price Controls, Politics, and the Perils of Policy by Analogy," 350-51.
36. Information on neighborhood geography can be found in Chicago Plan Commission, Chicago Land Use Survey, vol. 2: Land Use in Chicago (Chicago, 1942).
37. Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago's Near North Side (Chicago, 1929), 4.
38. I will refer to those who owned an apartment building as "owner" or "landlord." The term "building manager" refers to those who operated but did not own a building. Rent control documents reveal careless usage of the two terms, as officials often called a building manager a landlord when, in fact, he or she did not own.
39. Chicago Plan Commission, "Ten Square Miles of Chicago: A Report to the Land Clearance Commission," June 1948, pp. 3-6, Municipal Reference Collection (Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago, Ill.).
40. Case Records, folders: La Dolce, Peter and Mary, box 42, entry 110, Sample Rent Enforcement Case Records, Region VI, 1942-1953, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter, RG 252 (National Archives and Records Administration - Great Lakes Region, Chicago, Ill.).
41. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1-2.
42. On rent control's history, see Neil H. Lebowitz, '"Above Party, Class, or Creed': Rent Control in the United States, 1940-1947," Journal of Urban History, 7 (Aug. 1981), 439-70;
43. and Monica Lett, Rent Control: Concepts, Realities, and Mechanisms (New Brunswick, 1976).
44. On Chicago specifically, see Wendy Plotkin, "Rent Control in Chicago after World War II: Politics, People, and Controversy," Prologue, 30 (Summer 1998), 111-23.
45. For a legal history of rent control (national and international), see John W. Willis, "A Short History of Rent Control Laws," Cornell Law Quarterly, 36 (1950), 54-94.
46. On wartime urban planning and housing, see Philip J. Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations during World War II (Knoxville, 1978), 80-119.
47. Willis, "Short History of Rent Control Laws," 54-55.
48. Lett, Rent Control, 2-5;
49. Lebowitz, '"Above Party, Class, or Creed,'" 442-53.
50. Perry R. Duis, "Symbolic Unity and the Neighborhood: Chicago during World War II," Journal of Urban History, 21 (Jan. 1995), 201.
51. Information on wartime Chicago taken from Perry R. Duis and Scott LaFrance, We've Got a Job to Do: Chicagoans and World War II (Chicago, 1992), 3, 97, 103.
52. On train station traffic, see Mrs. A. L. Tidball to Statistical Department, April 12, 1946, folder 15, Travelers Aid Society of Chicago Papers (Department of Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Ill.).
53. Funigiello, Challenge to Urban Liberalism, 3-38, esp. 3.
54. See also Plotkin, "Rent Control in Chicago after World War II," 112.
55. Population figures on Chicago's African Americans are in Philip M. Hauser and Evelyn M. Kitagawa, eds., Local Community Fact Book for Chicago, 1950 (Chicago, 1953), 6, 39;
56. and Evelyn M. Kitagawa and Karl E. Taeuber, eds., Local Community Fact Book, Chicago Metropolitan Area, 1960 (Chicago, 1963), 31.
57. See also Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Duncan, The Negro Population of Chicago: A Study of Residential Succession (Chicago, 1957).
58. On black migration to Chicago, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York, 1992).
59. Chester Bowles's testimony reprinted in OPA, A Home You Can Afford (Washington, 1946), 27.
60. U.S. Department of Labor, "Current Labor Statistics," Monthly Labor Review, 65 (Dec. 1947), 730.
61. Jacobs, '"How About Some Meat?,'" 933;
62. Cohen, Consumers' Republic, 102.
63. Nathan Katz, "When the Last Boys Came Back: How the U.S. and Britain Handled Demobilization after the Last War," Survey Graphic, 32 (Dec. 1943), 516;
64. OPA, Rent Control Protects You (Washington, 1945), n.p.
65. On Truman, see Flamm, "Price Controls, Politics, and the Perils of Policy by Analogy," 337-42, esp. 337;
66. Ballard, Shock of Peace, 155-74;
67. and Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 221-45.
68. On the politics of controls in relation to housing, see Barton Bernstein, "Reluctance and Resistance: Wilson Wyatt and Veterans' Housing in the Truman Administration," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 65 (1967), 47-66;
69. Richard O. Davies, Housing Reform during the Truman Administration (Columbia, Mo., 1966), 40-58;
70. and Lebowitz, '"Above Party, Class, or Creed,'" 459-61.
71. On rent control's transformation and ultimate weakening, see Lett, Rent Control, 2-5;
72. Lebowitz, "'Above Party, Class, or Creed,"' 457-63;
73. and Plotkin, "Rent Control in Chicago after World War II."
74. Housing and Rent Act quoted in U.S. Department of Labor, Bruno Schiro, "Residential Rents under the 1947 Housing and Rent Act," Monthly Labor Review, 66 (Jan. 1948), 14. Because the OPA administered rent control until early 1947, well after the war ended, and the Office of the Housing Expediter (OHE) gradually absorbed its rent control activities from late 1946 through early 1947, I will use the acronym OPA/OHE, except when the specific case being discussed was adjudicated specifically by one agency or the other.
75. U.S. Department of Labor, Lester S. Kellogg and Dorothy S. Brady, "The City Worker's Family Budget," Monthly Labor Review, 66 (Feb. 1948), 133-70.
76. Cases are drawn from the OPA and OHE'S rent control records, located in the National Archives, Great Lakes Region, Chicago. I examined disputes in three neighborhoods: the Near North Side, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview. I reviewed 51 cases, 11 of which were just outside of my three areas, leaving me with 40 cases in the three neighborhoods. Each case file contained some combination of the agency complaint and response forms, investigators' notes and official reports, affidavits, correspondence, and, sometimes, court documents. These rent disputes were neither unusual nor exceptional, for OHE officials selected these cases for the archives as representative of the tens of thousands that came before them - in Chicago and throughout the rest of the midwestern region. The rest of the case files were destroyed.
77. Elmer Hedin to R. R. Anderson, memo, Aug. 30, 1945, folder: La Dolce, Peter and Mary (2), box 42, entry 110, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
78. Affidavit, Jennie Turnage, ibid.;
79. affidavit, Odessa Wallington, ibid.;
80. affidavit, Otis Jackson, ibid.;
81. affidavit, Katie Booker, ibid.;
82. affidavit, Essie Smith, ibid.;
83. affidavit, Bessie Welch, ibid.;
84. affidavit, Josephine Battles, ibid.;
85. affidavit, Ruth Donaldson, ibid.;
86. affidavit, Felix Henley, ibid.;
87. affidavit, Isabelle Lewis, ibid.
88. Chief to Information Officer, memo, Oct. 17, 1945, ibid.; affidavit, James F. Green, Aug. 21, 1947, Tighe Woods, Acting Housing Expediter, OHE, v. Peter La Dolce and Mary La Dolce, 45C 8347, Circuit Court of Cook County, Ill. (Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County Archives, Chicago, Ill.); affidavit, Frank Welch, Aug. 19, 1947, folder: LaDolce, Peter and Mary (2), box 42, entry 110, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
89. Handwritten notes, Aug. 28, 1947, folder: La Dolce, Peter and Mary (2), box 42, entry 110, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter; La Dolce, Answer, Nov. 17, 1945, Woods v. La Dolce and La Dolce.
90. Report of the Legal Staff of the Chicago Rent Section on Rents, Vacancies, Etc., in Chicago, March 28, 1942, folder: Report of Legal Staff of Chicago, box 1, entry 175, Reports of Field Inspectors Concerning Local Office Operations, 1942-1947, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter. On the opposition of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB),
91. see John Joseph Ryan to Tom Tippett et al., memo, July 5, 1945, folder: Narrative Reports, 1945 (2), box 6, entry 107, Narrative Reports of Area Rent Offices, 1942-1951, ibid.
92. See also Lebowitz, "'Above Party, Class, or Creed,'" 449-54.
93. Landlords' organized opposition to rent control can be found throughout the OPA/OHE records, as both federal and local officials kept track of such activities. "An Open Letter to Congress," Quincy Herald-Whig, March 1, 1949, clipping, in folder: 1948, box 4, Administrative Files, Chicago Regional Office, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter;
94. see also Property Owners News, April 19, 1948, ibid.
95. U.S. Department of Labor, "Effect of Wartime Housing Shortages on Home Ownership," Monthly Labor Review, 62 (April 1946), 560-66.
96. On rent control's effect on the housing market, see Glenn H. Beyer, Housing: A Factual Analysis (New York, 1958), 53, 55.
97. Lebowitz suggests that rent control would have lowered landlords' profits had Congress not made at least a few modifications to the law; see Lebowitz, '"Above Party, Class, or Creed,'" 462.
98. On builders' hostility, see Ryan to Tippett et al., memo, May 4, 1945, folder: Narrative Reports, 1945 (2), box 6, entry 107, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
99. OPA, Some Answers to Landlords' Questions about OPA Rent Control (Washington, 1946).
100. In fact, the OPA found that the net income of "the vast majority of landlords" had increased during the war because vacancies had disappeared, price controls held other commodity expenses down, and landlords had to do far less redecorating to attract and keep tenants: Some Answers to Landlords' Questions about OPA Rent Control ibid., n.p.;
101. see also John J. Scofield to District Rent Executives and Area Rent Directors, memo, April 12, 1946, folder: Executive Memos, 286-398 (1), box 1, entry 174, Serial Memoranda of Regional Rent Executive, 1942-1946, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
102. Harold B. Farley to Rae E. Walters, memo, Jan. 16, 1946, Area Statistics from D-501 Reports, Aug. 1945 through Dec. 1945, Chicago Defense Rental Area, Region VI, Jan. 15, 1946, folder: Narrative Reports, 1945 (1), box 6, entry 107, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter. Average comes from a tally of January, February, March, May, and June of 1946, Area Rent Office Operating Reports (April was missing). Reports for 1946 in folders: Narrative Reports, 1945 (2), ibid.;
103. Narrative Reports, Jan./June 1946, Reports for 1946 in Folders: Narrative Reports ibid.;
104. and Narrative Reports, July/ Dec. 1946, Reports for 1946 in Folders: Narrative Reports ibid.
105. On police presence, see Parley to Walters, memo, March 14, 1946, folder: Narrative Reports, Jan./June 1946, ibid.
106. Almost half of the cases reviewed had women involved in managing the building - as owners (part of a husband-wife ownership team) or as a hired landlord (often single, sometimes part of a hired husband-wife management team). Unfortunately, because the OPA/OHE used landlord as the catchall term for anyone who received rent payments, there is often no distinction between an owner-manager such as Kathrine Stertz or a hired landlord such as Mrs. La Dolce. Kathrine A. Stertz to Honorable Director of the OPA, May 1, 1946, folder: Stertz, Kitty (1 of 4), box 67, entry 110, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
107. Miss Bette Ackerman to Mr. Samuel Broyd, Aug. 11, 1947, folder: Stertz, Kitty (4 of 4), ibid. Ackerman spelled her name as Bette, but all other records use Betty.
108. Handwritten reports of Examiner, April 10-11, 1946, folder: Stertz, Kitty (1 of 4), ibid.
109. Time, April 29, 1946, p. 26.
110. Details of the case are also offered in North Loop News, June 27, 1946, pp. 1, 6;
111. Chicago Daily Tribune, April 16, 1946, p. 17;
112. Chicago Daily Tribune ibid., April 17, 1946, p. 25;
113. Chicago Daily Tribune ibid., April 18, 1946, p. 8;
114. Chicago Daily Tribune ibid., April 19, 1946, p. 3.
115. Clippings of the North Loop News articles can be found in folder: Stertz, Kitty (3 of 4), box 67, entry 110, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter; the Chicago Daily Tribune was found at the Chicago Historical Society. One account suggested that Ackerman had a friend who worked at the Chicago Daily Tribune, enabling her to get the coverage.
116. Cora Brooks to OPA, n.d., received Feb. 20, 1946, folder: La Dolce, Peter and Mary (5), box 42, entry 110, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter. Mr. E. Radtke to Mr. O'Conner, March 5, 1946, folder: 4322 N. Kenmore Ave., box 29, entry 110B, Area Rent Select Samples, 1943-1951, ibid.; this housewife signed her letter in her husband's name, a not uncommon practice for married female letter writers in these rent cases, who may have felt a letter in a man's name might have carried more weight, given the gender conventions of the era. Ackerman to Broyd, Aug. 11, 1947, folder: Stertz, Kitty (4 of 4), box 67, entry 110, ibid.
117. Chicago Plan Commission, "Housing Goals for Chicago," 1946, p. 4, Municipal Reference Collection;
118. Woods to Tippett et al., memo, Nov. 5, 1946, folder: Narrative Reports, July/Dec. 1946, box 6, entry 107, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
119. Home ownership on the Near North Side stalled in the postwar years; a mere 8.7% of all dwelling units were owner-occupied in 1950. For the city as a whole, the figure was just under 30%. Even by 1960, these numbers had not changed much: the city's owner-occupied units climbed only to 32.7%, and on the Near North Side the rate actually dropped to 6%. On postwar housing trends, see Davies, Housing Reform during the Truman Administration, 40-41;
120. and Jon Teaford, The Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore, 1993), 99-126.
121. On race and housing trends, see Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 18-29.
122. On postwar housing trends nationwide, see U.S. Department of Labor, "Trends in Housing during the War and Postwar Periods," Monthly Labor Review, 64 (Jan. 1947), 11-23.
123. On Chicago's homeowner rates, see Hauser and Kitagawa, eds., Local Community Fact Book for Chicago, 1950, 5, 39;
124. and Kitagawa and Taeuber, eds., Local Community Fact Book, Chicago Metropolitan Area, 1960, 3, 31.
125. Jacobs, '"How About Some Meat?,'" 921.
126. Tenants Statement, Agnes Weidenherner, Dec. 31, 1949, folder: 215 East Erie, box 17, entry 110B, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
127. On Chicago's wartime and postwar housing codes, see Seligman, Block by Block, 39-67.
128. On Chicago's apartments pre-World War II, see the famous survey by Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 (Chicago, 1936);
129. see also Perry R. Duis, Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920 (Urbana, 1998), 67-110.
130. On prewar landlord-tenant negotiations, see, for example, Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943 (New York, 1999).
131. Milton Gordon to Norman B. Shogren, memo, Sept. 29, 1947, folder: Monthly Reports - Chicago, 1947, Oct./Dec., box 5, entry 107, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
132. Joseph B. Kovarik to Morris A. Lieberman, memo, March 30, 1949, folder: Monthly Narrative Reports, Chicago, Ill., Region VI, ibid.
133. Hedin to Anderson, memo, Aug. 30, 1945, folder: La Dolce, Peter and Mary (2), box 42, entry 110, ibid.; affidavit, Odessa Wallington, Aug. 27, 1947, Woods v. La Dolce and La Dolce.
134. Figure comes from census data cited in Beyer, Housing, 16;
135. and Davies, Housing Reform during the Truman Administration, 103. Hirsch shows that subtenancy was more widely practiced among African Americans;
136. see Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 24-25. Given its underground practice, the OPA/OHE did not maintain statistics on subtenancy, but the evidence is abundant.
137. Affidavit, Bennie MacAbee, Jan. 11, 1949, folder: 1016 North Cleveland Ave., box 7, entry 110B, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
138. Landlord's Petition for Adjustment of Rent, Allen Mosley, March 6, 1950, ibid.
139. On employment discrimination against urban blacks, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 91-123.
140. For Chicago, specifically, see Duncan and Duncan, Negro Population of Chicago, 65-75.
141. On survival strategies among African Americans in an earlier period, see St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945).
142. On industrial demobilization, see Ballard, Shock of Peace, 123-41.
143. Landlord's Petition for Adjustment of Rent, Mosley, March 6, 1950, folder: 1016 North Cleveland Ave., box 7, entry 110B, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
144. Investigation Report, 1016 North Cleveland Ave., Louis Klar, Jan. 12, 1950, ibid. On land installment contracts,
145. see Lynne Beyer Sagalyn, "Mortgage Lending in Older Urban Neighborhoods: Lessons from Past Experience," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 465 (Jan. 1983), 98-108.
146. On the use of these contracts in Chicago, see Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 31-33.
147. Investigation Report, 1016 North Cleveland Ave., Klar, Jan. 12, 1950, folder: 1016 North Cleveland Ave., box 7, entry 110B, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter;
148. "Olivet Plans for Its Future!," 1958, p. 46, folder: Welfare Council 387-3, box 387, Olivet Community Center, 1935-1957, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers (Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Ill.).
149. Statement of Frederick D. Pollard, testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, quoted in Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 33.
150. According to Klar, Mosley "told some tenants that instead of making refunds he will sell out and quit the business": Investigative Report, 1016 N. Cleveland Ave. Knowing Mosley's financial back story, this was not an idle threat;
151. see Financial Statement, Allen Mosley, March 7, 1950, folder: 1016 North Cleveland Ave., box 7, entry HOB, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter. D. M. Scheffer, memo to file, March 1, 1950, Investigation Report, "Told Some Tenants That Instead of Making Refunds He Will Sell out and Quit the Business": Investigative Report ibid.
152. Landlord's Petition for Adjustment of Rent [Mosley], statement of Bennie MacAbee, March 6, 1950, folder: 1016 North Cleveland Ave., box 7, entry 110B, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter. As the OHE tried to protect MacAbee from Mosley's overcharging, it should be noted that it later raised the maximum rent from $18 to $40 per month.
153. See Order Adjusting Maximum Rent, March 15, 1950, ibid. On exploitation by African Americans,
154. see "Olivet Plans for Its Future!," 46.
155. Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley, 1994), 179-80.
156. Handwritten report, R. S. O'Toole, Sept. 24, 1946, folder: 211 E. Superior St., box 47, entry 110B, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter; A Government Worker ... to Office of Price Administration, May 1, 1947, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States ibid.
157. Handwritten report, O'Toole, Sept. 24, 1946, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States ibid.
158. Truman quoted in Flamm, "Price Controls, Politics, and the Perils of Policy by Analogy," 347.
159. The argument about World War II as a trigger for raised expectations has been made persuasively by several historians. See, for example, John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York, 1976), 8-9, 92-105;
160. John Bodnar, "Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America," American Historical Review, 106 (June 2001), 806-7;
161. Cohen, Consumers' Republic, 70-75;
162. Jacobs, '"How About Some Meat?,'" 912;
163. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 179-220;
164. Mark Leff, "The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II," Journal of American History, 77 (March 1991), 1296-1318;
165. Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 19-23;
166. and Robert B. Westbrook, "'I Want a Girl, Just like the Girl That Married Harry James': American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II," American Quarterly, 42 (Dec. 1990), 587-614.
167. Radio Script, Interview with William G. Barr, Oct. 23, 1946, box 5, folder: OPA Radio Scripts, 1945-1947, Chicago Regional Office, Administrative Files, Records of the Office of the Housing Expediter.
168. A Government Worker ... to Office of Price Administration, May 1, 1947, folder: 211 E. Superior St., box 47, entry 110B, ibid.
169. The term "nonepic everyday" comes from Patricia Yaeger's Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago, 2000), xv;
170. it is here drawn from Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's reference to it in Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Last Words," Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 30-36, esp. 32.