When World War II ended, Americans celebrated a military victory abroad,
but the meaning of peace at home was yet to be defined. From roughly
1943 onward, building a postwar society became the new national project,
and every interest group involved in the war effort--from business
leaders to working-class renters--held different visions for the war's
aftermath. In Postwar, Laura McEnaney plumbs the depths of this period
to explore exactly what peace meant to a broad swath of civilians,
including apartment dwellers, single women and housewives, newly freed
Japanese American internees, African American migrants, and returning
veterans. In her fine-grained social history of postwar Chicago,
McEnaney puts ordinary working-class people at the center of her
investigation.
What she finds is a working-class war liberalism--a conviction that the
wartime state had taken things from people, and that the postwar era was
about reclaiming those things with the state's help. McEnaney examines
vernacular understandings of the state, exploring how people perceived
and experienced government in their lives. For Chicago's working-class
residents, the state was not clearly delineated. The local offices of
federal agencies, along with organizations such as the Travelers Aid
Society and other neighborhood welfare groups, all became what she calls
the state in the neighborhood, an extension of government to serve an
urban working class recovering from war. Just as they had made war, the
urban working class had to make peace, and their requests for help,
large and small, constituted early dialogues about the role of the state
during peacetime.
Postwar examines peace as its own complex historical process, a
passage from conflict to postconflict that contained human struggles and
policy dilemmas that would shape later decades as fatefully as had the
war.
