Disposing of Wartime Factories and Metropolitan America, 1940–60

Little is known about the long-term effects of federal wartime investment on the intersection of metropolitan manufacturing, planning and civil society after 1945. For several reasons, however, attention to wartime investment is critical for a better understanding of the history of metropolitan governance in the postwar period, most notably the federal government’s huge investment in wartime factories and the difficulty it had in disposing of this plant. The result was the construction of an elaborate set of state agencies and a new industrial policy. The aim of this paper is to outline the building of a federal state apparatus to oversee plant disposal. The paper focuses on two main elements. First, it examines the creation of a rational-legal ensemble of war plant disposal, which consisted of a set of federal state agencies functioning under the aegis of the 1944 Surplus Property Act. In particular, four main features of the ensemble will be looked at: instrumental norms, routinized methods of work and decision making, a codified system of law, and a social hierarchy. Second, a case study of Chicago probes the local politics of disposal and planning between 1945 and 1960. In many cases, the long and torturous negotiations between corporations and the state resulted in poorly planned or unplanned development. Metropolitan planning and development was haphazard and politically contentious at best, and, as a result, planners faced almost overwhelming obstacles to the building of a workable set of plans. In the end, these federal ensemble-local planning tensions raise questions about the meaning of civil society in the immediate postwar period.