Chapter 7
The Culmination of the New Deal in Electrical Modernization, 1945–1960

History's Armillary Sphere

President Harry Truman shared Franklin Roosevelt's vision of housing modernization as social justice. Electrical modernization would be the means to modernize housing in the Fair Deal programs of 1948. Truman added his presidential commitment to racial modernization, extending the New Deal's promise of social and material justice for the American people to the nation's racial minorities. For households of color around the nation, as for African-American and Mexican households in Riverside, improvement in the material comfort and health of their homes stood at the center of concentric spheres of historic context, like a medieval armillary sphere illustrating the earth-centered Ptolemaic cosmology. The primum mobile was the Second World War. The war accelerated the emigration of the African-American people out of the South that had begun before the First World War. The war created the great armament manufactories; African-American workers and their families moved to cities in the North and the West to take the new employment opportunities. Assigned by military service to new regions of the country, many African-American men brought their families to new homes after the war, and the African-American population in southern California dramatically increased. After growing slowly to 881 persons in 1940, Riverside's African-American community doubled to 1,600 persons in 1945, then grew more slowly to 1,805 persons in 1950, before again doubling to 3,938 persons in 1960. Similarly rapid increases in other cities made African-American voters a significant influence in the national political parties by 1944.

In America's voluntaristic society, the number of neighborhood organizations is the true gauge of community conscience. By this measure, the war years in Riverside brought profound change. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) remained central, the African-American churches and their committees foundational, but expanding consciousness expressed itself in new or newly invigorated groups—the Women's Uplifting Club, the Negro Civic League, the Women's Political Study Group, the Lincoln Park Recreation Center Hospitality Group, the Los Angeles Urban League, the USO Traveler's Aid Society, the Cosmopolitan Club, and the annual war bond solicitation committees and air raid district committees. Each group signified repeated meetings, discourse, and politicking; each group conducted membership drives and fund raising and arranged programs, speakers, and special events. Each group socialized another individual's consciousness, forging another link in the chain of social causality from national events to the daily life of every person, and turning another wheel in the great armillary sphere of history by which the dramatic events of world war geared down to neighborhoods and households in Riverside's minority communities and to racial minority neighborhoods and households like Riverside's across the nation.^[1]

The organized drive to end segregation that erupted during the Second World War provided the second armillary sphere of changing historical context. Pressed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee and national reform organizations, such as the NAACP, the leadership of organized labor began to desegregate their labor unions. The national political parties in the North and West courted African-American urban voters. Although African-American voters traditionally allied with the Republican party—an allegiance to Lincoln—significant numbers of them moved to the Democratic party. FDR's third reelection in 1944 demonstrated their political power. The shift enabled Truman to break the deadlock on racial progress held by Southern white Democratic voters. The breakthrough came in the 1948 presidential election. Liberals fought successfully to get a plank endorsing civil rights and opposing discrimination in the Democratic party platform. Dixie Democrats followed Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina out of the Democratic party to form the States' Rights Democratic party. Four Southern states failed to vote for Truman; yet Truman squeaked out an electoral victory over Republican candidate Thomas Dewey.^[2]

Housing crises comprised the third sphere. The nation built little new housing after 1931 and virtually no nondefense housing after 1941. Where defense industries and military bases swelled population, as in Riverside, severe housing shortages resulted. In the major industrial cities of the Midwest and California, racial restrictions compelled African-American immigrants to live in previously established "black belts." Wartime workers crowded into Chicago's South Side, Los Angeles's Central Avenue district, and Detroit's Paradise Alley. Similar ghettos burgeoned in Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo, Portland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Oakland. Only Chicago and New

York City made strong political efforts during the war to increase the public housing for African-American defense workers. Federal policies exacerbated the housing shortage for nonwhite persons. When the Office of Price Administration froze rents in defense areas, as in Riverside, Robert Weaver pointed out, "the Negro lost his most effective tool for entering new areas. Since rents were fixed, he could not legally buy his way into white areas by paying higher prices." Federally subsidized public housing, intended to house defense workers, initially discriminated against African-Americans. Detroit built 44,000 housing units for war workers between 1941 and 1944, when over 60,000 African-Americans had moved into the city to work in the defense plants; but the city opened only 3,070 units to them. Because of FHA reluctance to push for housing for African-Americans, of all private priority housing permitted in defense areas during the war, landlords allocated only 4.3 percent for African-Americans.^[3]

War's end returned veterans to marriages and children, but did not bring nearly enough new dwellings to shelter all the new households. The housing shortage and its accompanying political crisis lasted through 1950 and provided the context in which minority Americans at last fulfilled the New Deal's promise of social justice through housing modernization. The National Housing Act of 1934 and veterans housing programs created a huge market for the home building industry and unleashed mass tract home building. Public housing programs brought urban renewal and public housing to most of America's cities. The civil rights movement sought to desegregate America's housing. In the late 1940s, liberals finally defeated housing segregation in legislation, in the courts, and in federal policy. For minority citizens, these wheeling contexts of change finally brought electrical modernization, the standard of living, and the quality of life to which Franklin Delano Roosevelt said a decade earlier all Americans had a right.^[4]

The Storm Breaks

The implosion of housing segregation in the United States after 1948 occurred because local property owners lost their constitutional authority and much of their direct, local governmental power to maintain the local social order against federal civil rights. To extend the New Deal's promise of home modernization and social modernization to racial minorities, racial custom—as Riverside illustrates—had to change. Watching the reorganization of real estate and succession of federal housing programs after 1932, Riverside's Anglo elite understood that the New Deal inverted the political ontology of the nation's historic freeholder society. The potential of the 1930s became the reality of the 1940s. Administrative elites began to use the new power of the federal government in regulating and insuring real estate, housing, and banking to modernize social policy. Federal bureaucracies interposed themselves between local white elites and discriminated minorities. Public hearing requirements gave minorities voice and influence in community dialogues in which they had not previously

participated. For local Anglo elites, the urban world they had known seemed out of control. Change began almost immediately after Roosevelt's death. Harry Truman's appointees ended Federal Housing Administration support for real estate racial covenants. Then Truman changed the federal government's position on African-American civil rights. As a first specific step, Truman moved the federal government against racial housing covenants. Finally, in his Fair Deal, Truman sought to increase significantly the federal government's commitment to public housing. These presidential initiatives extended the New Deal promise in housing. Believing strongly in the constitutional equality of all citizens and appealing to African-American voters for electoral success, Truman made the first presidential commitment to racial justice and integration in the nation's history.^[5]

The Federal Housing Administration's overt support for racial discrimination changed first. At its inception, the FHA linked housing modernization to racial segregation. To obtain FHA insurance for a dwelling or subdivision, a builder had to meet criteria to reduce the risk that the market value of the property would decline during the period of the mortgage. The FHA underwriters' manual repeatedly pointed to racial change in a neighborhood as one of the most serious threats to property values. "If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values." The FHA required racial restrictions on deeds to supplement zoning protection of property. Since the nation already consigned minorities of color to its worst housing, the FHA's requirement for segregation of new residences effectively locked minorities out of decent housing. The federal program that sought to modernize the nation's dwellings thereby imposed a barrier preventing African-Americans and other racial minorities from participating in federal home modernization programs. To obtain dwelling modernization, minorities had first to modernize their civil rights.^[6]

During the war, the NAACP tried to open housing in Northern industrial cities for African-American workers by breaking down racial covenants. The organization lobbied district FHA offices protesting discrimination and segregation. It prevailed on FHA directors to increase the assignment of priority housing to African-Americans. In 1944, the FHA also agreed to nondiscrimination in employment on FHA and Federal Public Housing projects, issuing administrative regulations to this effect. By the end of the war, African-Americans participated in nearly all public housing projects.^[7]

Truman built on the progress made during the war in changing FHA practices. He appointed Raymond M. Foley to be its commissioner in July 1945, and subsequently its administrator. In fall 1946, guided by the president's clear desire to modernize racial practices, Foley instructed all FHA personnel to take an active interest in the housing problems of minorities. He distributed a packet of special agency publications, "Material for F.H.A. Offices on Minority Group Housing," to assist field personnel. He assigned racial advisers to attend all re-

gional meetings conducted by the FHA for the building and real estate industry to speed construction of housing for veterans. In 1947, at the same time that the civil rights commission studied segregation around the nation, Foley ordered rewriting of the FHA's Underwriting Manual to remove FHA support for private racial covenants. The FHA continued to stress the desirability of homogeneous neighborhoods, but the agency now shifted its criterion to income, rather than racial, homogeneity. Implementation of nondiscrimination varied by locality, as it had during the war. In Los Angeles in 1946, for instance, local FHA officials stalled and weakened a Hollywood film union's application for financing for a biracial cooperative housing project, so that it eventually failed. Only in early 1948 did the FHA for the first time approve insurance for a biracial housing project (in Chicago).^[8]

Truman deplored the renewal of white violence against African-Americans that broke out around the nation after the war. Lobbied by the NAACP, in 1946 he appointed the Committee on Civil Rights, chaired by Charles E. Wilson, chairman of General Electric, to review the nation's racial relations. The committee report, To Secure These Rights, in October 1947 called for the end of segregation and suggested forty federal actions to secure that goal. The report pointed to substandard housing as the prevalent condition among the nation's African-American urban minority and identified racially restrictive covenants as the reason African-American families could not move to better housing. "One of the most common practices is the policy of landlords and real estate agents to prevent Negroes from renting outside of designated areas. Again, it is 'good business' to develop exclusive 'restricted' suburban developments which are barred to all but white gentiles." The report cited Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for the large extent of their residential areas restricted to whites only. Investigators estimated that property owners of 80 percent of Chicago's residential property prohibited African-American residents. The committee invoked the Roosevelt heritage as one of the bases for federal action to end inadequate housing: "the right to housing." The committee also invoked the recent experience of war. American society should not deny returning African-American veterans the same housing open to white veterans, which they—along with white soldiers—had fought to protect. The committee specifically recommended that the federal government enter civil rights cases that sought to end the restrictive real estate covenant.^[9]

Following the committee's recommendation, the Truman administration supported African-American plaintiffs in the housing discrimination suits, later known collectively as Shelley v. Kraemer, that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear in June 1947. Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, lawyers for the NAACP, wrote the briefs against racially restrictive real estate covenants for presentation to the Court. Other integration advocates approached U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark to request that the federal government support the plaintiffs by filing an amicus brief. A week after release of the Civil Rights Committee report, Clark, whom Truman appointed after requesting that FDR's attorney gen-

eral resign, agreed. The U.S. government for the first time entered a civil rights case involving only civil litigants. The federal attorneys argued that decent housing was a basic necessity of life and a fundamental right, equal opportunity to which the Fourteenth Amendment protected as a civil right. "Both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman have spoken of 'the right to a decent home' as part of 'a second Bill of Rights', and of the basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess." Racially restrictive covenants denied African-Americans the opportunity to participate in social modernization through housing modernization. Indeed, by compelling African-Americans to live in overcrowded ghettos, the covenants imposed social disintegration, social pathology, and personal ill health on them. The legal brief addressed the modernization issue directly, in language that resonated with Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the meaning of the materially abundant life:

[Racially restrictive covenants] are responsible for the creation of isolated areas in which overcrowded racial minorities are confined, and in which living conditions are steadily worsened. The avenues of escape are being narrowed and reduced. As to the people so trapped, there is no life in the accepted sense of the word; liberty is a mockery, and the right to pursue happiness a phrase without meaning, empty of hope and reality. This situation cannot be reconciled with the spirit of mutual tolerance and respect for the dignity and rights of the individual which give vitality to our democratic way of life.

Since the war, new housing developments had begun to provide modern housing for veterans and to solve the nation's housing shortage for white Americans. Racially restrictive covenants prohibited African-Americans and other minorities (the brief also cited Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islanders, Arabic, and Jewish peoples) from having access to modern housing and thereby from participating in the new standard of living made possible by electrical modernization.^[10]

In its brief in Shelley v. Kraemer, the NAACP mounted two large arguments against state enforcement of racially restrictive real estate covenants. The legal argument rested on the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee to all citizens, regardless of color, of equal protection of the law. The amendment prohibited states from enforcing private contracts that denied equal treatment on the basis of race. The social argument claimed that housing discrimination prevented the social modernization of African-American households that white households took for granted. Robert Weaver's The Negro Ghetto stated the social thesis and provided empirical information for the social and economic brief submitted to the Court. The NAACP claimed first that restrictive covenants had kept the African-American population boxed in historic ghettos in major cities. The housing in these ghettos represented the antiquated housing stock abandoned by white households. Landlords cut these dwellings into smaller and smaller apartments, until many families were living in single rooms without private toilets or kitchens. In a word, restrictive covenants confined African-Americans to severely substandard and overcrowded housing. Population growth in the

African-American ghettos occurred at the same time that the federal government engaged in extensive home improvement programs and began public housing and defense housing for white households. Since the FHA supported restrictive covenants and the federal Public Housing Administration practiced discrimination, the federal government policy abetted widespread local policy in creating two categories of urban housing—homes being modernized under Federal programs for white households and substandard housing largely outside those programs for African-Americans (and Mexicans, as in Riverside).^[11]

The war brought many changes to African-Americans. The major positive change, Weaver argued, was the first glimpse for many of the possibility of a new way of life. Leaving rural lives of poverty behind, migrating to thriving and energetic Northern industrial cities, they foresaw the possibility of decent housing, healthful neighborhoods, and possession of a wide range of consumer goods. Weaver did not use the exact phrase that Franklin Roosevelt used in his 1936 campaign for reelection, but he meant exactly what Roosevelt had meant. Roosevelt said the New Deal was all about "the abundant way of life." Restrictive covenants, supported by federal housing policy, denied the "American ideal of a high standard of living" that Roosevelt said the nation owed every American.^[12]

In May 1948, Roosevelt's liberalized Supreme Court struck down state enforcement of private racially restrictive covenants. Without state enforcement, restrictions were useless. Private property, as lawyers are fond of pointing out, is a bundle of enforceable rights. After Shelley v. Kraemer, home owners and neighborhood associations could not obtain state enforcement of racial restriction on the sale of homes. The decision forced the FHA to complete rewriting of its administrative rules and put the federal bureaucracy behind social modernization of minority American homes. Responding to political pressure to implement Shelley v. Kraemer, the FHA adopted a new eligibility rule requiring applicants to establish that home owners filed no racial covenant on the subject property after the implementation date of the new eligibility rule.^[13]

The Supreme Court's decision in Shelley v. Kraemer took practical effect immediately. President Truman's efforts to obtain a large national public housing program reinforced the Court's decision in bringing the issue of minority housing modernization to all levels of politics. No one could miss the connection between advancement of minority civil rights, housing issues, and social modernization. Liberals unsuccessfully attempted to insert antisegregation clauses into the 1948 and 1949 housing acts. Truman placed extension of civil rights and public assistance for housing at the center of his 1948 campaign for reelection. After his close victory over Thomas Dewey, the president proposed major civil rights and housing bills to Congress in early 1949 as part of his Fair Deal. When Truman signed the National Housing Act in July 1949, the national storm over racial integration of neighborhoods broke with full force. In this situation—a liberal presidential administration pressing for housing and social modernization from the top of the governmental hierarchy and minority organizations, such as the NAACP, pressing for modernization at the local level—

Riversiders debated whether to allow federal public housing projects in the city. Earlier, the city rezoned a large portion of the city for apartments, recognizing that minority citizens would rent them.^[14]

Immediately upon passage of the National Housing Act in summer 1949, civic liberals in Riverside city called for public housing. Administrators of the County Housing Authority responded by starting the planning and review process. Since 1915, progressive civic groups had worried about the substandard dwellings occupied by immigrant Mexicans and African-Americans in Old East Side. In 1948, a group of social workers and volunteers conducted a housing survey of Old East Side, examining mainly the nonwhite blocks. The survey revealed dilapidation of overcrowded houses, lack of indoor plumbing, and failure of physical shelter. There was no question of approaching the electrical standard of living. In response, the executive director of the Riverside County Housing Authority applied for 765 new housing units for the city of Riverside under the 1949 National Housing Act.^[15]

Federal public housing raised three issues related to control: () federal power intruded directly into the local community; (2) the federal housing bureaucracy challenged the power of the local private real estate and housing industry and public housing diminished the rental income of the local bourgeoisie; (3) federal housing threatened the local white community with unwelcome racial values. The issue of the intrusion of federal power appeared as different themes. Procedurally, the act required local housing authorities to hold public hearings on proposed public housing. Though meeting constitutional requirements for municipal control over real property, the public hearings ironically opened a forum for new local voices to be heard, besides those of the white civic-commercial elite. In 1922, demonstrating Anglo imperiousness during a desegregation controversy over a public swimming pool, Riverside park commissioners left a public meeting rather than listen to African-American petitioners. '"The members walked out, leaving us sitting here like a row of checkers,'" one petitioner described. Federal presence prohibited such arrogant abrogation of local minority rights at postwar public housing hearings. Federal housing officials spoke in support of minority housing rights. Local officials and local Anglo citizens listened to minority community speakers.^[16]

Administratively, the federal housing programs broke old political arrangements by forcing creation of new governmental institutions and rearranging local elite coalitions. The City of Riverside did not have its own housing authority, for instance, and local administration of a federal housing program would be in the hands of the county government. The city's real estate industry did not have the same political clout with the County Board of Supervisors and its agencies, as it did in the city. Riverside County established its housing authority in 1942 to administer federally funded defense housing, which included several large developments to serve nearby military bases. Neither the City of Riverside nor the county took advantage of the short-lived 1937 Wagner Housing Act, which required establishment of local housing agencies to receive and manage

the federal dollars for subsidized low-rent housing. When the county created its housing agency, the Riverside City Council legislated that its authority could extend inside the city, since lack of defense housing caused many of the city's housing problems also. California voters turned down a statewide initiative for state-funded public housing in November 1948—clearly indicating their opposition to public housing. The 1949 National Housing Act created a different scale and permanence of federal presence. If the federal government fully funded the Riverside County Housing Authority's application, over $10 million would be spent inside the city. Once again, rather than establish the city's own housing agency, the city council contracted with the County Housing Authority for administration of federally funded public housing. The city's realtors moved to have the city establish its own housing agency. They organized themselves as the Riverside Rental and Property Owners' Association, clearly identifying retention of private rental property as a major goal. During the course of the controversy, the local chapter of the Building Contractors' Association and the Real Estate Board joined the coalition seeking a city housing authority. Though the realtors political squeeze did not succeed, it pressed the bile of controversy through nearly every other local issue involving contracting, siting, building, and letting federal public housing and extended to related issues such as removing rent controls and regulating citrus growers' smudging.^[17]

The second issue concerned the relative roles of the private housing market and the federal government in construction and control of the local dwelling stock. The real estate industry and some members of the local business and civic communities strongly believed that the private marketplace could and should determine housing stock and quality. They did not enjoy their experience with direct federal regulation of housing during the war. They pointed to the revival of housing construction in California in late 1948 as evidence that private capital could solve the housing problem, including providing adequate housing for lower income groups, except for the poorest families who could not afford mortgages. They saw the 1948 presidential contest between President Truman and Governor Dewey of New York as a referendum on "the issue of the New Deal." As southern California lurched conservatively into the epoch of the "red scare," they began to call government housing "socialism." Their major concerns leading to opposition to public housing had less to do with government ownership, however, than with what the government as owner might do with its property.^[18]

The third issue concerned federal imposition of progressive racial values on local communities. The increasing legislative successes of the Truman administration's Fair Deal, President Truman's commitment to racial fairness, organized labor's effort to integrate the nation's unions and workplaces, and the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Shelley v. Kraemer threatened the private property-based system of racial segregation in Riverside, in California, and elsewhere in the nation. Truman sought a civil rights provision in the 1949 refunding of the Federal Housing Administration. Though Congress struck out the provision, national progressive forces had declared their intentions. They wanted to use

the administrative power of the national government to end residential racial segregation.

The centrality of the racial issue to the local housing issue is clear. Realty groups' opposition to housing integration remained unflagging. White social reformers occupied an ambiguous position. They favored social relief and housing reform in Old East Side, and they called for public housing, but they did not visibly lobby to locate integrated public housing in all-white neighborhoods. Other organizations supporting public housing included the Riverside Council of Church Women (with a special action committee, the Christian Social Relations Committee), the officers of the board of directors of the YWCA, the Latin-American Club, the Casa Blanca American Legion Post 838, the Eastside Neighborhood Council, the Riverside Ministerial Association, and the Central Labor Council of Riverside County of the American Federation of Labor.^[19]

White Riversiders expressed racial fears when discussing tenant characteristics and site selection for public housing projects. Opponents of public housing disliked subsidization of lower-income tenants. Federal housing officials estimated that housing would cost about $10,000 per unit but would rent for no more than $25 a month. In addition, though the federal government would pay 10 percent of shelter rent in lieu of taxes to the city, public housing would not directly and fully pay for the municipal services it used, such as street improvements, schools, water, and fire protection. Public hearings in December 1949 brought the opposing factions together for a vociferous debate. Supporters argued that public housing improved the lives of tenants, thereby decreasing crime and indirect welfare costs; in terms of social accounting, the balance sheet of cost and benefit evened out. For them, the issue was clear. Americans of color had earned their right to a quality standard of living by fighting in the war. The federal government owed them enforcement of this right. Joseph Park, representing the Mexican community's Casa Blanca American Legion post, put it plainly: "'We carried a heavy burden during the war, and we can do it again.... There's been talk about the City taking care of housing by itself, but there's been talk before, and nothing has been done. This is our chance. We not going to sit by for 20 years. We going to do our utmost to get a share of it.'" John Sotelo, speaking for the Mexican and African-American East Side, erupted emotionally at a hearing: "'You people who are against the program, get hold of me. I'll take you to places there to be cleaned up. Just look at them and see if you don't think something should be done.'" Resentment seeped through civic dialogue about imputed subsidization. At a city council hearing, an opponent complained, "'These $10,000 homes are going to rent for $20 a month. Why rent a mansion for $20 a month and make the rest of us pay for it? The opponents of the housing program applauded loudly." At a meeting of the city's Optimist Club, the regional director of federal housing defended public housing against the charge that "'Mexicans and Negroes up out of this slum class'" would destroy the better housing provided by the government.^[20] (See pl. 9.)

The possibility that the federal government might site public housing proj-

Plate 9.
The Promise of the New Deal for the Nation's Minority Families—
Electrically Modern Public Housing. (Leonard Nadel, photographer. "L.A.—
Residences—Housing Projects—Aliso Village. The Louis Gillen family after
relocation into their new three-bedroom apartment [for $35/mo.] at Aliso Village."
Security Pacific National Bank Photograph Collection. Los Angeles Public Library.)

ects near white neighborhoods angered white Riverside opponents most of all. So many persons lived crowded together in several blocks of Riverside's Old East Side, federal agencies could not rehouse all of them in the same area after they erected new buildings. The realtors' association coordinating the opposition campaign focused on the siting issue. It called for housing improvement programs that kept slum residents in place while landlords improved their properties. At a meeting called by the association, a prominent realtor addressed the audience with the explosive charge, "'You may have a housing project next to where you live. How would you like that?'" The Riverside Daily Press later editorialized about the issue in less volatile, but nonetheless direct, language: "Public housing can change the character of a community."^[21]

Local opposition protracted the housing approval process so that Riverside did not get public housing until after the Korean War. Cities with blue-collar voting strength, such as nearby San Bernardino, quickly received public housing contracts. Riverside realtors pushed a local initiative that would require voter approval for siting public housing. Legal tacticians in the city maneuvered around

them, but the reasons then led a successful statewide initiative to achieve the same goal. Passage of the statewide initiative in 1950 pointedly measured white Californians' opposition to disruption of their community arrangements. Riverside realty interests led the statewide initiative (the president of the state building contractors' association was a Riverside who also led local opposition to public housing). The outbreak of the korean War forced the Truman administration to shift its housing programs from public housing to defense housing. The public housing controversy briefly died down.^[22]

The defeat of public housing left unresolved the issue of housing modernization for Riverside African-American and Mexican-American households. Riverside's private housing market boomed following the war. High prices for the new dwellings closed out for most of Old East Side's better-off residents the option of exercising their rights under Shelley v. Kraemer by buying new homes in white neighborhoods. In 1949, a few white property owners in neighborhoods bordering the Eastside began to move out, presumably in anticipation of integration and impending changes in the area. In these circumstances, the city's civic leaders decided to rezone a large neighborhood just north of the Eastside's district. Rezoning from a uniform single-family home district to an apartment zone would greatly enlarge the stock of better rental dwellings to the Eastside's residents. In arguing for the rezoning, Henry Coil, a member of the commission, predicted, "The area seemed to be headed away from first-class residential development." The planning commission "should plan ahead of the tendency by recommending a wholesale rezoning instead of waiting for individual owners to request the zoning on their own." Only one of 162 property owners in the area protested the proposed rezoning.^[23]

Within a few years of the rezoning in 1949, the racial and ethnic composition of the district began to shift. Although we lack racial identifications needed to track the migration of African-American residents by name, by February 1950 Longfellow Elementary School in the newly rezoned neighborhood enrolled 51 African-American children, 60 Mexican-American children, and 438 Anglo children. Presumably, the presence of these minority children in the school represented the movement of families into newly opened rental homes. We can observe the shift in Mexican-American residents by the appearance in the district of Spanish surnames. In 1947, of 213 households (listed in the city directory) in a small study area in North East Side, only two had Spanish surnames. In 1960, of 277 households, fourteen had spanish surnames. In 1969, of 312 households, twenty-eight had Spanish surnames. in 1965, half of Longfellow's students were minorities, about evenly divided between African-American and Mexican-American children. The racial integration of North East Side did not take place overnight; it required a decade. Most settled white residents did not flee in panic. Residential integration would not be unopposed in Riverside or elsewhere in the nation. local planning boards, the real estate industry, and white home owners had an arsenal of legal and nonlegal techniques to resist integration, including covertly antiracial zoning for design and health requirements,

state constitutional mandates for local option voting, redlining, neighborhood pressure on sellers, white flight, and violence. Nonetheless, Shelley v. Kraemer shifted the burden of racial residential segregation in a manner that strengthened its foes. The decision deprived local white communities of their main positive tool for racial planning, forcing them into defensive strategies. In 1948, Riverside and many other communities began to walk the long gauntlet of racial animosity toward residential modernization.^[24]

The Culmination of the New Deal

Harry Truman's Fair Deal brought civil rights to the nation's housing through the New Deal national housing agencies and policies. Truman also continued Roosevelt's public power policies. Though a hostile Eightieth Congress forced him to curtail his support for replicating the TVA in other river basins around the nation, Truman never backed off from his views that America needed public power to ensure cheap electricity and that modern housing required cheap electricity. In the name of New Deal, the national government under Truman began to modernize the local American social order. By making home buying as cheap as renting, the New Deal rapidly shifted the nation from renting to owning. Because of the New Deal's creation of a national market for electrical goods and because of innovative private marketing strategies, such as the "completed home plan," domestic electrical modernization accompanied the shift to home buying. Economists long ago observed the relationship between home ownership and adoption of electrical appliances. Carolyn Bell, a consumer economist, noted in 1967 that "consumer spending for appliances accelerated only after the major shift from renting to home ownership took place, for housekeeping arrangements reflect patterns of housing." We can now appreciate that housekeeping arrangements did not reflect patterns of housing by coincidence. Electric housekeeping reflected home ownership because New Deal and Fair Deal policy intended it to do so.^[25]

The opening of housing opportunity for African-Americans and other minority groups after 1948 brought dramatic improvement in their living conditions. Between 1950 and 1960, the proportion of nonwhite families living in substandard housing declined by half. The urban home ownership rate for non-white households rose from 20 percent in 1940 to 33 percent in 1950 and 36 percent in 1960. The rise in the home owning rate does not by itself prove that nonwhite households improved their living conditions. Unlike the general situation of white families, where the rise of the home owning rate roughly signals an improvement in living conditions, the restrictions placed on nonwhite families before 1948 often meant that there was an inadequate rental market for them and that to have any housing at all they had to buy. That the median value of nonwhite-owned homes in 1950 ($3,000) was less than half that of white-owned homes ($7,700) supports—though not unambiguously—the thesis that lack of rental opportunities, not a desire for home owning, forced up nonwhite

Plate 10.
The Promise of the New Deal for the Nation's Minority Families—
Electrically Modern Private Homes. ([Amateur photographer.] "Picture of
home on Stanford near El Segundo and Avalon, called Carver Manor in 1945."
Snapshot donated in the "Shades of L.A." project, 1994/1995. Security Pacific
National Bank Photograph Collection. Los Angeles Public Library.)

home owning rates. As the Housing and Home Finance Agency noted in a review of the 1940s, regarding the housing problems of nonwhite households, "It is especially difficult for nonwhites to acquire living quarters during periods of general housing shortage because of prevailing restrictions upon their occupancy as well as their relatively lower incomes." The removal of housing restrictions after 1948 enlarged the opportunities for nonwhite families to live in better-quality dwellings, whether as renters or as owners. The doubling of the percentage of home owning nonwhite households in standard-quality dwellings between 1950 and 1960 also indicates that the increase was not due simply to public housing.^[26] (See pl. 10.)

The New Deal's policies for electrical modernization of the home completed their social revolution in the 1950s. After removal of the Second World War's national restraints on construction and rent controls in 1946, the nation entered a decade of unparalleled home building. In 1950, the agency insured 36 percent and the VA insured another 15 percent, that is, over half of all new private housing financing. Federal building codes required that new homes be built at the electrical standard. Rural electrification, urban rehabilitation, and urban renewal brought many older dwellings up to the New Deal's electrical standard. By the mid-1950s, an overwhelming majority of America's urban, suburban, rural, and farm households used electrical technology and lived socially modernized lives.

At the same time, the percentage of all households possessing major electrical appliances (with the exception of the range) reached a ceiling and the growth rate in saturation leveled off. In just over twenty years, the nation had transformed the material fabric of its home life. In 1933, the electrical standard divided the nation's housing into two classes. One-fifth of the households benefited from the prosperity of the 1920s and lived in modern housing; four-fifths of the nation's households did not receive a proportionate share of the decade's wealth and lived in antiquated housing without electrical modernization. In 1955, over three-fourths of households lived in electrically modernized homes, while less than one-fourth remained in substandard dwellings. This inversion of the national statistics on distribution of wealth from 1933 to 1955 reveals the scope of the New Deal's ongoing revolution. Shifting ownership of the nation's housing stock to those who had previously been tenants constituted a vast redistribution of the nation's wealth.^[27]

The nation at last made the celebrated social portrait of prosperous home life true for most Americans. Home ownership enabled accumulation of wealth. Although home "ownership" meant home buying for most households, the home mortgage nonetheless gave many of the benefits of fee simple ownership. It secured and enlarged the credit available to families. Credit provided financial flexibility for coping with the exigencies of capitalism's economic cycles. Home ownership eventually anchored the asset strategy life plan for three of four American families. Home ownership also brought higher-quality homes. Electricity enabled households to live in physically and socially detached dwellings with control over their own utilities. Refrigerators, electric washing machines, and small electric wares powered the productive activities of kitchen, cleaning, and home renovation. Recreation in the home, whether playing, reading, listening, or watching, also benefited from electrical devices. Social patterns whose mosaic is recognizable as a "style of life" distinctively reflected the capabilities of domestic electricity. Small machines enabled individualization and privacy in the home. Electrification of the home environment promoted bodily health through safer storage and preparation of fresh foods, environmental health from uniform warmth and air conditioning, and greater personal sanitation through private bathing and bodily hygiene. Greater wealth and health provided the means by which Americans could fulfill their individual talents and dreams. Electrical modernization gave Americans effective freedom.

In the 1950s, two decades of New Deal programs converged and fulfilled themselves. The REA and the TVA brought electricity to nearly every rural dwelling. The FHA and the VA, directly and through their stimulus to private lenders, extended home ownership, modernized existing homes, and placed new housing starts at the level of the electrical standard. The TVA demonstrated the possibility of a national mass market for electrical goods. Federal demonstration of the value of and subsidization of cheap consumer credit made possible purchase of electrical appliances for nearly all households. In 1940, the electric iron was the only electrical appliance owned by more than half of all American

households; by 1950, half of all homes possessed the refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, and clothes washer; by 1960, most homes had the full range of electrical devices, now including, of course, the television.^[28]

The Invisibility of the Revolution

Some revolutions are visible. The great national revolutions that wrenched colonial and autocratic states into modernity—the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution—are models of swift political change to which we apply the word revolution . Revolutions can also be invisible. Swift social and economic changes that leave political institutions nominally intact while they dramatically redistribute political power and wealth are also revolutionary. Such social and economic revolution is invisible, because preservation of political institutions pastes a patina of continuity over public life. News and public gossip endlessly stream through familiar channels and swirl around familiar rocks of institutional drama, without recognition that the material and social lives of the citizenry have fundamentally changed.^[29]

The New Deal in domestic electrical modernization worked an invisible revolution. The New Deal shifted the majority of American families to an asset strategy for economic security through state-enframed home ownership of electrically modern dwellings. Geographic mobility declined. Unrestrained domination of local politics by a locally resident real estate elite ended. Material accumulation based in the owner-occupied home created unprecedented material affluence. The dwellings modernized their occupants, as households rebuilt their social and labor relations around new technologies. Minority groups previously locked out of affluence gained the keys to their future. The New Deal created the 1950s.

The role of the New Deal rapidly faded in popular consciousness in the 1950s. How could consumers notice less the visible hand of the state than the invisible hand of the marketplace? Although New Deal relief programs ended in the year before U.S. entry into the war, federal price and production controls, restraint on consumer spending, and execution of the war effort kept the national government in front of all eyes. The war certainly did not push the hand of the state behind the scenes. Four other events played the important roles in normalizing the New Deal. Two of them developed before the war: the court-packing controversy of 1937 and acceptance of the lessons of the TVA and the REA by private enterprise between 1935 and 1939. Two events played themselves out following the war: the moderation of labor-capital conflict and the democratization of material abundance.

The political controversy over Roosevelt's court-packing scheme of 1937 drew attention away from the New Deal's revolution in local property. Riverside illustrates how the controversy suspended the bourgeoisie's pragmatic acceptance of the New Deal, compelling them to recast their opinions about the New Deal in terms of moralistic and legalistic constitutional principles. Critics

argued that if Roosevelt succeeded in packing the Supreme Court, a Rooseveltian majority would not block expansion of presidential power. Legislative intrusion into property relations could proceed unchecked. By stating opposition to the court-packing plan in terms of constitutional absolutes, critics obscured from themselves the New Deal's practical intrusion into local property capitalism accomplished through indirect restructuring and underwriting of the nation's real estate and home industries. Blinded by the exploding political fireworks of the court-packing controversy, Roosevelt's local critics could not see the gnomes of the New Deal quietly rebuilding the nation's political economy under their feet. Riverside's white civic leaders called public meetings, remonstrated in civic clubs, argued in the columns of the newspapers. The Riverside Daily Press interviewed civic leaders to obtain their opinion. They feared that if the Court lost independence, there would be no check to executive power. Eugene Best, Riverside city attorney, hinted at a subversive president: "'The proposal is plainly an effort to control the courts, and dictate their decision by one admittedly not friendly to the court or our Constitution.'" Local opponents invoked the purest Lockean philosophy of property as the source and basis for government. Francis Cuttle, a regionally prominent water administrator, saw capitalism attacked: "'Capitalists are still legal owners of their property, but apparently they have no control over their income.'" The local newspapers sponsored a reader referendum approving or disapproving Roosevelt's scheme as part of a national ballot on the plan organized by the National Editorial Association. Riverside's newspaper readers disapproved Roosevelt's plan by 993 votes against 55 in favor. In similar polls, Los Angeles voters favored the court scheme by 2 to 1. The defeat of Roosevelt's court-packing bill ended the controversy and—apparently—saved the Supreme Court as the last line of defense against executive aggrandizement and legislative erosion of property rights. This misimpression obscured the manner in which New Deal programs, such as the National Housing Act, diminished the rights of private property ownership in favor of governmental regulation even though they were not at issue in the controversy.^[30]

The second factor normalizing the New Deal was the muting of antagonism between the powerful electrical utility and manufacturing industries and the federal government on key issues of governmental activity. By the late 1930s, private enterprise had accepted the public power thesis behind the TVA and the REA. The New Deal created a truly mass consumer market. Behind the loud outrage over the earlier "court packing," private corporations quietly accepted the new economic framework and planned to prosper in it.^[31]

Subsiding industrial conflict between labor and management, as a third factor, normalized the New Deal. For laborers, the Wagner Act's legalization of collective bargaining for industrial unions partially achieved the New Deal goal of distributive justice. While laborers did not gain control of the workplace, collective bargaining enabled industrial labor to obtain a greater share of the wealth generated by private industry in the postwar boom. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 also blunted labor militancy. The federal government could enter into the labor-

capital bargaining process to compel strikers to return to work, thereby defusing protracted conflict and keeping key industries, such as coal and steel, up and running. The subsidence in the 1950s of the ferocious class antagonisms between labor and capital that had alarmed the nation from the 1870s to the 1930s naturally brought a concomitant diminution of the New Deal's direct presence in the everyday lives of unionized laborers.^[32]

The extraordinary material abundance brought within reach of nearly every American household after 1947, as a fourth factor, normalized the New Deal. Material abundance lessened differences between lifestyles of wage earners, salaried workers, and the wealthy. New Deal policies in social welfare, labor, and housing gave most wage-earning households enough assets for them to identify with the middle class, with whom their economic similarities became more obvious than their differences. Obtaining this abundance in the marketplace, consumers perceived their material affluence as resulting from the free enterprise system, rather than state-enframed capitalism. The extension of home ownership put American families' wealth on the same plane, a fact each perceived in daily life. Mass deprivation drove New Deal politics. When deprivation disappeared amid material affluence, the intensity of anyman's political identity lessened.^[33]

The postwar state no less actively guided the national economy toward social ends than did the New Deal state of the 1930s. Active guidance only apparently disappeared, because the position of the state relative to the consumer had changed. The nature of the New Deal achievement disguised the postwar role of the state in the manufacture of commodities and in making material abundance possible. Guaranteeing the solvency of capital institutions put the national government behind the facade of the private banking and financial institutions with which the consumer and home owner dealt directly. By requiring dwellings to meet an electrically modern standard, the New Deal literally stood inside the dwellings Americans lived in, behind drywall with its private manufacturer's name printed on it, out of sight and out of mind. The consumer consumes pleasures and utilities. As long as goods pour from the cornucopia, the mixed economy of supply and demand need not concern her. Similarly, the government's new Keynesian role of underwriting prosperity by managing aggregate demand hid the government from the consuming household's direct view.^[34]

When Democrats lost the presidency in the 1952 elections, they lost the enormous capability of the president, as a single symbolic voice, to represent the New Deal as a unified political vision. In the era of television and radio, mass broadcast media provided the means to determine the general impression voters had of national political issues. Democrats could not effectively contest Republican claims about the power of American capitalism. No one told consumers that the corporations producing the goods of mass abundance did not ultimately cause that abundance. Consumers mistook the mechanism of prosperity—the corporations—for its cause. Corporate advertising continued the 1920s' tradition of disinformation and ideological promotion of the private electrical utilities, giving the private sector credit for electrical modernization and social

modernization in the home. Living in the house that the New Deal built, their consciousness in thrall to fashion, households saw only the furnishing and appliances that filled up their homes, but not the design and designers of it. They had historical amnesia.^[35]

The New Deal strategy of hooking social modernization and electrical modernization to home ownership similarly disguised the role of the national government. The home buyer experiences home ownership as individual ownership obtained through a local lender, rather than as publicly enabled ownership. The role of home ownership is crucial here. The vast shift of the American households from renting to home owning generated prosperity after World War II. Home ownership even boosted the automobile industry, whose growth in turn contributed to the nation's prosperity. The New Deal's sponsorship of suburban home owning reinforced and diffused a dependence on the automobile that guaranteed the auto industry's growth.^[36]

The New Deal did not end in the late 1930s. It transmuted from process to structure. It enframed the prosperity of the postwar era, out of sight like studding, like Romex, like plumbing, behind drywall. Before 1942, the New Deal constituted a group of programs, actively implemented in the midst of political controversy to achieve politically sponsored goals. After 1945, the New Deal constituted a framework of institutions within which private enterprises pursued profit in a way that achieved social goals. People did not see that the New Deal remained around them as the infrastructure of prosperity because the social phenomenology of mass perception had changed. Political consensus restructured what individuals and groups perceived in their political and social worlds. Consensus painted over social division and class difference. Before 1942, politics built the New Deal much as architects build a home. Consciousness of intent animates every step of creating the home, from envisioning the design to constructing the dwelling and moving in. In the early stages of construction, as carpenters define rooms and hallways with studding frame, the floor plan is evident to its future occupants when they walk around. The carpenter's chalk lines on the concrete slab, two-by-four wall plates gun-nailed to the concrete, armored electric wires tunneling through bare studding, the unattached plumbing pipes, and the grease pencil instructions and dimensions on window and door frame reveal the architect's mind. As carpenters finish the interior, fill wall frames with insulation and cover studs with drywall, hang doors and windows, set floor boards and lay carpets, the floor plan disappears from view. Having moved in, residents experience spaces and functions. The social patterns of living inside the dwelling prevent them from perceiving the floor plan. The completion of the dwelling and moving in changes the phenomenology of the family living in it. After 1945, the New Deal was like a largely completed house. The floor plan guides the residents' social pattern, but they do not experience the floor plan by living in the home; they experience the home. Asked why they move about their home as they do, why they eat and sleep in the rooms they do, most households would answer in terms of their immediate intentions, not in terms of the floor

plan. Building the home could no longer be their goal. Their minds would now be conscious of other goals and values. With what material objects to fill up their new home would certainly be central. The dwelling thereby silently transforms itself from process to structure, from conscious goal seeking to unconscious guidance. This transformation does not mean that the architectural design of the house ceased to exist. Similarly, the transformation of the New Deal from process to structure did not mean that it ceased to exist. Rather, the nation bracketed the New Deal outside the foreground of its experience.

After 1948, everyday material technology underwent a transformation paralleling the postwar normalization of the New Deal. As the New Deal ceased to be a political project, the world of objects it had previously sustained as technologies also normalized. Electric appliances became transparent and unproblematic. They disappeared into the anonymity of the domestic background, along with the ubiquitous telephone and radio. Consumers need think about them only in terms of immediate usefulness. The many considerations about electrical technologies that animated public debate in the 1920s and 1930s were no longer relevant. Consumers did not need to know that using a refrigerator would decrease the probability of food poisoning by retarding spoilage, or would improve the health of the family by increasing their consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats. Homemakers did not need to know that serving meals with a variety of nonseasonal foods made possible by refrigeration would enhance family togetherness as family members looked forward to meals. The consumer did not need to know that owning a refrigerator would pay for itself by generating a flow of savings, because she took fewer trips to the market. She did not need to know the physics and engineering that made a "refrigerator" work; she did not need to know how the components fit into the refrigerator's box; she did not need to know how to fix one if it broke. To buy one, she did not need special shopping expertise or vocabulary. She did not need to know the nearly endless succession of persons, from assembly line laborers to sales persons, whose hands touched the refrigerator. She did not have to know anything about any of the other electrical appliances she used, whether television, vacuum cleaner, air conditioner, or water heater. She did not have to engage in political activity to shop. She did not have to pressure legislatures to set commodity safety standards. She did not have to remonstrate with businessmen for the lack of stores carrying electrical appliances, or lobby utilities for reduction of electric rates, or convert other voters to the view that they had a right to an electrically modernized domestic life, a right other property owners could not deny by reason of skin color or religion or low income. With normalization of the New Deal, electrical modernization of the home became a personal environment in which electrical appliances were simply commodities.^[37]

Social thinkers accept the transparency of household appliances as a natural consequence of wealth and abundance, as if ease of acquisition and familiarity made material objects invisible. The naturalness of "commodities" is part of the reason that the culture of the 1950s seems, sui generis, unconnected to the his-

tory of the New Deal. The history of the political creation of technology ought to caution us not to think that commodification of technology is a "natural" process. If politics made appliances into technology, we might suspect that politics makes technology into commodities. As the New Deal ceased to be a primary political project in the nation, the process by which household appliances were technologized reversed itself. As the mass of households achieved the New Deal standard of living, the technological status of appliances faded and the appliances became commodified. Normalization occurred, not because of the commonness of electrical technology or the affluence of households buying them, but because most households no longer acquired and used appliances within political projects.^[38]

When appliances lapsed into the status of commodities, American culture came full circle in development of the domestic values of electricity. In the 1920s, private enterprise marketed electrical household appliances to a small percentage of the nation's households. In that social context, appliances were not technologies and their employment did not challenge the bourgeois values held by that social class. The depression brought into political power a statist-tending progressive political party that sought to democratize the material benefits of the electrical age. The New Deal redefined 1920s luxury commodities into the necessities of the many, from the material symbols of the upper class's conservative retention of an unequal social structure to the material instruments of mass freedom and material justice. As a political issue, the New Deal pointed to those luxuries as the material condition of freedom to which the mass of American households had a right. New Deal policies embedded electrical devices in a primary project shared by most Americans. The New Deal made electrical home appliances into technology. The fading of the New Deal as a project, ironically involving its transubstantiation into structure, stripped electrical household appliances of their technological status. Commodification of household technology worked reciprocally to normalize the New Deal. Situated in homes as commodities, appliances obtained meaning only through personal pleasure. Personalizing of objects thereby separated the private environment of the household from the anonymous public environment. Separation of the private and public environments distanced families from mass institutions of the public environment, thereby reinforcing the withdrawal of New Deal politics. Privatization of American life in suburbia in the 1950s appeared as the New Deal's mass politics declined.^[39]