ABSTRACT
Public housing was originally intended by Congress as shelter for the working poor-those with income to pay rent. The federal government would indirectly provide municipal authorities with the funds to construct the housing. In the forties and fifties, only a minority of public housing tenants were caught in a cycle of dependency. In 1968, St. Louis provided a textbook case of the worse aspects of the failure of the national public housing policy. The federal government had provided other cities with a variety of special maintenance and repair subsidies over time, subsidies which could have helped substantially to ease St. Louis's distress, but Washington was not about to put any money into St. Louis. The strikers also received the editorial support of the conservative Globe-Democrat, as well as the liberal St. Louis Post Dispatch. McCarthy was administrative assistant to Harold Gibbons, the Teamster leader in St. Louis who was to play the central role in mediating the rent strike dispute.
