ABSTRACT
When American soldiers returned home from the Second World War, everyone thought the country would finally get down to reaping the benefits of the “fight for democracy.” The tremendous industrial capacity created by the war needed to be adapted to domestic production, and housing was one of the venues for peacetime conversion.1 Returning GIs read about “their” postwar house in any one of a number of national journals, each of which suggested that domestic life would be changed by the introduction of wartime innovations into everyday life.2 One of the most fundamental changes in national policy had to do with a new sense of entitlement for the decommissioned soldier. Whatever their background, race or social class, it was expected that returning soldiers had the right to an education and home ownership.3 This notion alone, that most of the working citizens of the country deserved to own their homes, carried with it huge implications for the radical transformation of the American landscape. And as the government guaranteed millions of home mortgages, suburbs and freeways proliferated.
