Definition
Postwar politics refers to the climate of American urban governance between roughly 1945 and 1960, when New Deal and wartime spending machinery were redirected toward highways, public housing, and slum clearance, while populations began their long migration to the suburbs. It is the era that defined and rewarded administrators who could absorb federal money and build at scale.
For The Power Broker it is the period in which Robert Moses's authority empire matured. The combination of strong federal funding, weak postwar mayors, and a public hungry for tangible improvement was almost engineered to suit his methods.
Why it matters
How it works
A political climate is the air a leader breathes. Postwar America breathed three convictions: that the federal government could and should pay for big domestic capital projects; that experts, having won the war, knew best how to spend the money; and that what was wrong with cities was their old housing stock and their lack of highway access. Combine these and you produce a generation of administrators who consider neighborhood objections an obstacle to be managed, not an input to listen to.
The climate cooled, eventually, under the pressure of civil-rights organizing, the suburban exodus, and the visible failures of urban renewal. By the late 1960s the same federal money was harder to access, mayors had more political latitude to say no, and the press had begun to ask harder questions. Moses's career trajectory tracks this arc exactly.