The first Levittown housing development on a former potato farm on New York’s Long Island (1947-1951) was seen as a ‘godsend’ by GIs returning from the war. Two-bedroom homes in the suburbs at a cost of only $6,990 with a minimal amount of money down (zilch down if you were a GI), seemed an opportunity too good to miss. The only catch was you had to be White as well as a veteran to get one! William Levitt’s planned housing development was intended for Caucasians only, restrictive covenants were inserted into sales contracts barring African-American families from membership of these new, model suburban communities.
Building comfortable White enclaves?
With Black veterans of WWII turned away from Levittown, Bill Levitt was forced to defend his exclusivist policy. Despite avowing (rather hollowly) that “as a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice”, Levitt sought to justify his position on the grounds that a White-only community was best for business. He argued that if he sold “to one Negro family, 90 to 95 per cent of White customers would not want to buy into the community”. Levitt was clearly not prepared to be an agent of social change if it meant a diminution of business profitability…self-interestedly and rather lamely he protested that it was unreasonable to saddle one builder with “the entire risk and burden of a vast social experiment” (even though the particular “one builder” in this case had been recognised by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in America) [‘When the Niggers Moved into Levittown’: Review of David Kushner’s Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 63 (Spring 2009): 80–81; Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109]. The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) was complicit with Levitt and other developers in the perpetuation of the practice of segregation, despite its clear violation of federal housing laws [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org]. Little wonder then that African-Americans saw the housing market as tainted, a “symbol of racial inequality”✱.
Desegregation of Levittown
Levitt resisted the criticism and made his third mass-produced settlement, Willingboro/Levittown in New Jersey, another Whites only community (no Blacks but it did permit White ‘ethnics’ – Hispanics/Latinos and Jews). By 1960 Willingboro had its first African-American family residing there (by 1970 it was 11 per cent Black). Only in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, did Levitt come out and announce that Levittown housing developments would no longer be racially segregated. Pointedly this occurred at the same time as the federal government enacted the Fair Housing Act into law [Kushner].
Over the years many sociological studies and much cultural criticism has focused on the Levittown housing model. An early take on Levittown described the housing project in aspirational working class terms as “the dream come true of the skilled mechanic in the blue dungarees” [‘Levittown U.S.A.’, A. Miller, Phylon Quarterly, 19(1), 1st Quarter 1958, 108-112]. Many observers have portrayed Levittown as a double-edged sword…”Levittown embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story”, some saw Levittown’s achievements symbolising America’s can do” spirit, its ingenuity and entrepreneurship, but for many liberals it symbolised violent prejudice, unthinking conformity and race-based exclusion [‘Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburb’ (C Galyean), US History Scene, www.ushistoryscene.com].
Sanitised homogeneity of Levittown
From the time of Levittown’s first outing in New York in 1947, some critics were concerned than the large-scale experiments in housing may turn into mass slums of suburban sprawl. If they weren’t thought of as slums, they were characterised as bland and unoriginal. Sociologist Lewis Mumford depicted the developments as comprising a “low-grade, uniform environment from which escape is impossible” [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com]. A common perception of Levittown from the outside looking in that has become generic is of an over-sanitised suburb consisting largely of identical housing [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Standardised houses produce standardised people was a popular view of critics at the time. Some went further and labelled Levittown a “social failure and an environmental disaster” [Steven Conn].
From an aerial or from a panoramic view, Levittown did leave itself susceptible to satire…the clear-cut “cookie-cutter” pattern of little boxes and white picket-fence wholesomeness invited comparisons with the world of the 1950s as portrayed on American television. The neighbourhood houses and their neat configurations resembled the sets of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best: images of irenic and idyllic communities of harmonious middle class suburbia…in other words, they looked like the cruel parodies of the American dream detached from realities – as depicted on the small screen [Review of Diane Harris (Ed), Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, (2010), (DR Contosa)].
Customising a Levittowner
The view of the Levittown landscape as fixed and immutable has been rejected by some observers who point out that the owners themselves were the agents of change and non-conformity…after they settled in some of the residents altered the nature of their tract-houses to suit themselves and their lifestyle – extending a standard utilitarian Cape Cod or a Rancher to express the individuality of their homes. They also converted car ports into garages or additional rooms for new children, and the like [Schuyler]. Furthermore, Richard Lacayo argues that Levitt homes were made to be customised, the original structures were basic and over time homeowners added features such as porches, dormers and new wings [Lacayo].
Un-Americanism, McCarthyism and Levitt
The formative days of the first Levittown projects coincided with the McCarthyist period of political witch-hunts aimed at exposing supposed communists within America. By a curious convergence of mutual interests, Senator Joe McCarthy joined up with fellow illiberal Bill Levitt in promoting the virtues of Levittown (“a model of the American way” McCarthy declared). In one of his incendiary speeches McCarthy equated public housing (Levitt’s competitors) with communism [‘The Levittown Legacy’, (Ellen Leopold), Monthly Review, 01-Nov-2000, www.monthlyreview.org]. Levitt returned the favour by vilifying anyone who opposed his segregationist practices as ‘communist’, linking Levittown to the McCarthyist cause, and by endorsing the Levittown way of housing as a more American and capitalist alternative to public housing [Galyean].
In 1968 Levitt sold Levitt & Sons to telecommunications goliath ITT for a cool $92M. Subsequent attempts by Levitt to replicate the glory days of Levittown in overseas housing projects (Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela) floundered, and then a big project in Orlando, Florida, also went “belly up”, with dire personal consequences for the realty developer. Levitt misused funds belonging to customers and from his charitable trust [‘Tough Times for Mr. Levittown’, (MT Kaufman), New York Times Magazine, 24-Sep-1989, www.nytimes.com]. The once great ‘King of Suburbia’ – whose multi-multi-million dollar business at its height was constructing 12 houses a day on its construction sites – died in debt, still dreaming of pulling off one more mega-housing triumph.
FN: By the late 1980s there were high taxes imposed on individual Levittown properties due to the absence of a commercial tax base. Levitt recognised, all-too belatedly, that this was a weakness of his developments (the estates were designed without adjacent industrial/commercial complexes)… which also deprived residents of a local employment source [Kaufman]. Another ironic twist for Levitt whose marketing mantra always invoked the affordability of a Levitt home, in 1988 homes in Levittown Philadelphia had a $200,000 price tag on them! [‘It Started With Levittown in 1947: Nation’s 1st Planned Community Transformed Suburbia’, (JF Peltz), Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com]
PostScript: “Little Boxes”
The period from the mid/late Fifties to the early Sixties saw a heightening of criticism of Levittown (and its clones) in literary and cultural forms. US novels of the period presented a downbeat, unappealing and even bleak view of life in a Levittown style environment, especially John C Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Social critic Keats wrote of the postwar suburban ‘solutions’, “find a box of your own in one of the fresh air slums”, Yates spoke of an era dominated by “a general lust for conformity”. The takeaway message of these works was that the tract-home buyer was entering a stultifying world of social alienation, the anonymity of suburbs, impersonal supermarkets, inane ‘mod’ gadgetry and mortgage servitude✜…bleak stuff indeed! To William H Whyte these were the “new package suburbs” whose residents (were) “transient, interchangeable cogs in the engine of corporate America” [Schuyler]. The critique of the Levitt house also extended to pop music of the day, Malvina Reynolds’ song ‘Little Boxes’ added a similar disparaging note to the Levittown commentary.
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✱ even after the removal of racial exclusion covenants in the 1960s, the 2000 Census revealed that Caucasian residents of Levittown, Bucks County, still comprised 98 per cent of the population
⍍ Kenneth Jackson has argued that the problem would have been avoided had Levitt simply made Levittown available to all from the start, he asserts that the demand for houses after the war was so great that White buyers wouldn’t have been put off by the prospect of having some Black neighbours [quoted in Schuyler]
⌖ it had been sold to the African-American couple by the home’s original owner (Levitt was legally powerless to prevent the re-selling of Levittown properties)
✫ the 2017 George Clooney movie Suburbicon is a fictionalised interpretation of the Myers Levittown incident
✜ the acerbic (other) Mr Keats followed up The Crack in the Picture Window with The Insolent Chariots (1958), a comparable hatchet job on the automobile and Americans’ problematic relationship with it