Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (11 page)

The Levitts understandably attracted reams of public notice, but they were only the most well-known of builders in a virtual paradise for suburban developers at the time. Suburbs had existed long before the 1940s. But they had spread relatively slowly until then, housing 17 percent of the population in 1920 and still only 20 percent in 1940. By 1960, 33 percent of Americans lived in what the Census Bureau defined as suburban areas. During the early postwar years some central cities in the West and Southwest grew substantially. But many other American cities expanded only a little, and some, including New York and Chicago, did not grow at all. Instead, Americans were streaming into the suburbs, some of whose populations increased at rates of 50 to 100 percent in these years.
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Such a spectacular development as suburbanization inevitably invited widespread attention, some of it hostile. Critics deplored the early suburban landscapes without tall trees and the absence of life on the streets. Suburbs, they said, were built for cars, not for the interaction of people: the front of many suburban houses was a garage. There was little place in most of the new suburbs for older folk, and intergenerational extended families and neighborhoods were thought to suffer.
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Critics especially yearned for a greater mix in the new suburbs of residential and non-residential areas—little shops, corner drugstores, cafes and restaurants—that existed in more varied or colorful urban neighborhoods. They objected to the essential sameness of the houses: "ticky-tacky, all in a row," the folksinger Malvina Reynolds later said.

Opponents of suburban development disliked above all the forced conformity that they claimed to find in some of these places. Levittown rules at first required home-owners to mow their lawns every week, forbade the building of fences, and outlawed the hanging of wash outside on weekends. Lewis Mumford, a sharp-tongued critic, was especially appalled by the passing of "community" that he found in more pluralistic urban neighborhoods. Places like Levittown, he thought, were bland, conformist, inhuman nightmares. When he first saw Levittown in Long Island, he was said to have pronounced that it would become an "instant slum." In 1961 he denounced the

multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the same common mold.
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A more serious criticism deplored the racial exclusiveness of many suburban developments. This exclusiveness tightened a "white noose" around minorities in many American cities.
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Blacks were barred from the Levittowns, and people who rented out their homes there were told to specify that the premises were not to be "used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race."
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Other suburbs relied on zoning or on restrictive covenants, even after the Supreme Court had stripped such covenants of legal standing in the courts. Racist patterns set at that time persisted long after civil rights activity changed much else in America: the 1990 census showed that there were only 127 African-Americans in the Levittown, Long Island, population of more than 400,000. The United States, blacks then complained, had become a nation of "chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs."
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Critics of racial policies in Levittowns thoroughly angered the builder. "The Negroes in America," William Levitt explained,

are trying to do in 400 years what the Jews in the world have not wholly accomplished in 600 years. As a Jew I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But . . . I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours. . . . As a company our position is simply this: we can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.
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Levitt's defense was of course cold comfort to black people. But he was surely correct about white attitudes. Other developers and realtors, fearing to challenge similar attitudes, did as Levitt did. Racial segregation of American neighborhoods was virtually ubiquitous, especially in the new suburbs, and harder to change than any other aspect of race relations. It reflected a culturally powerful desire of people to have neighbors like themselves—similar in class as well as race. Most of the postwar suburban developments were indeed homogeneous economically, whether stable working-class like the Levittowns, middle-class like much of Park Forest, or upper-middle-class.

Critics were unfair to single out suburban developers as the main cause of subsequent urban decay, especially in those central city areas that became a dumping ground for poverty-stricken minority groups. True, suburbs drained many cities, especially in the East and Midwest, of middle-class people and of urban tax bases. Downtown merchants complained bitterly about the new suburban developments and malls. So did central city movie operators, who lost business as early as 1947: suburbs (and the contemporaneous baby boom, which kept people at home), not TV, killed the downtown movie palaces.
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But residential movement has had a long history, and suburban growth would have occurred in the more prosperous postwar era with or without the FHA, the VA, or entrepreneurs like the Levitts.
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This is because people who can afford to—and many more could in the postwar era—seem naturally to desire lots of space around them. Some moved to the Levittowns of the world to get more house for the money, others to escape urban problems, others to find new and better schools. Most sought greater privacy and autonomy; they were not "conformists."
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Levittowners, and others who moved in the millions to suburbs in the postwar years, pulled up stakes, finally, because they were seeking a more satisfying family life. Most were very glad that they did. As one perceptive scholar concluded, Levittown "permits most of its residents to be what they want to be—to center their lives around the home and the family, to be among neighbors whom they can trust, to find friends to share leisure hours, to participate in organizations that provide sociability and the opportunity to be of service to others."
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A Long Island Levittowner remembered forty-seven years later the thrill of moving from a furnished apartment in Brooklyn. "We were proud," he recalled. "It was a wonderful community—and still is."
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The quest for a satisfying family life indeed proved strong during the postwar years. As early as 1940, marriage rates, which had been low throughout the hard times of the 1930s, moved upward.
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They peaked in 1946, when 2.2 million couples said their vows. This was a record that stood for thirty-three years. Though the rate then tailed off a bit, it remained high into the early 1950s. Divorce rates, which had increased fairly steadily since 1900, exploded to record highs in 1945–46, dropped sharply thereafter, and remained low until the mid-1960s.
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This was a striking, unanticipated reversal of what had seemed to be a long-range trend.

The baby boom that ensued was perhaps the most amazing social trend of the postwar era. Demographers, aware of long-term declines in fertility in the United States (and in other urban-industrial nations), thought that the relatively small cohort born in the 1920s and the very small cohort born in the Depression years would not produce a boom in the 1940s and 1950s. They therefore expected at most a short-term blip in child-bearing following the war.
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But birth rates ("furlough babies") rose in 1942 and 1943. And then: the boom. In May 1946, nine months after V-J Day, births increased from a low in February of 206,387 to 233,452. In June they rose again, to 242,302. By October they numbered 339,499 and were occurring at a record rate. Landon Jones, historian of the boom, notes that "the cry of the baby was heard across the land."
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By the end of the year an all-time high number of 3.4 million babies had been born, 20 percent more than in 1945. They came in time to abet the sales of a new book, one of the nation's great publishing success stories:
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
by Benjamin Spock, M.D.

The babies kept on arriving: 3.8 million in 1947, 3.9 million by 1952, and more than 4 million every year from 1954 through 1964, when the boom finally subsided. Birth rates—estimated total live births per 1,000 population—had ranged between 18.4 and 19.4 per year between 1932 and 1940. They rose to a postwar peak in 1947 of 26.6, the highest since 1921, stayed at 24.0 or higher from then until 1959, and were still at 21.0 in 1964, after which the rates dropped to 1930s levels. The total number of babies born between 1946 and 1964 was 76.4 million, or almost two-fifths of the population in 1964 of 192 million.

Historians and demographers have offered a range of explanations for this astonishing interruption of long-range trends. One hypothesis sees it as the result of a quest for "normalcy" immediately after the war. This explanation fails to account for the increase of the early 1940s or for the duration of it after 1946 into the early 1960s. A second theory points to wartime propaganda by the Office of War Information and other government agencies that called for Americans to build up the population. This explanation, however, tends to see people as tools and understates the depth of yearning by young adults for marriage and children. A third hypothesis accounts for the postwar boom by seeing it as part of a quest by Americans for psychological security (and by men to keep women at home) amid the fears and tensions of the atomic, Cold War age. This view, too, is both facile and conspiratorial.
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The boom in fact happened mainly because of decisions made by two different groups of Americans in these years. The first, who played a major role in the immediate postwar boom, were older Americans who had been forced by the Depression and World War II to delay marriage and child-rearing. Fertility for women in this group increased greatly after 1945. The second group, which accounted for the remarkable duration of the boom, was composed of younger folk, in their late teens or early twenties in the late 1940s. These people were more likely to marry than young people had been in the 1930s; by 1960, 93 percent of women over 30 were or had been married, as opposed to 85 percent in 1940. They tended to marry younger; the average age of marriage for women dropped from 21.5 years in 1940 to a low of 20.1 in 1956. They were more likely to have children; 15 percent of married women had remained childless in the 1930s, compared to only 8 percent in the 1950s. And they gave birth earlier in their marriages; first children were born an average of thirteen months following matrimony by the late 1950s, as opposed to an average of two years in the 1930s.
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The boom was not the result of parents having huge families, but rather of so many people deciding to marry young, to start a larger family quickly, and to have two, three, or four children in rapid succession.

Why did these groups act as they did? The behavior of the older parents was fairly easy to understand: deprived of "conventional" family life by the Depression, they sought to "catch up" in the 1940s. The younger cohorts, especially those who reached child-bearing age in the 1950s, often recalled no such deprivations, yet they seemed to yearn for marriage and children. This yearning appears to have been especially deep among men; women, after all, were the ones who shouldered most of the burden of child-rearing. But most women, too, seemed content enough with their decisions at that time. Many of these young adults may have have sought familial intimacy in order to cope with the pressures of an increasingly complex and bureaucratic world.

The most satisfactory explanation of the boom is offered by Jones, who highlights the "great expectations" of the younger generation at the time. Not only the veterans but also their younger brothers and sisters maturing in the next few years developed rising aspirations amid the increasingly prosperous economic climate of the 1940s and 1950s. Most of them knew that they were better off, relatively speaking, than their parents had been at their age. They sensed that they could afford to marry, buy a house, start a family, and educate their children.
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In this way as in so many others, the health of the economy—as well as optimistic perceptions of continuing prosperity—drove social change in postwar America.

No economic interpretation, of course, can entirely explain why large numbers of people decide to marry and have families. Black women, most of them very poor, continued to have considerably higher birth rates (averaging around 34 from the late 1940s to 1960) than white women. But the increasingly exuberant spirit of the age clearly was important. The biggest jumps in fertility occurred among well-educated white women with medium to high incomes. Demographers point out also that the only societies experiencing baby booms at that time, aside from the United States, were other dynamic, fairly prosperous nations with comparable moods of "high expectations": Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
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