Fifties (23 page)

Selling
mass-produced homes, though, was not the hard part. The hard part was building them, and the Levitts were ready. The most critical lesson they had learned in Norfolk was the necessity of forgoing the basement—the most difficult and complicated part of a house—for a slab foundation. That meant flattening the existing terrain with a bulldozer and then merely laying concrete slabs. If the slab deprived householders of the ancient right to a dank, dark basement, in which they could store all the things they would never
use anyway, it also jump-started the process for the builder. Who needed basements, anyway? Bill Levitt wondered. The ancient Romans had not built basements, he would point out when the question arose, and who was he, Bill Levitt, to question the Romans? At first a local Hempstead bureaucrat, obviously a basement lover, denied them a building permit “on general principles.” General principles, Levitt raged. What were those? But then a few days later a devastating editorial attacking general principles as manifested in Hempstead ran in the
Herald Tribune,
and the official backed down.

Levitt was quick to admit that he had borrowed Henry Ford’s production system at the great Rouge plant in Detroit. But his adaptation of it was sheer genius: A car was small enough to be moved along an assembly line while the workers remained stationary. Obviously, one could not do that with houses, so why not make the teams of workers mobile, moving them from one stationary house to the next? As such he created a new kind of assembly line, of specialized groups of workers who performed their chores and moved on. The site, as Levitt liked to point out, became the factory. The Levitts did not believe in prefabricating their houses; they had learned that it was too rigid a method. Instead, they had their own system of preassembling. Everything, William Levitt said, had to be made simple. As he saw it, America was not a country of skilled workmen—there were few enough of them around under the best of circumstances, and none were likely to go to work for Levitt’s company, where the stress was laid not on individual, elegant workmanship but on the maximum number of houses to be built in a given amount of time. Because his workers were less skilled, Levitt had many of the critical parts preassembled elsewhere. That made the on-site assembly easier, so ordinary workers, aided by power tools—just then coming into use—could take it from there. Of the tedium involved in so mechanized a process, Alfred Levitt once said, “The same man does the same thing every day, despite the psychologists. It is boring; it is bad; but the reward of the green stuff seems to alleviate the boredom of the work.”

At first the construction trucks kept getting bogged down in the muddy potato fields, so the Levitts figured out they had to go in first and create a sufficiently finished road to avoid the problem. Safe from the mud, the trucks would come in and drop off building materials at exact intervals of sixty feet. The floors were made of asphalt, and the walls of composition Sheetrock. There were floor men and side men and tile men and men who did the white painting and men who did the red painting. By July 1948 they were building
180 houses a week or, in effect, finishing thirty-six houses a day. It was, Bill Levitt noted, like clockwork: “Eighteen houses completed on the shift from 8 to noon, and 18 more houses finished on the shift from 12:20 to 4:30.” The system had to be foolproof: Anything that slowed it down—a strike by a subsidiary union, a shortage of nails or lumber—would throw off the entire schedule, and they would lose money. So they made their own nails, buying thirteen nail-making machines and a great supply of scrap iron; they made their own cement; and they even produced their own lumber, buying thousands of acres of timberland in Oregon and building a mill there.

Some 17,000 houses were built in the first Levittown and 82,000 people lived there. One swimming pool was built for every thousand houses. There were five schools, built by the county on public contract, which did not please pre-Levittown residents, who felt they were supporting these new arrivistes. Churches were erected on land furnished by the Levitts. One man had, in effect, created a community all his own, although he provided only the bedrooms, nothing more. It was a strange new world where each day the men got in their cars or boarded trains to go off to jobs in New York City, twenty miles away; it was not unlike an old whaling port where the men periodically went off for several months to hunt their quarry, leaving their wives to tend the community. But here, the men returned home at 6
P.M.
each night.

Bill Levitt was thirty-eight when the war was over. He was the son of Abraham Levitt, whose parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants. A self-made success as a real estate man in Long Island, Abraham was in the business for some twenty-five years before he made his first tentative move into building, around 1929. During the 1920s, the Levitt family lived in a lovely brownstone in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. But when the senior Levitt heard that a local black district attorney was moving into the area, he gathered his own family together and told them, “If this man moves in, the neighborhood will soon be black, and then the only question left for us is whether we’ll be able to sell our house and for how much. The longer we wait, the more the price will go down.” With that, Abraham Levitt sold his brownstone and moved his family to Long Island, a pioneer of the great migrations that were soon to come—blacks moving from the rural South to Northern inner cities, and whites fleeing them from the inner cities to the suburbs. By 1934, the Levitts had built a two-hundred-unit subdivision on Long Island. It
was called Strathmore, and the houses sold for between $9,000 and $18,000.

Bill Levitt was young and confident and intensely ambitious. Eric Larrabee described his appearance as like that of “a retired Marx brother turned master of ceremonies in a run-down night club.” He did not lack for ego. He tended to refer to the company in the third person, as “Levitt,” as if the company were a person: “Levitt plans to build here ...” or “Levitt isn’t the kind of company you can push around ...” William Levitt was, of course, the real Levitt of “Levitt.” By the time of their third Levittown, Abraham had retired and Alfred, unable to get along with his brother, had sold his shares of stock and gotten out of the company.

Bill Levitt was nothing if not tough. He did not even think of himself as a builder. “My father always taught me when you talk to a builder, keep your hands in your pockets,” he once said. He went against the grain in a number of ways. In an age largely sympathetic to unions and which saw a major increase in their economic and political power, Levitt fought them every inch of the way. Benefactor of the common man Levitt might have been. But he liked to say that Thomas Jefferson made the greatest mistake in history by implying that all men were equal. They might be created equal, he would say, but they were not equal: Some were more talented, some compensated for lack of talent by working harder, and some were neither talented nor hardworking and that was where the union came in. The job of the union, he insisted, could be reduced to a simple idea: the protection of the slowest and least efficient worker. Because of that, Bill Levitt hired only nonunion workers. He paid them top dollar and offered all kinds of incentives that allowed them to earn extra money. Levitt workers often made twice as much a week as those who had comparable jobs elsewhere, but they did it on terms set by Bill Levitt.

Levitt bought appliances from wholly owned Levitt subsidiaries, which meant that he had to pay fewer middlemen. The very idea of middlemen enraged Bill Levitt—the idea that people might make a profit on goods they had never seen or touched. If the number of middlemen were reduced, he liked to say, the price could be brought down considerably—“if only in three-cent stamps,” because less paperwork would have to be sent through the mails. When Levitt bought appliances, he bought them by the carload. The entire operation was so efficient, Eric Larrabee noted in
Harper’s
magazine, that the Levitts could spend about $1,500 less on carpentry and materials than competitors. No one had ever seen anything like it before.
(“How do you build forty houses a day—$40 million worth a year—that will please the American government, the American public and the American Institute of Architects? Levitt has the answer,” ran a caption in a
Fortune
magazine article in October 1952.) Knowing that many first-time homebuyers feared being fleeced by lawyers and businessmen during the paperwork, the Levitts simplified the buying process as well. There were no down payment, no closing costs, and no secret extras. Veterans who signed up for the first Levitt houses had to put down a one-hundred-dollar deposit, which they eventually got back. It was an unusual and appealing concept: The price was the price.

The homebuyers themselves seemed quite pleased with Levitt homes, which over the years proved unusually sturdy. Those who bought into Levittown were, more often than not, leaping ahead of their parents in terms of their standard of living. Yet the very nature of what Levitt was doing and the scope of his success made him a target for those who disliked and even feared the new mass culture of postwar society. “
For literally nothing down,
” wrote John Keats, “you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building around the edges of American cities ... inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversations, dress, possessions, perhaps even blood types are almost precisely like yours ... [these houses] actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them.”

There was no small amount of snobbery to the attacks on the Levitts; most of it came not from dissatisfied customers but from people who were fortunate enough, because of their backgrounds, to be able to afford more traditional middle-class housing. For those people, housing—like the choice of a profession—was a matter of preference and options. The most relentless critic of the new suburb was Lewis Mumford, one of the most distinguished architectural and social commentators of his time. Mumford claimed that Levitt was using “new-fashioned methods to compound old-fashioned mistakes.” “Mechanically it is admirably done,” Mumford said, “socially the design is backward.” Mumford’s attacks struck Levitt as essentially unfair and uninformed. Had Mumford, he asked, even bothered to find out about the housing these young people had vacated for their new Levitt houses?

Mumford did not stop with one or two articles. His attacks were persistent and more than a little cruel. It was as if Levitt and his subdivision came to symbolize all that Mumford hated about the homogenization (and democratization) of American culture then
being wrought by the combination of increasing affluence and mass-production technology. Levittown, he implied, represented the worst vision of the American future: bland people in bland houses leading bland lives. The houses were physically similar, theorized Mumford, so the people inside must be equally similar; an entire community was being made from a cookie cutter. In 1961, some ten years after the completion of the first Levittown, Mumford described it as “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless command waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.” Other critics agreed. The original version of
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
noted writer Ron Rosenbaum, was “about the horror of being in the ’burbs. About neighbors whose lives had so lost their individual distinctiveness they could be taken over by alien vegetable pods—
and no one would know the difference.
And those evil pods that housed the aliens and stole the souls of the humans: Were they not metaphors, embodiments of the Cape Cod pods of Levittown and the like, whose growth and multiplication came from sucking the individuality out of the humans housed in them?”

But others thought that Mumford was not quite fair; the young sociologist Herbert Gans, who decided to buy a house in the third Levittown with his young family, was surprised by the rich and diverse quality of life there. Levitt loathed critics like Mumford. When people spoke to him of the texture of a community, he turned cold: He was in the business of putting up good low-cost housing; he was not in charge of human relations after the building was finished. It was the classic confrontation of the doer and the critic, of the older America and the newer, entrepreneurial one. The criticism was, for someone of Bill Levitt’s background, like being told that no matter how successful he was, how much money he made, and how many good houses he built for people who wanted them, he was somehow not good enough for acceptance by the privileged, educated classes. When in 1956 the Levitt group decided to offer a greater variety of houses, Levitt said at the meeting, “Now Lewis Mumford can’t criticize us anymore.” In the press release on his third Levittown, Levitt wrote, “We are ending once and for all
the old bugaboo of uniformity.... In the new Levittown we build all the different houses ... right next to each other within the same section.” (Almost thirty years later, when Ron Rosenbaum wrote a piece for
Esquire
magazine celebrating the most important men and women of the last half century, he called Levitt, only to discover that the builder was still angry about Lewis Mumford. “I think by now we’ve shown that critics like Lewis Mumford were wrong,” Levitt told Rosenbaum. He thereupon launched upon a bitter diatribe that concluded: “I think that Lewis Mumford has been shown to be a prophet without honor.”)

Certain differences were most definitely not welcomed in Levittown, however. Blacks could not buy in—a Levitt policy that lasted for two decades, long after the nation began legally trying to rid itself of lawful segregation. “The Negroes in America 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,” Levitt said in the early fifties. At first the Levitts forbade fences, but in time fences appeared. For a time the Levitts supervised lawn cutting and sent families the bills, but soon the owners took that over. Owners were forbidden to dry clothes outside unless it was on a specially designed rack. But despite all the rules and the conformity implied by the identical houses and lots, American ingenuity and individuality could not be suppressed. Slowly, steadily, the owners in Levitt developments and those like them began to adapt their houses, putting their own stamp on them.