Levittown

Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb.
David Kushner (2009, Walker & Company)

The 1950s saw hundreds of battles over desegregation across the United States. The battles over lunch counters, buses, and schools were famously fought in the streets, in the press, and in the courts; all these venues were also significant in the story of housing desegregation. David Kushner’s Levittown tells the story of one such battle on an intimate scale: what happened when, in 1957, a black family moved into previously all-white Levittown, Pennsylvania. Without attempting to cover the entire history of the era, Kushner also casts a useful light on the larger economic, governmental, and social forces at work.

The tale starts with Abe Levitt and his sons, Bill and Alfred, who started building housing developments on Long Island during the Depression. Levitt & Sons went on to build housing on military bases in World War II, and they were primed for bigger things in the postwar housing boom. On thirty-five hundred acres of nematode-ravaged potato fields, they constructed an entire town, complete with parks and shopping centers. Under the influence of Bill Levitt’s considerable ego, the town of Island Trees was renamed Levittown. Veterans swarmed to rent, then to buy, and move in with their families.

White veterans, that is. In addition to Abe Levitt’s strictures about landscaping, about which he was something of a martinet, the rules of the new community excluded ‘any person other than members of the Caucasian race.’ Such a clause was permitted, indeed encouraged, by Federal Housing Administration regulations that had, from the FHA’s founding in 1934, specified that ‘business and industrial uses, lower-class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups’ all qualified as adverse influences that would lower property values.

The Supreme Court overturned such explicit restrictive covenants in 1948, calling the clause “unenforceable as law and contrary to public policy.” But the policy was still in effect in many places, including the second Levittown development, outside of Philadelphia, where Lew and Bea Wechsler lived with their daughter and son. The house next door to them had been up for sale for two years when the Wechslers met Bill and Daisy Myers, who were living in nearby Bloomsdale Gardens, and looking for a house. What the Myerses wanted in the spring of 1957 was a three-bedroom house for their growing family, with a garage for Bill to use as a workshop; 43 Deepgreen Lane fit the bill perfectly.

Kushner’s book is partly based on memoirs written by Lew Wechsler and Daisy Myers, based in turn on the journals they kept, so he can give us a day by day record of the mayhem that ensued in August, 1957, when Bill and Daisy Myers took possession of their charming pink house. A vociferous group of neighbors dedicated themselves to a campaign of harassment and intimidation that included rock-throwing, name-calling, cross-burning, and harassing phone calls, without any particular hindrance from various contingents of police who were ostensibly there to protect the newcomers. The Levittown Shopping Center sold Confedarate flags, and one faction of the neighborhood mob made inquiries about joining the Ku Klux Klan.

The story was catnip to the press, both because of its resonance with the integration of the Little Rock schools, which took place the same autumn, and because of the iconic nature of Levittown: “Papers from Moscow to London covered the standoff in what had long been viewed as America’s quintessential suburban dreamland. Life magazine had just run a long spread on the story that week, including dramatic photos of the Myerses and Wechslers under siege in their homes.”

Other neighbors supported the Myerses, repairing the damage done by vandals, bringing food, and sitting up nights in the Wechslers’ kitchen, standing guard. In October, Thomas McBride, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania filed an injunction to stop the “unlawful, malicious and evil consparacy...to force the said Myers family to leave Levittown;” McBride himself took part in the trial, two months later, and the transcript, which Kushner quotes liberally, is gripping.

The injunction served its purpose, and the Myerses remained safely in Levittown till they moved to York, Pennsylvania, a few years later, but-- how did this crisis happen? There’s plenty of blame to go around: certainly a few of the neighbors were unreconstructed racists, and the local police response was a failure. The court records show that Levitt and Sons made promises to buyers that Levittown would be whites-only. Bill Levitt claimed that he was just giving the buying public what it wanted, and that any other policy would have put him at a disadvantage to competing developers. Or perhaps it was the banks, the realtors, the FHA, Congress--it’s turtles all the way down. Be that as it may, the upshot, as Kushner says, is stunning:“... from 1934 through 1960, less than 2 percent of the $120 billion in new housing underwritten by the U.S. government went to minorities.”

Kushner’s writing style is a little too breezy for me in places, but the scope of the book is beautifully judged. Within the broader story of the great migration to the suburbs, he makes the Levitts, the Myerses, and the Wechslers distinct personalities and consequential actors. He can’t quite make me understand why some of the people of Levittown thought they had a legal right to deny other people their right to live there peacefully, but that kind of thing goes on today, and I don’t understand it yet.

Another thing that’s important to remember, because it now seems so strange to those of us who didn’t experience it, is the Red-baiting that was attached to civil rights activism. The Wechslers, as it happened, had actually met through the National Student League, a group with ties to the Communist Party, though their faith was severely damaged by Krushchev’s 1956 revelations about the Stalin era. To hear Senator Joseph McCarthy tell it, anyone who opposed racial discrimination was a Communist. Really? Communists were the only people who were fighting to extend the promises of America to all Americans? Where were the Christians?
I guess that’s a story for another time.


Email, July 2010

Carry Me Home; Leaving Birmingham

Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
Diane McWhorter (2001, Simon and Schuster)
Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son
Paul Hemphill (1993, Viking Penguin)

If one is of a certain age--which for this purpose I am not--Birmingham is a somewhat infamous place to be from. (I lived there in 1963, the year of police dogs, water cannons, and the dynamiting of the 16th Street Baptist Church, but I was two, and we lived ‘over the mountain’, in the leafy southern suburbs.) The civil rights history of Birmingham exerts a great fascination for some of us who just missed first-hand experience of it. To write Carry Me Home, Diane McWhorter immersed herself in that fascination for fifteen years.

McWhorter is a child of Mountain Brook, the wealthiest and leafiest of the southern suburbs. “Most of America knew of my city only as a sort of race circus--redneck freaks and Jim Crow wretches, clashing under the live fireworks of ‘Bombingham.’ But behind the scenes was a third set of principals, from whom I was learning the ordinary rituals of prosperity at the Mountain Brook Club.” Carry Me Home details the links between the Big Mules of Mountain Brook, assorted violent Klansmen, the city government, and the FBI. On the other side, the movement against segregation reflected the class divisions within black Birmingham, becoming a mass movement somewhat in spite of the traditional leadership.

McWhorter shows us large characters sometimes not at their best--Bull Connor, Fred Shuttlesworth, Robert F. Kennedy, George Wallace, as well as Martin Luther King--and hundreds who might otherwise be forgotten. From a thicket of incisive and often ironic details, a story of courage and perseverance emerges. In Carry Me Home, the martyrs and heroes of Birmingham have a worthy monument.

In the acknowledgments that end her book, McWhorter thanks the editor who ‘commanded me to shrink the manuscript to a size that could be manipulated without the aid of a forklift...’; trimmed by two-thirds, Carry Me Home still weighs in at 700 pages, with index and notes. If your reading list doesn’t quite have room for it, but you’re interested in the subject, allow me to commend an alternative.

Paul Hemphill’s Leaving Birmingham was written while McWhorter was starting her research; it’s longer on memoir, shorter on footnotes. Hemphill describes the industrial and class history that divided Birmingham into Poor white, Rich white, and Black. (He’s poor white: his father drove trucks on long hauls, before the Interstates; in a useful counterpoint, the book makes space for the voices of a black man, and a white woman from Mountain Brook. ) Like McWhorter, he contemplates the usefulness of racial division and hatred to the captains of industry. And like her, he’s passionate about the issues of justice and peace raised by Birmingham’s history, because it’s there that these are not abstractions, but visceral and deeply personal--indeed, matters of life and death.


February 2002

His Brother's Keeper

His Brother's Keeper: A story from the edge of Medicine
Jonathan Weiner (2004, HarperCollins)

     His Brother's Keeper takes Jonathan Weiner to the frontiers of biomedicine, where the latest genetic technologies promise wonders. Some of these wonders are happening already, and others are not quite around the corner. He is led by Jamie Heywood, a young mechanical engineer turned genetic engineer and activist, who is on a quest for a way to help his brother. In 1998, Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS, ametrophic lateral schlerosis, which we also know as Lou Gehrig's disease. Beginning with weakness in his right hand, Stephen gradually lost nerve function; he could expect to lose the ability to walk, and eventually the ability to breathe, leading to death within five to seven years.

     The past decade has seen spectacular advances in molecular biology and genetics, but the use of these technologies to help sick people is just getting off the ground. Today's work in genetic science includes the hope of using viruses to add genetic material to the cells of adult patients, potentially renewing their ability to carry out their functions. Weiner says, "Hope asked: How soon can we use this invisible anatomy to repair a dying nerve, brain, or heart? Fear asked: How much of the body can we change without losing the patient we hoped to save?"    

     This tension permeates the Heywoods' story. Jamie wavers between non-profit fund-raising and the entrepreneurial model of a Silicon Valley startup; he wants to see important basic research done, but he needs it to bear medical fruit in time to save his brother. Stephen has no choice about being a patient, and may consent to being a test subject, but he'd just as soon not be a poster child; he also wants to be a carpenter, and a husband and father. And while Weiner tries to be an objective reporter, he also falls under the spell of Jamie's persuasive enthusiasms, which sets him up for discouragement as problems, both scientific and bureaucratic, prove intractable. Meanwhile his own mother exhibits symptoms of a growing neural disability, and part of his attention is back at the family home worrying about her.

     Weiner fell into the middle of this story, and he leaves it before its end. Jamie remains driven, continuing single-mindedly to seek people and money who would bring a treatment for ALS closer. Stephen has moved into a wheelchair, and needed a voice enhancement apparatus; he remains easy-going and thoughtful. "Stephen was still convinced that his brother would find a treatment or a cure, maybe after Stephen himself was gone. But there was nothing supernatural about any of it. That is how big things always start. They have to grow from a couple of lucky little things. They are normal miracles."

     Such determination, such love, such hope--these are surely miracles too.

CTR
March 2005

Mockingbird

Any Good Books,
May 2010

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
Charles J. Shields (Henry Holt, 2006)

It’s a pleasing literary oddity that Harper Lee and Truman Capote shared a small-time childhood, and grew up to be such different kinds of Famous Writers: he, one of the most ardent self-promoters the literary world has known, as famous for parties he threw as for books he wrote; she, the author of one of the most highly acclaimed, widely read, and influential novels of the twentieth century, but somewhat overwhelmed by the resulting acclaim.

Mockingbird, Charles Shields’s unauthorized biography of Nelle Harper Lee, is packed with such gentle ironies. Capote had already published his first book when Lee left college to try the writing life, so his example may have proved to her that such a thing could happen; he read parts of To Kill a Mockingbird; and he incidentally introduced her to Michael and Joy Brown. The Browns, having come into a windfall, gave Lee the money to concentrate on writing for a whole year, without having to work at a job.

But the most direct literary assistance went the other way: without Lee’s help, Capote would not have gained entry to the inner life of Finney County, Kansas, and In Cold Blood would not have gotten off the ground. So, in addition to being the mother of one of the greatest books of its century, Harper Lee was the midwife to one of her friend’s most notable works. (By this time the reader has seen enough of him not to be surprised that his thanks are perfunctory.)

To Kill a Mockingbird, meanwhile, won the 1961 Pulitzer prize, and was featured by all the book clubs. It sold 2.5 million copies the first year, and some thirty million more, since. Shields observes, “...almost from the day of its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird took off, but gradually left its author behind.” Her second novel never saw the light of day, whether because of the time spent prize-collecting and movie-making, or helping Capote do research in Kansas, or, just as likely, the feeling that there was, after such success, nowhere to go but down. She was, to herself, a hard act to follow.
Alan Pakula’s production of the movie (and Horton Foote’s screenplay) subjected the book to the tightening and rebalancing necessary to bring in a reasonable running time; the three years of the books action become one year; and, at Gregory Peck’s urging, the dramatic focus fell more heavily on the trial, and much less on the lives of the children. Peck was probably right about that, cinematically speaking--and he won an Academy Award for the performance.

Now in her eighties, Lee still lives in Monroeville, where her book has become a cottage industry, the way Anne of Green Gables has for Prince Edward Island. In the twenty-five years between the action of the novel and its publication, Monroeville had modernized too much to be useable for filming. Since then economic progress has stagnated, and it’s returned to being something of a backwater. Since 1990, the town has produced an annual play of the book, bringing even more pilgrims to town. How trying it must be for Lee to go out to breakfast, and meet the millionth person who can’t help gushing about the book, and demanding to know why there wasn’t another.

Of course, as an unauthorized biography, Mockingbird is itself such an intrusion; our curiosity is natural, and perhaps this book is the safest distance from which to satisfy it. But if you’d like to be perfectly sure of being polite, don’t read it.

The Big House

The Big House: a century in the life of an American summer home
George Howe Colt (Scribner, 2003)

All over the Atlantic coast there are hundred-year-old houses passing into the third and fourth generations of ownership by a single family. Summer after summer of genial seaside matriarchy, with the menfolk turning up Friday night to go sailing or play a little tennis; and kids collecting seashells, or, driven within by rain, playing Sardines, or paging through their fathers' very own copies of the Hardy Boys.
George Howe Colt is the right man to tell his particular version of this archetypal story. He has the right house for the job--"a massive, four-story, shingle-style house as contorted and fantastic as something a child might build with wooden blocks." The Big House, as it's known within the family, is the most prominent house on Wings Neck, which stands on the Cape Cod side near the head of Buzzards Bay. The house boasts nineteen rooms, seven fireplaces, and a year-round population of mice, squirrels, and bats.
And he has the right family -- descended through one great-grandmother from the Forbeses of Naushon, the Atkinsons and Colts have all the marks of the Boston Brahmin--winter homes in Dedham; Harvard for the men; Miss Winsor's School and the Chilton Club (and the occasional insane asylum) for the women; and the proud vestiges of former wealth. "The Boston area was full of families like ours, venerable tribes that had nothing left to remind them of their former prominence but their names--which no longer counted for much--and their ancestral summer homes." The visitor is not meant to be able to tell whether they are sleeping on the original horsehair mattresses because the family can't afford new ones, or because these are perfectly good, and so long-wearing. (Probably both, of course, but it wouldn't do to discuss it.)
Times being what they are, with two-earner families unable to drop everything and give their children a couple of months by the sea, The Big House is too expensive to keep, and too high-maintenance to sell. Can anyone of George's generation come up with what it would take to buy it, let alone renovate it? Change is always painful, but the house winds up in good hands.
The Big House is a worthy addition to the pleasures of literary WASP-watching. Colt combines historical perspective with deep affection for this hardy tribe; we can only envy the legacy he is leaving for his own descendants.