“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist… he has too much to do” quipped builder Bill Levitt, whose massive Levittown subdivision in Long Island, New York, was the largest housing project in American history at the time. Indeed, in the early Cold War years the United States became a fully suburban-oriented country, as Americans sought stability, security, and the long delayed good life after a generation of depression, war, and now a threatening red menace. Suburban home ownership came to symbolize their triumphant yet lonely quest, along the way becoming an integral part of the American Dream.
Between 1950 and 1970, the nation’s suburban population doubled, from 36 million to 74 million; a rate of growth six times faster than the cities. Fueled by the Veteran’s Administration’s attractive new mortgage program, low inflation, cheap gas, and Eisenhower’s interstate highways, fully eighty-three percent of the population growth in the peak Baby Boom years of the 1950s was along the periphery of American cities. In fact, more people arrived in the suburbs every year than had ever come through Ellis Island. Mass-produced Levitt-style subdivisions represented 75% of all new housing starts. And by 1970, the US became the first country in world history to have more suburbanites than either city dwellers or farmers.
Homeownership brought its own rewards, but the prefabricated built environment of postwar suburbia offers useful glimpses into the fear and optimism animating the American mind at midcentury.
Consider the fortress-like quality of the popular ranch style home. Vintage Cold War. The exterior featured a low-pitched roof with pronounced horizontal lines and windows, often with a brick façade making it look suspiciously like a military bunker.
Designed with young families in mind, the basic one-story floor plan deliberately lacked dangerous stairways for those 76 million Baby Boomers to navigate. The kitchen moved to the front of the house, positioned prominently to showcase the housewife and mother, while giving her clear lines of site out picture windows to watch kids in either the front or back yards. So too did the “family room” evolve into the ground zero of togetherness. By adding a television set and durable Naugahyde furniture, this space eclipsed the traditional and more formal prewar “living room.” An attached garage allowed a family’s two cars to reside inside, under the same roof.
Within the reach of more Americans than ever, owning a house identical to your neighbor, set uniformly on a sixty by one-hundred-foot yard, in rigidly homogenous neighborhoods, was considered one of the best bulwarks against the class conflicts thought to breed communism. And nothing symbolized capitalism’s inevitable triumph over communism more than the suburban home. Much of American’s new discretionary spending power was targeted toward stocking these tract houses with vibrantly colored appliances, furniture, and other mid-century modern decorative visual clutter. Between 1945 and 1950, spending on household furnishings and appliances rose an astonishing two hundred and forty percent, as we bought 21.4 million cars, 20 million refrigerators, 5.5 million stoves, and 11.6 million televisions a year. Your very own Versailles castle along the cul-de-sac.
Besides, with our cities threatened by imminent nuclear destruction, many civil defense officials encouraged this move to suburbia, advocating “defense through decentralization.”
