Transcript
The Kitchen
July 24, 1959
Moscow · July 24, 1959
In the summer of 1959, the United States brought a house to Moscow. It was a copy of a real ranch house from Commack, Long Island.
So crowds could see inside, the builders split it in two with a walkway down the middle. They called it the Splitnik.
Vice President Richard Nixon walked the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, into the kitchen.
Nobody taped what happened next. Reporters wrote it down.
Richard M. Nixon Is it not far better to be talking about washing machines than machines of war, like rockets?
The Cold War, arguing about a washing machine. Each believed this kitchen proved his system gave ordinary people a better life.
The house was real, and so was the boom that built it. This film asks three things about that house: who built it, who was kept out, who felt boxed in. Start in 1945, when the soldiers came home.
Coming Home
1945–1947
Sixteen million Americans served in the war. Many economists feared that when they came home, the Depression would come back.
It didn't. During the war there had been little to buy, so people had saved. Now they wanted cars, refrigerators and, above all, houses.
There weren't nearly enough houses. In Chicago, 250 old trolley cars were sold as homes.
Period announcer Big Ice Box, 7 × 17 feet, could be fixed up to live in.
That was an ad in an Omaha newspaper.
Congress had already passed a law for them. Its official name was the Servicemen's Readjustment Act. Everyone called it the GI Bill.
Franklin D. Roosevelt It gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down.
It paid for college. About 2.2 million veterans went. It guaranteed their home loans, so banks would lend with little or nothing down.
But Congress let local officials run the program. Many Southern colleges wouldn't admit Black veterans, and banks often wouldn't lend to them.
In Mississippi in 1947, banks made 3,229 GI Bill loans for homes, farms and businesses. Two went to Black veterans.
The veterans married young and had children fast. Births jumped in 1946 and peaked at 4.3 million in 1957. That was the baby boom.
Every one of those babies needed a crib, then a school, then a bicycle.
On Long Island, a builder named William Levitt was looking at a potato field.
Levittown
1947–1951
Levitt built houses the way Detroit built cars, except the workers moved and the houses stood still. He broke a house into 26 steps.
He bought a lumber mill in California and made his own nails.
In 1950, a veteran could buy one for $7,990. No down payment. Fifty-six dollars a month.
Levitt liked to say a man with his own house had too much to do to be a Communist.
Buyers agreed to rules. No fences. Skip mowing for a week, and Levitt's men mowed it and sent you the bill.
By 1951, there were more than 17,000 of them.
Step inside one on moving day.
Levitt's leases said this.
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that courts could not enforce clauses like it. Levitt dropped the clause.
His company's announcement said that changed nothing.
December 1949 A Levitt sales office
In December 1949, a salesman told Eugene Burnett, a Black veteran, the owners hadn't decided to sell to Black buyers. The policy stayed.
Washington insured many of these mortgages, through the Federal Housing Administration.
Period announcer With a small down payment, your rent money will buy a home.
In its 1938 manual for lenders, the same agency said a neighborhood should keep “the same social and racial classes.”
Same agency. Two audiences. The card was selling. The manual was deciding. If you only had the card, you'd never know the rule.
In the 1930s, a federal agency colored Black and immigrant neighborhoods red and called them hazardous. Loans there were hard to get.
A house was the biggest thing most families would ever own, and what they handed down.
The suburbs built a new middle class. By law and by habit, they built it mostly white.
The Road
1950–1960
Levittown ran on cars, and so did the economy. In 1950, General Motors gave its union five years of raises, pensions and health insurance.
Fortune magazine called it the Treaty of Detroit.
Charles E. Wilson For years, I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.
Newspapers printed only the second half: what's good for General Motors is good for the country. That's the version people remember.
In 1919, a young Army officer named Dwight Eisenhower crossed the country in a truck convoy.
It took 62 days, at about six miles an hour.
In Germany in 1945, he saw the autobahns.
Dwight D. Eisenhower In case of an atomic attack on our key cities, the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas.
The case for highways was partly a case for escaping the bomb.
In 1956, Congress approved 41,000 miles of highway, with Washington paying ninety percent.
Along the new roads came businesses built for drivers: motels, franchises, malls.
And a new way to pay. In 1950, the Diners' Club card let members eat now and pay later.
The highways also had to go through cities. Planners often sent them through Black neighborhoods, where land was cheap and residents had little say.
In St. Paul, about 600 families in Rondo lost their homes to Interstate 94.
Many white families drove out along the same roads. By the 1960s, many older cities were poorer and more divided by race.
Go South, Go West
1945–1962
The Cold War moved money south and west. Washington built bases and bought jets, missiles and electronics, much of it in California, Texas, Florida and Arizona.
Then there was the machine that made the heat bearable.
Retirees and young families poured into Florida. Its population grew by almost 80 percent in the 1950s.
Universities grew with the jobs. Engineers who'd gone to college on the GI Bill followed the work west.
In ten years, California alone added 5.1 million people.
Other Americans were moving too. Between 1940 and 1970, about five million Black Southerners left for cities like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Oakland.
They wanted better jobs and a way out of Jim Crow. Many arrived just as white families were leaving those cities for the suburbs.
Washington also urged Native Americans to leave reservations for cities, in a program it called relocation.
After the 1960 census, California gained eight seats in Congress, and Florida four. New York lost two, and Pennsylvania three.
In new Southern California suburbs, engineers and their neighbors met in living rooms to talk politics. Many distrusted Washington, though defense contracts paid a lot of their salaries.
Nobody called it the Sun Belt yet. A political strategist named it in 1969, when it was already helping choose presidents.
The Same Show
1948–1960
In 1950, about one American home in eleven had a television. By 1960, almost nine in ten did.
Three networks sent the same shows into every one of those homes. Most of the families on those shows were white and middle class.
One Monday night in 1953, about 44 million Americans watched Lucy Ricardo have a baby. The next day, about 29 million watched Eisenhower sworn in as president.
In one 1952 episode, Lucy and Ethel argue with their husbands over whose job is harder. So they switch.
The women take jobs at a candy factory. The men try to cook. Everybody loses. The joke only works if everyone agrees where each of them belongs.
Real women had more going on. By 1960, about a third of married women were working or looking for work.
In 1957, a writer named Betty Friedan began surveying her college classmates about their lives.
In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Why then? The Senate was investigating Communists, and the Soviet Union was officially atheist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower …we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource, in peace or in war.
Ads, chains and charge cards taught the same wants from coast to coast.
On July 24, 1959, Khrushchev watched a demonstration of push-button appliances in Moscow.
Nikita S. Khrushchev Don't you have a machine that puts food in your mouth and pushes it down?
Some Americans had the same question.
Teenagers
1951–1958
The teenagers of the 1950s weren't baby boomers. They were born before or during the war. They had jobs, allowances and time.
A 1951 novel gave them a hero. Holden Caulfield was sixteen, and he thought most grown-ups were phonies.
The girl from the attic stairs is fifteen now, and the attic is finished.
And they had their own music.
That September, about 60 million people watched Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show.
On his last visit, in January 1957, the cameras showed him only from the waist up.
Ed Sullivan This is a real decent, fine boy.
Put that year in context: in Montgomery, Black residents were walking to work rather than ride segregated buses. Segregationists heard rock and roll as part of the same threat.
That April, men from Carter's group rushed the stage in Birmingham and attacked the singer Nat King Cole.
Some artists walked out of the picture altogether. In 1951, Jack Kerouac typed a cross-country novel in three weeks, on one roll of paper about 120 feet long.
In 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl in a San Francisco gallery.
In 1957, San Francisco police arrested the bookstore clerk who sold Howl. The publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was charged too.
Judge Clayton W. Horn Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemism?
Judge Clayton Horn found the poem was not obscene.
By 1958 there were about 4,000 drive-in theaters. The teenagers sat on the hoods. In the back seats, asleep, were the actual baby boomers.
The Crack
1950–1958
In 1956, a journalist named John Keats gave this film its title.
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 America's cities.
Critics said suburbs and big companies were turning Americans into copies. Organization men, in William Whyte's phrase.
John Kenneth Galbraith The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved…
Galbraith called it private opulence and public squalor. Rich families, shabby public services.
Then a sociologist moved in. Herbert Gans lived in Levittown, New Jersey, from 1958 to 1960.
Herbert J. Gans most new suburbanites are pleased with the community that develops.
Herbert J. Gans the critics are right about members of their own culture, but wrong when they presume to judge and speak for the majority of Levittowners.
Some Americans couldn't fit in without hiding. In 1950, five men in Los Angeles met in secret to start a group for gay Americans: the Mattachine Society.
In those years, gay federal workers were being fired, and gay Americans could be arrested for meeting. The Society's 1951 statement set three goals: unify, educate, lead.
In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that ONE, a gay magazine, could go through the mail.
In August 1957, William and Daisy Myers and their children moved into Levittown, Pennsylvania. They were its first Black family.
For nights, crowds gathered outside. Rocks came through their picture window.
State police broke up the crowds. Neighbors Bea and Lew Wechsler stood by the family. Someone burned a cross on the Wechslers' lawn.
William Myers said he had bought the house and meant to live in it. The family stayed four years.
Proof
1945–1960
So what did the house prove?
That the boom was real. In 1940, fewer than half of American households owned their home. By 1960, more than three in five did.
That builders, unions and a lot of federal money had built it together. And that the government had helped decide who got in.
Nixon was right that a steelworker could buy that house. He left out which steelworkers.
The kids growing up behind those windows had been watching all of it. In a few years, they'd have plenty to say.
The first baby boomers turned eighteen in 1964.