The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by William Manchester

  At the height of the crisis, every encampment of married GIs had its repertoire of gruesome stories. Their most striking advocate was an improbable U.S. Senator named Glen Taylor, a cowboy singer sent to the capital by the people of Idaho on the strength of his skill with a banjo. Standing on the Capitol steps with his wife and children, he wailed:

  Oh, give me a home near the Capitol dome,

  With a yard where little children can play;

  Just one room or two, any old thing will do,

  Oh, we cain’t find a pla-ace to stay.

  The country desperately needed a ten-year program to erect 1,500,000 homes a year, and for a while it looked as though the only answer would be tents. The housing industry’s lobby had enough muscle to block a huge government effort, but the industry was too expensive and too slow, with its brick-by-brick methods, to do the job itself. Somehow the vacuum had to be filled, and by early 1949 it had become evident that assembly-line prefab developers—the peacetime equivalent of those who had wrought wartime production miracles—were going to do the job. The Henry J. Kaiser of housing was to be the emerging firm of Levitt & Sons. In shaping postwar society, William J. Levitt’s purchase of a 1,500-acre potato field in Long Island’s Nassau County ranks with DuMont’s seven-inch TV screen and Howard Aiken’s construction of the first U.S. computer at Harvard. The origins of suburbia as it is today can be traced to the staking out of that field, and those who scorn Levitt’s first Levittown cannot know how grateful its first inhabitants were. Levitt made no announcement and bought no advertising. Word of mouth was enough; when he opened his modest sales office on the cold, blustery morning of March 7, 1949, over a thousand couples were waiting. Some of them had been there four days and nights living on coffee and doughnuts. When the doors opened it was like the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, with the Young Marrieds, as they were now beginning to be called, rushing around, resolved to be among the first to buy the basic four-room house for $6,990 or, with closing fees, landscaping, and kitchen appliances included, well under $10,000.

  Levitt built homes as Kaiser had ships, on beltlines—17,500 houses in that first eruption, each like the other. On signal his bulldozers moved across the landscape in echelon, pivoting at red flags. Street pavers followed, then electricians with light poles and men bearing stamped street signs. Next, house lots were marked off. Convoys of trucks moved over the hardened pavements, tossing out prefabricated sidings at 8 A.M., toilets at 9:30, sinks and tubs at ten, sheetrock at 10:45, flooring at eleven. And so it went. Levitt’s carpenters used only power tools; there wasn’t a handsaw in town. Paint came from spray guns, and at first in just one two-toned “color scheme.” Calculating that two thousand families could swim in a pool occupying the same amount of space as a tennis court, Levitt decreed eight pools and no courts. Everything was uniform. On Mondays wash was hung in 17,500 backyards; under no circumstances could it flap on Sundays. Picket fences were prohibited. Lawns had to be cut regularly. It was all in the deed. Even pleasant innovations conformed to Levitt’s game plans. Trees were introduced at the rate of one every 28 feet (2.5 for each house), and the distance from trunk to trunk was precise to the inch. Curbstones curved gently, but always at the same angle. Families struggling to assert their identity were limited to interior decorating and the pitch of the door chime. (It had to be a chime, though; buzzers and bell-pulls were out.) Architects and sociologists were aghast. To them this was the entrepreneur as a totalitarian. Yet the Levittowners didn’t mind. To ex-GIs who remembered military regimentation, and their wives from Quonset huts and trailer camps, the hearths were no less warm for having been built according to standard specifications.

  Bill Levitt became an instant legend, a checkout counter Paul Bunyan unscarred by the outraged aesthetes. As his imitators sprang up across the country he assembled his men, crossed the Pennsylvania state line, and targeted on eight square miles on the Delaware River which until then had been used to grow spinach. Levitt’s draftsmen had plans for 1,100 streets accompanied by schools, churches, baseball diamonds, a town hall, factory sidings, parking lots, offices for doctors and dentists, a reservoir, a shopping center, a railroad station, newspaper presses, garden clubs—enough, in short, to support a densely populated city of 70,000, the tenth largest in Pennsylvania. Levitt called Levittown II “the most perfectly planned community in America,” and when he spoke of it his voice grew husky. “Sure, there’s a thrill in meeting a demand with a product no one else could meet,” he said. “But I’m not here just to build and sell houses. To be perfectly frank, I’m looking for a little glory, too. It’s only human. I want to build a town to be proud of.” After a pause he added, “You have to have nerve. You have to think big.”

  Curiously, his own home was everything a Levittown house wasn’t—a lovely old Bucks County farmhouse with thick stone walls, hand-hewn rafters, stout beams, expansive rooms, and a stunning view of thick, uninhabited woods. He liked it, he admitted. But, he quickly added, most Americans, especially women, would not. “It isn’t fair,” he told a visitor, “to ask the public to pay for things they don’t need and can’t afford.” Pointing at the old building’s ornate moldings and other dust catchers, he said, “Imagine asking a modern housewife to clean this place. Imagine sticking your own wife way off in the country like this. People like people.” They’d better, his tone suggested. They weren’t going to get much choice.

  FIFTEEN

  A Little Touch of Harry in the Night

  It is possible to fix the time and place when the flag of world leadership began to pass from the dying British Empire to the United States. Late in the morning of Friday, February 21, 1947, Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador in Washington, telephoned the State Department to request an emergency appointment with General George C. Marshall, who had just replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State. His lordship explained that he had been instructed to deliver “a blue piece of paper”—diplomatic cant for a formal and important message—from Whitehall. Dean Acheson replied that Marshall was away, speaking at the Princeton bicentennial. Could the matter wait until Monday?

  Actually it couldn’t, Inverchapel replied. He would ask his First Secretary, H. M. Sichell, to make the delivery now. Here a bit of stage business intruded. As Undersecretary, Acheson couldn’t receive a First Secretary without violating protocol. Someone of lower rank was needed; therefore he designated as his representative Loy Henderson, director of the Office of Far Eastern and African Affairs. Thus it happened that two low-level diplomats, meeting in a dismal office in the Executive Office Building late that afternoon, took the first step in transferring world power westward.

  Sichell had in fact brought two documents, both of them, as Acheson later recalled, “shockers.” Acheson knew Greece was troubled. The Communists were reported ready to take over the country, there were rumors of British troop withdrawals, and Henderson had submitted a memorandum entitled “Crisis and Imminent Possibility of Collapse,” urging massive aid to a coalition government as Greece’s only hope of salvation. But nothing heretofore had signified the extent of Hellenic despair. If the Greeks didn’t receive a first installment of over two hundred million dollars in the immediate future, he now read, they would succumb to a new barbaric invasion from Russia. Turkey was also in straits—that was the second piece of blue paper. The Turks were somewhat stronger, but lacking aid they, too, would be overwhelmed. Britain couldn’t give either country anything more. The English were exhausted and depleted by their six-year struggle with Nazi Germany. Indeed, they, too, were in urgent need of fresh dollar transfusions; presently Lord Inverchapel would be approaching the Americans again, this time holding out his own silk hat.

  Apprised of all this, Truman was startled. He had no idea the situation was that bad. To be sure, Churchill had warned that Europe had become “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate,” but that had been largely discounted as a peal of Churchillian thunder. The press had either ignored the extent of Europe�
��s agony or underplayed it; Time, ever fortunate in its search for the epigrammatic bystander, had quoted the anonymous widow of a Czech partisan as saying, “We don’t need much, but we need it quickly.” That had made sense in Washington, where the premise had been that after a short period of turmoil and adjustment the continent, like the United States, would rebuild its peacetime economy. The week after V-J Day the President had reviewed Allied appeals for extensions of lend-lease and turned them down. Forty billion lend-lease dollars, he had said, was enough. The program must be liquidated as soon as possible; he was dead set against America’s playing the role of a global Santa Claus after September 1945.

  De Gaulle had protested, so had Chiang Kai-shek, and Churchill had cried: “I cannot believe that this is the last word of the United States. I cannot believe that so great a nation would proceed in such a rough and harsh manner.” It didn’t. One loaning device was merely discarded to be replaced by others, notably the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Yet despite the loans, credits, and outright gifts of eleven billion dollars, deprivation and want continued to stalk the Low Countries, France, Italy, Western Germany and the Balkans. In each of the two postwar autumns methodical Berliners had dug thousands of graves before the ground froze to accommodate neighbors whom they knew would never see another spring; UNRRA’s gifts to Greece had barely sufficed to replace the rusted pipes and pumps of Athens’s ruined water system. From the Aegean to the North Sea, Nazi tyranny had been succeeded not by freedom, but by hunger and disorder. Looted by the Germans, pounded by bombs, and gutted by resistance fighters, the blackened factories stood cold and mute. There were no raw materials for them anyway, and even if raw materials had magically appeared, the shattered railroad grid could not have brought them to the plants. Political leadership seemed about to pass to the Soviet Union, if only because there was no viable alternative.

  The State Department, upon learning of the need for a massive rescue operation, had at first counted on Britain and her far-flung empire to provide it. In July 1946 Truman had signed a bill authorizing a fifty-year loan of $3,750,000,000 to His Majesty’s government, and that, he had thought, should liquidate American obligations to Europe. But now the money was gone, with little to show for it. Some 17,000 homes, a quarter of London, still lay in ruins; the erection of 10,000 Nissen huts as emergency shelters had met the housing needs of only a fraction of the supplicants. While American women argued about the New Look, their English sisters were limited each year to one dress, four ounces of knitting wool, two yards of material, one-third of a petticoat, one-fourth of a suit, and one-fifth of a nightgown. Victory had brought America’s great ally survival, but not much else.

  Even that was menaced by the terrible winter which began in January 1947. Throughout that month and the next, temperatures remained below zero while blizzards piled layer upon layer of record-breaking snow accumulations. It paralyzed England. Agricultural production dropped below nineteenth-century levels. Industry shut down. Electricity was limited to a few hours each morning, unemployment rose to over six million, and rations were tighter than in wartime. On that bitter Friday when Sichell rode to Pennsylvania Avenue with the two blue pieces of paper, one for Greece and one for Turkey, Whitehall predicted “even worse things to come in the year ahead.” The Times of London called the forecast “the most disturbing statement ever made by a British government.” Any doubts about the magnitude of Europe’s plight vanished when Herbert Hoover returned from touring twenty-four countries at the President’s request to report that their populations—and especially their children, the flotsam of war—were on the verge of starvation and could be saved only by American largess on an unprecedented scale.

  Hoover’s fellow Republicans in Congress weren’t so sure. There was much talk about Uncle Sam being played for a sucker, of pouring money down a rathole or into a global WPA, of the American dream ending in bankruptcy. Europeans, in turn, were stung by such callous appraisals.

  Anti-Americanism had spread. An Army chaplain noted that in continental eyes U.S. soldiers were pathetic young men who had no idea why they had fought or what victory meant, and who were interested in finding only three things: women to sleep with, brandy to steal, and the next boat home. “There he stands in his bulging clothes,” the Reverend Renwick C. Kennedy wrote of the typical U.S. occupation soldier, “fat, overfed, lonely, a bit wistful, seeing little, understanding less—the Conqueror, with a chocolate bar in one pocket and a package of cigarettes in the other…. The chocolate bar and the cigarettes are about all that he, the Conqueror, has to give the conquered.”

  The transmittal of this mood to Capitol Hill raised congressional hackles, and for the first time since the 1930s legislators began muttering about Europe’s failure to repay its debts. But there was more to the Greco-Turk issue. Communists were a genuine threat there. Since the British could no longer disperse them with a whiff of grapeshot, Washington had to face a hard choice. An enslaved Europe under the hammer and sickle seemed unthinkable. The Soviet Union would double its steel capacity, shipbuilding facilities, skilled labor, electrical and chemical output, scientific and technical knowledge, and industrial plant. That way, and only that way, Russia could match American power. “I believe that if we lose Western Europe,” Admiral Forrest Sherman testified before a congressional committee, “…we would have an increasingly difficult time in holding our own. Whereas if we lost all of the Asiatic mainland, we could still survive and build up and possibly get it back again.”

  That was logical, although in 1947 it was less than compelling. The Russians were still remembered as a brave ally. Disillusion had just begun to sink in, and thus far its effect had been confined to depressed morale; savage as World War II had been, the conflict between good and evil had been plain, and the prospect of more strife on new issues was disheartening. In 1946 Herbert Bayard Swope had introduced the phrase “cold war” in a Bernard Baruch speech. Baruch had thought it too strong then and struck it out. On April 13, 1947, after another year of Soviet crudity, Baruch did use it in Columbia, South Carolina, but even then it was limited to what was called “the war of ideas,” and as late as May 1950—just before Korea—Paul Hoffman could argue that “The cold war is a good war. It is the only war where the question of destruction doesn’t enter into it at all.”

  Even in 1947, however, it was clear that General Markos and his 20,000 Communist (EAM) guerrillas could not be driven from Greek hills by better ideas. The legitimate government needed what the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff called “massive nonideological aid”—in a word, guns. Guns were better than butter in attracting congressional votes from anti-Communist Republicans. Truman and his advisers were determined to send both. Yet their experience in piecemeal commitments had been discouraging. Europe required reconstruction, not relief. America needed a genuine foreign policy. Casting about for a philosophy to fit its deeds, the administration found one in a current issue of the prestigious quarterly Foreign Affairs. The article was titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”; its author was identified only as “X.”

  “X” was George F. Kennan, then a brilliant if obscure student of the Russian mind. He had first written his treatise in America’s Moscow embassy, where he had served as counselor. He had been motivated by a careful study of Stalin’s hard-line 1946 speech to a gigantic rally of Communist party functionaries, in which the dictator denounced coexistence with democracies and pledged himself to a world revolution of the proletariat. In Kennan’s view Soviet leaders were frightened Marxist evangelists who had been unbalanced by a quarter-century of western distrust. Communism was their pseudoreligion, the opiate for their insecurity. Seen as theology rather than politics, it emerged in Kennan’s analysis as one of the world’s great faiths, complete with dogma, rituals, and historic mission. It was as indestructible as, say, Mohammedanism, and like Islam it would take hold wherever weakened societies had made men yearn for change. Once embraced it could never be wholly elimina
ted. It could, however, be contained—limited to the frontiers of nations already under its spell.

  In the context of the 1940s, containment was realistic. It made excellent sense to Harry Truman; as the largest and richest of the free nations, he declared, America must meet her obligations to “the free world.” The President became so staunch an advocate of Kennan’s views that they became known as “the Truman Doctrine.” On his order they were incorporated in Policy Paper Number 68 of the National Security Council, and in Dean Acheson’s opinion, NSC-68 became “one of the great doctrines in our history.” In fact, even before Kennan’s article became America’s cold war strategy, Acheson, in the President’s presence, outlined its principles to a meeting with the congressional leadership. At stake was the future of Turkey and Greece; “never,” he wrote later, “have I spoken under such a pressing sense that the issue was up to me alone.” When he had finished, there was a long pause. Then Arthur Vandenberg turned to Truman and said, “Mr. President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you, and I believe that most of its members will do the same.”