Report of the County Chairman

by James A. Michener

  I went to bed scarcely able to believe what I had seen. Suddenly the prospect of victory was very bright before me, for it seemed as if all America must have discovered what I had discovered, that John Kennedy was not only a match for Richard Nixon; he was measurably superior in command of facts, in forthrightness, in ability to reason, and in his willingness to talk sense to the American people. But I was in for a surprise.

  On Tuesday morning I had to go to New York, and while there I bought every newspaper I could find, even going to the Times Square special newsstand where I was able to purchase about a dozen out-of-town papers to savor the reports of Kennedy’s triumph. To my astonishment all the papers said that the debate had been a draw. Many implied that Nixon had won because of his superior statesmanship. One Associated Press story was particularly infuriating. It said that practically no one’s opinion had been modified by the debate. I got so mad at this that I went into a bar and spread that paper out before me and read every word of the report. What it said in its opening paragraphs was what the headlines proclaimed: that practically no one’s opinion was in any way modified by what the contestants had said, but farther down in the story, when I read the actual city-by-city reports, I found that everyone whose opinion had been changed had changed from Nixon to Kennedy.

  “What the hell!” I cried to the bartender. “Look at it for yourself. Practically nobody’s opinion was changed, but everybody who did change went over to Kennedy. That’s one percent of the vote, and one percent will win this election. We’re in!”

  It is a matter of record that I carried this newspaper up and down Bucks County, reading the actual news story and not the headline. There it was. A few people had changed to Kennedy. They could not have been so blind as not to see what I saw on that television screen. Of course Kennedy had won the first debate, and of course all America knew it.

  Prior to the fourth debate almost all news stories contained some phrase like this: “As is universally acknowledged, Jack Kennedy won the first debate by a wide margin.…” It was certainly not universally acknowledged until long after the event. But by then everyone had to admit that Nixon had lost, and panic had set in at Republican headquarters. I treasured the comment of the Republican committeeman who met Nixon two days after the first debate. “Has anyone told him?” he asked the aides.

  The break that I had prayed for had come, and it had come from a quarter that I least expected. I can only say, as a field worker, that it was both appropriate and deeply moving that Jack Kennedy got his campaign off the ground solely by virtue of his own character, his own force of mind, and his own dedication to common sense. Like a million other volunteers in this election, I worked desperately hard to elect Senator Kennedy, but all that I and all that the million others did would have accomplished nothing if in that first debate Kennedy himself hadn’t taken command and shown the American electorate that a real man was running for the Presidency.

  I think I can testify to the climactic importance of this first debate, because in the days before the confrontation it was very difficult for me to get others to work for Senator Kennedy, and we struggled along with one office and one paid secretary. Immediately after the debate we received funds from heaven knows where to open four additional offices, each with at least one paid secretary and some with three. We got phone calls volunteering services. We got automobiles and posters. We received checks through the mail and a steady stream of visitors. In Bucks County, where it used to take courage to be a Democrat, we had five thriving volunteer offices open seven days a week. In each area we had two or three meetings every day. I kept on a kind of merry-go-round, dashing from one to the next and on to the next. And now wherever I went I could say, with full assurance of recognition, “You saw how our candidate won the debate. That’s the way he’s going to win the election.” Where before I had usually been greeted with amused tolerance, I was now greeted compassionately. People seriously wanted to know why I was for Kennedy, and one night before a large crowd, I told them.

  I said, “Some years ago I was working in Djakarta, the capital of Indonesia. It was one of the most difficult cities in the world to work in, because in a few short years its population had exploded from 300,000 to nearly 3,000,000. It was hot, stuffy, crowded, and shot through with ugly bickering between the Indonesians and their former colonial overlords, the Dutch. It was the only place I have been where incoming planeloads of travelers simply couldn’t find any place to stay and so slept sitting up in chairs in the airport.

  “One afternoon we got a cablegram advising us that this congressman was dropping in for a visit, and we assumed that he was just another junketing legislator out for a free trip around the world. But we couldn’t find out what committee he was on, or what his business was. We expected that he would be rather difficult to deal with. Anyway, we went out to the airport and off the battered-up plane stepped a young man who looked as if he’d been on a five-day drunk. He was unshaved, rumpled, had sweat rings under his arms and a shock of uncombed hair. He said briefly, ‘I’m Jack Kennedy, of Massachusetts.’ And before we could ask what he was doing on such a junket, he said that he wanted to meet some labor-union people, some newspaper editors, some policemen and some soldiers. He didn’t demand to see the ambassador or the prime minister or anyone else. He told us that he was merely a congressman, traveling around the world on his own money and his own time in order to see what was going on.

  “In the next days Jack Kennedy dug into Indonesia as I have seen few strangers ever dig into a new terrain, so that when he left he was a stranger no longer, and he was prepared to deal with the problem of Indonesia if it ever came up in the Congress. As his plane flew off, a girl from our embassy said wistfully, ‘If he keeps this up, someday he’s going to be a senator from Massachusetts.’ I explained to her that there wasn’t a chance, since that state already had a fine senior senator, Leverett Saltonstall and that it had just elected a fine junior senator, grandson of one of the best men who had ever served in the Senate. I explained that with this new young man secure in his job, Kennedy would have to be content with being a representative, ‘because,’ I pointed out, ‘the new senator’s name is Henry Cabot Lodge, and with a name like that hell never be defeated.’

  “You know what Kennedy did to Lodge in that election, and you know what he’s going to do to him in this one, too. Well, I now knew Kennedy’s name, and I started following his work in the Senate. He stood for things that I stood for. With some courage he voted for bills that were unpopular in his own state, but which were necessary for the nation. I found out that he was an excellent writer and that he had a fine sense of history. And of course I knew that during the war he had performed with unusual gallantry.

  “To sum it all up, the more I studied John Kennedy the more convinced I became that he had the makings of a superb political leader with the social conscience of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the intellectual capacity of a Woodrow Wilson, and the down-to-earth political know-how of a Harry Truman. I promise you that not once since I made that first decision have I had cause to review or regret my choice. His opponents say he is a young man. Neither he nor I can fight the calendar, but I say he has the makings of a great man, and neither his opponents nor the record can successfully challenge that contention. Without any qualification, without any suppression of my own inner feelings or fears, without any hesitation I recommend John Kennedy to you as your next President. Neither you nor I will be disappointed in his performance.”

  Because Kennedy himself had triumphed in the debates and demonstrated to the electorate that there was substance behind such claims as I made in my nightly speeches, it was now possible to convince a few people each time that he had the makings of a fine President, but I must repeat that so far as those of us were concerned who worked at the grass-roots level, it was Kennedy himself, and only Kennedy, who won the election. At the end of the campaign I was to conclude that it was Nixon who had lost the election, rather than Kennedy who had won it, but tha
t’s another story on which I’ll comment later.

  If it were not for its southern end, Bucks County would be of no special political interest. It would merely duplicate hundreds of other semi-rural counties across the nation. But in our southern section three highways form an important triangle, and what goes on inside involves the very future of our nation.

  U. S. Route 1 is the oldest and most famous of our national highways, running from the northern tip of Maine south to Key West. It was the great road of our colonial days, linking Boston and Richmond, and today remains a major thoroughfare down our eastern coastline. On its way from Trenton to Philadelphia it forms the northwestern side of the triangle about which I am speaking.

  Along another route from Trenton to Philadelphia runs U. S. Route 13, a highway of no special significance, except that after it leaves Philadelphia it does form the main road down the Delmarva Peninsula, which is historic. As it crosses Bucks County it forms the eastern boundary of our triangle.

  The southern boundary is appropriately the newest road in the county, the majestic multi-lane Pennsylvania Turnpike as it sweeps westward from New York to Chicago. Its broad concrete ribbons and its stylish overpasses speak of the future.

  Nestled within these three highways is Levittown, that extraordinary collection of 17,000 brand-new homes built in one six-year spurt. In 1952, when General Eisenhower was first elected President, Levittown did not exist. Work had begun and a few families had moved into the outskirts, but the sprawling complex of homes and roads was only in the planning stage. In 1960, a mere eight years later, Levittown was a city of some 70,000 people, and everyone who lived there had moved in from somewhere else. In their youth, most of these newcomers, many from Catholic and Jewish families, had been Democrats, and it was supposed that when they settled down to the pleasant routines of Bucks County life they would continue to vote Democratic.

  But sociological and political changes of considerable magnitude were in progress, and when families who had been reared in the tight confines of a city reached the countryside they expanded in unforeseen ways, a principal one being that they no longer wanted to observe their inherited patterns of social or political behavior. When they saw suburbia with its hint of golf courses, private swimming clubs, rural marketing and Sunday drives through the countryside, they received the subtle impression that, in the words of one Levittowner, “if we lived in a nice clean area like this we were supposed to vote Republican.” And in all the nation’s suburbias they began to do so with startling force. Sociologists described these new voting patterns as “the revolt of the lace-curtain Irish,” but the effect was equally pronounced in Protestant and Jewish families of similar background. I watched various parts of the United States undergo this change and it is not accurate to brush it off as merely “the real-estate complex.” Other substantial factors were operating.

  Many of the younger couples consisted of a man who had served in World War II, which had certainly disrupted his traditional patterns, married to a girl who had had to work while waiting for her fiancé or who had been forced to care for a houseful of children without the help of a husband. Like her soldier partner, this young wife knew that the old patterns of allegiance were shattered. Together these couples honestly wanted something better than they had known in the past. They no longer wanted the social revolution represented by the Democrats; they longed for the quiet respectability of American middle-class life, and they felt, in astonishing numbers, that this could be obtained only by voting the Republican ticket.

  They were also subject to the new suburban mores which claimed, “Now that you have a good home, you’re entitled to vote Republican. To do otherwise would be an anachronism.” Many Levittowners were to tell me of friends who had argued, “You can’t vote Democratic. You would betray your class.” For these reasons, in 1956 Levittown, which according to the inherited tradition of its residents should have voted Democratic by not less than 60-40, turned in only 9,689 votes for Stevenson and nearly three hundred more, 9,954, for Eisenhower. Having thus failed to gain even a 50-50 split in this important segment of Democratic territory, Stevenson had no hope of carrying the county, for the northern sections remained overwhelmingly Republican.

  But by 1960 the young Jewish and Catholic newcomers to suburbia, plus thousands of their Protestant neighbors who had felt that with a new home they were obligated to have a new party also, had begun to reconsider what they had gained with their Republican vote and what they had lost, and there was a general feeling that they had somehow defrauded themselves. Certainly, wherever I went in suburbia I found people ready to reconsider their basic political allegiances.

  In dealing with the 1960 election I can speak only of Bucks County’s suburbia, which was the only one I knew well, and I do not argue that its reaction was typical, for of all the suburbias that had a right to feel that a Republican vote did not necessarily insure happiness on earth, the Bucks County suburbanites had the most legitimate cause for outrage.

  For Bucks County’s Levittown doesn’t really exist. It is a city of 70,000, but it has no entity. There is not even a place legally called Levittown, for when the vast suburbia started to evolve, the canny old-time citizens of Bucks County quickly realized that here was going to be a source of economic and political power, so instead of allowing the new community to coalesce naturally into a major city, four small political entities within the county each stubbornly held onto its inherited portion of the new city.

  LEVITTOWN, showing why the city is not a city but the tag end of four different political units: Middletown, Falls and Bristol Townships, and Tullytown Borough

  Therefore what is called Levittown today is actually a random collection of four fragments of four otherwise rather minor political units; Middletown, Falls and Bristol Townships, and Tullytown Borough. In each case, the Levittown portion of the old unit lies at the extremity of the physical area, and in each case the Levittown portion is politically the larger half of the unit. Thus Levittown, in appearance a city of 70,000, is actually a group of four contiguous rural communities, each governed in a separate manner and all governed as if they were unimportant rural villages. The result is governmental chaos, and the Philadelphian who fled the pressures of the city in order to find reasonable solitude in the country quickly found himself enmeshed in problems he never dreamed of before.

  For example, since there is no Levittown, there is no city fire company. Not long ago a house caught fire in Quincy Hollow, only 150 yards from the Bristol fire company, but since Quincy Hollow is not in Bristol, the distraught home owners had to wait until their own Middletown fire company, situated miles away, could stagger to the scene. Levittown has four fire companies, each with its own rules, four police forces, four postal systems, four school systems. Some of the segments have kindergartens; others don’t. It has no central library, no trash collection, no park system, no main post office with its superior services (although one branch office calls itself Levittown), no equalized tax system. In fact, it is as disgraceful a plan for government as I have ever seen, and I am amazed that it is tolerated.

  The problem is not simple. The old-time residents of Middletown, Falls, Bristol Townships and Tullytown, in sponsoring and perpetuating this appalling system, have been motivated in part by economic greed, in part by political sagacity. As long as each established governing unit can hold onto its proportionate share of the stillborn city, some of the old-timers are going to have good political jobs, and all residents of the areas will profit from the higher tax rolls accruing to the old townships. On the other hand, the old-timers have a good point when they say, “Sure, the Levittowners want to incorporate into their own city, but when they do so they want to take in the best industrial areas of Middletown, Bristol, Falls and Tullytown and leave us with no tax base at all. Never!” Finally, it must be admitted that a good many Levittowners, having tasted life in the never-never land of a suburbia that looks like a city but has the old-fashioned laws of a hamlet, prefer to k
eep it that way. They argue, “Why make ourselves into a city to be governed by people who want schools and libraries and big fire companies and parks? All that means taxation. We’re getting along pretty well the way we are, so let’s leave it that way.”

  So Levittown, this monstrous construction that doesn’t officially exist, staggers from one compromise to the next, an object lesson in frustration. If the old-time people of Bucks County resented the intrusion of this sprawling suburbia in their lush farm lands, they have wreaked the vengeance I referred to earlier.

  It is interesting to the Levittowners who want to do something about this confusion to observe that when the Levitts built their next city, in New Jersey, they avoided the glaring errors of their Bucks County experience. Explains one local leader, “In New Jersey the Levitts insisted upon complete incorporation before sinking a spade. School districts, fire districts, health districts are all unified. And most important of all, I think, in each area they mixed housing of different economic levels. Here in Bucks County all families who can afford an $18,000 home live together, usually on a little rise from which they can look down on all of us who have to live in $9,000 homes. Much of our trouble here stems from that arbitrary separation of the economic groups.”

  When I started work trying to line up votes for Senator Kennedy, all I knew about Levittown were the rumors that circulated in my end of the county. This gossip leveled five charges at Levittown. It was a rural slum with people crowded together like rabbits. It was filled with undesirable elements from the big cities, which meant Jews and Catholics with special emphasis on Italians. Unions were known to be strong and engaged in evil work. The area was crawling with communists who had even dared to name a public school after J. Robert Oppenheimer. And it was suspected that a good many Levittowners registered as Republican for social reasons but surreptitiously voted Democratic.