Levittown

by David Kushner

  In the fall of 1947, Daisy received a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in social work at New York University in New York City and made plans to go with two of her girlfriends. Her parents had heard horror stories about the big city and lectured her about “bad influences” to avoid. “Don’t get caught up in that Venus flytrap,” they warned. But Daisy couldn’t get there fast enough—and read all about the city in anticipation. From the moment she stepped out of her friend’s car on the morning she arrived, New York exceeded all of her expectations. It was fast and big and loud, tall buildings, honking horns, and activity. On her first day of classes at NYU, she eagerly took her seat near the front—and was surprised when a white student took the chair to her left, and another to her right.

  After a lifetime of segregation, it was a shock to her system, and a new world unfolded with every step. By day, she wandered Greenwich Village between classes, past the artists and musicians, of many colors and ethnicities. When she boarded a bus, she would sit anywhere she wanted, no questions asked. Most exciting of all was just seeing all these different people together—talking with each other, cooperating, laughing, having a good time regardless of their skin color. She took a job at a publishing company, where blacks worked equally with whites. To her amazement, one of the African-American foremen had more white people working under him than blacks.

  At night, Daisy would ride the subway up to the YWCA on 135th Street. While she grew up in Jackson Ward when it was known as the Southern Harlem, this other Harlem was a totally different scene. Her roommate, an effervescent young African-American woman named Nan, was a musician with a white boyfriend named Claude. At first, Daisy was taken aback by the interracial relationship, but her trepidation soon melted away.

  While her mind broadened, she was able to resolve something in her personal life too: her relationship with her biological mother. The two had lost touch years before, but now her mother was living in an apartment with her eleven children and new family in Brooklyn. The reunion was emotional, and her mother made up for lost time—filling her in on all her years, and reconnecting with her daughter. She explained how terrible she had felt about having to give Daisy away, but because she was so young and working so hard, she thought it was the best option. However, she reminded Daisy, she was adamant about never putting her daughter up for adoption, and she remained Daisy’s legal mother to that day.

  By the end of her first semester, Daisy was a changed person. She said it felt as if she had been living her whole life in a coal mine, but had finally come up for air. She began to reexamine her childhood and community, trying to understand how segregation had, as she put it, “handicapped” her. After her semester at NYU, she boarded a bus for her home and had one thought: “If integration works here, why not everywhere?”

  When Daisy came back to Virginia in 1948, it was with a new energy, and soon enough, she met a young man who shared her dreams: William Edward Myers Jr. Daisy met him at the Hampton Institute, where she had enrolled to take classes. Six foot tall, 192 pounds, athletically built with a warm smile and pencil-thin mustache, Bill was walking down the hall with a belt full of tools when she first laid eyes on him. At twenty-five, he was a Hampton Institute graduate and, now, chief engineer—teaching classes in industrial arts and overseeing maintenance. Bill was a dedicated repairman who could bring a wrench to an air conditioner or a transmission with equal gusto. As Daisy discovered after a few dates, Bill was even more passionate about the promise of racial equality in the North—and the troubles facing blacks in the South. And he had his own fix-it for the problem: leave.

  As he enthusiastically told her during long, slow strolls across campus, the place he dreamed of going back to was his childhood hometown up North: York, Pennsylvania. Bill regaled Daisy with starry-eyed descriptions of his life in this model town. Born on November 16, 1923, Bill had grown up among whites. His father, William, worked for years as a bellman at the Yorktown hotel and became close with the white family who owned it. He was said to be the first black man in York to own his own car.

  The Myerses were the only African-American family living in a white neighborhood near the hotel, but Bill told Daisy he had never felt out of place. In fact, he became known for his willingness to cross racial lines. A gifted clarinetist, Bill’s favorite musician was Benny Goodman, the white player, and Bill became the first black person to join his all-white high school band. The other kids nicknamed him Benny. Bill was also a star basketball player and earned a sports scholarship to attend Hampton Institute.

  After such a happy childhood in York, he despised the restrictive life in Virginia. When he went to buy a car, the salesman ignored him despite the money he had to spend. When he inquired about joining an engineering union, he was told he couldn’t because he was black. Even after two and one-half years away serving in the Army Quartermaster Corps in World War II, it felt bittersweet to come back.

  The worst experience happened when his mother, Minerva, came for a visit—her first to the South. Unfamiliar with the local ways, Minerva boarded a bus and sat in a seat in the front, only to have the white man next to her push her off the seat. No one rose to help. Bill was outraged when he heard the story, and his mother vowed never to return. He couldn’t blame her and promised to head back to York at his first opportunity.

  Daisy listened to Bill’s stories with mixed emotions. They had so much in common—their love of music and sports. They’d shoot baskets together. Daisy would play the piano, and Bill would accompany her on the clarinet. She saw how sweetly he treated his mother, a good sign. “A man who is good to his mother is usually good to his lady friend,” she’d say. Even better, she thought, he never says no to me. Daisy was falling in love, but this man wanted nothing to do with the community she held so close to her heart. At the same time, she had experienced life up North, and Bill’s passion inspired her.

  One day, they were parked together at their favorite spot—a bluff overlooking the copper blue waters of Chesapeake Bay. Bill looked at Daisy and said, “I’m going to marry you.” Daisy agreed. They would leave the past behind and find their new home, a freer life, they resolved, up North.

  Three

  DODGERS FANS

  IT WAS APRIL 15, 1947, and the radio was on. Inside a modest apartment in the Bronx, the announcer said that Jackie Robinson, the first African-American baseball player in the major leagues, had stepped out onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. He had just broken the color barrier in America’s favorite game by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Despite being lifelong Yankees fans, Lew Wechsler, a stocky twenty-eight-year-old with close-cropped hair and deep-set eyes, and his spry curly-haired, twenty-seven-year-old wife, Bea, eight months pregnant, let out a cheer. “Why did you do that, Daddy?” asked Katy, their three-year-old daughter. “Because, honey,” replied Lew in his thick New York accent, “we don’t like the Yankees anymore. We like the Dodgers. They’re our team.”

  For Bea and Lew, switching allegiances was a no-brainer—even though Lew had grown up just outside Yankee Stadium. As die-hard activists, they had risked everything—their jobs, their security, even their lives—for the sake of social causes. Their vision of the American Dream was built on the conviction that they could change the world, and they were young enough to believe it. The Levitts built and sold the fantasy of a perfect home for the wealthy. Daisy and Bill Myers struggled to find happiness despite exclusion. And the Wechslers—for generations—had been fighting to tear the divide down, just as Robinson had done this day in Brooklyn.

  For Bea, the revolutionary spirit was in her DNA. Both her parents were radicals. As a boy in Latvia, her father, Moses Chasanov, faced mandatory military service for a cause in which he didn’t believe. The army representatives came to his family’s house to get him. Chasanov’s trunk waited for them at the door. When they stooped to pick it up, the heavy trunk couldn’t be moved. They opened it to find it filled with rocks. Eighteen-year-old Chasanov watched the comical display from a nearby tree. Let
them struggle! he chuckled to himself. Then he scurried down and ran off for a boat headed to America—never to return.

  In Ukraine, Bea’s mother, Eva Schwartz, had even more trouble with the authorities. By sixteen, she was imprisoned as an anarchist in the revolutionary movement. Just as she was to be sent to Siberia, she got smuggled out of prison by the underground. But her mother warned her to stay away—the czarists, she said, had captured and killed her younger brother. Her mother eventually met her, and they went to New York City, seeking freedom too.

  Bea was born on September 5, 1919, and raised in the East Bronx. But her own fighting spirit was not just a matter of genetics. Her father left the family when she was five to live in Florida, and Bea, the youngest of three kids, relied on her fiery streak and Bronx-fed street smarts to get by. At Hunter College High School, she stood out as both a skilled modern dancer and a budding radical just like her mom. The lunchroom sold potatoes for five cents apiece, a fortune for poor families such as Bea’s. But she found a way to fight back—by leading a protest as part of a controversial new organization, the National Student League.

  Formed in 1931, the National Student League was a Communist-led, student-run organization that had risen from the ashes of the Depression. It grew out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist group founded by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and others. The stock market crash had shattered student support of Republicans after the boom years of the previous decade. As employment and loans vanished, the National Student League provided a more active means of protesting the problems—from student and worker rights to racial equality. But because it was linked with socialists and Communists, being a member of this group was to make oneself an easy target. One letter writer to the New York Times compared the activist students and their “Communist propaganda” to mosquitoes that needed to be exterminated.

  On April 12, 1935, fifteen-year-old Bea got her first taste of the limelight. The occasion was a student strike for peace, a national day of protest that had brought the National Student League and its members to the forefront. Thousands of students from around the country rallied against war and fascism. Despite their links with Communism, they had supporters, including Albert Einstein, who heralded the students fight for world peace. “The creation of the deeply felt good-will is the first important step to attain that goal,” Einstein said.

  Not everyone agreed. As the students crowded into the streets with their ABOLISH the ROTC protest signs, they were met with flying eggs. Most of the protesters were in college; few high school students had the nerve to join the ranks. But Bea was among them. Outside Hunter College, the streets teemed with young people—hoisting signs, singing protest songs, and chanting antiwar slogans. College students took turns on a soapbox, and Bea felt that unique electricity of being a young person, surrounded by other young people, rallying together for a cause.

  What she didn’t expect was to be the center of attention. “We have a student from the high school who’d like to speak,” announced one of the college kids on the soapbox to Bea’s surprise. He was volunteering Bea, who reluctantly took the stage. “Greetings from high school!” Bea said, as the crowd cheered. Her speech against the war was brief, but successful, and she was met with a wave of accolades. Then she was taken straight to the principal’s office.

  “You betrayed me,” said the principal.

  “I just wanted to talk to the other students,” Bea replied.

  But the principal wasn’t having any of it and told Bea she was swimming into dangerous waters filled with criminals and murderers. When Bea’s mother heard that the school was threatening disciplinary action, she stormed past the principal’s secretary into the office. “Don’t you ever call my daughter a murderer again!” her mother snapped. If Bea was going to continue her activities with the National Student League, she realized she would need help taking on this administration. One day she looked up and saw just the guy: a stocky West Bronx boy from City College of New York with a fistful of yellow leaflets and a warm, wide smile, Lew.

  Like Bea, Lew Wechsler was raised with the conviction that he could make the world a better place. His mother, Ray, a teacher and social worker, and his father, Maurice, a fur tradesman, were socially active. When poor tenants were evicted from their apartments in the Bronx, Maurice was the first one helping them move their furniture back into their homes from the street. Born on November 25, 1918, young Lew quickly became aware of the discrepancies in people’s living conditions. The African-American kids in his school told stories of their families paying as much for a run-down one-bedroom apartment as his family was paying for a three-bedroom.

  Lew became just as strong-willed as his father. At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in the 1930s, an English-literature teacher began making pro-Nazi statements in class. Jews were a minority in the school of Italians and African-Americans. But Lew and his buddies weren’t having any of it, and they defiantly spoke against the rising tides of fascism whenever the teacher aired her views. But there would be a price. The teacher was also Lew’s faculty adviser, and she wrote a scathing assessment of the boy, describing him as “an agitator of an extremely obnoxious type.”

  But after graduation, Lew found like-minded activists in the 1930s as a nonmatriculated student at the City College of New York in the Bronx. Lew became a leader in the National Student League and would venture far into Manhattan just to make inexpensive yellow leaflets to pass out to his peers—including Bea, whom he had briefly met. In December 1935, however, they would again meet, at a national convention in Columbus, Ohio, to announce the merging of two left-wing student groups—the National Student League and the Student League for Industrial Democracy—into the American Student Union.

  The ASU drew up rallying points: forming an alliance between the union and labor, fighting fascism, and defending civil rights. “It condemns the ‘southern system’ of keeping the Negro in servitude by denying him an education,” wrote the New York Times. Lew organized the buses of those attending from New York, and when Bea came on board, the two rekindled their friendship and became inseparable. They married in 1940 in a Bronx courthouse.

  Before long, they were meeting as a team with radicals from around the region. On one trip, they went up to a secret meeting place in Canada and were ushered into a back room of a building with blackened windows. They collected money to send activists to fight in the war in Spain. Many of their friends died in battle. They would go to rallies and be physically attacked. Lew got a job as a waiter in the Catskills and fought to organize a union. The hot-button issue: housing. Waiters were being shacked up in run-down cottages nicknamed the doghouses, with twelve people jammed in three tiny rooms. Lew’s efforts led to better living and working conditions, but not without repercussions.

  One day, when Bea was home alone pregnant, there was a loud pounding at the door. She opened it to find two thuggish representatives from the right-wing International Waiters Union who didn’t like her husband’s ways. “We gotta convert your husband into a good person,” one of the big tough guys told her in a thick New York accent. Bea was characteristically firm. “Why don’t you leave my husband alone?” she said, and slammed the door.

  In 1944, Lew would get called away for another reason: to serve as a rifleman in World War II. Though the Wechslers were not pacifists—they believed in the war against the fascists and the need to fight—it was difficult to have Lew go. Bea, who had the year before given birth to Katy, remained in New York with her sister, Florence, and the two raised their children together while their husbands fought overseas. After her brother-in-law was killed, Bea could only dream of the day when Lew would come home to build their new life together.

  The Wechslers weren’t the only ones hanging on to this hope. As the war dragged brutally on, the fantasy of a dream house in the suburbs took on an even greater role in the popular imagination. It wasn’t just a matter of escape from reality; home ownership was an explicit way, American leaders su
ggested, to keep the nation strong. There was just one problem. People like the Wechslers wouldn’t share in this future if the dream makers could help it.

  “Ownership of homes is the best guarantee against communism and socialism and the various bad ‘isms’ of life,” wrote one social scientist in 1938. “I do not say that it is an infallible guarantee, but I do say that owners of homes usually are more interested in the safeguarding of our national history than are renters and tenants.” President Franklin Roosevelt echoed the sentiment four years later when addressing the United States Savings and Loan League: “A nation of homeowners, of people who own a real share in their land, is unconquerable.”

  Popular culture began reflecting a utopian vision of life in the suburbs. At the New York World’s Fair in 1939, army wives and their children strolled through twenty-one homes in an artificial suburb called the Town of Tomorrow. Pop songs such as “My Blue Heaven” and “We’ll Build a Bungalow Big Enough for Two” hit the radio. The book Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, the story of new suburbanites, was a bestseller and a film starring Cary Grant. Magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal began churning out glossy spreads on “dream homes” designed by top architects.

  Accompanying ads happily sold the idea of a home. “All the fighting power of their nation is directed toward securing, for [soldiers] and their children, the one thing in life they value most: a happy and livable home . . . ,” read an ad in Better Homes and Gardens. “The home is the sound and constructive force, the builder of national characters . . . and what, for them makes up such a home? Love, freedom and human kindness of course. But also a host of little things—a new better room for Junior, a den for dad. New furniture for the living room. A glassed in porch . . . A housewife’s faith that gay flowers can continue to bloom, year after year, in a little garden forever safe from the violation of a conqueror’s boots.”