Levittown

by David Kushner

“Afterwards.”

  Again and again the defendants cloaked themselves in the flag of freedom, saying they were simply seeking their right, as Americans, to legally extricate the Myerses from their suburb. But McBride saw them for what they were—racists. And the local police had been complicit by not enforcing the rights of the Myerses and Wechslers. For months now, the local and state police had been ostensibly watching and protecting the Myerses and Wechslers from the mob violence, but to what effect? How had the cross burnings, the Molotov cocktails, the letters KKK painted on the home unfolded just a few feet from their watch?

  When Peter Von Blum, the friend of the Wechslers’ who had the cross with blank cartridges burned on his lawn, took the stand, he testified to the response he got when he phoned his township manager for help on the first night the violence broke out. “I described to him the situation,” Von Blum said, “and I asked him please to send some police, somebody was in danger of getting beaten up, and he said, ‘Well, the township police knows what it’s doing. We don’t see any need for it at present.’ ”

  When a corporal named Keith R. Dane was sworn in on the stand, McBride questioned the behavior of the police: “Now, in your opinion, was the presence and action of the police necessary to prevent mob violence?”

  “Objection!” said one defense attorney.

  “Objection!” said another.

  “Objection overruled,” the judge said.

  “Yes, sir,” Corporal Dane continued in response to the question, “in my opinion it was.” Yet nothing had been done.

  As testimonies continued, Levittown’s summer of hate unfolded in detail. At one point, a child, fourteen-year-old W. Paul Von Blum, the son of Peter and Selma, testified to the harassment he faced one day while he was playing outside the Wechslers’ at a cookout party: “Mr. Newell rode past in his car, and he called out several names, among them ‘nigger lovers.’ ”

  “Do you see Mr. Newell in court?” McBride asked.

  Von Blum looked into the sea of faces until his eyes landed on the mountainous man with the square head. “Yes, I do.”

  “Will you identify him?”

  “Right over there.” Von Blum pointed to Newell.

  “Is that the man who called you ‘nigger lover’?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  It became clear that the mob went way beyond the people on trial when it was revealed that twelve hundred people in Levittown had signed up as members of the Levittown Betterment Association. In the South they had lynchings, but in Levittown the racism took the shape of a suburban committee with Confederate flags for sale at the local Shop-O-Rama. The racists came from all walks of life—housewives and mothers, a candidate for county commissioner, a tax collector, and Bentley, a Democratic committeeman.

  One by one, the defendants hid behind the pretense of nonviolence, saying that all they were doing was looking for “legal means” to get the Myerses out of town. The rationale evoked strong emotions from the prosecution, and a surprising confession from the man who had led volunteers on the Myerses’ behalf, the Reverend Ray Harwick. Over the summer, Harwick had proved inconsistent and complicated—defending the Myerses’ rights on one hand, but leading a red-baiting inquisition of their main sympathizers, the Wechslers, on the other. His family had been threatened late at night to the point he shipped them off for protection. And the experience had left him changed.

  “Reverend Harwick,” McBride asked, “am I correct that you have certain strong convictions concerning this matter?”

  “I do now.”

  “What do you mean you do now, Reverend?”

  “Well, the implication made here before, it was a misnomer, of course, that I was an integrationalist [sic]. It is rather ironical, and I am ashamed to say it, that in six and a half years of my ministry until this time, that I definitely”—Harwick hesitated—“I had never preached a sermon on brotherhood.”

  “Do you want to explain the present view that you take on these things?”

  “The present view that I take is stated, of course, very effectively in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where in the first place he talks about the laws, man having derived from the laws of God, and, of course, in the book Genesis, we read that man was created in the image of God, and our Bill of Rights is, of course, very strong; the constitution of our Commonwealth, the Constitution of our nation makes no bones about its stand in this matter. The stand of our denomination is extremely clear and strong in this matter, and if I am in any way to live up to the vows that I took when I was ordained a Christian minister, I could not possibly do anything but be obedient and take a very strong stand on integration.

  “Prior to this time, it never really seemed much of a problem to me. I had never run into any controversial matter before, and certainly not this. My relations with Negroes prior to this time had for the most part been very good, except for a while I was in the service, but I never considered it too much of an issue, the areas in the country were pretty far removed from me personally, and they had never affected me before, but this did.”

  “Now, Reverend,” McBride continued, “I think quite a few people in this courtroom would agree with many of the conclusions that you have reached. I would like to ask you whether or not you think these people, these defendants, are guilty?”

  “You are asking me to pronounce judgment?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Harwick’s mind reeled. The harassing calls. The intimidation. It was all there. But who was he to judge? Wasn’t his role to forgive? Harwick looked out into the crowd. “I do think they are guilty,” he finally said, “because they have said one thing with their mouths and actually gone ahead and done something else. They said they are opposed to violence, and yet they provided the leadership, and at that time the only leadership that was available apparently in the community for the group that was opposed to Myers moving, whether it was openly and clearly and concisely stated or not, there could have been no other purpose to be served by the Betterment Committee or any of those who engaged in any acts of harassment or intimidation in order to remove them from the community, which, in effect, of course, is a deprivation of their rights.”

  McBride then got to the crux of the issue, that the pursuit of these so-called “legal means” of evicting the Myerses was just a mask for racism. He did this when John Bentley, the Democratic committeeman and mob member took the stand. “Is it your thought that the majority should rule in Levittown,” McBride asked, “that if a majority were against a colored person moving in, that colored person should not move in, because the majority have the right to rule?”

  “I felt this way about it,” Bentley said, “that if it could be shown to Mr. Myers that a majority of the people did not want him in Levittown, that he should accept it.” Bentley later explained why: “I went to school with Negroes. I sent my son to school with Negroes. I worked with Negroes. I am sometimes forced to eat with Negroes, but I do not want to live with them.”

  “And therefore,” McBride said, “you joined the Betterment Committee to prevent that from occurring in the future?”

  “If there was any way legally to prevent it, yes, sir.”

  McBride went on. “You said that you wanted to exert legal means to remove . . . the Myers family from Levittown?”

  “We were attempting to find some solution to the problem, yes, sir.”

  “Legally?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “By then the windows, at least the pane of glass, had been broken at the Myers home, had it not?” McBride said.

  “Yes, so I read in the newspapers.”

  “Did you take any stand that breaking their windows was a dirty deed, or that it was wrong and should be stopped?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t take any stand at all.”

  “You wouldn’t consider that legal means, would you?”

  “The breaking of windows?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you later hear of the burn
ing of the fiery crosses?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would you consider that legal means?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Would you consider that the throwing of firecrackers on the lawn were legal means?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Would you consider the terror that comes from anonymous telephone calls in the middle of the night legal means?”

  “No, sir.”

  McBride was through. “This pious pretense of acting legally is just what it seems to be from the witness stand, a sham to get these people out of their home. How can there be any legal means of depriving a citizen of a constitutional right? How can there be any legal way of doing it under the sun? They may say they wanted to act legally, but when the Supreme Court of the United States spoke authoritatively in Shelly versus Kraemer outlawing covenants which would debar Negroes from purchasing property, and outlawed even state action taken to enforce such covenants in deeds, how can anyone further pretend that here is any legal means of enforcing a proposition that would deprive these American citizens of the right to purchase property and live where they can and wish to do? Simply [there] are no legal means that could be adopted to the purpose that this evidence discloses, that is, getting the Myerses out of Levittown. Nobody has the right to get the Myerses out of Levittown by any means.”

  And though Bentley and the others did not agree with this, Bentley ultimately admitted that their cause was lost after all. “I am of the firm belief now, Mr. McBride,” Bentley said, “that there isn’t anything that can be done to keep Negroes out of Levittown.”

  After the first trial in December, which sought a permanent injunction against the Levittown 7 from harassing the Myerses or their supporters, a second trial began on January 31, 1958. Williams and his fellow mob member Howard Bentcliff had been charged with harassment for burning the cross on the Wechslers’ lawn. Once again a standing-room-only audience packed the stuffy upstairs courtroom. The evidence against the two was damning. Williams himself had admitted to building the cross that was burned on the Von Blums’ lawn. Sergeant Adrian McCarr testified that in Bentcliff’s car he had found a carbon copy of the letter that Lew had received after the cross burning, telling him to “pull out while you can.”

  The police had also confiscated copies of a newsletter called the Levittown Defender, which was written on October 10, the day after McBride’s attack on the Levittown police force’s inaction had been made public. Five hundred copies were made, and one turned up in the United States Steel Company close by. “Levittown, Penna. Proved to the world the public demand for segregation in the north,” it read. “Here 60,000 non negroes settled in five short years in 17,500 homes because negroes were excluded as buyers. Mr. Levitt has stated that ‘through various means we have found that if we sell to negroes 90 to 95% of the whites will not buy.’ The will of the majority is being ignored. American Indians beware; your reservation may be next! Support the Back-to-Africa plan! It helps the negro to help himself.” And, it concluded, “You can’t blame Bill M. for moving out of his former colored neighborhood; after all, who wants to live amongst negroes?”

  Literature on the “Back-to-Africa” movement was found, along with other “propaganda,” McCarr said, in Newell’s home. Something more incriminating was found in Bentcliff’s car: correspondence from E. L. Edwards, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The police found KKK membership applications inside Bentcliff’s car, which Bentcliff had mimeographed along with Williams to hand out to their followers. The letter from Edwards had come in response to an inquiry from Bentcliff.

  “The content of the letter dealt with the fact that he had received some communication from Bentcliff,” McCarr testified, “and was sending some literature. I questioned Bentcliff upon what office he held, and he claimed he did not hold an office, that they were getting the Klan together, and they had one hundred members, and when the Klan had gathered, when they had gotten sufficient members, Mr. Edwards would come up from Georgia, and they would initiate the group.” America’s legendary suburb was harboring the Ku Klux Klan.

  When it came time for the defense to present its case, Bentcliff sheepishly rose to defend himself, as he had done in the previous trial. His wife and sixteen-year-old daughter watched from the audience. But just as he took a few steps forward, he began to look dazed. Then, all at once, he collapsed face-first against the ground. Those in court gasped as he lay motionless. Lew watched in shock in the eerie silence. Had the guy just died of a heart attack? No one was coming to his aid, not even his friend Williams.

  From out of the crowd came Peter Von Blum, the man who’d woken up to find a burning cross with blank cartridges exploding on his lawn. Von Blum began taking off his overcoat to cover Bentcliff, then someone else was there to help: Lew Wechsler. It was a striking moment: The two victims of Bentcliff’s abuse were not above lending a hand.

  Bentcliff had fainted—a doctor said he suffered from a heart condition. But that couldn’t stop justice. When the first ruling eventually came, Williams was found guilty of conspiracy and fined $50 for the burning of the cross. Then Bentcliff who had admitted to burning the crosses on the Von Blums’ and another Levittowner’s lawns, painting KKK on the Wechslers’ home, and possessing the threatening letters—was put on probation for a year and fined $250 as well as court costs. “I’m giving you a break because of your health,” Bucks County judge Edwin Sat-terthwaite told him. “You should go to jail.”

  But once the trials were done, the final verdict—the official ruling in the case against the entire Levittown 7—would take months to come. Across the Delaware River in New Jersey, the builder of Levittown was digging in for one last fight.

  Eighteen

  THE PROMISE

  THE NEW POSTWAR suburbs are stereotyped, drab, and dull. The people who live in them, adapting like chameleons to the color of their surroundings, tend to become stereotyped, drab, and dull. There is no privacy. To get along with neighbors, conformity is a must. Not only does living in these new suburbs rob people of their individuality and bounce, but special kinds of neighborhood pressure tend to debase their values, warp their judgment, force them into unworthy behavior patterns, and interfere with the proper rearing of their children.”

  Not long after the Levittown trials concluded in early 1958, Bill Levitt sat at his desk reading these words. The harsh critique was aimed directly at him and the model town he and his family had set out to create just a decade before. And the words were his own. Fed up with the criticisms against his town, he had agreed to write an article for Good Housekeeping magazine in which he would recount and answer his critics’ charges.

  Some complained about the lack of privacy in his towns. But not so, Levitt wrote: “People can really have all the privacy they wish, all they have to do is hang draperies and maintain a decent reserve in personal matters.” Levittowners are drab and dull? “This is the greatest foolishness of all. People who live in the suburbs are pretty much like people who live elsewhere. There are so many of them, differing in so many ways, that no capsule classifications can apply. If these people represent anything, I should say it is a cross section of the middle generation of American citizens today.”

  Finally, he took aim at the heart of the critique itself: “It seems to me incredibly myopic to focus on the thread of uniformity in housing and fail to see the broad fabric of which it is a part—the mass production culture of America today.” Mass production was not just the rage with Levitt, it was changing the landscape of America in the 1950s: from the first franchise of Holiday Inn hotels dotting the roadways to the new McDonald’s fast-food restaurants nearby. “This isn’t something to grieve over,” Levitt continued. “It’s something to glory in—just so long as we keep in mind the difference between material values and those of the mind and spirit.”

  In the past decade, his town had become synonymous with America’s mass-produced culture in the 1950s—the good, and the bad. The critique had run through popular
entertainment from The Crack in the Picture Window to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But now, on the heels of the Myerses’ case—which dovetailed with the explosion of the civil rights movement—the fight against Levittown, and everything it represented, took on a new sense of urgency.

  Levitt hadn’t publicly addressed the Myers incident since it had unfolded the previous summer. Instead, he had tried to let his long history of justifications speak for the racial covenants he had so stubbornly enforced. It had been easier for him to do this in the past, when he had created Levittown in the postwar glow. But now, America was changing, and the promise of an integrated Levittown took on a new meaning.

  As sociologist Herbert Gans put it, “Levittown had become a national symbol of suburbia and a brand name in housing generally, so that the publicity value of its integration would be considerable. One could even argue that the firm had attracted more purchasers and profit because its communities had become national symbols, and that it therefore deserved being singled out.”

  As the ruling against the Levittown 7 was awaited, a private battle was being waged among Bill Levitt’s closest allies and advisers to turn him—and his towns—around. It was time for Levitt to open his communities’ doors to blacks, they said. Chief among these advisers were John Reagan “Tex” McCrary, the high-powered publicist who had coined the “I Like Ike” slogan in aid of General Eisenhower’s presidential bid, and the liberal Republican senator from New York, Jacob Javits.

  As Levitt hemmed and hawed, Javits reached out to leaders of the NAACP to plan for the integration of the next Levittown—the one set to open in New Jersey later in 1958. The idea was not to have a big announcement but to integrate quietly and without fanfare, to avoid the kind of violence that had broken out in Levittown, Pennsylvania. In his private conversations, Bill Levitt again voiced his concern that opening the doors to blacks would drive away the whites—and his sales. But Jav-its and the others tried to convince him that a controlled and managed integration would not affect his business at all, and that after the stand of the Myerses, the time to change was upon him.