Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

by Victor D. Brooks

  The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act was passed in September 1944 and was quickly shortened for everyday use to the “G.I. Bill.” More than 15 million servicemen and women were eligible for educational benefits under the bill, including full tuition to an educational institution of the veteran’s choice, a $35 monthly stipend for single students, $90 a month for married veterans, and up to $120 a month for students with children.

  This sliding scale influenced the creation of postwar families by prompting a rearrangement of the traditional school, marriage, family continuum. Now many marriages and births would occur parallel to college study. Hundreds of postwar campuses featured married and family housing, ranging from surplus Quonset huts and converted military barracks to more comfortable apartment houses. Mostly male veterans would emerge each morning from these “Vets-villes” or “Fertile Acres” to confront Philosophy or Business Law while their young wives dealt with the challenge of child-rearing on the cheap. At the University of Minnesota’s Veterans Village by 1948 there were 936 new babies and even more toddlers. The Village had a twelve-member board of aldermen made up of eleven young mothers and only one man. It decreed that any adult automatically became the temporary guardian of an unsupervised child, and initiated the right to spank any child who attempted to cross a dangerous street alone. Group shopping and baby-sitting were promoted, and the limited supply of home appliances was commonly shared by all.

  Married students at Stanford University: the G.I. Bill not only strained classroom facilities in postwar colleges but also created a new, parallel collegiate culture in which fraternity parties gave way to baby-sitting, trips to the playground, and shopping excursions. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  As of April 1947, of 2,000 married veterans at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, 800 already had new babies, and 288 others had wives in first pregnancies. The university persuaded the state’s Public Housing Authority to send in hundreds of prefab buildings that had been used for war workers, which now clustered around a cooperative grocery store, a bowling alley, and a community recreation center.

  The millions of married veterans and their spouses, who largely abandoned fried chicken for chicken soup and set up housekeeping in “homes” that had only recently served military purposes, faced a demanding experience that drove many young men and women to the limits of their endurance. Veterans attempted to study amid the din of screaming babies and noisy toddlers, not helped by paper-thin walls, while their wives set up housekeeping with few conveniences or appliances. Yet it seems likely that a substantial number of these young couples saw their young children as a symbol of their independence from older relatives and older lifestyles and believed they had embarked on a marvelous adventure in this new “Atomic Age.”

  One of the developments that made this great new adventure more manageable for young married couples, whether they lived in Fertile Acres or in more traditional housing, was the publication in 1946 of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, a paperback book that sold for 35 cents and was designed specifically for anxious young postwar parents. The book would go on to sell 30 million copies in 29 languages before the last Boomer was born, becoming the best-selling new title ever published in the United States to that time. Young mothers, from former war workers to future first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, were effusive in their praise of Dr. Spock’s reassuring, nonjudgmental approach, which explained that a simple combination of relaxation, persistence, and, above all, a sense of humor would solve most baby care issues, and that trust in one’s innate maternal and paternal instincts was an excellent first step in the parenting experience.

  The book included space for birth statistics, records of checkups, parent questions for the doctor, and an infant’s height and weight chart, along with advice that parents should enjoy their babies yet accept that some level of frustration was normal in all parenting activities. Spock admitted that “Children keep parents from parties, trips, theaters, meetings, games and friends. The fact that you prefer children and wouldn’t trade places with a childless couple for anything doesn’t alter the fact that you still miss your freedom.” Yet the rewards from this lifestyle were almost limitless, according to Spock, for compared with “this creation, this visible immortality, pride in other worldly accomplishments is usually weak in comparison.” On the other hand, if sacrifice was healthy, the martyrdom of needless self-sacrifice was counterproductive: “parents will become so preoccupied and tense that they’re no fun for outsiders or for each other.”

  Dr. Benjamin Spock, above, emphasized a commonsense, relaxed approach to postwar child-rearing. His book on baby and child care became one of the best-selling books of modern times. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  Benjamin Spock had the great good fortune to be accepted as authoritative and wise in a generally upbeat, pragmatic culture of young parenthood. His book gave young men and women permission to expand the traditional boundaries of parental involvement with and even indulgence in their children’s lives. These new parents were more willing to buy toys, less willing to use corporal punishment, and more open to friendship with their children than their own parents had been. New parenting now included playgroups, incentives for good behavior, and even children’s opinions in the forging of family decisions, from meals to vacations. New mothers were less often drill sergeants and more often counselors and advisers. New fathers were more involved and less forbidding.

  When these young parents had a rare moment to consider their role in the chain of generations of mothers and fathers, they often sensed a certain uniqueness in their experience. First, it gradually became evident that more of them were having children, and the numbers of children were larger in an American society that until recently had seemed to be moving toward fewer and later marriages, and fewer children. Second, they were being assured in books, films, and political speeches that their experience was vital to the nation’s welfare and future prosperity. Third, they were aware that demographic and technological changes were rapidly redefining the kind of life they would live and where they would live it. If Benjamin Spock opened a new frontier in the experience of parenting, a fast-talking, chain-smoking former naval construction engineer opened a new portal on the kind of home life where many of them would raise these new families. William Levitt’s transformation of a vast expanse of Long Island potato fields into a planned, child-friendly suburban community would inaugurate a new family experience for the Baby Boomers and their young parents.

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  HOME AND FAMILY IN EARLY POSTWAR AMERICA

  ONE OF THE MOST endearing films of the immediate postwar era gained much of its box-office popularity by recounting a modern fairy tale in which the prize is not a throne or riches but a “castle” in a new form of community that would come to define a newly emerging American lifestyle. Miracle on 34th Street is a story of the hopes and dreams of a little girl, played by Natalie Wood, living in a Manhattan apartment with her single mother, a Macy’s employee played by Maureen O’Hara. Cautioned by her mother to be skeptical of belief in Santa Claus, the little girl is coaxed into revealing her one true wish by a department store Santa who calls himself Kris Kringle. Dolls, toys, and cycles hold little interest for a girl who dreams of escaping the restrictions of apartment life for a new home in the suburbs, preferably with a new father who will complete a traditional family. When Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is fired as Macy’s Santa and nearly committed to a mental hospital, a young bachelor lawyer played by John Payne choreographs a brilliant defense that acquits his client and sparks the beginning of a romantic interest with the single mother. As mother, daughter, and bachelor drive home from a suburban Christmas morning celebration, Natalie Wood orders Payne to stop the car and runs across a lawn into her “dream home,” which is empty and for sale. Payne and O’Hara run after her and discover their love for each other in an empty living room that holds only the cane used by Kris Kringle. The “miracle” is an escape from Thirty-fourth Street and a new beginning in a new
family and a suburban home.

  While few early postwar families could match the miraculous nature of this transition from urban crowding to a spacious suburban home, the film struck a major chord in the desire for young parents to establish themselves in a new frontier of lawns, picture windows, and barbeque pits—a lifestyle that seemed especially congenial to growing families of the new Baby Boom.

  Postwar suburban development had its antecedents in the rise of earlier “bedroom communities” adjacent to large cities. Earlier in the twentieth century, the emergence of railroads, trolley cars, and other forms of public transportation had allowed workers in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities to commute from suburban homes to downtown jobs. The depression and World War II, however, had brought suburban home construction nearly to a halt. Even in a more positive economic environment, early suburbs had often been tethered to rail lines, and huge swaths of land beyond the range of public transportation remained underutilized. Then, just as the G.I. Bill expanded veterans’ educational frontiers with its tuition grants and subsidies, it also encouraged new housing frontiers through its mortgage benefits.

  One of the major barriers to home ownership in pre—World War II America was the size of the down payment. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act largely changed the rules by allowing a number of circumstances where the government would essentially guarantee the mortgage loan and encourage a policy of no down payment. The first entrepreneur who fully appreciated the impact of this provision was William Levitt, a New Yorker who had spent his wartime service managing the mass construction of buildings for the U.S. Navy.

  Soon after his discharge, the forty-three-year-old veteran, described as a “cocky, rambunctious hustler with the hoarse voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker,” bought twelve hundred acres of potato farmland near Hicksville, on Long Island about twenty miles outside of New York City. He turned his military organizational abilities into a construction campaign designed to entice young buyers into believing they could secure a part of the new American dream of home ownership in the pristine world of suburbia. From dawn to dusk in the muddy fields of a rising community called Levittown, the ground would shake as a convoy of tractors rumbled like charging squadrons of Sherman tanks. Every hundred feet they would dump identical bundles of lumber, pipe, boards, shingles, and copper tubing, all so neatly packaged they resembled enormous loaves of bread dropped by a bakery operated by giants. Then other massive machines fitted with a seemingly endless chain of buckets dug into the earth to form a trench around a twenty-five-by-thirty-two-foot rectangle. As men and machines engaged in a carefully coordinated operation, a new house would emerge largely complete every fifteen minutes until by July 1950 more than eleven thousand nearly identical homes sprawled across the fields, with parallel Levittowns rising in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

  The three original Levittown communities in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, above, symbolized the emergence of modern suburban lifestyles. By the sixties some Boomers would criticize their childhood homes as “ticky-tacky boxes.” (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  A sale price of $7,990 bought mostly young couples a new home that, even if it would never be mistaken for a castle, offered a phenomenally child-friendly environment in which to raise a rapidly expanding family. Each home featured a picture window fronting a twelve-by-fifteen-foot living room, a bathroom, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and an “expansion attic,” which could and usually was converted to two more bedrooms and an additional bath. Each house was equipped with a refrigerator, stove, washing machine, fireplace, and built-in seven-inch television.

  While young couples fired barbeque grills and their children raced tricycles and used their skate keys, most Americans who were either single or over thirty-five initially stayed well clear of the planned-community experience. Levittown and its hundreds of nationwide clones were worlds teeming with children and baby carriages but largely devoid of nightclubs and taverns. The first Levittown was peppered with huge new shopping centers, surrounded by enormous parking lots easily accessible from connecting roads. More than a hundred miles of winding streets and sidewalks teemed with vehicles partial to children, from station wagons to kiddy carts. If myriad descriptions were accurate, young mothers pushed strollers, held toddlers’ hands, dodged tricycles, and swapped recipes in the morning until an eerie silence descended on most of the community around noon. The next two hours were a mutually refreshing respite as children napped and mothers slumped into chairs or caught up on other chores. As late as 1950, only 10 percent of the children of Levittown were over seven years of age, encouraging one mother to explain that “Everyone is so young that sometimes it’s hard to remember to get along with older people.” The absence of an older adult presence contrasted with a seemingly limitless array of parks, playgrounds, baseball diamonds, swimming pools, and kiddie pools that seemed to cater to every whim, as long as it was a young whim.

  Levittown was only the first of thousands of suburban “subdivisions” that would eventually define much of America’s postwar lifestyle and become one of the iconic images of film, television, and literature. If suburbia could sometimes be made into a fantasy—either dreamlike or nightmarish, depending on the narrator’s outlook—it was also the home of a substantial portion of the Boomer generation. Still, many postwar children grew up in places where their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had spent their respective childhoods, and these locales continued to strike an important chord in the song of American culture. Children grew up in the rural farmland depicted on television programs such as Lassie and The Real McCoys; others experienced a small-town childhood, still a major topic of Normal Rockwell’s iconic artwork; many Boomers resided in large cities, as reflected in TV’s Make Room for Daddy. This author grew up in an “inner ring” suburb of Philadelphia, which had largely developed in the 1920s and 1930s. There stone Tudor singles mingled with brick twins and row houses, corner delicatessens, taprooms, and trolley cars, which hinted at an urban lifestyle while coexisting with the swimming pools, Little League fields, and barbeque grills that defined postwar suburban living. All of these environments featured many young couples with large numbers of children but also included senior citizens, single people, and childless couples, which made them appear slightly less Baby Boomer centered. Yet, in the postwar era, newer suburbs dominated by young couples and children often defined the Boomer experience in films, literature, and television. Since this suburban lifestyle offers both the distinctiveness of a new childhood experience and many elements of the more general experience of all Boomers, Levittown and its counterparts make a good introduction to the postwar home and family.

  The physical makeup of a Boomer-era childhood home reflected the design of three prominent suburban models: colonial, ranch, and split-level. Colonials were, at first glance, the closest approximation to the “Victorian” homes characteristic of much of the Northeast and Midwest and popular in most other sections of the country since the turn of the century. These are the homes most often seen in 1950s and 1960s family situation comedies and films, and featured the most traditional living arrangements. A colonial had two full stories with living room, kitchen, and dining room on the ground floor, bedrooms and bathrooms on the second floor, and often a basement and/or an attic. Unlike their Victorian predecessors, however, colonials largely dispensed with front parlors, front porches, and pantries, substituting powder rooms, dens, and rear decks. This configuration provided the advantage of relatively large kitchens that could also accommodate a table for meals, less intrusive noise for children sleeping upstairs, and the possibility of relatively generous storage space. The two major drawbacks of colonials were that they tended to be more expensive than other models, and the stairs could become extremely annoying when having to carry toddlers or wash baskets.

  The most popular postwar suburban home model was the ranch house. The single-floor layout eliminated the tedium of stair climbing, but many families found more togetherness tha
n they wanted with bedrooms in close proximity to living rooms. (Times & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  The ranch was probably the most popular home model for the entire Baby Boom childhood period. Ranches tended to be rather sprawling homes with virtually all the living space concentrated on one floor. These houses looked very contemporary, eliminated most stair climbing, and, like the colonials, might include a basement or an attic that could offer more room as families grew. This living arrangement was less frequently depicted on film and television but was the most common new housing in American suburbs.

  The third home model was generally a compromise between colonial and ranch—usually, but not always, designated a split-level. This style offered three or even four floors, divided by stairs that were roughly half the extent of steps in traditional two-story homes. In most cases, upper levels featured bedrooms; middle levels had kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms; and lower levels included laundry rooms, garage access, powder rooms, and the most innovative of postwar suburbia, a “family room” or “recreation room” that often included a television, record-player system, a new “recliner” chair or two, and perhaps a fireplace, pool table, or Ping-Pong table. In many homes this room might become a gathering place for younger members of the family while the living room was used by adults or reserved for relatively formal occasions.