Customer Reviews

Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb

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Passé words like riveting, remarkable and even shocking come to mind when you think about describing this book. But Levittown is far too good to use such canned vocabulary. I was born in Willingboro, New Jersey in 1970 - while our nation and that area of the U.S. were still on the cusp of dealing with racial divides. My Mother moved into Levittown during the Summer of 1960, her family trying to escape to suburbia from the city of Philadelphia and what her family perceived as an area heightening in crime and diminishing in a quality place to raise children. This story struck me on levels I am both ashamed and proud to speak of.

Reading the language and racial slurs in this book were difficult. It was difficult because you can't imagine that just a mere 50 - 60 years ago people (old and young) felt so strongly about other human beings all because of the color of their skin. Page after page is punctuated with the `N'-word and it just hangs there in the air and pierces your moral fiber. My shock is juxtaposed by having grown up with family members who then, and to this day, still say that word - I like to think it's merely a generational thing because I know the people saying this word are kind and wonderful. But they grew up in a time of ignorance and closed-mindedness and some people just don't shirk those feelings.

As shocking as the story of Levittown is, I couldn't help but ponder a message that defines the generations and races of even today: (nearly) everyone has a dream they hope to attain. Bill Levitt, in the eyes of the (white) nation and Levittown residents was living the American dream: huge house, gorgeous wives, big boat and he was (viewed as) generous. Bill Myers and his family sought the American dream as they saw it: to own property and live freely. Levitt reflected the times of that period in America. Yet, consider how individual groups think of their American dream today - think of it in terms of black and white - it almost makes you wonder how far we have not come. That's the one thing I really loved about this book: it made me think.

To some, the name "Levittown" conjures up images of crushing conformity spread out in row upon row of soulless Cape Cod "boxes." To others, it represents the ingenious entrepreneurial spirit of Levitt & Sons, the dynamic homebuilder embodied in the person of William Levitt, who enabled the wave of World War II veterans to purchase comfortable, if modest (two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bathroom) mass-produced dwellings for less than $8,000. Without question, the story of Levittown reflects fundamental elements of America's post-war ethos.

Whether it was Brown v. Board of Education's challenge to the segregated classrooms of Topeka, Kansas, or the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the 1950s likewise brought forth the first determined statements of the modern civil rights movement in America. In his stirring new book, David Kushner weaves these strands with Levitt's story to illuminate a lesser known but no less dramatic event in those tumultuous years --- the struggle to integrate the whites-only community of Levittown, Pennsylvania.

In 1957, Daisy and William Myers, an unassuming African-American couple living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, dreamed the simple dream of millions of Americans of their generation: a new home in a good neighborhood in which to raise their growing family. That spring, their wish coincided with the political agenda of a group of Levittown residents led by Communist-leaning, Jewish political activists Bea and Lew Wechsler, who sought to shatter the racial barriers of the community. When the Wechslers' next door neighbor's house went on the market, they approached the Myerses about moving in. Their arrival, in August 1957, sparked an outpouring of protest, often violent, severely testing whether blacks and whites could live peacefully in the country's fast-growing suburban communities.

The protests of the ironically named Levittown Betterment Committee (some 1,200 members strong at one point and supported by the Ku Klux Klan) featured everything from a cross burning, to relentless noise and vandalism, to purchasing the home behind the Myerses (the protestors called it the "Confederate House") as a base for harassing operations. The attacks on the Myerses and their supporters came to a head in September 1957, the same month President Eisenhower called on the National Guard to oversee the integration of the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. Effectively exposing the deplorable passivity of the local police, Kushner also chronicles the involvement of law enforcement authorities of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, tentative at first, but later applied with full force in a dramatic trial in December 1957.

Kushner sketches contrasting portraits of the politically motivated Wechslers and the quiet but no less determined Myerses, whose courage made the integration of Levittown possible. There's something especially moving in the account of the heroism of the Myers family, including that of their children, forced to confront both the extremes of harsh treatment and the loneliness that came from having only a handful of friends in a hostile environment.

While the picture of Bill Levitt that emerges from Kushner's book is decidedly unsympathetic, it's nevertheless a multifaceted and nuanced one. Levitt was a hard-driving, at times unscrupulous, businessman whose morals were dubious (for years he carried on an affair in a secluded estate in Levittown, Pennsylvania) but who gave generously to Jewish causes. There's no doubt his Levittown communities made homes available to hundreds of thousands who, in some cases, had been living in chicken coops before those developments sprouted from what once had been farmland. But the dark side of Levitt's brilliant success was his determination to maintain the racially segregated communities he believed (with the support, at least for a time, of misguided federal housing policies) were the only way to preserve home values. Levitt left behind a complex legacy," Kushner concludes, "a man who both provided the American Dream to a generation of veterans and denied it to an entire race."

Kushner employs a low-key, journalistic style and never becomes polemical or judgmental. Still, it's clear where his sympathies, as would those of any right thinking person, lie in the contest between the mindless mob and the strong-willed protagonists of this modern morality play. "By standing up for their rights, and for each other, the Myerses and Wechslers --- two families from different worlds --- showed the power that neighbors can conjure up when they choose to come together." This is a story well worth telling and one well told in an affecting account of humanity at its worst and ultimately triumphant best.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

Kushner has accurately portrayed the bigotry that existed in Levittown. As a teenager living several blocks away and knowing the families involved, it was shocking to see the hatred and violence of my neighbors and classmates. I remember delivering medicine to the Myerses and having to walk through the crowd and listen to the epithets and threats from people I had thought of as friends.

As my class prepares for our 50th anniversary of our high school graduation. I hope that all will read this book and reflect on hopefully how far we have come

Book was in excellent condition as promised and shipment was very fast. Very good vendor.

Disappointing to say the least. The story here is quite interesting and my heart bleeds for the the African American family fighting for the right to live in an integrated neighborhood. However, this book's writing, tone and analysis are so juvenile, awkward, facile and trite I had to stop reading it after a few dozen pages. It had the feel of one of my third grade textbooks from the 1960s. This author should be ashamed to put out this sort of product.

I was surprised to find an entire page of books on Amazon about Levittown. For the most part, the titles suggest a broad nostalgia for a time and place in America that many people gladly called home: Levittown: The way we were and Our House: The Stories of Levittown, for example.

But for a wide swath of Americans, Levittown was not home, even though they wanted it to be. David Kushner traces the story of three families whose lives intersected in Levittown: the Levitt family, whose utopian ideals envisioned a perfect--and perfectly white--community; the Wechslers, left-leaning activists looking for a cause; and the Meyers family, African-Americans who wanted a slice of the American dream, otherwise known as a house in Levittown.

After reading this book, I won't ever look at the 1950s with the sense of nostalgia often reserved for that time in American history. Kushner's story is one so filled with hate, it's hard to imagine it happening in the Northeast. I think we tend to believe racial crimes happened only in the South. But the community of Levittown was hateful... they made death threats, threw rocks at the house, burned crosses, paraded their Confederate-flag adorned cars up and down the street, amassed mobs in front of the Myers's house and worse. A group of people even rented a house behind the Myers's, where they harassed them with sound, lights and more. One man walked a dog back and forth at the property line, calling out its particularly ugly name, a racial slur.

The book does get bogged down in details and the titles of the various committees people formed to push their agendas, but the story is compelling enough to get you through. I only wish -- as the author undoubtedly does -- that the Myers' children, who are still living, would tell their own story about this traumatic time. The author says they claim not to recall the events, even though at the time at least two of them would have been of an age to remember. That's a shame. In this case, nostalgia needs to be tempered with the truth.

Kushner does a masterful job of telling this sorry and oft-ignored story of racism in suburbia and the role Levitt played in institutionalizing that racism. As I child who grew up in Levittown PA in the 1970s, the consequences of that systemized racism were still apparent. There were race riots in the high schools and the KKK burned crosses and distributed their hate filled propaganda. Kushner tells this important story in an extremely reader-friendly way. I don't read much non-fiction and this read like a novel to me. I highly recommend it.

I heard an interview with the author on NPR and bought this book. I read it over one weekend and could not put it down. This is a moving and masterful account of an American saga. It should be required reading for anyone interested in civil rights or suburbia. It is also just a terrific read...dramatic like a great film.

Very interesting story that expresses what the climate of that era was like. The book also explains how the Levitts began and built their Levittown empire. The civil rights story in 1950s Levittown, NY is a very captivating story that holds the reader's attention from the very start.

If "civil rights saga" were a genre of contemporary literature, then this book successfully fits the bill. Kushner has written a true story that will inspire you, make you angry and shake your head in shock and shame. His account of the events surrounding the arrival of the first African-American family in the "whites only" suburb of Levittown in 1957 lays bare not only the deadly and ugly racism that characterized the era, even in the more "progressive" northern states. It also shows how ordinary men, women and even children stood up for what was right and won, despite crosses burned in their backyards, being bullied and harassed night and day, and the windows of their picture perfect suburban homes shattered.

Apart from the compelling narrative, the book provides a good understanding of the psychology behind the phenomenon of "white flight" (whites moving out when African-Americans move in) that is still very much in place in the United States today. It explains how racism in housing was entrenched first by cultural attitudes and then, unbelievably, by law. Legal measures were taken to shut African-Americans out of neighborhoods even when they had all the qualifications necessary to buy homes in good neighborhoods, something almost every American in the booming post-World War II economy aspired to with the expansion of the suburbs between the 1940s and '60s. The argument that the arrival of African-Americans heralded "declining property values" is not just something the racists of Levittown screamed in loud, angry and violent protests. It is an attitude you can easily find in many racially homogeneous upper-class neighborhoods in the United States today. While housing discrimination is now officially illegal in the U.S., "white flight" continues.

Kushner's book is the kind that will keep you up at night reading till you're done. At the end, you'll not only be glad the good guys won, but you'll also be saddened by the fact that the attitudes the bad guys in the story represented are still in place today, over half a century later.