The History of White People (46 page)

For Italian Americans, highly segregated in slum neighborhoods and routinely called “wops,” “dagoes,” and “guineas” before the war, the 1940s brought brand-new money for college and homes. Before the war, Italian Americans had rarely achieved a higher education. But around 1940 their rates of college attendance quickly approached the national norm. Educational mobility led to economic mobility, which fostered political clout. Rhode Island, with its large proportion of Italian Americans, elected John Pastore its first Italian American governor in 1946. Italian Americans in Rhode Island’s state house numbered four before 1948, when their number doubled. By the late 1960s they numbered sixteen.
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Less numerous, Slavic Americans did not succeed as brilliantly in politics, although their timetable for gaining office was similar. The first Slovenian governor of a state, Frank J. Lausche of Ohio, got elected in 1945 and was sent to the U.S. Senate in 1956.
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P
OSTWAR PROSPERITY
drove the motor of mobility, and federal spending fueled the economy, most obviously in the form of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly called the GI Bill of Rights or simply the GI Bill. This multifaceted benefits program offered unemployment compensation, financing for education, and low-interest, fixed-rate, long-term loans for starting businesses and buying homes. Between 1944 and 1956, the GI Bill spent $14.5 billion to subsidize education for about half the veterans, some 7.8 million people all told.
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*

The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), along with the Veterans Mortgage Guarantee program, offered veterans and developers federally insured mortgages and loans on terms far more favorable than those of savings and loan institutions and banks. The FHA and the Veterans Administration (VA) required only 10 percent down, and their attractively low interest rates were fixed for thirty years; people with modest incomes could pay for their homes over the long term, with no balloon payment at the end. Now it was cheaper to buy than to rent in the cities.
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An increase in home values would underlie family wealth and middle-class status in coming generations.

The FHA and VA financed more than $120 billion in housing between 1934 and 1964, peaking in the fifties and early sixties. By then, the FHA had become the nation’s prime mortgage lender, holding about one-half the home mortgages, and the VA had insured mortgages for nearly five million more.
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Those homes were largely in new suburbs, early and famously the two Levittowns in Nassau County, Long Island, New York (built between 1947 and 1951), and in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (built in 1951).
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*
(See figure 26.1, Levittown, Pennsylvania.)

Fig. 26.1. Levittown, Pennsylvania, mid-1950s.

Sameness marked the suburban theme. Even the Holocaust seldom got mention, though popular culture recognized Jews obliquely. In 1945 the first (and only) Jew was crowned Miss America after a tussle over her Jewish-sounding name—Bess Meyerson (b. 1924). The Miss America organizers had always preferred Mayflower girls and pressured Meyerson to change her name to something more One Hundred Percent American.
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But Meyerson resisted the pressure and won the crown.
^†
Success also came to Laura Z. Hobson (1900–86), whose 1947 novel
Gentleman’s Agreement
became a number one best seller and an Academy Award–winning movie starring Gregory Peck as a Gentile journalist who passes for a Jew in order to expose American anti-Semitism. Biblical movies of the 1950s cast Gentiles as Jews: Charlton Heston (of English and Scottish descent) as Moses in
The Ten Commandments
(1956) and Victor Mature (of Italian and Swiss descent) as Samson in
Samson and Delilah
(1950). The war for independence of the scrappy republic of Israel in 1948 made Israelis into American revolutionaries and solidified the notion of the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation.
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Still primarily working-class, Italian Americans hovered longer on the fringes of American whiteness, longer than Jews, but the 1950s made individuals such as the singer Frank Sinatra (1915–98) and Annette Funicello (b. 1942), the star Mouseketeer of Walt Disney’s
Mickey Mouse Club
, into One Hundred Percent Americans who happened to be Italian. The simple and welcome point of these blockbusting books, movies, and figures—the essential sameness of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew (in the phrase of Will Herberg’s popular book)—was a theme that played well in the postwar era.
*
Some pointed out, however, that sameness could appear as conformity, a much less comforting idea. David Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
(1950) and William W. Whyte’s
The Organization Man
(1956) called attention to the anomie and conformity of
the
American of the postwar era on a best-selling scale. In its hardcover publication by Yale University Press and subsequent paperback abridgments,
The Lonely Crowd
sold more than a million copies, never mind that its
American
—white, northern, and middle-class—inhabited a constricted territory. Black Americans, poor Americans, and southerners of any race appear only in passing, as “remnants” of older traditions. To most Americans, these limitations seemed inconsequential. Riesman appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine, the first social scientist to receive this sign of national import.
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Jewish American writers—Philip Roth most notably—chronicled a transit from the old city neighborhood into the suburbs as an American, not merely a Jewish, tale. In Herman Wouk’s best-selling 1947 novel, Marjorie Morgenstern translates her quintessentially Jewish last name, into Morningstar, just as name changes, nose jobs, hair straightening, and dieting proliferated among would-be American Americans living in their “little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.”

Not that sameness and conformity seemed all bad. That line from Malvina Reynolds’s 1963 hit song, “Little Boxes,” culminates a process of going to university to be doctors and lawyers and business executives. Those who “came out all the same” did so in nice, new neighborhoods, with good, new schools.
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In 1960, a quarter of the American housing stock was less than a decade old, and suburban residents in single-family homes outnumbered people living in the country or in what was coming to be denigrated as the “inner city.”
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Suburbia might be monotone, but it was a sameness to be striven toward.

Not surprisingly, suburbanization changed culture as well as residence. The literary critic Louise DeSalvo spoke for millions of postwar Jewish, Italian, and other working-class white ethnic families who used GI Bill loans to move out of the city. Her family left a fourth-floor tenement apartment in Hoboken for a home in suburban Ridgefield, New Jersey. Soon Louise’s mother began refusing to eat her immigrant mother’s homemade peasant bread, “a bread,” DeSalvo recalled, “that my mother disdains because it is everything that my grandmother is, and everything that my mother, in 1950s suburban New Jersey, is trying very hard not to be.” DeSalvo’s mother prefers commercial sliced white bread.

Nor does DeSalvo, like so many of her generation, speak the European language of her immigrant grandparents. She has more in common with her Jewish and Irish American peers in the suburbs than with her cousins back in Puglia, which she did not visit until she was sixty years old. The GI Bill, the FHA, and the suburbs made her a middle-class American confronting American American ideals.

To be American American had rapidly come to mean being “middle class” and therefore white, as in the facile equation of “white” with “middle-class.” It was as though to be the one was automatically to be the other. Such a conflation of class and race had popped right out of postwar politics’ weakened organized labor, and led to dwindling visibility of the working class.

Passed after a nationwide wave of strikes in 1946, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 severely curbed the power of organized labor by barring sympathy strikes, secondary boycotts, and mass picketing. These tactics had stood at the heart of worker power in many a shop or industry. Now employers had the whip hand, and union growth languished. Prohibiting communists from working for unions, Taft-Hartley had also stripped organized labor of many dedicated rank-and-file organizers.
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To be prolabor came to smell like being a communist or at least a pinko, dangerous charges during the 1950s postwar red scare. Even the very image of “the working man” came to seem old-timey, as artists turned their backs on the worker as a theme. Painters invented nonfigurative abstract expressionism in a reaction against socialist realism and shopped it around internationally as proof that American art had come of age. Noteworthy prosperity inaugurated a fat new American era that generated its own mythology.

In the twilight of their years, members of the GI Bill–FHA generation looked back on their economic success with a good deal of self-congratulation. One Leonard Giuliano presented his history of his people: “With determination and perseverance…the Italian was able to…pull himself up by his own bootstraps…. His greatest desire, of course, was for his children and his family to have a better life than he had left in Italy, but he did not expect this for nothing. He had to work.” Al Riccardi told a similar story: “My people had a rough time, too. But nobody gave us something.”
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A daughter of Jewish garment workers agreed: “My grandparents were like Russian serfs, but we climbed our way out of poverty, we worked our way up. We were poor when we were growing up, but we were never on home relief, and our family still had closeness and warmth!”
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Hard work, yes, but pushed along nicely by government assistance rarely acknowledged in the aftermath.

W
ERE ALL
boats lifted by the government’s largesse? No, they were not. Economic subsidies reached few African Americans still segregated behind a veil created and constantly mended in Washington. Those lovely new suburbs, creatures of FHA and VA mortgages, were for white people only. Federal policy made and kept them all white—on purpose.
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As in the New Deal, postwar policies crafted by a southern-dominated Congress were intended to bypass the very poor, which meant southern blacks in particular. John Rankin of Mississippi chaired the Committee on World War Legislation in the House of Representatives. He made sure that the servicemen’s bill included no antidiscrimination clause and that every provision would be administered locally along Jim Crow lines.
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In 1940, 77 percent of black Americans lived in the South. They were leaving as fast as work opened up elsewhere, but 68 percent still remained in the South in 1950. A few aggressive blacks had pushed their way into GI programs, but local agents, invariably white, had obstructed the great mass. As early as 1947 it was clear—as investigations by black newspapers and a metastudy revealed—that the GI Bill was being administered along racially discriminatory lines. It was, the report
Our Negro Veteran
concluded, as though the GI Bill had been intended “For White Veterans Only.”
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This color line appeared sharply in the suburbs.

The Levittowns, for instance, managed to lock out African Americans by way of “restrictive covenants,” deeds and codicils that barred an owner from selling or renting to anyone not white. (Where the rare black buyer did succeed in purchasing a house, as in Levittown in Pennsylvania, neighbors resorted to violence.) Not one of the 82,000 new inhabitants of Levittown, New York, was black, a lily-white policy that held on well into the 1960s. No matter.
Time
magazine featured William Levitt on its cover of 3 July 1950, and for decades discussion of suburbs like his made no mention of white-lining.
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