American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  In truth, however, hardly any Americans knew about the campaign. Some had spotted the balloons floating in the western skies, and, in January 1945, Newsweek even published a story titled “Balloon Mystery.” But that was as far as it got; the nation’s Office of Censorship quickly ordered radio stations and media outlets to stay silent on the issue for fear of creating exactly the sort of general panic that Japanese propaganda was suggesting had occurred.

  By April 1945, the Japanese military, sensing the program’s ineffectiveness and seeing no mention of it in the American media, finally abandoned it. The program had launched a total of ninety-three hundred balloons. Ultimately, the worst damage came the month after the initiative’s conclusion, when six people from a Sunday school group were killed by the delayed explosion of a balloon that had landed in an Oregon forest—these were, in fact, the only casualties from enemy combat that occurred in the continental United States during the war.

  Following the fire balloon campaign, Japan made no further attempts to harm the nation’s forests. The American government, nonetheless, remained on edge. Fear for the safety of the forests was even listed as a reason to sustain the internment of Japanese Americans, one of Roosevelt’s most controversial acts as president—a June 1945 decision upholding certain elements of its continuation pointed to “[t]he peculiar vulnerability of Military Area No. 1 to devastating forest fires.” Fears of further attacks or sabotage on the forests subsided only in August 1945, when Japan finally surrendered in the wake of America’s dropping two catastrophic atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki.

  The end of the war, however, did not mean the end of the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention campaign. Its success in reducing the total number of accidental fires seemed to justify its continuation. Plus, Smokey Bear had quickly won over the American public.

  The postwar years saw what had begun as a replacement for Bambi develop into one of the nation’s most recognizable images. In 1947, Smokey gained a signature catchphrase, when the Ad Council—the peacetime successor to the War Advertising Council—invented the slogan: “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” Three years later the character was brought to life after a black bear cub that escaped from a forest fire in New Mexico was christened “Smokey” and brought to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.; it became one of the zoo’s most popular attractions. During the 1950s and 1960s, countless celebrities teamed up with the fictional bear in radio advertisements to encourage responsible behavior in the forests.

  The character also became an ambassador to the nation’s youth. There were Smokey Bear dolls and songs and comic strips. One 1955 headline declared, “‘Smokey’ Makes Half Million Youngsters Junior Forest Rangers.” The bear’s popularity with schoolchildren grew so intense that the postal service even created a special ZIP code in 1964 to handle all the fan mail that poured in.

  In more recent years, Smokey’s celebrity status has diminished somewhat, but he remains an integral part of forest fire prevention in America. Various estimates have suggested that the character’s impact in decreasing forest fires has saved the country tens of billions of dollars in forest damage. The campaign has also stood as the nation’s longest-running public service announcement.

  Of course, Smokey Bear was but one story to emerge from World War II, which was among the most transformative events in human history. The war’s end marked a reordering of international power structures, with the United States ascending as the strongest nation in the world. Along with this increase in global influence would come a period of sustained American prosperity, in which living standards rose dramatically for more than twenty years. There would be new opportunities and new conflicts. And the nation’s trees, once more, would play an integral role.

  9

  Postwar Prosperity

  Wooden Boxes with Picture Windows

  WILLIAM LEVITT TOOK a drag from his cigarette, the first of several dozen the forty-year-old would smoke that day. It was October 1, 1947, and he had been anticipating this date for months. Later in the morning, some three hundred veterans and their families would begin to arrive at Nassau County, Long Island, to move into three hundred near-identical houses that Levitt had built for them, seemingly overnight. This day marked the start of what would soon be known as Levittown, the largest planned community in America.

  Levitt’s eponymous project would symbolize the new American suburbs, which over the next few decades would dominate the national landscape, both literally and figuratively. The suburbs would represent a new kind of domestic norm for the nation, one in which communities were frequently planned by large-scale developers such as Levitt and in which social life became notably insular. Where there once had stood working farms there would be rows upon rows of single-family houses, many of them indistinguishable from one another, each of them containing the hopes and aspirations of a generation of Americans who had just watched their nation triumph in the largest war in history. By and large, the dwellings would be simple in design, readily affordable, filled with recently developed conveniences, and, to a remarkable degree, dependent on wood, the single most important material in their construction. Though their new residents likely wouldn’t take long to contemplate the fact, these homes would owe their existence to America’s trees, the unnoticed pillars of suburbia.

  The idea of suburbia was not itself a postwar invention. Its history actually predated that of the nation. Historian Kenneth Jackson, author of Crabgrass Frontier, observed that written depictions of the suburb—which is to say, a residential area outside but dependent upon an urban center—traced back as far as 593 BCE. Most early American cities featured some variant of suburbs. These communities initially evolved somewhat organically, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, there began to appear fully planned suburban developments. The first of these, located in the eastern foothills of New Jersey’s Orange Mountains and constructed in the 1850s, was named Llewellyn Park, in honor of its creator, Llewellyn S. Haskell. He was both a wealthy New York merchant and an adherent of Perfectionism, a religious cult that advocated correct living as a way to attain a perfect earthly existence. His new suburb featured upscale homes and, equally important, extensive landscaping, including a fifty-acre ramble at its center; Haskell, a staunch champion of Central Park, invested more than one hundred thousand dollars to plant trees and other plants. Llewellyn Park aimed to become a picturesque garden community, one that, in the words of an early architectural reviewer, provided “not only a source of health and recreation, but of culture and refinement.” It quickly proved to be an attractive alternative for those who could afford the privilege—one of the most famous residents was the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who lived there for over forty years.

  The suburban ideal continued to evolve throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the task of planning and landscaping drew on the talents of many of the nation’s preeminent designers, including Frederick Law Olmsted. He once opined, “[N]o great town can long exist without great suburbs.”

  But the suburbs that appeared in the wake of World War II shared relatively little with the expressive and fashionable enclaves that had inspired Olmsted. Levittown would have almost nothing in common with Llewellyn Park (other than the fact that they each owed their names to their self-aggrandizing developers). As historian Witold Rybczynski once observed, “It’s almost as if a sort of amnesia set in and the garden suburb was forgotten.”

  The primary reason for this shift was that Levittown, like almost all postwar subdivisions, arose not as an alternative to urban life but as a solution to an acute housing crisis. The end of overseas fighting in 1945 had meant the return of some 16 million veterans, many of whom would be starting families and would need places to live. However, since the early 1930s, new-home construction had been somewhat stalled, first due to the economic effects of the Depression and then due to the war, a period when many homebuilders were contracted to meet emergency military housing needs. The lack of immediately
available housing forced families to double up and, occasionally, to take more extreme measures. In 1947, two years after the war’s end, some 500,000 families were still occupying Quonset huts or other temporary housing. In Chicago, 250 families took up residence in former trolley cars that had been converted into living quarters. In Omaha, one newspaper advertisement declared: “Big Ice Box, 7x17 feet, could be fixed up to live in.”

  The federal government sought to address the unfolding crisis head-on. As President Harry Truman told Congress in 1945: “A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization. . . . The people of the United States, so far ahead in wealth and productive capacity, deserve to be the best housed people in the world. We must begin to meet that challenge at once.” It became a national imperative to ensure that sufficient housing be made available by any means necessary. And faced with the choice of building homes directly—a policy that seemed implausibly socialist—or of providing incentives to private builders, the federal government chose the latter.

  Some measures had already been put in place before the crisis hit. Specifically, several acts passed under FDR during the Depression had created a number of housing agencies, which, among other things, provided federally backed mortgage insurance. This system helped to free credit for home loans, but it had not been designed to accommodate the needs of 16 million veterans, many of whom would have limited incomes upon returning from combat. Thus, in 1944, when the government passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (better known as the G.I. Bill of Rights), a sweeping set of veteran entitlements, it included the right to purchase a home without a down payment. Two years later, Truman signed the Veterans Emergency Housing Program, which channeled additional resources toward construction. At this point, in the words of Levitt, “Two of the three ingredients of success were there—the demand for housing, and the availability of money. The only thing missing was the product, the house.”

  Levitt was especially well equipped to provide this final ingredient. Nearly his entire adult life had been spent learning how to build houses. Real estate was the family business. His father, Abraham, had gotten involved in Long Island home construction during the 1920s, first as a supplement to his law profession and later as a full-time vocation. Abraham’s business appealed greatly to William, who showed a flair for marketing, a facility with organization, and an unrelenting impulse to get rich. As he later observed, “I wanted to make a lot of money. I wanted a big car and a lot of clothes.” William’s younger brother, Alfred, found the family business equally attractive, though for different reasons. The more introverted of the two, Alfred had little taste for the industry’s unavoidable hustling, but was fascinated with architecture; it was a subject that he’d learned largely through self-study, though he briefly interned with the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Collectively, the three men formed a brilliant team, soon to be known as Levitt & Sons. Abraham handled the financing, Alfred the design, and William, the world-beater and company president, attended to most everything else.

  In the years before the war, Levitt & Sons pursued homebuilding in a relatively traditional fashion, a few projects at a time, each custom-built over the course of several months. Their homes were targeted at upper-middle-class New Yorkers looking for the tranquility of life outside the city. During the 1930s the firm earned some local renown for a small, two-hundred-unit subdivision that they constructed near Manhasset, Long Island. Known as Strathmore, it was full of Tudor-style houses priced between $9,100 and $18,500, and it shared certain elements with earlier high-end suburbs like Llewellyn Park. William, already a master salesman, drummed up interest by having one of the new houses wrapped the whole way round with cellophane, including a gargantuan red cellophane bow that sat above the entryway.

  The arrival of war brought new opportunities and challenges to the firm. In 1941, it received a contract from the government to build sixteen hundred military worker homes in Norfolk, Virginia. The contract demanded speed and efficiency on a scale that the Levitts had never before attempted. In response, they began to experiment with mass-production techniques: time-consuming dug-out basements were replaced with poured-cement foundations; walls and roofs were partly preassembled; construction was broken down into simple tasks that could be performed without trained carpenters or unionized labor. Homes became stationary units in a moving assembly line of people; it was Fordism turned on its head. Thanks in large part to these innovations, the Levitts met the government contract ahead of schedule.

  The experience transformed the family’s outlook on homebuilding, encouraging them to think on a much grander scale. As William explained, “[I]t proved to us what we had long suspected—that houses could be mass-produced in the field; and it infected us with the fever of mass building. . . . [I]t made us hungry for a full-blown, unhampered try at mass-producing houses.” The Levitts began to contemplate a radical new idea in housing: a gigantic planned community, one that transferred the mass-production techniques that their military contract had required to civilian life. “It was a king-sized dream,” said William. And it would require the combined efforts of all three family members. Alfred would take charge of designing a home that would be simple to construct and would appeal to popular sentiment. Abraham, who by this point had semiretired and turned his attention to gardening, would handle the landscaping. And William, the wunderkind, would coordinate the rest.

  The homes they were about to erect on several thousand acres of potato fields in Nassau County, Long Island, would introduce an aesthetic that still controls much of the American landscape. They would be icons of a new age of prosperity. They would show remarkable innovation. They would feature new technologies and futuristic materials. However, the heart of the Levitt houses would depend solely on trees, just as had been the case in America from the outset.

  THOUGH THE FIRST British settlers in New England had emigrated from a country where wood was a scarce commodity, they nonetheless brought with them knowledge of building homes using wood. English carpenters of the era favored a technique known as timber framing: Heavy beams of wood, often eight inches by eight inches, provided structural posts upon which was erected a wooden grid held together with mortise-and-tenon joints. Beyond this basic frame, however, the house contained materials that were often easier to acquire and less expensive than wood: The spaces between the support beams were filled in with bricks, loam, or wattle and daub, and the outer walls were coated with plaster. According to historian James Deetz, when English homes featured wood in the façade, it was primarily as “ostentation,” an outward display to “show that [the wealthy] could afford such a luxury.” But in America the forests expanded in every direction without end, a repository of timber unlike any the world had ever seen.

  Unconstrained by the limitations of English life, the early colonists were free to cut down centuries-old white oaks and hew them into beams of sizes that were practically unknown in England. And the ready availability of good lumber encouraged the colonists to use wood in almost all construction tasks. For example, while builders in England typically constructed roofs from heavy materials such as slate, thatch, and tile, Plymouth colonists used cedar shingles, which were significantly lighter but equally protective. And the same story could be told for nearly all aspects of American homebuilding: Thin wooden strips, known as lath, were stacked horizontally along the structural beams to provide a latticework against which plaster was then applied; thick white pine boards, sometimes more than two feet across, lined the floors; vertical planks, running from the ground to the eaves, were often used to clad the frame; and long, overlapping bands of oak or pine, known as clapboard, covered the external siding. The typical New England home contained so much timber throughout that, but for its size, it might easily have been mistaken for the dwelling of nobility had it existed in the mother country.

  While the English-influenced timber-framed home became the most common construction style in early America, it was far from
the only one in a pluralistic society. Swedish settlers along the Delaware River introduced the log cabin to America during the seventeenth century. Dutch settlers preferred to build stone houses, examples of which can still be seen throughout New York’s Hudson Valley. In the South, homes built of brick predominated in many regions, especially among the well-to-do. Nonetheless, even these non-timber-framed homes depended extensively on lumber, for internal paneling, doors, window frames, ceiling beams, supplemental supports, shutters, staircases, and furniture. Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello home was built mainly of brick, wrote, “I have thought myself obliged to decline every application which has been made to me for [the sale of] timber of any kind. [W]ithout that resource I could not have built as I have done, nor could I look forward [to life] with any comfort.” Wood was, quite simply, the universal American building material.

  However, there was always potential to improve upon the methods of wooden construction. Timber framing, in particular, had several pronounced downsides. The technique depended upon extensive joinery, which required time and skilled labor, something that was always expensive in a land of freeholders. Additionally, the amount of heavy timber involved made increasingly less sense as lumber ceased being something locally harvested and became a commodity hauled in from afar.

  During the early nineteenth century, carpenters searching for a solution to this dilemma began experimenting with different approaches that took advantage of an emerging technology: cheap, machine-fabricated iron nails. In the 1830s, a Chicago builder discovered that a sound structure could be produced using thinner, two-by-four-inch pine timbers that were precisely spaced, cross-braced, and fastened together with a generous dose of hammering. Skeptical carpenters supposedly joked that a stiff midwestern wind would blow away this curious-looking adaptation like a balloon. Their concerns were quickly disproved, but the dismissive name stuck and the new technique became known as “balloon framing.” It quickly gained popularity, and by the turn of the century was the standard building technique throughout America. Whether the façades of individual homes featured clapboard (as in New England), brick (common in the South), or stucco (the most popular choice in the West), they most often contained an underlying structure of two-by-fours, and this continues to the present day.