Levittown

by David Kushner

  At all hours of the night, the mob members played a bugle or took turns slamming the mailbox shut on the corner near the Myerses’ and Wechslers’ homes. Some, to the Wechslers’ horror, even employed old union techniques of harassment—shuffling their feet noisily outside their windows as the Myerses’ children struggled to sleep. A spotlight had been affixed to the roof to better illuminate the Confederate flag and kept them up late into the night.

  Daisy Myers later appealed to a reporter: “What they’re doing has all the earmarks of the Ku Klux Klan.” When a reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin wandered over to investigate late that night, he found a group of people listening to a championship boxing match on the radio. “We’re just a group of neighbors,” one of the men told him. “We have no meetings. It’s open to all Levittown visitors. You might say that this is just Dogwood neighbors and their Levittown friends.”

  They called themselves the Dogwood Hollow Social Club. Inside, the home had been converted into a makeshift clubhouse. Twenty-five men and women milled about the house, serving and drinking coffee from a hot pot on the stove. They sat at mismatched tables and chairs. As visitors came in, they were offered coffee and asked to sign a registration book on a table. The living room had been transformed into the clubhouse center. A record player spun the same song, “Ol’ Man River,” over and over, as visitors joined in. “Niggers all work on the Mississippi,” they sang, “Niggers all work while the white folks play.”

  Benches were lined up facing the center of the room, a reporter observed, “similar to church pews.” Two large Confederate flags and one yellow one with the words DON’T TREAD ON ME were propped up against the window facing the Myerses’ home. More Confederate flags were for sale in the corner, just like the ones that had been for sale at the Levittown shopping mall. Purchasers could pay for the flags in a wooden box on a table. The price: a donation of sixty cents for adults. Children got a break: They could buy the flags for thirty cents.

  From a corner of the room, a scrappy, thin man with a cigarette appeared. He identified himself as the caretaker of the house, Eldred Williams. “We’re going to keep up the appearance of the home and grounds,” Williams told the reporter, but then quickly turned the questioning around. “Why are the white people on the defensive? Myers is causing all this trouble. What hold does this man have on Harrisburg that he can get state police protection and we can’t?”

  After the reporter left, a group inside the home convened to discuss how they might take matters into their own hands. A batch of lots was produced. Howard Bentcliff and four others took turns plucking lots from a hat. The first two men drew blanks. But Bentcliff and the fourth man drew the lots with the special marks.

  They knew what they had to do.

  While the standoff continued in Levittown, the crisis in Little Rock was reaching an apex. On Tuesday, September 24, three weeks after school began, President Eisenhower took what one reporter called “the most drastic action ever used by a president to enforce a federal court decree on school desegregation.” He ordered the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine African-American students to their first day of classes.

  “The interest of the nation in the proper fulfillment of the law’s requirements cannot yield to the opposition and demonstrations by some few persons,” Eisenhower said. He cited the charter of the United Nations to affirm “ ‘faith in fundamental human rights and in the dignity and worth of the human person . . . without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.’ ”

  The words rang across the country, as the burgeoning civil rights struggle took hold. From Brown v. Board of Education through Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, and now Little Rock, a new kind of battle had gripped the country. Martin Luther King Jr. was at the forefront of the struggle, advocating nonviolence in the face of growing threats.

  But when the Myerses and Wechslers awoke on September 25, the morning after Eisenhower’s order in Little Rock, they would find no such peace in Levittown. In the wee hours of the morning, they were awoken by the police. While the families slept, someone had painted the letters KKK, eighteen inches high, on the wall of the Wechslers’ home on the exterior wall facing the Myerses’ house. Next to the letters, a small poster entitled CONQUER AND BREED was framed in thick red paint.

  The poster showed a crude drawing of voluptuous white woman in a strapless dress with thick red lips and flowing hair. At her feet were the words SOUTHERN WOMANHOOD. She looked fearfully back over her shoulder at a fat, shirtless African-American man with a tribal necklace and menacing hands. A label on his pants read INTEGRATION. At the bottom of the poster were two quotes attributed to spokespersons for the NAACP: “The association of the Races in public schools leads to friendship, love and marriage” and “Integration will result in White girls being associated with Negro boys . . . Naturally intermarriage would result. We of the NAACP are committed to a program of full integration.” At the bottom of the page read the warning THE SOUTH MUST FIGHT OR PERISH. Someone had added in the margin, scrawled in red crayon, “We’re right here in Levittown. We know every move you make.” Someone had added the letters “K.K.K.” under the heading of the poster, CONQUER AND BREED.

  That same morning, a cross had been burned nearby at the home of man who had sold a car to Bill Myers and whose friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter had brought flowers to the Myerses on the day of their arrival. A similar note was included at the cross-burning site, along with the warning “Keep your mouth shut. The KKK has eyes on you.”

  Bea and Lew struggled to decide what to do. On the one hand, they knew they had support. In the morning paper, an ad by the Levittown Citizens Committee came out quoting lines from Eisenhower’s speech the day before: “These truths were spoken by President Eisenhower on Sept. 24 . . . They refer to Little Rock, but they also apply directly to Levittown, PA.”

  But it was hard to take solace. For years, the Wechslers had stood in the face of opposition, but they had never been targets themselves. A person can only endure so much. “We just can’t take it,” Lew told one reporter who stopped by their house. “The fear in this town is enough to curl your hair. Those who were neutral before are afraid to open their mouths now. The troublemakers are as brazen as can be. The place is cluttered with Confederate flags. [Their] plans are to dress up in white sheets Ku Klux Klan–style for Halloween.” Rumors were that they were going to blow up the Myerses’ house on October 31.

  And the Wechslers and Myerses weren’t getting any help from the authorities. Where was the law? Levitt had defied the Supreme Court to foster this hateful environment, and nobody was stopping him. In fact, he was now building another Levittown just up the road with the same plan in mind. The local police had sat by and watched the harassment now for weeks. And even the state police had failed to help during their twenty-four-hour coverage, as the crosses were burned just yards from where they were parked on guard. Even the call to the attorney general had led to nothing.

  For advice, Bea and Lew contacted their local state representative, A. Patrick Brennan, who had been pushing for help for them from the start. “Pat, we just don’t know what do anymore,” Lew said. “The police let these bigots congregate, abuse the Myers family with racial epithets, and call us ‘nigger-loving Jews.’ What do you think I should do?”

  “If it was my house,” Brennan said, “I’d have a half dozen friends come in, openly carrying their shotguns. Then, the first son of a bitch who stepped on my property, I’d shoot.”

  As these words ran through Bea’s and Lew’s minds, the Myerses were taking matters into their own hands. Despite the support, the “war of nerves,” as Bill Myers had put it, was wounding him. Frequent visits to the doctor for nervous tension didn’t alleviate his stress. He was chain-smoking now, his knee bobbing uncontrollably when he sat. He had told Daisy before that he had wanted to give up, to move out and find the life they had dreamed of when they’d parked on the shores of the Chesapeake in Virginia. Daisy had always been the strong one, b
ut now he had to find the strength in himself.

  Bill fished a letter from the pile of mail with a return address from Hampton, Virginia. Curious, he opened it to find a note from his alma mater. “We, the Faculty of Hampton Institute, wish to express our admiration for your quiet courage and forbearance under the trying circumstances,” it read. They praised his embodiment of “every American’s right to establish a home and rear a family without regard to discrimination based on race, color, or creed. While the ugly head of racial violence is being raised on several fronts of the national scene and when the tendency to meet violence with violence is a growing danger, your behavior is exemplary. It is with great pride that we commend you.”

  We face battles every day, Bill knew, little ones and big ones. We can fight them in two ways, with violence—physical and emotional—or quiet strength. It was time for the Myerses and Wechslers to choose. Bill took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out in an ashtray. Then he went to his garage and pulled out his bayonet. When Daisy asked where he was going, he lit another cigarette and said he had to pull some weeds. Bill stepped outside with the bayonet as the strains of “Ol’ Man River” blasted from the Confederate House.

  Eyeing Bill, a man in the Confederate House hollered, “You better keep on your side of the line or else.”

  Then Eldred Williams joined in. “This is it, we are here now. This is the boundary.”

  The mob spilled out of the house and began roaming their grounds around him. Others pulled up in cars with Confederate flags affixed to join their stand. Bill gripped his bayonet. With determined strokes, he thrust the weapon into the ground, ripping up the dandelions from their roots as his neighbors watched.

  Sixteen

  FREEDOM FIGHTERS

  THE SPUTNIK I satellite was just twenty-three inches in diameter, but when the Russians launched it into space on October 4, 1957, it left a planet of fear in its wake. By putting the first human-made object into orbit, the Russians shot an icy chill into the Cold War with America.

  It was a psychologically shattering moment for a country still trying to enjoy the postwar glow. If the Russians ruled space, then it seemed they had the ultimate power—the ability to track our every move, drop nuclear bombs from the sky, descend and vaporize happy families like the aliens depicted in the black-and-white sci-fi movies that ruled the box office of the day. As Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson put it, the Soviets “will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”

  The news fired the imaginations and nightmares of the residents of Levittown, just as it did in other suburbs across the country. For years, people had flocked to these neighborhoods to escape the problems of the cities, but now that seemed increasingly futile. Whether it was the Cold War or the civil rights struggle, not even the highest white picket fence could keep out the rapidly changing times. In Levittown, it was not just Sputnik that threw the community into panic, it was the agents of change on Deepgreen Lane: the Myerses and Wechslers.

  By October, the crisis had reached frightening heights—with the KKK graffiti, and the Confederate House raging despite the alleged 24-7 protection of the cops, who claimed not to have seen the crimes take place. The Myerses and Wechslers realized they couldn’t expect the police or Levitt or even the Supreme Court of America to protect their safety or rights anymore. They had to find the strength within themselves, just as others across the land engaged in the civil rights struggles would have to find theirs. They weren’t mere neighbors anymore. They were, as the activist paper the Militant dubbed them, “Levittown’s Freedom Fighters.”

  And they weren’t alone. As the Confederate flag waved in the house nearby, the Myerses and Wechslers experienced the flip side of hate: the love and support of their neighbors who came to their aid. After the KKK slogan was painted on the Wechslers’ home, local community groups including the Quakers, the William Penn Center, the American Jewish Congress, and the neighboring communities of Bryn Gweled and Concord Park organized a 24-7 citizen patrol.

  One night at three A.M., Lew got up to go to the bathroom when he heard voices in his kitchen. He walked down the hall to find a gray-haired woman and a teenage kid keeping guard. A pot of coffee steamed on the counter next to plates of cookies and cakes. “There they sat, holding the Klan at bay,” Lew later effused, “a gray-haired 65-year-old woman and a 16-year-old boy!” Outside the house, Bea and Lew posted a letter of support in the place of the KKK poster that had been hung in a makeshift frame of bloodred paint. “Dear Sir,” the letter read, “Thank you for being a good neighbor. The enclosed [money] is for some paint to help cover somebody’s dirty work on your house.” Wechsler posted the five-dollar bill sent with the letter on his wall too.

  Next door, volunteer guards stood watch at the Myerses too all day and night. White couples arrived to babysit the children or lend a hand cleaning up. The outpouring moved the Myerses, and they took pains to point out how this awful standoff brought out the best in Levittown as well as the worst. “I doubt there were one hundred Levittown troublemakers in [the mob’s] crowd,” Bill told the reporter from the Militant, “that speaks for a very small percentage. On the other hand, it was inspiring to see how many friends rallied to my defense. I felt it was unnecessary but the people themselves decided they wanted to stay through the night and give us protection. Most people here live in fear. The township police joked with the racist crowd, encouraging them.”

  Bill, once visibly shaking from nervous tension, had a newfound sense of power. When asked by a reporter for the umpteenth time if he would be run out of town, he replied more firmly than ever, “I definitely do not plan to leave. I think this neighborhood will change. I just painted the garage but haven’t got to the cinder blocks yet.”

  “We’ll leave you to your peace,” the reporter said on his way out to see the Wechslers.

  “We have no peace.” Bill replied.

  After all they’d been through, the Wechslers had finally become just as resolute. “I am not going to let some scum drive me out,” Bea told the Militant reporter. “I was very upset when they burnt a cross in front of our house. But you reach a point where you get mad. It’s much better to be mad than scared. I used to cringe when this first started, now I look them in the eye and feel I could spit.”

  The kids agreed. “I’m not leaving till I graduate,” Katy said, “and nobody better bother me.”

  Outside, darkness began to fall. The Wechslers had taken to leaving their spotlights on all night, despite the protest of their neighbor next door, the FBI agent. The Wechslers found it hard to believe that the agent had complained to the cops about the spotlight, but not the Confederate House. As the sky turned black, Lew jokingly told Nick, “It’s about time to light the Christmas tree.” Nick flicked the light switch, and the spotlights blared on the yard.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Lew said to the reporter. “To get the real story, you have to see William Levitt. He built this whole town with the clear understanding that Negroes would be kept out.”

  As the Levittown newspaper cheerily reported on October 9, however, the iconic builder had another story in mind: expanding his dream across the river. The paper was still ignoring the crisis in the community’s backyard in favor of trumpeting their leader’s momentous plans. WORKERS BUSY IN LEVITTOWN, N.J. read the headline, and the story, once again, spun Levitt’s press releases into fairy-tale prose. The first Levittown had sprung from potato fields; the second, broccoli; and now this one, like some Jack-and-the-Beanstalk fantasy, would come from corn. “Across the Delaware on New Jersey’s sandy soil,” the article read, “the third planned miracle of Levitt and Sons is starting to burst forth from a Burlington County corn field.”

  Despite the racial tensions in Levittown, Pennsylvania, nothing could distract Bill Levitt from his own grand sense of his miraculous adventure—just like the fantastic tales of Captain Kidd that his father, Abe, had told him so long ago. Though still married to
his wife, Rhoda, Bill Levitt continued to carry on his affair with his secretary Alice in the secret castle just a mile from Deepgreen Lane. His next empire in New Jersey would be his greatest yet, he promised.

  Bill had plenty to prove. Since his brother had left the company, Alfred had been making a name for himself with his new projects in Long Island. Alfred, along with the help of his son Jon, was building an innovative “apartment colony” on the waterfront of Queens called Levitt House. The identical thirty-two eight-story-high buildings had his trademark blend of uniformity with openness and simple innovation. Each apartment had twenty feet of glass walls, and the exteriors were painted in whimsical shades of yellow and blue and brown. The kitchens were separated from the living rooms by a food bar and sliding wall. The New York Times praised Levitt House as having “some of the freshest ideas in design and construction.”

  With Alfred out of the picture, Bill could focus on making his New Jersey project any way he pleased. Still stung by attacks on his ticky-tacky towns by critics such as Lewis Mumford, he vowed to put the skeptics in their place. In Pennsylvania, he had been entangled in local politics because the community was built across four townships, but in Jersey, he worked within one township, Willingboro, which gave him freer rein.

  With the four-thousand-acre Levittown, New Jersey, he would break away from any of Alfred’s conventions. “Known for his low opinion of the city planning profession, however, and lacking Alfred’s interest in its concepts and schemes, he had no intention of building the community to please the planners,” wrote sociologist Herbert Gans. “. . . Unlike his father, he had no desire to involve the firm in the life of the community or to uplift the cultural level and civic performance of the residents. He wanted only to build what he deemed to be a better Levittown, what he often called ‘a showplace.’ ”