The postwar surge in demand ushered in a new consumer-oriented society that to some Americans represented the fulfillment of the American dream and to others the creation of an unthinking, materialistic culture. Builders such as Levitt and Sons adapted mass-production techniques developed during the war to provide housing for war workers, to mass-produce suburban homes, and even to create entire new communities such as Levittown, New York. Aided by advances from the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, the Levitts offered attractive terms to returning servicemen and other buyers.
Balladeer Malvina Reynolds expressed the feelings of many critics of the new “tract” housing in a popular folksong:
Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same. (1983, 378-380)
Defenders of the new construction techniques argued that by achieving the economies of long production runs, builders were able to lower the unit cost of housing and permit people to buy homes who otherwise could not afford them. No one, however, was able to put that into an enduring folksong. These years witnessed the beginning of the “baby boom” as birthrates surged in the late 1940s and 1950s. The image of a baby boom following shortly after the reuniting of soldiers with their loved ones is romantic and undoubtedly valid in many individual cases, but the baby boom was a much broader
Phenomenon that continued into and peaked in the late 1950s. In fact, this unusual deviation from the long-term trend toward smaller families (Haines 1994) may be due to the development of a range of labor-saving devices for the home that lowered the costs of having children (Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke 2005).
The war, in short, ushered in a period in which millions of Americans could take part for the first time in a middle-class lifestyle. Government programs for veterans such as the GI Bill helped, but the key factor was the thing that did not happen—a return to the depressed economic conditions of the 1930s.
World History
