Fifties (22 page)

By 1946, when he began to devote his time to building a high-compression engine, he had been retired from the company for three years, but he still pursued his longtime goal. The combination of a higher-compression engine and a higher-octane gas, he was convinced, would permit a far more powerful engine. The vapor of the gas could be more tightly confined in the cylinders before exploding, thus driving back the pistons with increased force. For years Kettering had been pushing the oil companies to develop a higher-octane gas, but they had been notably unresponsive. Their complacency irritated him greatly: “When Mother Nature formed petroleum in the earth she did not have the automobile in mind any more than the hog intended his bristles for toothbrushes, and it is foolish to expect the best molecules in gasoline to be found in crude oil,” he said. Kettering came up with a high-octane gas himself, and in 1947, at the age of seventy-one, he presented a technical paper to his colleagues on his work: a new V-8 engine and a new high-compression ratio from higher-octane gas. The new engine was installed for the first time on the ’49 Cadillac. Greater efficiency might have been what Kettering sought, but his colleagues at GM saw only bigger, more powerful cars bearing more and heavier accessories. The way was cleared for power steering, power brakes, and air-conditioning.

All this signaled the changing of the company culture during the fifties. Charlie Wilson, who had come up from engineering, left to serve in government. His successor, Harlow Curtice, was a salesman, who believed passionately in bigger and gaudier cars and who had led the fight against the Cadet. Curtice had grown up in Petrieville, a small town in Michigan, and had gone to a nearby business school, called the Ferris Institute. Founded by Woodbridge Ferris, a United
States senator, the school emphasized hard work: The young men practiced their arithmetic outdoors at six o’clock in the morning by shouting their answers to math questions, with no paper or blackboard to help them. After graduation, Curtice took a job as a bookkeeper at the AC Spark Plug company, a partly owned subsidiary of General Motors. He rose to controller and eventually to president of AC, thereby earning his big chance: the presidency of Buick. Buick, of all the GM divisions, was the most troubled at the time; it had slipped to fewer than 45,000 cars a year after a high of 245,000. Here was the perfect place for an ambitious young man. Curtice was good with figures, but unlike many of the men who came after him, he also loved cars. In the words of his close friend and fellow GM executive Tony De Lorenzo, “he could see beyond the figures—he knew that they were not just dead little numbers on a piece of paper, but he understood what they meant in terms of trends and taste.”

When Curtice had taken over at Buick, in 1933, the first call he made was to Harley Earl. “Harley, what do you drive yourself?” he had asked. “A Cadillac,” Earl answered. “I’d like you to design a Buick for me that you’d like to drive,” Curtice said, setting the tone for a new sexier Buick division. He turned Buick around quickly, and he did it in bad times. He was a devotee of the Sloan/Earl philosophy and he believed in styling as the manifestation of status. Earl was impressed with him. More than any of the other division heads, he liked to say, Curtice was always in the design room, trying to get a sense of which way the stylists were going. By quadrupling Buick’s sales, to 200,000 a year, Curtice became the rising star at the company. When Wilson left for Washington in January 1953, it was Curtice’s company.

Eisenhower’s was the first Republican administration in twenty years, and it promised greater tolerance of big business. For years the biggest limitation at GM in terms of market share had been self-imposed, for fear that if its market share ever went above 50 percent, the Justice Department’s antitrust people would come in and break up the company. Now all such restraints were off. Curtice did not believe in such gentlemanly restraint. If the feds wanted to stop GM, it would have to come and get him: “You never stand still in this business. You either go up or down.” he said. He intended to dominate GM so completely that John DeLorean noted some twenty years later with a measure of nostalgia, the last person really to run GM was Harlow Curtice. In 1953, when GM had 45 percent of the market, Curtice announced he wanted 48 percent for 1954. By 1956 it was 51 percent and even that was not enough. As Robert Sheehan
noted in an article about Curtice in
Fortune
in 1956, the joke around the company went: “You know what the boss says—it means that we’re losing almost five out of every ten deals.” “Fifty percent, hell,” Curtice himself told Semon (Bunkie) Knudsen, the son of the man who had turned Chevrolet around for Sloan and was himself tapped to head Pontiac. “I want
seventy-five percent
of the market.”

NINE

T
HE SURGING SIZE AND
increased emphasis on style and luxury in American cars were just one sign of the new abundance of the era. After World War Two most Americans had a vision of a better life just ahead. At the core of it was owning one’s own house—and as Henry Ford’s invention and a rapidly improving network of roads and highways opened up the vast spaces of farmland surrounding American cities, the vision started to become a reality: Suburbia. Indeed, people knew even what they wanted to pay for their first house: $5,000, which was then roughly equal to an average family’s wages for two years. Right after the war, auto workers made about $60 a week, or $3,000 a year, while workers in other parts of the manufacturing sector made about $2,400. If a new car was a critical status symbol, a house was something else. More often than not, the people who intended to own one had, in the
past, rented apartments, which symbolized not merely a lack of space but also a lack of independence and security. Owning a house came to be the embodiment of the new American dream. As promised by endless Hollywood films, it represented fulfillment,
contentment:
confident dads, perky moms, and glowing children, attending good schools and, later, college. A house brought the American family
together
(at precisely the moment, of course, when cars and television began pulling it apart). If the first great business figure of the American Century was Henry Ford, the second, arguably, was William J. Levitt.

It was Bill Levitt who first brought Ford’s techniques of mass production to housing, up to then the most neglected of American industries. Until he arrived on the scene, builders were small-time operators, employing multiple subcontractors (“graduate carpenters and bricklayers,” Levitt called them). The typical prewar builder put up fewer than five houses a year (few put up more than two a year since the Depression). Levitt revolutionized the process of home building with remarkable planning and brilliant control procedures. These techniques made it possible to provide inexpensive, attractive single-unit housing for ordinary citizens, people who had never thought of themselves as middle-class before. As much as anyone, William Levitt made the American dream possible. As Paul Goldberger of
The New York Times
noted years later, “Levittown houses were social creations more than architectural ones—they turned the single detached single-family house from a distant dream to a real possibility for thousands of middle-class American families.” It was, Levitt liked to boast, capitalism in the most personal sense. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do,” he once said.

It was the war that taught Levitt the promise of the future and how to reach for it. In 1941 he and his brother, Alfred, won a government contract to build 2,350 war workers’ homes in Norfolk, Virginia. At first it was a disaster; everything went wrong. Saddled with union workers who, in their view, asked for too much and produced too little, they were unable to make a profit or meet a tight schedule. The Levitts and their managers knew they had to change the essential philosophy of home building in order to meet their deadlines. They analyzed the construction process and broke it down into basic components. There were, they figured out, twenty-seven separate steps, so they would train twenty-seven separate teams—each team would specialize in one step. This solution enabled them not only to find a way around the acute shortage of skilled carpenters—for
it demanded less talented workers—but also to speed up the entire process. They also figured out that the traditional method of paying workers hourly wages and overtime was not a good way to maximize production. They carefully studied each job, how to do it well, and how much time it took. Then they figured base salaries according to average schedules and paid extra to those exceeding the norms—in effect, they were paying for piecework at a high level. This made it possible for the worker to augment his base salary by accomplishing more—instead of merely working longer. As the war ground on, the Levitt team became increasingly expert in mass building.

Eventually, Bill Levitt was transferred to serve with the Seabees in the Pacific, where he was commissioned to build instant airfields for the Navy. Unburdened by union restrictions and the constraints of conventional building limitations, and operating under terrible deadlines—for lives were in the balance if the airfields were not completed—Levitt took on tasks that no one thought could be done and pulled them off. At night, Levitt sat around with other young men in the Seabees, all of whom had backgrounds in building and contracting, and they would brainstorm about their work—what they were doing that day, how to do it faster, and also what they would do after the war. The Navy, Bill Levitt said years later, provided him with a magnificent laboratory in which to experiment with low-cost mass housing and analyze it with his peers—a chance he might never have had in civilian life.

As for the future, Bill Levitt had no doubts: It consisted of men like himself building mass housing for the families of young veterans, who were going to return overnight to civilian life. “Just beg, borrow, or steal the money and then build and build,” he kept saying to his friends, about a dozen of whom followed him into his company. When some talked about the risks involved, he would tell them to examine their own desires and needs. What did they want? A car, and then what else? A house, of course. What were their friends all telling them about their own postwar plans? That the first thing they were going to do was get married or, if they were already married, have kids: Most were going to have to live with their parents for a few years because none of them had their own place in which to live.

Even before the war, Bill Levitt had taken out an option on a thousand acres of farmland near Hempstead, Long Island. It was relatively inexpensive, a steal, he thought, and while he was over in the Pacific, he urged his brother, Alfred, to keep up the option. Alfred Levitt, an architect, was the more artistic member of the family. He seemed not to understand his brother’s grand design for
the postwar years: Alfred looked at the Hempstead land and saw a lot of potato farms being cleared for a few houses; Bill Levitt looked at it and saw a gargantuan, virtually self-contained suburban community.

No industry had suffered more than housing during the Depression and World War Two; housing starts fell from 1 million a year to fewer than 100,000. But during the same period the marriage rate and, not surprisingly, the birthrate increased sharply, the latter reaching 22 per 1,000 in 1943—the highest it had been in two decades. As everyone returned from the war, the housing situation was not merely tight—it was a crisis. Some 50,000 people were reportedly living in Army Quonset huts. In Chicago it was so bad that 250 used trolley cars were sold for use as homes. Estimates placed the number of new houses needed immediately at over 5 million. A federal housing bill was rushed through that contained very little in the way of controls, and a great deal in the way of federal insurance to protect builders by means of federal mortgage guarantees. “The real estate boys read the bill, looked at one another in happy amazement, and the dry rasping noise they made rubbing their hands together could have been heard as far as Tawi Tawi,” a writer named John Keats noted of the moment. The stored-up energy of two decades was unleashed. In 1944 there had been only 114,000 new single houses started; by 1946 that figure had jumped to 937,000: to 1,118,000 in 1948; and 1.7 million in 1950.

Bill Levitt was sure that he was riding the wave of the future. “We believe that the market for custom housing, like that for custom tailoring, no longer exists. People who want to buy that kind of thing will always be able to get it, but the real market is for the ordinary, mass-produced suit of clothes. And you can’t build thirty thousand-dollar houses by the six thousands,” he said even as he started his first development. In 1946 the Levitts pushed ahead with Bill Levitt’s dream of creating his own community in Hempstead, by adding more and more acreage to what they already owned. There, some twenty miles from Manhattan, they set out to create the largest housing project in American history. At first it was called Island Trees, but inevitably the name Levittown stuck. (“Well,” he said years later, talking about the change in name, “the original name was something of an embarrassment. After all, here was this great new place called Island Trees, a very fancy name, and it was flat as could be as far as the eye could see, with only these two scrawny trees in the front to give it the name ...”)

Levittown was an astonishing success from the very beginning.
The first Levitt house could not have been simpler. It had four and a half rooms and was designed with a young family in mind. The lots were 60 by 100 feet, and Bill Levitt was proud of the fact that the house took up only 12 percent of the lot. The living room was 12 by 16 feet. There were two bedrooms and one bathroom. A family could expand the house by converting the attic or adding on to the outside. The house was soon redesigned with the kitchen in the back so that the mothers could watch their children in the yard. In his book
Crabgrass Frontier,
Kenneth Jackson noted that in their simplicity, durability, and value, the early Levitt houses were not unlike the Model T. The basic Levitt Cape Cod sold for $7,990; later, an expanded ranch-style house sold for $9,500. In the beginning the Levitts threw in a free television set and a Bendix washing machine as incentives. At first only veterans were invited to buy. A small showcase home was erected on a plot near New York City for easy inspection: “This is Levittown!” went the ad in
The New York Times.
“All yours for $58. You’re a lucky fellow, Mr. Veteran. Uncle Sam and the world’s largest builder have made it possible for you to live in a charming house in a delightful community without having to pay for them with your eye teeth ...” The ad ran on a Monday. On Tuesday, Bill Levitt went out to check the model home. There was a line of some thirty people. “What are you doing here?” he asked one of the men in line. “I’m out here to look at one of these Levitt houses and buy one,” the man answered. “But they’re not available until next Monday,” Levitt protested. “Doesn’t matter,” the young man said. Bill Levitt was shaken. It was one thing, he realized, to sit around on a small Pacific island in 1944 and brainstorm about the need for postwar housing; it was another to run smack into the full fury of it. The line grew day by day, and the ex-GIs themselves figured out how to police it, creating a system to let people take a break and eat without losing their place in line. Indeed, a kind of community began to form among those in line. These people, after all, were going to be each other’s neighbors. After the office opened in March 1949, 1,400 contracts were drawn on a single day.