December 3, 2025 • 64 mins
What happens when the machinery of war is turned loose on the home front? In this episode of Built to Divide, host Dimitrius Lynch traces how the end of World War II, the GI Bill, and federal housing policy combined to build the largest middle-class expansion in U.S. history—while quietly deepening racial and economic division.
Beginning with the surrender in Tokyo Bay and the massive demobilization of Operation Magic Carpet, Lynch follows millions of returning veterans back to a country racing to answer a simple question: Where will they all live? The answer reshaped the nation. FHA and VA loans, the rise of Fannie Mae, and the secondary mortgage market drove homeownership from 43% to nearly 62% by 1960, cementing the single-family house as the centerpiece of the American Dream.
But this “great reset” came with a price. Lynch unpacks how zoning laws, redlining, racial covenants, and underwriting standards drew hard lines around who could belong in postwar suburbia. He contrasts the inclusive vision of Case Study Houses and Eichler Homes with the mass-produced segregation of Levittown, where black families were explicitly barred and violence met the first to cross the color line.
From John Dean’s warning about homeownership “booby traps” to the weaponization of media by business elites like Henry Regnery, this episode reveals how corporate interests used patriotism, racial fear, and Cold War anxiety to roll back New Deal gains and reframe government as the enemy. Along the way, Lynch explores how Fannie Mae’s privatization, the birth of American Express credit cards, and the cultural glorification of the nuclear family turned housing into a speculative asset, a consumption engine, and a source of isolation.
We end in Roseto, Pennsylvania, where a community’s disappearing social bonds literally changed its heart attack rates—proof that how we house ourselves shapes how we live, connect, and survive.
If you want to understand how postwar housing policy, suburbanization, zoning, media, and finance fused into a system that still determines who gets stability and who gets left behind, this episode shows how the board was reset—and who it was reset for.
Episode Extras - Photos, videos, sources and links to additional content found during research.
Episode Credits:
Production in collaboration with Gābl Media
Written & Executive Produced by Dimitrius Lynch
Audio Engineering and Sound Design by Jeff Alvarez
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Six years and one day after Germany invaded Poland, the world's second great war finallycame to an end.
On September 2nd, 1945, under a hazy Tokyo Bay sky, Japan's surrender was signed aboardthe battleship USS Missouri.
(00:27):
Cameras clicked, generals saluted, and across continents, millions of families, mothers,wives, children wept in relief.
The war had swallowed nearly everything.
By the time the ink dried on that surrender document,
between 60 and 80 million people were dead, roughly 3 % of the world's population.
(00:51):
Entire cities lay in ashes, Dresden, Warsaw, Tokyo, 6 million Jewish people murdered inthe Holocaust.
Villages erased, nations starved.
It was as if humanity had stared into the mirror and seen its own capacity for destructionand barely looked away in time.
(01:12):
Just seven weeks earlier, the United States had crossed a threshold no one had imaginedpossible.
On July 16th, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, the sky itself caught fire.
atomic test.
Three weeks later, President Harry Truman, new to the presidency after FranklinRoosevelt's death that spring, authorized its use.
(01:41):
On August 6th, the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Super Fortress bomber, dropped an atomic bombknown as Little Boy over Hiroshima.
80,000 people killed in an instant.
Tens of thousands more would die in the following weeks.
Three days later, Nagasaki.
(02:03):
Another city, another flash, another 40,000 lives gone.
The message was clear.
Humanity now held the power to unmake itself.
When World War II began, the United States was far from ready for global war.
Its army enlisted fewer than 200,000, smaller than Portugal's.
(02:25):
Isolationism ran deep, and the Great Depression had left the nation weary of foreignentanglements.
Dear Mr.
President, my name is Olf Olsen, from 4408 44th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
(02:45):
My opinion of the present conditions relative to this war is that the low-paid wage earneris uh not getting the break that
that he should be entitled to considering the fact that the cost of living has been goingup.
(03:08):
The only ones who have been benefiting by it are those in the middle class and upperclasses who have been getting increases in wages to adjust the higher cost of living.
(03:28):
It seems that nothing has been done for the people who are in the lower brackets.
who have a very difficult time to make a living for themselves and their families.
But the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed that overnight.
Dear Mr.
President, my name is Mrs.
M.R.
Schuller.
(03:48):
My reactions to the war are those of the average wife and mother.
For my husband is a defense worker in Newfoundland and my only son
an engineer employed at the University of Minnesota, is of draft age.
Of course, I have read of Pearl Harbor, the magnificent resistance at Manila andSingapore, and so forth, and yet it has all seemed more like a dream than something real.
(04:19):
Yesterday, however, I was shocked into the realization of what it all means by the news ofthe death of John Martin.
the son of a very dear friend of mine.
I believe, like most mothers and wives, in peace.
In fact, I believe in it so much that I believe in fighting for it.
(04:42):
I have never been in favor of starting a fight, but I do believe in finishing it.
uh
Within months, factories were running day and night.
The nation became the arsenal of democracy, building planes, ships, tanks, and the largestmilitary force in its history.
(05:06):
By 1945, 16 million Americans had served, but nearly half of them were still stationedoverseas when the war came to an end.
And now the question was, how do you bring 8 million men home?
The answer was Operation Magic Carpet, one of the largest logistical efforts in humanhistory.
(05:28):
Over 300 cargo ships were converted into troop carriers.
Day and night, they crossed the oceans ferrying men back from the front lines.
The ships came in droves from the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, docking atports in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and New Orleans.
(05:49):
Within 14 months, the torrent of deployment that had taken nearly four years to sendabroad was reversed.
They came home to parades, banners, and tiers, and a nation that had changed beneath theirfeet.
Factories that once made weapons were shifting to consumer goods.
Soldiers dreamed of college, family, and stability.
(06:12):
But with millions returning all at once, the country faced an entirely new crisis.
Where would they all live?
America's next great battle wouldn't be fought overseas.
It would be fought on its own soil, in blueprints, zoning maps, and suburban tracks, asthe nation set out to build not just homes, but a new version of the American dream.
(06:37):
I'm Demetrius Lynch, and this is Built to Divide.
We had to build houses for people to live in.
We had to a water system and a sewer system.
We had to set up a police department, put in roads, direct streetlights so that peoplecould feel secure.
I'll do what I can to help to get them out legally and peacefully.
(07:00):
And as far as accepting them socially, if that's what you mean, I could never do that.
Thanks for coming back.
In our last episode, we discussed the turmoil that brought forth foundational institutionsand events that transformed the U.S., particularly the establishment of the Federal
(07:23):
Reserve and the Gilded Age that led up to the Great Depression.
We also touched on the New Deal, the birth of the Federal Housing Authority, and thecreation of Fannie Mae.
If you haven't listened to that episode,
I encourage you to go back and listen to all the episodes of this series in order.
Today we trace the fallout from the Gilded Age, Great Depression, and World War II, wherethe U.S.
(07:47):
leveraged wartime production into remaking American society and delivering domesticstability, GI Bill benefits, FHA VA loans, and a secondary mortgage market powered by
Fannie Mae, which drove homeownership
from 43 % to nearly 62 % by 1960.
(08:08):
We stepped through the culture that sold the dream, the West Coast case study houses, andthe assembly line suburbia of Levittown.
But we also exposed the price.
Zoning, underwriting, and developer practices that drew bright lines around who couldbelong, turning stability for many into exclusion for others.
(08:31):
And we'll get into all of that after this break.
Episode 3 The Great Reset In 1904, a little-known inventor and writer named ElizabethMaggie decided to challenge the rules of the American game.
(08:58):
She believed the greatest danger to democracy wasn't foreign invasion or moral decay, itwas inequality.
Watching industrial monopolies swell under men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt,
Maggie saw how power consolidated not just money, but control over life itself.
(09:18):
So she did something radical for her time.
She turned that system into a literal game.
She called it the Landlord's Game.
Its purpose wasn't entertainment, it was education.
Maggie wanted players to feel the squeeze of rent, the thrill of profit, and the despairof collapse.
(09:38):
As she wrote in 1903,
The Landlord's Game is a practical demonstration of the present system, of land grabbing,with all its usual outcomes and consequences.
It might well have been called the Game of Life, as it contains all the elements ofsuccess and failure in the real world.
(10:02):
In other words, a simulation of capitalism's winners and losers.
That game would ultimately become Monopoly.
And if you've ever played, you've already played her warning.
The rules are simple.
Accumulate property, charge rent, bankrupt your opponents, and win by eliminating everyoneelse.
(10:22):
The game ends when one person owns everything.
Or when someone flips the board in frustration.
In October, 1929 for the United States, the game ended and it was time to reset the board.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office on March 4th, 1933, the country was broken.
(10:45):
One in four Americans was unemployed.
Banks in nearly every state had failed or closed their doors.
Two million people wandered around the country without homes.
The Great Depression wasn't just an economic collapse.
It was a moral and structural reckoning.
Roosevelt, fifth cousin to Theodore Roosevelt, shared his cousin's zeal for reform, butinherited a crisis of unprecedented scale.
(11:13):
His first act as president was to call a bank holiday, closing the nation's financialarteries before they bled out entirely.
Within days, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, and within weeks, confidenceflickered back to life.
When the banks reopened, deposits flowed in, not out.
The first 100 days of Roosevelt's presidency set a legislative pace never seen before orsince.
(11:41):
What followed became known as the New Deal, a sprawling experiment in national recovery.
It put men to work in forests and fields through the Civilian Conservation Corps, rebuiltbridges and dams under the Public Works Administration.
and sent electricity across rural America with the Rural Electrification Administration.
(12:03):
The programs were partially possible after the marginal tax rate of high-income earnershad already reversed under President Hoover, jumping from 25 % in 1931 to 63 % that
following year.
Roosevelt also aimed to reform the economy through the National Industrial Recovery Act,or NIRA.
(12:26):
which in collaboration with industry leaders sought to end cutthroat business practicesand suspend antitrust laws in exchange for better wages for workers.
However, the Supreme Court ultimately declared the N.I.R.A.
unconstitutional in 1935.
Without the promise of higher wages to fund programs, the highest marginal tax continuedto rise, immediately going to 79 % in 1936.
(12:56):
and peaking at 94 % in 1944.
Roosevelt wasn't just stimulating the economy, he was redefining the relationship betweencitizen and state.
The government, once a distant referee, was becoming a participant, a builder, a lender,and a safety net.
(13:17):
But for all its ambition, the first New Deal was still largely about survival.
Relief, not reinvention.
By 1935, that wasn't enough.
Inequality remained entrenched, workers were restless, and industry still dictated therules of play.
So Roosevelt went further.
(13:38):
The second New Deal wasn't just economic policy, it was philosophical rebellion.
It asked the question no American administration had dared to ask before.
What if the pursuit of profit alone can't build a stable nation?
In this second wave, Roosevelt introduced the Social Security Act, anchoring the idea thata government could guarantee a measure of dignity in old age or hard times.
(14:07):
He signed the National Labor Relations Act, giving workers the right to organize andcollectively bargain, a direct challenge to the monopolists of industry.
The Works Progress Administration hired millions, not just to build roads and bridges,
but to paint murals, compose symphonies, and document the American experience itself.
(14:31):
Even art became infrastructure.
These weren't just programs.
They were principles carved into policy.
Roosevelt's vision turned the economy from a game of individual winners into a sharedproject.
Imperfect, controversial, but undeniably collective.
(14:51):
Not everyone agreed.
The same business elite who once backed coups abroad now whispered of plots at home, likethe plan known as the business plot.
This scheme was a political conspiracy to overthrow President Roosevelt's administrationin 1933.
A bond salesman for a Wall Street banking firm and a leader of a U.S.
(15:12):
veterans organization aimed to recruit and install decorated Major General of the U.S.
Marine Corps, Smedley Butler,
as a fascist dictator.
I appeared before the Congressional Committee, the highest representation of the Americanpeople under subpoena, to tell what I knew of activities, which I believe might lead to an
(15:34):
attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship.
The plan, as outlined to me, was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff, oras a club at least, to intimidate the government and break down our democratic
institutions.
The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000men, which would be able to take over the functions of government.
(15:57):
I talked with an investigator for this committee, who came to me with a subpoena onSunday, November 18th.
He told me they had on Earth evidence linking my name with several such veteranorganizations.
As it then seemed to me to be getting serious, I felt it was my duty.
to tell all I knew of such activities to this committee.
(16:19):
My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institution.
I want to retain the right to vote, I have the right to speak freely, and the right towrite.
If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe.
No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech, and press.
(16:39):
While historians have questioned the imminent threat of a coup,
Most agree that the scheme was contemplated and discussed.
At the very least, it conveyed the business elite's ire for what Roosevelt was doing.
Critics accused Roosevelt of socialism.
The American Liberty League, funded by corporate titans and conservative Democrats,painted him as a traitor to his class.
(17:04):
And in a sense, he was.
The second New Deal rebalanced power, not just between rich and poor,
but between the private market and public responsibility.
For a fleeting moment, the pendulum swung towards the people.
Workers organized, wages rose, unions gained strength.
(17:25):
The federal government became a moral actor, not just a fiscal one, but the temporarilytamed forces were already gathering strength again, preparing to rewrite the rules once
more.
Sociologists
John Dean would later warn in 1945, the problem of home ownership will someday be facedsquarely by the United States.
(17:49):
When that time comes, America will look back on our own time as an era in which societyencouraged its families to stride ahead through a field deliberately sown with booby
traps.
He was right.
The New Deal had restructured the board
but the pieces still belonged to the same players who lay in wait.
(18:11):
The machinery of war had become the machinery of finance.
Credit, debt, and home ownership would soon fuse into a new national myth, stabilitythrough property.
The GI Bill, officially the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, became the cornerstoneof that vision.
(18:31):
It offered veterans education, unemployment support, and most importantly,
federally guaranteed home loans.
Together with the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, and the Veterans Administrationloan programs, it made long-term, low-interest mortgages possible for millions of
returning soldiers.
(18:53):
Before the war, buying a home meant putting down half its value and paying it off within adecade, a tall task for most Americans.
Now,
A veteran could buy a home with almost nothing down and stretch payments over 30 years.
It wasn't just generosity.
It was policy by design, a way to channel industry power into consumer demand,construction jobs, and civic stability.
(19:21):
But that transformation needed financial muscle.
In 1938, before the war, Congress had created the Federal National Mortgage Association.
or Fannie Mae, to buy mortgages from lenders and free up their capital for more loans.
In essence, Fannie Mae turned home debt into a renewable resource, buying, bundling, andreselling mortgages to keep credit flowing.
(19:49):
After the war, as VA and FHA loans surged, the model scaled nationwide.
By 1948, Fannie Mae was investing in VA loans directly.
creating a secondary mortgage market that would eventually define American finance.
Combined with tax incentives like the mortgage interest deduction, which allows homeownersto reduce their taxable income, these programs rewired the economy around homeownership.
(20:21):
Between 1940 and 1960, Americans had access and a manageable pathway to homeownership andownership rates soared from
43 % to nearly 62%.
The fastest and largest expansion in modern history.
With continued messaging around home ownership and an easier on-ramp, owning a home wasboth a financial advantage and a declaration of identity.
(20:50):
Proof of good citizenship, stability, and belonging.
Politics wrapped it all in purpose.
In the Cold War era,
were tensions between the Soviet Union, who promoted communism, and the US, who championedcapitalism, the nuclear family became propaganda.
Our prosperity versus their poverty.
(21:13):
Imagery in the US linked communism to misery.
Pursuit of the American dream was a path to happiness.
Homes were transformed into consumption engines.
Each room was a stage set for buying.
The kitchen wanted the latest mixer.
the nursery needed safer plastics, the den demanded a television and matching furniture.
(21:35):
Subdivisions multiplied the effect.
Rows of nearly identical houses meant your neighbor's upgrade instantly made yours feelbehind.
Credit followed the script.
Department store charge plates, installment plans, and federally backed mortgages stitchedretail desire to monthly payments.
(21:56):
Home wasn't just shelter.
It was a bundle of purchases and proof you belonged.
Media, retailers, and developers weren't just selling homes.
They sold the American dream.
The perfect lawn on TV, the good schools euphemism in classifieds, detergent spotsequating whiteness with virtue, every sitcom ending each episode with a spotless living
(22:21):
room, and the housewife in print ads smiling through the latest appliance.
Proof.
that the system worked, so long as you fit the picture.
Domestic containment casts order as virtue.
Dad at work, mom at home, kids in tow.
While federal mortgage policy, local real estate practices, and zoning steered who couldbuy where, the message was simple and relentless.
(22:48):
Happiness resided in a single-family home in a homogenous neighborhood, managed by acheerful homemaker, paid for,
by a steady male breadwinner.
More ominously, some entertainment and advertisements made light of domestic violence, awink to an implied hierarchy.
(23:09):
Drugs like amphetamines and tranquilizers were promoted and prescribed to women to manage,quote, anxiety and depression, which were marketed as mother's little helpers.
Beneath the gloss and flicker of the screen, dissonance grew.
Women who'd been Rosie the Riveter were told to grin gracefully and find fulfillment infloor wax.
(23:33):
While many continued to find work, the share of women in the workforce droppedapproximately 5 % from 1945 to 1950.
Many at home felt what Betty Friedan referred to in her book, The Feminine Mystique, asthe quote, problem that has no name.
A widespread unhappiness experienced by many housewives in the 1950s and 60s.
(23:58):
The 1950s had locked in a powerful equation.
Citizenship as consumption, virtue as domestic order, and home ownership as the ticket toboth.
Sears, Roebuck and Company had pioneered the trend decades earlier with its modern homescatalogs.
Entire houses sold by mail.
(24:21):
promising comfort, beauty, and ownership as a sign of success.
By the 1940s and 50s, that message was everywhere.
Life, better homes and gardens, and newspaper spreads turned housing into aspiration.
Bright kitchens, happy children, white fences framing prosperity.
While mail order homes from Sears offered Americans a do-it-yourself version of stability,
(24:46):
they were experimenting with a very different vision of domestic life on the oppositecoast.
Earlier, as the country braced for a massive housing boom, Arts and Architecture magazineannounced in its January 1945 issue, one of the most radical design experiments in US
history, the Case Study House Program.
(25:08):
The idea was deceptively simple and quietly revolutionary.
Under editor John Intenza, the magazine would commission the nation's leading architectsto design and build a new kind of American home.
Efficient, affordable, modern, and repeatable.
Each house would serve as a prototype, a case study, in how design and industry could cometogether to meet the post-war need for mass housing.
(25:37):
This wasn't about the mansions or monuments of the wealthy.
It was about proving that modernism, the sleek industrial language,
of floor-to-ceiling glass, open plans, steel frames, modular components, and lots ofnatural light could belong to and even be an improvement for ordinary families.
(25:57):
In the program's first issue, Intenza wrote,
For average prospective house owners, the choice between the hysterics who hope to solvehousing problems by magic alone and those who attempt to ride into the future piggyback on
the status quo, the situation is confusing and discouraging.
(26:18):
Therefore, it occurs to us that the only way in which any of us can find out anything willbe to pose specific problems in a specific programme on a put-up or shut-up basis.
We hope that a fairly good answer will be the result of our efforts.
The magazine itself acted as client, orchestrating a collaboration between architects,manufacturers, and material suppliers to imagine what home could look like in the Atomic
(26:49):
Age.
The first group of architects were mid-century modern giants, Richard Neutra, EeroSaarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Rafael Soriano, JR Davidson, and William Wurster among
them.
Together they envisioned homes that rejected nostalgia and embraced the optimism andanxiety of a new technological world.
(27:15):
Southern California became their laboratory.
mild weather, open land, and the emerging car culture offered the perfect testing groundfor a new domestic ideal.
Between 1945 and 1966, the program produced 36 designs, 25 of which were built
mostly in the hills and suburbs surrounding Los Angeles.
(27:38):
These homes weren't hidden in gated enclaves.
They were open to the public, often for weeks at a time, so Americans could walk throughand imagine their own futures inside walls of glass.
One of the most famous, the Eames House, Case Study House number eight, captured thespirit of experiment perfectly.
(27:59):
Industrial materials reimagined for warmth, play, and family life.
Its bright, primary-colored panels and modular structure reflected a belief that designcould make life not only more efficient, but more human.
The case study houses offered a glimpse of what America could have been open,experimental, egalitarian in spirit.
(28:22):
They suggested that beauty and affordability didn't have to be opposites, that progresscould serve people, not just profit.
However, the case study homes were not adopted in mass.
likely for a few reasons.
The modern style was very specific and may not have aligned with some preferences.
By the end of the 60s, modernism was waning in general, and the prevailing designvernacular of flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling glass, and indoor-outdoor features weren't
(28:53):
appropriate for other regions, limiting national adoption.
While this architectural optimism flourished in the pages of arts and architecture, themarket was moving elsewhere.
For every case study house visited by a few thousand design enthusiasts, a new developmentwould soon rise to house tens of thousands.
Not as experiments in living, but as products of a perfected system.
(29:27):
These are the 36 men who built this house.
Another 40 houses.
No one understood that system better than William Levitt.
Levitt, a New York born real estate developer and the president of Levitt & Sons waswidely regarded as the father of modern America's suburbia.
(29:49):
The son of a Brooklyn real estate attorney, Levitt dropped out of New York University tojoin his father's firm where he learned to blend business acumen with an instinct per
scale.
After serving as a Navy Lieutenant,
in the CBs during World War II, he returned home to confront a national housing shortagefor returning veterans.
(30:11):
His company took the lessons of wartime production, assembly lines, standard parts,efficient labor, and applied them to suburbia.
Levittown wasn't just a development, it was a movement.
Row after row of nearly identical traditional wood-framed homes built fast and cheap,offering returning veterans
(30:32):
something their parents never had, ownership.
We had to build houses for people who live in.
We had to a water system and a sewer system.
We had to set up a police department, put in roads, direct streetlights so that peoplecould feel secure.
Levitt's marketing promised that every home was both a sanctuary and a stepping stone, aninvestment that would grow in value year after year.
(30:57):
But this prosperity was built on a system of exclusion.
redlining, racial covenants, and neighborhood stability standards, tools we explored inthe last episode, sourced their power in the law itself.
At first, American cities were largely unregulated.
In the 19th century, land use was a matter of private choice, guided by custom more thangovernment.
(31:23):
But as cities industrialized, the push to separate homes from factories, the wholesomefrom the harmful,
gave rise to a new planning language, zoning.
The first comprehensive zoning code appeared in New York City in 1916, born out oflegitimate public health and safety concerns.
(31:45):
It divided land into districts for factories, commerce, and homes, setting height limitsand use restrictions.
The intent was protection of public health.
The result, however, was an instrument of exclusion.
Within a generation, cities across the country adopted similar systems.
(32:05):
Then came 1926.
In Village of Euclid versus Ambler Realty, the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld zoning as constitutional, ruling that a city could regulate land useto protect the character of its neighborhoods.
Justice George Sutherland, who made up part of the Four Horsemen, a group of conservativejustices,
(32:28):
that often voted to strike down New Deal legislation, wrote that apartment buildings, ifplaced among single-family homes, could become, parasites, feeding off the open spaces and
amenities of their surroundings.
That one word, parasite, carried enormous weight.
It cast density itself as a threat.
(32:51):
It made the detached single-family home not just a lifestyle choice, but a moral ideal.
and everything else as a danger to be repelled and contained.
By the mid 20th century, zoning had quietly become the new face of exclusion.
Instead of overt racial covenants, which courts struck down after Shelley v.
(33:12):
Kramer in 1948, municipalities began using land use laws to achieve the same endsindirectly.
Minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, and bans on multifamily housing all work together
to keep certain people and certain incomes out.
So for developers like William Levitt in the idyllic 1950s, he wasn't just selling homes,he was selling an entire social order.
(33:40):
His first Levitt town built on Long Island in 1947 offered affordable homes to returningveterans, complete with washing machines, television hookups, and manicured lawns.
The price, they were priced around
$8,000, the equivalent of roughly $100,000 today.
(34:00):
Yeah, imagine buying a home for $100,000 today.
These homes were accessible to a very specific profile of working class families thatLevitt himself made explicit.
When pressed about why black families were barred from buying homes in his developments,he said, quote, we can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem.
(34:24):
but we cannot combine the two." End quote.
In contrast, Eichler and Sons, founded by real estate developer Joseph Eichler, sold homesin their developments to Asian Americans in 1949 and African Americans in 1954.
Eichler's salespeople were advised to sell without discrimination.
(34:49):
Eichler believed firmly in this principle.
He offered to buy back homes from white homeowners that took issue.
He said he would not employ anyone who opposed non-discriminatory policies.
and he even resigned from the National Association of Home Builders in 1958 when theorganization refused to support a non-discrimination policy.
(35:11):
Ned Eichler explained his father's position on the issues of profit and progress.
I think that builders cannot evade the fact that what they're doing is going to have animpact on the whole.
Community, even on the nation, for a long time and they cannot simply say, well, I'm justa businessman.
I'm here to make a buck.
(35:32):
Eichler and Sons were much smaller in scale compared to Leavitt and Sons, who became atranscendent symbol of suburban expansion.
Leavitt's perspective was the norm and a chilling, honest summary of mid-century housingpolicy and the industry's logic.
Integration, they claimed, would disrupt property values and threaten neighborhoodstability.
(35:55):
And since the FHA's underwriting standards and most local banks agreed,
Exclusion wasn't just tolerated, it was incentivized.
Every family that moved into a Levittown home stepped into a carefully curated vision ofAmerica.
Identical homes, identical lots, identical lawns.
A mass-produced dream.
(36:17):
Children played in cul-de-sacs where everyone looked the same.
Schools and churches were nearby, but public transit and apartments were not.
Levitt's efficiency made him rich.
but his model made suburbia synonymous with separation, physical, social, and racial.
For a decade, Levittown had been sold as a triumph of the American dream, tree-linedstreets, tidy lawns, and the quiet hum of stability.
(36:45):
But in 1959, that illusion fractured.
That year, Bill and Daisy Myers, a young black couple, bought a home in Levittown,Pennsylvania.
They'd purchased not directly from Levitt & Sons, but from the Welschlers, a Jewish familythat was ready to move on.
It was a small legal loophole where William Levitt's contracts barred anyone not of theCaucasian race.
(37:09):
He couldn't stop individual homeowners from selling to whoever they chose.
Well, I first read a small article in the newspaper that the first colored family hadmoved into this community.
following that, why I began to hear on the radio and read in the newspaper that there wassome disturbance around this home that these people had bought.
(37:35):
What was your initial reaction?
I was terribly shocked to find that there were people in this community who would be soviolently opposed to it.
When word spread that a black family was moving in, the phone at the Welchler's house rangnon-stop.
(37:56):
One neighbor screamed obscenities on the phone.
The Meyers were within their rights, but rights in Levittown didn't guarantee welcome.
But there are others who are for the Myers?
(38:17):
Yes, I've read about them.
For what reason, do you think, do they support the Myers?
Frankly, I don't know what reasons they can have for it.
If there are homeowners in Levittown, I don't see what reasons they can have for it.
Do you think Myers will be able to live here comfortably?
(38:37):
Comfortably?
No.
What course of action are you going to follow?
I'll do what I can to help to get them out legally and peacefully.
And as far as accepting them socially, if that's what you mean, I could never do that.
By the time the Myers family arrived, the entire town was watching.
(39:04):
You're aware that a Negro family has moved into Levittown?
Yes.
I heard about it.
What was your reaction?
Dynamite.
Dynamite.
What have you done about it?
Well, I guess we just discussed it.
How do you feel about the Myers moving in?
(39:25):
I'm very definitely against it.
Before coming to Levittown, did you have any contact with Negroes?
Well, I came from a small town where we didn't have any colored people.
And at that time I had, well I had no feelings either way.
But while we were waiting for our house to be built, we lived in Trenton for nine months.
(39:47):
And well that was my first contact with them.
Both in work and going through colored sections to work.
And I was very happy I was moving into an all-white community.
Do you think other Negro families will come to Levittown?
Definitely.
What do you think will happen?
Well, just what's happening already.
(40:07):
I don't know.
It's a rumor I read in the paper where they have two colored school teachers now inLevittown.
So that's just a good example of what is going to happen.
Well, what's wrong with that?
I do not like...
I have two daughters and two sons.
And if there's too many colored people around here, I definitely will get out.
(40:28):
I'm not thinking my...
I don't want to associate with colored people.
Well, I'm very definitely against mixed marriages and that's eventually what it's going tocome to.
If children are raised together, they're not going to think of anything of marryingtogether.
Well, I just could not live beside them.
I don't feel that they should be oppressed.
(40:50):
But I moved here.
One of the main reasons was because it was a white community.
And that's the only place I intend to live.
If I have to leave Levittown, I will do so.
Do you think a Negro family moving here will affect the community as a whole?
Definitely.
In what way?
(41:11):
I think that all the property values will immediately go down if they are allowed to movein here in any number.
A white cross stood planted on the Myers front lawn.
Confederate flags fluttered from nearby porches.
In Pennsylvania, mind you, not the Deep South.
(41:33):
Crowds gathered cheering.
Cars flying Confederate flags would drive past, flaring songs like Dixie, the unofficialanthem of the Confederacy.
rocks shattered the Myers windows.
Threats of bombs and murder followed.
Even the police were attacked.
One officer was struck in the head, left bleeding out on the lawn of the family he'd cometo protect.
(41:59):
Levittown, a model of peace and order, had erupted overnight.
The whole thing centers around the word integration.
Well, as Mr.
Myers said, because his home has been anything but peaceful since he moved in.
He's got three children.
And uh evidently he feels that they will be accepted socially.
(42:24):
And uh I don't feel that they ever will be.
But the whole trouble with this integration business is
that in the end it probably will end up with mixing socially.
And you will have, well, I think their aim is mixed marriages and becoming equal with thewhites.
(42:46):
But the only way they're going to do that is by education and by bettering themselves, notby pushing in the way they have here.
Some residents were more open-minded, however limited.
(43:06):
I think so, I hope so.
think the majority of people here will grow accustomed to it and realize that they can begood neighbors, which I'm sure they are.
And I think the majority of people here are not the violent group that we have heard somuch about.
(43:30):
Do you think the Myers thing in Levittown will affect property values?
ah I don't think that the Myers have anything to do with the property decreasing orincreasing.
I think it's purely a white problem, not a Negro problem.
In what way?
I think it is the feeling of uh the majority group which will influence the property, notthe minority group.
(43:58):
In my business, whoever's got money and has good credit or wants to pay cash can buy acar.
It has no discrimination, color, religion, or any type of that sort.
Has the coming of the Myers affected your home life?
Personally, my home life, hasn't affected nothing whatsoever.
But, on the neighbors, they have a right.
Because the average white person living in Levitan has four and five children.
(44:22):
Well, let's put it this way.
If the Levitan has migrated in hordes of Negroes, which they have a right to come here,but if something happens that way,
Pretty soon, my neighbor will be having a Negro son-in-law or daughter-in-law.
How would that look?
Wasn't Myers within his rights as a citizen to move wherever he pleased?
Well, let's put it this way.
(44:44):
Mr.
Myers and all the Negroes have a right.
I'm no better than them.
They're as good as I am.
They can go anywhere they want.
I mean, they have God-given rights, and being a good American, they have the rights to thecivil rights.
They have the right to pursue their happiness.
But by the same token,
We have mixed communities and it's a proven fact that those mixed communities are over athird empty.
(45:06):
He could have stayed there.
He had a beautiful home there.
The only reason that Mr.
Myers came into Levittown is to show people they could get here.
It wasn't that he wanted to come to Levittown, but my personal opinion is this.
There is something bigger behind this.
Is that your personal opinion only or is it a fact?
No, I say it's a fact and I would tell anybody.
(45:27):
I mean, Barn nobody, I would tell them in a meeting, including the gentleman at the headof this committee for bringing Mr.
Myers, yeah, I'd tell him.
That was the logic of the system laid bare.
Stability and prosperity had been built on scarcity, on the belief that equality wouldcost you something.
(45:52):
Levittown families questioned the motives of the Myers, but it was clear, disinvestment inminority communities.
As we've discussed, the cornerstone of this system of prosperity came from the FederalHousing Authority.
At its heart, a deceptively technical tool
the neighborhood risk assessment, where wealthy white homogenous suburbs received thehighest ratings and with them the easiest access to credit.
(46:21):
The results rippled across the country.
From 1934 to 1962, less than 2 % of FHA loans went to black borrowers.
Entire cities were starved of investment.
As capital drained outward into white suburbs, urban neighborhoods
redlined and abandoned, spiraled into disrepair, prompting those that could afford it tolook for a better environment to raise their children.
(46:49):
Some economists later argued that the Federal Housing Administration's policies became aself-fulfilling prophecy.
By denying loans to quote, high-risk neighborhoods, most of them black or immigrantcommunities, the FHA ensured those areas would in fact decline.
Homes deteriorated because owners couldn't get credit to maintain them.
(47:12):
Businesses fled because financing vanished.
Poverty deepened and the data that resulted seemed to validate the maps that created theproblem in the first place.
And yet, even amid the barriers, black homeownership miraculously rose from about 23 % in1940 to nearly 38 % by 1960.
(47:38):
On paper, that looked like progress.
But numbers don't tell the full story.
The geography of opportunity was already fixed.
White families bought into appreciating suburbs backed by federally insured loans.
Black families were largely confined to undervalued neighborhoods where ownership waslittle protection against decay.
(48:02):
The system had created not only inequality, but a narrative to justify it.
It's easy to look back and see Levitt as a symptom, but he was complicit, an advocate anda benefactor of the system.
Levitt was building more than homes.
He was actively building physical boundaries, but simultaneously,
(48:23):
Others were reinforcing these boundaries in the hearts and minds of the public.
After the war, as labor grew stronger and civil rights gained traction, business interestsrecognized a threat.
They were losing influence as power shifted toward the people.
To counter it, corporate leaders found an effective tool in media.
Specifically, they would vigorously cultivate division through media channels.
(48:47):
The labor movement had long been the backbone of Roosevelt's New Deal coalition.
Unions had fought for wages, benefits, and political voice.
But as the economy surged and workers demanded more, a backlash brewed.
Big business joined with conservative politicians to weaken unions, and they needed astory the public could believe in.
(49:10):
One that reframed solidarity as subversion.
That story was fear.
Fear of socialism, of outsiders, of the other.
Domestically, it played out through racial sentiment.
Internationally, through isolationism.
This convergence began to take shape in 1953, when Henry Regnery, a conservative publisherand son of a wealthy businessman, gathered a small circle of other businessmen, media
(49:39):
figures, and political thinkers in New York City.
Regnery told them plainly, The side we represent controls most of the wealth in thiscountry.
The ideas we believe in are the ones most Americans instinctively believe in too.
But he feared that liberalism, the ideology of government intervention, labor rights, andsocial welfare, was capturing the cultural high ground.
(50:06):
The press, the universities, the foreign policy establishment.
He proposed something new.
A counterintelligence unit for ideas.
Media channels
with openly ideological communication in contrast to previous balanced policy focusedoutlets.
The men in that room already control platforms like Human Events, Regnery Publishing, theManion Forum, and the newly emerging National Review.
(50:36):
What they build from that meeting would become the blueprint for modern conservativemedia.
Regnery inherited his ideology from his father, William Henry Regnery.
a wealthy textile magnate who once supported Roosevelt before turning against the NewDeal.
William helped found the America First Committee in 1940, a powerful isolationist movementthat opposed US entry into World War II under the banner of patriotism.
(51:05):
Like the business plot, the AFC reflected concerns about political and economic changes inthe US.
The AFC's banner of patriotism
was complicated by its connection to fascism too.
Charles Lindenberg, the committee's most famous spokesman, infamously blamed, quote, theBritish, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration for dragging America toward war.
(51:31):
Later, over 20 sitting members of Congress that were connected to the group were found tohave colluded with Nazi agents spreading propaganda in the US.
This episode
culminating in the largest sedition trial in American history, revealed how easilyideology could blur into extremism when wrapped in the language of otherism.
(51:56):
Henry Regnery took a lesson from that.
Propaganda works when it feels like patriotism.
Using his family's fortune, he built a media ecosystem tailored to a specific audience,white, middle-class, business-minded Americans,
anxious about losing their place in a changing world.
(52:17):
In the 1950s, that demographic was primed to devour that narrative.
His network abandoned the pretense of neutrality.
News and opinion merged.
Outrage became strategy.
They didn't just report stories, they manufactured consensus.
They warned that liberal media was biased while creating a conservative mirror image
(52:41):
that blurred the line between information and identity.
Audiences who consumed it didn't just vote, they belonged.
From the beginnings of his father, the Regnerys built both the stepping stones forbusiness elites to return to dominance and the platform of support that would cheer them
on even at their own expense.
(53:06):
Meanwhile, in Washington, the business lobby's political allies moved to dismantle whatwas left of the New Deal order.
President Truman, facing post-war strikes and inflation, saw his popularity collapse asRepublicans and conservative Southern Democrats seized control of Congress.
They passed the Taft-Hartley Act, curbing union power over his veto.
(53:31):
Truman also attempted to expand civil rights with the Fair Deal.
which he communicated in an address before the NAACP.
Our immediate task is to remove the last remnants of the barriers which stand betweenmillions of our citizens and their birthright.
There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry or religion or raceor color.
(54:08):
We must not tolerate such limitations on the freedom of any of our people and on theirenjoyment of basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess.
Every man should have the right to a decent home, the right to an education, the right toadequate medical care, the right to a worthwhile job, the right to an equal share in
(54:42):
making the public decisions through the ballot, and the right to a fair trial in a faircourt.
The fair deal splintered his party.
Southern Democrats recoiled at the idea of integration, while business leaders saw federalactivism as socialism in disguise.
(55:07):
By the late 1950s, corporate inches began to finance media that weaponized patriotism,racial fear, and Cold War anxiety to erode public faith in government intervention.
Every call for equality could be cast as radical.
every strike as subversion, every civil rights demand as special treatment.
(55:28):
Through newspapers, radio, and television, Americans were increasingly conditioned to seegovernment not as a safeguard, but as a threat.
And as that narrative spread like a virus, policies that once built the middle class werereframed as dangerous experiments.
The purpose?
(55:49):
To preserve order, to protect wealth,
and to keep the board tilted towards those already winning the game.
In 1954, the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act quietly transformed therole of federal government in housing.
Fannie Mae, once a wholly public institution created to stabilize lending, became apublic-private hybrid.
(56:14):
Exempt from most taxes, but now operating partly with private capital.
It was a bureaucratic shift with seismic consequences.
Then in 1968, Fannie Mae completed its metamorphosis, reorganized into a for-profit,shareholder-owned company.
(56:35):
It was eventually listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a symbol of how deeply the ideaof home had merged with the logic of markets.
It still carried the federal halo, but now it spoke the language of Wall Street.
housing, a social good and basic need officially became a speculative asset.
(56:56):
The goal officially was efficiency to reduce direct government involvement in mortgagefinance.
But the deeper shift was cultural.
With credit now flowing through private hands, risk was no longer something to be managedcollectively.
It was something to be priced, packaged and sold.
During this transition,
(57:18):
another company was redefining what it meant to borrow.
On October 1st, 1958, American Express, once an express mail service out of Buffalo, NewYork, launched its first credit card.
Demand was so strong that hundreds of thousands of cards were issued within months of itsrelease.
(57:38):
Together, the privatization of housing finance and the rise of personal credit rewired theAmerican psyche.
The home was no longer just a place to live.
It was a lever, a symbol of independence and self-worth, and increasingly a platform forconsumption.
The formula was elegant and profitable.
(58:00):
Fannie Mae bought up mortgages, freeing lenders to make more.
Developers built homes to meet that credit supply, and homeowners, now flushed withconfidence and access to loans, filled those homes with the goods of modern life.
televisions, appliances, cars, furniture, the emblems of arrival.
(58:20):
The result was a cultural flywheel.
Credit-built homes, homes built identity, identity fueled consumption.
But the same system that built the suburban dream also dismantled something older, thefabric of interdependence.
As ownership became synonymous with success, multi-generational living declined sharply,ultimately reaching its lowest point in 1980 when only about 12 % of Americans lived with
(58:52):
extended family.
The ideal of the nuclear family, a couple, their children,
replaced the interwoven households that had once defined communities.
That shift may have offered privacy, but it came with isolation.
Researchers decades later found evidence of what we lost.
(59:13):
In Roseto, Pennsylvania, a small, close-knit Italian-American town, sociologists stumbledonto something extraordinary.
In the 1950s, a time when heart attacks were an epidemic across the United States,
Almost no one under 55 in Roseto died of heart disease.
There was no special diet, no remarkable genetics, no modern medicine.
(59:37):
In fact, residents smoked heavily and ate diets rich in fat.
What kept them healthy wasn't the food, it was each other.
Families lived together across generations.
Neighbors visited daily, shared meals, and looked after one another.
The social bonds were so strong,
that stress, the silent killer, simply didn't take root.
(01:00:01):
But as younger generations moved out into suburban life, those bonds thinned.
By the 1970s, Rosetto's heart attack rates matched the national average.
The lesson was clear.
Connection mattered.
The housing system that grew from the New Deal to the Cold War had promised stability, andfor many, it delivered.
(01:00:24):
But as the market took over,
As Fannie Mae went private, as credit cards spread, as home ownership became a proxy foridentity, stability turned inward.
The same house that once represented security became a vessel for self-containment.
The American dream was no longer about what we built together.
(01:00:45):
It was becoming what we could buy alone.
Now in the housing reform era, the booby traps that John Dean warned of slowly began toreveal themselves.
from the Fair Housing Act to HUD's Section 235, from riots to urban renewal, will ask,when government finally tried to fix the map, why did so many neighborhoods break?
(01:01:10):
Who paid, who profited, and what new lines were drawn?
Next time on Built to Debate.
boy last week, was 16 in San Francisco, told me on television, thank God we got him totalk.
Maybe somebody will start to listen.
He said, I got no country, I've got no flag, and he's only 16 years old.
(01:01:34):
And I couldn't say you do.
you
Thanks for listening.
Built to Divide is presented by Lines, my architecture and creative studio.
(01:01:59):
This podcast is produced in collaboration with Gable Media.
If you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and rate and review it on Apple podcasts andSpotify.
It really helps others find it.
And if you're looking for similar content, Built to Divide is part of the Gable Medianetwork where you can find even more like this.
(01:02:19):
Visit gablemedia.com.
That's G-A-B-L media.com.
And before I go, if you want to see additional photos, video clips and content that wentinto this episode, you can visit me at lines.studio slash podcasts.
Talk soon.
(01:02:50):
In 1924, Mrs.
Coolidge redid the interior and added 18 rooms to the third floor.
Her work was necessary, but again the structure was heavily stressed by the haphazardconstruction.
The bill for damages was presented in 1948.
President Truman became concerned because the floor of his study was vibrating.
(01:03:12):
An investigation was held.
and the structural weaknesses of the White House became immediately apparent.
One of the investigators said, the building is standing up purely from force of habit.
The beams under Margaret Truman's sitting room had split.
The building was too dangerous for occupancy.
(01:03:33):
The White House was taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle.
The pieces were marked and stored away.
The whole inside was scooped out.
the exterior walls were left standing.
Steel beams were raked in the interior.
It was a little difficult to get the new steel beams through the windows designed by Mr.
(01:03:54):
Hoban in 1790.
It would have been easier and less expensive to demolish the whole building.
But the White House is so great a symbol to Americans that the exterior walls wereretained.
Six years and one day after Germany invaded Poland, the world's second great war finallycame to an end.
On September 2nd, 1945, under a hazy Tokyo Bay sky, Japan's surrender was signed aboardthe battleship USS Missouri.
(00:27):
Cameras clicked, generals saluted, and across continents, millions of families, mothers,wives, children wept in relief.
The war had swallowed nearly everything.
By the time the ink dried on that surrender document,
between 60 and 80 million people were dead, roughly 3 % of the world's population.
(00:51):
Entire cities lay in ashes, Dresden, Warsaw, Tokyo, 6 million Jewish people murdered inthe Holocaust.
Villages erased, nations starved.
It was as if humanity had stared into the mirror and seen its own capacity for destructionand barely looked away in time.
(01:12):
Just seven weeks earlier, the United States had crossed a threshold no one had imaginedpossible.
On July 16th, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, the sky itself caught fire.
atomic test.
Three weeks later, President Harry Truman, new to the presidency after FranklinRoosevelt's death that spring, authorized its use.
(01:41):
On August 6th, the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Super Fortress bomber, dropped an atomic bombknown as Little Boy over Hiroshima.
80,000 people killed in an instant.
Tens of thousands more would die in the following weeks.
Three days later, Nagasaki.
(02:03):
Another city, another flash, another 40,000 lives gone.
The message was clear.
Humanity now held the power to unmake itself.
When World War II began, the United States was far from ready for global war.
Its army enlisted fewer than 200,000, smaller than Portugal's.
(02:25):
Isolationism ran deep, and the Great Depression had left the nation weary of foreignentanglements.
Dear Mr.
President, my name is Olf Olsen, from 4408 44th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
(02:45):
My opinion of the present conditions relative to this war is that the low-paid wage earneris uh not getting the break that
that he should be entitled to considering the fact that the cost of living has been goingup.
(03:08):
The only ones who have been benefiting by it are those in the middle class and upperclasses who have been getting increases in wages to adjust the higher cost of living.
(03:28):
It seems that nothing has been done for the people who are in the lower brackets.
who have a very difficult time to make a living for themselves and their families.
But the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed that overnight.
Dear Mr.
President, my name is Mrs.
M.R.
Schuller.
(03:48):
My reactions to the war are those of the average wife and mother.
For my husband is a defense worker in Newfoundland and my only son
an engineer employed at the University of Minnesota, is of draft age.
Of course, I have read of Pearl Harbor, the magnificent resistance at Manila andSingapore, and so forth, and yet it has all seemed more like a dream than something real.
(04:19):
Yesterday, however, I was shocked into the realization of what it all means by the news ofthe death of John Martin.
the son of a very dear friend of mine.
I believe, like most mothers and wives, in peace.
In fact, I believe in it so much that I believe in fighting for it.
(04:42):
I have never been in favor of starting a fight, but I do believe in finishing it.
uh
Within months, factories were running day and night.
The nation became the arsenal of democracy, building planes, ships, tanks, and the largestmilitary force in its history.
(05:06):
By 1945, 16 million Americans had served, but nearly half of them were still stationedoverseas when the war came to an end.
And now the question was, how do you bring 8 million men home?
The answer was Operation Magic Carpet, one of the largest logistical efforts in humanhistory.
(05:28):
Over 300 cargo ships were converted into troop carriers.
Day and night, they crossed the oceans ferrying men back from the front lines.
The ships came in droves from the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, docking atports in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and New Orleans.
(05:49):
Within 14 months, the torrent of deployment that had taken nearly four years to sendabroad was reversed.
They came home to parades, banners, and tiers, and a nation that had changed beneath theirfeet.
Factories that once made weapons were shifting to consumer goods.
Soldiers dreamed of college, family, and stability.
(06:12):
But with millions returning all at once, the country faced an entirely new crisis.
Where would they all live?
America's next great battle wouldn't be fought overseas.
It would be fought on its own soil, in blueprints, zoning maps, and suburban tracks, asthe nation set out to build not just homes, but a new version of the American dream.
(06:37):
I'm Demetrius Lynch, and this is Built to Divide.
We had to build houses for people to live in.
We had to a water system and a sewer system.
We had to set up a police department, put in roads, direct streetlights so that peoplecould feel secure.
I'll do what I can to help to get them out legally and peacefully.
(07:00):
And as far as accepting them socially, if that's what you mean, I could never do that.
Thanks for coming back.
In our last episode, we discussed the turmoil that brought forth foundational institutionsand events that transformed the U.S., particularly the establishment of the Federal
(07:23):
Reserve and the Gilded Age that led up to the Great Depression.
We also touched on the New Deal, the birth of the Federal Housing Authority, and thecreation of Fannie Mae.
If you haven't listened to that episode,
I encourage you to go back and listen to all the episodes of this series in order.
Today we trace the fallout from the Gilded Age, Great Depression, and World War II, wherethe U.S.
(07:47):
leveraged wartime production into remaking American society and delivering domesticstability, GI Bill benefits, FHA VA loans, and a secondary mortgage market powered by
Fannie Mae, which drove homeownership
from 43 % to nearly 62 % by 1960.
(08:08):
We stepped through the culture that sold the dream, the West Coast case study houses, andthe assembly line suburbia of Levittown.
But we also exposed the price.
Zoning, underwriting, and developer practices that drew bright lines around who couldbelong, turning stability for many into exclusion for others.
(08:31):
And we'll get into all of that after this break.
Episode 3 The Great Reset In 1904, a little-known inventor and writer named ElizabethMaggie decided to challenge the rules of the American game.
(08:58):
She believed the greatest danger to democracy wasn't foreign invasion or moral decay, itwas inequality.
Watching industrial monopolies swell under men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt,
Maggie saw how power consolidated not just money, but control over life itself.
(09:18):
So she did something radical for her time.
She turned that system into a literal game.
She called it the Landlord's Game.
Its purpose wasn't entertainment, it was education.
Maggie wanted players to feel the squeeze of rent, the thrill of profit, and the despairof collapse.
(09:38):
As she wrote in 1903,
The Landlord's Game is a practical demonstration of the present system, of land grabbing,with all its usual outcomes and consequences.
It might well have been called the Game of Life, as it contains all the elements ofsuccess and failure in the real world.
(10:02):
In other words, a simulation of capitalism's winners and losers.
That game would ultimately become Monopoly.
And if you've ever played, you've already played her warning.
The rules are simple.
Accumulate property, charge rent, bankrupt your opponents, and win by eliminating everyoneelse.
(10:22):
The game ends when one person owns everything.
Or when someone flips the board in frustration.
In October, 1929 for the United States, the game ended and it was time to reset the board.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office on March 4th, 1933, the country was broken.
(10:45):
One in four Americans was unemployed.
Banks in nearly every state had failed or closed their doors.
Two million people wandered around the country without homes.
The Great Depression wasn't just an economic collapse.
It was a moral and structural reckoning.
Roosevelt, fifth cousin to Theodore Roosevelt, shared his cousin's zeal for reform, butinherited a crisis of unprecedented scale.
(11:13):
His first act as president was to call a bank holiday, closing the nation's financialarteries before they bled out entirely.
Within days, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, and within weeks, confidenceflickered back to life.
When the banks reopened, deposits flowed in, not out.
The first 100 days of Roosevelt's presidency set a legislative pace never seen before orsince.
(11:41):
What followed became known as the New Deal, a sprawling experiment in national recovery.
It put men to work in forests and fields through the Civilian Conservation Corps, rebuiltbridges and dams under the Public Works Administration.
and sent electricity across rural America with the Rural Electrification Administration.
(12:03):
The programs were partially possible after the marginal tax rate of high-income earnershad already reversed under President Hoover, jumping from 25 % in 1931 to 63 % that
following year.
Roosevelt also aimed to reform the economy through the National Industrial Recovery Act,or NIRA.
(12:26):
which in collaboration with industry leaders sought to end cutthroat business practicesand suspend antitrust laws in exchange for better wages for workers.
However, the Supreme Court ultimately declared the N.I.R.A.
unconstitutional in 1935.
Without the promise of higher wages to fund programs, the highest marginal tax continuedto rise, immediately going to 79 % in 1936.
(12:56):
and peaking at 94 % in 1944.
Roosevelt wasn't just stimulating the economy, he was redefining the relationship betweencitizen and state.
The government, once a distant referee, was becoming a participant, a builder, a lender,and a safety net.
(13:17):
But for all its ambition, the first New Deal was still largely about survival.
Relief, not reinvention.
By 1935, that wasn't enough.
Inequality remained entrenched, workers were restless, and industry still dictated therules of play.
So Roosevelt went further.
(13:38):
The second New Deal wasn't just economic policy, it was philosophical rebellion.
It asked the question no American administration had dared to ask before.
What if the pursuit of profit alone can't build a stable nation?
In this second wave, Roosevelt introduced the Social Security Act, anchoring the idea thata government could guarantee a measure of dignity in old age or hard times.
(14:07):
He signed the National Labor Relations Act, giving workers the right to organize andcollectively bargain, a direct challenge to the monopolists of industry.
The Works Progress Administration hired millions, not just to build roads and bridges,
but to paint murals, compose symphonies, and document the American experience itself.
(14:31):
Even art became infrastructure.
These weren't just programs.
They were principles carved into policy.
Roosevelt's vision turned the economy from a game of individual winners into a sharedproject.
Imperfect, controversial, but undeniably collective.
(14:51):
Not everyone agreed.
The same business elite who once backed coups abroad now whispered of plots at home, likethe plan known as the business plot.
This scheme was a political conspiracy to overthrow President Roosevelt's administrationin 1933.
A bond salesman for a Wall Street banking firm and a leader of a U.S.
(15:12):
veterans organization aimed to recruit and install decorated Major General of the U.S.
Marine Corps, Smedley Butler,
as a fascist dictator.
I appeared before the Congressional Committee, the highest representation of the Americanpeople under subpoena, to tell what I knew of activities, which I believe might lead to an
(15:34):
attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship.
The plan, as outlined to me, was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff, oras a club at least, to intimidate the government and break down our democratic
institutions.
The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000men, which would be able to take over the functions of government.
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I talked with an investigator for this committee, who came to me with a subpoena onSunday, November 18th.
He told me they had on Earth evidence linking my name with several such veteranorganizations.
As it then seemed to me to be getting serious, I felt it was my duty.
to tell all I knew of such activities to this committee.
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My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institution.
I want to retain the right to vote, I have the right to speak freely, and the right towrite.
If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe.
No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech, and press.
(16:39):
While historians have questioned the imminent threat of a coup,
Most agree that the scheme was contemplated and discussed.
At the very least, it conveyed the business elite's ire for what Roosevelt was doing.
Critics accused Roosevelt of socialism.
The American Liberty League, funded by corporate titans and conservative Democrats,painted him as a traitor to his class.
(17:04):
And in a sense, he was.
The second New Deal rebalanced power, not just between rich and poor,
but between the private market and public responsibility.
For a fleeting moment, the pendulum swung towards the people.
Workers organized, wages rose, unions gained strength.
(17:25):
The federal government became a moral actor, not just a fiscal one, but the temporarilytamed forces were already gathering strength again, preparing to rewrite the rules once
more.
Sociologists
John Dean would later warn in 1945, the problem of home ownership will someday be facedsquarely by the United States.
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When that time comes, America will look back on our own time as an era in which societyencouraged its families to stride ahead through a field deliberately sown with booby
traps.
He was right.
The New Deal had restructured the board
but the pieces still belonged to the same players who lay in wait.
(18:11):
The machinery of war had become the machinery of finance.
Credit, debt, and home ownership would soon fuse into a new national myth, stabilitythrough property.
The GI Bill, officially the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, became the cornerstoneof that vision.
(18:31):
It offered veterans education, unemployment support, and most importantly,
federally guaranteed home loans.
Together with the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, and the Veterans Administrationloan programs, it made long-term, low-interest mortgages possible for millions of
returning soldiers.
(18:53):
Before the war, buying a home meant putting down half its value and paying it off within adecade, a tall task for most Americans.
Now,
A veteran could buy a home with almost nothing down and stretch payments over 30 years.
It wasn't just generosity.
It was policy by design, a way to channel industry power into consumer demand,construction jobs, and civic stability.
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But that transformation needed financial muscle.
In 1938, before the war, Congress had created the Federal National Mortgage Association.
or Fannie Mae, to buy mortgages from lenders and free up their capital for more loans.
In essence, Fannie Mae turned home debt into a renewable resource, buying, bundling, andreselling mortgages to keep credit flowing.
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After the war, as VA and FHA loans surged, the model scaled nationwide.
By 1948, Fannie Mae was investing in VA loans directly.
creating a secondary mortgage market that would eventually define American finance.
Combined with tax incentives like the mortgage interest deduction, which allows homeownersto reduce their taxable income, these programs rewired the economy around homeownership.
(20:21):
Between 1940 and 1960, Americans had access and a manageable pathway to homeownership andownership rates soared from
43 % to nearly 62%.
The fastest and largest expansion in modern history.
With continued messaging around home ownership and an easier on-ramp, owning a home wasboth a financial advantage and a declaration of identity.
(20:50):
Proof of good citizenship, stability, and belonging.
Politics wrapped it all in purpose.
In the Cold War era,
were tensions between the Soviet Union, who promoted communism, and the US, who championedcapitalism, the nuclear family became propaganda.
Our prosperity versus their poverty.
(21:13):
Imagery in the US linked communism to misery.
Pursuit of the American dream was a path to happiness.
Homes were transformed into consumption engines.
Each room was a stage set for buying.
The kitchen wanted the latest mixer.
the nursery needed safer plastics, the den demanded a television and matching furniture.
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Subdivisions multiplied the effect.
Rows of nearly identical houses meant your neighbor's upgrade instantly made yours feelbehind.
Credit followed the script.
Department store charge plates, installment plans, and federally backed mortgages stitchedretail desire to monthly payments.
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Home wasn't just shelter.
It was a bundle of purchases and proof you belonged.
Media, retailers, and developers weren't just selling homes.
They sold the American dream.
The perfect lawn on TV, the good schools euphemism in classifieds, detergent spotsequating whiteness with virtue, every sitcom ending each episode with a spotless living
(22:21):
room, and the housewife in print ads smiling through the latest appliance.
Proof.
that the system worked, so long as you fit the picture.
Domestic containment casts order as virtue.
Dad at work, mom at home, kids in tow.
While federal mortgage policy, local real estate practices, and zoning steered who couldbuy where, the message was simple and relentless.
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Happiness resided in a single-family home in a homogenous neighborhood, managed by acheerful homemaker, paid for,
by a steady male breadwinner.
More ominously, some entertainment and advertisements made light of domestic violence, awink to an implied hierarchy.
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Drugs like amphetamines and tranquilizers were promoted and prescribed to women to manage,quote, anxiety and depression, which were marketed as mother's little helpers.
Beneath the gloss and flicker of the screen, dissonance grew.
Women who'd been Rosie the Riveter were told to grin gracefully and find fulfillment infloor wax.
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While many continued to find work, the share of women in the workforce droppedapproximately 5 % from 1945 to 1950.
Many at home felt what Betty Friedan referred to in her book, The Feminine Mystique, asthe quote, problem that has no name.
A widespread unhappiness experienced by many housewives in the 1950s and 60s.
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The 1950s had locked in a powerful equation.
Citizenship as consumption, virtue as domestic order, and home ownership as the ticket toboth.
Sears, Roebuck and Company had pioneered the trend decades earlier with its modern homescatalogs.
Entire houses sold by mail.
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promising comfort, beauty, and ownership as a sign of success.
By the 1940s and 50s, that message was everywhere.
Life, better homes and gardens, and newspaper spreads turned housing into aspiration.
Bright kitchens, happy children, white fences framing prosperity.
While mail order homes from Sears offered Americans a do-it-yourself version of stability,
(24:46):
they were experimenting with a very different vision of domestic life on the oppositecoast.
Earlier, as the country braced for a massive housing boom, Arts and Architecture magazineannounced in its January 1945 issue, one of the most radical design experiments in US
history, the Case Study House Program.
(25:08):
The idea was deceptively simple and quietly revolutionary.
Under editor John Intenza, the magazine would commission the nation's leading architectsto design and build a new kind of American home.
Efficient, affordable, modern, and repeatable.
Each house would serve as a prototype, a case study, in how design and industry could cometogether to meet the post-war need for mass housing.
(25:37):
This wasn't about the mansions or monuments of the wealthy.
It was about proving that modernism, the sleek industrial language,
of floor-to-ceiling glass, open plans, steel frames, modular components, and lots ofnatural light could belong to and even be an improvement for ordinary families.
(25:57):
In the program's first issue, Intenza wrote,
For average prospective house owners, the choice between the hysterics who hope to solvehousing problems by magic alone and those who attempt to ride into the future piggyback on
the status quo, the situation is confusing and discouraging.
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Therefore, it occurs to us that the only way in which any of us can find out anything willbe to pose specific problems in a specific programme on a put-up or shut-up basis.
We hope that a fairly good answer will be the result of our efforts.
The magazine itself acted as client, orchestrating a collaboration between architects,manufacturers, and material suppliers to imagine what home could look like in the Atomic
(26:49):
Age.
The first group of architects were mid-century modern giants, Richard Neutra, EeroSaarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Rafael Soriano, JR Davidson, and William Wurster among
them.
Together they envisioned homes that rejected nostalgia and embraced the optimism andanxiety of a new technological world.
(27:15):
Southern California became their laboratory.
mild weather, open land, and the emerging car culture offered the perfect testing groundfor a new domestic ideal.
Between 1945 and 1966, the program produced 36 designs, 25 of which were built
mostly in the hills and suburbs surrounding Los Angeles.
(27:38):
These homes weren't hidden in gated enclaves.
They were open to the public, often for weeks at a time, so Americans could walk throughand imagine their own futures inside walls of glass.
One of the most famous, the Eames House, Case Study House number eight, captured thespirit of experiment perfectly.
(27:59):
Industrial materials reimagined for warmth, play, and family life.
Its bright, primary-colored panels and modular structure reflected a belief that designcould make life not only more efficient, but more human.
The case study houses offered a glimpse of what America could have been open,experimental, egalitarian in spirit.
(28:22):
They suggested that beauty and affordability didn't have to be opposites, that progresscould serve people, not just profit.
However, the case study homes were not adopted in mass.
likely for a few reasons.
The modern style was very specific and may not have aligned with some preferences.
By the end of the 60s, modernism was waning in general, and the prevailing designvernacular of flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling glass, and indoor-outdoor features weren't
(28:53):
appropriate for other regions, limiting national adoption.
While this architectural optimism flourished in the pages of arts and architecture, themarket was moving elsewhere.
For every case study house visited by a few thousand design enthusiasts, a new developmentwould soon rise to house tens of thousands.
Not as experiments in living, but as products of a perfected system.
(29:27):
These are the 36 men who built this house.
Another 40 houses.
No one understood that system better than William Levitt.
Levitt, a New York born real estate developer and the president of Levitt & Sons waswidely regarded as the father of modern America's suburbia.
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The son of a Brooklyn real estate attorney, Levitt dropped out of New York University tojoin his father's firm where he learned to blend business acumen with an instinct per
scale.
After serving as a Navy Lieutenant,
in the CBs during World War II, he returned home to confront a national housing shortagefor returning veterans.
(30:11):
His company took the lessons of wartime production, assembly lines, standard parts,efficient labor, and applied them to suburbia.
Levittown wasn't just a development, it was a movement.
Row after row of nearly identical traditional wood-framed homes built fast and cheap,offering returning veterans
(30:32):
something their parents never had, ownership.
We had to build houses for people who live in.
We had to a water system and a sewer system.
We had to set up a police department, put in roads, direct streetlights so that peoplecould feel secure.
Levitt's marketing promised that every home was both a sanctuary and a stepping stone, aninvestment that would grow in value year after year.
(30:57):
But this prosperity was built on a system of exclusion.
redlining, racial covenants, and neighborhood stability standards, tools we explored inthe last episode, sourced their power in the law itself.
At first, American cities were largely unregulated.
In the 19th century, land use was a matter of private choice, guided by custom more thangovernment.
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But as cities industrialized, the push to separate homes from factories, the wholesomefrom the harmful,
gave rise to a new planning language, zoning.
The first comprehensive zoning code appeared in New York City in 1916, born out oflegitimate public health and safety concerns.
(31:45):
It divided land into districts for factories, commerce, and homes, setting height limitsand use restrictions.
The intent was protection of public health.
The result, however, was an instrument of exclusion.
Within a generation, cities across the country adopted similar systems.
(32:05):
Then came 1926.
In Village of Euclid versus Ambler Realty, the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld zoning as constitutional, ruling that a city could regulate land useto protect the character of its neighborhoods.
Justice George Sutherland, who made up part of the Four Horsemen, a group of conservativejustices,
(32:28):
that often voted to strike down New Deal legislation, wrote that apartment buildings, ifplaced among single-family homes, could become, parasites, feeding off the open spaces and
amenities of their surroundings.
That one word, parasite, carried enormous weight.
It cast density itself as a threat.
(32:51):
It made the detached single-family home not just a lifestyle choice, but a moral ideal.
and everything else as a danger to be repelled and contained.
By the mid 20th century, zoning had quietly become the new face of exclusion.
Instead of overt racial covenants, which courts struck down after Shelley v.
(33:12):
Kramer in 1948, municipalities began using land use laws to achieve the same endsindirectly.
Minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, and bans on multifamily housing all work together
to keep certain people and certain incomes out.
So for developers like William Levitt in the idyllic 1950s, he wasn't just selling homes,he was selling an entire social order.
(33:40):
His first Levitt town built on Long Island in 1947 offered affordable homes to returningveterans, complete with washing machines, television hookups, and manicured lawns.
The price, they were priced around
$8,000, the equivalent of roughly $100,000 today.
(34:00):
Yeah, imagine buying a home for $100,000 today.
These homes were accessible to a very specific profile of working class families thatLevitt himself made explicit.
When pressed about why black families were barred from buying homes in his developments,he said, quote, we can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem.
(34:24):
but we cannot combine the two." End quote.
In contrast, Eichler and Sons, founded by real estate developer Joseph Eichler, sold homesin their developments to Asian Americans in 1949 and African Americans in 1954.
Eichler's salespeople were advised to sell without discrimination.
(34:49):
Eichler believed firmly in this principle.
He offered to buy back homes from white homeowners that took issue.
He said he would not employ anyone who opposed non-discriminatory policies.
and he even resigned from the National Association of Home Builders in 1958 when theorganization refused to support a non-discrimination policy.
(35:11):
Ned Eichler explained his father's position on the issues of profit and progress.
I think that builders cannot evade the fact that what they're doing is going to have animpact on the whole.
Community, even on the nation, for a long time and they cannot simply say, well, I'm justa businessman.
I'm here to make a buck.
(35:32):
Eichler and Sons were much smaller in scale compared to Leavitt and Sons, who became atranscendent symbol of suburban expansion.
Leavitt's perspective was the norm and a chilling, honest summary of mid-century housingpolicy and the industry's logic.
Integration, they claimed, would disrupt property values and threaten neighborhoodstability.
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And since the FHA's underwriting standards and most local banks agreed,
Exclusion wasn't just tolerated, it was incentivized.
Every family that moved into a Levittown home stepped into a carefully curated vision ofAmerica.
Identical homes, identical lots, identical lawns.
A mass-produced dream.
(36:17):
Children played in cul-de-sacs where everyone looked the same.
Schools and churches were nearby, but public transit and apartments were not.
Levitt's efficiency made him rich.
but his model made suburbia synonymous with separation, physical, social, and racial.
For a decade, Levittown had been sold as a triumph of the American dream, tree-linedstreets, tidy lawns, and the quiet hum of stability.
(36:45):
But in 1959, that illusion fractured.
That year, Bill and Daisy Myers, a young black couple, bought a home in Levittown,Pennsylvania.
They'd purchased not directly from Levitt & Sons, but from the Welschlers, a Jewish familythat was ready to move on.
It was a small legal loophole where William Levitt's contracts barred anyone not of theCaucasian race.
(37:09):
He couldn't stop individual homeowners from selling to whoever they chose.
Well, I first read a small article in the newspaper that the first colored family hadmoved into this community.
following that, why I began to hear on the radio and read in the newspaper that there wassome disturbance around this home that these people had bought.
(37:35):
What was your initial reaction?
I was terribly shocked to find that there were people in this community who would be soviolently opposed to it.
When word spread that a black family was moving in, the phone at the Welchler's house rangnon-stop.
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One neighbor screamed obscenities on the phone.
The Meyers were within their rights, but rights in Levittown didn't guarantee welcome.
But there are others who are for the Myers?
(38:17):
Yes, I've read about them.
For what reason, do you think, do they support the Myers?
Frankly, I don't know what reasons they can have for it.
If there are homeowners in Levittown, I don't see what reasons they can have for it.
Do you think Myers will be able to live here comfortably?
(38:37):
Comfortably?
No.
What course of action are you going to follow?
I'll do what I can to help to get them out legally and peacefully.
And as far as accepting them socially, if that's what you mean, I could never do that.
By the time the Myers family arrived, the entire town was watching.
(39:04):
You're aware that a Negro family has moved into Levittown?
Yes.
I heard about it.
What was your reaction?
Dynamite.
Dynamite.
What have you done about it?
Well, I guess we just discussed it.
How do you feel about the Myers moving in?
(39:25):
I'm very definitely against it.
Before coming to Levittown, did you have any contact with Negroes?
Well, I came from a small town where we didn't have any colored people.
And at that time I had, well I had no feelings either way.
But while we were waiting for our house to be built, we lived in Trenton for nine months.
(39:47):
And well that was my first contact with them.
Both in work and going through colored sections to work.
And I was very happy I was moving into an all-white community.
Do you think other Negro families will come to Levittown?
Definitely.
What do you think will happen?
Well, just what's happening already.
(40:07):
I don't know.
It's a rumor I read in the paper where they have two colored school teachers now inLevittown.
So that's just a good example of what is going to happen.
Well, what's wrong with that?
I do not like...
I have two daughters and two sons.
And if there's too many colored people around here, I definitely will get out.
(40:28):
I'm not thinking my...
I don't want to associate with colored people.
Well, I'm very definitely against mixed marriages and that's eventually what it's going tocome to.
If children are raised together, they're not going to think of anything of marryingtogether.
Well, I just could not live beside them.
I don't feel that they should be oppressed.
(40:50):
But I moved here.
One of the main reasons was because it was a white community.
And that's the only place I intend to live.
If I have to leave Levittown, I will do so.
Do you think a Negro family moving here will affect the community as a whole?
Definitely.
In what way?
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I think that all the property values will immediately go down if they are allowed to movein here in any number.
A white cross stood planted on the Myers front lawn.
Confederate flags fluttered from nearby porches.
In Pennsylvania, mind you, not the Deep South.
(41:33):
Crowds gathered cheering.
Cars flying Confederate flags would drive past, flaring songs like Dixie, the unofficialanthem of the Confederacy.
rocks shattered the Myers windows.
Threats of bombs and murder followed.
Even the police were attacked.
One officer was struck in the head, left bleeding out on the lawn of the family he'd cometo protect.
(41:59):
Levittown, a model of peace and order, had erupted overnight.
The whole thing centers around the word integration.
Well, as Mr.
Myers said, because his home has been anything but peaceful since he moved in.
He's got three children.
And uh evidently he feels that they will be accepted socially.
(42:24):
And uh I don't feel that they ever will be.
But the whole trouble with this integration business is
that in the end it probably will end up with mixing socially.
And you will have, well, I think their aim is mixed marriages and becoming equal with thewhites.
(42:46):
But the only way they're going to do that is by education and by bettering themselves, notby pushing in the way they have here.
Some residents were more open-minded, however limited.
(43:06):
I think so, I hope so.
think the majority of people here will grow accustomed to it and realize that they can begood neighbors, which I'm sure they are.
And I think the majority of people here are not the violent group that we have heard somuch about.
(43:30):
Do you think the Myers thing in Levittown will affect property values?
ah I don't think that the Myers have anything to do with the property decreasing orincreasing.
I think it's purely a white problem, not a Negro problem.
In what way?
I think it is the feeling of uh the majority group which will influence the property, notthe minority group.
(43:58):
In my business, whoever's got money and has good credit or wants to pay cash can buy acar.
It has no discrimination, color, religion, or any type of that sort.
Has the coming of the Myers affected your home life?
Personally, my home life, hasn't affected nothing whatsoever.
But, on the neighbors, they have a right.
Because the average white person living in Levitan has four and five children.
(44:22):
Well, let's put it this way.
If the Levitan has migrated in hordes of Negroes, which they have a right to come here,but if something happens that way,
Pretty soon, my neighbor will be having a Negro son-in-law or daughter-in-law.
How would that look?
Wasn't Myers within his rights as a citizen to move wherever he pleased?
Well, let's put it this way.
(44:44):
Mr.
Myers and all the Negroes have a right.
I'm no better than them.
They're as good as I am.
They can go anywhere they want.
I mean, they have God-given rights, and being a good American, they have the rights to thecivil rights.
They have the right to pursue their happiness.
But by the same token,
We have mixed communities and it's a proven fact that those mixed communities are over athird empty.
(45:06):
He could have stayed there.
He had a beautiful home there.
The only reason that Mr.
Myers came into Levittown is to show people they could get here.
It wasn't that he wanted to come to Levittown, but my personal opinion is this.
There is something bigger behind this.
Is that your personal opinion only or is it a fact?
No, I say it's a fact and I would tell anybody.
(45:27):
I mean, Barn nobody, I would tell them in a meeting, including the gentleman at the headof this committee for bringing Mr.
Myers, yeah, I'd tell him.
That was the logic of the system laid bare.
Stability and prosperity had been built on scarcity, on the belief that equality wouldcost you something.
(45:52):
Levittown families questioned the motives of the Myers, but it was clear, disinvestment inminority communities.
As we've discussed, the cornerstone of this system of prosperity came from the FederalHousing Authority.
At its heart, a deceptively technical tool
the neighborhood risk assessment, where wealthy white homogenous suburbs received thehighest ratings and with them the easiest access to credit.
(46:21):
The results rippled across the country.
From 1934 to 1962, less than 2 % of FHA loans went to black borrowers.
Entire cities were starved of investment.
As capital drained outward into white suburbs, urban neighborhoods
redlined and abandoned, spiraled into disrepair, prompting those that could afford it tolook for a better environment to raise their children.
(46:49):
Some economists later argued that the Federal Housing Administration's policies became aself-fulfilling prophecy.
By denying loans to quote, high-risk neighborhoods, most of them black or immigrantcommunities, the FHA ensured those areas would in fact decline.
Homes deteriorated because owners couldn't get credit to maintain them.
(47:12):
Businesses fled because financing vanished.
Poverty deepened and the data that resulted seemed to validate the maps that created theproblem in the first place.
And yet, even amid the barriers, black homeownership miraculously rose from about 23 % in1940 to nearly 38 % by 1960.
(47:38):
On paper, that looked like progress.
But numbers don't tell the full story.
The geography of opportunity was already fixed.
White families bought into appreciating suburbs backed by federally insured loans.
Black families were largely confined to undervalued neighborhoods where ownership waslittle protection against decay.
(48:02):
The system had created not only inequality, but a narrative to justify it.
It's easy to look back and see Levitt as a symptom, but he was complicit, an advocate anda benefactor of the system.
Levitt was building more than homes.
He was actively building physical boundaries, but simultaneously,
(48:23):
Others were reinforcing these boundaries in the hearts and minds of the public.
After the war, as labor grew stronger and civil rights gained traction, business interestsrecognized a threat.
They were losing influence as power shifted toward the people.
To counter it, corporate leaders found an effective tool in media.
Specifically, they would vigorously cultivate division through media channels.
(48:47):
The labor movement had long been the backbone of Roosevelt's New Deal coalition.
Unions had fought for wages, benefits, and political voice.
But as the economy surged and workers demanded more, a backlash brewed.
Big business joined with conservative politicians to weaken unions, and they needed astory the public could believe in.
(49:10):
One that reframed solidarity as subversion.
That story was fear.
Fear of socialism, of outsiders, of the other.
Domestically, it played out through racial sentiment.
Internationally, through isolationism.
This convergence began to take shape in 1953, when Henry Regnery, a conservative publisherand son of a wealthy businessman, gathered a small circle of other businessmen, media
(49:39):
figures, and political thinkers in New York City.
Regnery told them plainly, The side we represent controls most of the wealth in thiscountry.
The ideas we believe in are the ones most Americans instinctively believe in too.
But he feared that liberalism, the ideology of government intervention, labor rights, andsocial welfare, was capturing the cultural high ground.
(50:06):
The press, the universities, the foreign policy establishment.
He proposed something new.
A counterintelligence unit for ideas.
Media channels
with openly ideological communication in contrast to previous balanced policy focusedoutlets.
The men in that room already control platforms like Human Events, Regnery Publishing, theManion Forum, and the newly emerging National Review.
(50:36):
What they build from that meeting would become the blueprint for modern conservativemedia.
Regnery inherited his ideology from his father, William Henry Regnery.
a wealthy textile magnate who once supported Roosevelt before turning against the NewDeal.
William helped found the America First Committee in 1940, a powerful isolationist movementthat opposed US entry into World War II under the banner of patriotism.
(51:05):
Like the business plot, the AFC reflected concerns about political and economic changes inthe US.
The AFC's banner of patriotism
was complicated by its connection to fascism too.
Charles Lindenberg, the committee's most famous spokesman, infamously blamed, quote, theBritish, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration for dragging America toward war.
(51:31):
Later, over 20 sitting members of Congress that were connected to the group were found tohave colluded with Nazi agents spreading propaganda in the US.
This episode
culminating in the largest sedition trial in American history, revealed how easilyideology could blur into extremism when wrapped in the language of otherism.
(51:56):
Henry Regnery took a lesson from that.
Propaganda works when it feels like patriotism.
Using his family's fortune, he built a media ecosystem tailored to a specific audience,white, middle-class, business-minded Americans,
anxious about losing their place in a changing world.
(52:17):
In the 1950s, that demographic was primed to devour that narrative.
His network abandoned the pretense of neutrality.
News and opinion merged.
Outrage became strategy.
They didn't just report stories, they manufactured consensus.
They warned that liberal media was biased while creating a conservative mirror image
(52:41):
that blurred the line between information and identity.
Audiences who consumed it didn't just vote, they belonged.
From the beginnings of his father, the Regnerys built both the stepping stones forbusiness elites to return to dominance and the platform of support that would cheer them
on even at their own expense.
(53:06):
Meanwhile, in Washington, the business lobby's political allies moved to dismantle whatwas left of the New Deal order.
President Truman, facing post-war strikes and inflation, saw his popularity collapse asRepublicans and conservative Southern Democrats seized control of Congress.
They passed the Taft-Hartley Act, curbing union power over his veto.
(53:31):
Truman also attempted to expand civil rights with the Fair Deal.
which he communicated in an address before the NAACP.
Our immediate task is to remove the last remnants of the barriers which stand betweenmillions of our citizens and their birthright.
There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry or religion or raceor color.
(54:08):
We must not tolerate such limitations on the freedom of any of our people and on theirenjoyment of basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess.
Every man should have the right to a decent home, the right to an education, the right toadequate medical care, the right to a worthwhile job, the right to an equal share in
(54:42):
making the public decisions through the ballot, and the right to a fair trial in a faircourt.
The fair deal splintered his party.
Southern Democrats recoiled at the idea of integration, while business leaders saw federalactivism as socialism in disguise.
(55:07):
By the late 1950s, corporate inches began to finance media that weaponized patriotism,racial fear, and Cold War anxiety to erode public faith in government intervention.
Every call for equality could be cast as radical.
every strike as subversion, every civil rights demand as special treatment.
(55:28):
Through newspapers, radio, and television, Americans were increasingly conditioned to seegovernment not as a safeguard, but as a threat.
And as that narrative spread like a virus, policies that once built the middle class werereframed as dangerous experiments.
The purpose?
(55:49):
To preserve order, to protect wealth,
and to keep the board tilted towards those already winning the game.
In 1954, the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act quietly transformed therole of federal government in housing.
Fannie Mae, once a wholly public institution created to stabilize lending, became apublic-private hybrid.
(56:14):
Exempt from most taxes, but now operating partly with private capital.
It was a bureaucratic shift with seismic consequences.
Then in 1968, Fannie Mae completed its metamorphosis, reorganized into a for-profit,shareholder-owned company.
(56:35):
It was eventually listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a symbol of how deeply the ideaof home had merged with the logic of markets.
It still carried the federal halo, but now it spoke the language of Wall Street.
housing, a social good and basic need officially became a speculative asset.
(56:56):
The goal officially was efficiency to reduce direct government involvement in mortgagefinance.
But the deeper shift was cultural.
With credit now flowing through private hands, risk was no longer something to be managedcollectively.
It was something to be priced, packaged and sold.
During this transition,
(57:18):
another company was redefining what it meant to borrow.
On October 1st, 1958, American Express, once an express mail service out of Buffalo, NewYork, launched its first credit card.
Demand was so strong that hundreds of thousands of cards were issued within months of itsrelease.
(57:38):
Together, the privatization of housing finance and the rise of personal credit rewired theAmerican psyche.
The home was no longer just a place to live.
It was a lever, a symbol of independence and self-worth, and increasingly a platform forconsumption.
The formula was elegant and profitable.
(58:00):
Fannie Mae bought up mortgages, freeing lenders to make more.
Developers built homes to meet that credit supply, and homeowners, now flushed withconfidence and access to loans, filled those homes with the goods of modern life.
televisions, appliances, cars, furniture, the emblems of arrival.
(58:20):
The result was a cultural flywheel.
Credit-built homes, homes built identity, identity fueled consumption.
But the same system that built the suburban dream also dismantled something older, thefabric of interdependence.
As ownership became synonymous with success, multi-generational living declined sharply,ultimately reaching its lowest point in 1980 when only about 12 % of Americans lived with
(58:52):
extended family.
The ideal of the nuclear family, a couple, their children,
replaced the interwoven households that had once defined communities.
That shift may have offered privacy, but it came with isolation.
Researchers decades later found evidence of what we lost.
(59:13):
In Roseto, Pennsylvania, a small, close-knit Italian-American town, sociologists stumbledonto something extraordinary.
In the 1950s, a time when heart attacks were an epidemic across the United States,
Almost no one under 55 in Roseto died of heart disease.
There was no special diet, no remarkable genetics, no modern medicine.
(59:37):
In fact, residents smoked heavily and ate diets rich in fat.
What kept them healthy wasn't the food, it was each other.
Families lived together across generations.
Neighbors visited daily, shared meals, and looked after one another.
The social bonds were so strong,
that stress, the silent killer, simply didn't take root.
(01:00:01):
But as younger generations moved out into suburban life, those bonds thinned.
By the 1970s, Rosetto's heart attack rates matched the national average.
The lesson was clear.
Connection mattered.
The housing system that grew from the New Deal to the Cold War had promised stability, andfor many, it delivered.
(01:00:24):
But as the market took over,
As Fannie Mae went private, as credit cards spread, as home ownership became a proxy foridentity, stability turned inward.
The same house that once represented security became a vessel for self-containment.
The American dream was no longer about what we built together.
(01:00:45):
It was becoming what we could buy alone.
Now in the housing reform era, the booby traps that John Dean warned of slowly began toreveal themselves.
from the Fair Housing Act to HUD's Section 235, from riots to urban renewal, will ask,when government finally tried to fix the map, why did so many neighborhoods break?
(01:01:10):
Who paid, who profited, and what new lines were drawn?
Next time on Built to Debate.
boy last week, was 16 in San Francisco, told me on television, thank God we got him totalk.
Maybe somebody will start to listen.
He said, I got no country, I've got no flag, and he's only 16 years old.
(01:01:34):
And I couldn't say you do.
you
Thanks for listening.
Built to Divide is presented by Lines, my architecture and creative studio.
(01:01:59):
This podcast is produced in collaboration with Gable Media.
If you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and rate and review it on Apple podcasts andSpotify.
It really helps others find it.
And if you're looking for similar content, Built to Divide is part of the Gable Medianetwork where you can find even more like this.
(01:02:19):
Visit gablemedia.com.
That's G-A-B-L media.com.
And before I go, if you want to see additional photos, video clips and content that wentinto this episode, you can visit me at lines.studio slash podcasts.
Talk soon.
(01:02:50):
In 1924, Mrs.
Coolidge redid the interior and added 18 rooms to the third floor.
Her work was necessary, but again the structure was heavily stressed by the haphazardconstruction.
The bill for damages was presented in 1948.
President Truman became concerned because the floor of his study was vibrating.
(01:03:12):
An investigation was held.
and the structural weaknesses of the White House became immediately apparent.
One of the investigators said, the building is standing up purely from force of habit.
The beams under Margaret Truman's sitting room had split.
The building was too dangerous for occupancy.
(01:03:33):
The White House was taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle.
The pieces were marked and stored away.
The whole inside was scooped out.
the exterior walls were left standing.
Steel beams were raked in the interior.
It was a little difficult to get the new steel beams through the windows designed by Mr.
(01:03:54):
Hoban in 1790.
It would have been easier and less expensive to demolish the whole building.
But the White House is so great a symbol to Americans that the exterior walls wereretained.
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