Post-War Suburbanization: Developing Effective

Questions for Historical Investigations

Bruce A. LeshFranklin High School

Reisterstown, Maryland

1920s Unit Plan

•1920s Consumer Culture (1 Day)•New Women of the 1920s (1 Day)•Marcus Garvey and African Americans in the 1920s *(1 Day)•Prohibition (1 Day)•Buck vs. Bell and Intolerance (1 Day)•Causes of the Depression (1 Day)•Hoover and the Depression (1 Day)•Bonus Army * (2 Days)•Unit Exam

Elements of a History Lab• A central question that does not

have one answer.•Source work—Historical sources are

evaluated and the information gained is applied to the development of an answer to the lab’s central question.

• The employment of literacy skills to evaluate historical sources.

• The development, refinement, and defense of an evidence-based answer to the guiding historical question

Let’s help Jerry

“The point of questions…is to provide direction and motivation for the rigorous work of doing

history.”Linda Levstik and Keith Barton, Doing History: Investigating

with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools

“…teachers introduce a sense of mystery…by raising

thought-provoking questions, ones that

demand answers supported by reasons, by evidence…”

Teaching United States History as a Mystery

David Gerwin and Jack Zevin

“What Leads to the Fall of a Great Empire? Using Central Questions to Design Issues-based History Units,”

Edward Caron

Six criteria for effective questions to guide historical inquiry:

– Does the question represent an important issue to historical and contemporary times?

– Is the question debatable?– Does the question represent a reasonable amount of

content?– Will the question hold the sustained interest of middle

or high school students?– Is the question appropriate given the materials

available?– Is the question challenging for the students you are

teaching?

“Challenging History: Essential Questions in the Social Studies Classroom” by Heather Lattimer

• Get at the heart of the discipline

• Have more than one reasonable answer.

• Connect the past to the present.

• Enable students to construct their own understanding of the past.

• Reveal history as a developing narrative.

• Challenge students to examine their own beliefs

Historical Categories of Inquiry

• cause and effect• change and continuity• turning points• using the past• and through their eyes

• “spiraled and sequenced throughout the curriculum”• build a common language” to structure students

examination of the past

Thinking Like an Historian: Rethinking History Instruction A Framework to Enhance and Improve Teaching and Learning

Nikki Mandel and Bobby Malone

Marcus Garvey: The Evolution of a History Lab Question

• Who was Marcus Garvey?• What was Garvey best known for?• What was the Back to Africa movement? Did people

support the movement?• How did Garvey compare to Washington and

Dubois?• Did Marcus Garvey have a negative or positive

impact on society? • What did Garvey bring to the 1920s?  • Marcus Garvey a Renaissance man?• Visionary or agitator at the beginning, but realized

no matter what he is definitely an agitator• Was Garvey seen as a villain or a superhero?• Marcus Garvey: Enemy of the State, Statesmen, or

Savior?

Marcus Garvey: The Evolution of a History Lab Question

Marcus Garvey: Racial Visionary or Enemy of the state?

“Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds Little boxes on the hillsideLittle boxes made of ticky-tackyLittle boxes on the hillsideLittle boxes all the same

There's a green one and a pink one And a blue one and a yellow oneAnd they're all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses All went to the universityWhere they were put in boxes And they came out all the same

And there's doctors and there's lawyersAnd business executives And they're all made out of ticky-tackyAnd they all look just the same

And they all play on the golf courseAnd drink their martinis dry And they all have pretty children And the children go to schoolAnd the children go to summer campAnd then to the universityWhere they're all put in boxes And they come out all the same

And the boys go into business And marry and raise a familyIn boxes made of ticky-tackyAnd they all look just the same

There's a green one and a pink one And a blue one and a yellow oneAnd they're all made out of ticky-

tacky And they all look just the same

Levittown, New York

(Before and After)

G.I. Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment Act of

1944 )

The Baby Boom

Housing Shortage

1956 National Defense and Interstate Highway Act

White flight from

cities to the

suburbs

“Suburbia is becoming the most important single market in the country.

It is the suburbanite who starts the mass fashions—for children…

dungarees, vodka martinis, outdoor barbecues, functional furniture, [and]

picture windows … All suburbs are not alike, but they are more alike than they

are different.“

William H. Whyte, Organization Man.

“What the people were looking for were good schools, private space, and personal safety and they found

them in the suburbs. It was the single tact home that offered

growing families a private haven in a heartless world.”

Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontiers

"Levittown represented the worst vision of the American future: bland people in bland houses leading bland lives.

The houses were physically similar, theorized Mumford, so the people inside must be equally similar; an entire

community was being made from a cookie cutter…a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a

treeless command waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing

the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the

same common mold.”

Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects, 486.

“These are very gregarious communities, in which people wander in and out of one another’s houses without any invitation, and

organize themselves into everything from car pools to PTAs and hobby clubs of numerous sorts; and in which the churches are

more important institutions than anyone who was brought up in the twenties and thirties would have imagined them to be. Such

communities are paradises for the well-adjusted; by the same token, they are less inviting to residents who prefer a modicum of seclusion and resist being expected to live up to the “Joneses”…A

firm believer in diversity, who would like to see more, not less, mixing together on easy terms of people of different economic fortunes, different age groups, and different occupations and

preoccupations, cannot help wondering if these larger new suburbs can escape being natural breeding grounds for conformity.”

Frederick Lewis Allen, “The Big Change in Suburbia,” Harpers Magazine, 1954.

“The community has an almost antiseptic air.  Levittown streets, which have such fanciful names as

Satellite, Horizon, Haymaker, are bare and flat as hospital corridors.  Like a hospital, Levittown has rules all its own.  Fences are not allowed (though here and there a home-owner has broken the rule).  The plot of grass around each home must be cut at least once a week; if not, Bill Levitt's men mow the grass and send

the bill.  Wash cannot be hung out to dry on an ordinary clothesline; it must be arranged on rotary,

removable drying racks and then not on weekends or holidays....”

"Up From the Potato Fields, "Time 56. July 3, 1950.

“These communities have none of the long-festering social problems of older towns, such as slums, crowded streets, vacant lots that are both

neighborhood dumps and playgrounds, or sagging, neo-fronted business districts that sprawl in all directions. Instead everything is new.

Dangerous traffic intersections are almost unknown. Grassy play areas abound. Shops are centrally located and under one roof…Everybody lives

in a “good neighborhood”; there is, to use that classic American euphemism, no “wrong side of the tracks”…Even Levittown, with 70,000

people not far from New York’s turbulent underworld, has virtually no crime…Police attribute this lack of crime to the fact that nearly all the men

were honorably discharged from the services and subjected to credit screening. This, they say, eliminated the criminal

element and riff-raff. Some police officials included the absence of slums and disreputable hang-outs as causes. Personally, I feel many more

factors were involved, including the absence of real poverty; the strong ties of family, religious and organizational activities; steady employment; and

the absence of restrictive, frustrating social structure.”

Harry Henderson, “The Mass Produced Suburbs,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1953.

“The Negroes in America…are trying to do in 400 years what the Jews in the world have not wholly

accomplished in 600 years. As I Jew I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But…I have come

to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not

buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours…As a company our position is simply this: we can

solve a housing problem, or we can solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.”

William Levitt, builder of Levittown

“…The children growing up in New Suburbia run the danger of becoming ‘homogenized.’ In many of the new suburbs the white child never sees a Negro. In others the Jewish child never plays with any but Jewish children. Some of these

suburbs are virtually all Catholic. In other areas there are no Catholics. Even without racial and

religious segregation---and in these new developments groups tend to segregate themselves to an alarming degree---the

pressure to conform is intense, and stultifying…”

Sidonie Gruenberg, “The Homogenized Children of New Suburbia.”

New York Times Magazine, 1954.

“Those who lambasted suburbia…tended to ignore several basic facts: the boom in

building energized important sectors of the economy, providing a good deal of

employment; it lessened the housing shortage that had diminished the lives of

millions during the Depression and war; and it enabled people to enjoy conveniences, such as modern bathrooms and kitchens,

that they had not before.”

James Patterson, Grand Expectations, pg. 340.

“Within Levittown, many residents say, the atmosphere is more tolerant and neighborly than any other place they ever lived. However, Levittowners collectively have not yet come to grips with one problem that could give rise to a really tense situation. This is the problem of Negro

exclusion.The Levitts do not sell their houses to Negroes. This, as

William Levitt explains it, is not a matter of prejudice, but one of business.

“The Negroes in America,” he says, “are trying to do in four hundred years what the Jews in the world have not

wholly accomplished in six thousand. As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But, by various means, I have come to know that if we sell one

house to a Negro family, then ninety to ninety-five percent of our white customers will not buy into the

community. That is their attitude, not ours. We did not create it, and cannot cure it. As a company, our position is simply this: we can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the

two.”

Craig Thompson: “Growing Pains of a Brand-New City” (August 7, 1954)Saturday Evening Post, Volume 227

Broad Classes of Reasons Given for Moving to the Suburbs,

and Percentage of Respondents Mentioning Each Type

Wendell Bell, "Social Choice, Life Styles, and Suburban Residence," in The Suburban Community, ed. William Dobriner (New York: Putnam, 1958), 234–35.

Specific Reasons for Moving to the Suburbs Per Cent

Physical reasons (N=172): 72.3

More space outside house 19.7

More space inside house 14.3

"The outdoors" (fresh air, sunshine, etc.) 12.6

Less traffic 11.8

Cleaner 6.3

No neighbors in same building 3.8

Quiet 2.1

No stairs 1.7

Social reasons (N=66): 27.7

Better schools 10.2

"Nice" children to play with 9.2

Other children to play with 2.5

More organized activities 2.5

Home of own (security) 1.7

Adults "nice" to children 0.8

Better churches 0.8

Total reasons in this category (N=238) 100.0

Wendell Bell, "Social Choice, Life Styles, and Suburban Residence," in The Suburban Community, ed. William Dobriner (New York: Putnam, 1958), 234–35.

Specific Reasons for Moving to the Suburbs Per Cent

Physical reasons (N=172): 72.3

More space outside house 19.7

More space inside house 14.3

"The outdoors" (fresh air, sunshine, etc.) 12.6

Less traffic 11.8

Cleaner 6.3

No neighbors in same building 3.8

Quiet 2.1

No stairs 1.7

Social reasons (N=66): 27.7

Better schools 10.2

"Nice" children to play with 9.2

Other children to play with 2.5

More organized activities 2.5

Home of own (security) 1.7

Adults "nice" to children 0.8

Better churches 0.8

Total reasons in this category (N=238) 100.0

Restrictive Covenants

Red Lining

Block Busting

Create three real estate signs that might appear outside a home in the exploding suburbs of post-war America. For each sign, be sure to consider:

Factors that promoted post-war suburbanizationThe benefits/problems of living in a new suburb like the Levittown’sCharacteristics of Levittown and other suburbs Racially discriminatory practices such as blockbusting, racial covenants, and red-liningWas this the American Dream or the homogenization of American Culture?

Benefiting from the G.I. Bill?

Traveling on the new Interstate Highways?

Move to the Suburbs and lose

your individuality!

Call 333-456 now and live the American Dream