“What killed the legendary estates?” asks Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, in its guide to the structures still standing. Its answer is more or less right: “A triple whammy dealt by the advent of a federal income tax, the financial losses of the Great Depression and changes in the U.S. economic structure that made domestic service a less attractive job for the legions of workers needed to keep this way of life humming.”[2]
If the Gold Coast mansions symbolized Long Island in the Long Gilded Age, there was no question what took its place in the 1950s: Levittown, the quintessential postwar suburb, which broke ground in 1947.
William Levitt’s houses were tiny by the standards of today’s McMansions: the original two-bedroom model had only 750 square feet of living space and no basement. But they were private, stand-alone homes, pre-equipped with washing machines and other home appliances, offering their inhabitants a standard of living previously considered out of reach for working-class Americans. And their suburban location presumed that ordinary families had their own cars, something that hadn’t been true in 1929 but was definitely true by the 1950s.
Levitt’s achievement was partly based on the application to civilian housing of construction techniques that had been used during the war to build army barracks. But the reason Levitt thought, correctly, that he would find a mass market for his houses was that there had been a radical downward shift of the economy’s center of gravity. The rich no longer had anything like the purchasing power they’d had in 1929; ordinary workers had far more purchasing power than ever before.
Making statistical comparisons between the twenties and the fifties is a bit tricky, because before the advent of the welfare state the U.S. government didn’t feel the need to collect much data on who earned what, and how people made ends meet. When FDR spoke in his second inaugural address of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he was making a guess, not reporting an official statistic. In fact the United States didn’t have a formal official definition of poverty, let alone an official estimate of the number of people below the poverty line, until one was created in 1964 to help Lyndon Johnson formulate goals for the Great Society. But despite the limitations of the data, it’s clear that between the twenties and the fifties America became, to an unprecedented extent, a middle-class nation.
Part of the great narrowing of income differentials that took place between the twenties and the fifties involved leveling downward: the rich were significantly poorer in the fifties than they had been in the twenties. And I literally mean poorer: We’re not just talking about relative impoverishment, a failure to keep up with income growth further down the scale, but about a large absolute decline in purchasing power. By the mid-fifties the real after-tax incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans were probably 20 or 30 percent lower than they had been a generation earlier. And the real incomes of the really rich—say, those in the top tenth of one percent—were less than half what they had been in the twenties. (The real pretax income of the top 1 percent was about the same in the mid-fifties as it was in 1929, while the pretax income of the top 0.1 percent had fallen about 40 percent. At the same time, income tax rates on the rich had risen sharply.[3])
Meanwhile the real income of the median family had more or less doubled since 1929.[4] And most families didn’t just have higher income, they had more security too. Employers offered new benefits, like health insurance and retirement plans: Before the war only a small minority of Americans had health insurance, but by 1955 more than 60 percent had at least the most basic form of health insurance, coverage for the expenses of hospitalization.[5] And the federal government backed up the new security of private employment with crucial benefits such as unemployment insurance for laid-off workers and Social Security for retirees.
So working Americans were far better off in the fifties than they had been in the twenties, while the economic elite was worse off. And even among working Americans economic differences had narrowed. The available data show that by the 1950s unskilled and semiskilled workers, like the people manning assembly lines, had closed much of the pay gap with more skilled workers, like machinists. And employees with formal education, like lawyers and engineers, were paid much less of a premium over manual laborers than they had received in the twenties—or than they receive today.
Economic statistics are useful, of course, only to the extent that they shed light on the human condition. But these statistics do tell a human tale, that of a vast economic democratization of American society.
On one side the majority of Americans were able, for the first time, to afford a decent standard of living. I know that “decent” isn’t a well-defined term, but here’s what I mean: In the twenties the technology to provide the major comforts and conveniences of modern life already existed. A modern American transported back to, say, the time of Abraham Lincoln would be horrified at the roughness of life, no matter how much money he had. But a modern American transported back to the late 1920s and given a high enough income would find life by and large tolerable. The problem was that most Americans in the twenties couldn’t afford to live that tolerable life. To take the most basic comfort: Most rural Americans still didn’t have indoor plumbing, and many urban Americans had to share facilities with other families. Washing machines existed, but weren’t standard in the home. Private automobiles and private telephones existed, but most families didn’t have them. In 1936 the Gallup organization predicted a landslide victory for Alf Landon, the Republican presidential candidate. How did Gallup get it so wrong? Well, the poll was based on a telephone survey, but at the time only about a third of U.S. residences had a home phone—and those people who didn’t have phones tended to be Roosevelt supporters. And so on down the line.
But by the fifties, although there were still rural Americans who relied on outhouses, and urban families living in tenements with toilets down the hall, they were a distinct minority. By 1955 a majority of American families owned a car. And 70 percent of residences had telephones.
On the other side F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remark that the rich “are different from you and me” has never, before or since, been less true than it was in the generation that followed World War II. By the fifties, very few Americans were able to afford a lifestyle that put them in a different material universe from that occupied by the middle class. The rich might have had bigger houses than most people, but they could no longer afford to live in vast mansions—in particular, they couldn’t afford the servants necessary to maintain those mansions. The traditional differences in dress between the rich and everyone else had largely vanished, partly because ordinary workers could now afford to wear (and clean) good clothes, partly because the rich could no longer afford to dress in a style that required legions of servants to help them get into and out of their wardrobes. Even the traditional rich man’s advantage in mobility—to this day high-end stores are said to cater to the “carriage trade”—had vanished now that most people had cars.
I don’t think it’s romanticizing to say that all this contributed to a new sense of dignity among ordinary Americans. Everything we know about America during the Long Gilded Age makes it clear that it was, despite the nation’s democratic ideology, a very class-conscious society—a place where the rich considered themselves the workers’ “betters,” and where workers lived in fear (and resentment) of the “bosses.” But in postwar America—and here I can speak from my personal memory of the society in which I grew up, as well as what we can learn from what people said and wrote—much of that class consciousness was gone. Postwar American society had its poor, but the truly rich were rare and made little impact on society. A worker protected by a good union, as many were, had as secure a job and often nearly as high an income as a highly trained professional. And we all lived material lives that were no more different from one another than a Cadillac was from a Chevy: One life might be more luxurious than another, but there were no big differences in where people could go and what they could do.
2.
“The Glittering Domains of LI’s Royalty,” http://www.newsday.com/ entertainment/localguide/ north-shore-nassau/ny-dligold,0, 7095725.story?cool=ny- explore-nsn-utility.
4.
Income for the middle fifth of families from