Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (4 page)

Married students at Stanford University: the G.I. Bill not only strained classroom facilities in postwar colleges but also created a new, parallel collegiate culture in which fraternity parties gave way to baby-sitting, trips to the playground, and shopping excursions.
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As of April 1947, of 2,000 married veterans at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, 800 already had new babies, and 288 others had wives in first pregnancies. The university persuaded the state's Public Housing Authority to send in hundreds of prefab buildings that had been used for war workers, which now clustered around a cooperative grocery store, a bowling alley, and a community recreation center.

The millions of married veterans and their spouses, who largely abandoned fried chicken for chicken soup and set up housekeeping in “homes” that had only recently served military purposes, faced a demanding experience that drove many young men and women to the limits of their endurance. Veterans attempted to study amid the din of screaming
babies and noisy toddlers, not helped by paper-thin walls, while their wives set up housekeeping with few conveniences or appliances. Yet it seems likely that a substantial number of these young couples saw their young children as a symbol of their independence from older relatives and older lifestyles and believed they had embarked on a marvelous adventure in this new “Atomic Age.”

One of the developments that made this great new adventure more manageable for young married couples, whether they lived in Fertile Acres or in more traditional housing, was the publication in 1946 of Dr. Benjamin Spock's
Baby and Child Care
, a paperback book that sold for 35 cents and was designed specifically for anxious young postwar parents. The book would go on to sell 30 million copies in 29 languages before the last Boomer was born, becoming the best-selling new title ever published in the United States to that time. Young mothers, from former war workers to future first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, were effusive in their praise of Dr. Spock's reassuring, nonjudgmental approach, which explained that a simple combination of relaxation, persistence, and, above all, a sense of humor would solve most baby care issues, and that trust in one's innate maternal and paternal instincts was an excellent first step in the parenting experience.

The book included space for birth statistics, records of checkups, parent questions for the doctor, and an infant's height and weight chart, along with advice that parents should enjoy their babies yet accept that some level of frustration was normal in all parenting activities. Spock admitted that “Children keep parents from parties, trips, theaters, meetings, games and friends. The fact that you prefer children and wouldn't trade places with a childless couple for
anything doesn't alter the fact that you still miss your freedom.” Yet the rewards from this lifestyle were almost limitless, according to Spock, for compared with “this creation, this visible immortality, pride in other worldly accomplishments is usually weak in comparison.” On the other hand, if sacrifice was healthy, the martyrdom of needless self-sacrifice was counterproductive: “parents will become so preoccupied and tense that they're no fun for outsiders or for each other.”

Dr. Benjamin Spock, above, emphasized a commonsense, relaxed approach to postwar child-rearing. His book on baby and child care became one of the best-selling books of modern times.
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Benjamin Spock had the great good fortune to be accepted as authoritative and wise in a generally upbeat, pragmatic culture of young parenthood. His book gave young men and women permission to expand the traditional boundaries of parental involvement with and even indulgence in their children's lives. These new parents were more willing
to buy toys, less willing to use corporal punishment, and more open to friendship with their children than their own parents had been. New parenting now included playgroups, incentives for good behavior, and even children's opinions in the forging of family decisions, from meals to vacations. New mothers were less often drill sergeants and more often counselors and advisers. New fathers were more involved and less forbidding.

When these young parents had a rare moment to consider their role in the chain of generations of mothers and fathers, they often sensed a certain uniqueness in their experience. First, it gradually became evident that more of them were having children, and the numbers of children were larger in an American society that until recently had seemed to be moving toward fewer and later marriages, and fewer children. Second, they were being assured in books, films, and political speeches that their experience was vital to the nation's welfare and future prosperity. Third, they were aware that demographic and technological changes were rapidly redefining the kind of life they would live and where they would live it. If Benjamin Spock opened a new frontier in the experience of parenting, a fast-talking, chain-smoking former naval construction engineer opened a new portal on the kind of home life where many of them would raise these new families. William Levitt's transformation of a vast expanse of Long Island potato fields into a planned, child-friendly suburban community would inaugurate a new family experience for the Baby Boomers and their young parents.

ONE OF THE MOST
endearing films of the immediate postwar era gained much of its box-office popularity by recounting a modern fairy tale in which the prize is not a throne or riches but a “castle” in a new form of community that would come to define a newly emerging American lifestyle.
Miracle on 34th Street
is a story of the hopes and dreams of a little girl, played by Natalie Wood, living in a Manhattan apartment with her single mother, a Macy's employee played by Maureen O'Hara. Cautioned by her mother to be skeptical of belief in Santa Claus, the little girl is coaxed into revealing her one true wish by a department store Santa who calls himself Kris Kringle. Dolls, toys, and cycles hold little interest for a girl who dreams of escaping the restrictions of apartment life for a new home in the suburbs, preferably with a new father who will complete a traditional family. When Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is fired as Macy's Santa and nearly committed to a mental hospital, a young bachelor lawyer played by John Payne choreographs a brilliant defense that acquits
his client and sparks the beginning of a romantic interest with the single mother. As mother, daughter, and bachelor drive home from a suburban Christmas morning celebration, Natalie Wood orders Payne to stop the car and runs across a lawn into her “dream home,” which is empty and for sale. Payne and O'Hara run after her and discover their love for each other in an empty living room that holds only the cane used by Kris Kringle. The “miracle” is an escape from Thirty-fourth Street and a new beginning in a new family and a suburban home.

While few early postwar families could match the miraculous nature of this transition from urban crowding to a spacious suburban home, the film struck a major chord in the desire for young parents to establish themselves in a new frontier of lawns, picture windows, and barbeque pits—a lifestyle that seemed especially congenial to growing families of the new Baby Boom.

Postwar suburban development had its antecedents in the rise of earlier “bedroom communities” adjacent to large cities. Earlier in the twentieth century, the emergence of railroads, trolley cars, and other forms of public transportation had allowed workers in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities to commute from suburban homes to downtown jobs. The depression and World War II, however, had brought suburban home construction nearly to a halt. Even in a more positive economic environment, early suburbs had often been tethered to rail lines, and huge swaths of land beyond the range of public transportation remained underutilized. Then, just as the G.I. Bill expanded veterans' educational frontiers with its tuition grants and subsidies, it also encouraged new housing frontiers through its mortgage benefits.

One of the major barriers to home ownership in pre—World War II America was the size of the down payment. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act largely changed the rules by allowing a number of circumstances where the government would essentially guarantee the mortgage loan and encourage a policy of no down payment. The first entrepreneur who fully appreciated the impact of this provision was William Levitt, a New Yorker who had spent his wartime service managing the mass construction of buildings for the U.S. Navy.

Soon after his discharge, the forty-three-year-old veteran, described as a “cocky, rambunctious hustler with the hoarse voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker,” bought twelve hundred acres of potato farmland near Hicksville, on Long Island about twenty miles outside of New York City. He turned his military organizational abilities into a construction campaign designed to entice young buyers into believing they could secure a part of the new American dream of home ownership in the pristine world of suburbia. From dawn to dusk in the muddy fields of a rising community called Levittown, the ground would shake as a convoy of tractors rumbled like charging squadrons of Sherman tanks. Every hundred feet they would dump identical bundles of lumber, pipe, boards, shingles, and copper tubing, all so neatly packaged they resembled enormous loaves of bread dropped by a bakery operated by giants. Then other massive machines fitted with a seemingly endless chain of buckets dug into the earth to form a trench around a twenty-five-by-thirty-two-foot rectangle. As men and machines engaged in a carefully coordinated operation, a new house would emerge largely complete every fifteen minutes until by July 1950 more than eleven thousand nearly identical homes sprawled across the
fields, with parallel Levittowns rising in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The three original Levittown communities in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, above, symbolized the emergence of modern suburban lifestyles. By the sixties some Boomers would criticize their childhood homes as “ticky-tacky boxes.”
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