The "Battle of the Books" that waged amongst late 17th Century English intellectuals like Swift and Pope over the issue of the relative aesthetic and philosophical qualities of ancient classics and modern academic endeavors had its curious analog in the battles between Levittown's "progressive" and "traditionalist" educators in the 1950's and early 60's.
Contemporary popular culture's stereotype of the placid Eisenhower/Kennedy era notwithstanding, in the two decades following V-J Day, very different ideas emerged about what the "American Dream" entails and what should be its future and those ideas were microcosmed in educational conflicts not over taxes, salaries, and school district finances that became especially pronounced in the 1970's (see "Levittown's Civil War" 9/4/13) but over ideological issues.
Controversies over school prayer, the teaching of human reproduction in biology class, the political leanings and/or affiliations of textbook authors, and the manner in which books and poems were interpreted (with respect to who "communistic") embroidered teachers, administrators, and parents to a level of acrimony South Parkian in its absurdity by today's standards but utterly polarizing under the Cold War climate of McCarthyism, Sputnik, and the Soviet H-bomb. A vaguely progressive, middle-of-the-road District Five Educational Association established in 1950 whilst Levitt & Sons were still building row-upon-row of Ranch houses was found to be too moderate for the "progressives" and "traditionalists" and was quickly overshadowed by the conservative Information and Education Committee (1957) and the liberal Better Education League (1959); both prepaired to do battle.
Most noteworthy was the degree to which these controversies, in ostensibly homogeneous Levittown, found their tectonic divisions along ethno-religious fault lines. "You had, for want of better words", resident Clare Worthing observed in the September 28, 1997 issue of Newsday , "the liberals and conservatives. The liberals were represented by Jewish and liberal Catholics predominantly. Conservatives were represented by conservative Catholics and conservative Episcopalians."
The fuel for these conflicts actually predates Levittown and was refined in the Great Depression of the 1930's and the war years of the 40's amongst the hyphenated ethnicities who later arrived to Levittown from more ethno-segregated neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. This translated into families predisposed to react to the tumultuous decades of the first half of the 20th Century in different ways. Working class families that emerged from the poverty of the Great Depression, cognizant of the role of government via the New Deal and GI Bill, and sensitive to their vulnerability as hitherto discriminated-against minorities - Jews, for example - were wont to see the American Dream in more progressive terms of liberation from past patterns that encouraged discrimination.
In contrast, working class families from larger denominations, whose nationalism was forged by the war, hailed from old ethnocentric urban settings and consequently were more tradition-oriented; the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Irish and Italians, for example. This latter cohort, given the demographics, were more abundant endowing Levittown with a working class conservative patina evident in people like Bill O'Reilly; New Deal, FDR-voting families who, to the relief of Nassau GOP leader Russel Sprague, re-oriented towards the political right as suburban homeownership became a part of their American experience.
The National Education Association took an interest in this phenomenon and concluded in a 1962 study that whilst "the construction of houses in a mass-produced community is a relative simple matter", developing a deeper consensus "of community traditions and accepted leadership is not something that can happen overnight....no long-standing traditions on which to rely for stability". These conflicts did subside after the mid-1960's, with the exception of the book-banning issues that sired the U.S. Supreme Court's Pico vs. Island Trees (1976). Nevertheless, reports of political polarization have probably been greatly overplayed and were not necessarily the day-to-day concern of everyone living in Levittown back then, even residents with children attending our local schools.
Daniel Bell, during the Kennedy years, wrote of "the end of ideology" in a book by that name; maintaining that future politics will more likely revolve around more subdued financial and administrative concerns than conflicting political philosophies - both in the halls of Congress and in the nation's boards of education. He failed to recognize that civil rights, feminism, and gay rights were powder kegs awaiting some spark like the Vietnam conflict to ignite them. We can not, therefore, ignore the possibility that some new round of school wars is just one unexpected controversy away.
Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org.
