Dianne Harris - Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Architecture, Landscape and Amer Culture)

ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE, AND AMERICAN CULTURE SERIES

Katherine Solomonson and Abigail A. Van Slyck, Series Editors

Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 18931943

Annmarie Adams

Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America

Dianne Harris

Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture

Paula Lupkin

Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War

David Monteyne

Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 18901915

Jessica Ellen Sewell

194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front

Andrew M. Shanken

A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 18901960

Abigail A. Van Slyck

The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States

Carla Yanni

This book is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided for the publication of this book from the University of Illinois Campus Research Board.

A version of appeared previously as Race, Class, and Privacy in the Ordinary Postwar House, 19451960, in Landscape and Race in the United States, ed. Richard H. Schein (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 12756.

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For my family

Contents

In 1933, my maternal grandparents, Rudolf and Eva Weingarten, left their home and family in Germany, embarking on a journey that would eventually see them established and recognized as American citizens. As a Jew, my grandfather had already found his career possibilities restricted in Germany. Trained as an engineer, he traveled to Tel Aviv (then Palestine), where he worked for four years before emigrating with his family to the United States. By that time, their family had expanded to include two young daughters. After a brief stay with family in New York, Rudy and Eva moved to Los Angeles, where my grandfather found employment with a company called Gateway to Music, a job that allowed him to follow his deep interest in stereophonic engineering. But by 1941, classified by the U.S. government as an enemy alien and perhaps considered especially suspicious because of his knowledge of shortwave radio technology, Rudy found his freedom, once again, severely restricted. For the duration of the U.S. involvement in World War II, Rudy Weingarten could not drive beyond a five-mile radius from his house, and he could move beyond that boundary only with special permission from government officials. Despite the fact that he was a Jew fleeing a repressive and violent regime, FBI agents interrogated him in his home on a periodic basis for the duration of the war.

Like many others who immigrated to the United States, my grandparentswho were fluent in both German and Hebrewmostly stopped speaking their native languages. They obtained citizenship as quickly as possible, and they did everything they could to assimilate, to become unobtrusive, to become as ethnically white and American as possible. Owning a home of their own was an important goal for them, as it was for millions of other postwar Americans, and I think it is fair to speculate that homeownership symbolized much for them, as it did for millions of others. To own a home was to have a sense of permanence, of investment; it represented the ownership not just of real property but of a crucial piece of the American Dream. Then, as now, that dream was not equally available to all. A primary factor in determining access to the dream of homeownership was a white identity.

As I will detail in this books introduction, the postwar period was one in which cultural notions of whiteness shifted, and the relationship of Jews to whiteness was particularly in flux. I do not believe my grandparents regularly or consciously pondered their racial identity in the cultural terms I explore in this book, but I do think it is fair to say that they were aware of conforming to a set of residential expectations that may have been linked to their sense of themselves as immigrants who desired to be seen as Americans according to the terms they fashioned for themselves and their family. Their inherent personalities dictated that their house would be immaculately kept and that they would comport themselves unobtrusively and quietly in public. That these traits also served to enforce their appearance as solidly white, middle-class citizens was coincident with the norms enforced by the mass media in the United States, as I will demonstrate in the pages that follow. Yet it is interesting to consider also how media representations created a set of definitions and expectations for the identities of postwar homeowners, and how those parameters were internalized by the millions of new homeowners from various cultural backgrounds across the United States between 1945 and 1960. As media and rhetoric scholar Cara Finnegan has noted, there is, and always has been, a powerful relationship between seeing and knowing. This book began as my way of trying to understand how seeing, reading, thinking about, and living in postwar domestic environments helped my grandparents and many others of their generation know what it meant to be a new citizen of the United States and how they navigated the waters of belonging in a country that appeared to offer, but clearly did not offer, equal opportunity for all.

As immigrants who had rented a series of apartments and houses, they were without a baseline of American knowledge to inform their later experience of homeownership. Like many other immigrants and upwardly mobile blue-collar and working-class Americans, they performed the cultural work required to establish solidly white identities. To be seen as other than white could be perilous and costly in a climate of nationwide and institutionalized racism, where anyone seen as other could be denied housing, services, and societal benefits. As Karen Brodkin observes, The alternatives available to nonwhite and variously alien others has been either to whiten themselves or to be consigned to an animal-like, ungendered underclass unfit to exercise the prerogatives of citizenship. This was a condition my grandparents and many other immigrants from many other parts of the world clearly wished to avoid, and their houses became important symbols of their attainment of both citizenship and its attendant privileges.

My grandparents purchased their first house in Southern Californias San Fernando Valley in 1955, and it was the home they occupied for the rest of their lives. Theirs was a nonrestricted neighborhoodsuch areas were available in some abundance in that geographic region of the Los Angeles basin. As the single largest purchase they made in their lifetime, the house became a focus of much of their attention. It was scrupulously maintained, fastidiously clean, carefully furnished and decorated. Like thousands of other Americans, my grandparents read newspaper and magazine articles that focused on house design and interior decoration; they watched television shows that focused on domestic life; and they both adopted the spatial practices and forms they viewed and simultaneously found opportunities to preserve (if modestly) subtle cues to their personal identity. Their house serves as a leitmotif for this book, just as my memories of them are nearly inseparable from my memories of their house. Those memories helped me create the plan of their house that appears in this book, as well as the short vignettes that appear at the beginnings of the chapters. As Richard White has so brilliantly demonstrated, memory is not history; indeed, history is the enemy of memory. But memories, which for me are always profoundly spatialized, provide important portals for asking questions about the past. While they can mislead as well as lead, I hope that in this instance my memories of a particular house have fruitfully led to the formation of a new perspective on the way we understand the history of postwar housing in the United States.