Careful Who We Admire

Dear Commencement Characters:

By July of 1948, Levitt & Sons construction company was building homes at a rate of 30 per day. This astounding record was made possible by the company’s forward-thinking president, William Levitt, who applied assembly line production methods to home construction. Breaking the process down to 24 steps, entire blocks of homes would be constructed semi-simultaneously as subcontractors repeated each process in sequence on property after property. This method of uniform construction met the massive housing needs of post-World War II America and placed Levitt among the most wealthy and influential industrial characters of the 20th century. So astounding was his influence on architecture, many claim him to have been the inventor of U.S. suburbia.

Levitt’s obsession with uniformity, however, extended well beyond the houses he constructed. Levitt also believed that the homes’ occupants should likewise be monochromatic. In addition to his squeezing out union labor, Levitt also refused to sell his homes to ethnic minorities. Although he himself was Jewish, he believed the biggest market for his housing were white families; Levitt insisted that Caucasian buyers would never purchase a house if they knew they would have black neighbors, and so he refused to sell to Negroes. Levitt’s dedication to segregated housing was not subtle—clause 25 of the standard contract for a home in Levittown, his pioneering development on Long Island, stated that the home could not “be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.'' In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned these racial covenants as legally unenforceable, but Levitt continued to bar Negroes from purchase well into the late 1950s.  

I’m musing about Levitt’s segregated housing because his name came up in a recent commencement address. The speaker praised Levitt’s forward-thinking real estate acumen as an example of American drive and focus. The speaker went on to say that Levitt experienced a serious decline in influence and wealth because he lost his drive, pointing to Levitt’s divorce and subsequent marriage to a ‘trophy wife,’ which the speaker believed led to the demise of his real estate empire. Yet Levitt’s decline was not due to losing his drive; it was that he had sold his company in 1968 to ITT in exchange for $100 million in stock. Over the next few years Levitt used the shares' value to collateralize loans for several international business ventures. Meanwhile, ITT was involved in a bribery scandal with the Republican National Convention in 1972, and in 1973 attempted a million-dollar bribe of the CIA to install a right-wing presidential candidate in Chile (ITT was the sole owner of the telecommunications system and several right-wing newspapers in Chile). As a result, the value of Levitt’s ITT-backed leverage tanked. He found himself drowning in debt. A few years later, he was found guilty of siphoning money from the Levitt Family Foundation and fraudulent real estate contracts for a development in Florida. The judgments required Levitt to pay back the foundation and the down payments for homes that were never constructed. When Levitt died in 1992, his estate was of nominal value.

All this made me wonder why, of all the great Americans to admire, a racist real estate developer whose life ended with his reputation mired in fraud would be the example used to inspire graduates in a commencement address? Who thought that was a good idea?

Musing over our choice of heroes, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor