Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design

Author(s): Sarah A. Lichtman

Source: West 86th, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011), pp. 115-118
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center
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 case studies. Anne Massey’s essay, for instance,
on the design of ocean liners, provides a detailed
exposé of the complex and collective design process
involved, while Alison Clarke’s essay, examining the
home furnishing choices of a retired couple, high-
lights the transitory nature of a domestic interior and
the way in which stylistic aspirations and biographic
memories structure its evolution. Like Clarke, Pat
Kirkham’s essay on the Eames House in Pacific
Palisades, California, also emphasizes the active
and ongoing construction of interior spaces by their
inhabitants as she analyzes the way in which the
couple used their home to entertain. In this, both
Clarke’s and Kirkham’s essays exemplify the influ-
ence of material culture studies, noted by Keeble in
his introductory essay, as the interior is viewed as a
performative setting, which is an ongoing process
requiring constant work.
What is less evident in the anthology is the
way in which material culture studies has sought to
uncover the normative practices that structure the
domestic interior.6 While Keeble suggests, correctly,
that much of this work ignores the importance
of style and aesthetics, and can tend toward a
synchronic analysis of the interior, there are some
notable examples where the demands of both are
interwoven with excellent results. Judy Attfield’s
seminal essay “Inside Pram Town: A Case Study of
Harlow House Interiors, 1951–1961,”7 for example,
explored the ways in which women responded
to “modern” open plan living and the strategies of
resistance they developed as a means to appropriate
“modernity to their own designs [my italics].”8 A little
more analysis of such “ordinary” interiors would have
been a welcome addition.
Of course an anthology must draw its
boundaries somewhere, and Designing the Modern
Interior pulls together essays that both extend
and refine existing (albeit dispersed) works of
historiographic significance as well as essays that
present new research, providing a stimulating and
authoritative introduction to the history of the
modern interior. Indeed, the quality of research—
in particular the detailed archival research—is
excellent throughout, and where the anthology is
particularly successful is in its “spatialization” of
history, which, as Sparke claims, leads to a more
complex and nuanced understanding of the subject.
This is backed up by extensive endnotes and a
114    West 86th  V 18  N 1
select bibliography that provide a rich source of
information to any student wishing to learn more.
With one hundred illustrations and an engagingly
lucid text, Designing the Modern Interior should be
essential reading for such students. While some
of the essays and issues raised might leave those
more familiar with the subject desirous of longer and
more extended analyses, this should not be read
as a criticism; rather it is an acknowledgment that
the subject of this quality work warrants further
investigation and publication.  on German and American period journals, maga-
1 Quoted in Anne Massey, Interior Design Since 1900, rev. ed.
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 161.
2 Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).
3 For example, see David Bell and Joanne Hollows, eds., Ordinary
Lifestyles: Popular Media, Consumption and Taste (Maidenhead,
UK: Open University Press, 2005).
4 Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008).
5 See, for example, Suzie Attiwill’s criticism that design history
provides inadequate analysis of the temporal and spatial nature
of interior design because it privileges the visual aspects of the
interior and views it in terms of enclosure and containment rather
than recognizing the more contingent and conceptual nature of
what an interior might be. Suzie Attiwill, “Towards an Interior
History,” IDEA Journal 1 (2004): 1–8.
6 For example, see Tony Chapman and Jenny Hockey, eds., Ideal
Homes?: Social Change and Domestic Life (London: Routledge,
1999); Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and
Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Elizabeth Shove, Matthew
Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack Ingram, eds., The Design of
Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
7 In Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, eds., A View from the Interior:
Women and Design, 2nd ed. (London: Women’s Press, 1995).
8 Judy Attfield, “Bringing Modernity Home: Open Plan Living in the
British Domestic Interior,” in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic
Space, ed. Irene Cieraad (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
1999), 73–81. A more recent work that takes up some of Attfield’s
findings is Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd’s Sentenced to
Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife (Oxford: Berg, 2004),
which—although written from the perspective of the social
sciences—examines the new “visuality of home-making” in the
postwar era through an analysis of advice literature, magazines,
and advertisements, making it highly relevant to the study of the
modern interior.
Emma Gieben-Gamal
Emma Gieben-Gamal is lecturer in design history and
visual culture at Edinburgh College of Art.
Cold War on the Home
Front: The Soft Power of
Midcentury Design
Greg Castillo
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
312pp.; 97 b/w ills.
Paper $24.95
ISBN: 9780816646920
Scholars have long recognized the centrality of the
home in Cold War discourse. They have also broad-
ened research into the Cold War by looking at design
and daily life behind the iron curtain. David Crowley,
Susan E. Reid, and others have brought the design
and material culture of the Eastern Bloc to the fore,
and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Cold
War Modern: Design, 1945–1970, curated by Crowley
and Jane Pavitt with contributions by Reid and Greg
Castillo, dedicated a significant portion of the exhibi-
tion and its catalogue to designs from Eastern Eu-
rope.1 In Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power
of Midcentury Design, architectural historian Greg
Castillo continues this trend, offering an informed
reading of the interiors and material artifacts exhib-
ited at trade fairs and exhibitions held in divided Ger-
many and elsewhere. He situates the Cold War home
and its material culture at the center of the ideological
battle between the United States and the Soviet
Union, and reinforces Beatriz Colomina’s argument
that “everything in the postwar age was domestic.”2
Castillo elaborates on the work of historian Robert
H. Haddow and expands our understanding of trade
fairs and exhibitions by breaking down the polemic of
consumerism versus communism as a Cold War con-
struct.3 In its place, he reveals the complex relation-
ship of consumption, domesticity, and midcentury
modernism with the self-representation of both the
East and the West.
As Marshall Plan organizers sought to sway for-
eign citizens with the pleasures of privatized capital-
ist consumption, Eastern Bloc governments hoped to
counter the allure through domestic displays of their
own. Castillo relies on archival materials, as well as
zines, and fiction, and convincingly applies political
scientist Joseph Nye’s dichotomy of “hard” and “soft”
power as his organizing methodology. According
to Nye, hard power controls and coerces through
overt displays and tactics, such as occupation and
trade embargos, while soft power beckons and
beguiles through intangibles, such as culture and
belief systems. The allure of soft power rests in its
capacity for appropriation and adaptation by foreign
recipients, who, while promoting their own interests,
also promote the interests of the generating nation.
For Castillo, then, the home, as exhibited throughout
the postwar period, was a “Trojan House” (p. 139) of
sorts, leading to the fateful exchange in the American
kitchen between Vice President Richard M. Nixon
and Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the 1959 American
National Exhibition in Moscow. That exchange, held
amid washing machines, hi-fi units, and other prod-
ucts of capitalist labor, Castillo argues, represented
not the inception but rather the culmination of an
ongoing ideological battle about the relative merits
of consumption. Its legacy is nothing less than the
single globalized economy we live in today.
After the Second World War, citizens of both
East and West Germany perceived the heritage of
the avant-garde as increasingly irrelevant, and even
retrograde. By the 1950s the Existenzminimum home
was replaced in the socialist East by a distrust of
modernism and an embrace of neoclassicism. In the
West, the introduction of the deutschmark and the
lifting of price controls in Marshall Plan Europe made
available, according to the latter day Werkbund, a
“false abundance” of goods and styles. With the U.S.
government locked in an increasingly bitter ideological
struggle with the Soviet Union, the home and its ma-
terial goods emerged as the offensive front lines. The
“contest between freedom and despotism,” according
to Paul G. Hoffman, a Marshall Plan administrator,
Book Reviews    115
 was “a contest between the American assembly line
and the Communist Party line” (p. 17), and through an
elaborate propaganda campaign—the largest such
campaign ever mounted during peacetime—the U.S.
government attempted to reconstruct the German
populace into a citizenry who embraced private afflu-
ence and material accumulation.
Model homes and exhibitions were a primary
means of cultivating this new group, and thus a
crucial soft-power resource. Castillo introduces
Peter G. Harden, a little known Yale-trained architect
who was stationed in Germany after the war and
was responsible for the design of many of the trade
fairs and exhibitions held over the next decade. In
1950, for example, Harden designed Berlin’s America
at Home exhibition, whose highlight was a single-
family suburban home that had been shipped from
Minneapolis as a kit of prefabricated components.
The exhibition was a success and drew an estimated
750,000 visitors, more than 50 percent of them com-
ing from East Berlin.
In Stuttgart, Germany, Edgar Kaufmann Jr.,   as a great propagandistic victory. Castillo provides
of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, oversaw the
installation of New Home Furnishings, which included
many transplanted displays from MoMA’s “Good
Design” program, a collection of allegedly affordable
and functional designs for everyday life, such as
George Nelson home furnishings and Pyrex measuring
cups. The U.S. government could not have found a
better booster for the soft power of midcentury mod-
ernism than Kaufman, who, in his 1950 manifesto
What Is Modern Design?, professed the integral rela-
tionship between design and democracy. By contrast,
in the East, the ideals of modernism ran counter to
the prevailing Stalinist doctrine of socialist realism,
a style rooted in celebrating the triumph of commu-
nism and proletarian culture. For the Eastern Bloc,
modernism represented bourgeois and U.S. capitalist
decadence, deemed detrimental to the welfare of
the socialist state. That many pioneering modernist
architects emigrated to the United States made the
association of modernism with Americanism all the
more acute. “Today, where are the architects who
represented the Bauhaus, such as Gropius, Mies van
der Rohe, Martin Wagner and others?” asked Kurt
Liebknecht, director of the Bauakademie in East Berlin.
“They are in America; they seem to like it there” (p. 52).
In 1953 the East struck back with Live Better—
More Beautifully, a conference and exhibition held in
116    West 86th  V 18  N 1
East Berlin. Initiating what Castillo calls “a cross-
border dialogue transacted in the language of exhibi-
tions” (p. 96), the installations represented styles
rooted in German vernacular traditions with gothic,
baroque, and neoclassical antiques, intermingled
with thirty new suites of neotraditional furniture.   impressive crowds as well, demonstrating the ap-
The exhibition also included a “Chamber of Horrors”
consisting of photographs of modernist interiors
ranging from a 1927 Weissenhof housing interior by
Mart Stam to Knoll’s Manhattan showroom.
By the mid-1950s Soviet Bloc nations increasingly
participated in foreign exhibitions, which, with their
hard-power displays of satellites and nuclear-powered
vessels, portrayed communism as technologically
and economically advanced. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, who recognized the importance of hard
as well as soft power—even if Congress did not—
turned instead to private enterprise to fund federal
propaganda and promote the American way of life,
culminating in the 1959 American National Exhibition
in Moscow. Many Americans celebrated the exhibition
a compelling, soft-power alternative reading to
American triumphalism, pointing out that it was the
Kremlin itself that invited the Americans to their
capital city. Occurring on the heels of Khrushchev’s
ambitious plan to reformulate Stalinist ideology
by, among other things, prioritizing private over
public space, Castillo suggests that the invitation
was part of a larger ideological plan by Khrushchev
to plunder the resources of consumer modernity
and send a wake-up call to under-producing Soviet
manufacturers. The new mass-produced apartments,
whose modern style provided an aesthetic rebuke to
Stalinist socialist realism, would not only increase
privacy and radically transform Soviet daily life but
also, by necessity, increase the production and
consumption of household goods. “The Kremlin,”
Castillo argues, “deliberately parted the iron
curtain in the USSR’s national interest” (p. 164).
Khrushchev’s seven-year plan for 1959–65 asserted
that the USSR would surpass the West in productivity
and even distribute certain basic consumer goods
free of charge by 1980. So when Khrushchev taunted
Nixon at the exhibition, declaring, “As we pass you
by, we’ll wave ‘hi’ to you,” he predicted, incorrectly of
course, that the very success of the United States
would serve as the catalyst for the USSR’s own, even
greater triumph.
Castillo perhaps could have better contextu-
alized the popularity of Berlin’s America at Home
exhibition by noting that similar exhibitions in the
United States, such as MoMA’s House in the Garden
(1949–55) or the Case Study Houses (1945–62), drew
petite for new ways of living in the postwar period.
Women were often featured in such exhibitions on
both sides of the iron curtain, frequently cast in the
role of domestic guardians and highlighting the deep
patriarchal ideology pervading exhibitionary strate-
gies. Castillo touches on these ideas through the
dichotomous figures of the model housewife, as pre-
sented in exhibitions, and the worker-activist, fasci-
natingly represented by the daring Marianne Brose,
the protagonist of Theo Harych’s novel Stalinallee.
He could have deepened his discussion here, how-
ever, by drawing out women’s roles in the ideological
construction of the Cold War consumer. Describing a
model housewife at the 1952 U.S.-sponsored Berlin
exhibition We’re Building a Better Life, Castillo relates
how consumption transformed the traditional Ger-
man housewife into a subversive agent. “Beneath the
apron, pinned up braids, and Kaffee-Klatch charm,”
he writes, “lurked a cultural revolutionary” (p. 78).   time. Looked at another way, the Model Apartment
A personification of capitalist commodification in the
West and “rational consumption” in the East, women,
as Susan E. Reid has shown, occupied a central and
powerful position in the discourse over consumption
and domesticity.4
Women also acted as the face of the 1959
American National Exhibition. Pat Nixon and Nina
Petrovna Khrushchev both adorned the cover of Life
magazine, reenforcing women’s centrality in pro-
jecting the exhibition’s message. Castillo mentions
Barbara Sampson, the “demonstration lady” in the
General Foods/Birds Eye kitchen, as well as Helena
Rubenstein, whose beauty parlors were responsible
for making over Soviet visitors. It would have been
helpful, however, if Castillo had also discussed the
many other roles of women at the exhibition. The
women who acted as hostesses, modeled fashions,
and disseminated information as one of the so-called
girl guides (clad in polka-dot shirtwaist dresses, hats,
and gloves) also worked in acceptably feminine jobs,
occupying a central yet gendered role. These smiling,
attractive women contrasted with their Soviet coun-
terparts, as reported by the U.S. press at the time,
which derided Moscow as a large city of “hard-work-
ing women who show few of the physical charms of
women in the West.”5 Relying on modern appliances
rather than on sledgehammers to get their job done,
American women could spend their time tending to
the more “feminine” pursuits of beauty and fashion
so lacking in the lives of their Soviet counterparts.
Contradicting this ideal woman at the exhibition
was Lucia DeRespinis, a designer working in George
Nelson’s office who was responsible for the design
and furnishing of the Model Apartment, a modernist
space all but forgotten by the Soviet and American
press and by future historians. Castillo notes that
while the Soviet media excoriated the Model Home,
a suburban ranch, in the United States it received a
resounding welcome, touring the country and even
appearing on the roof of Macy’s department store in
San Francisco. In both countries, however, the Model
Apartment remained largely absent from the exhibi-
tion discourse, an off-limits topic that in the Soviet
Union could perhaps draw unwelcome comparisons
to the small, ill-equipped apartments under Khrush-
chev’s new plan. Why, though, was the Model Apart-
ment also overlooked at home? Perhaps this was the
result of the bias in favor of suburban living at the
also highlights the intersection of gender and work
during the Cold War. After the liberation of wartime
work, many women found themselves confronted by
societal pressure to resume “traditional” domestic
roles. Viewed as threatening and neurotic, ambitious
women suffered heightened professional scrutiny.6
At the exhibition, then, DeRespinis’s identity as
a woman negated her professional identity as an
interior designer, placing her within larger cultural
stereotypes that affiliated women with home and
wifely duties. As designer of the Model Apartment,  
DeRespinis represented an “acceptable” working
woman, much the way Pat Nixon or the fashion models
did. Historians have demonstrated the gendered
nature of design in the twentieth century, and how
interior design in particular, informed by nineteenth-
century assumptions about morality and taste, and
rooted in Catherine Beecher’s separate spheres,
emerged as an acceptable “feminine” occupation.7
By locating DeRespinis within the everyday feminine
culture of domesticity, the press marginalized the
design of the Model Apartment and transformed
DeRespinis from professional designer into amateur
decorator, underscoring an essentialist belief in a
Book Reviews    117
 feminine predisposition toward decoration and the
decorative.8
As the battle over the new consumer wore on,
government and party officials continued to use
midcentury modernism as a stylistic barometer of
taste and values. By the late 1950s Soviet and East-
ern European designers had rehabilitated the style,
infusing it with a socialist sensibility rooted in the
vernacular. East German periodicals poked fun at the
Nierentisch, or “kidney style,” of Western midcentury
excess and degradation rooted in exaggerated or-
ganic shapes. “There certainly are places in the world
where the meaningless is modern,” declared Kultur
im Heim, “but the German Democratic Republic is
not one of them” (p. 181). Yet despite the supposed
cultural superiority of the GDR, its attempts to create
enlightened socialist consumers faltered. Eastern
Bloc production could not match consumer desire or
demand, leaving many disenchanted. As one visitor
wrote in the comment book for the 1961 Art Into Life!
exhibition, held the same year that the Berlin wall
would be erected, “Do we still have to live in Potemkin
villages from Catherine’s time? . . . Simply so offen-
sive it could make you weep” (p. 204).
In the end, then, soft power prevailed: do-
mestic consumption sounded the death knell for
communism. But, as Castillo convincingly argues,
its demise was self-inflicted; “the poison pill was
willingly ingested” (p. 206). Cold War on the Home
Front resoundingly confirms David Crowley and Jane
Pavitt’s assertion that “design was not a marginal
aspect of the Cold War but central—both materi-
ally and theoretically—to the competition over the
future.”9 Castillo’s book also offers a caution about
the continued potency of soft power and its legacy of
accelerated consumption and material excess in the
United States today.
In 1960, Eisenhower delivered a prescient com-
mencement address admonishing graduates to re-
flect not on the opportunities but rather on the con-
sequences that a decade of unprecedented growth
and prosperity had wrought on the United States.
“Freedom,” he declared, “is imperiled where peoples,
worshipping material success, have become emptied
of idealism. Peace with justice cannot be attained . . .
where opulence has dulled the spirit” (p. 207). Some
fifty years later, with a citizenry increasingly unable
to pay their debts and many former dream homes in
foreclosure, Warren Susman’s question, “Did success
118    West 86th  V 18  N 1
spoil the United States?,” is increasingly relevant
and confirms that the soft power of Cold War design
packed a very hard punch.10
1 Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism:
Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford:
Berg, 2000); David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Socialist
Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford: Berg,
2002); Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ed., Borders of Socialism: Private
Spheres of Soviet Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, eds., Cold War Modern: Design,
1945–1970 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2008).
2 Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Brennan, and Jeannie Kim, eds.,
Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit
to Playboy (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 12.
See also Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families
in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Beatriz
Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2007); Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachman, eds., Cold War Kitchen:
Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009).
3 Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American
Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1997).
4 Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the
De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under
Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 212.
5 May, Homeward Bound, 19.
6 William H. Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff, eds., A History of Our Time:
Readings on Postwar America, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 224; Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were:
American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books,
1992), 161; Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Modern
Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947).
7 Pat Kirkham and Lynne Walker, “Women Designers in the USA,
1900–2000,” in Pat Kirkham, ed., Women Designers in the USA,
1900–2000: Diversity and Difference (New York: Bard Graduate
Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, in association with Yale
University Press, 2000), 62.
8 On how these assumptions affected women entering the
interior design profession, see Pat Kirkham and Penny Sparke,
“‘A Woman’s Place . . .’: Women Interior Designers, 1900–1950,” in
Kirkham, Women Designers in the USA, 305.
9 David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, “Introduction,” in Crowley and
Pavitt, eds., Cold War Modern, 14.
10 Warren Susman, with the assistance of Edward Griffin, “Did
Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar
America,” in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics
in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Sarah A. Lichtman
Sarah A. Lichtman is assistant professor of design history
and design studies in the School of Art and Design History
and Theory at Parsons The New School for Design.
Second Suburb:
Levittown, Pennsylvania
Edited by Dianne Suzette Harris
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
448pp.; 166 b/w ills.
Cloth $45.95
ISBN: 9780822943891
In Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, in
which the doomed Frank Wheeler and his young wife,
April, become castaways in a Connecticut commuter
town, the suburbs stand for the chilling suffocation
of newlywed dreams. For a later generation watch-
ing Kevin and Winnie in The Wonder Years (1988–93),
television’s nostalgic re-creation of the 1960s, the
suburbs must have seemed like the fulfillment of the
American Dream. What both evocations reveal, how-
ever, is the extent to which postwar suburbia became
a foil for the exploration of popular culture, family,
and the individual almost at its birth. In Second Sub-
urb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, Dianne Harris has cul-
tivated a similar narrative richness to these fictional
accounts of planned communities without losing
purchase on the scholarly necessities of meticulous
research and detailed presentation. Harris and her
contributors have collated a wealth of primary visual
sources, oral histories, and contextual case studies
centered on Pennsylvania’s Levittown.
Built between 1952 and 1958 as the second of
five sister housing tracts, these seventeen thousand
suburban homes were based on the first development  illustrate Levittown at a range of scales, from the
in Long Island, New York. Housing models named
“Jubilee” and “The Rancher” were sited within thirty
miles of Philadelphia, but the suburb existed less
as a commuter town than as a residence for migrant
steelworkers employed at the nearby U.S. Steel mill.
Although it was staunchly white in its racial demo-
graphic, there existed a mixture of blue collar and
white collar amid the young families putting their
first foot on the ladder of home ownership. When
building in Pennsylvania began at the close of opera-
tions in Long Island, William Levitt and Sons was
already a household name, known as the largest post–
World War II home developer. As Richard Longstreth
remarks in his contribution to Second Suburb, a sat-
isfyingly comprehensive history of Levitt’s company
and its relation to postwar planning, the building
merchant was an excellent self-publicist who was
“quoted in a stunning array of product advertisements,
and featured in magazines of almost every descrip-
tion. . . . No one did more to satisfy the market for
single-family houses than William Levitt” (p. 174).
Second Suburb is a seminal resource because
Harris plays generous host when inviting contributors 
from a range of disciplines. The book contributes to
the growing literature on postwar mass housing by
underlining the important sociocultural role these
tracts play as repositories for the historical treat-
ment of race, gender, and consumer habits, while
also highlighting what service this interdisciplinary
approach can do for the historiography of the home.
Harris devotes the first half of the book to two sub-
stantial essays from authors who look at Levittown
“from the inside.” Sociologist Chad Kimmel, who grew
up in Levittown and wrote his 2004 doctoral disser-
tation on his birthplace, collates oral histories that
are both informative and pleasurable to read. Daisy
D. Myers’s essay is excerpted from her 2005 memoir
and relates her family’s experience as the first black
residents in the previously segregated development.
Her story is compelling, chronicling an important yet
less-known moment in civil rights history in the form
of the race riot that erupted outside her Levittown
home in 1957. Bill Griffith’s cartoon strip Zippy the
Pinhead, a document of his disaffected youth in the
Levittown suburb in Long Island, provides a fitting
coda to this section.
Following the first half of the book, Harris
has included over forty pages of photographs “to
macro scale of the development itself to the micro
Book Reviews    119