After V-J Day, millions of young men and women were demobilized and thrust into civilian life without jobs or homes. Historically, demobilized armies with nowhere to go and nothing to do - no frontier country to settle or overseas colonies to rule - become dangerous armies in the street.
In the modern era, they were the brown shirts, black shirts, red guards and revolutionary mobs who stormed palaces and staged insurrections.
"After World War One", wrote Michael J. Bennett in the August 2001 issue of The American Legion Magazine, "virtually every belligerent nation other than Britain and the United States had its government overthrown by veterans". Armies in the streets in countries whose middle class had dissolved along with its lifesavings.
Without the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill), and the rise of suburbia that began with Levittown, America in the late 1940's and 50's could have become a nation of bomb-throwing radicals, militias in homemade uniforms, and demagogues able to assemble a volatile crowd like a gathering storm; manpower diverted away from creating the greatest economic dynamo in history which turned people who stood on bread lines in 1935 into middle class suburban homeowners in 1955.
Moreover, given the U.S.' role in the world as a shield against Soviet and Red Chinese expansionism and as the rebuilder of Europe and Japan, the results could have been catastrophic.
Indeed, anticipating this possible scenario, George Orwell created the historical backdrop for his Nineteen Eighty-Four by offering an alternative 1950's whereupon weaknesses wrought by the West's internal strife merely emboldened communist aggression abroad paving the way for another round of world wars and the rise of the subsequent totalitarian system by the title date.
Orwell's nightmare could have happened. However, as even William Levitt was wont to observe, no man with his own house and backyard and earning a decent family wage - things becoming more elusive in the 2010's-has the time or inclination for revolutionary struggle. Ward Cleaver didn't have it in him to become a storm trooper. He had somewhere to go and something to do and, as such, the only armies in the street were at VFW picnics and homecoming parties for the boys back from Korea. As Orwell crafted his futuristic dystopia (written in 1946 and '47), Levitt was literally pouring the foundations of a new and better future.
We cannot, in all intellectual honesty, as people whose very community was deemed the quintessential example of, blueprint for, and most celebrated example of "the American Dream", but wonder about the return of conditions hostile to intact families and stable middle class communities but favorable to armies in the street.
Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org.
