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Paige Glotzer, Tim Keogh. In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Suburb., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 509–510, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae624
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Levittown is one of the most well-known popular symbols of the postwar American dream—and nightmare. Tim Keogh’s must-read contribution to its prodigious historiography mainly expands on the latter. The title’s double meaning acknowledges Levittown’s prominence. In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb refers to the people and places dwarfed by the New York community’s fame and serves as an ambitious reorientation of suburban history around what that fame has obscured. In short, it has obscured suburban poverty. Keogh argues that Levittown became the physical manifestation of “suburban exceptionalism,” or the set of discourses, policies, and silences that foreclosed more egalitarian modes of living in the United States between the mid-twentieth century and the present. Under this framing, Keogh tracks how Levittown seemed incompatible with the existence of poverty, making it the model that policymakers, activists, and experts assumed could result in affluence for all Americans. They thus prioritized expanding access to the suburbs to combat social ills. However, once access became the goal, they entrenched the predatory labor, development, and lending practices that accompanied Levittown to Long Island. Keogh grounds this history of poverty with a close examination of local property records, civic and government organizations, and life stories that he traces across multiple chapters.
