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Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) should be read as a public relations effort to dramatize the film industry's American allegiances at a volatile time in studio history.
Communists, Housing, and Hollywood. In the September 1948 issue of Harper's, real estate developer William Levitt issued his famous postwar pronouncement on the relationship between homeownership and national allegiance: "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist . . . He has too much to do."1 Levitt had a vital personal interest in his prescription for national stability through the pressures of domestic responsibility. He was angling to sell houses, thousands of them, and the feasibility of his capitalist venture depended on substantial government cooperation with materials and finaneing. Levitt delivered his assessment of the homeowner's loyalty with the force of a punchline, but the sentiment behind his remark also carried serious weight for a country concerned about the presence of Communists, the absence of adequate housing, and the possible connections between these issues.
The return of veterans, a marriage boom, and the construction hiatus during most of the Depression and war years combined to cause an unprecedented housing shortage in the aftermath of World War Ð. Declaring it the worst deficiency "since 1607 when John Smith wondered where he would spend his first night in Virginia," the editors of Fortune devoted the April 1946 issue to the housing crisis; when the situation had scarcely improved by the next year, they followed up with an article called "The Industry That Capitalism Forgot."2 They estimated that three million new homes were needed to alleviate the problem and focused on the efforts of Wilson Wyatt, Truman's newly appointed housing expediter, to stimulate the construction of single-family dwellings. Fortune reported that Americans, particularly veterans and the poor and lower middle class, "are strikingly in favor of positive government action to end the severe shortage."3 In a national survey conducted by the magazine, nearly half of those polled "went so far as to advocate government construction of homes on a large scale, a much more drastic attack on the shortage than anything Mr. Wyatt has proposed."4 While this response hardly signaled an upheaval of popular opinion in favor of socialized housing, Fortune played up...