City Limits

Peter Coclanis from the June 1996 issue

The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s, by Alan Ehrenhalt, New York: Basic Books, 310 pages, $24.00

I was born in Chicago, as the song made famous by Paul Butterfield goes, and grew up around Clybourn and Ashland, near the Tavern Pail Brewery. My neighborhood best could be described as industrial-residential, with brick two-flats, workingmen's rooming houses, and tar-shingled frames sharing space with the tanneries along the river, the Medill incinerator, big factories like Stewart-Warner and Appleton Electric, and innumerable small machine shops and tool-and-dies. Chicago's last public bath house--many houses and apartments in the neighborhood lacked tubs or showers--was loca ted on my street, Marshfield, named after Marshall Field I, who developed the area. There were three Catholic churches--St. Josephat, St. Bonaventure, and St. Alphonsus--within a few blocks of my grandparents' two-flat (we lived in the second-floor apartment), and each ran a good-sized elementary school.

As a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, I loved this neighborhood. It was a close-knit ethnic enclave populated by lots of what Michael Novak calls PIGS--Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs--and a smattering of sou thern whites, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. The only blacks lived several blocks away at the Julia Lathrop Homes, Chicago's oldest public-housing project. Mine was a union neighborhood--my father was a member of Local 753 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters--which in the 1950s and 1960s meant rising wages. The area was safe and, allowing for the usual industrial toxins and carcinogens, pretty clean.

I did well in school and, unlike most of the kids in the neighborhood, went to college and, afterward, even to graduate school. Sometime in the mid-1970s, a graduate-school friend--an Ohio bank president's son who had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate--spent a few days with me and my parents while he was in Chicago on a research trip. The main thing, really the only thing, I recall about his visit was how surprised--astonished even--he was by the street life in my neighborhood: He just couldn't get over the front-stoop sitting, small-lawn watering, handshaking, bearhugging behavior of all the Stanislaus , the Attilios, the Christos, and the Boschkos on Marshfield, each of whom we had to stop and talk to every time we made our way up or down the block. To my upper-bourgeois friend, this was a world he had never experienced or perhaps even known about, not one that he had lost.

The journalist Alan Ehrenhalt does know about this world, however, and he renders it well in his provocative new book The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s . In so doing, he issues p erhaps the strongest statement yet in behalf of the communitarian/civil society critique of what he calls the "hyperindividualism" said to be characteristic of life in America today. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that social criticism is Ehrenhalt' s main point all along. From this perspective, his portrait of Chicago in the 1950s, however careful and loving, is merely a means to an end, an attempt, as it were, to shed light on what he considers our present predicament.

Over the past 35 years, argues Ehrenhalt, hyperindividualism has caused social breakdown in the United States. Specifically, he argues, "The worship of choice has brought us a world of restless dissatisfaction, in which nothing we choose seems good enough to be permanent and we are una ble to resist the endless pursuit of new selections--in work, in marriage, in front of the television set. The suspicion of authority has meant the erosion of standards of conduct and civility, visible most clearly in schools where teachers who dare to dis cipline pupils risk a profane response. The repudiation of sin has given us a collection of wrongdoers who insist that they are not responsible for their actions because they have been dealt bad cards in life. When we declare that there are no sinners, we are a step away from deciding that there is no such thing as right and wrong."

For Ehrenhalt, the solution is a return or reactivation of a sense of moral limits, limits derived from and endorsed and upheld by vibrant neighborhood communities not unlike those that flourished (just east of Eden) in Chicago during the 1950s.

By now, of course, this sort of critique has become something of a commonplace, and licentious baby boomers wantonly pursuing unlimited choice at the expense of community, order, and authority are now objects of parody, if not obloquy in some circles. To be sure, much of the communitarian carping by the chattering classes can be dismissed summarily. Hillary Rodham Clinton's fatuous It Takes a Village comes immediately to mind in this regar d. Communitarian arguments mounted by serious social critics such as the late Christopher Lasch, Mary Ann Glendon, Robert D. Putnam, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Ehrenhalt cannot be treated similarly, for they raise truly important questions about the social and moral costs of freedom in the post-communist, vaguely Fukayamish 1990s. Furthermore, unlike some of the writers mentioned above, Ehrenhalt not only raises such questions, but also tries to answer them, in this case through empirical research in urban history.

In fact, the power of The Lost City derives in large part from a brilliant rhetorical conceit employed by the author: The book is built around detailed portraits of three distinct and distinctive Chicago-area communities in the 1950s, with brief, depressing looks at each of these communitie s again in the 1990s. Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, and author of The United States of Ambition , a well-regarded 1991 work on what might be called the American politiciate, is a gifted prose stylist, with broad sympathies and a tight story line. He also knows a thing or two about Chicago, and has chosen his target communities well.

The three areas studied reflect both the diversity of Chicago in the 1950s and the degree to which the city's diverse peoples shared certain core values, assumptions, and behaviors. To Ehrenhalt, the white, blue-collar ethnics on Chicago's southwest side, the African Americans in the teeming Bronzeville ghetto on the south side, and the middle-class whites who homest eaded in the mud-filled, tree-bare subdivisions of Elmhurst, 15 miles to the west of the Loop, differed in many ways, but not in their belief in limits, desire for order, respect for authority, and faith in community.

For the "bungalow people" of St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish on the southwest side, for example, the 1950s was about loyalty to kith and kin and about stable factory jobs, about a plethora of local institutions and about fealty to Chicago's Democratic pols. And most of all it was about acceptance of limits and limitations in a patriarchal order seemingly ordained by God.

Limits and limitations were even more apparent in Bronzeville. Indeed, there is no gainsaying the fact that most residents of this area, a city within a city really, lived economically pinched, politically squeezed, and socially and culturally constricted lives. Yet even amid the filth and squalor, Bronzeville residents, many of whom had recently migrated from the South, found reason for hope. For unlike the generally forlorn and desolate situation in the area today--several of the poorest and most socially dysfunctional census tracts in the nation are located in the area--Bronzeville was a viable community in the 1950s, replete with institutions and individuals that fostered or at least represented upward mobility.

How else, Ehrenhalt asks, can one describe a community that in the 1950s boasted institutions like the Chicago Defender, the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, and the annual Bud Billiken parade? Or remarkable p eople such as political leaders William L. Dawson and Earl Dickerson, the Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, Nat King Cole, and Lorraine Hansberry? About limits, Bronzeville residents knew much in the 1950s. They were confident, nonetheless, that with faith, resolve, and community there existed more than a touch of hope or a dash of possibility.

Hope and possibility, of course, were what the new middle-class subdivisions of Elmhurst and other Chicago suburbs were built upon. In the 1950s, however, hope and possibility were ameliorist rather than utopian concepts, and the 15-mile trek to Elmhurst didn't relieve migrants of their sense of limits and restraints, much less transform them into libertines. If Ehrenhalt suggests that suburbanization of the white bourgeoisie w as a necessary precondition for the moral chaos of our times, the process was insufficient just the same. Residents in the new subdivisions of Elmhurst valorized and promoted authority, order, limits, and conformity, albeit in different ways than did the p eople living in Bronzeville or in St. Nicholas of Tolentine. Elmhurst was a cuffed-pants, button-down town in the 1950s, not yet ready, it seems, for bell-bottom, fly-away days.

Both in Elmhurst and, even more, in the two other communities examined in The Lost City , life in the 1950s was about boundaries and constraints--"the limited life" is Ehrenhalt's preferred phrase--so unlike the let-it-all-hang-out era of gluttony and excess that in his view began in the 1960s. During the crowded years of the 1950s, there was still a rough consensus about cultural norms, public behaviors, and moral conventions, and most, though certainly not all, Chicagoans flourished as a result. Chicago--the "I will" city "that works"--thrived too, with safe streets, decent schools, and stable communities.