City Limits

Peter Coclanis from the June 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

The city thrived, says Ehrenhalt, because there were clear rules and rulers in the 1950s. However arbitrary and even unjust the rules and rulers may have been at times, they charted a more or less decent course for people to follow and, in so doing, significantly increased human happiness and reduced moral confusion and uncertainty.

Central to Ehrenhalt's main argument is the idea that we could use a lot more 1950s-style rules and maybe even rulers today. To demonstrate this point, we need only look at the human waste, the hellish schools and streets, and the "unravelled" communities in contemporary Chicago.

While well-crafted and attractive in its evocation of tight-knit neighborhoods, The Lost City is nonetheless unconvincing. It romanticizes the virtues of gemeinschaft communities while downplaying or ignoring altogether the vices of such places. It is particularly difficult to buy Ehrenhalt's key assumptions: that America in the 1990s is drowning in a sea of freedom, and that most Americans, if pressed, would both prefer and be better off with fewer choices, more clear-cut moral and social guidelines, and greater respect for authority, broadly conceived.

Indeed, it pays to be skeptical about both Ehrenhalt's assumptions regarding American values and his interpretation of history. For starters, moral responsibility is as easily eroded as instilled by power and coercion. Authoritarianism, whether exercised at the federal level or at the local-machine level (as it was practiced in Chicago during the '50s), works against community and involvement in fairly obvious ways: Individuals assume that everything is someone else's problem, that the government is taking care of it (whatever "it" might be). Top-down control also makes social organ izations less flexible and open. When order is maintained by doling out favors and patronage, new developments and newcomers are inevitably seen in negative terms. Such systems, which must ultimately crush dissent and unauthorized activity or risk being un dermined, find it almost impossible to regenerate themselves in new and different situations.

Ehrenhalt, though, clearly prefers stability over opportunity. This predilection causes him to simultaneously misrepresent the causes, effects, and pace of change . The single biggest factor causing change not just in Chicago but throughout postwar America was a booming economy that enriched most families. Relatively poorer people have a solidarity borne out of a lack of options; once they get richer, they buy more flexibility in where they shop, where they live, and who they associate with. Throughout the '50s and '60s, people poured out of cities not because of some newly developed hyperindividualism but because they could finally afford to.

The neighborhood stability Ehrenhalt romanticizes in The Lost Cityis largely an artifact of the author's method: He takes snapshots frozen in time rather than following the constantly evolving lives of individuals--and communities--over time. To some--the people who lived in Elmhurst before Chicagoans began streaming in , for example--the '50s represented not community building, but unwanted upheaval and community decline. Moreover, social transformation is often less linear and certainly less predictable than Ehrenhalt insinuates. My own neighborhood in the early and mid-'70s was not so different from what it was in the '50s. It then plummeted sharply in the late '70s and early '80s, but since then has come back strongly and is now becoming increasingly gentrified.

Bronzeville's decline since the 1950s can in some ways be viewed as a byproduct of the migration of many of its more successful denizens to more comfortable areas, and anyone who has competed against York High School's powerful (and amazingly well-supported) track and cross-country teams over the years would be hard pressed to find much evidence in Elmhurst for community dissolution and decline. Things change, then, but seldom in simple ways.

On a more abstract level, The Lost City grossly misrepresents what most of us would identify as the quintessence of the American experience. Simply put, limits do not square with our historical imagination: American individualism has always been at odds with community. Even the Pilgrims and Puritans, settlers who founded communitie s based on common goals and aspirations, soon saw their settlements riven apart by differences of opinion and inclination. In an age such as ours, one of relatively easy and affordable relocations, geographic proximity will less and less be the main factor in the creation and maintenance of community. Recent and ongoing developments in information technology will continue to allow us to reconfigure our associations so that they will more and more be predicated upon mutual benefit and satisfaction.

In general, that's a good thing, especially if the alternative is the type of community that existed in Chicago in the 1950s. The "lost city" had its virtues, to be sure, but life around Clybourn and Ashland had its dark side, too. In particular, I remember drunken ness, brutality, and rage made manifest in countless ways. Whether we're speaking of stinko fathers beating their sons with cat-o'-nine-tails or the same boys forcing neighborhood girls into sex, the ritualistic humiliation of people suspected of being gay or the often violent harassment of people who happened to be brown or black, the type of community that existed in my old neighborhood--and in countless other Chicago-area neighborhoods in the 1950s--is not necessarily something we should look to for inspiration, much less try to emulate.

Life in America in the 1990s is in many ways disgusting, even degenerate, but we shall have a better chance of addressing contemporary problems once we get over easy nostalgia and acknowledge three basic facts: Things tod ay are merely different, not worse, than they were in the 1950s; each and every era is good and bad in its own way; and there is at times an exorbitant price to pay for what we call "community."