IN SEARCH OF LOST CITIES

Contemplating the 1950s, the same cynic could rejoin with, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of race prejudice, fairly open anti-Semitism, the suppression of women, and sexual repression.” But Alan Ehrenhalt, who has written an excellent book on the virtues of that complex decade, isn’t likely to avail himself of that rejoinder. Nor, as someone who came of age during the decade — I was 13 when it began and a married man of 23 when it ended — am I.

“Insufficiently thrilling” is perhaps the first of many raps against the 1950s. People who went to university in those years were known as “the silent generation” and were deemed apolitical — clearly, it was thought, a marked deficiency. The formal, the reserved, the socially nervous (in popular sociology, the stick figures of the day were known as the “organization men,” the “other-directed,” the “status seekers”) everywhere predominated, or so it was believed. Dwight David Eisenhower was president of the United States for eight of the decade’s years; he twice defeated crushed is more precise — Adlai Stevenson, intellectually perhaps the most attractive candidate for the presidency in this century. And let us not forget Senator Joseph McCarthy and the good ole boy from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Those were the days, my friend, we though! they’d never end . . . and many people are pleased they did.

“Allen Ginsberg thinks of those years as a liberating time,” Gore Vidal writes of the 1950s in his recent memoirs. “I don’t. I remember only conformity and fear and silence.” Finding oneself in even partial agreement with Allen Ginsberg or Gore Vidal, even when the two disagree, a thoughtful person will wish to reconsider his position and find yet a third place for himself. In my own view, the 50s was neither a liberating nor a frightening time. It was instead a comfortable and rather pleasingly boring time. Life had not become so politicized — and hence so divided — as it now is. It was a time of cultural seriousness. The word “lifestyle” had not yet come into play; people were content merely to have — and live — lives.

In intellectual circles, a key 1950s word was “community.” It gave the title to Percival (brother to Paul) Goodman’s book, Communitas. The attraction of socialism for intellectuals was in part bound up in the notion of community — the community of man and all that, which would come together only when capitalism was defeated. But then, intellectuals have always been keen for community, chiefly because they seem, by their very natures, unable genuinely to share in it. Community tends, I fear, to be a little like sex, in that those who talk most about it probably experience it least.

Ehrenhalt’s The Lost City (Basic Books, 310 pages, $ 24) is about people who didn’t talk all that much about community, but knew it in their daily lives. His book carries the word community in its lengthy subtitle: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s. He remarks that the people who most disliked life in the 50s — academics, intellectuals, certain artists, disaffected radicals — have been allowed to write its history, and much of what they wrote sets out to prove that the good things about the decade “were a mirage.” He thinks otherwise. He believes that the major themes of the time were contentment and stability, at least for the majority of Americans who lived through it. In his view, ” majorities, however unfashionable or inarticulate, have a right to be heard.” The Lost City, in good part, represents these majorities. Ehrenhalt’s is history from the bottom up, as the left-wing academics have long wanted it, but without being a tale of victimization, which isn’t what they have in mind at all.

The Lost City is a book that I read with the added pleasure of having known at first hand many of the things Ehrenhalt has written about. To the old vaudevillian question, “Vas ya dere, Charlie?,” I can resoundingly reply, “Yep.” This puts me in a position to certify that, in his many details, Ehrenhalt has got things dead-on right. Much of his book fixes on the year 1957. The author was himself 10 years old at the time. Richard Daley pere was in city hall, Ernie Banks was at shortstop in Wrigley Field, a bruiser named Rick Casares was the main man in the Bears backfield, Sophia Loren was the great movie sex goddess (for me she still is), the top-selling record album was Nat “King” Cole’s Loving You, and all was right with the world.

Ehrenhalt writes that “there is a longing, among millions of Americans reaching middle age, for a sense of community that they believe existed during their childhood and does not exist now.” The search for what had made communities so vibrant in 1950s Chicago is at the heart of Ehrenhalt’s project in The Lost City. Many things made for the social cohesion that goes by the name of community, and high on the list among them was the authority of leadership and the two-way loyalty that was at the center of the relationships between leaders and followers. Chicago was dominated by strong leadership: Mayor Daley in city government, the Catholic Church in education and morals, parents in the home.

The city in those days was so firmly stratified as to be a sociologist’s dream, a congeries of neighborhoods as isolated from one another as islands. A boy sociologist myself in those days, if I knew the neighborhood in which you lived in Chicago, I could have told you your ethnic group, religion, family income (roughly), whether you ate in the dining room or kitchen, and whether your old man came to table in a suit jacket or undershirt. Every neighborhood in those years was a little village, and, when young, one left the village only on rare occasions: to visit relatives, to go to a ballgame, to see a physician for an ailment requiring a specialist, to look at the grand Christmas decorations at Marshall Field’s in the Loop, or to catch a stage show at the Chicago or Woods theaters. For the rest, the neighborhood contained everything one needed. In those days, ask a Chicagoan where he lived and after naming his neighborhood, he would invariably add either the nearest public park or, if he were Catholic, as a vast part of the city’s denizens were, his parish.

Ehrenhalt describes life in a working-class neighborhood on the city’s Southwest Side dominated by St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church; in Elmhurst, a newly expanded suburb west of the city; and in Bronzeville, the section of the city’s South Side where Negroes (as the dignified name then was) predominated. His richest material is about St. Nick’s parish and its surrounding neighborhood. So specific is it that” it feels less like historical sociology than like memoir, causing one to wonder if Ehrenhalt himself didn’t grow up in the neighborhood. He has its quotidian rhythms by heart (in the deepest sense): the comings and goings, the meals, the life on the porch stoop, the games in the alley, the corner bar, the deposit of pay checks on Fridays at the savings and loan.

In the 50s, people believed in the seriousness of sin, the formation of character, and the importance of posterity. It is not certain that most people believe any longer in these things, so crucial to the way Americans once lived. Things came apart, the center did not hold. Why? Ehrenhalt’s answer is a complex one, but, put briefly, it is that people preferred choice over cohesion, and now we live with the consequences. In the matter of neighborhood bars, banks, butchers, and other shops, for example, market forces have ripped them up and buried them. For all its many virtues — the best of all lousy economic systems — capitalism is no respecter of either tradition or community. And as Ehrenhalt notes: “The difference between the 1950s and the 1990s is to a large extent the difference between a society in which the market forces challenged traditional values and a society in which they have triumphed over them.”

Not least among those market forces are the ones that sent women out to work and thereby radically changed family life. In St. Nick’s parish in the 50s, mothers were always home to keep watch over children in the streets, to prepare organized meals, to ensure respect for working fathers. The Church backed these arrangements up every way. In its clubs and sodalities and innumerable charitable organizations, it also gave people a social life. A nun in her classroom was an authority from whom no appeal was possible. A priest was a minor monarch. The Church, as women in James T. Farrell novels used to say, was “the grand thing.”

The neighborhood life, to be sure, was not everybody’s bowl of borscht. Some found it suffocating, and wanted out, desperately. When I began teaching at a Midwestern university in 1974, my best students were almost all Catholic- educated, and the majority of them had a strong grudge against what they had been put through. Yet they could write English prose, many of them knew Latin, and they could argue well. Much that was unusual and interesting about them was owed to their upbringing in Catholicism, from which they earnestly wanted to free themselves.

The loss of authority of the Church itself is emblematic of the slippage that, in Ehrenhalt’s view, is behind the loss of community in the Southwest Side neighborhood he describes in such fond detail. And behind this slippage of authority is the demand for choice. Authority makes demands: of loyalty, of commitment to standards, of constancy. “People,” Ehrenhalt writes of the 50s, “stayed married to their spouses, to their political machines, to their baseball teams.” Choice shuns all that. Choice advises one to stay loose, keep one’s options open, travel light, never forget one’s first commitment is to the self. You are Number One.

As a doctrine, choice was already finding expression in the writing of academics and intellectuals, who were sounding the clarion call against one of the decade’s great straw men, “conformity.” For those people who might be thought to conform — the parishioners of St. Nick’s, the white-collar workers and middle-managers who bought new homes in the suburb of Elmhurst — conformity was not a real issue. They had, after all, come through the gray years of the Depression, followed hard upon by World War II. For them, the conformist 50s were a time, as Ehrenhalt writes, “when life as it was seemed so much better than life as it might have been.”

For the rest of us, even the conformity, in retrospect, was useful, for it gave us something to run away from. Nor, in making our run, did we have to dye our hair purple and pierce three earrings through our pupiks. Bohemianism had not yet become pandemic. Art was still a matter of passion and seriousness, not all left-wing politics and gaudy performance. And an impressive roster of first-class artists, genuine non-conformists, still walked the earth; in literature alone, Frost, Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hemingway, and Nabokov were not only extant but productive. In other words, there was not only something to run away from but something to run toward. And, astonishing to report, in the 1950s, even the artists, as you will note from the roster of names just mentioned, were adults, fully fledged, not pony-tailed old guys in denim.

The most controversial part of Ehrenhalt’s book is doubtless his section on the Bronzeville community. The 1950s was not a banner decade for blacks. Still a heavily segregated city, Chicago was even more firmly segregated then. Not only were there no places outside black neighborhoods where blacks with money could live, but a white person had to scramble to find a restaurant to which he could take a black friend or acquaintance. At Riverview, the city’s great amusement park, our Coney Island, there was a concession at which, for half a dollar, one was given three lumpy baseballs to throw at a round target attached to a lever that, when released, would drop a black man sitting on a swing into a of tub of water. To stimulate business, blacks who had this extraordinary job became expert at taunting passing whites. Such was one emblem of race relations in Chicago in the 50s.

But Ehrenhalt maintains that within black neighborhoods there was powerful social cohesion, much more so than today. A strong newspaper, the Chicago Defender, stood guard over local conniving. Living conditions were crowded, usually dreary into the bargain, but there was a community life nonetheless, chiefly lived through the churches, whose ministers were men of genuine (here’s that word again) authority. Bronzeville businesses — restaurants and nightclubs, insurance, even numbers-running — were authentically local institutions.

Some of the world’s most wretched public housing — the notorious Robert Taylor Homes — all but destroyed the neighborhoods of Bronzeville. In the ironic way of progress, minimal integration finished the job. When successful blacks could find a way but of their old neighborhoods so as be able to bring up their children in safety, they took it and cut out — and who can blame them? — leaving behind people increasingly defined by their problems.

One step forward, two steps back. Integration dealt a death-blow to community in blick neighborhoods; women’s liberation takes women out of their homes, gives many among them vaunted self-esteem, and along the way helps loosen the bonds that held families together; the birth-control pill is invented, sex education is taught in the schools, censorship is eliminated, and, poof!, illegitimate pregnancy and rape increase. Mike that three steps back for every step forward.

Ehrenhalt’s pages on the somewhat bland suburb of Elmhurst are perhaps his most predictable, but here, too, his story is one of rise followed by a rather sad fall. Many of the people who moved to Elmhurst in the 50s were fleeing the blacks who were then beginning to take over the West Side of Chicago. But quite as many were seeking the tranquillity that the suburbs, with their practically nonexistent crime rates, offered as well as what seemed the more expansive life that more roominess promised. To have a son playing in the backfield of the York High School football team, to have a daughter who was a cheerleader, to be oneself a Jaycee, and one’s wife a potent member of the PTA, all this seemed, for a time, very like heaven.

It didn’t turn into hell, but in time the bright colors of this dream, too, wore away and became drab. Dr. Spock, whose famous book on child rearing did a great deal to undermine authority in family life, was no help. Neither was the phenomenon of the working mother. Off at a full-time job, she couldn’t be expected either to watch her children or to do volunteer work for those organizations in churches and schools that could have created a sense of community in these new areas.

In Ehrenhalt’s view, we have exalted choice over all other possibilities in American life, and because of this we have repealed a bargain that was central not only to the middle class but to nearly everyone in America. “The bargain provided us with communities that were, for the most part, familiar and secure; stable jobs and relationships whose survival we did not need to worry about in bed at night; rules that we could live by, or, when we were old enough, rebel against; and people known as leaders who were trusted with the task of seeing that the rules were enforced.”

One can feel Ehrenhalt’s longing for the older life, even though he knows all its flaws, foibles, and lack of freedoms. He also knows that he cannot have it back. He studies the past chiefly for what it can tell us about how we got to where we are. He is not a true reactionary, such as Evelyn Waugh, who refused to vote again for the Tories because, he declared, after eight years in office that they hadn’t turned back the clock one minute.

One wishes one could feel even as qualifiedly hopeful as Ehrenhalt is about future generations recapturing something of the better qualities of the past. He reminds us that the solid achievements of the Victorians followed the let- ‘er-rip spirit of the Romantics, with the generation of the 1960s standing in this analogy for the Romantics. He asks if it isn’t possible that the generation raised under the new regime, with all its dissatisfactions, will ” be tempted to move, in its early adult years, toward a reimposition of order and stability, even at the risk of losing something of the choice and personal freedom its parents worshiped?” He ends his book by saying that to eliminate this possibility is to deny the “natural desire of any generation to . . . correct the errors and excesses of the one before.”

Would it were so. The more pessimistic among us may be more struck by Ehrenhalt’s observation that “there is no real majority culture to rebel against. . . . We have not only lost the ability to enforce standards of conduct but we have lost any clear sense of what standards we would wish to enforce.”

For now, though, the best one can say about this earnest and useful book, written without a scintilla of snobbery, is that it reminds us that the past can be a very nice place to visit, and it’s a damn shame one can’t live there.

Jospeh Epstein is the author, most recently of With My Trousers Rolled.