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Faculty Book Recommendations[There is much discussion today in public discourse about the concept of "community"--its definition, its importance, its attainability, and, inevitably, whether we really had more of it in earlier decades. This book looks back at the concept of community in the 1950's, and while it focuses on Chicago, it can be generalized to cover all of America. The author devotes the major parts of his study to three slices of Chicago society: the "Parish," a Catholic bungalow neighborhood that made up St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish; the "Ghetto," the strictly segregated South Side black neighborhood then known as Bronzeville; and the "Suburb," the boomtown of Elmhurst, ten miles west of Chicago. Ehrenhalt neither scorns the 1950's nor uncritically praises them. Instead, he analyzes the elements of community that distinguished post-war America--"stable relationships, civil classrooms, safe streets"--and concludes that they all come at a price: "The price is limits on the choices we can make as individuals." As with so much of life, a giant trade-off is at work, what Ehrenhalt calls "the implicit bargain." His book asks, "What was it really like to live under the terms of that bargain? Would we ever want to do that again?"]
11 People just stayed married in the 1950s, to their spouses, to their political machines, to their baseball teams. Corporations also stayed married--to the communities they grew up with. 12 If it is true to say of 1950s America that it was a world of limited choices, it is also fair to call it a world of lasting relationships. 17 There is a longing among millions of Americans now reaching middle age, for a sense of community that they believe existed during their childhoods and does not exist now. 18 Authority and community have in fact unraveled together, but few mourn the passing of authority. 21 We don't want the 1950s back. What we want is to edit them....But there is no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved. Every dream we have about re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a pipe dream in the end. 23 To worship choice and community together is to misunderstand what community is all about. 24 In the 1950s, however, a whole array of social institutions still stood outside the grip of the market and provided ordinary people with a cushion against it. In the last generation, as Alan Wolfe and others have eloquently pointed out, that cushion has disappeared. The difference between the 1950s and the 1990s is to a large extent the difference between a society in which market forces challenged traditional values and a society in which they have triumphed over them. 26 ...the cultural images that come down to us as history are written, in large part, by the dissenters....I am not arguing with the accuracy of any of those individual memories. But our collective indignation makes little room for the millions of people who took the rules seriously and tried to live up 27 to them, within the profound limits of human weakness. 29 If one marker that sets off America today from America a generation ago is our attitude toward choice, then another is our attitude toward physical space. 31 In many ways, the hyperindividualism that characterizes the baby-boom generation is a reaction to the close quarters in which its members grew up during the 1950s. One of the first things 32 we will learn is just how different the adults of the 1950s really were--not only on the outside but in their perceptions of the world and in their deepest personal values....And they believed in one other important idea that has been lost in the decades since: they believed in the existence of sin. The Chicago of the 1950s was a time and place in which ordinary people lived with good and evil, right and wrong, sins and sinners, in a way that is almost incomprehensible to most of us on the other side of the 1960s moral deluge. 36 The baby-boom generation has taken pains to provide its children with complex societal explanations for virtually all forms of human misfortune. 38 But that there was such a thing as sin, and that it applied to individual people in their everyday lives, was a core belief that the Chicagoans and Americans of the 1950s largely held, and that we have largely lost. 44 [Richard Daley was] an icon of raw, unchecked authority. 48 What was truly unsettling was the graft that was paid simply for the privilege of doing things that were legal. 50 It is in the courts and the electoral system that even the most sympathetic student of the Daley years, four decades later, has to stop and say that something was really wrong. 53 What is indisputable is that Daley was a man who thought about good and evil, who absorbed strict standards of right and wrong from his religious upbringing and applied them to the people he dealt with in personal life. 74 Tranquilizers are more than just a medication; they are part of the culture....It isn't the volume of our drinking; it's the curious way in which so many of us are growing obsessed with it,... 76 Of course, there is another convenient, if perhaps equally addictive, medium of escape from the tensions of modern life: television. 77 All three networks employ censors to judge the appropriateness of regular programming,... 78 America seems to be perched uneasily this summer [1957] between prohibition and tolerance...befuddled about just where the line should be drawn but determined to draw it somewhere. 80 The hankering after role models, whether Charles Van Doren, Pat Boone, or Elvis Presley, reveals the depth to which America is worried about its young people. 85 But what they [St. Nick's parish] fear most in the world is disorder--any set of events that threatens the hard-won lower-middle-class lives that seem to them not only precious but very fragile.
100 ...establishments that based their livelihood on personal relationships....101..a big trust factor 103 All this communalism clearly had its bad points. Corruption was the most notable among them. 104 Here [Nabisco] the social balance sheet is fairly easy to draw up: on the one hand, steady jobs, lifetime work, opportunities for friends and relatives, camaraderie on the mixing line; on the other hand, a set of union leaders who were robbing the membership blind....no shortage of authority. It was merely that the authority was crooked....If you ask modern factory workers whether they would rather be victims of old-time personal labor corruption or modern market economics, they waste little time in nominating the market as the more terrifying evil by far. 109 Ulcers, juvenile delinquency, the threat of nuclear war--all of these were minor themes. The major themes were stability and confidence. 110 But what standard are we measuring postwar America against?...Has there ever been a society that provided prosperity, opportunity, and optimism on an equal basis? Is equality of discontent somehow preferable to a stable and comforting middle-class majority culture with blind spots? In drawing up our balance sheet for 1950s America, we need to examine the holes in its assumptions of contentment. But that the contentment was real--and widespread--is a truth that needs to be remembered as well. Majorities, however unfashionable or inarticulate, have a right to be heard. It is not the place of the historian or the critic to mock the comforts of ordinary people. 112 For the parishioner, there was no participation, no individuality, no choice. 119 By 1957, the Catholic Church was already in the midst of change, and the center of all this change and intellectual ferment was the archdiocese of Chicago. 123 A fair number of Chicago parishes actually operated this way in the 1950s, with a saintly monsignor serving the spiritual needs of the congregation and a tough disciplinarian below him making the trains run on time. 128 The core of education in these schools was not teaching children to think independently. It was teaching them to execute--to acquire the discipline to do things in the right way. 132 In the revolutionary aftermath of Vatican II, a whole literary genre grew up around memories of Catholic education...133 the single most powerful piece of this genre, and by far the best known, is Christopher Durang's play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You...134 There is no point-by-point rebuttal to be made to this indictment of 1950s parish Catholicism. There is only the observation that history has been written, in this case, almost entirely by the discontented.
140 'It was economically poor, but spiritually and socially rich. People had hope that things would be better.' 143 The incidents of hospital bias, police harassment, and school inequity pointed up just how indifferent Jim Crow was to class distinctions in the 1950s: having money was simply no help in these situations. The problem that united everyone in the black community--wealthy, working class, and poor--was housing. 147 Our concern here, however, is not what the [public housing] projects created; it is what they helped to destroy. Under all of Bronzeville's challenges, a whole network of institutions grew up and faced the task of bringing hope, comfort, and meaning to ghetto life. 150 'People in order to survive have to create institutions. The things the Defender [local newspaper] created and sustained were vital to the health of the community.' 152 ...thriving Bronzeville nightclub and entertainment scene 153 ...for ordinary working people 157 It is easy to forget, forty years later, just how many successful black-owned businesses there were in Chicago....'Business,' as Dempsey Travis says, 'was the pillar of optimism.' 161 Increasingly, the issue for blacks was not so much where they could work but how far they would be allowed to rise once they were there. The...Democratic political machine....was the largest employer in the community. 164 The Bronzeville policy games, the illegal gambling industry...created almost as many jobs for South Side blacks as the Democratic machine did....167 Policy was mass entertainment, a form of theater for the poor that cost only a dime to buy into....it did represent hope....it generated genuine leaders. 170 Bronzeville was a community that thought about things in moral terms, in the language of good and evil. 174 Of all the Bronzeville social institutions of the 1950s, the churches were the most uniformly successful and self-reliant....177 the status of the ministers as figures of authority and respect was not really in doubt. 187 ...the decline of those institutions [business, entertainment, churches] is a genuine loss from which it has been very difficult to recover. 188 Bronzeville's leaders were doing what leaders in any community are supposed to do: maintain a set of institutions that can give a semblance of order and stability to life.
194 ...the magic word in suburban home sales: family. 196 Nearly all the men were World War II veterans, many were beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill, and most had bought their homes with little or no money down on V.A. mortgages. Nearly forty years later, these are the people who insist with little prompting that the 1950s were their favorite time of life. 197 The new suburbanites were not fleeing community...they believed, with the faith of the 1950s, that community was something they could simply re-create in the place they were moving to....Authority was something else again....we will remember these suburbs more accurately if we think of them another way: as places where natural authority was eroding, in a new and unfamiliar world in which rules were difficult to enforce, and where adults invoked it hesitantly, less certain than in the old days of just what the rules were. 204 By 1957, the split-level home had become a national icon for middle-class aspirations to luxury. 206 ...reflected the values and aspirations of postwar America....In erasing the physical boundaries of the house, what did they do to the boundaries among the people who lived there? 208 Raise children in surroundings that deliberately play down the importance of boundaries and privacy; raise them at the same time to be proud of their individual identities and specialness; and it should be no surprise if you end up decades later with middle-aged adults talking endlessly about 'personal space' and sustaining publications with names like Self magazine. 210 It was, the critics said, a parody of community, like the togetherness that was supposed to prevail within the home. The bible and the primary source for that view was William H. Whyte's The Organization Man. It is hard to overstate the impact of Whyte's work. 216 ...one is tempted to say that artificially created community is, at least, a form of community. Given a choice between Great Books and the Dos-a-Do's on the one hand, and the modern neighborhood of strangers on the other, it is difficult to be quite as caustic about suburban values as the social critics of the 1950s were at the time. 219 [re: Jaycees]...one bond was preeminent: their common experience in World War II. It was a confidence builder.... 224 ...new parishes and congregations...were little more than social clubs, satisfying the need for belonging in a confused world. Religion was ceasing to be a matter of faith and becoming a matter of social identity. 231 It was widely 232 believed in suburban America in the 1950s that the authoritarian family was already a relic, a casualty of change in the unraveling postwar world. 233 These anti-authoritarian ideas were reinforced by specialists with impeccable social science credentials. 239 His recollection of those days is of an institution grown frightening in its sheer size and forced to cater to the needs of rebellious adolescents who, unlike the prewar high school population, had no particular academic reason for being enrolled. Those on the receiving end of authority at York High remember it as intimidating; those on the other end remember it as fragile....it was both. 244 The truth is that it is hard to have any sort of public value system without generating a fair amount of hypocrisy; the mere existence of social virtues guarantees a class of citizens who will preach them but not be able to practice what they preach. Do we declare a culture indefensible simply because it breeds its share of hypocrites in conspicuous places? 248 ...what a life full of contradictions those suburban teenagers lived....forced to grow up in two cultures at the same time....a life of role-playing.
260 As it has abandoned arbitrary discipline, however, the present-day high school has also abandoned the belief in the value of character 261 building that gave it a sense of purpose in the postwar years....In cleansing education of the windiness and frequent hypocrisy that plagued it in the 1950s, we have also cleansed it of much of its sense of mission. 263 Of all the fixtures of Bronzeville life, the churches come the closest to having survived in recognizable form....264 But they have ceased to be voices of clear authority. 267 Memory may play tricks on us all, but the flight from authority and the enshrinement of individualism and choice in the last forty years do not represent lapses of memory, personal or societal. They represent losses that it is altogether rational to mourn. 270 The bargain provided us with communities that were...familiar and secure....The price of the bargain was a whole network of restrictions on our ability to do whatever we liked. 271 Channel surfing is not exactly a metaphor for life, but it isn't a bad caricature of the larger predicaments of the 1990s. We are trying to operate without a chart. 274 Can we impose some controls on the chaos of individual choice that we have created in the decades since then? 275 Is the only sequel to social disorder further disorder? There are other scenarios, if we do not mind making a leap to look for them. 276 [The 1920s displayed] the loss of community and the loss of authority. [Depression and WW II brought societal cohesion again.] 280 [Another example: England in 1820, then revival] What can be said about the Victorians is not that they reversed the flow of societal change but that they searched for anchors to help them cope with it, and that they found them in the familiar places: family, religion, patriotism of the hokiest and most maudlin variety. And that also seems a fair thing to say about the 1950s in America. What we badly need to do, once our rebellion against the 1950s has run its course, is to rebuild some anchors of stability to help us through times of equally unsettling change. For that to happen anytime soon, the generation that launched the rebellion will have to force itself to rethink some of the unexamined 'truths' with which it has lived its entire adult life. 281 There is a good chance that this will not happen. In that case, what really matters is what the next generation grows
up believing--those who are children now, who are being raised by the
creators of the deluge. What will they think about community and authority,
habit and choice, sin and virtue? |
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