Ah, the good old days. Everyone’s looking back to better times when people knew their place and respected authority and didn’t expect a whole lot of change. Newt Gingrich has looked back to fictional versions of earlier times, taking Boys Town as a model for what to do with all the orphans he’s laboring to create. Bill Bennett has reaped millions peddling platitudes from earlier writers (it saves writer’s fees). Bob Dole, who’s old enough to compare at least five generations, reminisces fondly about the days of self-reliance before farmers were softened by government subsidies. Phil Gramm has made nostalgia trips part of his campaign, settling in with Iowa farmers for discussions just like the ones the Gramms used to have “around my momma’s old Formica kitchen table.” (Wouldn’t you love to have heard the talk around that table when momma found out Phil flunked another grade in grammar school?)
Ehrenhalt develops his thesis by taking detailed looks at three Chicago communities around 1957: the white, working-class neighborhood of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine parish on the southwest side; the Bronzeville area about five miles east, then the center of African-American life in the city; and the new subdivision of Brynhaven in the middle-class suburb of Elmhurst. In every community, he writes, you found people who had limited choices. The folks in Saint Nick’s parish were generally limited to blue-collar jobs in the area’s factories and warehouses; the people in Brynhaven were pretty much forced to be social conformists; and the denizens of Bronzeville–well, they couldn’t even leave the neighborhood safely, as Alvin Palmer learned one terrible day in 1957 when he wandered too far west on 63rd Street and was beaten to death by thugs from Saint Nick’s. Nevertheless, writes Ehrenhalt, people were generally happy and willing to pay the price of obedience and conformity that was required for safety and stability.
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I remember all too clearly the ugliness at Harper High (the public school for those of us who lived east of Kedzie) around 1954, when the school’s first two black students–two small, frail-looking young women–were mercilessly harassed and ostracized. And the race riot that occurred at the Harper-DuSable football game that fall, a huge melee that brought in scores of squad cars and put an end to nighttime Public League sporting events for decades. Ehrenhalt mentions neither the harassment nor the violence.
Perhaps most revealing is Ehrenhalt’s celebration of religious life in Elmhurst. He praises the Reverend Clare Tallman, brought in to start a new Presbyterian church, as above all “a man who was very good at business,” a man who “understood the bottom line.” He joined the Rotary and Kiwanis as part of his campaign to raise funds for the new church building and meshed well with the pragmatic, ambitious congregation that hired him. The church’s 1955 annual report read, “Blessed are those who use the offering envelopes, for their contributions shall be recorded, and shall be deductible from their income tax. Blessed are the systematic givers, for there shall be order in their lives and in their quarterly statements.” Without irony Ehrenhalt states that the congregation “had a profound faith in so many things: in American capitalism, in democratic government, in the technology that had made prosperity possible and given most of them their livelihoods.” A church where George Babbitt would feel right at home.
For Ehrenhalt, today’s villain isn’t the greed of corporations that downsize and move operations overseas and thereby destroy lives and neighborhoods. It isn’t the hypocrisy of politicians who argue for tax breaks for the comfortable while refusing to raise the minimum wage or provide health care for the marginal. No, he declares, it’s our “worship of choice” that has made our families unstable, our schools unfit, and our streets unsafe. We’ve lost the steadfastness of Ernie Banks and embraced the opportunism of Rickey Henderson, he says, apparently forgetting that Banks and his peers were virtual slaves to their owners and couldn’t have moved if they’d wanted to. “A generation ago in America we understood the implicit bargain, and most of us were willing to pay the price. What is it really like to live under the terms of that bargain? Would we ever want to do it again?” His own examples of institutional racism, mindless obedience, and sterile faith ought to have persuaded him the answer is no.
