It is only the middle of June, but it feels more like August. For several days in a row the thermometer has edged close to 100 degrees. The Good Humor trucks have run out of ice cream; the drug stores are running low on suntan lotion. The Chicago Health Commissioner, Herman Bundesen, has used his position of authority to issue a dispensation: Women need not wear girdles to work, and men should not feel obligated to wear ties.
It is summer in Chicago, summer in America. It is 1957.
Downtown, on State Street, it is not just the sun that is generating heat. The State-Lake Theater is showing “Jeanne Eagels,” a new movie starring Kim Novak, and the ads for the movie are designed to raise everyone’s temperature a few degrees. “Sinful, Stormy, Shocking, Profane,” one ad says, as it marches down the left-hand column. Then, for balance, it tells the other side of the story on the right-hand side. “Virtuous, Sacred, Serene, Inspiring.”
The fact is, Chicagoans have spent more than their share of time thinking about sin this year. As prosperous and promising as 1957 has been, it has also forced the entire community to confront some grotesque images of evil. The city remains mesmerized by a string of brutal and unsolved murders dating back nearly two years. Just last December, the teenage Grimes sisters were kidnapped on their way home from an Elvis Presley movie, and their bodies were eventually found in a forest preserve. What kind of maniac would kill teenage girls? “The idea is on the tongues of tens of thousands of Chicagoans,” the Daily News reports.
Fortunately, there are some special summer delights to distract the city from the heat and the gruesome headlines. On the North Side, there is Ernie Banks. The Cubs are going nowhere in the National League this year, but they have come up with the most exciting athlete the city has seen in years. When he stands at the plate, bat pointed straight up in the air, fingers wiggling the handle, it almost seems as if the ball has an appointment with the left field bleachers. Two seasons ago, just a year out of the Negro League at age 24, Banks astonished everyone by hitting 44 home runs, more than any Chicago player had hit in a quarter-century. Now he is on track to do it again, maybe to win the Most Valuable Player award.
You have to wonder what it might be like for him in a place like New York, with championship teams and big-time press coverage. He could be a Mays or a Mantle, instead of merely a local hero. Of course, he knows that’s impossible. The Cubs own him, and they aren’t going to give him up. So Banks might as well make the best of his situation-as he invariably does, showing up at the ballpark every day with an energy and enthusiasm that the team’s losses never seem to quench.
To say that Banks is a man with a restricted menu of choices is to say something that applies equally well to lots of people in Chicago these days, famous and not so famous. If you want to get anywhere in local politics in 1957, in the third year of Richard J. Daley’s mayoral tenure, you essentially have one option: Sign up with the Daley machine, and hang on for life. Mayor Daley is the embodiment of authority in Chicago, personal and political. If you fancy yourself a dissident, no one will stop you from running for office, but except in a few pockets of free-thinking, in Hyde Park and on the North Side lakefront, you won’t get elected. A contested vote in the city council is one in which the Daley forces win by 40 to 10. Most of the time, it is more like 48 to 2. Any alderman who complains too loudly in council debate runs the risk of having his microphone shut off in mid-sentence. The Daley regime is no adventure in participatory democracy.
On the other hand, in its first two years, it has performed at a level of administrative competence that is unlike anything the city has seen in modern times. Not only that, but it has generated a building boom. Skyscrapers are changing the face of the Loop for the first time in more than 20 years. A few months ago, when Cook County voters overwhelmingly approved a new $113 million construction bond issue, the Mayor thanked them for supporting his efforts to “lay the groundwork for everything material that is needed for civic greatness.”
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If you were a 10-year-old in Chicago in the summer of 1957, as I was, you surely remember at least some of this. Certainly you remember an Ernie Banks line drive; more likely than not, you can also recall somebody in your family talking in somber terms about the latest news on the Grimes girls.
What you may not think about very often is just how different a moral culture this was from the one we live in now. The Chicago of 1957 wasn’t just a time and place where people drove cars with big tail fins and watched situation comedies in black and white. This was a different world altogether. In the 1990s in America, most of us believe a few simple propositions that seem so clear and self-evident they scarcely need to be said. Choice is a good thing in life, and the more of it we have, the happier we are. Authority is inherently suspect; nobody should have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave (let alone shut off their microphones). Sin isn’t personal, it’s social; individual human beings are creatures of the society they live in. Those ideas are the manifesto of an entire generation in this country, the generation born in the Baby Boom years and now in its 30s and 40s. In the past quarter-century, taken to excess, they have caused us all a great deal of trouble.
The worship of choice has brought us a world in which nothing we choose seems good enough to be permanent and we are unable 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, symbolized by schools in which teachers who dare to discipline students risk a profane response. The repudiation of sin has given us a collection of wrongdoers who insist that because they have been dealt bad cards in life, they are not responsible for their actions. 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.
The world that Ernie Banks and Richard J. Daley inhabited that summer of 1957 was one with a different set of rules altogether. In it, people lived their lives with a limited menu of choices and learned to make the best of them. They recognized the existence of authority and abided by its dictates, not because it was morally superior but because it made an ordered community possible. And they did their best, as decent citizens, to thread their way through or around the sin that they knew was lurking everywhere.
We have grown fond of saying that there is no free lunch, but we forget that it applies in moral as well as in economic terms. Stable relationships, civil classrooms, safe streets-the ingredients of what we call community-all come at a price. The price is limits on the choices we can make as individuals, rules we must obey and authorities who can enforce them, and a willingness to accept the fact that there are bad people in the world and that sin exists in even the best of us. The price is not low, but the life it makes possible is no small achievement.
A generation ago in America, we understood the implicit bargain, and most of us were willing to pay the price. What was it really like to live under the terms of that bargain? Would we ever want to do that again?
Let us see if we can find out.
The summer of 1957 is beginning peacefully in Elmhurst, 10 miles west of Chicago, where thousands of freshly arrived suburbanites are finding that there is too much to do at home to allow the luxury of a vacation. For those who have bought homes in Brynhaven, the town’s newest and most heavily advertised subdivision, there are basements to finish and, despite the unwanted early heat wave, there is digging to do in the front and back yards. The most common form of socializing is the barbecue, provided you can get hold of one of the new grills and learn how to use it without setting the patio on fire. As if the barbecue craze were not spreading fast enough, Soukup’s Hardware on York Road is offering Elmhurst residents free barbecue lessons this month, and throwing in free steaks from Otto’s Meat Market, “to acquaint the public with the family fun of covered barbecue cooking.”
Nothing very exciting is going on in town, and Elmhurst works hard to make a virtue of that. The council is preparing a celebration for mid-August, when it expects to mark the community’s 1,000th consecutive day without a traffic fatality inside its borders. “We’ve been using many gimmicks to keep death away,” the public safety director says.
Elmhurst did get a rare burst of embarrassing publicity a couple of months ago, when York High School students organized an assembly performance by a black singing group from the neighborhood called Bronzeville, on Chicago’s South Side, then had to cancel it because none of the suburb’s hotels or motels would allow the group to stay overnight. Elmhurst doesn’t like that sort of thing; it considers itself an enlightened, progressive community.
But the incident came as neither a surprise nor a cause celebre in Bronzeville, whose residents are used to having the indignities of segregation imposed on them amid the routines of daily life. Being denied hotel rooms is only one of those indignities, and a relatively small one at that: Far more worrisome this summer are the difficulties that even affluent Bronzeville citizens confront in finding space in Chicago hospitals and public schools.
Bronzeville is celebrating some small victories this summer, however, and feeling optimistic about change. A year-long crusade by the Chicago Defender has forced the products of black-owned businesses onto store shelves all over the city. Last month, A&P, Kroger and Walgreen’s all began carrying Baldwin Ice Cream, whose manufacturer likes to call it “the pride of a people.” And nearly everyone is looking forward to the opening of Dunbar High School, across the street from Olivet Baptist Church, in the old heart of the community. The fact that Dunbar will be all-black is less important to most people than the fact that it is a state-of-the art facility, the most impressive building the Chicago Board of Education has ever built in a black neighborhood. The newspapers make a point of referring to it as “$7-million Dunbar High School.”
If it is a summer of hope for Bronzeville, however, it is also a summer marked by fears that violent confrontation may be the price of advancement. A few months ago, Jesse Booker saw his home pelted with stones after he moved to Garfield Park, a neighborhood west of the dividing line that separates black and white Chicago. In March, Alvin Palmer, a black high school student who lived near Bronzeville’s western border, strayed one night to the distant and all-white Southwest Side, and was challenged at a bus stop by a gang of teenage thugs. An argument followed, and Palmer, 17 years old, was beaten to death with a hammer.
Even for a community accustomed to insults and violence, the murder of Alvin Palmer was a genuinely terrifying event. What sort of place had he ventured into, the residents of Bronzeville wanted to know? What sort of people were these?
St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish
In fact, the murder was as frightening to the inhabitants of St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish, where it occurred, as it was to those of Bronzeville. The night it took place, police dragged teenage boys out of bowling alleys and ice cream parlors all over the neighborhood and demanded to know whether they knew anything that would help find the killer. Within a couple of days, they had enough information to arrest Joseph Schwarz, a high-school dropout and notorious bully. In short order, Schwarz was tried, convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison. If the members of the parish had been allowed to vote on his sentence, however, it is very possible they would have chosen the death penalty.
It is not that the residents of St. Nick’s parish are comfortable with the idea of integration, or even with the presence of unfamiliar black faces on their neighborhood streets. But what they 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.
St. Nick’s is in the middle of the Bungalow Belt, the world of tidy little one-family homes that extends west from the edge of the black ghetto all the way to the Chicago city limits. More than 50,000 of these houses went up in Chicago in the 1920s, and a whole new generation has been erected in the 1950s; the Southwest quadrant of the city is now a sea of single-story bungalows, block after block of them, small and square, with tiny but exquisitely maintained lawns in front. There are hundreds of them in St. Nick’s parish alone. You can buy a good one for $15,000.
St. Nick’s is a square mile of Southwest Side territory, from Kedzie Avenue west to Pulaski Road, and from 59th Street south to 67th. Its parishioners are an adverse mix of Irish, Polish, Germans, Italians and Lithuanians. Before World War II, many of them had lived in dank apartment buildings further east, Back of the Yards or in enclaves such as Pilsen or Brighton Park. St. Nick’s parish is a giant step up from those places. It isn’t the suburbs, but it is home ownership, and decent space, and brick walls, 10 inches thick, instead of rickety old wood. It is a comfortable front porch, instead of a front door that had to be placed one floor above the ground just to keep the entrance out of the mud. In St. Nick’s parish, it is possible to be a laborer by day and a happy bourgeois property owner at night.
Every Monday and Thursday night in this neighborhood, 63rd Street is crowded with knots of local residents who come out to window shop and make conversation, whether they intend to buy anything or not. Late shopping nights are a neighborhood social occasion. They are a mechanism for making contact not only with fellow shoppers but with the merchants who are neighborhood institutions in themselves.
The very act of shopping is embedded in the web of long-term relationships between customer and merchant, relationships that are more important than the price of a particular item at a particular time. The sense of permanence that binds politicians to organizations, ballplayers to teams, reaches down to the mundane rituals of neighborhood commercial life. When people choose a grocer or a butcher or even a furniture store, they stick with it. They don’t re-evaluate their choice every time they hear about hamburger selling for 10 cents a pound somewhere else.
Every Friday evening, many of the residents of St. Nick’s perform the most important of these commercial functions: They make their weekly deposit at Talman Federal Savings, the underwriter of their newly won middle-class status. Friday nights at Talman are a joyful occasion. The place is always crowded. There are long rows of couches all over the enormous lobby, and nearly all of the seats are filled with people who have stopped to talk.
Talman is the seventh largest savings-and-loan in the United States, but it is still run on a personal basis by Ben Bohac, who started it in the kitchen of his apartment building on Talman Avenue in 1926. Last year, on the 30th anniversary of the founding, Bohac opened his new block-long headquarters at 55th and Kedzie. It is the largest single S&L office in America.
Ben Bohac is not just a businessman-he is an authority figure and a neighborhood symbol, and he acts the part. Year after year, he spends a fortune taking out full-page ads in the Chicago papers, each presenting a little moral essay or lesson in economics for the benefit of the community he likes to call Talmanville. Bohac is not shy when it comes to advising its depositors about how to conduct themselves. He prides himself on “looking beyond the houses we lend on, into the lives and circumstances of the people that live in the houses.” And what he tells them is profoundly conservative: Put your money away, avoid extravagant consumerism, and get out of debt the minute you can. “A poor person who can save money shows extraordinary strength of character,” Bohac likes to tell his readers. “And such people don’t remain poor very long.”
By far the most important ritual of neighborhood life, however, is the one that takes place on Sunday morning. There are 1,100 seats in the main sanctuary at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church, and most of them are filled several times: at 7 o’clock, when the nuns attend and Monsignor Fennessy sometimes presides; at 9, when the parish children file in and arrange themselves next to their school classmates; at noon, when the stragglers get their final chance to avoid starting the new week on a sinful note. There are few inactive members of St. Nick’s parish. Among the people who live in the parish and consider themselves Catholics, the vast majority are there at some point on Sunday.
When it comes to the mass itself, they are simply spectators. They are there to sit quietly and watch. The priest celebrates Mass in Latin, facing the altar, his back to the congregation. The choir does all the singing. For the parishioner, there is no participation, no individuality, no choice. Individual empowerment is a concept as foreign to the traditionalists in the pulpit at St. Nick’s as it is to the Cook County Democratic party. Hierarchy exists, in religion as in other institutions, for the express purpose of removing the burden of choice from the individual.
Life in St. Nick’s parish is a limited life, bounded by strict rules and enveloping institutions in almost every phase of day-to-day existence. And yet, to so many of the young families in this bungalow world, it is incomparably superior to any life they had foreseen for themselves.
Try to imagine it: Imagine that you are 32 years old this summer, and had grown up in a Chicago two-flat somewhere back of the yards, spending your first dozen years watching members of your family and those around you losing their jobs and, often, what little savings they had managed to accumulate. Imagine, if you were a male, heading straight from high school to boot camp in 1943, followed by a long solemn ride to Europe or the Pacific; or, if you were a female, going straight from high school to a defense production line, tightening bolts hour after hour, separated by an ocean from the boyfriend you had hoped to marry, without any guarantee that you would see him again alive. Imagine the excitement and chaos of life in the months right after V-J Day, with unlimited dreams but shortages of everything and all the experts predicting an economic slump on the way that would rival the Depression of the ’30s.
Then take one 10-year leap and here you are, living in an octagon bungalow in St. Nick’s parish, paying off a Talman mortgage in monthly installments on a single blue-collar income, driving a new 1957 Chevrolet. “All things considered,” one Bohac sermon proclaims, “no people on earth ever had it so good as we have here and now, in Chicago. How thankful we should be.” The residents of St. Nick’s see no reason to disagree with that.
Bronzeville
Five miles further east, however, is a neighborhood in which few can say those words with a straight face. Bronzeville is a slice of South Side turf eight miles long and only two or three miles wide, home to more than half a million black residents. They live together in chaotic proximity, the middle-class and the affluent as well as the poor, because it is difficult for them to find a place to live anywhere else. In a world of limited choices, Bronzeville offers the fewest choices of all.
Of the 77 hospitals in the Chicago area, only six accept black patients, and five of those have quotas, so that once a certain small number of beds are occupied by blacks, the next black patient is turned away, no matter how ill he or she is. Getting stopped for a traffic ticket on the South Side is not the same experience for blacks that it is for whites. The police maintain a special task force, known to just about everybody as the “flying squad,” whose standard practice it is to stop black motorists for traffic violations, frisk them and search their cars before writing the ticket.
Bronzeville residents with young children have special reason to be frustrated: Many of the white elementary schools on the South Side are underused, while the black ones are jammed far beyond capacity. Some black schools in Bronzeville are handling more than 2,000 pupils a day on a double shift basis, with one set of children in attendance from 8 to 12, and another from 12 to 4. At the same time, there are nearly 300 vacant classrooms elsewhere in the city.
It is impossible not to notice, however, amid all the indignities, what a vibrant and hopeful place Bronzeville is. The Defender’s annual Bud Billiken parade, with 30,000 marchers and half a million spectators, is one symbol of that; so is the newspaper itself. It is full of news about the exploits of black athletes and entertainers slowly gaining recognition in the larger white world: the Cubs’ double play combination of Ernie Banks and Gene Baker, for example, or Nat King Cole, a product of the South Side streets who finally has his own network TV show.
Even the ads in the Defender are written in the unmistakable language of hope. A few weeks ago, to commemorate National Negro Insurance Week, the paper ran the same inspirational message it runs every year: “I am the destroyer of poverty and the enemy of crime,” it says. “I bring sunshine and happiness wherever I am given half the welcome I deserve. I do not live for the day nor for the morrow but for the unfathomable future. I am your best friend-I am life insurance.”
There is in fact no better symbol of achievement in Bronzeville than the insurance industry. Altogether, the five largest black-owned insurance companies in Chicago have nearly $50 million in assets and more than 2,000 employees among them. The largest, Supreme Liberty Life, with $18 million in assets, is the leading black-owned business of any kind north of the Mason-Dixon line. Last year, it opened a brand-new headquarters building at 35th Street and South Park Way-“streamlined in appearance,” the company says, “and modern in every respect.”
But what the insurance industry produces above all is leaders-role models who have made it in business and stand out as figures of authority in the community. Earl Dickerson, the president of Supreme Liberty Life, is one of them. He is written about in black newspapers all over the country-“the eloquent, dashing Earl Dickerson,” a West Coast paper once called him.
Dickerson is as militant on race as anyone in his position could dare to be. When his daughter was denied a table at a restaurant in the Palmer House, he sued the hotel and won. “I want to devote the best part of my time and training,” Dickerson says, “to fighting against the inhuman attempt to jam my people into ghettos.” And yet he is not only a tough corporate executive but a pillar of the Bronzeville social elite, president of the 40 Club, the gathering place for those who have made it in business, politics and professional life. He is the first black person to serve as the director of a white Chicago bank.
Dickerson is one sort of role model; William Dawson, his archrival, is another. Years ago Dickerson beat Dawson to win a seat on the city council; later Dawson unseated him, then defeated him again for Congress. Now Dawson is the undisputed boss of six black South Side wards and godfather of more than 5,000 patronage jobs at City Hall and in the County Building downtown. He is also the man who, more than anyone else, made possible Richard J. Daley’s election as mayor two years ago.
Whether Daley has rewarded Dawson and his people sufficiently for that gift is a matter of constant dispute on the Bronzeville streets. There are only three black judges out of nearly 100 in the city and county, for example; there is only one black police captain out of 1,200 officers, and no lieutenants at all.
But Dawson’s status as a genuine authority figure on those Bronzeville streets is beyond dispute. He is a one-man symbol of organization, hierarchy and discipline. When he holds court on Friday nights, at the meetings of what is called “Dawson College,” in his headquarters on Indiana Avenue, he summons up all his authority to motivate his minions with the cadences of a preacher. “Walk together, children, and don’t get weary,” he nearly always concludes, “for there’s a great camp meeting in the promised land.”
By far the most important role models, however, are the preachers who speak from the pulpit on Sundays. There are hundreds of churches in the community; no one knows exactly how many. Most of them are basically storefront operations, but five Bronzeville churches seat 2,000 worshipers or more, and at least two have more than 10,000 people on their membership rolls. J.H. Jackson, the pastor at Olivet Baptist on South Park Way, is the head of the National Baptist Convention, said to be the largest black organization of any kind in the world.
Bronzeville’s preachers organize social clubs and give political advice, run funeral homes and counsel young people. They are the indispensable coordinators of the community, into everything, acquainted with everybody, able to make the connections and the contacts between one set of institutions and another. They focus on the future and breathe hope into a neighborhood where hope is always a fragile commodity.
And they teach their parishioners one other very important lesson. They teach them to live in the midst of personal sin, individual weakness and yet to rise above it. “Every human life is exposed to good and evil,” says one of them, the Rev. A. Lincoln Jones of Greater Bethesda Baptist Church. “When a room is filled with foul air, we do not get a club to beat it out, or a broom to sweep it out, but rather we raise the windows and let the fresh air come in. Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Elmhurst
You do not hear sermons like that in Elmhurst. It’s not that Elmhurst suburbanites reject the idea of sin as an abstract concept-it’s that they feel confident they left it behind when they moved out of their gray Chicago neighborhoods and into the greenery beyond the Cook-Du Page County line. The breadwinners of Elmhurst are salesmen and office managers, engineers, industrial chemists and printing plant supervisors. They have been moving to town throughout the decade, transforming it from the sleepy German-American village it had been for 100 years to a bustling commuter suburb that soon will hold 40,000 people. As the summer of 1957 begins, they are buying up the last of the split-levels on the market in Brynhaven, the new Elmhurst subdivision aimed at upwardly mobile middle-class families. Every weekend this summer, as many as 5,000 people are driving west from Chicago to see the Brynhaven models.
The promoters, the Dreyfus Brothers, are ready for them. “New financing,” they insist, “makes it possible for any family with a yearly income of approximately $7,500 from all sources to own a spacious, luxurious Brynhaven home. . . . The very same families who, up until now, have been restricted to homes in the $16-19,000 category, can now live a life of luxury in Brynhaven.” The names of the models have the right sound of traditional elegance: the Stuart and the Winston, the Malden, the Hampton and the Lamont. They are selling in the high 20s, $3,000 down and $130 a month.
Everybody who visits Brynhaven and subdivisions like it notices the extraordinary spirit and energy they seem to possess. The housewives wander into each others’ homes unannounced at all hours of the day, borrowing supplies or looking for an hour of ad hoc child care. In the evenings the streets have a summer vacation quality to them, smiling young families enjoying cookouts and back-yard volleyball games and impromptu dancing parties, some of them fueled by a couple of cocktails too many before dinner.
Still, not everybody appreciates this sort of suburban life. It is easy to find critics who complain that there is something forced and unnatural about all the socializing, something compulsive that imposes a stifling conformity on people and demands that they join the party, whether they wish to or not. You don’t get much opportunity to choose your circle of friends in the new subdivisions; your block is your little community, and you are expected to participate. Even the shyest and most reserved of these suburbanites can find themselves under pressure to be scoutmasters, PTA officers, 4th of July parade leaders and community-boosting Jaycees.
And churchgoers. The young families of Elmhurst nearly all go to church on Sundays. Indeed, they are practically ordered to go by their local newspaper, The Elmhurst Press. “Is support of your church a part of your plans for fall?” the Press asked last September. “It should be.”
Religion in Elmhurst is not quite the same thing as religion in Bronzeville or St. Nick’s parish. The problem of sin rarely comes up in the pulpit on Sunday. There are those who complain that the suburban church is more a social club than a place of worship. In these congregations, one critic recently wrote, “it is a miracle to see one man of faith.”
But surely that is wrong. These suburbanites are people of faith. They seem to possess an abiding faith in their country, in American capitalism, in the technology that has made their comfortable lives possible. They have faith in their own ability to solve problems and achieve things. Most of the men of Elmhurst served in World War II, many in combat, and it shapes their outlook on everyday life. Compared to the Nazis and the Japanese, no challenge of suburbia in the 1950s seems very imposing.
A couple of years ago, some of these young veterans decided Elmhurst needed a more modern form of government, and so they created one, junking the old form of partisan village politics and installing a city manager. Another group sat around a living room one evening and decided it was time to build a new church, and now, only a short time later, Elmhurst Presbyterian has more than 1,000 members and a gleaming new building almost ready for dedication. These people are doers.
They believe in community, and seem convinced that they can create it virtually from scratch in the brand-new subdivisions where they have chosen to live. They also believe in authority, although they seem a bit less certain on that score, a bit hesitant about how to exercise it in the modern family and in their new surroundings. Most of them have a well-worn copy of Dr. Spock and know what he has to say against the old authoritarian family and “the long repressive reach of tradition.”
In school, on the other hand, authority does not seem to have relaxed its grip all that much. York High, the secondary school that enrolls virtually the entire adolescent population of Elmhurst, is so huge and crowded-3,266 will enroll this fall-that the faculty doesn’t dare lighten up for fear of losing control. The teachers work at enforcing order and discipline every day, from the first bell until dismissal. The dean keeps a collection of ropes in his office for boys who fail to wear belts to school. Forgetting gym clothes is grounds for detention. So is talking during an assembly. Athletes who fail to keep their hair short risk expulsion from their teams.
The one theme that seems to permeate the high school experience more than any other is “character building.” York’s administrators are all but obsessed with character, citizenship and the molding of polite adults. This past February, for example, brought a student-enforced Courtesy Week. The school newspaper, the York-Hi, explained that “watchbirds, little birds who go around pointing out all the wrong things people do, will be watching discourteous people all over school. . . posters and slogans will try to point out to students that such discourteous acts as tripping people in the hall, shoving in a crowd or pushing a girl’s face into the water fountain are also unsafe practices.” At the end of the week, the two students judged to have the school’s best manners were named Mr. and Miss Courtesy.
Like the adults in Elmhurst, the students at York seem to have almost a limitless ability to believe in the possibilities of their lives and surroundings. They do this even when it requires heroic feats of imagination. Every year at York, for the junior-senior prom, they decorate the school gym according to some implausibly exotic theme, then manage to believe in it for at least a few hours.
This year, the theme was celestial. White gauze hung from the gym ceiling to form wisps of clouds overhead. The room was filled with white columns in two arcs, accented with gold at the top to depict age. The prom bid book closed with a poem: “We entered a mystic fairyland, upon a moonlit night.”
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There are those who will insist that any return visit to the neighborhoods and values of the 1950s is merely an indulgence in nostalgia, a cleansing and oversimplifying of the past that makes it look beguilingly rosy and innocent from the vantage point of a few decades of history.
But the flight from authority and the enshrinement of individualism and choice in the last 40 years do not represent lapses of memory, personal or societal. They represent losses that it is altogether rational to mourn. What we have done in the last 40 years is repeal a bargain that, if it was starting to unravel a bit at the margins in the 1950s, nevertheless was a fact of day-to-day life for nearly everyone in Chicago and 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 entrusted with the task of seeing that the rules were enforced.
The price of the bargain was a whole network of restrictions on our ability to do whatever we liked. Thus aspiring young politicians stuck with the Daley machine and accepted its authoritarian qualities, just as Ernie Banks stuck with the Chicago Cubs, because he had little choice. And thus bright young pupils chafed under the strictures of parochial school education, and introverted suburban homeowners forced themselves to be scoutmasters because it was what they were “supposed” to do.
That this price was substantial is a truth we would be foolish to deny. But that it was in fact a bargain, in which the costs could not be repudiated without affecting the benefits, is a reality that many of us are even now reluctant to admit.
It turned out to be possible to emancipate the individual and to give him free choice in all sorts of decisions that were once imposed on him by habit, custom or authority. And we have done that. But it has not been possible to make that change without sacrificing many of the things that most of us still value as comforts of life.
America is full of people willing to remind us at every opportunity that the 1950s are not coming back. Ozzie and Harriet are dead, they like to say, offering an instant refutation to just about anyone who ventures to point out some thing good about the social arrangements of a generation ago-conventional families, traditional neighborhoods, more stable patterns of work, school, politics, religion. All of these belong, it is said, to a world that no longer exists, and cannot be retrieved. We have moved on.
And of course they are right. If retrieving the values of the 1950s means recreating a world of men in fedora hats returning home at the end of the day to women beaming at them with apron and carpet sweeper, then it is indeed a foolish idea. It was an exaggeration even in 1957.
But the real questions raised by our journey back to the 1950s are much more complicated, and they have nothing to do with “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave It To Beaver.” They are questions like these: Can we impose some controls on the chaos of individual choice that we have created in the decades since? Can we develop a majority culture strong enough to tell its children that there are inappropriate ways to behave in a high school corridor and that there are programs that 8-year-olds should not be free to watch on television? Is there a way to re-learn the simple truth that there is sin in the world and that part of our job in life is to resist its temptations?
I don’t know the answer to those questions. I do know that the children of the Baby Boom generation are coming to maturity with an entirely different set of childhood and adolescent memories from the ones their parents absorbed. They will remember being bombarded with choices, and the ideology of choice as a good in itself; living in transient neighborhoods and broken and recombinant families where no arrangement could be treated as permanent; having parents who feared to impose rules because rules might stifle their freedom and individuality.
Will a generation raised that way be tempted to move, in its early adult years, toward a reimposition of order and stability, even at the risk of losing some of the choice and personal freedom its parents worshiped? That is asking a great deal; maybe it is asking the impossible.
Or maybe not.
