Review: The Lost City: When Communities Thrived
The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s by Alan Ehrenhalt
Four sparklers; nonfiction, contemporary social history, American culture
I’ve always been interested in why we do what we do as a culture. What is community? What is acceptable behavior? What has changed in the last seventy years? Or better, what has changed since the Greatest Generation saved the world in World War II and then settled down in the newly developed suburbs?
I was delighted to come across The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s by Alan Ehrenhalt because this book tried to explain some of what might have happened since 1946.
Everyone is familiar with the phrase “history is written by the winners.” It has a corollary: “memoirs are written by the whiners.” This is an important point. Happy people don’t write tell-alls about their terrible childhoods and surviving awful schools that stifled their creativity and kept them from reaching their full, glorious potential. Happy people are not disaffected; they don’t see misery all around them and write novels, movies, and plays to demonstrate how miserable we really are if only the blinders would fall off and let us see warts-and-all reality. Happy people don’t write histories emphasizing the evil behavior of their ignorant, benighted predecessors who, dammit, should have known better like we do today.
As modern people, we are naturally the most enlightened people ever and are marching forward to our evermore glorious future in the stars.
Which is why we are all so happy and carefree and get along so well today. We have thrown off the superstitious, tribal shackles of the past. Wait. Are we? Have we? All of us? Let me take a quick look around as I write on Monday, 14 December 2020. Perhaps not. Perhaps all is not well in this best of all possible worlds, where one half of our country despises the other half.
Which leads me back to The Lost City. It’s an older book, published in 1995, yet its message is more important than ever.
Who are we as a community? What are we willing to do to maintain our communities?
I mean this on both our local level and on a national level. I’ve mentioned before that I attend municipal meetings although I admit I have yet to attend a Zoom version of our township’s bimonthly board of supervisor’s meetings. I did attend a Zoom meeting for my writers’ group and it was maddening. Zoom is a poor substitute for meeting in person. All the social cues are lost and I couldn’t clearly hear everyone else and of course, several of our members experienced the dreaded “technical difficulties.” On the other hand, meetings in person have the same problem when a speaker at the podium mumbles, enunciates poorly, and I can’t understand them.
I knew going in that it wouldn’t be the same, but my local writers’ group (the CPRW, a chapter of Romance Writers of America) means something to me so I bit the bullet and signed on. Not many other people did; I believe we had eighteen people present at our peak in that session. More than half of our membership did not bother, despite not having to get up early and drive 45 minutes to attend. They merely had to get dressed from the waist up and walk to their computer in their living room.
When I attend a municipal meeting, the meeting room is normally mostly empty other than the participants who are required to be there: the people who work for the township. Yet important things get decided at the township level, decisions that affect every aspect of our lives. An active community shows up at its municipal meetings and community members march up to the podium and say what’s on their minds and make sure their elected representatives know what matters.
That’s one part of community. Why don’t more people do this? Partly because they have too many other things to do, I am sure. The rest of it might be that there’s always something more interesting to do than sit in the meeting room, listening to someone drone on about stormwater management and the difference between detention and retention basins. (Detention basins drain themselves dry between rainstorms whereas retention basins tend to have water in them all the time and function like mini-wetlands. The township doesn’t mow retention basins.)
Being part of a community means working with other people who don’t think like you. Some of these people can be intelligent, well-meaning, and deeply concerned about life in the community. Yet at the same time, they want a wildly different interpretation of the rules.
Being part of the community means compromise. It means accepting some authority from someone you may not agree with. It means going along to get along. This is darn difficult to do if you’ve spent your entire life believing in the magical power of the individual where no one can tell you what to do.
Unfortunately, you can’t be a rampant individualist and be a member of a given community. The goals are mutually exclusive. For example, building your palace at the top of the hill and logging off the forest below so you can enjoy your spectacular view from your extensive terraces is a worthy goal. Too bad the results for your neighbors downhill is that every time it rains, their basements fill up with water.
This very issue has been a bone of contention in the Township of Derry. After all, you paid for that hillside, you paid for that palace with the extensive terraces, and you paid for that view. The homeowners downhill — who may or may not have been there first — will argue over whose rights are more important after they finish pumping their basements dry.
How can a situation like this be managed, when none of us are willing to give up an inch of high ground? When none of us are willing to admit that our elected authorities were elected to make these difficult decisions where nobody gets everything they want? When we despise them for making those difficult decisions we don’t want to make?
We’re back at The Lost City./
A careful reading of the three parts (the working-class parish of St. Nicholas of Tolentine, the segregated African-American community named Bronzeville, and the newly built suburb in Elmhurst) shows the strains of community versus individualism.
Privacy back in 1957? Limited to very limited. Autonomy? Not much there either. Being able to do whatever you wanted? Didn’t happen. The hypocrisy of having to smile when you didn’t want to? Ever-present. Being told what to do and having to do it, whether you felt like it or not? Always.
Alan Ehrenhalt makes it clear, if you’re willing to see it, that the residents of these three communities lived very constricted lives in many ways. But they had positives as well; plenty of them. The residents knew their place in the world. If you, as a resident of the parish of St. Nicholas of Tolentine, were comfortable with the regimentation, you were probably quite happy.
If the lock-step regimentation made you crazy, you were miserable and went on to write tell-alls about the horrors of Catholic schools and vicious nuns and abusive priests.
I was fascinated by The Lost City. The world has changed so much since 1957. And, remembering that memoirs are written by the whiners and Alan Ehrenhalt has his own axe to grind, let me add that for many reasons, I’d never go back. I like having choices that I would not have had in 1957. A typical one is having a credit card in my name and not my husband’s. Privacy from prying and officious neighbors (which is why we don’t live in an HOA). The ability to go where I want and not worry that I’ll be harassed.
There’s lots to like about the modern world. But the modern world did not come without costs. That’s the great strength of The Lost City. It makes clear the community and togetherness that people of 1957 Chicago enjoyed and the cost they paid in loss of autonomy to get that community and togetherness.
We do not have similar communities today. We’re far more autonomous, to the point of anarchy. This situation has its plusses to be sure. There are negatives as well and we forget those negatives at our peril. The pendulum of society always swings and it will swing back eventually. When it does, we’ll all moan about the wonders of rampant individualism and never consider what it cost to both individuals and communities.
Alan Ehrenhalt doesn’t maintain a website so you can’t follow his adventures. He is a contributing editor for Governing Magazine if you want to read more of his essays.
If you want a copy of The Lost City so you can write notes in the margins: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Forgotten-Virtues-Community/dp/0465041930