The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s.

Next time a politician, business executive, or educator uses the word "community" as an all-purpose salve for the latest crisis, hand her a copy of Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt's bracing examination of three Chicago neighborhoods during the 1950s. Ehrenhalt does not want to abandon the term, but he argues that "community" depends upon the ability of authority figures to restrict choices, and that a culture suspicions of leadership in all forms will find it difficult to create communities more meaningful than a health club.

Ehrenhalt begins by probing the folkways of Chicago during the tailfin age. He concludes that choice remained an elusive commodity, most poignantly for African-Americans attempting to live outside the city's ghetto or women searching for rewarding work outside the home. To a lesser extent, however, all Chicagoans lived in a world that restricted choice, feeling considerable pressure to send their children to the neighborhood school, keep their money in a checking account at the comer bank, and patronize the closest grocery store. If Chicago Cubs' star Ernie Banks wanted to continue playing baseball, he had to accept whatever contract management decided to offer him, just as lieutenants in the Daley machine knew that disloyalty was the direct route to political oblivion. Corporations sank roots in particular communities instead of perpetually negotiating for a better tax break in a neighboring area.

Authority, by contrast, was rarely, in short supply. In the most compelling of his neighborhood sketches, Ehrenhalt examines a square-mile chunk of the city's southwest side dominated by Saint Nick's Catholic parish and a nearby Nabisco plant. The consistent theme is the overlapping sets of restrictions on individual behavior. Nabisco provided steady employment, for example, but also sent nurses to check on employees taking sick days. Local politicians excelled at constituent service but brooked little substantive debate about local issues. Priests ran the various altar society and Holy Name groups with an iron hand even as nuns exercised similar control over the parochial school. Children on neighborhood streets understood that all adults (not just their parents) felt entitled to report misbehavior to parents, priests, and nuns.

Life in the city's African-American section moved to similar rhythms. Prominent pastors and newspaper editors confidently assumed that part of their responsibility was to force recent migrants from the South to adopt middle-class standards of respectability and decorum. An impressive array of social groups and political clubs knitted the burgeoning African-American middle class into a series of crisscrossing networks. In suburban Elmhurst, Ehrenhalt's third example, peer pressure pushed women into the PTA and men into the leadership of Boy Scout troops, while both parents and teachers seemed less interested in educational issues than the attempt to stamp out bad posture, long hair (on boys), and gum chewing.

Among the many virtues of Ehrenhalt's analysis is his nuanced sympathy for the authority figures struggling to create order in Saint Nick's, African-American Chicago, and Elmhurst. Popular accounts of the 1950s, as Ehrenhalt knows, view the period through the civil rights and women's movements so crucial to distinguishing that time from our own. Complacency about discrimination defines the decade, along with the supposed conformity and false pieties of suburban life. The Catholic variant of this line of analysis is to describe the parishes of the 1950s as nothing more than authoritarian, adding well-worn anecdotes about tyrannical nuns.

Ehrenhalt cannot deny these narratives--women and African-Americans did endure discrimination, some nuns were tyrannical--so he wisely doesn't try. Instead he focuses on the value of organizations, with all their flaws, and their importance for sustaining livable cities. The problem with this strategy is that Ehrenhalt underplays the historical forces, notably racial segregation, shaping not only the African-American ghetto but all-white Saint Nick's and Elmhurst. The advantage is a subtle understanding of a community life more easily mocked than appreciated. The relentless interest of Elmhurst PTA members in the minutiae of high school life, for example, might strike contemporary readers as comical, but today's high school principals might welcome any parental interest, let alone an organization forced to schedule both afternoon and evening meetings. Lost City is a hymn to this institutional creativity, the ability to sustain the PTAs, Boy Scout troops, and Holy Name Societies that enabled citizens to share more with their neighbors than a zip code.

Exactly how to rebuild (or invent) neighborhood institutions in a new age remains the unanswered question. Ehrenhalt does speculate that once the babyboomers quit rebelling against the sadistic gym teachers of their youth a younger generation will reverse course. "The 1930s and 1940s not only produced real communitarian values," he argues, "but generated real leaders and authority figures whose arrival appeared as unlikely in the individualist era of the 1920s as it does amid the individualism of the 1990s."

Unfortunately, evidence for a shift toward communitarian values is at the moment fairly thin, especially as so-called conservatives trumpet the market as the solution to a range of social problems. The structural barriers are also formidable. Chicagoans spend more time on the job than a generation ago, with professional workers concerned about layoffs and blue-collar laborers making up for a persistent drop in real wages by taking second jobs or working more hours. And too, the mass entrance of women into the paid labor force has eliminated the most important source of 1950s-era volunteer energy. (A 7 A.M. men's Holy Name breakfast at Saint Nick's, for example, meant women frying bacon in the parish kitchen at 5 A.M.)

More specifically, the understandable movement of the African-American middle class away from the most severe ghettos has further weakened the social structure of areas beset by poverty and discrimination. In Elmhurst, the Jaycees and the Presbyterian church so central to community life of the 1950s play a less prominent public role. Parishioners at Saint Nick's struggle to sustain the institutions built during the 1950s, while presumably sharing in the general frustration with church teaching connected to gender and sexuality.

Answering the questions the book so eloquently raises, however, would unduly burden Lost City. Ehrenhalt's considerable achievement is to remind us of the historical importance of neighborhood institutions at a moment when the dominant impulse is to go it alone.

John T. McGreevy teaches history at Harvard.