free agent. You spent your career as a Chicago Cub. If you had the wrong accent or the wrong skin color or were the wrong gender, you probably couldn’t get a job at one of the fancy office buildings downtown. But people back then tended to have steady attachments and a stable connection to place. They did their duty for their institutions.
If you were a man who lived on Chicago’s South Side, there’s a good chance you followed your father and grandfather into the Nabisco plant, the largest bakery in the world at that time, and joined the union, the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International.
The houses were small, there was no air-conditioning, and TV had not yet penetrated, so when the weather was warm, social life was conducted on the front stoops, in the alleys, and with children running from house to house all day. A young homeowner was enveloped in a series of communal activities that, as Ehrenhalt puts it, “only the most determined loner could escape: barbecues, coffee klatches, volleyball games, baby-sitting co-ops and the constant bartering of household goods.”
If you went to the bank you went to the local bank, Talman Federal Savings and Loan. If you bought meat you went to the local butcher, Bertucci’s. Sixty-two percent of Americans in those days said they were active church members, and if you lived in that neighborhood in Chicago, you went to St. Nick’s Parish, where you listened to the kindly Father Fennessy say mass in Latin. You probably sent your boys to the local parochial school, where they sat in neat rows and quaked under the iron discipline of Father Lynch.
If you went into politics, you probably couldn’t win as a freelancer. But you could join Boss Daley’s machine and thrive, provided you did what your authority figures told you to do. For example, John Fary served the machine in the Illinois state legislature, and when he was sixty-four he was rewarded with a seat in the U.S. Congress. When asked what he was going to do once elected to Congress, he told the press, “I will go to Washington to help represent Mayor Daley. For twenty-one years, I represented the mayor in the legislature, and he was always right.” He did his duty.
The ethos nurtured the sort of rich, community life that many people pine for today. If somebody asked you where you were from, you didn’t just say “Chicago,” you mentioned the specific intersection your life revolved around: “Fifty-ninth and Pulaski.” The city was a collection of villages.
That moral ecology had a lot of virtues. It emphasized humility, reticence, and self-effacement. The message was you’re no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than you. It held that self-love—egotism, narcissism—is the root of much evil. If you talked about yourself too much, people would call you conceited, and they would turn up their nose.
Of course, this culture had failings, which ultimately made it intolerable. This moral ecology tolerated a lot of racism and anti-Semitism. Housewives felt trapped and stifled, and professional women faced daunting barriers. In 1963, Betty Friedan described a problem that had no name, which was the flattening, crushing boredom of many female lives. The culture had an emotionally cold definition of masculinity; men had trouble expressing their love for their wives and children. The food was really boring. People felt imprisoned by the pressure of group conformity and tortured by the intolerant tyranny of local opinion. Many played out their assigned social roles, but they were dead inside.
There’s a scene in John Steinbeck’s 1962 book Travels with Charley that captures how this communal code trapped many people in numb, joyless lives. Steinbeck’s cross-country journey with his dog has taken him to Chicago, and he needs a hotel room right away, so he can shower and rest. The only room the manager has available has not been cleaned yet, but Steinbeck says he’ll take it anyway.
When he opens the door, he sees the detritus of the previous guest’s stay. From a leftover dry-cleaning receipt, Steinbeck deduces that the previous resident, whom he calls Lonesome Harry, lives in Westport, Connecticut. On the desk is a letter he had started to his wife on the hotel stationery. “I wish you were hear [sic] with me. This is a lonesome town. You forgot to put in my cuff links.”
It’s a good thing Harry’s wife didn’t make a surprise visit. Both a highball glass and half the cigarette butts in the ashtray have lipstick