Critical analysis of a U.S. history book

Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America challenges many of the commonly held assumptions and culturally held beliefs about progress and how the idea of progress has changed throughout the course of this American Century for Americans. In many ways, the book can be seen as an elegy to the 1950s, not an era that is often elegized. It seems that Ehrenhalt's major reason to write the book was in fact to argue that this decade was not nearly as bad as we like to think it was - not in terms of insularity, pressure to conform, excessive consumerization of the economy, or the suppression of the rights of women, gays and racial and religious minorities. But he also at times seems to argue that even if it were not the ideal decade in many ways, than the virtues that it did contain were still well worth praising (and worth revitalizing) because they offered to Americans something so precious (and something that is in such short supply these days) that it would have been worth giving up something important in exchange.

One of Ehrenhalt's most valid points is hardly original to him, but he presents it convincingly and within a context in which it is not often presented. There is no free lunch, and a sense of community, like other kinds of personal (emotional) richnesses must be paid for somehow, although (he argues) not in the kinds of drastic ways that we now think of the 1950s as having required.

The book examines the 1950s as the time before Baby Boomers began to attack the institutions of education, government, religious belief - the visible sociological forms of authority - and draws connections between these feints against the established order and the fact that American streets are no longer safe to walk along at night (although, of course, they were never entirely safe, and one hazards that despite all of Ehrenhalt's elegiac words, they were particularly unsafe for a black man in Mobile in a white neighborhood in the 1950s). Baby Boomers, Ehrenhalt correctly if just a touch simplistically writes, demanded more personal autonomy and a greater sense of individuality, and in the process of acquiring these traits they destroyed the institutions that were holding American communities together: churches, schools, even families.

Ehrenhalt demonstrates his thesis by concentrating on several neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1950s, evoking the character of the time and place as well as that of his non-fictional "characters" with the skill of a novelist. But all of this beautiful writing cannot hide the controversial and for many unpalatable nature of his thesis, which is that people want rules, regulations, and authority figures, that we all desperately want someone out there telling us what is right and what is wrong and what will happen to us if we stray from a path of moral virtue that someone else has defined for us. He summarizes this point, which he sees a form of bargain rather than the traditional Liberal Social Contract:

We have grown fond of saying that there is no free lunch, but we forget that it applies in moral as well as 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 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 (Ehrenhalt, 1995, p. 3).

It is not surprising that Ehrenhalt, given such an ideal society, would write a paean to the 1950s, for despite his many protestations that it was not nearly as bad as we all now like to think it was, it is clear in the descriptions of even this fan of the postwar years that difference was not a virtue, and that society held fewer places at the table for those who differences - because of race or sexual preference or moral ideals - they could not lay aside.

Ehrenhalt's most convincing arguments in favor of the 1950s as a good place and one that we ourselves might want to emulate do not come when he is talking about one particular subject, but rather stem from the seamless quality of his writing and his ability to make his arguments sound convincing because he has based them on the lives of real people.

He makes the point that those who could fit in during the 1950s were happy. This is a valid claim and something that we are likely to forget in our own times. All people have a right to happiness, including the white and Republican and suburban and middling classes. What was wrong with the 1950s is not that it afforded people like this a chance at happiness - of course not. What is wrong about the era is the many who were left outside the gates. Ehrenhalt does not seem to understand this distinction, or if he does he is being jesuitical. Or perhaps he simply believes that it is truly not possible for both the majority and minorities to be happy at the same time, and he thinks that in such a situation, it is more important for the majority to be happy - but he does not quite want to come out and say this because of the backlash such statements rightly engender.