Donald Trump’s most resonant political slogan has always been the one he borrowed from Ronald Reagan: “Make America Great Again.” Trump rarely has been pushed to define when exactly he believes America experienced the greatness he promises to recapture. But many of his followers believe that America’s golden age — particularly for its working class — was the 1950s. A 2024 PRRI survey found that some 70 percent of Republicans think that America’s culture and way of life has changed for the worse since the 1950s. But what is it that Republicans miss about the 1950s? 

Alan Ehrenhalt, who has been a longtime writer and editor at Governing magazine, in 1995 explored this question in his classic study, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s. Ehrenhalt investigated three communities in Chicago in that era: St. Nicholas of Tolentine, a working-class Catholic parish on the city’s Southwest Side; Bronzeville, the heart of Black Chicago in that era of segregation; and Elmhurst, a split-level suburban community eighteen miles west of downtown, which experienced explosive growth in the 1950s. Ehrenhalt found that Chicago’s citizens in the 1950s were subjected to what most Americans now would regard as excessively powerful and intrusive authority — including the authority of the political machine during the regime of Mayor Richard Daley, religion, employers, tradition, and the community itself — but that authority enforced an order that made possible a deep sense of community that has largely vanished from American urban life, for which many Americans remain deeply nostalgic.

In this podcast discussion, Alan Ehrenhalt discusses that loss of community and the way it has played into American politics, particularly during the Trump era; the individualism of the baby boom and the way that many young people of that era chafed against the restraints of the 1950s; and the cultural matrix that produced the first American pope, Leo XIV, who (as Robert Prevost) grew up in a community similar to St. Nicholas of Tolentine during the 1950s. He analyzes what both the contemporary political left and right miss about that time, but acknowledges the difficulty of recovering communitarian values in the present era.

Transcript

Alan Ehrenhalt: Every generation, as it grows older, laments what it sees as the decline of the community that existed in its youth. The question is: Is what has happened to us since the 1950s qualitatively different from the changes that evoke nostalgia in early generations?

Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And it’s a great pleasure today to be joined by Alan Ehrenhalt. He is a renowned journalist who has also held a number of academic positions and is a recipient of the American Political Science Association’s McWilliams Award for distinguished contributions to the field of political science by a journalist. He was the creator and editor of the first four editions of Politics in America, which is a biennial reference book profiling all 535 members of Congress. And he was for nineteen years the executive editor of Governing magazine, a publication that covers politics, policy, and the management of government enterprises, and he is currently one of the magazine’s contributing editors. Welcome, Alan!

Alan Ehrenhalt: Well, glad to be here.

Geoff Kabaservice: Great to have you with me. I should add that you are a frequent contributor to a variety of national publications as well as the author of four books, the most recent of which is The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. But I’m particularly excited to have you on this podcast because you are the author of one of my all-time favorite books of urbanology, and one of my all-time favorite books period, which is The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s. I should add that this book, The Lost City, is not a new release. In fact, this is its thirtieth anniversary, since it came out in 1995. But it’s also a book that is so well-written, so evocative of the vanished world of Chicago in the 1950s, and yet also so relevant to so much of today’s politics that it meets every criterion that determines a classic.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Well, thank you.

Geoff Kabaservice: Speaking of which, in terms of its relevance… Donald Trump’s most resonant political slogan has been one he borrowed from Ronald Reagan: Make America Great Again. And Trump has rarely been pushed to define exactly what he means by greatness or when America was great according to his definition. But when he has been pushed, he has said that he has in mind the periods of military and industrial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also in the late 1940s and 1950s. The earlier period, I think, helps explain some of his obsession with tariffs. But the 1950s is the decade that really seems to be the vanished utopia for many of his supporters. And in fact, a 2024 survey by PRRI found that some 70% of Republicans think that America’s culture and way of life has changed for the worse since the 1950s, as compared to only 30% of Democrats who say the same.

But what is it that Republicans in particular miss about the 1950s? Well, many would say that it was a time of patriotism, prosperity, religiosity, and stability. And critics on the left would say, of course, that MAGA Republicans want to return us to a time when gays and lesbians were in the closet, African Americans were denied the American dream and indeed the full rights of citizenship in many parts of the country, and women were told that happiness and fulfillment would only come from marriage and childbearing, not from attending college…

Alan Ehrenhalt: “A woman’s place is behind the stove…”

Geoff Kabaservice: Exactly, and not from attending college or pursuing a career. And you conceded much of the validity of that critique in The Lost City, but you came to different conclusions about what Americans continue to find appealing about their memories of (or projections onto) life in the 1950s, particularly in a big city like Chicago. But before we get further into The Lost City, can you tell me something about yourself? Can you tell me where you grew up and went to school and how you came to the interests that have defined your career?

Alan Ehrenhalt: Sure. I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, so writing about Chicago was not a coincidence. My dad was a small-time real estate broker, and he knew the neighborhoods of the city because that was his business. And I sort of inherited some of that interest and fascination with neighborhoods and the way they functioned in cities. There was a period where, as a bedtime story, every night he would tell me about a particular street in Chicago.

Geoff Kabaservice: Amazing! Okay, so where did you go to school in Chicago?

Alan Ehrenhalt: I went to The Lab School, the University of Chicago high school, which has many distinguished and less distinguished alumni, but I won’t get into all of them. I went to Brandeis undergraduate and to Columbia for graduate school in journalism, and I’ve been a journalist ever since. I came to Washington in 1969 looking for a job that would allow me to help end the war in Vietnam — but I didn’t actually find that. A publication called Congressional Quarterly was hiring at that time and they took me on. And I worked there for many years, because Governing was a sister publication of Congressional Quarterly. So until 2010, when that link was severed, I really had a connection with CQ and with the Times Publishing company of St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Poynter Institute, which owned Governing and Congressional Quarterly and a variety of other efforts.

Geoff Kabaservice: So I happen to know that Governing magazine is still published, because one invariably sees it in the anterooms of congressional offices on Capitol Hill. And I like Governing magazine’s fairly rigorous and austere focus on matters of governing, but it’s not necessarily a general-interest publication. How did you come to your particular interests in the stuff that is featured in Governing magazine?

Alan Ehrenhalt: Well, when I was the editor for nineteen years, I tried to edit it as a general interest magazine even though it was operating in a trade magazine environment economically. But I thought that we could put out a magazine that would appeal to almost anybody with some interest in government and politics, and we’re still trying to do that. As you mentioned, we’re back in print, which is very unusual for publication… We went out of print in 2019 and we went back into print just about a little over a year ago, in a much more targeted, small-circulation format. It’s now a quarterly. Whereas it used to have almost a hundred thousand readers, now we have 10,000, and they’re carefully selected. But if we get it on the right tables in the right waiting rooms, I think the decision will have been well taken.

Geoff Kabaservice: I should add that the column you write every other week for Governing is of great general interest.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes, I try to make it that way. I shouldn’t say this, but for all the time I’ve spent on governing and state and local issues, I’ve never been fascinated by the minutiae of state and local government, municipal finance, these things. I made sure they were in the magazine because our readers and advertisers wanted that, but that’s not my interest. My interest is much more generally in politics and social issues, and I’ve tried to get that into Governing as much as I can over the years. And I’m still trying to do that.

Geoff Kabaservice: A question about your upbringing again… Would you have said that you were a middle-class resident of Chicago?

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yeah, lower-to-middle. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Hyde Park, not very fancy at all. Some years my dad did well and spent money, and some years he didn’t. So I would say on a scale of zero to ten, we were about a four.

Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. And why did you want to go to Brandeis University for your undergraduate education?

Alan Ehrenhalt: I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t have a great academic record in high school. I did apply to a number of colleges, but we knew somebody who gave money to Brandeis and he took care of it.

Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. Brandeis, I suppose it should be said here, had only been founded in 1948, so like fifteen years before you would have arrived on campus, although it was built on the foundations of the older Middlesex University. And it was founded as a Jewish-sponsored secular university, open to students and faculty of both sexes and all races and religions, which from the get-go made it a more left-leaning campus than most others in the United States. And by the late 1960s, it was essentially an epicenter of the counterculture, anti-Vietnam war protests, and radical student activism. And how did you experience that late ‘60s environment at Brandeis?

Alan Ehrenhalt: I experienced it in a number of ways. One was that I think I went to college with some of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and some of the most neurotic people I’ve ever known. So it wasn’t always a pleasant experience, in that an awful lot of people were just dissatisfied with things. And I guess I was dissatisfied in a way myself, but I definitely was center-left and not a radical. I mean, I was at the Pentagon in 1967…

Geoff Kabaservice: Were you seeking to levitate the Pentagon along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin?

Alan Ehrenhalt: I never met either of them, although Abbie Hoffman went to Brandeis in the 1950s. But when I got to the March Against the War, I was disconcerted by all the other causes that people were raising placards for. All I wanted to do was protest the war. Other than that, I was sort of a crew-cut liberal. I was not a radical.

Geoff Kabaservice: You are a baby boomer yourself, and yet in much of your writing I find a critique (either explicit or implicit) of your generation. Is that fair to say?

Alan Ehrenhalt: Sure. As I go back over The Lost City, which I’ve just done, a lot of it is an argument against the individualism of the baby boom generation, and the sort of thing that produced magazines like Me and Self and all that kind of thing. So yes, I am a communitarian. I am not a proponent of individualism particularly, and certainly not a libertarian. But that’s sort of where I am and who I am.

Geoff Kabaservice: So besides describing yourself as a communitarian, how else would you describe your politics today?

Alan Ehrenhalt: I would say that at the deepest human level I am a conservative, a Burkean conservative. But in practical terms, the way politics is conducted these days, that translates into voting Democratic for most offices. If there were more conservative Democrats, I would vote for them, but there aren’t any.

Geoff Kabaservice: We will get into the whole issue of why the working class seems to vote overwhelmingly for Trump nowadays. But I wanted to mention something I thought about as I reread your book. One of the great contemporary studies of American religion and society in the 1950s was Will Herberg’s 1955 book Catholic, Protestant, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. And it’s been a while since I read it as a grad student…

Alan Ehrenhalt: I have to say I’ve never read it. I know about it, but I haven’t read it.

Geoff Kabaservice: But I do remember that its principal observations included the fact that America in the 1950s had become in many ways a three-religion society, as the title suggests, and that this followed three decades of a cutoff of immigration as well as the unifying experience of World War II. And Herberg also recorded that there had been assimilation and a kind of mainstreaming of Catholicism and Judaism in particular as America had suburbanized, but also that each religion had lost something of its former distinctiveness as American culture embraced a sort of popular mainstream Judeo-Christianity. And I was wondering… The Lost City does not include a particular focus on Chicago’s Jewish communities. Had you considered such a focus at the outset of your research?

Alan Ehrenhalt: No, not really. Well, yes and no. I thought about writing about my own neighborhood, Hyde Park, which was not heavily but significantly Jewish in its makeup. But I just decided there wasn’t enough to say about that. And I singled out three neighborhoods, as you know. One was a more or less working-class Catholic parish on the Southwest Side, St. Nicholas of Tolentine; and Bronzeville, which was the historic home of Blacks on the South Side of Chicago; and the other was… I wanted a 1950s split-level suburb, and I picked the community of Elmhurst.

Geoff Kabaservice: Elmhurst is about eighteen miles to the west of the downtown, and in the 1950s, when you’re writing about it, it was really going from having been almost like a village to being a commuter exurb.

Alan Ehrenhalt: If you think more broadly about the pre-war suburbs, they were villages — all over the country. And they changed enormously in the early 1950s, mostly, and that was as true of Elmhurst as of other places.

Geoff Kabaservice: So tell me something about how you came to the idea of this project and then how you carried out your research in these three communities.

Alan Ehrenhalt: I wanted to pick out three (or in the beginning maybe more) communities and see how they had changed from the 1950s to the 1990s. But then I decided that, although I get into a little of that at the end, really what I wanted to do was paint a portrait of what these places were really like in the 1950s — and I hope warts and all. The reaction to the book was very disparate. There were people who thought it was a nostalgic defense of the 1950s, and there were people who thought it was a warning that we can’t go back to the 1950s. And in some ways, it’s both, it is both of those.

Geoff Kabaservice:

Yes. I actually would assign your book to my students when I was teaching, and in particular they were struck by the line that “Ozzie and Harriet are dead now” and we can’t go back. They didn’t know who Ozzie and Harriet were, of course. 

Alan Ehrenhalt: You can still watch them on streaming video if you really want to know what it was like.

Geoff Kabaservice: One can. And yet at the same time, there was something they found appealing about these descriptions. Your descriptions of all of these communities are fascinating, but the one that I found the most interesting in various ways was your description of St. Nicholas Tolentine. And that was, first, because when I recently reread The Lost City, I could not but help think that your description of that small, tightly-knit, post-immigration Catholic working-class community on Chicago’s Southwest Side pointed toward a very similar community on Chicago’s South Side where the new Pope Leo XIV grew up…

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes, that is true.

Geoff Kabaservice: …as Robert Prevost in the 1950s. And in fact, there’s a photo in The Lost City of fifty or so neatly dressed children in their homeroom at St. Nicholas Elementary during the 1950s that’s almost a mirror image of the photo we’ve seen of Robert Provost in his overcrowded homeroom at St. Mary of the Assumption Elementary School in the Riverside community of Chicago in the 1950s.

Alan Ehrenhalt: I was struck by how similar they were. And it reinforces the point that Catholic elementary education was about the same all over the city, if not all over urban America: huge classes, fifty or sixty kids, usually a nun as the teacher — and the nun could be rather dictatorial and authoritarian. But yes, where Pope Leo went to school was not… I believe he was living outside the city limits, but he went to school in Chicago on the South Side.

Geoff Kabaservice: So your book, without your knowing it, was describing the cultural matrix in which the first American Pope would grow up.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes, that’s right. And so I abandoned the idea of simply tracing change. As I said, I wanted to show what it had been like, and then only at the end to talk a little bit about how it had changed. But that’s the last chapter.

Geoff Kabaservice: And I did think that your description of the St. Nicholas Tolentine community was also fascinating because in some sense it required the greatest leap of historical imagination to try to understand it in our contemporary circumstances. Let me take a step back for a minute. You wrote an article for Governing about five years ago called “Cities and the Forgotten World of Archie Bunker.”

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yeah, “Archie doesn’t live here anymore.”

Geoff Kabaservice: Exactly. And it’s quite possible that younger people will not have heard of Archie Bunker, but he was the star of the sitcom All in the Family, which was arguably the most influential and popular TV show of the 1970s. 

Alan Ehrenhalt: It was, although I have to say I thought it was a bore.

Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I kind of liked it as a child. And it actually was the most watched show in America…

Alan Ehrenhalt: Oh, definitely. 

Geoff Kabaservice: …for five years in a row, from 1971 to ’76. And Archie Bunker, as played by Carroll O’Connor, was a middle-aged white man, a sort of family patriarch, who was a blue-collar worker from the borough of Queens in New York City. He was employed, I think, on a loading dock and also drove a taxi part-time at night. And Archie was portrayed as a decent but narrow-minded man struggling to deal with the changes of the era and nostalgic for what he regarded as better times when people who shared his viewpoint were in charge.

Alan Ehrenhalt: You probably know the song that the show starts with…

Geoff Kabaservice: As a matter of fact, Charles Strauss, who co-composed that song with Lee Adams, just died at age ninety-six. And it is one of the classic TV openers, and it gives you some insight into the mindset of Archie Bunker just through the lyrics. “And you knew who you were then/ Girls were girls and men were men/ Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

Alan Ehrenhalt: That’s where I take issue with it. Archie Bunker would not have been a supporter of Herbert Hoover. He would have been a New Deal, FDR Democrat.

Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. He would have grown up in… I think Detroit is where he was depicted in the show in the ‘30s, when he would have been on the verge of homelessness and people would have looked to FDR and the New Deal as their salvation.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Archie Bunker was from Detroit?

Geoff Kabaservice: I think he was originally. [He wasn’t.]

Alan Ehrenhalt: I didn’t know that.

Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I think he moved from Detroit to Queens. I can’t remember. But the interesting thing is that there actually was a second stanza to that song that was not incorporated in the show, and it’s actually much darker. Without inflicting my singing on you, I remember lyrics like: “People seemed to be content/ Fifty dollars paid the rent/ Freaks were in a circus tent.” And then it concludes: “Hair was short and skirts were long/ Kate Smith really sold a song/ I don’t know just what went wrong.” And you know, that part — of the sort of working-class discontent with the world as it was emerging in the 1960s — really did I think ring true to a lot of the viewers of the ‘70s when they were watching it.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Well, if I can broaden out for a moment, there are two points I want to make. One is that every generation, as it grows older, laments what it sees as the decline of the community that existed in its youth. This goes back all the way through American history, and it’s true in Europe also. The question is: Is what has happened to us since the 1950s qualitatively different from the changes that evoke nostalgia in early generations? In other words, we always lose community as time goes on, and people think we do. But have we lost more since the 1950s? That’s the question. And I’m inclined to think that a lot of those losses are real, and that they are greater than the ones that people imagined in earlier generations.

Geoff Kabaservice: I would agree. And I also feel that the losses continue to play into our culture in ways that, for example, contributed to the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes. When I think about, not Archie Bunker, but the working-class voters who supported Donald Trump, I think about a family in a small town in Iowa, say, or Wisconsin, that in the 1950s lived in a community that was understood, that was familiar. It ate the same boring food, but nevertheless it was familiar with it. The church was the anchor of the community. And of course the workers had steady jobs, usually in a factory. And that’s a lot of what Donald Trump is talking about. MAGA is about how to return to a world like that, which of course we can’t do. I mean, we can’t return to that. It’s also interesting that the Trump voters who are under fifty or maybe even under sixty, sixty-five, they don’t remember the 1950s. If he wants to go back to that period, he’s advocating a return to a time that the vast majority of his voters don’t even remember.

Geoff Kabaservice: Although Donald Trump did grow up in Queens…

Alan Ehrenhalt: He didn’t grow up in a working-class family in Iowa.

Geoff Kabaservice: That is true. I remember that about a dozen or so years ago, I reviewed a book by an academic named Robert O. Self that was called All in the Family, even though it didn’t actually touch on the show. Essentially the thesis was that it was changes to the family, and arguments over breadwinner liberalism in particular, that led to both the changes of the 1960s and then the backlash from the right. There are a lot of reasons we can put forward for why the changes to the right happened, and why people have responded to them and continue to respond to them as they have, but I think that’s one of them.

Alan Ehrenhalt: But nevertheless, and notwithstanding the fact that younger people don’t remember the 1950s, they have a sense that in an earlier time there was an order and a stability that has disappeared. And they are familiar with the fact that factories have disappeared all over the industrial areas of the country.

Geoff Kabaservice: So let me quote again from that piece you wrote on Archie Bunker. You wrote that all American cities, even into the 1960s, were “teeming with people like Archie Bunker: middle-aged working-class white men of limited education, many of them children of immigrants, employed in tedious but secure blue-collar jobs in factories or on loading docks or at city patronage enclaves, and living in brick bungalows with large families, crowded but one happy step up from the tenements of the pre-war years.” And you added that Nicholas Lemann, in his book Transaction Man, had identified what he felt were the three icons of this life: the Democratic Party, the Catholic church, and the employers the workers felt committed to for life.

Alan Ehrenhalt: That’s exactly right. Those were the anchors.

Geoff Kabaservice: Very much an established order. The way that you characterized life in St. Nicholas in the 1950s, and to a great extent in Bronzeville and beyond, was the title of your first chapter in The Lost City: “The Limited Life.” And you gave a few concrete examples of those kind of limits. One was John Fary, who was the owner of a tavern on the Southwest Side of Chicago, who was a loyal cog in the Democratic Party machine of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. And you have a wonderful quote from him: “For twenty-one years, I represented the mayor in the legislature, and he was always right.” Machine politics has few defenders nowadays, but in the 1950s that principle of obedience was seen as what made machine politics able to deliver for its constituents.

Alan Ehrenhalt: In the ‘60s, we sang “Where have all the flowers gone?” It might be more appropriate now to say: Where have all the followers gone?

Geoff Kabaservice: And I’m paraphrasing here, but you had also had a great quote in the book about how in Washington you can see lots of bumper stickers that say “Question authority,” but you won’t see any that say “Obey the Boss.” Generally, one of the things that has vanished from that world of the 1950s is the way in which authority loomed so large in most people’s lives, whether that was the authority of the political machine, the church, one’s employer, the schoolteacher or school principal, or even just the authority of community leaders and parents and older people generally.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes, that’s right. I mean, it was a form of authority that… Well, here’s a way of looking at it. In the 1930s, we stuck together to fight the Depression, and in the 1940s we stuck together to fight World War II. And that carried over into the 1950s just through a societal inertia. And then we got tired of doing that and we broke off from that. It’s a common belief, but I think largely inaccurate, that history is written by the winners. But the history of a generation, and the great literature of any generation, are written by dissidents, by people who are writing to complain about what has happened to them. So you get a false picture of what life in a parish like St. Nick’s was, based on all the people who wrote angry tirades against the nuns who taught them. But I have to tell you, when I interviewed people in that neighborhood in the 1990s and I asked about the ‘50s, they said, “That’s the best time I can remember.”

Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, although you do point out that the baby boomers — in particular the ones who went on to college — did chafe at the lack of privacy in those days, and at the strict authority to which they were subject at every turn. And this in some ways gave rise to their particular brand of liberationist, “gotta be me” individual expression.

Alan Ehrenhalt: That’s right. It was a rebellion against authority. An interesting question now is: Does Donald Trump represent a return to authority? He’s certainly an authoritarian, but he’s also an iconoclast. He’s really not a defender of conventional authority in any sense, but to the people who admire him, he is an authority figure. And there are very few others like that.

Geoff Kabaservice: I think that’s very well put. Let me also mention one of the other characters you wrote about to illustrate what “the limited life” meant. This was Ernie Banks, the African-American shortstop and the first baseman of the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

Alan Ehrenhalt: My hero.

Geoff Kabaservice: Your hero and a lot of people’s hero in Chicago, one of the greatest players of all time. Something interesting you pointed out about him was that he was woefully underpaid even by the standards of the time. In 1959, when he was named Most Valuable Player for the second season in a row, he earned $45,000. Not much even then. 

Alan Ehrenhalt: It may have seemed like a decent salary to him. But when you think that Juan Soto was paid hundreds of millions of dollars to sign with the New York Mets, it’s horribly out of whack and out of proportion — although I would say that Ernie Banks had a good life.

Geoff Kabaservice: And he genuinely seemed well, number one, happy to have made the step up from the Negro Leagues, where he was considerably less well paid, but also he genuinely seemed to love playing baseball and loved Chicago and the Cubs.

Alan Ehrenhalt: “Let’s play three today!”

Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, exactly. That was one of his famous sayings in a doubleheader.

Alan Ehrenhalt: In fact, he’s commonly thought to have said, “It’s a beautiful day, let’s play two!” But I distinctly remember him saying, “Let’s play three!” “Let’s play two!” would have been silly because they were already playing doubleheaders, so what would be the point of saying that?

Geoff Kabaservice: One hesitates to put it this way, exactly, but the Cubs almost literally owned their ballplayers in those days before free agency, so Ernie Banks couldn’t have jumped to another higher-paying team even if he’d wanted to. But he seemed pretty happy with the whole setup, whereas someone like Juan Soto strikes one as famous, rich, and unhappy, like a lot of baseball players nowadays.

Alan Ehrenhalt: That seems to be true. I think Ernie Banks is typical of the world of the 1950s that I wrote about: limited choice, and acceptance of those limits, and a realization that you can’t have everything.

Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. Let me quote, in fact, from The Lost City: “Today we live in a time of profuse choice, with all the opportunity and disillusionment that it brings. Ernie Banks and John Fary lived in a world where choice was much more limited, where those in authority made decisions that the free market now throws open to endless individual examination.” And these limits and constraints, you go on to say, applied to all the important personal relationships in life. So the divorce rate, for example, was practically non-existent compared to what it would become by the 1980s, because the vast majority of married couples, even unhappily married couples, simply didn’t see divorce as an option.

Alan Ehrenhalt: It didn’t ever occur to them to say: “Could there be something better out there that I should try?” No, because you got married and then you made that work if you possibly could, or you were unhappy. But in general, you made that work.

Geoff Kabaservice: And you go on to say: “People just stayed married in the 1950s, to their spouses, to their political machines, to their baseball teams. Corporations also stayed married — to the communities they grew up with.” The idea that a corporation could fire its employees when they reached their fifties and their productivity started to slow down, or that they could relocate somewhere with lower wages, just wasn’t something that occurred to company officials in those days.

Alan Ehrenhalt: That’s right. And if they had to accept a lower level of profit, they did that. I mean, they didn’t go broke or want to go broke, and they sometimes laid off people. But they had a commitment to the community that has disappeared. In retrospect, I think we can say it would have had to disappear with globalization and to some extent with computer technology. I’m not sure that I write about the Lennox Corporation in Marshalltown, Iowa…

Geoff Kabaservice: You do.

Alan Ehrenhalt: I don’t know at this point if there’s still some remnant of the Lennox Corporation in that town. But the arrangement of the 1950s couldn’t survive a world in which everything could be made more cheaply in Asia. And the fact that, thanks to Milton Friedman and others — Milton Friedman is one of my total anti-heroes — it was assumed that it was a good thing to make those choices, that was good for the society.

Geoff Kabaservice: When I look at what to me is the nearby city of Baltimore and try to figure out how that city descended from its comparative prosperity in the ‘50s and ‘60s to nowadays, there are certain reasons of discrimination that obviously come into play, but it’s also that so many of the community leaders of those days aren’t there anymore because their law firms were taken over by bigger national firms, or their companies were absorbed by bigger national and global concerns. And that sort of seems to be the story of many communities in America writ large.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes. We wrote a story many years ago in Governing called “The Rise of the Absentocracy.” And “absentocracy” is the corporate leadership and civic leadership that is no longer based in the local community but is part of something much larger — a publicly traded corporation, usually, that is based in New York or even in a foreign country.

Geoff Kabaservice: So here’s the paradox of the 1950s, as you describe it. Millions of Americans miss the sense of the community they grew up with and experienced in the 1950s, or they miss hearing about those communities from older people and their parents. They miss the loyalties and the lasting relationships that characterized those communities. They miss the crowds of neighbors who would hang out for hours on the front stoops in those summer evenings before air conditioning, when no one had to lock their front doors. They’re nostalgic for the neighbors who would always be there to help out if you needed them, the mom-and-pop storekeepers who knew you by name, the bank tellers who didn’t need to see your identification to cash your check, the company that would employ you until you retired, the locally-owned newspaper, the heroes on your hometown sports teams who wouldn’t just jump to your higher-paid rival team.

But all of these ingredients of communities came at the price of severe limits on individual choices and a kind of authority that we would now regard as too powerful, too intrusive, too unaccountable. But it was the authority that enforced the order that made the community possible.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes. Years ago, I was at a dinner (I think I told you this over lunch) at the White House, and we all spoke around a table. And I said, “What we really need that we have lost is authority.” And Bill Clinton seemed to agree with that — at least he said he did, although he often said he agreed with whatever you said. But Benjamin Barber, the political scientist, who was also there, took such umbrage at my comments that he, being a typical baby boomer, denounced me in his book for supporting a return to authority. 

Some of the writers about the modern family make a distinction between the “authoritarian parent” and the “authoritative parent,” and say that it is possible to be authoritative without being authoritarian. Not an easy thing to bring off, but that’s what we need. We’re getting some of that here and there. Look at the movement over young teens’ access to social media and the desire for parents to exercise some authority over them, or (misguided or not) the efforts of parents to decide what books their kids can read. I may not agree with that form of authority, but it is in some ways a return to authority of a sort.

Geoff Kabaservice: Around the time that your book, The Lost City, came out, there was a movie called Pleasantville, which depicted 1990s teenagers going back to the 1950s, and it was so complacent and literally colorless that the 1950s were in black and white, and these teens from the ‘90s had to introduce color into that world. But it was that kind of contempt for the 1950s, and what they would have seen as the complacent, bigoted, authoritarian style in everything from parenting to governance, that turned so many people in the 1990s in the direction of complete liberation, I guess I would say.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes, including, as we said, people who didn’t remember the ‘50s at all but have an image of it that has been burned into their psyche.

Geoff Kabaservice: Now, of course, when we do look back in the 1950s, one has to say that one of the most glaring of the inequalities of that era was the treatment of African Americans — obviously in the American South, where it was the Jim Crow era, but also in the North. Bronzeville was unlike the other communities you described in that people in St. Nicholas Tolentine and especially Elmhurst really wanted to be there, but the Blacks in Bronzeville had no choice. And it’s kind of a chilling statistic you include in there which is that of the 77 hospitals in Chicago at that time, only six would accept Black patients at all, and five of those had quotas on how many Black patients they would see at any given time. But one of the many counterintuitive aspects of The Lost City is that you found former residents of Bronzeville who remembered their time there in the segregated 1950s as the best years of their lives. They missed the spiritual and social richness of the community. They felt that maybe they had made a mistake in leaving the ghetto.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Timuel Black, who is a rather distinguished Black sociologist in Chicago, who I believe would now be about 105 years old, said to me in 1994, “All in all, I think we made a mistake leaving the ghetto.”

Geoff Kabaservice: Which seems on the face of it rather strange.

Alan Ehrenhalt: It does. But there was a vibrancy and a life and an enthusiasm and a self-sufficiency in those Black neighborhoods that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m not a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, but that’s what he talks about: the all-Black neighborhoods, limited as they were, that fostered a very vibrant social life. And it’s interesting… I wrote in a fairly favorable way about Bronzeville in the 1950s, and I got virtually no criticism for that. Whereas when I wrote about the role of women, I got lots of criticism.

Geoff Kabaservice: Right. Well, one of the strengths of your chapters on Bronzeville was that you were able to draw upon one of the greatest studies of any Black community, which was Black Metropolis by Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake.

Alan Ehrenhalt: A great book.

Geoff Kabaservice: A great book. A lot of it came from research that they conducted under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal. But they anatomize that community in great detail and talk about the huge number of flourishing Black-owned businesses in Bronzeville, the fact that the Chicago Defender was not just the greatest Black newspaper but one of the best newspapers in the United States at that time…

Alan Ehrenhalt: It was the only way to find out what was going on in the Black community in Chicago, because the mainstream press didn’t write about it.

Geoff Kabaservice: Exactly. And also you echoed their description of the over 2,000 social organizations that flourished in this relatively narrow strip that’s only about eight miles long by about two and a half miles wide.

Alan Ehrenhalt: It was an enormously clubbable community, and that meant something. It meant more because they were shut off from so many other things that these entities that they created were much more meaningful.

Geoff Kabaservice: And you also actually were surprisingly sympathetic, I thought, to figures like, well, let’s say Joseph Harrison Jackson, who was the pastor of Olivet Baptist Church, which was one of the largest black churches in the country, but also William L. Dawson, who was the Democratic boss of the Black South Side wards. And by the 1960s when I’m writing about Chicago Republican politics, there actually were young Republican activists working with young Black activists to try to unseat Dawson from his seat in Congress, because he was seen as a sort of holdover of the worst aspects of the Daley machine. And yet he really was this figure, as you point out, of genuine achievement and authority whom people looked up to in the community. And the disappearance of people like that and the institutions that they represented was a genuine loss to those communities.

Alan Ehrenhalt: He was in many ways responsible for the longevity of Mayor Daley. Not many people know this, but Mayor Daley Senior in 1963, running against Benjamin Adamowski, Daley lost the white vote — and he was bailed out by Dawson. Now, the other side of that, which is I think a fair criticism, is that Dawson never really argued for or received the kinds of jobs that his contribution to the Daley machine should have given to him. As formidable and even frightening a figure he could be to his own Black community, he was somewhat obsequious to the white machine.

Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. The way it was put at the time is that he would rather have a hundred menial jobs for the Black community than ten judgeships.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes.

Geoff Kabaservice: But at the same time, the Democratic patronage machine was the biggest employer in the Bronzeville neighborhood. And just to return to something you mentioned, Daley lost the white vote in Chicago 1963 because he was perceived by many elements of the white community as too close to the Black community…

Alan Ehrenhalt: Correct.

Geoff Kabaservice: …and working too closely with a figure like Dawson. And it was then, in many ways, that he turned against the civil rights movement that he had hitherto supported and became identified with some of the ugly protests against Martin Luther King and integration, particularly on Chicago’s West Side.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes. I think you have to divide Daley’s career in two. There’s the Daley that ruled and reigned in Chicago as mayor from 1955 to the early 1960s, in which he was really quite a good, conscientious, and reasonable mayor, and not a bigot. He developed these less attractive qualities in the 1960s as Black militancy gained and grew, and that stains the reputation that he will always have. He was a much more complicated man than the portrayals of him, including Mike Royko’s Boss, really give him credit for.

Geoff Kabaservice: And although you may not be the biggest fan of the world of issues of municipal finance, there is no doubt that Daley was a master of such details. And also that Chicago deserved its motto as “The City That Works” when he was mayor.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes. Daley — people also don’t know this — he was the State of Illinois Finance Director under Adlai Stevenson. He knew numbers.

Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. And this is relevant because one of the most interesting intellectual and political movements of the present day is the Abundance movement. And this is in a way, to really reduce it, an attempt to wrestle with the legacy of somewhat tyrannical figures like Robert Moses in New York, who ran roughshod over vulnerable communities but also got things done and delivered the results to the New Deal coalition. And Daley, in his own way, is a comparable figure.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes. Moses similarly needs to be seen as one man before World War II, in which he did some really good things, and the tyrant and autocrat he became after the war.

Geoff Kabaservice: So there’s a line you have in your book where people don’t literally want to go back to the 1950s, but they want to edit their memories of the 1950s. In a sense, they want the good parts as they remembered of the 1950s without the bad parts.

Alan Ehrenhalt: We all want that from our youth.

Geoff Kabaservice: I suppose we do. But this has different valence when it comes to liberals and conservatives nowadays. So how do you see it when people look back to the 1950s, liberals and conservatives, what are the parts they would like to have back and what are the parts that they’re omitting from their memories?

Alan Ehrenhalt: Now are you talking about the conservatives or the left?

Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I have my own examples. Of course the conservatives would like to return to a time when, as they see it, family structure was stable, religious belief was widespread, “In God We Trust” went on the currency, and when people, so it seemed, looked up to the police as authority figures and there was much more seeming social stability in society. But they’re editing out a lot of those memories. And part of what they’re editing out, as you pointed out earlier, is that those working-class masses in their stable communities were also voting Democratic and had intense loyalty to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Is there any way for the conservatives to get back the things they miss without also moving back towards a kind of benevolent and even big government that brought the good things they remember?

Alan Ehrenhalt: Well, they’re trying things. There’s a parents’ rights movement on the right, which we talked about. In general, we’re not going back to the… I can’t think of too many elements of 1950s culture that we either can retrieve or would want to retrieve. What’s crucial, if we can do it, is that we develop new forms of community for the twenty-first century, which is now a quarter gone.

Geoff Kabaservice: Tell me more.

Alan Ehrenhalt: And that leads to a very large question, which is: What do computers and social media have to do with community? People are going on computers and joining groups that mean a lot to them, there’s no doubt about that, from gameplay in groups to new mothers talking to each other online. So there are benefits to that. On the other hand, is it a substitute for physical community? I would say no, probably not. You need to be with people in order to receive the full measure of community.

Geoff Kabaservice: I would tend to agree. But there also is a certain sadness to your book, The Lost City, because even in the 1990s, it was clear that cities like Chicago had changed and there was no way to return to some of what they had been and what people remembered so fondly about them. And in particular, there really are no longer any white working-class communities in Chicago.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Not to speak of, no. I believe Chicago still has a law that requires police and fire and those people to live within the city, unless that has been recently repealed; I haven’t checked on that. And so that’s the one element of working-class community that has remained through the years, and it’s based on rules of civic employment.

Geoff Kabaservice: And it is why, for example, a neighborhood like the one that Mayor Daley lived in, Bridgeport in the Back of the Yards, still has some aspects of the older community.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes, I think that’s right.

Geoff Kabaservice: But nonetheless, Archie Bunker and his children do not live in the city anymore. And there’s a sense of dispossession, I guess, that blue-collar communities who started out in those cities feel, which feeds into the anger of Trumpism and the desire for retribution, even if it’s not focused. I remember that your book on The Great Inversion was reviewed by the late Fred Siegel, who was another urbanologist. And I actually remember that his New York Times obituary said “Fred Siegel, Urban Historian and a Former Liberal.”

Alan Ehrenhalt: That’s true of Fred, actually.

Geoff Kabaservice: And he was somebody who came out of the Jewish working class, remembered these communities fondly, and was very angry at what he saw as the crime and even racial integration that had destroyed these communities and driven its inhabitants out, scattered them to the four winds. You have avoided that anger, which is a commendable aspect of you personally, but I honestly think this is a real phenomenon that helps to explain Trumpism in a lot of ways.

Alan Ehrenhalt: Yes. Well, I try not to get too angry about these things. I report them and I make some judgments about them, but to curse the darkness is not something that I’m really into.

Geoff Kabaservice: So let me ask you this question then from a liberal standpoint. Is there a way to reconstitute the order that people miss about the 1950s in a way that is not overweening order, or authoritarian even in the way of Donald Trump?

Alan Ehrenhalt: I haven’t found one. I mean, there are forms of community, as we said, that have emerged from book clubs and garden clubs and all of that sort of thing, and they still exist. Book clubs are tremendously popular and a common element in this century’s social life. So that’s something. I mean, I think a lot more people are in book clubs in 2025 than there were in 1957. Sure, that means something. Soccer teams…

Geoff Kabaservice: These are important in their way, but they aren’t as broadly scaled as some of the other institutions of the 1950s like, for example, religion. And obviously the mainstream Protestant churches and Jewish reform communities are still with us. Is there any sense in which they ought to ask more even of their liberal adherents than they do now? Is there any sense in which, if they were to recover a sense of their older authority, both these institutions and the cause of liberalism might be better served?

Alan Ehrenhalt: The mainstream denominations, to use an unfriendly term, are pretty “woke” these days. They have gone quite far to the left, and I think they have lost the parishioners who preferred them the way they were. They have lost enormous numbers of adherents as a result of that, and they are a major part of the move to the left in general among American elites.

Geoff Kabaservice: So what can the Democratic Party do, in your opinion, to regain the lost affections of so many of the working-class voters who once upon a time supported Democrats and now vote for Trump and the Republicans?

Alan Ehrenhalt: I don’t have a magic answer to that. I generally agree with the idea that they should talk about nuts-and-bolts economics and get away from cultural issues. Inflation, unemployment, taxes — that’s what they ought to be talking about. So we may be on the verge of returning to something like the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s, which steered the party towards the moderate politics of Bill Clinton and away from further-left entities.

Geoff Kabaservice: I agree that there probably is a need for such an entity. And yet one hears so many criticisms of neoliberalism of the kind associated with Bill Clinton and his presidency. Do you think that there’s a way to recover the good parts of the DLCs move toward the political center without necessarily going in the neoliberal and even quasi-libertarian direction that you yourself oppose?

Alan Ehrenhalt: Well, they should talk about things like the minimum wage and holding corporations to their commitment to remain in communities. Those are things that are important to working-class people, and the Democrats could perhaps get somewhere with that. Are they really going to do it? I don’t know. But yes, there’s an opening there.

Geoff Kabaservice: Well, let’s hope for the best. Alan Ehrenhalt, thank you so much for joining me today…

Alan Ehrenhalt: It’s been a pleasure.

Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you for writing your classic book, The Lost City, which has meant so much to me in the thirty years since its publication.

Alan Ehrenhalt: It was great to be with you.

Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Inegnieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.