Blue Collars in Cicero
Epstein, Joseph
Cicero, Illinois, population 69,130, is a town with a sordid past and a troubled future. Cicero adjoins the City of Chicago on its West Side, and during a rare reform administration in...
...If Cicero is afraid of the ghetto, the ghetto is also afraid of Cicero...
...Those Cicero homes, those carefully tended bungalows and twoflats, are felt to be threatened by blacks, and no amount of "sensitivity training" can undo that fact...
...In recent years, too, Western Electric has run a program on the order of "sensitivity training" for its own foremen and supervisors as well as for those in supervisory jobs in other plants in the area to enable them to deal better with the day-today tug of personal relations in the shop between various ethnic groups...
...Instead they suffer, as kids have always suffered, under their parents' (not wholly unfounded) belief that they know more about the world than their children do...
...A reputation for being a wide-open town is one thing, but a reputation for being a mean town is quite another...
...Fortresslike in appearance, it would be equally convincing as a prison or a state insane asylum or in fact what it is—a factory employing approximately 20,000 people in the manufacture of telephone parts and cable...
...Cicero, Illinois, population 69,130, is a town with a sordid past and a troubled future...
...Not long after you move into Cicero, or change your residence within the town, you are likely to get separate visits from the precinct captains of both local political parties...
...Next to the question of property, class and race seem peripheral issues in Cicero...
...They are not only the biggest investment most of them will ever make, but they also symbolize the leg up on society that they and in many instances their immigrant fathers dreamed about...
...Since precinct captains and aldermen do not work so hard at their jobs out of mere Samaritan impulse, a certain amount of low-level corruption is assumed and, in deed, tolerated...
...Many whites, forced to vacate Lawndale, for instance, have moved to Cicero...
...How, for example, does the town replenish itself...
...Easing himself into a chair before his television set or unfurling his newspaper, he has in recent years seen and read about universities aflame...
...BLUE COLLARS IN CICERO Cicero is a town of homeowners...
...Not the least bit funny, but more on the order of the truth...
...It is as homeowners that the people of Cicero—and not without reason—feel threatened...
...It isn't as if the problem is altogether traceable to Cicero's lack of liberality...
...But, most assuredly, at a price...
...they see a groundwork of precedent for it being laid by recent Supreme Court decisions on busing and other manipulative devices to affix quotas for integration in education...
...To be black is to be beautiful, to be Jewish is to be (somehow or other) intellectual, to be Spanish is to be special, but to be Polish, Italian, Greek, or Slavic is to be the butt of jokes...
...But the simple point that had been underlined during this time was that in a period of crisis or even pseudo-crisis, the worst elements in Cicero tend to prevail...
...Yet however mad the world may seem to have gone, Cicero has clearly remained much the same...
...Few clergymen in Cicero try...
...The pressure came partially from within as well...
...In the end King backed down on his threat to march through Cicero, and anyone who cared even vaguely for human life breathed easier...
...The problem with so total a consensus, however, is that it tends to preclude further discussion...
...No small matter this, especially when one lives on wages and plans later to be living on a pension and social security...
...The roots of Cicero's xenophobia sink deep...
...People die and new people move in, but in Cicero the new people often bring with them an even heavier fund of resentment than now obtains in Cicero...
...Whatever the value of "sensitivity training," whatever the quality of relations between ethnic groups in Cicero's various plants—however useful the first, however fine the second—the issue in Cicero is the question of property...
...The town is for the most part a conglomeration of white ethnics—Poles, Italians, Greeks (though not many of these), and Slays—or, in the new and demeaning shorthand, PIGS...
...children pumping their bodies full of drugs whose effect nobody knows much about...
...Do the tensions of the celebrated generation gap make themselves felt in the town...
...1, one white and the other black...
...how the same person would feel if his neighbor sold his house to a Negro is not...
...Question: what did the Honky do with his first 50¢ piece...
...then, later, it was thought that to live in Cicero one had to be a racist...
...As no one in Cicero of sound mind would dare walk the streets of the ghetto at night, neither would any Negro dare walk Cicero's streets in the dark...
...The line, then, has been drawn—specifically, at Cicero Avenue, with blacks to the east and the blue-collar workers of Cicero to the west...
...This last is the approach Cicero has chosen, and it has worked all these years...
...Of Chicago's two ghettos, the West Side one is the less organized, the more intensely festering with chaos, rage, and the potential for desultory destruction...
...Can any portent for change be found in Cicero...
...This would be done under government supervision, with the aid of government funds, and under a strict quota system...
...More important than the put-downs explicit in such jokes, the white ethnics, in Cicero and elsewhere, have over the past decade or so experienced a thunderous assault on their most cherished values...
...My God, such a man feels, is nothing any longer valued in this country— not family, not church, not hard work, not the law, nothing...
...Tool-and-die firms, small print shops, and odd-item manufacturers stand alongside the Hotpoint Division of General Electric and the Cities Service Oil Company...
...But for the newer-model cars parked along its curbs, walking or driving down Cicero's streets you might think yourself somewhere in the late 1940s...
...For the great part comprised of those miniscule news items—"Cookie Sale Planned," "Viet Hero Returns Home On Furlough"—that are the staples of most suburban newspapers, the Cicero Life's editorials never go against the town's core values...
...As children of the working class, the kids of Cicero, or at least the majority of them, see the climb as still ahead and the abyss—not some vague existential "abyss" but the pit of simple failure—not all that far behind...
...Many of them, like JOSEPH EPSTEIN their parents, will go into the trades...
...When you ask a Cicero union local president what, if any, position his union takes on the question of race in Cicero, the man is likely to respond, friendly but slightly tense, by saying: "Well, you know, we try to stay out of that ball game...
...In the Sicilian tradition of hospitality before execution, Capone, after serving up a sumptuous meal, had the three men lashed to their chairs, gagged, and then, baseball bat in hand, he personally shattered nearly every bone in their bodies till they slunk forward, dead in their chairs...
...The answer is by no means clear...
...There is a third way a community can go when confronted with the situation that confronts Cicero, but it, too, is as of the moment illegal...
...As workers, they apparently feel no such threat...
...Michael Novak, a young writer of white ethnic background, has recently remarked: I am born of PIGS—those Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slays, non-English-speaking immigrants, numbered so heavily among the workingmen of this nation...
...Care of a kind made possible only by the utmost pride has been lavished on these modest dwellings...
...with the priority given to welfare and other kinds of government spending in which the town will not share but that will cause an increase in federal taxes...
...No local president in Cicero cares to be quoted by name on the subject, and most of them seem, if not exactly to stand for, at least prepared to live with, the status quo...
...The Cicero–Berwyn Council on Human Relations never exceeded 40 members in its ripest days nor did it actually come out for integration in the two towns of Cicero and JOSEPH EPSTEIN Berwyn, but it was not, in principle, opposed to talking about preparing for the possibility...
...As recently as the late 1950s, strip joints lined Cicero Avenue, and in their back booths, between numbers, dancers performed tasks both raw and byzantine...
...The trim everywhere appears freshly painted, the brass on doorplates and knobs shined...
...Under Capone's reign, Cicero became known as a center for sensuality—his west suburban whorehouses alone were said to gross more than $4 million annually— and for slaughter...
...As the largest single employer in the immediate area, Western Electric has a stake not merely in Cicero but in Lawndale as well...
...A public meeting sponsored by the latter organization, held in Berwyn, with a large contingent of police in attendance, was disrupted at several points by jeering and rowdiness...
...Mere talk, however, was sufficient to incite deep passions...
...The leaders of the union locals in Cicero, though integrationist on the matter of employment, sedulously avoid speaking out on the matter of Cicero's segregated residential status...
...Perhaps this is not so stiff a penalty, after all, since most people who live in Cicero live there in large part because they think and feel precisely the way they do—which is to say, in consonance with the town itself...
...There, with fires roaring only a few blocks away in the ghetto, shopkeepers along Roosevelt Road in Cicero expected the worst—and prepared for it...
...Many of the people who have moved in in recent years are those who have already been dispossessed by the spread of the ghetto elsewhere...
...The people of Cicero pay still another toll—that of conformity...
...Curtains are stretched across many of the basement windows, which usually means that the basements are rented out as apartments, thereby providing extra income...
...Cicero adjoins the City of Chicago on its West Side, and during a rare reform administration in Chicago it was the site to which Al Capone retrenched during the 1920s till the heat was off in the city...
...Long after Capone's death, Cicero retained the reputation of a wide-open town...
...A family man himself, Capone never lived in Cicero proper but in a house in Chicago with his wife and young son, his mother and brothers installed on the second floor...
...And to own one's own home, when the maintenance and protection of that home becomes a big event in one's life, is in nine cases out of ten to move politically at least two full notches to the Right...
...All predictive real-estate studies, for example, call for the West Side ghetto to continue its expansion westward, on into Cicero and beyond...
...They prevail, too, because racial fear in Cicero turns out not to be totally unwarranted...
...It is a Chicago neighborhood directly to the east of Cicero known as Lawndale...
...As with its demography, so with its politics, Cicero tends to be a mini-version of Chicago...
...Reverend DeHority's church was located in Berwyn, a town adjoining Cicero to the immediate west and one sharing many ethnic and political affinities with it...
...With its tremendous investment in physical plant, however, it is not about to move, and so Western Electric has stood its ground and attempts to do what it can to stabilize things...
...What, for example, about the young...
...The kids of Cicero work without the net beneath them the kids of the middle class have—that net, of course, being parents standing by with tolerance and money, ready to pick up any of the pieces generated by a fall...
...Not surprisingly, then, Cicero's institutions turn out to be highly supportive of what is felt to be its way of life...
...Considering the fierce attachment of people of Cicero to their homes, one is inclined to think that perhaps nothing provides so great a stay to the revolution of the proletariat Marx dreamed of than does home-ownership...
...Some will take up white-collar jobs in the plants around Cicero...
...the town has proved remarkably resistant to change...
...The two communities have lived in a state of open if undeclared cold war, with, thankfully, few violent incidents so far...
...Nor, given their backgrounds, have they had the full opportunity to become jaded by the material aspects of life that children of richer parents have had...
...The West Side ghetto has expanded extensively over the years, with Lawndale being its westernmost point to date...
...In the middle '60s, when Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his campaign of moral suasion up from the South to Chicago, he threatened at one point a protest march in Cicero...
...Advocates of this approach, among them Anthony Downes of the Chicago Real Estate Research Corporation, feel that it is an idea whose time has nearly come...
...That class is of less than paramount importance has been made plain by the fact that, in its southeast sector, near Sportsman's Park racetrack, Cicero has in recent years experienced a small ingress of Appalachian whites...
...From "White Ethnic," Harper's Magazine, September 1971, p. 44.] This may seem to smack of a resentment out of proportion with all reality—the country, after all, has a vice-president who is a Greek and a Democratic presidential candidate who is a Pole—yet there can be little question that, culturally speaking, the white ethnics have taken a beating in recent years...
...How, Wilson asked, account for the fact that Southem California has come to be looked upon as—and frequently behaved politically as if it actually were—the Munich of America...
...Nor does any serious attempt to alter the tone of Cicero come from the clergy...
...Smile," says the billboard, "You're in Mid-America Federal Country...
...Their gist is to make clear that if you have any complaints (garbage collection not what it should be), or require help with any special little problems (cutting through the red tape of acquiring a building permit to make certain home improvements), your precinct captain is at your disposal...
...Could the matter even be reasonably discussed...
...It was the West Side ghetto in Chicago that broke into a binge of rioting, looting, arson, and death after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...The town's conservatism derives from its stake in its homes, its strong family and ethnic feeling, and its generally cautious, savings-and-loan approach to life...
...The sadness, if not for the kids themselves but for Cicero, is that the best of the town's kids, those who make it in the world, will leave Cicero behind them, much as the most talented young people of the South have over the years left the small towns in which they were raised...
...Hearing only bad news about itself from outside, it eventually could accommodate only good news from within...
...Certain sections of the town are heavily Polish, others Italian, still others Czech...
...Few WASPS, fewer Jews, and most decidedly no Negroes live in Cicero...
...Chicago has two large ghettos, the South Side and the West Side...
...Cicero is a blue-collar town...
...A similar march through Cicero, it was widely believed at the time, would have made the one in Gage Park seem like a stroll down Proust's Guermantes Way...
...Living near one's work is after all an immense advantage: it means not spending an eighth of one's waking life fighting the freeways, having the possibility of an occasional lunch at home, and saving a lot of wear and tear on one's car...
...Living near one's work is one of the requisites for an ideal community set down by Paul and Percival Goodman in Communitas, a book of utopian city-planning...
...They want good jobs, and the things that good jobs bring: cars, houses of their own, vacations, security...
...Mid-America Federal Savings, Clyde Federal Savings, Olympic Federal Savings, Hawthorne Federal Savings—savings-and-loan banks, housed in buildings both garish and grand, dot almost every thoroughfare in Cicero...
...Reverend DeHority left the area...
...But almost all of the kids of Cicero, excepting only the unregenerate screw-offs, are futureoriented...
...QuesBLUE COLLARS IN CICERO tion: what did the Honky do with his first 500 piece...
...So Cicero stands today, perched on the edge of chaos, grown sullen in its own implacable sense of self-righteousness, and not quite able to believe in its own future...
...Instead, it echoes what opinion already exists in the community, and in the process reinforces it...
...The consequence is that a certain rigidity sets in that is limiting, and not only intellectually so...
...Kids in Cicero do not suffer under parents who make pretense to being more hip, with-it, and attuned to the modern scene than they themselves are...
...A town grows tired of always being told how dreary it is...
...The simple absence of long hair, beards, and Zapata mustaches among men and boys is notable...
...What, hypothetically, if a quota system on residential integration became the law of the land, and Cicero, along with other all-white communities, were required to make room for a black population constituting, say, 15 percent of the town...
...The price is paid in the coin of a continually deepening sense of insularity...
...Decrepit BLUE COLLARS IN CICERO buildings, boarded-up windows, kids and dogs running loose over shattered glass and garbage, street gangs, the stink of poverty— does the ghetto require still another description, still another plodding (if perfectly true) explanation of its origin in human disregard and exploitation...
...In Cicero what fashion magazines have called the Costume Party, far from being over, never began...
...Every man has his own notion of utopia...
...It can deal with it legally and above-board, letting history run its course—and perhaps, as a result, go under in the process...
...Probably not...
...One night at the Hawthorne Inn, Capone feted three fellow gangsters who, he had discovered, were planning to betray him in one of the gang wars of the day...
...Not particularly liberal, nor radical, born into a history not white Anglo-Saxon and not Jewish—born outside what in America is considered the intellectual mainstream...
...How would Cicero react...
...Not that some of the kids at Morton East haven't been on pot, or that others haven't screwed the gauge of experimentation up higher with speed or acid, but for the most part drug use is not a regular part of teen-age life in Cicero...
...By and large the people of Cicero are great savers, a habit that perhaps derives from having had nothing when they or their parents first came to this country, and expecting nothing in the way of help from anyone outside their immediate families in the future...
...The family was forced to vacate, and Ciceroans, or at least a minority of them of a certain temperamental bent, learned a lesson: as a solution to racial problems, violence sometimes works...
...Modestly priced in today's inflationary market—most still sell for under $30,000—these houses are their owners' deepest aspirations palpably realized...
...Such is the frenzy of saving that goes on in Cicero that the earlier joke stands in need of substantial revision...
...Things have been this way since the 1940s," they will tell you, and they see no good reason why they cannot go on being the same for the indefinite future...
...There are two security guards stationed at Western Electric's Gate No...
...Although a sprinkling of small business and professional families live there, its population is made up predominantly of workers...
...120 JOSEPH EPSTEIN Cermak Road runs up the middle of Cicero...
...It is not unusual, for example, to find two brothers who, after marriage, buy houses a block or so away from that on which their parents have a home...
...In the main, there are one-story bungalows and two-flat apartment buildings, and even blocks of buildings that look as if they started out to be two-flats but stopped after the first floor—vertical structures of uniform design that simply end in a flat roof after a single story...
...In those days, and through the better part of the '20s, if you wanted anything done in Cicero you went not to City Hall but to the Hawthorne Inn where, behind bullet-proof steel shutters and with armed guards stationed at every entrance and window, Capone held court...
...They are the children of workingclass parents, and though the American working class may in several respects be better off than their counterparts in other countries, there is no good reason why their children should be satisfied with what their parents have...
...But, more practically, having all that industry within the town borders has the advantage of giving Cicero an extremely solid tax base— which means, among other things, that residential real-estate taxes are very low while community services are of a fairly high order...
...As part of the Capone legacy, it was once thought that to live in Cicero one had to be a gangster, or at least in some peripheral way connected with the Mob...
...Lawndale is the ghetto —and the ghetto, physically decaying and humanly demeaning, at its cruelest...
...It is named after Anton J. Cermak, the Chicago mayor who was the first local politician to win a mayoral election by putting together an ethnic political coalition...
...It has an elaborate program of community relations, ranging from working with the merchants and civic leaders of Cicero on a project to take the best commercial advantage of a new freeway that is supposed to cut through the town, all the way down to aiding local Boy Scout programs...
...Their overall impact on the town has been to push up its political temperature still another degree or two...
...The answer is, not noticeably...
...Girls, gambling, bootleg booze, name your action, Cicero had it and in epic proportions...
...The Hawthorne Works of Western Electric is located on Cicero Avenue, and its red brick structures stretch southward from Cermak Road for roughly four city blocks...
...Harvey Clark, Jr., a Negro bus driver, had rented an apartment in the heart of Cicero, and the immediate consequences of his having moved in his family were the destruction of the building, mob violence, and a general brutalization of the Clarks...
...One-liner: did you hear about the two flamingoes who bought a house in Cicero and decorated their front lawn with two plastic Polacks...
...Many of the blacks at Western Elec tric live in Lawndale, many of the whites JOSEPH EPSTEIN live in Cicero...
...At Western Electric and at other plants in Cicero blacks and whites work side by side, belong to the same locals, take breaks and lunches together...
...Before actually undertaking it, however, the King marchers had been assaulted in a Chicago neighborhood known as Gage Park, where moral suasion was met with spittle, unequivocal language, and bricks hurled through the air...
...The vast majority of parents in Cicero did not go to college—nor will all the kids now in Morton East...
...Answer: he saved 490 of it...
...The lawns, though small, are manicured...
...Because of its strategic position in the path of the West Side ghetto, once the dike of Cicero's segregated status is broken—after the usual dreary cycle of panic, block-busting, and other shoddy real-estate practice has run its course—the town of Cicero figures to be all black...
...Cicero's political tone is comprised of roughly equal parts of conservatism, resentment, and xenophobia...
...Cermak Road is a wide-berthed street, which runs for blocks and blocks unscarred by chain-store shopping...
...Cicero's houses—in many ways they are what their inhabitants' lives are really all about...
...There in Cicero, just across the city line, Capone set up new headquarters, and it wasn't long before his operation was rolling in earnest...
...As for race, who is to say whether Cicero holds blacks in greater contempt than do the people of dozens of other communities around America...
...With the notion of black power, which soon engendered talk about black separatism, much of the fire was taken out of the issue of integration, and things in Cicero cooled down...
...The Cicero Life, 122 one of a chain of west-suburban newspapers, can surely never be accused of attempting to direct opinion in Cicero...
...Suddenly the letters column of the Cicero Life was filled with missives of high indignation against the plot of the Cicero–Berwyn Council on Human Relations to integrate the two towns...
...And so it goes...
...There is even a kind of idiot truth in Spiro Agnew's remark to the effect that if one has seen one ghetto one has seen them all...
...J. Korvette is two towns away in North Riverside...
...The days of that riot were uneasy ones all over Chicago, but perhaps nowhere more so than in Cicero...
...Cicero is very much a church-going town, but a priest or minister would need to command a rare courage to try to liberalize his parish or congregation in any substantive way...
...Answer: a Jew...
...Many of Cicero's citizens work in the town itself, for it is rich in industry, ranging in size from the mammoth Hawthorne Works of Western Electric (which employs some 20,000 workers) down to the Bee & Bee Candy Company...
...In the mid-60s, in fact, there was great animosity toward Archbishop (now Cardinal) John Cody, who had a reputation as an integrationist, to the point where a small movement was underway among Cicero Catholics to cease supporting their churches till Cody cooled it on the subject of race...
...In Illinois a savings-and-loan bank is allowed to pay a half percentage point or so more interest on a savings account than a regular bank and in Cicero, especially on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings after paydays, the town's savings-and-loans hum with action...
...Cermak was killed in an assassination attempt on Franklin Roosevelt, though some people believe it was all along a Syndicate killing...
...The fact is, the cards of neglect, discrimination, and obtuse social policy have been shuffled for more than a half-century, and Cicero has been dealt a bad hand...
...Perhaps if the company had to do it over again, it would have located its enormous plant elsewhere and in less troubled terrain...
...Its resentment derives from the way the world is thought to be going against its, Cicero's, grain: with inflation eating into savings, wages, and pensions...
...Over at Morton East, Cicero's high school, football practice is ending for the day, and the thick-legged sons of strong backed men, in helmets, shoulder pads, shorts, and kleats, round off their workout with a mile jog four times around the field...
...Determined not to be done in again, they came to Cicero, many of them to make what is in effect a last stand...
...Cicero took on the latter reputation in the summer of 1951, when it became the scene of a race riot, one of the first to take place in the United States after World War II...
...And when they do, even as they have begun to now, they will leave behind a town caught in a social dilemma— the ghetto—that represents a responsibility an entire nation has shirked...
...Unlike the children of the modern middle class, they do not have to run to extremes to find room to breathe...
...on most questions and issues of the day, the books in Cicero are quite simply closed...
...Parking lots reserved for Western Electric employees also dot the street, and from the look of the cars in them—lots of recent Fords and Chevvies, but no scarcity of Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, and Buicks—both the company and their unions have done decently by the workers...
...or a father and a son or son-in-law sharing a two-flat, and possibly renting out the basement apartment to a cousin...
...Kobzinga Furniture, Novak Sporting Goods, Old Prague Restaurant, Richard J. Talsky: Doctor of Chiropractic, Hruska Bakery, Local 1806 IBEW AFL–CIO, S&H Food Mart, Greek-Italian Imports and Liquors, Law Offices: Mlede & Kucera, Sparta ABA Soccer Club, Pavlicek Drugs, E. Kavin Floral Shop, Klaus Restaurant: Bohemian-American Food—Cermak Road's storefronts offer as useful an index to Cicero's demography, interests, and character as is perhaps to be had anywhere...
...Or it can deal with it by other than legal means, its realtors either not showing homes to Negroes, or discouraging them in ways subtle and varied, while the town itself makes clear that for any Negro family that cares to move in the way will not be made easy...
...women, blacks, homosexuals making strident demands in abusive language...
...Faced with this prospect, a community can go one of two ways...
...The Cicero Democrats do not have the stranglehold on politics that their confreres in Chicago do, nor does Cicero have a figure remotely comparable to Richard J. Daley, but the prevailing politics is the same elaborate chain of favors, clout, and due bills that traditionally goes by the name of ward-heeling...
...The position of a minister is altogether too vulnerable— funds can be cut off, attendance can drop, resignations can be requested—to steer a congregation into a direction it doesn't wish to take...
...As things stand currently, if one lives in Cicero and one's thoughts run counter to the town's, one has but two alternatives: shut up or leave...
...Does any greening of Cicero seem likely to come from that quarter...
...Nor is there likely to be so considerable a confusion of values in the home...
...Workers and people of the lowermiddle class, the same people who in the large cities of the East and the Middle West lived in apartments, owned their own homes in Southern California...
...Yet there is a considerable difference in political tone between Cicero and Chicago...
...In Cicero, to dissent is unthinkable, merely to express disagreement on basic issues a form of betrayal...
...In the eyes of, say, a 60-year-old, Czech-born, Cicero homeowner, a wage worker and a union man, America must seem a place recently gone quite mad—and become quite threatening...
...Success in life is still a vivid notion for most of them, and the conquest of boredom not yet a full-time occupation...
...Cicero is not a pleasant place to live in, whatever its other conveniences, if one's thoughts go against the reigning ethos of the community...
...Even the 126 most cursory glimpse of Cicero's young leads one to believe that the generation gap is a phenomenon originated and anchored in the middle class...
...BLUE COLLARS IN CICERO...
...They prevail not because Cicero has more racists, bigots, andother nutty right-wingers per square block than are anywhere else in the country, but largely by default...
...How anyone in Cicero would feel if his sister or daughter married a Negro is open to question...
...Other places— suburban villages on Chicago's North Shore, neighborhoods within the city itself—have been able to achieve a certain minimal integration, and achieved it peaceably...
...Which perhaps explains why drugs have been less of a problem at Cicero's Morton East High School than they have been, for example, at Evanston Township High School across the city and in the northern suburbs, where last year, at the height of the drug craze, a security officer was assigned fulltime to surveillance of the drug traffic...
...There things stand, and have stood for some years now, and may well stand for years to come...
...Neighborhoods within Cicero tend to divide into ethnic concentrations...
...In part, this is a consequence of the sense of family feeling and ethnic community that still obtains in Cicero, however it may be beginning to break down elsewhere...
...By day they get along well enough, at night they go their separate ways...
...Question: what is an Italian with an IQ of 160...
...Election day, should you not be noticed at the polls, you can expect a telephone call inquiring if you've voted as yet and reminding you of the time that the polls close...
...In fact, so strong is the threat— even if unvoiced—of violence that would attend any attempt by a black family to move into Cicero, that none is soon likely to try...
...No corporation executive on his way up (or on his way down, for that matter) would contemplate living in Cicero, even though he might work there, so clearly declass6 is the town as an address for such men...
...Answer: he married her...
...Some time not long after this meeting Reverend DeHority woke to find a bomb—a dud, it turned out—planted on his front lawn, a la Ku Klux Klan...
...Cicero grocers kept pistols under their aprons, tavern owners nestled shotguns beneath their bars...
...The answer, it turns out, is not so very complicated...
...If you drive your car to Cicero neither by the Eisenhower nor the Stevenson expressways but instead through the center of Chicago up Roosevelt Avenue, you get a clear picture of what it is that haunts the hearts, beclouds the future, and scares the hell out of the people of Cicero...
...The true sadness of this state of affairs is that it admits of no easy solution...
...This third way involves the idea of defusing the explosive pressure of the ghetto by parceling out its population to various surrounding towns, suburbs, and 124 neighborhoods...
...Mid-America Federal Savings and Loan Association, that is, assets over $185 million...
...The fate that has visited Lawndale awaits Cicero, and nobody knows this better than the workingman of Cicero who has slaved and saved over the years to acquire his own home...
...A handful of men, apart from the regular football coaching staff, stick around to discuss the team's prospects for the coming year...
...Within the plant itself somewhere between 25-30 percent of the employees are either Negro or Spanish (spe cifically, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Cu ban...
...Countering the CiceroBerwyn Council on Human Relations, the Concerned Citizens of Cicero and Berwyn, an organization led by many of the same people opposed to Cardinal Cody, propelled itself into action...
...and with the questioning that has been going on in recent years of such core concerns as the correctness of the Cold War (many Ciceroans have relatives still living in Eastern Europe), the extent of dissent a country ought to allow, and patriotism itself...
...James Q. Wilson once noted much the same point in an essay entitled "A Map of Reagan-Land...
...Kids in Cicero as a general rule do not have as much, neither in material goods nor psychological attention, lavished on them as do the kids of the more affluent middle class...
...A Presbyterian minister and his wife, a couple of exceptional courage and intellectual resources named George and Shirley DeHority, founded an organization called the Cicero–Berwyn Council on Human Relations...
...nor are you likely to find girls got up in hot pants, pants suits, or the midi...
...These homes, bungalows, one- and two-flats alike, are maintained with a scrupulosity not possible under absentee ownership...
...And thus privy to neither power nor status nor intellectual voice...
...It is more than enough to heighten the man's normally cautious outlook into a blinding paranoia...
...Cicero has come to be—and thinks of itself as—an island, its ideas and ideals landlocked in a sea of change...
...Not that the utopian impulse runs with any strength through Cicero...
...In Cicero, for reasons soon to be made clear, the shift to the Right is more on the order of five full notches...
...Fortunately for them, most workers do not—not yet, at any rate—suffer under the subtle lash of such delicate status problems...
...like Chicago to its east, Cicero is a pot whose human contents have never really quite melted...
...But Cicero is not threatened so much with integration as it is by that more devastating phenomenon known as inundation...
...Only the more talented and industrious will go off to colleges...
...So the gap that exists between them and their parents is the one that has always existed between parents and children, and, with luck, always will...
...Its houses are not distinctive, let alone distinguished, but they are magnificently wellcared for...
...A politician who made too great a show of turning up his nose at lagniappe would in fact be suspect...
...In the near distance a power mower whirrs away in someone's backyard...
...It would take a very fine soBLUE COLLARS IN CICERO cial Geiger counter to distinguish the differences in class gradation between the way blacks and Appalachians are viewed by their countrymen as a class, yet the latter have moved into Cicero without the slightest stir...
...During this same period, when there was a clearer consensus than exists now about the value of integration both in education and in housing, Cicero was made to feel uncomfortable about its lily-white status...
...Anyone who did would require courage of a kind that would make James Meredith by comparison seem shy and fumbling...
...The town seems always to have been a patsy for journalists—for the facile generalization, for the ready analogy of Cicero with Mississippi, or Alabama, or South Africa...
...Viewed from Cicero, the Lawndale ghetto seems the maximum threat, like a knife, aloft and twirling end-over-end, coming at one's heart...
...These houses were bought through sweat and at the price of self-denial...
...Across the street from the Western Electric plant the setting is emblematically Ciceroan: along with a few storefronts, there are two bars, another with a sign reading "Exotic Entertainment—All Girl Revue," the Unemployment Office, a couple of workingmen's hotels, and the Hawthorne Savings and Loan...
...So much so that it began to be believed that "outsiders" had a stake in misunderstanding Cicero and thereby in judging it in the worst of all possible terms...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
