25 LOST Gentleman Codes American Working-Class Men Swore By Before 1965

Subscribe to the channel:    / @forgottencharmamerica   In nineteen fifty-one, a steelworker in Gary, Indiana walked his daughter to school every morning before a double shift. He owned two shirts. He had a sixth-grade education. He had never read a book on manners. But when he passed a woman on the sidewalk, he stepped to the outside. When he entered a room, his hat came off. When he gave his word, it held like iron. The men on his shift called him the cleanest poor man in the mill. He died in nineteen seventy-three. Four hundred people came to bury him. Most of them could not have told you why. They only knew the man had carried something. A set of rules. A code he never once explained. They moved through the world by a code. Not written down. Not taught in any school. Carved into them by fathers who knew exactly what kind of man they meant to build. The code cost nothing. It asked everything. It held marriages together. It gave a poor man bearing when he had no money to buy any. Then we decided the code was stiff. Old-fashioned. A cage. We tore it down and called the rubble freedom. We told our sons to just be themselves. We never once stopped to ask what a self was worth with no code holding it up. The men who swore by these rules are nearly all gone now. So is almost everything they knew.