as a bar-tender. There are no native New Yorkers. All New Yorkers
come from small towns and farms. Ask Dad, ask the Sunday editor, ask
the census-taker--they know. And what is true of New York is true of
Boston and Chicago. The big men, the notable men of the big cities,
hail from the small towns, the Springfields, the Jacksons, the
Jamestowns, Georgetowns, Charlestowns--yes, and from the Elizabeths and
Charlottes--of the nation.
Under the circumstances any back-to-the-land movement in this country
seems futile if not ridiculous. The land is still confident and
capable of taking care of itself. It needs no aid from the city chaps
and asks none. The Freudians are not deceived for a moment over the
basis of a return-to-the-farm enterprise. They recognize it for what
it is--a sentimental complex superinduced by the nervous hysteria of
the city. But even the amazingly small proportion of the population
that is not Freudian refuses to become influenced by the cry of the
sentimentalists. Because it is keenly, though unpretentiously, aware of
the genuinely rural state of its culture and civilization.
The civilization of America is predominantly the civilization of
the small town. The few libertarians and cosmopolites who continue
to profess to see a broader culture developing along the Atlantic
seaboard resent this fact, though they scarcely deny it. They are too
intelligent, too widened in vision to deny it. They cannot watch the
tremendous growth and power and influence of secret societies, of
chambers of commerce, of boosters’ clubs, of the Ford car, of moving
pictures, of talking-machines, of evangelists, of nerve tonics, of
the _Saturday Evening Post_, of Browning societies, of circuses, of
church socials, of parades and pageants of every kind and description,
of family reunions, of pioneer picnics, of county fairs, of firemen’s
conventions without secretly acknowledging it. And they know, if they
have obtained a true perspective of America, that there is no section
of this vast political unit that does not possess--and even frequently
boast--these unmistakably provincial signs and symbols.
I do not mean to imply that such aspects make America an unfit place
in which to live. On the contrary, America’s very possession of them
brings colour and rugged picturesqueness, if not a little pathos, to
the individual with imagination sufficient to find them. Mr. Dreiser
found them and shed a triumphant tear. “Dear, crude America” is to
him a sweet and melancholy reality. It is a reality that has been
expressed with a good deal of prophecy--and some profit--by the young
novelists. Small-town realism with a vengeance, rather than a joy,
has been the keynote of their remarkable success during the past
year. However, they pulled the pendulum of cultural life too far in
one direction. They failed, for the most part, of appreciating the
similarity of human nature in city as in country, with the result that
their triumph is ephemeral. Already the reaction has set in. There are
now going on in the work-rooms of the novelists attempts to immortalize
Riverside Drive, Fifth Avenue, Beacon Street, Michigan Boulevard, and
Pennsylvania Avenue.
Unless they penetrate into the soul of these avenues, unless they
perceive that these avenues are not spiritually different from Main
Street, though they may be clothed in the habiliments of metropolitan
taste and fancy, they will fail to symbolize correctly America. They
will be writing merely for money and controversial space in the
literary supplements.
For the soul of these avenues is a soul with an _i_ substituted
for _u_. It is the soul of the land. It is a homely, wholesome
provincialism, typifying human nature as it is found throughout the
United States. We may herd in a large centre of population, assume
the superficialities of cosmopolitan culture and genuinely believe
ourselves devils of fellows. It takes all the force of a prohibition
law to make us realize that we are more sinned against than sinning.
Then are we confronted sharply by the fact that the herd is appallingly
inefficient and inarticulate in a conflict with isolated individualism.
The prohibition movement originated in farming communities and
villages where the evils of alcohol are ridiculously insignificant. No
self-respecting or neighbour-respecting villager could afford to be
known as a drinking man. His business or his livelihood was at stake.
Then why did he foster prohibition? Why did he seek to fasten it upon
the city resident who, if he drank, did not lose apparently his own
or his neighbour’s respect? Chiefly because of his very isolation.
Because he was geographically deprived of the enjoyments which the city
man shared. I can well imagine a farmer in the long sweating hours of
harvest time or a small town storekeeper forced to currying favour with
his friends and neighbours 365 days in a year, resolutely declaring
that what he cannot have the man in the city shall not have. The
hatching of all kinds of prohibitory plots can be traced to just such
apparent injustices of life. Dr. Freud would correctly explain it under
the heading of inferiority-complex.
City men have marvelled at the remarkable organization of the
reformers. It is not so much organization, however, as it is a national
feeling perceived and expressed simultaneously. Cities may conduct the
most efficient propaganda against such a feeling, they may assemble
their largest voting strength to assail it. All in vain. The country
districts roll up the majorities and the cities are left unmistakably
high and dry.
So it is with most of the laws and movements of America. The rural
sections have but to will them and they become in due time established
facts. An idea merely has to take root in the mind of some socially
oppressed individual. He talks it over with his friends at lodge
meeting or during an informal hour at a board of trade meeting. He
receives encouragement. He imparts the idea to his wife, who carries it
to her literary club, where it is given further airing. It spreads to
the volunteer firemen’s clubrooms, to the grange picnics and the church
socials. It is discussed in the pulpits. Finally it reaches the ears
of the village and county politicians who, impressed by its appeal to
the moral force of the community, decide after hours in the back room
of the post-office or the national bank to interest the congressman or
assemblyman from their district in its merits as a possible law upon
the statute books. The congressman and assemblyman, acutely aware of
the side on which their bread is buttered, agree to do “everything
within their power” to put the measure through. Having the assistance
of other congressmen and assemblymen, most of whom are from rural
districts, their tasks assuredly are not difficult.
Before the appearance of the automobile and the movie upon the national
horizon, the small town was chiefly characterized by a distinctly rural
and often melancholy peacefulness. A gentle air of depression hung
over it, destructive of the ambitious spirit of youth and yet, by very
reason of its existence, influencing this spirit to seek adventure and
livelihood in wider fields. Amusements were few and far between. It was
the day of the quilting party, of the Sunday promenade in the cemetery,
of buggy-riding, of the ice-cream festival and the spelling bee. The
bucolic note was ever present.
Such an environment, while joyous to the small boy, became hopelessly
dull and lifeless to the youth of vitality and imagination.
Restlessness with it tormented him day and night until it grew into an
obsession. Especially did he dislike Sunday, its funereal quiet with
stores closed and other possible avenues of excitement and adventure
forbidden. He began to cherish dreams of a life strange and teeming in
distant cities.
As he grew older and a measure of independence came to him he
fled, provided there was no business established by a patient and
hard-working ancestry which might lure him into remaining home. And
even that did not always attract him. He was compelled to go by his
very nature--a nature that desired a change from the pall of confining
and circumscribed realism, the masks of respectability everywhere about
him, the ridiculous display of caste, that saw a rainbow of fulfilled
ideals over the hills, that demanded, in a word, romance.
He, who did not feel this urge, departed because of lack of business
opportunities. Occasionally he returned disillusioned and exhausted
by the city and eager to re-establish himself in a line of work
which promised spiritual contentment. But more often he stayed away,
struggling with the crowd in the city, returning home only for short
vacation periods for rest and reminiscence, to see his people and renew
boyhood friendships. At such times he was likely to be impressed by
the seeming prosperity of those boys he left behind, of the apparent
enjoyment they found in the narrow environment. The thought may have
occurred to him that the life of the small town had undergone a marked
change, that it had adopted awkward, self-conscious urban airs.
Suddenly he realizes that the automobile and the movie and to some
extent the topical magazine are mainly responsible for the contrast.
The motor-car has given the small town man an ever-increasing contact
with the city, with life at formerly inaccessible resorts, with the
country at large. And the movie and the magazine have brought him news
and pictures of the outside world. He has patronized them and grown
wiser.
The basis, the underlying motive, of all cultural life in the small
town is social. The intellectual never enters. It may try to get in but
the doors are usually barred. There is practically no demand for the
so-called intellectual magazines. Therefore, they are seldom placed on
sale. But few daily papers outside of a radius of fifty miles are read.
Plays which have exclusive appeal to the imagination or the intellect
are presented to rows of empty seats. On the other hand, dramas teeming
with primitive emotions and the familiar devices of hokum attract
large audiences, provided the producing managers care to abide by the
present excessive transportation rates. There is but little interest
manifested in great world movements, such as the economic upheaval
in Eastern Europe. Normalcy is, indeed, the watchword so far as
intellectual development is concerned.
It is in the social atmosphere that the American village has its real
_raison d’être_. Therein do we meet the characteristics that have
stamped themselves indelibly upon American life. The thousand and one
secret societies that flourish here have particularly fertile soil in
the small towns. Count all the loyal legionaries of all the chapters
of all the secret societies between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
and you have a job suited only to the most irrepressible statistician.
And the most loyal live in the small towns and villages of the United
States. The choice is not limited. There are societies enough to suit
all kinds of personalities and purses.
The Knights of Pythias, the Knights of the Maccabees, the Odd Fellows,
the Elks, the Eagles, the Loyal Order of the Moose, the Modern Woodmen,
the Masons with their elaborate subdivisions of Shriners and Knights
Templar--all count their membership throughout the nation. And the
women, jealous of their husbands’ loyalty to various and complex forms
of hocus-pocus, have organized auxiliary societies which, while not
maintaining the secrecy that veils the fraternal orders, nevertheless
build up a pretentious mystery intriguing to the male mind.
No town is a self-respecting town unless it can boast half a dozen of
these societies. They are the fabric of which the basis of the social
structure is built. They are the very essence of America. They dot
the national landscape. Every city, as if to prove conclusively its
provincial nature, displays one or more temples devoted to the rituals
of fraternal organization.
Recently the South has revived the order of the Ku Klux Klan which
flourished after the Civil War as a means of improving upon the
orderly course of the law in dealing with the Negro race. Here is the
apotheosis of the secret society, with its magnificent concealment of
identity in a unique form of dress, its pretensions to 100 per cent.
Americanism, its blatant proclamations of perpetuating the great and
glorious traditions of the republic. The Negro has already organized to
offset this propaganda. He knew that unless he could show secret orders
of imposing strength he had no right even to the questionable heritage
of habitation here. He would be outside the spirit of the times. He
owed it to America, to “dear, crude America,” to organize lodges and
secret societies; and he has done so.
Undoubtedly the secret society plays a large part in the greatness of
America. It has made the American class-conscious. It has made him
recognize his own importance, his own right to the national distinction
of good-fellowship. It provides him temporary surcease from domestic
and business details, though there are countless numbers of men who
join these orders to make business details, so far as they affect them,
more significant.
The amazing prevalence of conventions in America is an outgrowth of
the secret societies. Life to many 100 per cent. Americans is just one
lodge convention after another. Held in a different city each year,
a distinction that is industriously competed for, the convention has
become a fixed fact in American cultural life. Here is the one occasion
of the year when the serious diddle-daddle is laid aside, and refuge
and freedom are sought in such amusements as the convention city can
offer. The secret order convention has inspired the assembly of all
kinds and descriptions of conventions--trade conventions, religious
conventions, educational conventions--until there is no city in the
land boasting a first-class hotel that does not at one time or another
during the year house delegates with elaborate insignia and badges.
Probably the first parade held in America was that of a class-conscious
fraternal organization eager to display its high standard of membership
as well as a unique resplendence in elaborate regalia. The parade
has continued an integral part of American life ever since. There
is something of the vigour, the gusto and crudeness of America in a
parade. It has come to represent life here in all its curious phases.
The parade had become an event of colourful significance when P. T.
Barnum organized the “greatest show on earth.” He decided to glorify
it--in his dictionary “to glorify” really meant “to commercialize”--and
once and for all time associate it chiefly with the circus. He
succeeded, mainly because the residents of the villages were receptive
to the idea. They saw a bizarre relief from the monotony of existence.
The farmers rolled down from the hills in their lumber-wagons and
found an inarticulate joy, storekeepers closed shop and experienced a
tumultuous freedom from the petty bickerings of trade, men and women
renewed their youth, children were suddenly thrown into a very ecstasy
of delight. Thus, the circus parade became part and parcel of American
civilization.
And the precious and unique spirit created by the circus parade has
been carried on in innumerable representations. To-day America shelters
parades of every conceivable enterprise. Firemen have a day in every
small town of the land on which they joyously pull flower-laden
hose-carts for the entertainment of their fellow-citizens. Bearing such
labels as Alerts, Rescues and Champion Hook and Ladder No. 1, they
march proudly down Main Street--and the world goes hang. The volunteer
firemen’s organization is an institution peculiar to the American small
town,--an institution, too, that is not without class-consciousness.
The rough-and-ready, comparatively illiterate young men form one group.
The clerks, men engaged in the professions and social favourites
compose another. This class is usually endowed by the wealthiest
resident of the town, and its gratitude is expressed usually by naming
the organization for the local Crœsus.
The Elks parade, the Knights of Pythias parade, veterans of various
wars parade, the Shriners and Knights Templar parade, prohibitionists
parade, anti-prohibitionists parade, politicians parade, women parade,
babies parade--everybody parades in America. Indeed, America can be
divided into two classes, those who parade and those who watch the
parade. The parade is indelibly identified with the small town. It is
also inalienably associated with the large city, composed, as it is, of
small-town men.
There has lately taken place in the villages throughout the country a
new movement that has civic pride as its basis. It is the formation
of boosters’ clubs. Everybody is boosting his home town, at least
publicly, though in the privacy of the front porch he may be justly
depressed by its narrowness of opportunity, its subservience to social
snobbery, its intellectual aridity. “Come to Our Town. Free Sites
Furnished for Factories,” read the signs along the railroad tracks.
“Boost Our Town” shout banners stretched across Main Street.
Is there not something vitally poignant in such a proud provincialism?
Is not America endeavouring to lift itself up by its boot-straps, to
make life more comfortable and interesting? The groping, though crude,
is commendable. It is badly directed because there is no inspiration
back of it, because its organizers are only remotely aware how to make
life here more interesting. However, there is the effort and it is
welcome.
Perhaps, when the towns--and for that matter the cities--realize that
artistic sensitiveness is necessary to achieve comfort and interest we
shall have boosters who are as enthusiastic on the front porch as in
the board of trade meeting. When will our towns take artistic advantage
of their river-fronts? The place for the most beautiful walk and
drive and park presents usually unsightly piers, factories and sheds.
Railroad tracks are often laid in the very heart of the town. For many
years the leading hotels in practically all of our towns and cities
were built in close proximity to the railroad station. In seeking to
save a traveller time and convenience hotel proprietors subjected him
to the bodily and mental discomforts that are related to the vicinity
of a railroad station. Of late there is a marked tendency to erect
hotels in quiet residential streets away from the noise and confusion
of shops and railroad yards.
The billboard menace, while diminishing, is still imposing. It is
to the everlasting shame of the towns and cities that in an era of
prohibitions no legislative effort has been made to stop the evil of
desecrating our finest streets with advertising signs. Such commercial
greed is inconceivable to the foreign visitor. It is one of his first
impressions, though he charitably takes refuge in public in attributing
it to the high tension of our existence.
While the first symptoms of artistic appreciation are beginning to
be faintly discerned upon the American horizon, the old and familiar
phases of social life in the country are still being observed. The
picnic of first settlers, the family reunion, the church supper, the
sewing circle, the Browning society--all have national expression.
The introduction of such modern industrial devices as the automobile
has not affected them in the least. It can truly be asserted that the
flivver has even added to their popularity. It has brought people of
the country districts into closer contact than ever before. It has
given a new prestige to the picnics and the reunions.
What offers more rustic charm and simplicity than a family reunion?
Practically every family in the farming districts that claims an
ancestral residence in this country of more than fifty years holds
one annually. It is attended by the great and the near-great from
the cities, by the unaffected relatives back home. Babies jostle
great-grandparents. Large and perspiring women bake for days the cakes
and pies to be consumed. The men of the house are foolishly helping in
making the rooms and the front lawn ready. At last the reunion is at
hand--a sentimental debauch, a grand gorging. Everybody present feels
the poignancy of age. But while the heart throbs the stomach is working
overtime. The law of compensation is satisfied. “A good time was had
by all” finds another expression in the weekly paper, and the reunion
becomes a memory.
At pioneer picnics one finds the family reunion on a larger scale.
The whole township and county has for the time become related. It is
the day of days, a sentimental tournament with handshaking as the
most popular pastime. Organized in the rugged primitiveness of the
early part of the 19th century by men who were first to settle in the
vicinity, the pioneer picnic has been perpetuated, until to-day it
is linked inalterably with America’s development. It has weathered
the passing of the nation from an agricultural to a great industrial
commonwealth. It has stood the gaff of time. And so it goes on for
ever, a tradition of the small town and the farming community. While it
has been divested almost entirely of its original purpose, it serves
to bring the politicians in touch with the “peepul.” Grandiloquent
promises are made for a day from the rostrum by a battalion of
“Honourables”--and forgotten both by the “Honourables” and the public
intent upon dancing and walking aimlessly about the grounds. The
politicians smile as they continue to preserve their heroic pose,
and the “peepul,” satisfied that all is well with the world, turn
to various gambling devices that operate under the hypocritical
eye of the sheriff and to the strange dances that have crept up
from the jungle, for it is a day filled with the eternal spirit of
youth. There is ingenuous appeal in the fair samples of the yokelry
present. There is a quiet force beneath the bovine expressions of
the boys. The soul of America--an America glad to be alive--is being
wonderfully and pathetically manifested. No shams, no superficialities,
no self-conscious sophistication are met. Merely the sturdy quality
of the true American civilization, picturesque and haunting in its
primitiveness.
The county fair belongs in the same classification as the first-settler
picnic. It is the annual relaxation by farmers and merchants from
the tedious tasks of seeing and talking to the same people day after
day. It offers them a measure of equality with the people in the city
with their excursion boats, their baseball games, their park sports.
And they make the most of their opportunity. They come to see and to
be seen, to risk a few dollars on a horse race, to admire the free
exhibitions in front of the side-shows, to watch with wide eyes the
acrobatic stunts before the grandstand; to hear the “Poet and the
Peasant” overture by the band, proud and serious in a stand of its own.
Three or four days given to such pleasures naturally bestow a fine
sense of illusion upon the visitors. They begin to believe that life
has been specially ordered for them. They see through a glass lightly.
They care not a whiff about the crowded excitements of the city. They
have something infinitely more enjoyable than a professional baseball
game or an excursion ride down the river. They have days of endless
variety, of new adventures, of new thoughts. They, too, know that
America cannot go wrong so long as they continue to find illusion. And
they are correct. They may not suspect that American culture is crude.
They do know, however, that it is dear. They should worry.