LET MAIN STREET ALONE!
CERTAIN questions lie dormant for long periods and then, often with no apparent provocation, assume an acute phase and cry insistently for attention. The failure of the church to adjust itself to the needs of the age; the shiftlessness of the new generation; the weaknesses of our educational system—these and like matters are susceptible of endless debate. Into this general classification we may gaily sweep the query as to whether a small town is as promising a habitat for an aspiring soul as a large city. When we have wearied of defending or opposing the continuance of the direct primary, or have found ourselves suddenly conscious that the attempt to decide whether immortality is desirable is unprofitable, we may address ourselves valiantly to a discussion of the advantages of the provinces over those of the seething metropolis, or takethe other way round, as pleases our humor. Without the recurring stimulus of such contentions as these we should probably be driven to the peddling of petty gossip or sink into a state of intellectual coma.
There are encouraging signs that we of this Republic are much less impatient under criticism than we used to be, or possibly we are becoming more callous. Still I think it may be said honestly that we have reached a point where we are measurably disposed to see American life steadily and see it whole. It is the seeing it whole that is the continuing difficulty. We have been reminded frequently that our life is so varied that the great American novel must inevitably be the work of many hands, it being impossible for one writer to present more than one phase or describe more than one geographical section. This is “old stuff,” and nothing that need keep us awake o’ nights. One of these days some daring hand capable of wielding a broad brush will paint a big picture, but meanwhile we are not so badly served by those fictionists who turn up their little spadefuls of earth and clap a microscope upon it. Suchnovels asMiss Lulu BettandMain Streetor such a play as Mr. Frank Craven’sThe First Year, to take recent examples, encourage the hope that after all we are not afraid to look at ourselves when the mirror is held before us by a steady hand.
A serious novel that cuts close to the quick can hardly fail to disclose one of our most amusing weaknesses—our deeply ingrained local pride that makes us extremely sensitive to criticism in any form of our own bailiwick. The nation may be assailed and we are philosophical about it; but if our home town is peppered with bird shot by some impious huntsman we are at once ready for battle. We do like to brag of our own particular Main Street! It is in the blood of the provincial American to think himself more happily situated and of a higher type than the citizens of any other province. In journeys across the continent, I have sometimes thought that there must be a definite line where bragging begins. I should fix it somewhere west of Pittsburgh, attaining its maximum of innocent complacency in Indiana, diminishing through Iowa and Nebraska, though ranging high in Kansasand Colorado and there gathering fresh power for a dash to the coast, where stout Cortez and all his men would indeed look at each other with a mild surmise to hear the children of the Pacific boast of their landscape and their climate, and the kindly fruits of their soil.
When I travel beyond my State’s boundaries I more or less consciously look for proof of Indiana’s superiority. Where I fail to find it I am not without my explanations and excuses. If I should be kidnapped and set down blindfolded in the midst of Ohio on a rainy night, I should know, I am sure, that I was on alien soil. I frequently cross Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, and never without a sense of a change of atmosphere in passing from one to the other. Kansas, from territorial days, has been much more strenuously advertised than Nebraska. The very name Kansas is richer in its connotations. To think of it is to recall instantly the days of border warfare; John Brown of Osawatomie, the New England infusion, the Civil War soldiers who established themselves on the free soil after Appomattox; grasshoppers and the days of famine; populism and the SocklessSocrates of Medicine Lodge, the brilliant, satiric Ingalls, Howe’sStory of a Country Town, William Allen White of Emporia, andA Certain Rich Man, down to and including the present governor, the Honorable Henry J. Allen, beyond question the most beguiling man to sit at meat with in all America.
A lady with whom I frequently exchange opinions on the trolley-cars of my town took me to task recently for commending Mr. Sinclair Lewis’sMain Streetas an achievement worthy of all respect. “I know a score of Indiana towns and they are not like Gopher Prairie,” she declared indignantly. “No,” I conceded, “they are not; but the Indiana towns you have in mind are older than Gopher Prairie; many of them have celebrated their centennial; they were founded by well-seasoned pioneers of the old American stocks; and an impressive number of the first settlers—I named half a dozen—experienced the same dismay and disgust, and were inspired by the same nobleambition to make the world over that Mr. Lewis has noted in Carol Kennicott’s case.”
Not one but many of my neighbors, and friends and acquaintances in other towns, have lately honored me with their views on provincial life with Mr. Lewis’s novel as a text. Most of them admit that Minnesota may be like that, but by all the gods at once things are not so in “my State” or “my town.” This is a habit of thought, a state of mind. There is, I think, something very delightful about it. To encounter it is to be refreshed and uplifted. It is like meeting a stranger who isn’t ashamed to boast of his wife’s cooking. On east and west journeys across the region of the tall corn one must be churlish indeed to repel the man who is keen to enlighten the ignorant as to the happy circumstances of his life. After an hour I experience a pleasurable sense of intimacy with his neighbors. If, when his town is reached, I step out upon the platform with the returning Ulysses, there may be time enough to shake hands with his wife and children, and I catch a glimpse of his son in the waiting motor—(that boy, I’d have you know, took all the honors of his class at our Stateuniversity)—and it is with real sorrow that I confess my inability to stop off for a day or two to inspect the grain-elevator and the new brickyard and partake of a chicken dinner at the country club—the snappiest in all this part of the State! Main Street is proud of itself, and any newcomer who assumes a critical attitude or is swollen with a desire to retouch the lily is doomed to a chilly reception.
My joy inMain Street, the book, is marred by what I am constrained to think is a questionable assertion in the foreword, namely: “The town is, in our tale, called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Street everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told up York State or in the Carolina Hills.” Now I should say that there are very marked differences between Gopher Prairie and towns of approximately the same size that have drawn upon different strains of foreign or American stock. Mr. Lewis depicts character with a sure stroke, and he communicates the sense of atmosphere admirably.There are paragraphs and single lines that arrest the attention and invite re-reading, so sharply do they bite into the consciousness. One pays him a reader’s highest tribute—“That’s true; I’ve known just such people.” But I should modify his claim to universality in deference to the differences in local history so clearly written upon our maps and the dissimilar backgrounds of young America that are not the less interesting or important because the tracings upon them are so thin.
Human nature, we are frequently assured, is the same the world over, but I don’t believe it can be maintained successfully that all small towns are alike. All manner of things contribute to the making of a community. A college town is unlike an industrial or a farming centre of the same size. A Scandinavian influence in a community is quite different from a German or an Irish or a Scotch influence. There are places in the heart of America where, in the formative period, the Scotch-Irish exerted a very marked influence indeed in giving tone and direction to the community life, and the observer is sensible of this a hundred years afterward. There arevaried shadings traceable to early dominating religious forces; Catholicism, Methodism, Presbyterianism, and Episcopalianism each imparting a coloring of its own to the social fabric. No more fascinating field is open to the student than that offered by the elements that have contributed to the building of American communities as, for example, where there has been a strong foreign infusion or such a blend as that of New Englanders with folk of a Southern strain. Those who are curious in such matters will find a considerable literature ready to their hand. Hardly any one at all conversant with American life but will think instantly of groups of men and women who in some small centre were able, by reason of their foresight and courage, to lay a debt upon posterity, or of an individual who has waged battle alone for public betterment.
The trouble with Mr. Lewis’s Carol Kennicott was that she really had nothing to offer Gopher Prairie that sensible self-respecting people anywhere would have welcomed. A superficial creature, she was without true vision in any direction. Plenty of men and women vastly hersuperior in cultivation and blessed with a far finer sensitiveness to the things of the spirit have in countless cases faced rude conditions, squalor even, cheerfully and hopefully, and in time they have succeeded in doing something to make the world a better place to live in. This is not to say that Carol is not true to type; there is the type, but I am not persuaded that its existence proves anything except that there are always fools and foolish people in the world. Carol would have been a failure anywhere. She deserved to fail in Gopher Prairie, which does not strike me, after all, as so hateful a place as she found it to be. She nowhere impinges upon my sympathy. I have known her by various names in larger and lovelier communities than Gopher Prairie, and wherever she exists she is a bore, and at times an unmitigated nuisance. My heart warms, not to her, but to the people in Main Street she despised. They didn’t need her uplifting hand! They were far more valuable members of society than she proved herself to be, for they worked honestly at their jobs and had, I am confident, a pretty fair idea of their rights and duties, their privileges and immunities, as children of democracy.
Nothing in America is more reassuring than the fact that some one is always wailing in the market-place. When we’ve got something and don’t like it, we wait for some one to tell us how to get rid of it. Plunging into prohibition, we at once become tolerant of the bootlegger. There’s no point of rest. We are fickle, capricious, and pine for change. In the course of time we score for civilization, but the gains, broadly considered, are small and painfully won. Happiest are they who keep sawing wood and don’t expect too much! There are always the zealous laborers, the fit though few, who incur suspicion, awaken antagonism, and suffer defeat, to pave the way for those who will reap the harvest of their sowing. There are a hundred million of us and it’s too much to ask that we all chase the same rainbow. There are diversities of gifts, but all, we hope, animated by the same spirit.
The Main Streets I know do not strike me as a fit subject for commiseration. I refuse to be sorry for them. I am increasingly impressed by their intelligence, their praiseworthy curiosity as to things of good report, their sturdy optimism,their unshakable ambition to excel other Main Streets. There is, to be sure, a type of village with a few stores, a blacksmith-shop, and a gasolene station, that seems to express the ultimate in torpor. Settlements of this sort may be found in every State, and the older the State the more complete seems to be their inertia. But where five thousand people are assembled—or better, when we deal with a metropolis of ten or twelve thousand souls—we are at once conscious of a pulse that keeps time with the world’s heart-beat. There are compensations for those who abide in such places. In such towns, it is quite possible, if you are an amiable being, to know well-nigh every one. The main thoroughfare is a place of fascinations, the stage for a continuing drama. Carrier delivery destroys the old joy of meeting all the folks at the post-office, but most of the citizens, male and female, find some excuse for a daily visit to Main Street. They are bound together by dear and close ties. You’ve got to know your neighbors whether you want to or not, and it’s well for the health of your soul to know them and be of use to them when you can.
I should regard it as a calamity to be deprived of the felicity of my occasional visits to a particular centre of enlightenment and cheer that I have in mind. An hour’s journey on the trolley brings me to the court-house. After one such visit the stranger needn’t trouble to enroll himself at the inn; some one is bound to offer to put him up. There is a dramatic club in that town that produces good plays with remarkable skill and effectiveness. The club is an old one as such things go, and it fixes the social standard for the community. The auditorium of the Masonic Temple serves well as a theatre, and our admiration for the club is enhanced by the disclosure that the members design the scenery and also include in their membership capable directors. After the play one may dance for an hour or two, though the cessation of the music does not mean that you are expected to go to bed. Very likely some one will furnish forth a supper and there will be people “asked in” to contribute to your entertainment.
There are in this community men and women who rank with the best talkers I have ever heard. Their neighbors are proud of them andproduce them on occasion to represent the culture, the wit and humor, of the town. Two women of this place are most discerning students of character. They tell stories with a masterly touch, and with the economy of words, the whimsical comment, the pauses and the unforeseen climaxes that distinguished the storytelling of Twain and Riley. The inhabitants make jokes about their Main Street. They poke fun at themselves as being hicks and rubes, living far from the great centres of thought, while discussing the newest books and finding, I fancy, a mischievous pleasure in casually telling you something which you, as a resident of the near-by capital with its three hundred and twenty thousand people, ought to have known before.
The value of a local literature, where it is honest, is that it preserves a record of change. It is a safe prediction that some later chronicler of Gopher Prairie will present a very different community from that revealed inMain Street. Casting about for an instance of a State whose history is illustrated by its literature, I pray to be forgiven if I fallback upon Indiana. Edward Eggleston was an early, if not indeed the first, American realist. It is now the habit of many Indianians to flout theHoosier Schoolmasteras a libel upon a State that struts and boasts of its culture and refuses to believe that it ever numbered ignorant or vulgar people among its inhabitants. Eggleston’s case is, however, well-supported by testimony that would pass muster under the rules of evidence in any fair court of criticism. Riley, coming later, found kindlier conditions, and sketched countless types of the farm and the country town, and made painstaking studies of the common speech. His observations began with a new epoch—the return of the soldiers from the Civil War. The veracity of his work is not to be questioned; his contribution to the social history of his own Hoosier people is of the highest value. Just as Eggleston and Riley left records of their respective generations, so Mr. Tarkington, arriving opportunely to preserve unbroken the apostolic succession, depicts his own day with the effect of contributing a third panel in a series of historical paintings. Thanks toour provincial literature, we may view many other sections through the eyes of novelists; as, the Maine of Miss Jewett, the Tennessee of Miss Murfree, the Kentucky of James Lane Allen, the Virginia of Mr. Page, Miss Johnston, and Miss Glasgow, the Louisiana of Mr. Cable. (I am sorry for the new generation that doesn’t know the charm ofOld Creole DaysandMadame Delphine!) No doubt scores of motorists traversing Minnesota will hereafter see in every small town a Gopher Prairie, and peer at the doctors’ signs in the hope of catching the name of Kennicott!
An idealism persistently struggling to implant itself in the young soil always has been manifest in the West, and the record of it is very marked in the Mississippi Valley States. Emerson had a fine appreciation of this. He left Concord frequently to brave the winter storms in what was then pretty rough country, to deliver his message and to observe the people. His philosophy seems to have been equal to his hardships. “My chief adventure,” he wrote in his journal of one such pilgrimage, “was the necessity of riding in a buggy forty-eightmiles to Grand Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, and the next morning back to Kalamazoo in time for the train hither at twelve.” Nor did small audiences disturb him. “Here is America in the making, America in the raw. But it does not want much to go to lectures, and ’tis a pity to drive it.”
There is, really, something about corn—tall corn, that whispers on summer nights in what George Ade calls the black dirt country. There is something finely spiritual about corn that grows like a forest in Kansas and Nebraska. And Democracy is like unto it—the plowing, and the sowing, and the tending to keep the weeds out. We can’t scratch a single acre and say all the soil’s bad;—it may be wonderfully rich in the next township!
It is the way of nature to be perverse and to fashion the good and great out of the least promising clay. Country men and small-town men have preponderated in our national counsels and all things considered they haven’t done so badly. Greatness has a way of unfolding itself; it remains true that the fault is in ourselves, and not in our stars, that we are underlings.Out of one small town in Missouri came the two men who, just now, hold respectively the rank of general and admiral of our army and navy. And there is a trustworthy strength in elemental natures—in what Whitman called “powerful uneducated persons.” Ancestry and environment are not negligible factors, yet if Lincoln had been born in New York and Roosevelt in a Kentucky log cabin, both would have reached the White House. In the common phrase, you can’t keep a good man down. The distinguishing achievement of Drinkwater’sLincolnis not merely his superb realization of a great character, but the sense so happily communicated, of a wisdom deep-planted in the general heart of man. It isn’t all just luck, the workings of our democracy. If there’s any manifestation on earth of a divine ordering of things, it is here in America. Considering that most of the hundred million trudge along away back in the line where the music of the band reaches them only faintly, the army keeps step pretty well.
“Myself when young did eagerly frequent” lecture-halls and the abodes of the high-minded and the high-intentioned who were zealous in the cause of culture. This was in those years when Matthew Arnold’s criticisms of America and democracy in general were still much discussed. Thirty years ago it really seemed that culture was not only desirable but readily attainable for America. We cherished happy illusions as to the vast possibilities of education: there should be no Main Street without its reverence for the best thought and noblest action of all time. But those of us who are able to ponder “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world” in the spirit of that period must reflect, a little ruefully, that the new schemes and devices of education to which we pointed with pride have not turned the trick. The machinery of enlightenment has, of course, greatly multiplied. The flag waves on innumerable schoolhouses; literature, art, music are nowhere friendless. The women of America make war ceaselessly uponphilistinism, and no one attentive to their labors can question their sincerity or their intelligence. But these are all matters as to which many hear the call but comparatively few prostrate themselves at the mercy-seat. Culture, in the sense in which we used the word, was not so easily to be conferred or imposed upon great bodies of humanity; the percentage of the mass who are seriously interested in the finest and noblest action of mankind has not perceptibly increased.
Odd as these statements look, now that I have set them down, I hasten to add that they stir in me no deep and poignant sorrow. My feeling about the business is akin to that of a traveller who has missed a train but consoles himself with the reflection that by changing his route a trifle he will in due course reach his destination without serious delay, and at the same time enjoy a view of unfamiliar scenery.
Between what Main Street wants and cries for and what Main Street really needs there is a considerable margin for speculation. I shall say at once that I am far less concernedthan I used to be as to the diffusion of culture in the Main Streets of all creation. Culture is a term much soiled by ignoble use and all but relegated to the vocabulary of cant. We cannot “wish” Plato upon resisting and hostile Main Streets; we are even finding that Isaiah and St. Paul are not so potent to conjure with as formerly. The church is not so generally the social centre of small communities as it was a little while ago. Far too many of us are less fearful of future torment than of a boost in the price of gasolene. The motor may be making pantheists of us: I don’t know. Hedonism in some form may be the next phase; here, again, I have no opinion.
Mr. St. John Ervine complains that we of the provinces lack individuality; that we have been so smoothed out and conform so strictly to the prevailing styles of apparel that the people in one town look exactly like those in the next. This observation may be due in some measure to the alien’s preconceived ideas ofwhat the hapless wights who live west of the Hudson ought to look like, but there is much truth in the remark of this amiable friend from overseas. Even the Indians I have lately seen look quite comfortable in white man’s garb. To a great extent the ready-to-wear industry has standardized our raiment, so that to the unsophisticated masculine eye at least the women of Main Street are indistinguishable from their sisters in the large cities. There is less slouch among the men than there used to be. Mr. Howells said many years ago that in travelling Westward the polish gradually dimmed on the shoes of the native; but the shine-parlors of the sons of Romulus and Achilles have changed all that.
I lean to the idea that it is not well for us all to be tuned to one key. I like to think that the farm folk and country-town people of Georgia and Kansas, Oklahoma and Maine are thinking independently of each other about weighty matters, and that the solidarity of the nation is only the more strikingly demonstrated when, finding themselves stirred (sometimes tardily) by the national consciousness,they act sensibly and with unity and concord. But the interurban trolley and the low-priced motor have dealt a blow to the old smug complacency and indifference. There is less tobacco-juice on the chins of our rural fellow citizens; the native flavor, the raciness and the tang so highly prized by students of local color have in many sections ceased to be. We may yet be confronted by the necessity of preserving specimens of the provincial native in social and ethnological museums.
I should like to believe that the present with its bewildering changes is only a corridor leading, politically and spiritually, toward something more splendid than we have known. We can only hope that this is true, and meanwhile adjust ourselves to the idea that a good many things once prized are gone forever. I am not sure but that a town is better advertised by enlightened sanitary ordinances duly enforced than by the number of its citizens who are acquainted with the writings of Walter Pater. A little while ago I should have looked upon such a thought as blasphemy.
The other evening, in a small college town,I passed under the windows of a hall where a fraternity dance was in progress. I dare say the young gentlemen of the society knew no more of the Greek alphabet than the three letters inscribed over the door of their clubhouse. But this does not trouble me as in “the olden golden glory of the days gone by.” We do not know but that in some far day a prowling New Zealander, turning up a banjo and a trap-drum amid the ruins of some American college, will account them nobler instruments than the lyre and lute.
Evolution brought us down chattering from the trees, and we have no right to assume that we are reverting to the arboreal state. This is no time to lose confidence in democracy; it is too soon to chant the recessional of the race. Much too insistently we have sought to reform, to improve, to plant the seeds of culture, to create moral perfection by act of Congress. If Main Street knows what America is all about, and bathes itself and is kind and considerate of its neighbors, why not leave the rest on the knees of the gods?
What really matters as to Main Street isthat it shall be happy. We can’t, merely by taking thought, lift its people to higher levels of aspiration. Main Street is neither blind nor deaf; it knows well enough what is going on in the world; it is not to be jostled or pushed by condescending outsiders eager to bestow sweetness and light upon it. It is not unaware of the desirability of such things; and in its own fashion and at the proper time it will go after them. Meanwhile if it is cheerful and hopeful and continues to vote with reasonable sanity the rest of the world needn’t despair of it. After all, it’s only the remnant of Israel that can be saved. Let Main Street alone!