The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

III

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 and produce 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 in Main Street. Casting about for an instance of a State whose history is illustrated by its literature, I pray to be forgiven if I fall back upon Indiana. Edward Eggleston was an early, if not indeed the first, American realist. It is now the habit of many Indianians to flout the Hoosier Schoolmaster as 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 to our 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 of Old Creole Days and Madame 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-eight miles 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’s Lincoln is 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.