George Soule
THE SMALL TOWN
America is a nation of villagers, once remarked George Bernard Shaw in a moment of his most exclusive scorn for what he believed was our crude and naïve susceptibility to the modes and moods, to say nothing of the manners, of the professional patriots during that hectic period when Wilhelm was training to become the woodman of Amerongen. Now Shaw is the oracle of the Occident, and when he speaks there is no docile dog this side of Adelphi Terrace presumptuous enough to bark. At least there should not be; and in any event, neither history nor H. G. Wells records any spirited protest on America’s part to the Shavian accusation. It was allowed to stand invulnerable and irrefutable. Of course, in our hearts we know Shaw is right. We may for the moment be signifying rus in urbe, but between you and me and the chief copy-reader of the Marion (Ohio) Star, in urbe is a superfluous detail.
Show me a native New Yorker and I will show you something as extinct 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.