Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

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.