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.
Against such a background have the flavour and essence of American life been compounded. Their influence has extended in all directions, in all walks of industry. They have left their impress upon the character of the country, upon the mob and the individual. Sentimental attachment to the old ties, to boyhood ideals and traditions remains potent though a little concealed by the mask, be it affected or real, of sophistication. It is the voice of a new land, of a vigorous and curious nationalism that is being exerted. There obviously cannot be among such a naturally healthy people a supercilious contempt for sentiment. We may laugh a little haughtily at the amazing susceptibility of folks to the extravagant eloquence of itinerant evangelists. We may look on an “old home week” with a touch of urban disdain. We may listen to the band concert on a Saturday night in the Court House Square with a studied indifference. We may assume an attractive weariness in watching the promenaders on Main Street visit one ice-cream emporium after another. But deep down in our hearts is a feeling of invincible pride in the charming homeliness, the youthful vitality, the fine simplicity, yes, and the sweeping pathos of these aspects of small-town civilization.
Louis Raymond Reid