One major loss in our culture that is not widely remarked upon is the death of narrative and recitative poetry. I got to thinking of this subject while reading Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1810), a romantic narrative of some 120 pages taking its background from the 16th century conflict between King James V of Scotland and some rebellious clans of the Highlands.  It features several memorable scenes including a duel to the death between the chief protagonist and antagonist, and is colored by Scott’s usual themes of chivalry and honor. The poem was hugely popular not only in Britain but in the United States for over a century, but now is essentially forgotten. This fact should surprise us more than it does. Why do poems like this, widely read and loved well into the 20th century, now seem even more alien than those of Shakespeare?

My position is not that of an aficionado who wants to share his passion with others. To the contrary, I am someone who never had any particular appreciation for poetry. It took considerable time and more than one reading before I became comfortable with The Lady. The problem is partly the archaic language, but even more, modern readers are not at all trained to enjoy the leisurely cinematic rolling out of events and scenes meant to be savored more for the way they are told, than for suspense or depth of character.

I was always more inclined to the humanities than to the sciences, but I never had any appreciation for poetry, except such as was found in song lyrics. The little I read in school didn’t capture my imagination much. The discussion of poetic devices gave the impression that poetry is an obscure intellectual exercise in which a poet decides, for instance, “I’ll use alliteration here to intensify the pathos,” and the reader’s task is to identify the techniques. Robin Williams portrays the harmful effect of such instruction beautifully in his role as a teacher in the film Dead Poets Society. In the film, he has his students read the introduction to a poetry textbook which declares that the value of poetry can be calculated and charted on a graph. Williams then tells the boys that is nonsense: the real purpose of poetry is “to woo women” and then has them tear out the offending introduction from the book.

I did know people who loved poetry fiercely. At college, I knew a girl who wrote deeply personal and sometimes cryptic free-form poems. She seemed to use it for self-expression, or as a kind of therapy. I was impressed by her intense involvement with poetry, but couldn’t relate to it myself. Then there was my father, who had written poetry in his youth and could recite famous poems by heart. (He did think Dead Poets Society was a great movie, which makes me wonder about his original motivations!) This, too, was impressive, but also seemed rather eccentric and pedantic – again, not something I could relate to.

Not too many years ago, I had a small breakthrough when I realized that there is no trick to reading poetry – you can just read it as you do a novel or essay, for its content. Sure, hearing it read aloud would be better, and knowledge of the poetic forms helps, but the primary content of the poem – its language – is perfectly accessible through reading. So I began reading some of the great poets again, and, perhaps aided by greater maturity, was able to do better with it.

I think that part of the modern ideal, is close to that of my college friend, who would have agreed with Emily Dickinson in seeing the individual, subjective, emotional response as being the most important thing. Of course, Dickinson’s statement is wonderful and true in its own way:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.

If not about deep emotional states expressed in original language, modern poetry, like other modern art, seems to be preoccupied with itself, interested in de-familiarizing ordinary experiences and playing with different layers of meaning. An example from Richard Wilbur:

A Measuring Worm

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back….

Interesting, but hardly evocative of a Dickinsonian ecstasy.

A large portion of poetry in the English language, though, is what I will call narrative poetry. I have a very nice collection of it edited by Kingsley Amis, entitled The Faber Popular Reciter. (1) Poems of this type were “learned by heart and recited in class, or performed as turns at grown-up gatherings; they were sung in church or chapel or on other public occasions” (p. 15). This sort of poetry required “absolute clarity, heavy rhythms and noticeable rhymes with some break in the sense preferred at the end of the line.” Also, “[s]ubject-matter must suit the occasion by being public, popular, what unites the individual with some large group of his neighbours” (p. 16). Amis is talking about poetry as a civilizational practice, poetry as part of the common, living heritage of a people.

And these poems can be enjoyed by boys who like sports and guns (a large part of the imagined readership of this blog) as well as by sensitive college girls. It includes the old favorites, like “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere“:

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower, as a signal light, –
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

The form cannot be written today (1978), wrote Amis, because

Clarity, heavy rhythms, strong rhymes and the rest are the vehicles of confidence, of a kind of innocence, of shared faiths and other long-extinct states of mind. The two great themes of popular verse were the nation and the Church, neither of which, to say the least, confers much sense of community any longer. Minor themes, like admiration of or desire for a simple rustic existence, have just been forgotten. The most obvious cause of it all is the disintegrative shock of the Great War. (p. 18)

We still know, on some level, that a national poetry is needed. Indeed, the Obama inauguration featured a reading of a poem that quite accurately reflected the current state of the American “nation” that elected this president – a collection of strangers, alien to each other:

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

The fact that it was beyond-parody awful has everything to do with the fact that production and consumption of poetry – or any art of any depth – requires an audience with shared values and understandings. For poetry, in particular, it requires a common language, and not just in the sense that Sonia Sotomayor and I both speak English, but a common mother tongue, including a shared heritage of stories and experience, a familiarity with conventional forms, and, to a certain degree, a shared ancestry. All of this was the case for the English-speaking peoples when Scott’s poem was written.

I would like to see a revival of narrative and recitative poetry. The Vanishing American website has been instructive and inspirational for me in its author’s featuring of important patriotic and declamatory poems, which she often does on significant dates, giving us a chance, at least in this “virtual” world, to have a national, communal poetic experience.

As for the Lady of the Lake, maybe next time I can say something about it. Suffice it to say for now that whatever flaws it may have, the notions of honor and chivalry it presents are by no means ludicrous, and the author’s admiration for the virtues of warriors is by no means a celebration of war and bellicosity, but quite the opposite.

For now, a tribute to the power of poetry from the end of the poem, sung by the narrator to his “muse” from whom he has fancifully borrowed an abandoned Celtic harp:

Much have I owed thy strains on life’s long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawn’d wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devour’d alone.
That I o’erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own. (Canto VI)

Notes

(1) Kingsley Amis ed., The Faber Popular Reciter, London: Faber and Faber, 1978.

I don’t have a TV at home, and the sheer awfulness of most of it gives me no reason to change that. My wife remarked that she had watched a bit of Ellen and was surprised at how the show wasn’t about anything. I have noticed the same thing. Little stories about rescued animals, vapid conversations with celebrities promoting their latest performance, or ordinary people who get a makeover or something….This was an interesting comment, because I suppose even I, who am not in favor of a Lesbian quota for TV, assumed that the “diversity” Ellen adds would include some element of sophistication. I guess not.

The liberal members of my family like Jon Stewart and some of the dramas, but to me both are like the New York Times – possessing a certain sophistication and craftsmanship but spoiled by their flaunting of their liberal agenda, which they assume all viewers share.

Indeed, even at a young age I was aware of the stupidity of many of the programs – something I picked up from my father. I seem to recall being in the habit of making sarcastic comments about shows as we watched them, not necessarily an endearing habit!

But were Charlie’s Angels and Dallas good shows? No, I think it’s safe to say they were more or less…but I try not to be the smart-mouth anymore. They were entertainment. I myself can truly enjoy something like reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard just because it is so innocent and because it conjures up an America that still was a place I could feel comfortable in.

Things like the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon remind us how much has changed (Michael Jackson’s death is sad too, but in a different way). May they rest in peace. Consider this great sketch from the Carol Burnett Show. This was just ordinary entertainment for ordinary people. But it could not be done today. The silly slapstick is a product of a world of white families consisting of married couples with children, people still largely unselfconscious about their ethnic particularity, people not battered with messages of their own guilt and lack of control over their society, people with family-centered values and lives. For them a joke about sex meant a double-entendre that would make the adults laugh while confusing the kids.

For people who reject the current social order, the alienation one feels with much of the current media can be dispiriting. There are several things we can do, though. One is, of course, to go back to books and to the films and movies of the past. The second is to develop a knack for appreciating some selected parts of our current culture, even though this usually requires learning to ignore some objectionable aspect. The third is to begin setting the groundwork for the culture of our future. I have no pretension of being capable of anything grandiose, but one thing I try to do in this blog is to try to sketch out, at least in the imagination, some ideas about what a healthy culture could be like if it existed in America again.

Billy Bragg, one of my favorite singers once upon a time, had the following lines which came back to me recently:

The temptation
To take the precious things we have apart
To see how they work
Must be resisted for they never fit together again

(”Must I Paint You a Picture”)

He was talking about love affairs – and describing the sort of affair those of my generation experienced so commonly, left on our own with no pressure to make a commitment, and indeed encouraged to “experiment.” I imagine the scenario is no less common today.

Yet the warning applies equally to the reckless stresses we are placing on our society. A conservative thought from Bragg, whose political philosophy was nevertheless precisely that described by Robert Frost in the following lines:*

A Case for Jefferson

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

A nice description of the radical impulse! I believe Frost was thinking of the radical 1920s or maybe ’30s here.

The compulsion to destroy seems to rule our society today – though there is now much less of any solid society remaining to be smashed. Let’s hope for a revival of the conservative impulse – to save what we can of what we have left.

*Bragg has continued to struggle with his conservative side, as shown in his book The Progressive Patriot (which I originally learned of from the Oz Conservative, and left a comment).

The images had remained with me since childhood: an Indian dashing a baby’s brains out outside a house, and a great wooden door with a jagged hole chopped in the middle, through which the same Indians fired a gun at English men, women, and children taking shelter from the attack.

I learned about the Deerfield Massacre from a family visit to the Deerfield Memorial Hall, and from two books: The Boy Captive of Old Deerfield (originally published in 1904) and The Boy Captive in Canada (1905) (1), both by Mary P. Wells Smith, a college-educated Unitarian and supporter of women’s suffrage who had an active career in community affairs. The books tell the story of the year of captivity among the Indians suffered by Stephen Williams, the 10-year-old son of the Reverend John Williams, minister of Deerfield. I was about the same age as Stephen when I read them. The small frontier town of Deerfield was attacked by French and Indians in 1704 as part of the conflict known as Queen Anne’s War. 50 residents were killed and 112 captured and marched 300 miles to Canada to be held for ransom.

The two volumes are classics for older children, combining truthful accounts of the brutality of the attack which make the reader shudder, with romantic imagined episodes of young Stephen’s interactions with the Indians. The latter would be perfect in a Disney version of the story: the kind Indian girl; the nasty boy who pushes the white boy under the ice; the one who befriends him and teaches him to hunt. Stephen is described as intelligent and sensitive, unwavering in his Christian, Protestant faith (some of the Indians are partially-converted Catholics) but willing to learn Indian ways from his captors. The Indians, despite their willingness to instantly dispatch of any captive lacking the strength to travel, by and large treat him well once they have determined to adopt him and teach him Indian ways. Since Stephen, after attending Harvard College, did go on to become a minister active in missionary efforts with the Indians, Smith’s portrait of him is reasonable.

It is essential for American children to be acquainted with stories such as that of Stephen Williams. Through them they can understand their link with the settlers of 300 and more years ago, and understand the hardships and adventure and human drama of the formation of the country. The author also portrays the absolute centrality of religion in Puritan society in terms a child can easily understand. In a Preface to the second book, she writes:

In reading this true story, we can but wonder afresh what superhuman power enabled a young boy, suddenly dragged from home and friends by savages, to endure and survive such an ordeal, and realize anew that in the religious faith instilled by our Puritan forefathers lay the secret of this power of enduring seemingly unbearable hardships and sorrow, so often manifested by our ancestors in the trying times of the old French and Indian wars. (p. vii)

I was disappointed, though, when I recently returned to the Memorial Hall. The door was there, of course, and various portraits and artifacts displayed; but there was no coherent narrative of the events of 1704-5. The lack of clarity came, of course, from the unsuccessful attempt to reconcile contemporary concern with the suffering of displaced Indians with the original and inherent purpose of the museum, which was to commemorate the experience of the white forebears of modern America. The display on the massacre (now called a “raid”) featured numerous Indian artifacts and explanatory texts musing over how “Natives” are ambivalent about the memorializing of Deerfield.

Even worse, the exhibit attacked the more recent inhabitants of Massachusetts for their supposed bias against Indians. For instance, a photographed re-enactment of the “raid” from, I suppose, the early 20th century, showing an “Indian” carrying away Stephen Williams’s younger sister, Eunice, was described as follows:

The darkly painted face on the “Indian” contrasts sharply with the white Puritan cap and innocent face of little “Eunice,” drawing a firm symbolic line between the sinister “savage” and the helpless child.

Another photograph shows young men of perhaps college age standing outdoors, dressed in “Indian” garb and pretending to perform a prayer. The text helpfully informs us:

In pretending to be engaged in a Native American religious activity, they belittle the customs of Native people.

Now I am the first to agree that it is desirable for objective information be given about the three tribes involved in the Deerfield incident and the reasons for their actions. And some devices do not work today, like having the Indian characters say things like “heap good fire,” as Smith did in her novels. Nevertheless, Deerfield is not and never can be a monument to American Indians. It was a town built by English settlers and partly destroyed in a horrific attack which became enshrined the memory of their descendants. These settlers ultimately prevailed against the French and Indians alike to form a new nation.

Have white Americans been guilty of demeaning and belittling the Indian peoples who inhabited the continent before them? No doubt; but in the history of human affairs I do not see why they should be singled out for doing what all people do: placing their group first and seeing things from their group’s perspective. And of course a tradition of humane concern for and admiration of Indians has existed for as long as Europeans have been in contact with them. I would like to defend the young men “praying” mentioned above, who were obviously conducting an innocent ritual that expressed, if anything, admiration for Indians, with no intent to belittle anyone. And if the seizure of a seven-year-old white girl by an Indian warrior can be portrayed without making the girl look innocent and the man sinister, I would like to know how! Further, it seems to be assumed that to identify with the English in the Deerfield incident somehow means to demonize American Indians, which is obviously not the case.

If the reader wishes to see an even more nightmarish deconstruction of Anglo-American identity, he may refer to the website entitled “The Many Stories of 1704,” which attempts to give equal “airtime” to each of three Indian tribes involved, the French, and, yes, the hapless English. To get a flavor of the bias of the website, note the picture which visually suggests that the settlers had destroyed an Indian village to build their own, and the anthropological description of the English as just another human “tribe” driven by economic and other pressures (supplemented by a painting reinforcing a view of them as a collective mass). Amazingly, the website even emphasizes Stephen Williams’s lack of cultural sensitivity – apparently he was an ungrateful captive and “offended” his captors with his eagerness to be ransomed and preference for the French.

This is the kind of “Indian atrocity” that takes place today. The massacres are long past, but our memory of the white founders of America is under continual attack, and the ferocity of the attacks is increasing. If they are not countered, the day may come when the lovely colonial buildings in Old Deerfield, and the Memorial Hall, no longer tell their story at all – if they are even still standing. (If the reader believes that “Old New England’s” future existence is secure, he should look up demographic statistics for cities like Springfield, Massachusetts, now about 30% Hispanic.)

Today, it is not Stephen Williams, but his younger sister, Eunice, who draws the interest of historians (2). Eunice Williams, like one-third of the Deerfield captives, never returned to her original home. Only seven years old when captured, she forgot her English and assimilated completely to the society of her captors, marrying an Indian and converting to Catholicism. Stephen and others made contact with her and repeatedly attempted to persuade her to return to Massachusetts, but to no avail. In our era, in which non-European immigrants steadily move in to overwhelm the white, English-speaking, Protestant population, assimilation out of the founding population is the new ideal for historians, most of whom support the change. Eunice thus replaces Stephen as the subject of interest and sympathy. I too find her to be a sympathetic and interesting character. Nevertheless it is the survival of Stephen that is most important for Americans to remember, symbolizing as it does the roots of our nation and, one hopes, the strength we will find to survive threats of a very different sort.

Notes

(1) Mary P. Wells Smith, The Boy Captive of Old Deerfield (Deerfield, Massachusetts: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 2004), and The Boy Captive in Canada (ibid).

(2) The Unredeemed Captive, by John Demos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), is a very popular and scrupulously researched account of the incident which focuses on the fate of Eunice. I do not make use of it in this essay, however. The Memorial Hall also gives her story much attention. The Indian practice of adopting whites into their tribes, suggesting that they were less “racist” than the English, seems to be generally admired these days.

A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, written in 1918:

God’s Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Balint Vazsonyi

I truly wish that Americans would learn to stop caring about whether foreigners like them. What has happened to this once-proud people? Of all the reasons to dislike George Bush, one of the worst was that he was hated in Europe. The Americans who said this didn’t notice, or acknowledge, that Bush was most hated precisely when he stood up for American sovereignty and national security, or appeared to. The same thing was true for Bush Sr., and Reagan before him. Being disliked by the French was, more often than not, a sign that you were on the right track.

Nevertheless, we can feel happy when someone we like and respect, likes and respects us back. I feel this way about people from Eastern Europe who are pro-American – a couple of whom are part of my family by marriage. One of my favorite such figures is the late Balint Vazsonyi, whose book America’s 30 Years War: Who Is Winning? (1) is a good introduction to an American conservative perspective to people who may be leaning in that direction. Not having read the book in some time, I will not review it here. His basic contention, that America, founded on “English” ideals of liberty, rule of law, and so forth, is being destroyed by “Franco-German” notions of the supremacy of human reason – embodied in ideologies like Communism, Nazism, and so forth, is pretty standard conservative stuff (but is at least genuinely conservative, not neo-conservative). From the perspective of this blog, as my regular readers know, this view is inadequate in its failure to engage the racial and immigration-related aspects of our crisis. But I am interested here in the spirit of what Vazsonyi says.

When I learned about Balint Vazsonyi, he had only recently passed away of cancer (in 2003). It saddens me to think I will never be able to meet him or see him speak, because he conveys a real warmth and humanity – and love for America –  in his writing. A concert pianist, Vazsonyi arrived in the United States in 1959 as a refugee from Hungary after the failed revolt against Soviet occupation, and became a U.S. citizen in 1964. I do not know much about his career as a pianist, but at some point he decided to devote himself to the American conservative cause and became one of its most devoted advocates.

Older people from formerly Communist states like Hungary and the Czech Republic, having experienced Communism very recently, are one group of Europeans who are relatively free of anti-Americanism. And among those who have immigrated here, many seem to be reliably conservative, often more so than “conservative” Americans. Of course, the obvious explanation for this, given by Vazsonyi himself, is that they have experienced Communism first-hand and therefore are not fooled by socialism and other collectivist causes as they appear in America.

Yet this cannot be the whole story. It is not anti-Communism per se, since Eastern Europeans are quite willing to say that some things under Communism worked fairly well for them. And in some other ways, the affinity of people like Vazsonyi to American culture is puzzling, or at least intriguing. The strong Catholicism, the sense of social class, the strong provincial identities, the particularity about food and clothing, and other cultural factors do not seem to add up to a strong affinity to American Anglo-Protestant culture. And yet something is there, some kind of earthiness and work ethic, that seems to work well between us in many cases.

The deeper issue, it seems to me, is that unlike the people of Western Europe, the majority (?) of the people of Eastern Europe seem not to have succumbed to the mind-destroying powers of modern liberalism. (I am sure that it has taken root to some extent among the younger generations.) I cannot prove this myself but it is asserted by the writer Takuan Seiyo, who despite his Japanese pen (brush?) name is a Polish cosmopolitan with a strong attachment to America. Why have the Eastern Europeans not been taken over by the “pods”? Why do they remain comfortable and secure in their identity as white Christians when Western Europe and the English-speaking nations have descended into full collective madness? (I am not sure it is a deep religiosity – the Czechs, at least, seem very secularized.) One could, no doubt, cite their history, religion, and other concrete factors in explanation. But in nations there is also something intangible called character, and that is what I would like to know more about.

I believe we could do worse than to listen to the voices of East Europeans. Czech president Václav Klaus is another public figure from whom Americans and other Westerners have much to learn. When I watched this interview on YouTube I actually felt ashamed for my country, that we should be sternly lectured by this foreign leader on our own founding principles. And, mind you, it is not as if someone like Havel has any sort of inferiority complex with regards to America or any other country. He simply understands the virtue of America’s founding principles, in a sober way, free of the hubris and utopianism that continues to pervade American conservative discourse – to say nothing of the liberal craziness.

What can we learn from the people of these smaller European nations, rarely in the center stage in the history we learn, more distant from us culturally and linguistically than the countries of Western Europe? I remain intrigued by the thought that they have got something right that we, here, just don’t get. If my readers have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.

References

Balint Vazsonyi, America’s 30 Years War: Who is Winning?, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998.

When I was a teenager I yearned to leave my small Midwestern town. The place was just too small; there seemed to be nowhere to go and nothing to do. Classes at school were mainly dull, and not belonging to the small set of “popular” kids I saw little prospect of finding a nice girlfriend. Despite this, the adults in our town constantly proclaimed its all-around superiority and progressiveness. When it came time to leave, with no hesitation I chose a college in a city on the East Coast, where I was finally able to enjoy a satisfactory social and intellectual life. I was bitter enough about my high school life that when the editor of our local newspaper asked me to write a piece on how my town had influenced my college and later experiences, I told him I didn’t have anything to say. So whatever sentimentality I have about my hometown developed much later. (I now blame my own bad attitude for some of my youthful discontent, but that is another subject!)

What I did not realize was that wanting to leave my town was not merely the personal response of myself and a few friends to local conditions, but a generalized cultural phenomenon. People have been wanting to leave their small towns for much of the 20th century, but especially in the post-World War II era. Richard Davies describes the situation thus:

A destructive cycle…took hold. Camden provided a secure haven in which young people were reared and educated, but on reaching adulthood they left for greater opportunities than those available in their hometown. (p. 139)

I now appreciate the privilege of growing up in a “secure haven” much more than I did at the time. Then, I couldn’t leave fast enough.

It is, of course inevitable in a modern society that its talented members should tend to migrate to urban areas. Even regional cities suffer from this loss – the Beatles left Liverpool for London, never to return. But the loss we have experienced is much deeper than that – not, unfortunately, the mere urbanization of our society, but a widespread  disintegration. What Davies describes as happening in small towns happened at every level of society:

What went unrecognized at the time [the early 1950s] was that the social fabric, which had long provided a sense of community responsibility and unity, had begun to unravel…. Television tended to isolate families inside their homes during evening hours, reducing the amount of visiting between neighbors…. Over time, neighbors became more distant; newcomers sometimes remained strangers. Attendance at the three traditional churches became a subject of concern…. Store owners also knew that when farmers and townsfolk went shopping now, especially for major purchases, they got into their automobiles and headed out of town. (p. 155)

Reports of increased crime also began to filter onto the pages of the local newspaper. A series of break-ins of businesses and residences stunned local citizens, who began to lock their doors even during daytime hours. Few residents considered the relationship of juvenile behavior and rising crime rates to national trends because they naturally tended to view life from the perspective of their daily lives and their local community. Also, they tended to know their neighbors less, thus increasing the level of suspicion and lowering their sense of security. (p. 157)

No one could argue that the loss of community in America’s towns was compensated for by equivalent cultural gains in the cities. The suburbs people flocked to had even less community and character than the small towns. The cities kept their status as cultural centers, but have of course been devastated by crime and economic decay. Even culturally they are far from what they used to be, with symphonies and newspapers closing down constantly, and hope for good city schools expressed as a matter of form only. Urban crime, of course, has been inseparable from black, Hispanic, and other ethnic migration to the cities, a topic I won’t expand on here, but the decline of industry has been the result of economic dislocation analogous to those suffered by the small towns. As the national expansion of markets eroded the small town, the globalization of industry eroded the city, and indeed the nation itself. Or so it seems to me.

One thing is for sure: we are left a society yearning for the community and the moral order that once characterized our small towns, but at present without material or economic incentive to go back to living in such communities – if there even were a plausible way for large numbers of people to do so. Still less clear is how we could return to the social and sexual mores of a half-century ago. Can a people collectively and voluntarily give up social freedoms for the greater good? I have no idea how this can happen, though it will have to happen if our civilization is to survive.

A couple of years ago I learned of the song “Roots,” from the Show of Hands album Witness, on the Oz Conservative blog. The title track of that album is another one that can be well appreciated by traditionalists and conservatives. It describes a small village of people who have left the modern world to live in the countryside, farming and living a life of prayer looking forward to the coming Messiah. The song was apparently inspired by the artists’ visit to a religious commune.

We’ve got land, we grow food
We bake bread, and fell wood
Spring lambs in the fields
Sweet water in our hills

And at sunrise each day
We connect, we pray
We’ve got faith to spare
We bond, we share

So, sit down, stop running
He’s near, he’s coming….

The song is a fantasy, of course – I might even call it a liberal fantasy, for a life of subsistence farming is a life of hard toil, and the community desired could only be achieved by giving up much personal freedom and choice and mobility. As for the faith – can it be regained in any way other than hardship and suffering? Yet I admit it is also my fantasy, or dream, not so much to live in the countryside but to live in a true Western civilization and in a nation where my family and I are part of a greater whole.

It is becoming increasingly evident, in any case, that apart from a few areas like medicine, technical progress and improved communication and information technology are no longer improving our quality of life. Getting back to my hometown: in the 1950s one had to drive about an hour to shop in the nearest city; when I was growing up there was a mall a half-hour away. Now there is one of those ubiquitous strip malls with all the shopping one could ever hope for (I’m partial to the Barnes and Noble), about 20 minutes away. Ugly as sin, but unquestionably convenient. Yet…I recently learned another such mall is going up in the same region. We don’t need it! For those already there it only means more crowding, less green. It is obviously for the anticipated growing population, fueled by mass immigration, that the managing class of this country has signed on to. The sprawl closes in – and there are signs that urban crime is reaching the area too.

Is there a silver lining to all this loss? I believe that there is, but it is found in the bittersweet truth that only great loss will teach us the true value of our civilization, so we can begin fighting for our families, our towns, our nations again. I pray that the realization comes sooner rather than later, with as little loss as possible.

References
Richard Davies, Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

In discussing Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street in last week’s essay, I was mainly interested in Lewis’s condemnation of the moral and intellectual character of the American small town of his day. How fair was his picture of small-town life? Undoubtedly there was much truth in his portrayal of the shallow materialism, smug-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, enforced conformity, and physical drabness of his Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. On the other hand, most of these shortcomings were hardly unique to the small towns, while their work ethic, community spirit, safety, and other virtues that were once taken completely for granted now seem like rare treasures. What fools we have been – to allow ourselves to believe that greatest achievement of our civilization has been mere economic productivity!

However, it is also true that we cannot talk about morality and culture in isolation from socioeconomic factors. The rise and decline of the American small town is inseparable from the history of the larger society, a point that was driven home to me again and again while reading Richard Davies’s Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America (1998). “A century or more ago,” writes Davis, “[small towns] occupied a central place in the overall scheme of things, but modern America, with its dominant urban culture, has now passed them by, relegating them to the cruel obscurity that comes from being abandoned by a railroad or left off the federal interstate highway map.” (p. 1)

Davis’s book tells the story of Camden, Ohio, the town of his birth and birthplace of the author Sherwood Anderson. Its story parallels that of thousands of other American small towns. The first white settlers arrived in 1803, purchasing sections of the pristine forest at $2 an acre at the terms of the Land Act of 1800. Like David Crockett, Ohio settlers started by slaughtering the amazing profusion of wildlife that was available for the taking, as they took on the arduous task of clearing the forest for farming. Camden lay in the economic orbit of Cincinnati, and produced pork and grain for that market. By 1850 it was home to some 400 persons, with another 750 living in the surrounding farmland. Railroad service reached Camden in 1852; electric service in 1883.

Adapted to its function as a local economic hub in the national network of agriculture and industry, “by the end of the nineteenth century Camden was indistinguishable in appearance, form, and function from some ten thousand similar communities spread across the land.” (p. 44) Davis paints a detailed picture of the physical environment, dominated by the banks and the churches, and the moral ethos, likewise attuned to the mandates of economic productivity and moral propriety. The largely middle-class citizenry was divided into upper, middle, and lower sub-groups with invisible but universally recognized boundaries. The values of the town are familiar to all of us, if only in our imagination:

Certain behavioral characteristics were expected of those enjoying substantial social standing; sobriety, diligence, probity, reliability, and a responsible work ethic went a long way toward determining one’s standing in the community. Residents believed in the inevitability of Progress, a benevolent but demanding God, and the American Dream. They were unquestionably patriotic. (p. 46)

In a small town, everyone knew everyone else, and while that meant unacceptable or nontraditional behavior was quickly identified and powerful community sanctions imposed, it also meant that the protective cloak of the community was available in times of emergency or need. Criminal activity of any type was extremely rare. (p. 47)

By the mid-1920s telephones, automobiles, and radio connected Camden to the larger region and to the national culture. The future looked bright, but Camden’s very connectedness was undermining its former self-sufficiency. Local merchants lost business to the department stores of Dayton; movies replaced the Vaudeville-type entertainment of the “Opera House.” These phenomena were harbingers of the great changes in national life, propelled by technology and national social and economic trends, that would ultimately reduce towns like Camden to shells of their former selves. Davis describes these changes decade by decade. First came the Depression, with plummeting agricultural commodity prices leading to a wave of mortgage foreclosures. The Depression shook residents’ belief in efficacy of their work ethic, and, as they came to depend on government funds and to subordinate their activities to the mandates of centralized planning, it reduced their actual self-sufficiency. Davis describes the impact of the Depression as follows:

In confronting the cruel realities of the massive economic collapse, residents had to wrestle with the realization that many of the fundamental values upon which they based their lives were no longer viable. It was no longer possible to explain the existence of poverty as the result of laziness or personal failure. They now recognized that they did not have control over their own economic futures. (p. 89).

Subsequent events contributing to the surprisingly rapid decline of the small town included World War II, the suburban boom of the 1950s, the interstate highway system, the spread of television, and other familiar events in our history. By the early 1960s, the decline of America’s small towns was evident to all and seemed to be irreversible. As someone born in the mid-1960s who grew up in a small town and imagined it to be a stable, secure type of community, Davis’s book helped me to understand various physical and institutional features of my town as historical phenomena. I could also see how various events in my town over the years were symptoms of the general unraveling of small-town society that he describes. In the entry that follows this one I will try to articulate some of the issues and questions that the rise and fall of America’s small towns raise for those of us trying to recapture some aspects of our traditional culture.

References

Richard Davies, Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

Last year I wrote about driving through some Midwestern small towns and having a somewhat mystical feeling that the spirit of the American people still lived there. This was not an original sentiment, of course; Americans have a long tradition of pride in their small towns, which are thought to embody the community spirit, work ethic, and moral values that represent the best qualities of our nation. The small town where I grew up was unusual for its liberal ethos and the presence of a substantial middle-class black community. Nevertheless I think my experience there was broadly similar to that of most small-town Americans. The drawbacks of life there – the geographic isolation, self-satisfaction, and petty local politics – were more than compensated for by the safety, friendliness, and the feeling of knowing one’s neighbors and being known by them. These qualities, so easily taken for granted then, now are almost painful to contemplate. They seem the qualities of a world that is rapidly passing away.

For as long as Americans have been extolling the virtues of their small towns, other Americans have been attacking the mythology by attempting to expose those towns as uncultured, shallow, judgmental, hypocritically pious, and just plain ugly. Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and other native sons labored in earnest to expose the petty and ugly sides of small-town life. Lewis carried out the definitive attack in his novel Main Street (1920) and other works which followed. I was reminded of this book recently while listening to a recorded collection of American poems put together by John Derbyshire.* Introducing Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (whose name means “a view of death”), Derbyshire notes the reference to the poem in Main Street, in which the ladies of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, meet to study culture in their Thanatopsis Club. Lewis’s choice of this comically inapt name for a club where ladies discuss poetry without actually reading any poems serves his satiric intent. Gopher Prairie is culturally dead.

Small towns can no longer be said to represent America as a whole; fewer than 10% of Americans now live in them. And yet they remain somehow representative of the American soul. If American culture as a whole is in decline – certainly the view of this writer – then it is natural that small towns would reflect that decline in their own way.

And so they do. In a review of Richard Davies’s Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America, historian Amy Greenberg lays out the sad facts.

As Richard O. Davies states….”modern America, with its dominant urban culture, has now passed [small towns] by, relegating them to the cruel obscurity that comes from being abandoned by a railroad or left off the federal interstate highway map” (p. 1). The casual visitor to most of these towns will note this decay immediately. Central business districts are devastated, shopfronts are boarded up, and both streets and once elegant houses are in advanced states of disrepair.

It is those features not automatically apparent to casual visitors that constitute the real tragedy of modern small-town life. Populated primarily by the elderly and by families attracted by the cheap rents, towns of less than 10,000 have larger concentrations of the poor, on a percentage basis, than cities do. Health care is generally inadequate, and both underfunded schools and social services are severely taxed, while domestic abuse, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy are on the rise. (p. 267)

My visits to various Midwestern small towns confirm this general picture. Many of the mostly white residents of these areas are overweight and shabbily dressed; tattoo parlors and seedy bars suggest a degraded social milieu. Some towns still look nice, and one senses that the churches are thriving; others have been partly engulfed in suburban sprawl. Still others, and my hometown is like this, have redefined themselves as local tourist attractions – with pricey gift shops and restaurants making up the core of visible commerce, while most residents commute to jobs outside of town. The physical entity survives; the old community is mainly gone.

Despite my conservative sympathies I do take Lewis’s critique of small-town America seriously. He was a socialist and hardly unbiased, but he knew small-town life intimately. Lewis drew on his experience as the son of a doctor in Sauk Centre, Minnesota to tell the story of Carol, a college-educated, progressive, idealist, who marries Will Kennicott, a decent if extraordinarily conventional local doctor. Lured by Kennicott’s invitation to use her education and artistic talents to bring beauty, culture, and humanitarian ideals to his hometown, she finds herself constantly watched and usually derided by local residents, who resist every project she undertakes and resent her sense of cultural superiority. She makes friends with several like-minded nonconformists, whom she loses one by one, and has a flirtation with a younger man who admires her. Finally, she leaves her husband to live with her son in Washington for two years, where she associates with various progressives but never decides on a new life course. In the end, she returns to Kennicott, and the novel ends with her acknowledging that she has been “beaten” in her attempts at reform but still determined to resist the town’s narrow, shallow ways:

“I have won in this: I’ve never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept my faith.” (p. 451)

In terms of the Three Pillars of American Civilization, Carol’s faith is in Culture. For her, literature, plays, and public architecture are needed to turn the shanty-like Gopher Prairie into a sophisticated European-style community. Mixed in with Culture is the idea of Progress, which to her means mainly moral progress – the replacement of the town’s Old Testament moral code with modern, scientific, humanistic standards of conduct. She has no active concern with Morality, though she is not personally inclined to immoral behavior.

The citizens of Gopher Prairie believe in Progress too – but to them this means such things as concrete pavement, a nice “rest room” for farmers’ wives, street lights – things strictly material. As for a code of conduct, they rely strictly on old-fashioned Morality – on watching over your neighbors and ostracizing those who violate the moral code. For Culture, the occasional banal movie and patriotic poem are quite sufficient for these practical people.

Lewis, of course, largely sides with Carol, though the narrative makes her naiveté and impracticality evident from time to time. Was his attack on the small town justified?

No doubt he was right in decrying the downsides of small-town life: the ugliness and crude materialism; the rewarding of mediocrity and ostracizing of the weak or different; the false piety, the carefully-maintained class system hidden beneath the veneer of “democracy.” And yet today, when the Main Street he describes scarcely exists anymore, the question for us is not so much whether to condemn or defend the small town, but to see what that critique meant in the context of our history.

Their limitations and problems of small towns were bound up in their origins. One thing that Lewis’s brief allusions to the history of Gopher Prairie remind us of is the extraordinary speed with which these thousands of small towns sprang up as America extended westward during its frontier years, from about 1790 to 1890. With fertile land available at low prices, it was possible for most people willing to work hard to achieve, if not opulence, certainly a much-improved standard of living. The small towns existed to serve the farms and local industries.

As a result, culture was limited to that which was familiar and non-threatening to the community. Conformity was reinforced by the smallness of the population, and probably by the fact that those who did not fit in could move on to somewhere else, while those with artistic or intellectual inclination would make their way to the cities. Those with wealth and business or political skills formed themselves into a sort of local oligarchy, leading to a well-defined pecking order. Meanwhile, in northern states like Minnesota, large numbers of immigrants from places like Sweden and Germany lived with some tension alongside the Anglo-Saxon stock, a tension sometimes exacerbated by the socialistic ideas, or the Catholic religion, that some of them brought.

By 1920 American civilization and culture were coming into their own, and it is hardly surprising that people like Lewis became increasingly discontented with the cultural life in the small towns, which must have seemed decades behind the times. Did Lewis’s critique affect the small towns directly? Probably not much. (It is amusing that Sauk Centre, after a period of anger, eventually made its status as “the original Main Street” a point of pride.) But the critique of the small town was symptomatic of a growing gap in values between the cities and towns, or between the intellectuals and the masses. Main Streeters held on to the church as the center of community life and arbiter of morality; they were rightly suspicious of Socialism and understandably in no hurry to adopt woman suffrage. Yet their position remained a reactive one that could not alter the development of the larger society into ever more “progressive” ways. Socialism, suffrage, theosophy, humanism, free love  – these words inspired in them fear and contempt that, to Lewis, was absurd and exaggerated. Left to herself, Carol Kennicott did not divorce her husband. But 90 years later, after decades of rising divorce and illegitimacy rates, can we still share her faith in a flexible, tolerant code?

Though the small towns may have been harmed by short-sighted leadership, much of their decline can be traced to economic and social policies of the post-World War II era. Greenberg’s review mentions the development of the interstate highway system, federal mortgage programs that encouraged large-scale suburban housing, and farm subsidies that favored agribusiness over family farms. Larger trends like the promulgation of television also altered American life in ways that hurt the towns.

It seems unfortunate that a more salutary relationship did not develop between the cities and small towns of the United States. One could wish that small-town America had been a bit more culturally nuanced, so that they did not feel the need to ban any book in the library that mentioned adultery. One sympathizes with the victims of wrongful ostracism that angered Lewis so. One could also wish that the intellectuals in the cities had held more respect for the values of the heartland. Our civilization is, after all, made up of both the urban and the rural, intellectuals and common folk. Divisions between these sectors, and alienation from the mother cultures of Europe, have surely contributed to the weaknesses which are now endangering our national existence.

In particular, the experience of the 20th century inured all of us, in town and city alike, to a dizzying level of material development and a constant flowing in and out of people. Towns like the fictional Gopher Prairie were not nearly as stable as they may have appeared to be from the outside. All of this makes me wonder if Americans are too accepting of change, and strangely passive about it despite our general activeness in other areas. Could our confidence as a young and successful nation have helped to blind us to the implications of the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened our gates to the mass non-Western influx that is wiping out the society that created Main Street? Did the constant growth and change of America make us today a people unable to call for a halt to growth and change?

I do not believe that a “return” to small-town society is the way to save our country from the forces that threaten it. But Main Street is part of our history, and part of our soul. It may live again in some form if we work to make it happen.

***

*The CD is worth buying, though not slickly-produced like those produced by large publishers;  but be sure to email Mr. Derbyshire before attempting to order it online.

References

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948 (1920).

Amy Greenberg, “Babbitt Who? The Decline of Small-Town America,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (June 1999), p. 267-274.

The Heritage American has been low in activity of late; I hope to return to a regular posting schedule by the end of this week.

From “A Psalm of Life,” by Longfellow:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real !   Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal ;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way ;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.