THE MAN IN THE STREET

PAPERS ON AMERICAN TOPICS

BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1921

Copyright, 1921, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Published September, 1921

Copyright, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1920 by THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY CO. Copyright, 1918, by THE YALE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION, Inc. Copyright, 1921, by THE NEW YORK EVENING POST, Inc. THE SCRIBNER PRESS

To CORNELIA

FOREWORD

My right to speak for the man in the street, the average American, is, I am aware, open to serious question. Possibly there are amiable persons who, if urged to pass judgment, would appraise me a trifle higher than the average; others, I am painfully aware, would rate me much lower. The point is, of course, one about which I am not entitled to an opinion. I offer no apology for the apparent unrelated character of the subjects herein discussed, for to my mind the volume has a certain cohesion. In that part of America with which I am most familiar, literature, politics, religion, and the changing social scene are all of a piece. We disport ourselves in one field as blithely as in another. Within a few blocks of this room, on the fifteenth floor of an office-building in the centre of my home town, I can find men and women quite competent to answer questions pertaining to any branch of philosophy or the arts. I called a lawyer friend on the telephone only yesterday[viii] and hummed a few bars of music that he might aid me with the correct designation of one of

Beethoven’s symphonies. In perplexity over an elusive quotation I can, with all confidence, plant myself on the post-office steps and some one will come along with the answer. I do not mention these matters boastfully, but merely to illustrate the happy conditions of life in the delectable province in which I was born.

The papers here collected first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, except “Let Main Street Alone!” which was published in the New York Evening Post, “The Cheerful Breakfast Table,” which is reprinted from the Yale Review, and “The Poor Old English Language,” which is reproduced from Scribner’s Magazine. The political articles are sufficiently explained by their dates. They are reprinted without alteration in the hope that some later student of the periods scrutinized may find them of interest.

M. N.

Indianapolis, July, 1921.

LET MAIN STREET ALONE!

I

CERTAIN questions lie dormant for long periods and then, often with no apparent provocation, assume an acute phase and cry insistently for attention. The failure of the church to adjust itself to the needs of the age; the shiftlessness of the new generation; the weaknesses of our educational system—these and like matters are susceptible of endless debate. Into this general classification we may gaily sweep the query as to whether a small town is as promising a habitat for an aspiring soul as a large city. When we have wearied of defending or opposing the continuance of the direct primary, or have found ourselves suddenly conscious that the attempt to decide whether immortality is desirable is unprofitable, we may address ourselves valiantly to a discussion of the advantages of the provinces over those of the seething metropolis, or take[2] the other way round, as pleases our humor. Without the recurring stimulus of such contentions as these we should probably be driven to the peddling of petty gossip or sink into a state of intellectual coma.

There are encouraging signs that we of this Republic are much less impatient under criticism than we used to be, or possibly we are becoming more callous. Still I think it may be said honestly that we have reached a point where we are measurably disposed to see American life steadily and see it whole. It is the seeing it whole that is the continuing difficulty. We have been reminded frequently that our life is so varied that the great American novel must inevitably be the work of many hands, it being impossible for one writer to present more than one phase or describe more than one geographical section. This is “old stuff,” and nothing that need keep us awake o’ nights. One of these days some daring hand capable of wielding a broad brush will paint a big picture, but meanwhile we are not so badly served by those fictionists who turn up their little spadefuls of earth and clap a microscope upon it. Such[3] novels as Miss Lulu Bett and Main Street or such a play as Mr. Frank Craven’s The First Year, to take recent examples, encourage the

hope that after all we are not afraid to look at ourselves when the mirror is held before us by a steady hand.

A serious novel that cuts close to the quick can hardly fail to disclose one of our most amusing weaknesses—our deeply ingrained local pride that makes us extremely sensitive to criticism in any form of our own bailiwick. The nation may be assailed and we are philosophical about it; but if our home town is peppered with bird shot by some impious huntsman we are at once ready for battle. We do like to brag of our own particular Main Street! It is in the blood of the provincial American to think himself more happily situated and of a higher type than the citizens of any other province. In journeys across the continent, I have sometimes thought that there must be a definite line where bragging begins. I should fix it somewhere west of Pittsburgh, attaining its maximum of innocent complacency in Indiana, diminishing through Iowa and Nebraska, though ranging high in Kansas[4] and Colorado and there gathering fresh power for a dash to the coast, where stout Cortez and all his men would indeed look at each other with a mild surmise to hear the children

of the Pacific boast of their landscape and their climate, and the kindly fruits of their soil.

When I travel beyond my State’s boundaries I more or less consciously look for proof of Indiana’s superiority. Where I fail to find it I am not without my explanations and excuses. If I should be kidnapped and set down blindfolded in the midst of Ohio on a rainy night, I should know, I am sure, that I was on alien soil. I frequently cross Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, and never without a sense of a change of atmosphere in passing from one to the other. Kansas, from territorial days, has been much more strenuously advertised than Nebraska. The very name Kansas is richer in its connotations. To think of it is to recall instantly the days of border warfare; John Brown of Osawatomie, the New England infusion, the Civil War soldiers who established themselves on the free soil after Appomattox; grasshoppers and the days of famine; populism and the Sockless[5] Socrates of Medicine Lodge, the brilliant, satiric Ingalls, Howe’s Story of a Country Town, William Allen White of Emporia, and A Certain Rich Man, down to and including the present governor, the Honorable Henry J. Allen, beyond

question the most beguiling man to sit at meat with in all America.

II

A lady with whom I frequently exchange opinions on the trolley-cars of my town took me to task recently for commending Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street as an achievement worthy of all respect. “I know a score of Indiana towns and they are not like Gopher Prairie,” she declared indignantly. “No,” I conceded, “they are not; but the Indiana towns you have in mind are older than Gopher Prairie; many of them have celebrated their centennial; they were founded by well-seasoned pioneers of the old American stocks; and an impressive number of the first settlers—I named half a dozen—experienced the same dismay and disgust, and were inspired by the same noble[6] ambition to make the world over that Mr. Lewis has noted in Carol Kennicott’s case.”

Not one but many of my neighbors, and friends and acquaintances in other towns, have lately honored me with their views on provincial life with Mr. Lewis’s novel as a text. Most of them admit that Minnesota may be like that, but by all the gods at once things are not so in “my State” or “my town.” This is a habit of thought, a state of mind. There is, I think, something very delightful about it. To encounter it is to be refreshed and uplifted. It is like meeting a stranger who isn’t ashamed to boast of his wife’s cooking. On east and west journeys across the region of the tall corn one must be churlish indeed to repel the man who is keen to enlighten the ignorant as to the happy circumstances of his life. After an hour I experience a pleasurable sense of intimacy with his neighbors. If, when his town is reached, I step out upon the platform with the returning Ulysses, there may be time enough to shake hands with his wife and children, and I catch a glimpse of his son in the waiting motor—(that boy, I’d have you know, took all the honors of his class at our State[7]

university)—and it is with real sorrow that I confess my inability to stop off for a day or two to inspect the grain-elevator and the new brickyard and partake of a chicken dinner at the country club—the snappiest in all this part of the State! Main Street is proud of itself, and any newcomer who assumes a critical attitude or is swollen with a desire to retouch the lily is doomed to a chilly reception.

My joy in Main Street, the book, is marred by what I am constrained to think is a questionable assertion in the foreword, namely: “The town is, in our tale, called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Street everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told up York State or in the Carolina Hills.” Now I should say that there are very marked differences between Gopher Prairie and towns of approximately the same size that have drawn upon different strains of foreign or American stock. Mr. Lewis depicts character with a sure stroke, and he communicates the sense of atmosphere admirably.[8] There are paragraphs and single lines that arrest the attention and invite re-reading, so sharply do they bite into the consciousness. One pays him a reader’s highest tribute—“That’s true; I’ve known just such people.” But I should modify his claim to universality in deference to the differences in local history so clearly written upon our maps and the dissimilar

backgrounds of young America that are not the less interesting or important because the tracings upon them are so thin.

Human nature, we are frequently assured, is the same the world over, but I don’t believe it can be maintained successfully that all small towns are alike. All manner of things contribute to the making of a community. A college town is unlike an industrial or a farming centre of the same size. A Scandinavian influence in a community is quite different from a German or an Irish or a Scotch influence. There are places in the heart of America where, in the formative period, the Scotch-Irish exerted a very marked influence indeed in giving tone and direction to the community life, and the observer is sensible of this a hundred years afterward. There are[9] varied shadings traceable to early dominating religious forces; Catholicism, Methodism, Presbyterianism, and Episcopalianism each imparting a coloring of its own to the social fabric. No more fascinating field is open to the student than that offered by the elements that have contributed to the building of American communities as, for example, where there has been a strong foreign infusion or such a blend as that

of New Englanders with folk of a Southern strain. Those who are curious in such matters will find a considerable literature ready to their hand. Hardly any one at all conversant with American life but will think instantly of groups of men and women who in some small centre were able, by reason of their foresight and courage, to lay a debt upon posterity, or of an individual who has waged battle alone for public betterment.

The trouble with Mr. Lewis’s Carol Kennicott was that she really had nothing to offer Gopher Prairie that sensible self-respecting people anywhere would have welcomed. A superficial creature, she was without true vision in any direction. Plenty of men and women vastly her[10] superior in cultivation and blessed with a far finer sensitiveness to the things of the spirit have in countless cases faced rude conditions, squalor even, cheerfully and hopefully, and in time they have succeeded in doing something to make the world a better place to live in. This is not to say that Carol is not true to type; there is the type, but I am not persuaded that its existence proves anything except that there are always fools and foolish people in the world. Carol would have been a failure anywhere. She deserved to fail in Gopher Prairie, which does not strike me, after all, as so hateful a place as she found it to be. She nowhere impinges upon my sympathy. I have known her by various names in larger and lovelier communities than Gopher Prairie, and wherever she exists she is

a bore, and at times an unmitigated nuisance. My heart warms, not to her, but to the people in Main Street she despised. They didn’t need her uplifting hand! They were far more valuable members of society than she proved herself to be, for they worked honestly at their jobs and had, I am confident, a pretty fair idea of their rights and duties, their privileges and immunities, as children of democracy.

[11]Nothing in America is more reassuring than the fact that some one is always wailing in the market-place. When we’ve got something and don’t like it, we wait for some one to tell us how to get rid of it. Plunging into prohibition, we at once become tolerant of the bootlegger. There’s no point of rest. We are fickle, capricious, and pine for change. In the course of time we score for civilization, but the gains, broadly considered, are small and painfully won. Happiest are they who keep sawing wood and don’t expect too much! There are always the zealous laborers, the fit though few, who incur suspicion, awaken antagonism, and suffer defeat, to pave the way for those who will reap the harvest of their sowing. There are a hundred million of us and it’s too much to ask that we all chase the same rainbow. There are diversities of gifts, but all, we hope, animated by the same spirit.

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,[12] 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.

[13]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[14] 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[15] 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[16] 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!