Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition

II. Provincialism

II provincialism  Ipropose, in this address, to define certain issues which, as I think, the present state of the world’s civilization, and of our own national life, make both prominent and critical. I The word ‘‘provincialism,’’ which I have used as my title, has been chosen because it is the best single word that I have been able to find to suggest the group of social tendencies to which I want to call your especial attention. I intend to use this word in a somewhat elastic sense, which I may at once indicate. When we employ the word ‘‘provincialism ’’ as a concrete term, speaking of ‘‘a provincialism,’’ we mean, I suppose, any social disposition, or custom, or form of speech or of civilization, which is especially characteristic of a province. In this sense one speaks of the provincialisms of the local dialect of any English shire, or of any German country district. This use of the term {  }  provincialism in relation to the dialects of any language is very common. But one may also apply the term to name, not only the peculiarities of a local dialect, but the fashions, the manners, and customs of a given restricted region of any country. One also often employs the word ‘‘provincialism’’ as an abstract term, to name not only the customs or social tendencies themselves, but that fondness for them, that pride in them, which may make the inhabitants of a province indisposed to conform to the ways of those who come from without, and anxious to follow persistently their own local traditions. Thus the word ‘‘provincialism ’’ applies both to the social habits of a given region, and to the mental interest which inspires and maintains these habits. But both uses of the term imply, of course, that one first knows what is to be meant by the word ‘‘province.’’ This word, however, is one of an especially elastic usage. Sometimes, by a province, we mean a region as restricted as a single English county, or as the smallest of the old German principalities. Sometimes, however, one speaks of the whole of New England, or even of the Southern states of our Union, as constituting one province; and I know of no easy way of defining how large a province may be. For the term, in this looser sense, stands for no determinate political or legal division of a country. Meanwhile we all, in our minds, oppose the term ‘‘province’’ to the term ‘‘nation ,’’ as the part is opposed to the whole. Yet we also often oppose the terms ‘‘provincial’’ and ‘‘metropolitan,’’ conceiving that the country districts and the smaller towns and cities belong even to the province, while the very great cities belong rather to the whole country , or even to the world in general. Yet here the distinction that we make is not the same as the former distinction between the part of a country and the whole country. Nevertheless, the ground for such an identification of the provincial with that which pertains to country districts and to smaller cities can only lie in the supposed tendency of the great city to represent better the interests of the larger whole than do the lesser communities. This supposition, however, is certainly not altogether well founded. In the sense of possessing local interests and customs, and of being limited to ideas of their own, many great cities are almost as distinctly provincial as are certain less populous regions. provincialism  The plain people of London or of Berlin have their local dialect; and it seems fair to speak of the peculiarities of such dialects as provincialisms . And almost the same holds true of the other social traditions peculiar to individual great cities. It is possible to find, even amongst the highly cultivated classes of ancient cities, ideas and fashions of behavior as characteristically local, as exclusive in their indifference to the ways of outsiders, as are the similarly characteristic ways and opinions of the country districts of the same nationality. And so the opposition of the provincial to the metropolitan, in manners and in beliefs, seems to me much less important than the other opposition of the province, as the more or less restricted part, to the nation as the whole. It is this latter opposition that I shall therefore emphasize in the present discussion. But I shall not attempt to define how large or how well...