In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Babbitt Who? The Decline of Small-Town America
  • Amy S. Greenberg (bio)
Richard O. Davies. Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. xiii + 234 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $39.95 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

The small town once occupied a central place in American culture, society, and politics, but is largely a thing of the past. Towns of fewer than 10,000 people now contain less than 10 percent of America’s population, but the death of small towns is much more than a factor of this numerical decline. The towns of our cultural imagination are now the schmaltzy vision of Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A., and the parody of The Simpson’s Springfield. Small towns hardly register anymore. Even Babbitt, once the symbol of all that was malignant in small-town America, is largely forgotten, his name no longer a sign of anything to most people. Actual small towns, of course, are in dire straits. As Richard O. Davies states in Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America, “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). 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.

Richard Davies grew up in one of these towns, Camden, Ohio. Today Camden is “caught up in a slow but sure downward spiral, from which there is no escape. The town will not die, but neither will it flourish. A mood of quiet resignation seems to hover over the small valley in which it is located” (p. 2). But during Davies’ youth, Camden was a very different place, [End Page 267] prosperous, friendly, and a little bit smug. Davies lived in three different houses on Main Street, and graduated from Camden’s high school in 1955 in a class of thirty. He knew most of the other residents in his hometown. “Although I did not comprehend it at the time,” Davies writes in the preface to this work, “I was privileged to be permitted to grow up in a community that embodied the values, virtues, and foibles of an older America that was rapidly disappearing. Camden was certainly a stereotype of the towns that Sinclair Lewis lampooned and Sherwood Anderson lamented” (p. x).

Davies bears comparison to Sherwood Anderson, a recurring figure in Main Street Blues and fellow one-time resident of Camden. Motorists approaching Davies’ hometown in the 1950s were greeted by the sign, “Welcome to Camden, Birthplace of Sherwood Anderson, Famous Author” (p. 7). Like Davies, Anderson left Camden before publishing his critique of small towns. After writing Winesburg, Ohio in 1919, a novel based on the nearby town of Clyde, Anderson was wrongly lumped in with intellectuals like Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Mencken who ridiculed small-town residents for their perceived narrow-mindedness. Contrary to the understanding of most readers of Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson did not intend to likewise denounce small-town residents in his novel, but rather hoped to critique American society in general. He placed his story in a small town simply because it was the setting he knew best. According to Davies, Anderson felt compassion and sympathy for the residents of such towns. Davies might be similarly misread, since Main Street Blues chronicles a bleak history, and offers a gloomy prognosis for the future of small towns. But like Anderson, Davies writes not to condemn the residents and decision...

Share