Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

Chapter 4. A New Machine in the Small-Town Garden: Periodizing an Automodernity

4 / A New Machine in the Small-Town Garden: Periodizing an Automodernity In the early twentieth century a new machine appeared in the smalltown garden: the automobile. In response, a popular U.S. narrative emerged that this new machine was destroying the nation’s home. The film scholar and critic Emanuel Levy observes that the trope of the automobile catalyzing the demise of the small town is pervasive in Hollywood films in the 1930s and 1940s. Commenting on the 1940 cinematic adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Levy writes, “[Like] other small-town films, Our Town is strategically situated in 1901, at the end of an era, just before the introduction of a most significant technological invention—the car” (“Our Town”). At the beginning of Wilder’s play Our Town (1938), the Stage Manager takes the audience back in history to 1901, an age before the automobile. At the turn of the century Grover’s Corners is presented as a vibrant, contained island community. However, the play (and the subsequent film) is about change, and the first change announced is the arrival of the automobile.1 In 1906, the Stage Manager informs us, the town’s “richest citizen” purchased the first automobile (5). But what is novel in 1906 becomes a symbol of the everyday when Our Town’s narrative concludes seven years later. In 1913 the Stage Manager reports, “Gradual changes in Grover’s Corners. Horses are getting rarer. Farmers coming into town in Fords. Everybody locking their doors now at night” (85–86). Despite the use of the adjective “gradual,” the transformations are radical. Our Town functions as a historical play that narrates the development of the twentieth century—symbolized by the arrival of the automobile—as the decline of the small town. a new machine in the small-town garden / 71 Our Town periodizes the emergence of what I call an “automodernity ,” a purportedly new modernity, symbolized by the automobile, that threatens the small town’s identity.2 Although an automodernity and the small town seem diametrically opposed, I argue that the former becomes the condition of possibility for the latter in a changing U.S. economy. A Brave New Capitalist World In 1896, P. T. Barnum’s circus displayed exotic animals such as camels and elephants and featured the latest exotic technological wonder: “a horseless carriage” (Lynd and Lynd 252). However, what was exotic in 1896 became central to the global economy within the short span of three decades. When Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was published in 1920, there were nine million automobiles registered in the United States; by the end of the decade, the number of registered cars had ballooned to twenty-three million (Goist, From Main Street 35). In the 1920s the automobile industry became the largest industry in the United States, and it was rapidly becoming central to a globalizing economy (Gordon 299).3 The rapid dominance of the automobile exemplifies Marx and Engels’s thesis that capitalism is a continuous history of revolutionary transformations in which “all that is solid melts into air” (Manifesto 476). The American studies scholar Peter Ling argues that the automobile, more than any other technological invention, unified the United States for the purposes of capitalist expansion and exploitation. Ling writes, “By linking the many constituent parts of the industrialized nation together, and particularly by incorporating hitherto self-sufficient or relatively isolated regions more fully into the cash economy, . . . [the automobile] served to transmit the heightened pace of industrial production to other phases in the cycle of capital accumulation” (1). In an automodernity, Ling claims, there are no more “island communities.”4 The automobile was the symbol of this new chapter in capitalism’s revolutionary history, and the face of this new chapter was Henry Ford. Ford’s centrality to understanding the social changes in the early twentieth century is evident in the popular periodizing name of this era: Fordism.5 Ford revolutionized social relations in the United States and beyond. In the 1920s Ford automobiles were being assembled in nineteen countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, Malaya, Mexico, and South Africa. In 1925 Ford opened an auto plant in Yokohama, which resulted in Ford’s dominance of the Japanese automobile market. In fact “Fordo” became a generic term for “car” in Japanese (Barnet 261). 72 / a new machine in the small-town garden In the popular imagination outside of the United States...