I don’t want to yield to nostalgia, but it does seem that small towns were in some respects the canaries in the coal mine for the quality of life in U.S. society at large.
Even a rare and wonderful place such as parts of Sullivan County once seem to have been to people who grew up there may have more in common with my own home town, Bucyrus, Ohio–bastion of McKinley, Harding, and McCarthy that it was–than people think. One item strikes me: in the 1920s if you lived in Bucyrus (population fluctuating somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000) you could get an interurban trolley car all the way to Columbus if you had the time to make the trip. There were two passenger railways with local service (Pennsylvania and NYC) that would take you anywhere in the country. Fresh fish arrived by rail on ice twice a day from Lake Erie. There was an Opera House with live vaudeville, as well as the movie theaters of the time, and an amusement park just outside of town with an enormous rollercoaster (still vividly present as a ruin during my boyhood). It’s thought that there were eighty saloons and twenty bordellos; there were probably a hundred churches, most of them staid and respectable. There were no socialists after World War II, although there were rumored to have been a few before, but there were still unions that had a degree of power and influence. By 1990 you couldn’t even get there by bus and even though the town, with its factories (some of which still existed), was surrounded by farms, you couldn’t buy anything in the stores that wasn’t imported by truck and airplane from god knows where. The movie theater was closed, and the only way to have a holiday was to get in your car and drive hundreds of miles on the interstate. Right to Work was the rule and it was Morning in America. Even the Presbyterians, if not Born Again, had at least become Promise Keepers. It wasn’t that the place has become a ghost town–it’s still within a thousand or two of its peak size, and there are no empty streets filled with the hulks of deserted houses, though unemployment is still very high and real wages are way, way down. But something has been beaten out of the place–not something golden that once was, but something that could have been if U.S. capitalism had not taken the course it took after the Depression–or if the U.S. had somehow gotten off the capitalist road and allowed socialism to redeem the promise of industrialism and modernization. I’m not sure what this means, if anything. Enough palaver. Peter G. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
