A good prophet–what today we tend to call a social critic–speaks harshly but accurately about a flawed social order. In Main Street Sinclair Lewis speaks with a prophetic voice that still rings true for our own culture. In many ways the new modern culture that Lewis describes in the early twentieth century–with its automobiles and telephones, its dominant commercial class and its American imperial hubris–is like our own, and we can apply his comments to our own time as well.

There is, for example, the confident swagger of this young region, sure in its faith that its outlook will dominate the world. From the very introduction of the book, Lewis informs us that Gopher Prairie represents the future for the entire world:

“Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea….”

Here is a look at the beginnings of the American empire that exists today, when the United States is the sole superpower. The Main Streets of America are the product of a long western tradition and are seen by their residents as its highest achievement. As Lewis saw early on, those same residents were beginning to make their power felt around the world, beginning to influence and even dictate the conditions of life elsewhere.

Even more telling is this long quotation from the book, which both describes the ills of the small town and represents the United States Empire as successor to the British Empire:

Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation.

But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius.

Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors.

And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall.

Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oilcloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace.

If all the provincials were…kindly…there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is the…small busy men crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy. (266-7)

The wartime setting of Main Street is also relevant for our present moment, with the Iraq War occurring as a continuation of the vague, shadowy War on Terrorism. Much of the novel takes place during World War I, and it criticizes the prejudice masked as patriotism that surfaces during wartime. When the United States enters the Great War and opposes Germany, German immigrants in and around Gopher Prairie are treated with suspicion, and “citizens’ committees” force them to buy war bonds or risk arrest.

One of the few dissenting voices in the town is Miles Bjornstam, the Swedish handyman who becomes a farmer and family man. An agnostic who accepts the theory of evolution, he questions the town’s hierarchy and its religious and civic faiths. When war starts, he denies the propaganda that most residents of Gopher Prairie believe. As a result he is treated coldly by everyone but Carol, even after he settles down by marrying and becoming a dairy farmer. When fate treats him cruelly, the town offers feeble help too late. He rebuffs the advances and moves away.

Lewis does not write without affection for the people, culture, and natural environment of Gopher Prairie, but that affection does not blind him to the town’s shortcomings. He punctures the myth of the small town as the fount of all virtue, showing how its conformist orthodoxy smothers the nonconformist, how its culture hinders the freedom that it sees itself championing. If towns like Gopher Prairie were not so cruel to people like Miles Bjornstam, Lewis may have written a very different book.

I wonder now whether life in today’s small towns would be different. Surely things have improved some. Modern transportation, telecommunications, and media–radio, television, planes, cheap long distance phone service, the Internet–have reduced the isolation that Lewis saw as the source for the stultifying qualities of Gopher Prairie. But such media cannot completely erode the divides of distance and other forms of segregation–natural and artificial–that mark our society, and they can also be the means for dispensing narrow ideologies. Such divides will always cause communities to turn inwards, demonizing those who are different–the Other, the alien–including those who are so because they have strayed from the official and unofficial faiths of the community.

Source: Main Street. 1920. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1922. Thirty-first printing.

It’s difficult to know where to begin a brief discussion of Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott. The book is at once a study of a region and of the emergence of an entire modern American culture–a culture that in many ways has not changed much since the book was published in 1920. It touches on more issues than can be analyzed here, issues such as provincialism and small town life, marriage, class, politics, and the changing role of women. Given the regional focus of this column, I’ll first examine the book’s view of “the Northern Middlewest,” “the newest empire of the world” as Carol Kennicott thinks of it.

The heroine of the story is born Carol Milford in Mankato, Minnesota. Her father, originally from Massachusetts, is a judge and something of an intellectual. Carol reads Balzac and Rabelais in his library, and she acquires “a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people.” While in college Carol becomes interested in sociology and for a time fantasizes vaguely about a career in “village-improvement”–the reform and beautification of a “prairie village.” She quickly drops her fantasy for the more pragmatic profession of librarian. She spends a year training in Chicago, then works in St. Paul. But when she meets Dr. Will Kennicott, from the small town of Gopher Prairie, her vision of village improvement returns and the two eventually get married, despite some misgivings Carol has about the doctor.

The story then follows Carol’s continuous cycle of romantic, idealistic endeavor followed by disappointing reality as she vainly tries to make an impact on the stolid town. She finds a wide variety of people in Gopher Prairie, but their lives are dominated by gossip and a conformity that narrowly restricts behavior and thought. She becomes subject to what another intellectual resident, Guy Pollock, calls the “Village Virus.” As he describes it, this is “the germ which…infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You’ll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants–all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp.” Such people think they can keep their cosmopolitan interests up to date, but distance and isolation prove to be too powerful, and the virus claims them as victims.

Carol also finds that the town is simply ugly, in a way that the beauty of the surrounding countryside cannot quite redeem. She has traveled and seen the Twin Cities and Chicago, later California and the East Coast, and her more traveled eyes sees the lack of beauty that the residents of Gopher Prairie cannot make out. See, for example, Carol’s first impression of the house that she will share with Dr. Will Kennicott:

“A concrete sidewalk with a ‘parking’ of grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cottonwoods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible.”

Carol concludes that the town’s ugliness, and many of its other aspects, result from its pioneer rawness, the very newness of its region. Making her way to Gopher Prairie after marrying Dr. Kennicott, Carol looks at her fellow train travelers and thinks, “They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land.” And as a pioneer land, she concludes, its future is still to be determined.

The novel describes the class structure of the town, which consists of a largely Yankee upper-class–people such as Sam Clark and Ezra Stowbody and the Kennicotts–and a lower class made up mostly of Scandinavian and German immigrants who work as farmers and servants–people such as Miles Bjornstam and Bea Sorenson. The upper class, a business class, rules over the town with the “sedate pomposity of the commercialist.” This coming together of new and old Americans, native and immigrant communities, is one of the interesting dimensions of the book. The Yankee families look on the new immigrants with some suspicion and condescension, and there is occasionally some ugliness, particularly when the arrival of World War I leads to the dominance of a bullying patriotism, but for the most part the different groups manage to coexist peacefully.

The novel is fascinating also for its realistic details of life in the early twentieth century. We see, for example, how the residents of Gopher Prairie ready their houses for the onset of the harsh winter. “Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest,” the narrator tells us, “it is an industry.” Residents put up “storm sheds” outside their doors and hang storm windows, while “the poorer houses of Gopher Prairie” are “banked to the windows with earth and manure”–all efforts to keep houses warm during the winter.

Next week: More on the social criticism of Main Street.

When I was in graduate school studying British and American literature, I accumulated books–lots of books, mainly consisting of literature, literary criticism, and history, and including a small collection of books by Midwestern writers. I remember in particular having a lot of Booth Tarkington and Sinclair Lewis novels in hardcover. They were not hard to come by at book sales and used bookstores.

As time went on and I moved nearly every year, and as a career in academia failed to materialize, I gradually unburdened myself of many books. I sold off lots of literary theory books without remorse. I got rid of many of my Midwestern books with not much more regret, because I hadn’t read the vast majority of them. I did, however, keep two of Lewis’s novels, Main Street and Babbitt, feeling that they were important. I had read Babbitt when in high school and was not extremely taken with it. Of Minnesota authors, I preferred Scott Fitzgerald.

Over the years I continued to come across references to Main Street as an important American novel, and I was nagged by the sense that I needed to read it. Finally, I picked it up off a bookshelf at home and started reading.

I don’t remember where I got my copy of the book, but it was probably in Minnesota. Just inside the cover it’s stamped “Joseph K. Kidder, Lacrosse, Wis.”; the typography of the stamp is in the Art Deco style of the 1920’s. The copyright page indicates the novel was first published in 1920 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, but my copy of the book was published by Grosset and Dunlap of New York in 1922–the thirty-first printing, not too bad for two years, and just one indication of the book’s success. The book nearly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921; a jury voted to give the award to Main Street, but the Columbia University trustees overruled it to grant the prize to Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. Angered, Lewis would later refuse the Pulitzer in 1926 for his novel Arrowsmith. By 1922 the book had also been made into a silent film. My edition comes complete with illustrations from “the photoplay,” “a Warner Brothers screen classic.” (The novel was made into a movie again in 1936, titled I Married a Doctor.)

I finished the book not long ago, and I found it to be an eloquent novel of sharp social observation that is still relevant today. It doesn’t surprise me that it was so successful in its day, nor that Sinclair Lewis–a native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota–would receive the Nobel Prize for literature only ten years later, after publishing four more novels in the 1920’s that, with Main Street, are generally considered to be among his best work: Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929).

In the next week or more I’ll look in detail at Lewis’s novel about life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and its relevance for us today.

For almost a week now I’ve been following the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its effect on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, including the grim aftermath faced by the survivors and refugees. For most of that week here, hundreds of miles north and in the center of the continent, near the opposite end of the Mississippi River, the weather has been calm and mild and sunny. It could not have been much better. The storm down in the Gulf could not have been much worse.

It’s generally only in hurricane season, or when a coastal earthquake hits, that living in the center of the continent seems better than living on the coast. For many reasons, people want to live near the oceans. They like the moderating influence of the ocean, which keeps things cooler in summer and warmer in winter as compared to areas inland. They like the opportunities for recreation that water provides. They like to live on the boundary between two very different environments—land and water—and they like the variety and interest that adds to life. They like the cultural interest of the port city, the entrep?t on the margin between the native country and foreign lands, a gateway to things beyond and entry point for the exotic.

However, as we all know very well right now, the benefits of ocean-side living have a price: vulnerability to catastrophic events such as hurricanes and tsunamis. The beautiful ocean vista, the pleasant beach, the exciting port—all can change suddenly as the ocean’s waters rise up and inundate the land and its ferocious winds lash the coast.

Despite the devastation caused by an unstable ocean, I understand why people would want to stay in a place like the Gulf Coast. If your family lived there for generations, if you loved the place, its people, its natural environment, its culture, if it gave you a reasonably comfortable life for decades, you’d stay too. That’s why I live here in the Upper Midwest, a region that has been called “a cold place at the end of the road.???

As someone who is interested in people’s attachment to place, and who feels that attachment himself, I understand the desire to go back and rebuild. Nature will return to those places destroyed by the storm, so why shouldn’t people?

Now there’s talk of political fallout from this hurricane and the ineffective early government response to it. No less a figure than David Brooks, the moderately conservative New York Times columnist, said on the September 2 PBS NewsHour that this will be a turning point, a rallying cry for reform in a number of institutions. It follows, Brooks said, a whole series of missteps and failures by government and private authorities, from business scandals to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, that have shaken Americans’ faith in their leaders. He commented on something that had struck me as well: President Bush looked insensitive as he flew above the disaster—safe and snug on Air Force One—while people below stewed in conditions unfit for animals and days-old dead bodies floated in the streets of an American city. It was odd to hear Brooks, usually a Bush supporter, express anger about the president’s actions and the kind of national humiliation Americans are feeling about this disaster. It was odd too to hear a conservative express hope for a kind of progressive movement that will grant greater power and respect to the less powerful in our society—something that many of us have wished for years now. In the same NewsHour discussion Boston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant, a liberal, predicted greater national focus on the two different Americas made apparent by this disaster—the wealthy America and the poor America, the two Americas, Oliphant noted, discussed by John Edwards in his run for president.

While President Bush and other Republicans, the current leaders on the federal level, will receive their share of criticism in the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, Oliphant pointed out that Democrats played their own role in the human suffering playing out in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast. Over the years leaders from both parties have done little to shore up the levees or to prevent the decimation of wetlands around New Orleans—wetlands that could have reduced the storm’s flooding. And then there is the lack of action on mitigating global warming, which is likely to make this kind of human suffering more common in the future. It will be the poor and powerless who will suffer most from rising sea levels, but many rich folks will suffer as well, unable to shield themselves from all of life’s miseries, least of all those created by a Mother Nature that has been made even more powerful by rising global temperatures caused by our own pollution.

It remains to be seen what the fallout from this hurricane will be. For now, however, we know that Americans have been reminded that not everyone owns a car that will take them out of harm’s way. Not everyone is healthy enough to walk to the corner and board a bus. Not everyone has the money to pick up and move out, especially at the end of the month before the paycheck arrives. Not everyone hears the message on the grapevine that leads from governmental authorities to private citizens.

Right now we can at least offer help to the storm’s victims. Here are two organizations that are accepting donations to support hurricane relief: the American Red Cross and the United Methodist Committee on Relief.