Classic Book Review: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Part 3
September 29th, 2005,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.