Where Have the Small Towns Gone?

As I rolled across the country at the end of this summer, in search of new experiences and sights and sounds alien to the East Coast of my childhood, I kept one line from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in mind, hoping it would ring as true for me as it had for Nick Carraway. "I was simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life," Fitzgerald wrote.

It was this inexhaustible variety I sought as I traveled the backroads of the American West. I would have been equally happy being enchanted by old-fashioned hospitality or repelled by rednecks stoning me for the Harvard sticker on my car. I wanted to find the variety of experiences, of people and of culture that Fitzgerald's quote had suggested to me.

Alas, I found no such variety. What I found instead was an increasingly homogenous and media-saturated country, one utterly devoid of places with real individuality. We drove through town after town, always seeing the same thing: a depressed downtown area dotted with closed shops and "For Sale" signs and an area on the outskirts of town where Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and other such stores existed in all their banal, sterilized splendor. There was a stretch in Minnesota and Wisconsin where there were definitely more Pizza Huts than grocery stores.

The downtown areas of all these towns and cities were once bustling centers of local commerce, replete with local stores and an individual character. Now those centers are modern-day ghost towns, with all the consumers having fled to the gold rush of national chain stores on the outskirts of town.

The irony is that nothing can be done about this particular problem. It is a result of pure capitalism and consumer choice. Any Ec10 student can tell you that if something costs less in one place than in another, people will seek that lower price.

Consumers pay less for a frilly, carpet-covered toilet seat at a cavernous Wal-Mart or K-mart than they would pay for that same glorious throne at a local mom-and-pop store. And, thus, the consumer is better off. Who am I to stand in the way? By criticizing this trend, I am not trying to advance a socialist agenda, I am merely lamenting the disappearance of small-town America, the America suggested to me by Norman Rockwell paintings.

But what about my image of small town America? Perhaps I am a little too naive, a little too romantic in my notion of what the American West should be like. But it seems that it couldn't always have been this homogenous. Yes, Wal-Marts are now ubiquitous, and that Taco Bell chihuahua exhorts people across the nation to eat gorditas, but it wasn't always so. Besides strip malls, chain stores and other such monuments to consumerism, the other factor contributing to the increasing uniformity of America is the combination of cable TV and other forms of media saturation.

In towns from Anchorage, Alaska, to Billings, Montana, kids who have grown up watching TV shows centered on urban culture and fashion emulate them as best they can while overlooking the fact that the places they live are essentially very different from those they see portrayed on TV. This influx of popular culture only leads to further uniformity.

It also leads to some interesting combinations, like the hip-hop-talking teenager I saw in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, who was wearing cowboy boots and chewing Red-Man Tobacco. The town of Belle Fourche was a hub for cattle roundups and cattle sales for the past two centuries. Apparently, now it is the hub of the rap world, the place from which the next Puff Daddy will emerge.

I am all for communications technology, which is ironic considering it is responsible for the trend I am now bemoaning. It's great that a kid in Omaha can go on-line and be exposed to all sorts of things he might never have seen were the Internet less far-reaching. Unfortunately, at the same time, the history and culture of many areas are being supplanted by the mass culture of cable TV and the Internet. Granted, culture from the Midwest is occasionally exported to the major markets.

One example of this is the Jerry Springer show, which has certainly found quite a following wherever it is shown while still retaining a distinctly rural, Midwestern feel. In general, however, it is the mass culture of our major cities that is exported via our speedy communications technology to all corners of the country. Kids in the interior of Alaska might now watch Beavis and Butthead rather than learn their native culture and history. Tragic? Yes, but also a by-product of a process I would be loathe to stop.

So what's the solution? We must be aware of the cost of both our new warehouse style of capitalism, as embodied by Wal-Mart and Costco, and the revolution in communications technology. Small-town America no longer exists the way it did when our parents were growing up. You can still find unique places, but they are becoming more and more rare.

Fitzgerald's "inexhaustible variety of life" is getting harder to find. My romantic notion of what the wide open American West should be is outdated, but who among us would stand in the way of the processes destroying small-town America?

All we can do is hope that somewhere out there, some town can withstand the onslaught of modern culture and consumerism and retain some element of their history and individuality. And, if that fails, there's always the "inexhaustible" array of useless garbage you can buy at Wal-Mart for those of us still seeking variety. Timothy F. Sohn '01, a Crimson editor, is a history and science concentrator in Adams House.