In Willa Cather's My Antonia, as elsewhere in her stories, small towns don't fare well. What thrills her heart and soul is the open country she remembers as a child, the land she calls "the Divide," a landscape of immense proportions peopled amicably by immigrants from all over the country and the world. Life was a joy out there in the wilds.
Small-Town Dreams: Stories of Midwestern Boys Who Shaped America
University Press of Kansas
544 pages
$39.99
If you have ever visited the rolling, red hills where Cather lived as a child, a stark Great Plains landscape long ago deserted by homesteaders who once made the whole area a community, you'll know it's difficult to buy her reverence for the place. Most people wouldn't want to live there, and few do.
Red Cloud, Nebraska, the small town where she moved when she left all that open country, must have seemed nowhere near as fulfilling. When the fresh-off-the-boat immigrant homesteaders moved to town, they moved to a place she appeared to see as far more sluggish and stultifying, far more narrow, and less—far less—ripe with adventure. Small towns, in Cather's book, had a distressing habit of scouring the uniqueness off peculiarly interesting people, ushering them into conformity created by untoward looks, gossipy nosiness, and preening self-righteousness.
She left Red Cloud, of course. For a time in her life, Willa Cather watched joyously as her childhood home disappeared in her rear view mirror, as did literally millions of other small-towners back then. My Antonia was published in 1918, just before the First World War altered the course of world history, and affected thousands of doughboys from America's small towns. "How you going to keep 'em down on the farm, now that they've seen Paree?" wasn't just a cute postwar ditty; it seemed a virtual summary of American demographics.
In a wonderfully readable compilation of distinguished biographies, Small Town Dreams: Stories of Midwestern Boys who Shaped America, John E. Miller documents the shifts that emptied Main Streets throughout the Midwest, closed down schools and businesses, and left an abundance of ghost town detritus on what has become, once again, a greatly empty landscape.
That's not the story of Miller's book, however. The story is the stories of men whose childhoods were spent in the small-towns all of them left behind, but some of them never left spiritually. Miller's Small Town Boys is a museum of big men from small towns.
America's heartland, in actuality, is, today, not the rural Midwest at all but the country's cities. "Heartland" is a misnomer really because demographics have long ago shifted away from the country's agricultural center. There still is a breadbasket, but Iowa, where I live, is the heart of nothing but the map these days. Small towns still exist within our own vast rural areas, but the population shifts which began more than a century ago have left those small towns gasping, made them little more than dots on blue highways only journalists travel, on the lookout for eccentrics in yawning fly-over country.
Hollywood seems to relish dramas in which city folk wander out perilously into rural backwaters only to encounter hellish creatures (think Deliverance) or loveless, luckless parents (think Nebraska—not the state, the movie, and August: Osage County). What our most high-gloss storytelling offers is ghastly burgs full of zombies or closet criminal minds, as if the back forty is just a sprawling Bates Motel.
What Miller shows, clearly and proudly, is that in their heyday, America's small towns birthed wholesome generations of men of influence. I'm not sure why he chooses men only, but he does, citing his list of prior publications as perhaps unequally weighted with women.
He begins his stories with Frederick Jackson Turner, who, more than anyone, touted the powerful effects of white America's burgeoning spread into what it considered the continent's open spaces, as if no one else had ever lived there.
Turner grew up in Portage, Wisconsin, during the 1860s, when that small town at the confluence of two rivers was, in fact, the edge of the frontier. The man often cited as this country's first historian of significant authority began his work by studying his own neighborhood, Miller says, then simply stayed with the thesis throughout his life: "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."
Miller's gallery includes 22 portraits of individuals, most of whom need no introduction—William Jennings Bryan, Henry Ford, George Washington Carver, Bob Feller, James Dean, Walt Disney, Lawrence Welk, John Wooden, and Ronald Reagan— and ends with America's retailing leviathan, Sam Walton, once reputed to be the richest man in the country.
A few individuals along the way aren't necessarily household names. I'm ashamed to admit I'd never heard of plainspoken Alvin Hansen, who grew up on a farm three miles west of Viborg, South Dakota, just an hour or so away from my home. Had I taken an economics class somewhere along the line, I'm sure I would have run into him; but the fact that he isn't celebrated regionally today (unless I've missed it) may well be because he is still referred to as "the American Keynes," and thus probably disdained by robust voting blocks right here in his neighborhood.
Nor had I heard of Oscar Micheaux, the African American filmmaker who spent some time homesteading in South Dakota, then wrote a novel or two about it (The Homesteader is now on my Kindle), but whose fame and fortune was far more celebrated in the nation's black community because he was the foremost African American filmmaker before the industry was, you might say, integrated. Micheaux was the first African American to create a feature-length film, a movie he created based upon his own experiences homesteading near Gregory, South Dakota. I had no idea.
Small-Town Dreams is a really fascinating read, especially if you like biographies, as I do. Even if the subjects are amply familiar, few of us, I'd guess, have a strong sense of their individual stories. I found every one of the narratives to be interesting and enlightening.
Throughout the book, I kept wanting to believe that an argument was forming, that the arrangement of bios would eventually nudge out a thesis to the effect that the Midwestern small town has had some peculiar critical influence on the character of these accomplished American boys. I wasn't wrong—a thesis did form—but the argument I anticipated was never advanced, not even in the introduction. In fact, Miller begins the book by dampening what expectations someone like myself—a small-town boy throughout most of my life—might expect or at least desire. He makes it very clear that while it might be nice to think that small towns had significantly similar effects on these men, those effects simply aren't traceable because they aren't there.
Some of his subjects couldn't leave the small towns of their childhoods fast enough. Some looked back with feverish disdain, and some worshiped their boyhoods from afar but never returned. Some of their worship was pure fantasy. Some, as Americans did for a time, created a cartoon mythos from small-town life. Some claimed reverent fondness, yet, like Henry Ford and Sam Walton, likely did more to destroy small towns than keep them vigorous. Some hated their boyhoods. Sinclair Lewis told the world as much in Main Street, then, when his own spit and vinegar dissipated, backed away from the very horrors he'd created.
The real thesis of all these fascinating biographies, and Miller admits it freely, is that any attempt to explain behavior on the basis of some single feature of a person's life story—like one's small-town past—is doomed to failure. Human character is too complex. With that admission, Miller steps back and talks somewhat about the importance of "place" in our lives and, perhaps, the withering away of place in a culture so mobile, so connected, so media-driven. "There is no there there," Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, California.
I don't know that Miller would agree with Stein, but he would be tempted. When mirroring strip malls in suburban America are the backdrop of all of our lives, we're not doomed, but we may well have become little more than a huge small town, 300 million strong, most of whom carry sameness that's just as stultifying as that Willa Cather disdained.
That would be sad.
And while Miller is obviously right in not advancing a thesis he can't prove, the non-existence of that common core experience becomes a little dispiriting, in part because I wanted so badly to find something, anything, that could bring these folks together, other than, of course, their small-town stories and the fact that their own childhood experiences never really left them. What this collection of stories admirably demonstrates is that the child is the father of the man, even though Miller doesn't even attempt to suggest that "the small town is the father of the man." There are just too many variables.
And we are ourselves, often as not, puzzles. Take Miller's assessment of Carl Sandburg, for instance, a giant in his own time (once called "the voice of the Middle West") but a man (like his region) largely lost today, even when some of his contemporaries (say Robert Frost) are not. Sandburg's most important work may likely have been that massive biography of Abraham Lincoln; but Miller claims his most quoted line is this one: "the past is bucket of ashes."
Go figure. From a man who spent a lifetime writing history.
Miller quotes Sandburg asserting his own contradictions: "I hated my home town and yet I loved it. And I hated and loved myself about the same as I did the town and the people."
To me, at least, one of the most fascinating stories in 400 pages of fascinating stories is one which includes both Carl Sandburg and Sinclair Lewis, both writers, but possibly as different in their work and character as any two of these small-town boys could be. I had no idea Sandburg was something of a musician, although Miller advises us that he knew only three guitar chords. Nonetheless, at a gathering celebrating Sinclair Lewis and after being asked by the host to favor the group with a song, Sandburg, who reportedly had been unusually quiet during dinner, pulled out his guitar and started singing "The Buffalo Skinners," an old American folk tune, which brought Sinclair Lewis, hard as it is to believe, to tears. "That's the America I came home too," Lewis said, reportedly. "That's it."
Who would have believed it?
Every last one of Miller's choices deserves a place, although I think I would have left James Dean on the cutting room floor, his early death at 24 taking him out of life long before he could have matured sufficiently to begin to separate the strands of influences in his life, to distinguish who he was from the Hollywood image he so suddenly created.
What gives the stories some consistency—even though there's little for a common denominator other than a rural American street address—is the recurrent way Miller documents his subjects' own attitudes toward their personal histories on their own Main Streets.
Sinclair Lewis is himself a good example. There exists some scratchy handwriting on the pages of my copy of the book that claims I simply couldn't believe Miller's appraisal of America's very first Nobel Prize winner. The sweet argument Miller offers is that Lewis created his acidic treatment of small-town America in order to prompt places like his own hometown, Sauk Center, Minnesota, into the kind of self-assessment that would help citizenry change the small-mindedness so rakishly mocked in Main Street, a novel that was in the Twenties and for decades after, phenomenally popular.
Honestly, I never read Main Street, even though I've had a Signet Classic copy since high school, defaced deplorably. I promised myself I was going to read it this month yet, even though I may well be the only one because Lewis's literary fortunes have not risen since the early years of the century. But I couldn't help but ask myself why on earth was I assigned Main Street fifty years ago, when I was a senior in high school, the only novel I had to read (and didn't), when I know, by reputation, that it savages places like the very small town in which I grew up. Our teacher wasn't in the least contrary, no Lewis-type herself, but a demure older woman who was sincere about everything she did, sometimes somewhat pathetically so, at least that was our assessment. The only reason she assigned that novel, I'm guessing, is because she'd been assigned Main Street when she was in college sometime in the 1940s.
But Miller finds obscure quotes and anecdotes hither and yon and seems determined to baptize Mr. Lewis as someone who really loved the Sauk Centers of the rural Midwest. I'm more likely to believe the tale and not the teller.
Miller has done his homework, and I'm glad to give him the last nod here; but what I admire about the consistency in the lives of these small-town saints is the way he doggedly goes after his subjects' own assessments of their small-town boyhoods. Again, there's not enough for a grand argument about the influence of small towns in the aggregate, but he marches out sufficient primary material to finish what he wants to accomplish in the portraits.
Most of the choices simply have to be there—Meredith Wilson, Iowa's Music Man, for instance, and Lawrence Welk, who, maybe more than any of Miller's subjects, never really left North Dakota, even though he lived most of his life in Hollywood. Norfolk's Johnny Carson made a fortune by reacting to slightly off-color humor the way Midwesterners almost always did, as if their mothers were right there over their shoulders.
Some choices are more thought-provoking—we don't immediately think of Walt Disney as a small-town boy from the Midwest, though he indubitably was, or Ronald Reagan. Miller handles both of them well, even if they seem have grown like the willowy palms at the edge of California's beaches. John Wooden, just as Midwestern, is an easier fit, a man strictly outfitted with heartland Puritanism.
What John E. Miller has done is told good stories about important men, stories otherwise too easily lost. In the process, he travels through a world that likely no longer exists, a world where some of America's finest men and women, its leaders, grew up on fertile Midwestern soil, on streets full of vibrant life and character.
As a teacher of literature for more than forty years, I couldn't help but wonder about who's telling the good stories these days, about whether or not there are, among the best, stories that grow from that same fertile soil.
It might be helpful to remember that last year's Nobel Prize went to Alice Munro, a Canadian fiction writer whose brilliant, life-encompassing short stories never really depart from small-town Ontario, where she grew up. Iowa's own Pulitzer winner, Marilynne Robinson, has created novels that rarely touch cities.
And I couldn't help but remember 1991, during Iowa's glory years, when Hawkeyes won everything—Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, a shocking remake of Shakespeare's King Lear set on rich loess earth. Smiley won the big accolades that year, but it was Richard James Waller who walked off with all the loot, thanks to his New York Times bestselling Bridges of Madison County.
But then again, maybe I shouldn't bring all of that up because the plain truth is that the moment the two of them achieved fame and fortune they left; both of them—as our story goes—departed. Neither stayed. I found it equally distressing that the two writers who made Miller's top 22, Sandburg and Lewis, are generally out of favor with contemporary criticism—and barely read.
Still, John E. Miller has done us all a favor by helping us remember that Midwestern small towns have been, without a doubt, a seedbed for some of the most significant contributors to American culture.
The only weakness of his book, from my corner, is that it simply couldn't deliver on what it never promised to do—to argue something substantial about the glory of a childhood spent on the streets of some soft-spoken Midwestern village.
That can't be done, even if I wish it could be.
James Calvin Schaap is the author most recently of Up the Hill, a collection of stories from New Rivers Press.
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