Thinking Small

Daniel Immerwahr

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674745445
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians
Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences."Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them…This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign's record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking… How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small."
—Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review "As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement…Immerwahr's account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big."
—Jamie Martin, The Nation

1

When Small was Big

THE FUTURE looked bright from Anaheim in 1955. There, Walt Disney opened his long-awaited theme park, Disneyland, with its five “lands.” In one, Tomorrowland, Disney offered “a vista into a world of wondrous ideas.”¹ Forecasting the future of 1986, its attractions included the Flight to the Moon, Autopia, and the Hall of Chemistry. Disney accompanied it with a series of television programs—“Man in Space,” “Mars and Beyond,” and “Our Friend the Atom”—that U.S. military advisers and prominent technical consultants, such as the famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, had helped to write. The message of Tomorrowland and the television programs was very much the official one: government, scientists, and corporations were extending the frontiers of human striving. That lesson was conveyed by the space rides and also by the Disneyland exhibits showcasing everyday technology, such as Monsanto’s House of the Future, added to Tomorrowland in 1957.

But Tomorrowland was not the only attraction in Disneyland. Visitors entered the park via Main Street, U.S.A., a re-creation of a small, turn-of-the-century midwestern town. It was modeled on Marceline, Missouri, where Disney had lived as a child. “I feel so sorry for people who live in cities all their lives and don’t have a little hometown,” Disney explained. “I’m glad my dad picked out a little town where he could have a farm.”² The word little was not an accidental verbal choice. In contrast to the imposing Tomorrowland, with its Moonliner cresting the horizon, Main Street, U.S.A. was purposefully diminutive. At substantial cost, Disney had “every brick and shingle and gas lamp” made at five-eighths of their ordinary size.³ As an avid model trainman, Disney had an affinity for such scale models, yet there was something more to it. Disney yearned for, as one of his later exhibits would famously put it, a “small world”—a world of the neighborly sociability he associated with Marceline. That desire showed itself frequently in his films. It grew even stronger toward the end of his career, which he dedicated to an attempt to create his own town, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT).⁴

Disney was simultaneously fascinated by technological transformations and obsessed with small-town life. It is easy to see where the first of those two allegiances came from. The midcentury decades are often regarded as a golden age for technological optimism in the United States. World War II, which gave so many Europeans reason to question the very basis of industrial society, was for the United States an astonishing triumph of technical expertise and mass-production techniques. It also catapulted the country into a position of unassailable economic supremacy, which in turn released a flood of cheap consumer goods. And so the war set a pattern for the United States. It was to be a mass society, managed by experts, promising widely available rewards. When Jonas Salk embarked on a highly public campaign to find a vaccine for the devastating polio virus, Time put him on the cover. He was a fitting symbol for the age: a benevolent technocrat in eyeglasses, a lab coat, and a tie.⁵

But Tomorrowland brought dangers as well. Two weeks after Salk’s appearance in Time, the magazine’s cover showed an ominous black-and-white photograph of a mushroom cloud, with small text at the bottom of the page reading “H-Bomb over the Pacific.”⁶ The test of the hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll was the largest human-made explosion in history to date. It summoned reminders of industrialism’s dark side, to which the middle of the twentieth century had been no stranger. Even in the Arcadia of the United States—perhaps the most fortunate nation on earth in that period—economic depression, decreasing autonomy for workers, the deterioration of rural life, the emptiness of consumerism, the horrors of combat, the unbounded growth of the warfare state, the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, and the threat of totalitarianism stalked the land.⁷

For Disney, such issues were personal. Despite all his mythologizing of his “little hometown” of Marceline, he had only lived there for three and a half years. His family had been forced to leave when his father, who refused to use chemical fertilizers or market his crops through middlemen, could not keep pace with agricultural mechanization. The farm went up for auction, and the Disneys moved to Kansas City.⁸ For the rest of his life, even as he experimented boldly with new technologies, Disney could not give up the vision of the community life that Tomorrowland had imperiled.

Disney’s ambivalence about the prospect of a technology-driven mass society was not unusual. Even the most zealous boosters of Tomorrowland appear to have felt it, their hypercharged optimism seeming at times to be a sort of the-lady-doth-protest-too-much-methinks attempt to “ward off the ghouls” of anxiety, totalitarianism, and nuclear obliteration, as Nils Gilman has put it.⁹ Yet less noted is how many thinkers and artists sought to escape those same wraiths by a different route, one that took them through Main Street, with its promise of life lived on a small scale. That cultural turn can be hard to see because it is easy to assume that the United States has always had a soft spot for the small town, that it is a chronic form of nostalgia and a timeless cliché. And yet it is remarkable how many of the images of small-town life that are now stock elements of U.S. culture were generated during the middle of the twentieth century—and how few were generated before that. Rather than being an always-longed-for point of origin, the small town in the United States was an “invented tradition,” and a tradition that was invented particularly to express a growing discomfort with industrial society.

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THE SUDDEN interest in the small town in the 1930s is best understood in contrast to what came before. Skepticism about the benefits of technology was, of course, not new to the United States. A tension between the pastoral ideal and the industrial one runs through the whole of U.S. thought and literature. In the nineteenth century, expressions of pastoralism could be found in sentimental celebrations of village life, promotion of the home environment as a sort of familial community, and the intentional communities that utopians built for themselves.¹⁰ Not all pastoralism was communal, though. Among the most enduring visions of agrarian and non-industrial life in literature are Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s On Walden Pond (1854), and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).¹¹ Notably, those books associate the world of nature not with the rural community but with the individual.¹²

Throughout the nineteenth century, pastoral thought increasingly favored the individual over the community. That trend reached its climax with Frederick Jackson Turner, who captured the pastoral revolt against industry in what became the single most potent hypothesis that has ever been offered in the field of U.S. history. In his vaunted “frontier thesis,” Turner held that, contrary to the heady celebrations of industry that were so audible in the Victorian culture of his day, it was the frontier—the border between savagery and civilization—that was the true source of U.S. democracy and political character. But what was it, precisely, about the frontier that was so important? It was its “anti-social” character: “frontier individualism.”¹³

By the end of the nineteenth century, the rugged frontiersman had become the counter-image to industrial society. Writers continued to discuss the small town but rarely in positive terms. Rather, what one critic described as a “storm of literary abuse” descended on small-town living starting in the 1880s.¹⁴ Novelists saw the small not as a place of rustic peace and neighborly cheer but of punishingly constrained horizons. The torrent of invective grew to a flood by the 1910s, in what the scholar of literature Carl Van Doren called “the revolt from the village.”¹⁵ Novels such as Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Poor White (1920), under the guise of literary realism, chronicled the narrow-minded pathos of provincial life.

Sinclair Lewis—the first U.S. writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature—offered the archetype of the genre with his bestselling novel Main Street (1920). Writing about a fictionalized version of his hometown, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis laid out his complaint: “There was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness.”¹⁶ It contained only “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations.”¹⁷ Better people were to be found, no doubt, in the cities. Or at least that was the message conveyed by two new magazines, H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury (founded 1924) and the New Yorker (1925), and by Mencken’s sardonic coverage of the Scopes Trial in 1925.¹⁸

The 1930s, however, saw a series of stunning reversals. A cadre of intellectuals, swimming against the demographic current, moved away from cities to small towns. One member of that group was none other than Sinclair Lewis. After a career made on eviscerating provincial ways, Lewis moved to Barnard, Vermont. From there, he wrote two new novels: It Can’t Happen Here (1935), pitting small-town values against Hitlerism, and The Prodigal Parents (1938), pitting them against Bolshevism.¹⁹ Remarkably, Sherwood Anderson followed a nearly identical path. He moved to Marion, Virginia, and took up the editorships of the Smyth County News and the Marion Democrat.²⁰ “Our only hope, in this present muddle, was to try thinking small,” is how Anderson explained his logic.²¹ He made that point in a book called Home Town (1940), which defended small-town ways with as much vigor as Winesburg, Ohio had attacked them two decades earlier.

The exodus continued. Surely it meant something when, in 1938, the New Yorker’s fiction editor and the longtime author of its “Notes and Comments” section—Katharine Angell and E. B. White—nearly wrecked the magazine by catching the “decivilizing bug” and decamping together for North Brooklin, Maine (where White wrote Charlotte’s Web).²² Of course, by that time, the New Yorker’s architectural critic, Lewis Mumford, had been writing his regular “Sky Line” column from the hamlet of Leedsville, New York, for nearly two years. Even the solidly Marxist literary journal The New Masses found itself vulnerable. Its literary editor, Granville Hicks, abandoned New York City for Grafton, New York. Within a few years he had quit his post, resigned from the Communist Party, organized a community league, joined the PTA, become the editor of the Grafton town bulletin, and begun to publish a series of books and articles in praise of localism, including the widely read Small Town (1946).

What made small towns, for so long the targets of derision, suddenly attractive? “It would be hard to put my finger on one thing,” wrote E. B. White. “Rather it was an accumulation of things,” a gnawing feeling that the forces of modernization had somehow overshot their mark.²³ That feeling arose sharply, and for obvious reasons, during the Depression, a time when the enormous technical and industrial capability of the United States seemed to have ruined rather than enriched the nation. But it continued through the war and into the postwar period. “The trend is toward bigness,” wrote Paul Appleby in his 1945 overview of the political scene.²⁴ That observation, in various forms, animated a great deal of social criticism of the day. From all angles, social critics considered how best to achieve what Lewis Mumford called “the restoration of the human scale.”²⁵

Of course, reducing the size of human affairs would not in itself solve longstanding problems of politics and economics. But perhaps it might render them tractable. There were forces alive in small towns—improvisatory adaptation, informal negotiation, and widespread participation—that were not to be found on the larger scale. And just as surface tension can hold together a drop of water but not a gallon of it, perhaps those tiny forces could overcome challenges that, when encountered in enlarged form, were insurmountable. The “twin gods of Bigness and Sameness” must be brought to heel, wrote Granville Hicks, and the spirit of “personalized, face-to-face community” allowed to flourish.²⁶

Granville Hicks, formerly the premier literary critic of the Communist Party, showing off small-town life in Grafton, New York, for a Life photographer in 1947. Kosti Ruohomaa, photog. (Black Star)

Hicks’s attitude was a far cry from the gee-whiz optimism of Tomorrowland. But how common was it? A closer examination of some expressions of small-town pride in popular culture may give some sense of its surprising extent—and of how antagonistic it was to the incursions of mass society.

A good place to start is with Norman Rockwell, possibly the most popular artist in the twentieth-century United States. Although he is remembered today for his glowing portrayals of small-town life, Rockwell came to that theme only late in his career. In his early years, he was an urban artist; he lived in or near his birthplace of New York City, dressed in Brooks Brothers, and belonged...