Habits of the Heartland

Small-Town Life in Modern America

Lyn C. Macgregor

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457739
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rural Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"So, how do Americans in a small town make community today? This book argues that there is more than one answer, and that despite the continued importance of small-town stuff traditionally associated with face-to-face communities, it makes no sense to think that contemporary technological, economic, and cultural shifts have had no impact on the ways Americans practice community life. Instead, I found that different Viroquans took different approaches to making community that reflected different confluences of moral logics—their senses of obligation to themselves, to their families, to Viroqua, and to the world beyond it, and about the importance of exercising personal agency. The biggest surprise was that these ideas about obligation and agency, and specifically about the degree to which it was necessary or good to try to bring one's life into precise conformance with a set of larger goals, turned out to have replaced more traditional markers of social belonging like occupation and ethnicity, in separating Viroquans into social groups."—from Habits of the HeartlandAlthough most Americans no longer live in small towns, images of small-town life, and particularly of the mutual support and neighborliness to be found in such places, remain powerful in our culture. In Habits of the Heartland, Lyn C. Macgregor investigates how the residents of Viroqua, Wisconsin, population 4,355, create a small-town community together. Macgregor lived in Viroqua for nearly two years. During that time she gathered data in public places, attended meetings, volunteered for civic organizations, talked to residents in their workplaces and homes, and worked as a bartender at the local American Legion post.Viroqua has all the outward hallmarks of the idealized American town; the kind of place where local merchants still occupy the shops on Main Street and everyone knows everyone else. On closer examination, one finds that the town contains three largely separate social groups: Alternatives, Main Streeters, and Regulars. These categories are not based on race or ethnic origins. Rather, social distinctions in Viroqua are based ultimately on residents' ideas about what a community is and why it matters.These ideas both reflect and shape their choices as consumers, whether at the grocery store, as parents of school-age children, or in the voting booth. Living with—and listening to—the town's residents taught Macgregor that while traditional ideas about "community," especially as it was connected with living in a small town, still provided an important organizing logic for peoples' lives, there were a variety of ways to understand and create community.

Part I

CULTURES OF COMMUNITY

The first feature of Viroqua to make a deep impression on me was the larger-than-life fiberglass bull that stared sternly out over drivers on Highway 14 as they entered the town from the south. The bull advertised what was, at the time of my first visit in December 2000, a restaurant called Ricky’s. Passing the bull and heading into the downtown proper, I passed the VFW hall on the right, the Century 21 real estate office on the left and, shortly after that, the Latter-day Saints church, the optometry office, the Vernon County Historical Society Museum, and Vernon Memorial Hospital, before entering the designated historic section of the downtown. These two blocks of Main Street were lined with brick one- and two-story buildings that housed shops at the street level with apartments and offices above. The first block was home to Gary’s Rock Shop, Dairyland Printing, Clark/ Peterson Motors, Dahl Pharmacy, Buzzy’s Furniture and Buzzy’s Country across the street (specializing in “country”-style furnishings and decor), and a long, low building housing an IGA supermarket that later became a branch of the Western Wisconsin Technical College. At the end of this block, a traffic light stopped travelers at the intersection of Highway 14 and Jefferson Street. A right on Jefferson led to Viroqua’s post office and the MacIntosh Public Library.

Continuing north on Main Street, I passed Rockweiller Appliance, the Bramble Press bookstore, Bonnie’s Wedding Center, Art Vision, two banks (Citizens First Bank and the Bank of Virginia), and the Viking Inn restaurant. Across the street were the Temple Theatre, the Common Ground coffee shop, Box Office Video, Center Stage clothing, a second-hand shop called Second Time Around, Felix’s clothing store, and Soda Jo’s diner. The marquee over the Temple Theatre heralded a film festival to raise money for the theater’s $2 million renovation that was eventually completed in 2002. The city’s second traffic light stopped me at the intersection with State Highways 56 and 82. Taking a right on Highway 82 leads the traveler to the parking lot of Nelson’s Agri-Center and the American Legion hall and bar. Turning around and following Highway 56 in the other direction took me toward the courthouse and the public schools and into the residential neighborhood where I would eventually live.

The afternoon that I visited Viroqua for the first time, I ate lunch at Soda Jo’s diner, which then occupied the space that later housed Bella Luna, an Italian restaurant. The waitresses at Soda Jo’s wore saddle shoes, and they sometimes sang along with the oldies broadcast over the restaurant’s sound system. The walls were cluttered with 1950s and 1960s memorabilia, including 45 records and LP album jackets. A pair of penny loafers was affixed to the wall at the bottom of a pair of black pants and a white T-shirt that were stapled to the wall in a way that suggested a two-dimensional dancer frozen in mid Twist.

After finishing my slice of banana cream pie and paying the waitress at the diner’s vintage cash register, I stepped outside and spent a moment surveying Viroqua’s main street. I was struck, as I would be again and again, by the quintessential Midwest downtown aura of the shop fronts, the knots of laughing kids, and the patient dogs lounging in the backs of parked pickup trucks. The lunchtime crowd was slowly trickling out of the diner and out of the Viking Inn, diagonally across the street. A little girl struggled to pile into a minivan with her older siblings while remaining in command of a dripping ice cream cone. Down the street a Buick sedan pulled into the IGA parking lot (by the building that later became the Tech College). Its elderly driver alighted and made his way around the car’s wide front end to open the passenger-side door for a woman I assumed to be his wife.

On the surface at least, Viroqua had the timeless character that many Americans associate with small towns. The pastiche of historic eras represented in the downtown by features like the reproduction 1930s lamps lining the street, the 1920s theater, and the 1950s diner did not give the sensation of stagnation in any particular era. Instead, it gave the impression of stepping out of time, and suggested that time was perhaps not the most important consideration there. Timelessness is an important feature of the way Americans think about small towns, especially those in the Midwest. The rest of the world may be cruising down the fast lane, but the small towns of the heartland never seem to be in any such hurry.

A visitor might be able to maintain this illusion of timelessness if he or she did not continue traveling north, past the downtown area, where there are familiar franchise restaurants and stores: Country Kitchen, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Wal-Mart. There is also an entrance to the town’s industrial park and to the large steel building housing a National Cash Register company factory that specialized in producing labels.

In this book I examine the variety of ways that the citizens of this quintessential yet unique small Midwestern town make community together. The first four chapters, which make up part 1, explore in depth the three principle orientations that Viroquans had to making community and how differences in the fundamental commitment to Viroqua itself and the sense that community is something to deliberately create led to important social distinctions. These differences also led to residents having different sets of practices as community members in an everyday sense. In chapter 1 I present an overview of the three different groups I encountered in Viroqua and the ways they celebrated a major cultural holiday. I begin looking at the groups in more detail in chapter 2 with a consideration of those I call the Alternatives, not because they are the most important residents, or even the largest group of residents, but because they were so visible as a group and their presence was somewhat surprising. In chapters 3 and 4 I analyze the cultures of community in the Main Street and Regular groups respectively.

In part 2 I examine the ways that residents’ different ideas about community manifest themselves in a number of aspects of commercial life. Viroquans’ ethics of agency and logics of commitment guided their actions when it came to mundane decisions about exchanging goods and services, and in these arenas we can see how the different models of making community played out in everyday life.

The book’s concluding chapter examines some of the opportunities and constraints each group faced in Viroqua. It extends the idea that community making anywhere might be fruitfully understood through cultural analysis of the logics of commitment and ethics of agency.

1

THREE HALLOWEENS, THREE VIROQUAS

By three-thirty in the afternoon, it was nearly impossible to walk down Main Street without being poked by a witch’s broomstick or swatted with a fairy’s magic wand. Small Spider-Men darted among ghosts wearing plastic Scary Movie masks with flashing red lights. A giggling chain of Snow Whites and Cinderellas snaked out of Felix’s clothing store holding hands and ran (as fast as possible considering the crowds) up the sidewalk to the next store on the block. The sidewalks were swarming with children of all ages, including some teenagers. It was a scene of unmitigated collective glee.

The kids did not seem to care (or even notice) that many other kids were dressed in Halloween costumes identical to their own. When two Incredible Hulks passed each other on the sidewalk, they did not even glance at each other. The vast majority of children were wearing store-bought costumes representing familiar commercial characters. The Snow Whites were obviously Snow Whites because their costumes evoked Disney’s animated Snow White. Children did vary in the degree to which their parents had mandated concessions to the late-fall temperatures, so some of the Hulks’ “muscles” were clearly augmented by sweaters, while others remained lean. Costume originality, however, was not the point of the event. Candy was.

Some of the Main Street business owners who were on hand to provide the candy attempted to keep the hordes of marauding trick-or-treaters out of their stores by standing just outside the entrances of their shops to distribute it. They looked a little like trees hanging tenuously onto the banks of a river flooding with X-Men, Bob the Builders, and Dora the Explorers and in danger of being swept under at any moment. At other shop entrances, eddies of children formed where they entered and hustled out as quickly as possible to move on to the next shop for more treats. Some of the adults were dressed in costumes. Most, however, were wearing workaday clothes but had added signifiers of costumes, such as rubber noses or funny hats.

Like many cities and towns across the country, Viroqua had attempted to bring some order to the Halloween ritual of trick-or-treating both for children’s safety and to try to curb the potential for chaos on a holiday that sometimes invited rule breaking. The planned and advertised Halloween celebration on Main Street served an additional purpose: it was one of a number of events throughout the year designed by the Viroqua Partners, a group formed when the Chamber of Commerce and the Viroqua Revitalization Association merged in 1995. In order to promote local businesses, the Partners organization was always looking for ways to bring residents into the downtown to have a good time, with the ultimate goal of encouraging them to think of the downtown and the shops located there as the heart of the community.

But Main Street’s was not the only public observance of Halloween in town. After watching the activity there for a while, I went home and donned my own Halloween costume1 and went to meet Bjorn Leonards, a furniture maker, and his wife Brie Lamers, an artist, who were taking their two kids to what turned out to be a rather different Halloween event. As we walked from their house on Rock Street toward the Landmark Center, Brie explained that the event we were about to attend had been spearheaded largely by Paula Greneier, a chiropractor and parent of children who attended Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School.2 “She thought we should try to make Halloween about something other than just kids eating tons of junk food,” Brie explained from behind a clown-size pair of cat’s-eye glasses, which she was wearing with a silver dress, go-go boots, and a pair of wings made of fabric and wire. As we neared the Landmark Center building, we could see lots of other kids and parents, almost all in homemade costumes.

As on Main Street, there were princesses and witches and ghosts, but there were also pirates and gypsies and woodcutters and armored knights and parrots and farmers. It was not always easy to tell exactly what some of the children’s costumes represented, as they were clearly the work of the children themselves. Adults took advantage of such ambiguities to engage children in conversation. Exclaimed one woman to a little girl wearing a bright dress (several sizes too big) along with many strands of plastic beads and a winter hat made of synthetic fleece, “You look great! Tell me about your costume!” The woman had knelt down on the ground to the child’s eye level, and though they were standing too far away for me to hear the child’s response, I was struck by the little girl’s poise and the confidence with which she addressed this adult who was not her parent.

Three parents were collecting donations of a dollar per person in front of the Landmark Center, a three-story brick building that had once housed Viroqua’s public high school. The building was now owned by Nancy Rhodes, a local businesswoman who had purchased the building from the city in hopes of preserving it by finding new uses for it. She had turned the old gymnasium into a health club and had rented out much of the rest of the space. The Landmark Center housed a Waldorf kindergarten, several offices (including the Greneiers’ chiropractic practice), and the Youth Initiative High School, a high school with a Waldorf-inspired curriculum. YIHS was founded by graduates of the Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School, which was located next door in the midcentury building that was once Viroqua’s public elementary school. Paula Greneier was dressed in a green hat, tights, and tunic. We formed a group with about fifteen other adults and kids who had arrived at the same time, and Paula explained that she would lead us to an enchanted forest. We followed her a block and a half to the wooded lot that the Pleasant Ridge school had purchased to use as an outdoor classroom.

The forest had indeed been enchanted, thanks to Pleasant Ridge’s seventh and eighth graders. These older students were dressed in costumes and stationed throughout the property, acting out fairy tales and handing out treats to the younger children. As we followed a path through the trees, a student dressed as a troll emerged from beneath a small wooden bridge and explained theatrically that she was waiting for some Billy Goats Gruff, and asked the smaller children in our group if they had seen any. When the younger children replied that they had not, the troll said they had better have treats to help them on their journey through the woods. Reaching into a cloth bag, she gave every child a homemade peanut butter cookie.

A few moments later, a teenage bear emerged from behind a tree and handed out small tubes filled with honey. Periodically, a singing gingerbread man would run by, followed momentarily by an old lady who, true to the fairy tale, never caught her gingerbread man. The children eventually received edible gingerbread men of their own, however. In another part of the forest, another four students acted out the Swiss Family Robinson’s life in a tree house. At the end of the trail through the forest, children were invited to select a small pumpkin to take home that was donated by a local farm. Back indoors, the final element of the event was a complex play put on by a small group of adults and children using traditional Asian shadow puppets.

This group of parents and students had produced an alternative to the Main Street Halloween celebration. While the events on Main Street were planned in part with an eye toward improving Viroqua’s downtown, this second celebration attempted to improve on Halloween itself by downplaying the importance of store-bought costumes and candy and shifting the focus to kids’ creating their own fun from scratch together with adults. Bjorn, Brie, their kids, and I started a slow walk back toward their home, stopping at the homes of some of their friends whose doors were open. We ate in each one: one served hot cider and handed out fresh apples; at another we ate slices of homemade bread with jam.

I also knew of children who did not participate in either organized event. The day after Halloween, I was at my part time job, tending bar at the American Legion. I asked a patron I knew only by his first name, Mark, a father of school-age children, if his kids had enjoyed the Halloween festivities. He explained that it was just too much of a hassle to get the kids home from school and then take them right back into town again for the trick-or-treating on Main Street. Mark worked at a local muffler manufacturing plant, where employees worked ten-hour shifts four days a week. Mark seemed unaware of the Enchanted Forest event, and the timing of trick-or-treating on Main Street was a problem for his family. It occurred just when he was coming home and trying to get a few things done around the house, while his wife was trying to make dinner, and, he added, the kids didn’t need more candy anyway. His niece and nephews had brought over lots of candy, and the kids’ grandma brought over a fair amount of it too. So at his house, Halloween was observed informally and privately. Mark’s kids, their cousins, and some neighbor children ran around in their costumes...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Cultures of Community
• Part II. Commerce, Consumption, and Community in Viroqua