100 Years of Main Street
I just finished reading Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. I mentioned the basic premise in my last post, so I won’t rehash it. (Plus, you can relive your high school/college days by checking out an in-depth analysis on SparkNotes.) It is important to realize that Lewis’s novel is satire, both of life in a small town and how literature portrays life in a small town. The author’s observations are astute and sharp. What struck me most, then, was how little has changed since 1920: Lewis could be satirizing small towns and the portrayal of small town life, today— think Sarah Palin and “Joe the Plumber” and her numerous references to “Main Street.”
Here are a few quotes that struck me as particularly pertinent, especially in light of the progressive grassroots movement that has sprung up in response to the current presidential administration and congress:
“I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.”
“It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose. For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now — and we’re going to try our hands at it.”
“All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and Squarehead farmers themselves, they’re seditious as the devil — disloyal, non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that’s what they are!”
“Did this organizer say anything pro-German?”
“Not on your life! They didn’t give him a chance!” His laugh was stagey.
“So the whole thing was illegal — and led by the sheriff! Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?”
“Maybe it wasn’t exactly regular, but what’s the odds? They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it’s justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure.”
“What editorial did he get that from?” she wondered, as she protested, “See here, my beloved, why can’t you Tories declare war honestly? You don’t oppose this organizer because you think he’s seditious but because you’re afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we’re at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn’t like is ‘pro-German,’ whether it’s business competition or bad music.”
Lewis also wrote a book called It Can’t Happen Here, which Robert Reich is reading and has recommended on his Facebook vlog “The Resistance Report.” Lewis had a keen eye for human nature and its societal foibles. Nearly one hundred years later, we have yet to evolve.
