000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page i small town 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page ii Portrait-photograph of Granville Hicks taken about 1943 by Lotte Jacobi. (Courtesy Craib family) 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page iii Granville Hicks SMALL TOWN fordham university press new york 2004 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page iv Copyright © 2004 Fordham University Press “Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition,” copyright © 2004 Ron Powers “Granville Hicks: Champion of the Small Town” and “A Granville Hicks Bibliography,” copyright © 2004 Warren F. Broderick All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hicks, Granville, 1901– Small town / Granville Hicks.—1st Fordham University Press ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. Originally published : New York : Macmillan, 1946. With new pref. and biographical essay. ISBN 0-8232-2357-4 (hardcover) 1. City and town life. 2. Intellectuals. 3. Cities and towns—United States. I. Title. HT153.H53 2004 307.76—dc22 2004014754 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1 First Macmillan Company edition, 1946 First Fordham University Press edition, 2004 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page v For Dorothy 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page vi 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page vii Contents Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition, by Ron Powers ix Granville Hicks: Champion of the Small Town, by Warren Broderick xvii Author’s Preface xxxix small town i. Starting Out from Roxborough 1 ii. The Natural History of an Intellectual 13 iii. What Came with the House 34 iv. The Rise and Fall of a Country Town 52 v. The Influence of a Ghost 75 vi. The Mind of Roxborough 92 vii.Human Nature, Roxborough Style 123 viii. Institutions and People 152 ix. The Future of the Town 181 x. The Larger Society 204 xi. The Burden on the Schools 227 xii. The Duty of the Intellectuals 247 A Granville Hicks Bibliography 257 Index 259 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page viii 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page ix Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition ron powers Granville Hicks saw it coming. “Has any small town a future in this age of industrialism, urbanism, and specialization?” he asks in his classic work of 1946, which examined a town caught in the decline of small-scale society that even back then was well un- derway. Nearly 60 years of “future” later, the balefulness of Hicks’s question seems sadly to have been enlarged, transmuted, and emphatically justified. For evidence, we need look no farther than the three categories he lists—although, if we did look far- ther, the evidence would continue to mount. Industrialism? How about “post-industrialism,” tethered to a concept scarcely imaginable in the wary, fractious year after the end of World War II—“globalism?” After manufacturing aban- doned towns for centralized locales in the decades following the war, it went overseas—“overseas” itself being a museum piece of a term in the age of cyberspace. Nor is it only America’s erstwhile Axis enemies whose workers inherited the factory jobs once hap- pily performed by folks in Smallville, U.S.A. That, too, is stale news, as quaint-sounding as the old toy label, “Made in Occu- pied Japan.” These days, the multinational corporations have tar- geted countries in a far-distant realm for cheap labor in making designer shoes, electronics, clothing, and automotive parts, a realm unsuspected by any Grafton bobby-soxer or soda-jerk, un- less they were sci-fi fans or readers of Strange Tales comic books: a realm known as the Third World. Urbanism? By 1946, urbanism was already a trend “as dead as yesterday’s headlines,” to quote some fast-talking dame in a black-and-white flick whose name I no longer recall (though I 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page x x Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition recall that the dame was a blonde). Suburbanism was replacing it as the migratory town-killer from the late 1940s onward, as hun- dreds of thousands of returning white servicemen took advantage of low-interest G.I. loans to move themselves and their new fam- ilies away from the dreaded central cities populated by the (equal- ly dreaded) African-American laboring class that had migrated out of the South just a few years earlier. With the advent of the interstate highway—another innovation unknown to Granville Hicks’s “Roxborough” (actually, Grafton, New York)—the ‘burbs eventually mutated, or metastasized, into the great, formless, centerless “edge cities”: clusters of office towers and shopping malls out there on the Crabgrass Frontier, as Kenneth T. Jackson has called it. The suburbs and the edge cities swallowed up many existing small towns, and created economic incentives that drained the youthful workforce from many others. As for specialization—well, that concept, correctly identified by Hicks, has also swelled far beyond the boundaries of the term as it was understood in 1946. Not only have the passing years seen an erosion in the viability of the old-fashioned jack-of-all- trades, the yeoman farmer, the family doctor, the carpenter- builder, the skilled journeyman mechanic, and factory worker; they have witnessed a radical segmentation, an atomization real- ly, in the way people choose to live their lives. Witness those tightly compartmentalized office cubicles in those edge-city of- fice towers; witness the gated communities from which those of- fice workers commute (usually in the encapsulated space of the single-passenger car); witness the commodifying and “niching” of everything from recreation to sports to ideas in politics, schools and colleges, literature, music, magazines and newspapers, the movies. Witness the many stratifications of Internet porn. (On second thought, don’t witness that.) Within each of these categories cited by Granville Hicks, we can see myriad dynamics at work that militate against the fate and fortunes of the small town, and very few, if any, dynamics mili- tating in the small town’s favor. All of them bear heavily on the 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page xi Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition xi value that implicitly underlies Hicks’s concern for the Small Town—the value of community. For instance, “industrialism,” or industrialization—its unde- niable benefits notwithstanding—has reached into the vitals of town life, extracting not only people and livelihoods, but also the underpinnings of purpose and self-identity for those who remain. Most small towns are sustained by a surrounding farm econo- my. America has lost half its farms since 1950, and four-fifths of its farmers. Those who continue today are mostly over 55. Since 1981 alone, 750,000 family farms have yielded to suburbanization, mall development, and agribusiness in America, taking with them a million small-business jobs based in the rural economy. But that’s hardly the whole story. In addition to its fertilizer- and pesticide-driven damage to vast stretches of topsoil and ground- water, agribusiness—which the writer Wendell Berry has called “economic genocide”—has vitiated the rural folk-culture on which small-town life depends. The economies of scale, reinforced by the shift of governmental subsidies and other kinds of support from family farms to agribusiness conglomerates, has further di- minished the traditional farm’s survival prospects. The collateral damage has included the network of interdependency built up over decades, even centuries. Granville Hicks’s Grafton, New York, lies about 15 miles from the southern Vermont border. I live a little more than 100 miles north of the town he studied, in a region where town life is still the norm. Vermont is a surviving cradle of American town cul- ture: a still-operative latticework of small-scale community life, with its nearly 250 towns compacted into 9,609 square miles. Millions of visitors come each year (and leave behind a billion and a half dollars in purchases) seeking to encounter a Brigadoon of 200-year-old villages, tidy dairy farms, town meetings, and glimpses of earflap-wearing oldsters passing on the skills of huntin’ and fishin’ and doin’ the chores to the eagerly receptive small fry. And to shop and ski a little. 000_Hicks_FM_R.ts 9/30/04 1:38 AM Page xii xii Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition The visitors find much of what they are seeking, or persuasive representations thereof, but the day-to-day reality of Vermont has long since ceased to fit with the myth. At the start of the twentieth century, 80 percent of Vermont was indeed farm coun- try, with 32,000 family farms, most of them producing dairy products. Today, only about 6,000 of those remain. The rest were casualties of overwhelming economic competition (see: agribusiness), and the lure of developers’ prices. (In 1993, Vermont finally surrendered its stance as the last state in the union to deny access to Wal-Mart. Several “big-box” retailers followed, the corporate-owned ski industry has expanded, and small family- owned stores have boarded up their windows proportionately.) Two-thirds of the surviving farms no longer keep herds of cows, but have adapted to niche products such as salsa and llamas. A growing number of these farms have learned to market them- selves to tourists as stylized versions of their functioning pasts— as venues for “agritourism.” The state’s small towns and their close-knit community tradi- tions have suffered accordingly.