The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MAIN STREET: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community. By Miles Orvell. xiii and 286 pp.; ills., notes, index. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. 2012. $39-95 (cloth), ISBN 9780807835685. Miles Orvell has produced a model of cross-disciplinary scholarship straddling two major interdisciplinary fields--American Studies and Urban Studies--while also mining the literatures of other disciplines, including geography, sociology, history, planning, and literature. The book brings insights from all these different domains to bear on a fascinating question: how has the myth of Main Street influenced land-use planning in the United States? In a scholarly world that is increasingly subdivided into narrow specialties, OrvelPs book shows us how a broadly synthetic mind can make cultural sense of large-scale trends across a long historical arc. This treatment relies mainly on three key, overlapping terms: "Main Street," "small town," and "community." Each term may be used to describe an idea or a physical place, and most of the book focuses on the complicated and changing relationships between ideas and physical places. Orvell applies these terms to places of widely divergent sizes, across several centuries. Although his account goes all the way back to the Puritans, Orvell confirms the durability of the myth of Main Street by reminding readers that media commentators in our own time often contrast the conditions prevailing on Main Street versus those on Wall Street, confident that their audience will understand the meanings attached to these economic and social poles. Why has Main Street remained so powerful a symbol in the American psyche? Orvell suggests it is because Main Street is a place where private enterprise is combined with public space. Main Street offers a mythology that reconciles Americans' devotion to the marketplace with their belief in community. Perhaps because of his grounding in American Studies, Orvell bolsters his case with examples from material culture to show how the myth of Main Street is enshrined in the American consciousness, for example, through the elaborate model-railroad villages that re-create on a tiny scale all the elements of mythical American small towns. Or through life-size, living museums like Williamsburg, Virginia, and Greenfield Village, Michigan, which were produced by what Orvell calls "acts of philanthropy powered by nostalgia" (p. 35). Orvell includes photographs throughout the chapters to illustrate his arguments, including many images taken by Depression-era photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration. And perhaps most convincing of all is his discussion of Disneyland, whose 1955 reconstruction of America's small town qualifies, in Orvell's words, as "the apotheosis" of Main Street (p. 37). Some of the strongest parts of the book are chapters 3 and 4, which offer the author's commentary on literary works of the 1920s and 1930s, illustrating an amazing shift in attitudes toward America's small towns. He devotes an entire chapter to Sinclair Lewis's classic novel Main Street, which Orvell sums up as "a piercing satire that paints a bleak and miserable picture of small-town life on the prairie" (p. 75). Yet in the very next decade of the 1930s, the tide of opinion reversed among those who were shaping our culture. Photographers and writers began extolling the virtues of small-town life, and Thornton Wilder produced Our Town, a play that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for its sentimental portrayal of Grover's Corners. Orvell attributes this reversal of attitudes toward small towns to America's need for an anchor in the chaos of the Depression. Since that time, America's tastemakers have maintained an unshakeable faith in the virtues of small town life, despite what Orvell identifies as the harsher realities of many small towns. In particular, the author devotes Chapter 5 to the exclusionary tendencies that we sometimes observe in tightly bound communities. …