During the early twentieth century, many sociologists and social commentators worried about the decline of community in the United States. A country that had been largely defined by small towns and rural communities was witnessing large-scale social change such as the movement of peoples to large cities to live in crowded tenements and work in smoky factories. Prominent sociologists such as Edward Ross thought that the loss of the communal world of rural life would damage the development of young people and ultimately the functioning of American democracy.
Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello, an American Studies scholar and chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts, raises questions about this traditional understanding of community. Duclos-Orsello brings many years of experience as a social justice activist to her reconsideration of the meanings of community. Duclos-Orsello argues that the notions of community advanced by Ross and others is too constricted and that the “ubiquitous declension narrative” used to describe the eroding social bonds of the modern era should be thrown overboard (7). Duclos-Orsello thinks that place-based community has been given too much focus, much to the detriment of other forms of affinity-oriented community such as race. She specifically focuses on St. Paul, Minnesota, from roughly 1900 to 1920. She chose to focus on St. Paul, she says, because of its “ordinariness” (13). The latter choice may surprise some who would see St. Paul as somewhat unique given its heavily Irish Catholic nature, its role as a prominent state capital, the presence of figures such as James Hill, and its location on the mighty Mississippi River.
In order to show different forms of community and how it can be “renegotiated” (the jargon is heavy in these pages), Duclos-Orsello focuses on Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street (1920). Duclos-Orsello argues that Main Street, with its purported criticism of small Midwestern towns, demonstrates that large cities were preferable. Duclos-Orsello believes that the character Carol Kennicott's experiences in the Twin Cities reveals a broader, more cosmopolitan, and more progressive world and a new and better form of community. A better reading of Main Street, however, or at least one that is as plausible as that advanced by Duclos-Orsello, is that Carol is the goat of the novel. Lewis persistently portrays Carol as flighty, out of touch, too snooty, and too blind to the benefits of community life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Carol's husband, the town doctor (modeled on Lewis's own father in Sauk Centre, Minnesota), is the real hero, selflessly serving his community while growing frustrated by his differently directed wife. Lewis strenuously objected to the idea that his novel was part of a “revolt from the village” tradition in American literature, or a literary strain designed to unmask and mock small-town Midwestern life. Lewis said he loved his hometown in Minnesota and did not intend to denigrate it.
In order to expose and undermine an older conception of community, Duclos-Orsello also focuses on the St. Paul winter carnivals of 1916 and 1917. Duclos-Orsello does not focus on the immediate place-based nature of these celebrations, or the fact that a major city in the state of Minnesota had a winter carnival, or embraced its status as a cold northern state with a Viking heritage. This is all reinforced by that centrality of ice castles, toboggan races, skating, sleigh rides, and skiing. Instead, Duclos-Orsello is concerned that the Hill family, with its railroad fortune, underwrote the carnival. She believes that the presence of prominent and wealthy families undercut the potential for a more egalitarian community event.
Duclos-Orsello is also heavily focused on race and sees great racial exclusion in the carnivals. The degree of racial tolerance would, of course, not meet our modern standards. This was 1916 after all. But African Americans could attend the carnival and the broader atmosphere in Minnesota was not overtly hostile relative to other places in the nation. St. Paul was home to the first African American attorney west of the Mississippi, Frederick McGhee, a well-organized African American middle class, and widely-read African American newspapers, including the Appeal. Minnesota more generally was known for the adoption of progressive racial legislation during the late nineteenth century. Duclos-Orsello mentions a lynching in Duluth to suggest a hostile racial environment, but does not offer a comparative benchmark. But, in fact, the regional differences were stark. While Louisiana witnessed 540 racially motivated lynchings between 1877–1950, Minnesota witnessed nine lynchings, most of which involved white victims, between 1882–1968. The historian Michael J. Pfeifer's work has concluded that lynching in the Upper Midwest was “comparatively rare.”Footnote 1
The absence of objections to the winter carnivals from the African American newspapers of St. Paul is evidence, for Duclos-Orsello, of the fact that African Americans were so marginalized they didn't think it worth commenting on. The possibility that African American newspapers didn't protest because they did not see major problems is not something Duclos-Orsello considers.
It is an important project to explore new and various forms of community in the United States, and Duclos-Orsello is to be applauded for her efforts. But her evidence does not always point in the direction she thinks it does. Deeper studies and better understandings of the dense civic culture of the old Midwest would provide more revealing entry points into the history of urban spaces such as St. Paul. They would also likely reveal that those who once worried about the deleterious effects of the erosion of rural communities were in the right.
