Granville Hicks' Small Town
Harrington, Michael
The Capital District is an urban complex around Albany, New York. It includes Troy, a winter-beaten sort of city, with shops and factories, old enough to have a down-town section with much of...
...I ARRIVED near the end of a bitter struggle...
...Between Slow to Thirty-Five Miles an Hour and Resume Speed Please, there is obviously a complicated, intricate society...
...perhaps the towns, except for those which are the centers of a prosperous agricultural life, must disappear, like Grafton, unless they become suburbs of cities...
...Yet the anomaly is that Grafton is holding its own, and will probably grow...
...but then it is not at all private...
...According to the "better" natives, promiscuity, inter-marriage of cousins, and drinking are rife...
...Here, Hicks, argued, personal relations are of the very essence of existence...
...ONLY A FEW ,.MILES closer to Troy, the town of Eagle Mills more closely approaches the image of the suburb...
...its lawns, trim...
...two for the Jewish family that had moved in down at the General Store...
...The hotel never came, and the hill folk remained (though now, some say, they are given candy as well as wine) . At the end of World War II, Hicks was hopeful that Grafton could find the power to maintain itself within itself...
...And the Methodist Church, or rather the Methodist Minister, was tied in too...
...Granville Hicks, one of America's most active intellectuals, a leader in the Communist literary movement of the thirties and currently a frequent writer in the New Leader, has lived here since 1932...
...And the Summer People who cluster around the nearby lakes, they hardly count at all...
...but that quality also seems a little more complicated that his book might lead one to suspect...
...And when this situation is placed in the context of the struggle between the Natives and the Outsiders, it raises some serious thoughts about the value of "neighborliness...
...In between there is, at best, a mile of houses...
...The Republican Party, the traditional focus of loyalty, and the Democrats are the merest beginning of the complicated structure...
...If that were to shut down, the town would disintegrate...
...Today, almost everyone seems to regard the old Klan activity as having been prankish and not too serious...
...One of them was later a Republican Committeeman (along with the Catholic in front of whose house crosses were burned) , another was the postmaster...
...That impression lasts just as long as you don't talk to anyone...
...Most of the people I spoke to seemed surprised at the idea, but when confronted with it were sure it would never work...
...As an appendage of Mass Society, it has a very real hope...
...True enough, one deals with problems over a chance cup of coffee-but with a co-factionist...
...Should Grafton send its children to school in Berlin, to the east, or in Brunswick, to the west...
...But it is enough to shatter the image of the Small Town, or at least of this small town...
...In this Small Town, for instance, you can encounter the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, all side by side...
...Grafton was never able to find the resources within itself for growth...
...The worst motives were consistently imputed to the opposition...
...Yet one or two people, when asked about the Klan, looked at me significantly and said, "It's still here...
...what kind of One Hundred And Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration to hold...
...That also should be mentioned...
...But they can stay, perhaps even keep a cow and a few chickens, and live off the nearby industry...
...Depending on whom you listen to, you can learn that the new Center is either a forty-thousand-dollar pipe-dream of the impracticed reactionaries, or an imminent reality...
...Or take the question of the Sesqui-Centennial...
...There will be thanks from Troy, and much talk, and everyone will know that the anti-Hicks faction, opposed to the Community League, has won a victory...
...Perhaps, then, industrial decentralization is the only way out...
...Salvation is not from within...
...how to handle the school problem...
...Down at the General Store, the coasters advertise Screwdrivers with Smirnoff Vodka-Mass Society has come to the Small Town...
...is a wry question, at least for those to whom I spoke...
...There is a perverse sort of pride in the intense, fruitless politicking, in the factionalism and disharmony...
...The Town, if Grafton is in any way typical, is local and personal...
...If the hill folk are an Eighteenth Century survival, and the Klan a legacy of the Nineteenth, even a day or so in Grafton is enough to surprise one with the Twentieth Century...
...But peace in the world brought the factional budget struggle back to Grafton...
...Yet Hicks is probably right when he says that organized bigotry is not a force any more...
...Even celebrating a Hundred and Fifty Years is a divisive problem in Grafton...
...WHAT OF GRAFTON'S future...
...The hill people vote in the major elections, but they are apparently not a real part of the life of the town...
...It accepts the wretched existence of the hill folk with a shrug...
...The City is, to be sure, huge and impersonal, and that is a loss...
...Within a matter of hours I was told by the pro-Brunswick faction that Granville Hicks supports Berlin because of a marriage tie to the superintendent there...
...Among them there still persists the shadowy existence of the Ku Klux Klan...
...For I only passed through...
...That it is so easy to find these things in this Small Town shatters many a stereotype...
...All of the factionalism and the Insiding and the Outsiding are scrupulously recorded...
...In all probability what they meant was not that the Klan as a group but that the anti-Semitism and racism persist, as part of the narrowness of the town itself...
...THE FIRST THOUGHT, after passing through the center of town while still looking for it, is that Grafton could not possibly he the subject of a full book, that one can't stretch a clump of houses into a discussion of several hundred pages...
...Within a day I was informed that the Catholics favored Brunswick because it would facilitate their getting free bus transportation to the parochial school...
...Factions are defined and redefined around a whole series of immediate questions: whether or not to build a station for the Volunteer Fire Department...
...It is not simply that Grafton is some fifty-six square miles in area, that the town is physically more than the little square on Route 2 and the white Town Hall...
...Every person I met had an opinion, a strongly held, thoroughly factional opinion...
...I lock it, because I've got my work to do...
...It fell away from its prosperity of the nineteenth century, when there was a factory and a hotel...
...So Grafton is not merely a small town...
...Grafton change...
...The town itself is organized from top to bottom...
...But then the nicer people are not so simply that...
...But Grafton is different...
...Hicks, with a mere twentynve years of continuous residence, is of course an Outsider...
...Now no one employs more than six or eight workers...
...They were born here...
...Anyone is ready to plunge into the most indiscreet conversation with someone who happens along Route 2. But this situation raises some serious questions about the values put forward by Hicks in Small Town...
...My story is of a small town that surely has something to do with the Small Town...
...But as of today, a curious mixture helps to maintain the smalltownishness of Grafton...
...That, I can't do...
...Unlike the mass society of the great outer world, the small town does not know its politics and its news as huge impersonal things which happen in the distance...
...In a day or so of just talking, one finds quite a bit of neighborliness, of close relations-arid also a neighborly hatred, an inbred hostility, the familiarity of contempt...
...The former Republican boss had to sneak into property owning back in 1911, and the Scrivens thwarted him when he interested some outside capital in restoring the hotel...
...That is the obvious paradox just behind the calm, there for the finding of any stranger coming down Route 2. But then, Grafton is infectious...
...The town can't provide them with a living...
...The factionalism of Grafton goes far beyond that of the small political group-for here factionalism is neighborly...
...But he also found a crucial value...
...They just walk in...
...It is able to exist because of one factory...
...And the same goes for the new Community Center...
...There is a great readiness to believe a good half of the town "shiftless...
...The Eighteenth Century is represented by the hill folk...
...There is very little work for the men, and it is possible to live a little off Welfare...
...But the Scriven family, which owned the hotel, a factory and niuch of the property in Grafton, didn't like Outsiders...
...The Capital District is an urban complex around Albany, New York...
...It has a record of tuberculosis cures, and a long time ago there was a big hotel...
...but it is also private...
...So Grafton has a new lease on life...
...Or have all the judgments been made by city folk living some four hours from Grafton in New York...
...it does not have the impersonal cover of the city...
...Most of the people I spoke to felt that the hill folk made up half of Grafton's population, but their figure is probably high...
...All ofthis is, admittedly, the merest impression-but that is what makes it so singular, so striking...
...But talk-conversation here seems to flow in torrents-and the life which fascinated Hicks fairly leaps out and engulfs the listener...
...And even the old Republican boss is willing to admit that it was a pretty easy matter to vote them, especially after they began to depend on Welfare...
...He does not idealize and put forth the "pastoral" image of a city man dreaming of the countryside...
...There had been several meetings ("they," the New York State education people, were in league with the Berlin faction, and ordered meetings until "they" won, I was told) , and there was violent feeling, deep and thorough-going hostility...
...In other words, a day in the Town places new value on the impersonal life of the megopolis...
...Twenty miles to the east, after Route 2 has risen through rolling hills to a height over 1,500 feet, there is Grafton...
...There was a rather large party not too long ago, and one couple realized (more with amusement than shock, to hear them tell it) , that they were the only legally married couple present...
...Hicks himself would cut it by half at least...
...The economy is based upon the city, but the social relations are those of the country...
...I can't pretend to answer my own question...
...it is rather that the community fairly seethes with relationships beneath its clapboard calm...
...But they never tell you when they're coming...
...And if these attitudes are the dominant values of the town as town, if these are what it develops when left to itself, then perhaps Grafton is an anachronism that can only charm the city man speeding through on his way to Boston, or the Summer Person driving to the lake...
...But is that good...
...Approaching the town, there is a Slow Down sign...
...But now, ten years or so later, that optimism seems to have been the product of an abnormal situation...
...BUT THE INTENSE politicalization of life is not the only surprising fact about Grafton...
...And here one has to hark back to the radical sect for a metaphor...
...It sure was a mistake to go in with Berlin...
...The story has it that the minister received three dollars for every Klansman he recruited...
...Is Faulkner's Frenchmen's Bend, one wonders, really such a Gothic and Southern phenomenon...
...What their politics are like, if the judgment is true, is hard to imagine...
...As a result Hicks' case for the small town depends upon one major value: that of neighborliness, of a possibility of personal relations denied to the metropolis...
...During the War, Grafton discovered quite a bit of unity, and the Civil Defense group (Hicks' faction) was able to accomplish a great many things...
...But the impressionistic, unscientific feeling that Grafton excites in the rankest Outsider is one which puts Hicks' value in a delicate balance...
...Some miles to the east lies Berlin...
...And then, what good is there in maintaining the character of the place...
...And typically, the Sesqui-Centennial is celebrating One Hundred and Fifty Years of existence in an atmosphere of sharp hostility...
...Though more and more threatened each year by the Outside, the Natives still mainfain their sense of identity...
...Another, a woman who has been operating the General Store for over thirty years, explained carefully that she was not a "native...
...The commuters in Grafton are, for the most part, workers...
...The oldsters can remember their antics in the twenties when they burned crosses: one for the hired hand on a Catholic's place...
...They are, it would seem, a reliable part of Grafton's Republican majority...
...Should it...
...One old-timer remembers that the Scrivens fought against a new hotel on the grounds that it would have a liquor license-but then tanked up the hill folk in a shed on every election day...
...A stranger can enter Grafton and so intense are the factional arguments that he can learn something about the intricacies of local politics in a matter of hours...
...By itself, Grafton is dying...
...For all the intimacy of Graf ton's life, there still remains the difference between the Native and the Outsider...
...Today, most of the workers in Grafton have jobs in Albany or Troy, and the town is becoming a metropolitan bedroom...
...And the Summer People have not made a change, for they cluster around the lake and don't really enter into the life of the town...
...Seventeen years later, Gratton certainly communicates the quality which Hicks found...
...A day or so in Graftcn isn't the basis for balancing the neighborly relations and the neighborly hatred and coming up with a judgment...
...Does it have one...
...There have been gains-the Fire Department has its building, the Library testifies to the labors of the Community League-but any real forward movement has failed to develop...
...More interesting is Grafton's apparent tolerance for easy living...
...He recorded the narrowness and the bigotry...
...Along Route 2 you feel the presence of calm and order, but the strange and unorthodox are there just beneath the surface...
...At first glance, Grafton is one of the thousands of American towns where you Reduce Speed: a bend in the road, a clump of life, and not much more...
...for it has no Troy or Albany to save it...
...In those days, the Klan numbered men who were to become the leaders of the community...
...It includes Troy, a winter-beaten sort of city, with shops and factories, old enough to have a down-town section with much of the architectural charm of Louisburg Square in Boston...
...His Grafton was not an idyllic place, a retreat for a modern Thoreau...
...One worker here spends his forty hours in the shop and then raises chickens and keeps a cow in his spare time...
...For Hicks that fact was the center of Small Town...
...But the struggle between the Natives and the Outsiders is only one curious aspect of the divisiveness of being neighborly...
...But the unscientific impression also has its use, and even a few hours in Grafton goes deep...
...It comes, rather, from the Mass Society of the Outside, the arch enemy of the Small Town...
...It is not suburbia, or exurbia, for those terms imply the presence of the middle class...
...He has not been an alien sociologist from some great university looking for the stuff of statistics...
...In Small Town Hicks is quite objective...
...Indeed, the way some of the oldsters talk, it is the struggle between the Natives and the Outsiders which has kept Grafton from growing...
...A Negro family that moved in not too long ago didn't have any "trouble," but there were remarks...
...Native and Outsider, factions on the School Question, hill folk, the Klan, an avant-gardish attitude on sex: these form an amazingly complex pattern just below the surface of Grafton's curtained calm...
...The citizen acts over a cup of coffee, he decides how to vote on the basis of a close knowledge of the candidate who lives down the road and whom he questioned at the General Store the week before...
...I myself favor amalgamation of the school district with Brunswick...
...More important is the political life...
...The factional disputes in Grafton, as they are reflected in the talk of its people, are so intense as to politicalize social life...
...Their hovels are there to see on the back roads, and their life seems to resemble that of a Kentucky mountaineer...
...It is Small Town, the subject of a full length book...
...Its houses are modern, expensive...
...Now the factory is long since gone, the hotel has been torn down, and Grafton is witnout any real industry...
...One man, the former Republican boss of the town, a resident since 1911 and a summer visitor since 1898, confessed that he was still an Outsider...
...It will be held this Fourth of July under the aegis of the Veterans of Foreign Wars...
...They are part of a daily rhythm...
...And it fairly cries out to be a symbol, to be made to stand for a way of life that involves some millions of Americans...
...For the Grafton which develops out of its own history, on its own power, is provincial, filled with rumors, quarrels and factions...
...Whom one invites over to the house is, evidently, a function of the School Question or the Fourth of July Question...
...The Town believes that these are shiftless people who only want to work a day or two, until they can get enough money for some food and wine...
...The hill folk are not alone in their promiscuity...
...The town is, as you will learn in a matter of minutes, "the second most healthful in the United States...
...And there you have one of the strangest impressions of a day or so in Grafton: almost everyone is pessimistic...
...For twenty-five years he has been an active, partisan citizen, one of the few intellectuals to make good the threat to find roots...
...In time, it is possible that the spread of the suburbs will engulf Grafton itself and completely change its character...
...And almost before you can obey the law, you are told to Resume Speed...
...Here, a major decision can begin over a cup of coffee, a basic change can emerge out of a chance meeting at the Post Office...
...Around a little square on Route 2, there is the General Store, and on the catty-corner a one-room school house, and set back from the road a row of houses, among them the Baptist Church...
...Or rather, perhaps, all the small towns are different from the image that develops in the urban imaginationwhereas what really distinguishes Grafton is that it has its chronicler...
...Still, it is hard to realize that some twenty-five miles from the capital of one the richest states in the richest nation in the world, there is a social stratum whose way of life dates back to the Revoluionary War...
...A case could certainly be made for the destruction of the small town qualities by the influence of the city, even while the space and the trees and the fine mountain air remain...
...A young woman of Grafton summed up the negative aspects of this intensely personal community life: "Sure, people just stop by for coffee...
...The Natives were victorious in the struggle against the Outsiders...
...And sometimes I close the door when I see someone coming down the road...
...Paradoxically, Grafton is noted in nearby towns for its communinty spirit...
...There has been, for example, no attempt to bring an industry to Grafton...
Vol. 4 • July 1957 • No. 3
