A Sentimental Journey

...In fairness, Lingeman does include a chapter on "Caste and Class in the American Town," but it draws largely on the stale sociology of community studies (Middletown and the like), with hardly a nod toward political history...

...For Lingeman, like so many Americans, is a displaced villager doomed to wander in the urban wilderness...

...ditto the important and heartbreaking farm labor struggles in the South and Far West...

...But probably the bustling townspeople in their factory-made clothes were too busy to listen to his maunderings...

...As a youth he forsook the Babbittry of Main Street (in his case, Crawfordsville, Indiana) for the Babel of Manhattan, and more than anything else, this book seems to reflect the pain of his voluntary exile, an anguish rooted in loss of community and heightened by a knowledge that "you can't go home again...

...Such ethnic tributaries, with their separate but unequal currents, flow outside Lingeman's mainstream mystique...

...Here he is, for example, waxing nostalgic about the frontier even before it was tamed: "Gone too was the wildlife that once had roamed the land, the bears, the wolves, deer, elk and wild turkeys and the rattlesnakes too, probably exterminated by the hundreds in mass hunts...

...For the places Richard Lingeman so lovingly limns are essentially the same unchanging elm-shaded villages memorialized by Thornton Wilder in Our Town and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, two of the many writers he copiously quotes...

...So, among other things we learn that in 1827 the trustees of Greenville, Ohio, appointed three school directors, "no two of whom by reasons of feuds and ill-feeling would speak to each other...

...Well, now that we have worked through our ambivalence, perhaps we can leave the attic and get back to the ground floor, where the problems persist...

...He gives us some dates and some data, but mostly he gives us Zeitgeist, a record of what it must have felt like to live in those towns, both the early frontier settlements and the later, more settled communities...

...Lingeman gives the impression of telling everything-why the Puritans clustered around town squares, how sod huts were built in Nebraska, what William Allen White said about his beloved Emporia-but after a time we begin to fear he will explain nothing...

...A good deal of his intellectual energy, then, is directed backwards, toward recollection and recovery and away from discovery or reform...

...The omissions loom particularly large to anyone seeking to understand rural America's history in a context that is neither entirely white nor exclusively middle class...

...For what Lingeman has fashioned out of the dust and detritus of towns past is a remarkable interior chronology...

...There were other changes too, marked now only by some grizzled elder as he rambled on about how once the river had run high and fast, how the nights had been cool in summer because the great 'butts,' or trees, that blocked out the sun prevented the ground from soaking up heat...

...No longer did dark, rumbling clouds of passenger pigeons darken the sky for hours at a time...

...Given equally short shrift are the New Deal's rural innovations, courtesy of the Farm Security Administration: the attempts at land redistribution, the recognition of sharecroppers as entitled citizens, and the rudimentary "health maintenance organizations" that took root in more than 3,000 rural communities...

...What he lavishes attention on instead is the Midwest village, that romantic repository of so many faded dreams...

...materialistic, insular, suspicious, set in its ways, canny, backbiting, smothering...

...There is no room in this otherwise ample work for, say, Wattensburg, Colorado, a Chicano village 50 miles north of Denver where the citizens have spent half a century unsuccessfully lobbying the county for paved streets...

...The cooperative movement, a radical rural invention, is barely mentioned...

...In a moving but discouraging peroration, Lingeman spells it out, alluding to "The town in our hearts...: good, generous, kind, helpful in trouble, cradle to grave...

...Lingeman finds a great deal in our attic to rummage through, but for all his discoveries the effort finally seems an exercise in nostalgia-millions of fascinating faded postcards piled to the rafters...

...Still, the virtues of this book are conspicuous, even gaudy...

...One guesses this talented writer is searching for another kind of Edennot the aboriginal paradise of a sky darkened by pigeons but the bright garden of his own childhood...

...What is he up to anyway...

...and that the "false-front" store commonly found in pioneer West em towns, with its fake second story, "was a Potemkin-village device designed to present the illusion of an eastern main street with its rows of two- and three-story blocks...

...Most writers give their game away in introductions replete with theme music...

...nor for Eatonville, Florida, the all-black "folk hamlet "that inspired Zora Neale Hurston's brilliant ethnography, Mules and Men...

...stored like a faded postcard in the attic of American memory...

...that some of the rural roads back then were so bad that certain luckless horses were rumored to have drowned in the rain-filled "potholes...

...but Lingeman plunges right in without preliminaries, instantly introducing us to "The [Colonial] New England town...

...Reviewed by Richard J. Margolis We have before us a wonderful failure of a book, a beautifully crafted history of rural America that should win a Pulitzer for what it includes as well as the rural equivalent of a Bronx cheer for what it omits...

...Much of this is interesting and some of it is not...