PHONY REGIONALISM
Hesseltine, William B.
Phony Regionalism A Profile Of 2 States PINE, STREAM AND PRAIRIE. Wisconsin and Minnesota in Profile. By James Gray. A. A. Knopf. $3.50. Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine FOR the past decade...
...Aside from the fact that the author has attempted neither analysis nor synthesis, the volume suffers from 2 major defects...
...A college president sweeps isolationism away . . . A leader . . . repudiates the philosophy of 'America first...
...Sociologists, historians, political scientists, philologists, geographers, and journalists have rushed into print with regional studies, and a host of minor writers who would have been dismissed as local color artists a generation ago have been ballyhooed into national fame as new-style regionalists...
...Such global gobbledegook helps prevent this book from being either an adequate or an accurate "profile" of this part of the American scene...
...Minnesota and Wisconsin do not constitute a unit in the American scene...
...PERHAPS the book would have jumped this hurdle more convincingly if it had not been for its second major defect—an obsession with the world scene rather than the American scene...
...There are sections, more superficial than inaccurate, on the Washburnes, Ignatius Donnelly...
...But throughout the tone is superficial, and there is no attempt at analysis or critical appraisal...
...In the first place, the mere contiguity of two political units called states does not make a region...
...Minneapolis looks down the Mississippi, but Wisconsin, turning its back upon the Father of Waters, faces Lake Michigan...
...It gives in sketchy "profile"—but never full-face—an appreciation of the scenery, of the varied racial groups, of the historic lumbering and milling industries, of the fishing activities, of the educational facilities, and of the intellectual and cultural aspects of the 2 states...
...John R. Commons, Veblen, Turner, Babcock, E. E. Stoll...
...continued with a Lakes series, a Harbor series, a Mountain series —and probably a fish-pond series, a mud-puddle series, and a sink-hole series...
...Pine, Stream and Prairie purports to survey the "region" of Wisconsin and Minnesota...
...Pine and stream they may have in common, but the prairie of Minnesota falls into a different region...
...The natives won't recognize it, and the tourists can get more useful information from the girl at the filling station...
...Some of them are indescribably bad—journalistic rewrites of Chamber of Commerce handouts and feature-story stuff for the Sunday supplements...
...There is a chapter on Frank Lloyd Wright, and a few pages on the Lunts...
...One publisher has an '.'American Scene" series...
...It began with a "Rivers of America" series (which contained some good books until it expanded to include every wet weather freshet with an amateur writer on its banks) and...
...The generalizations are more distinguished for their literary quality than for their factual basis...
...And every major publishing house in the land has sponsored a regional series...
...The book, in placing its major emphasis on Minnesota, demonstrates the futility of trying to effect a literary welding of 2 largely different states...
...The mingled miners of the Mesabe range know "what it is like to be free" and understand their importance to the United Nations...
...Blueprint for world cooperation...
...Some, like Howard's Montana, High, Wide, and Handsome, are products of deep understanding and keen analysis...
...There is no escaping the evidence...
...As might be expected, the regional books vary in quality...
...A public man [Stassen] . . . rejects isolationism...
...and "Old Bob" La Follette...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine FOR the past decade regionalism has been a leading literary fad...
...Some, like the first-rate sociological studies from the University of North Carolina, are based on careful scholarship...
...to wipe out arrogant international gangsterism...
...The most recent regional book falls into the latter class...
...The Finnish lumberjacks put most of their wages into War Bonds...
...Odum may have begun it, or he may have just exploited it, but, at any rate, ever since the New Deal started damming—and the power companies started damning—the Tennessee, the reading public has been subjected to a barrage of "regional" books...
...Most of them, however, are mediocre compilations of local history and folklore —literate rethrashing of straw already garnered by the WPA Writers Project...
...another an "American Folkways" while some, devoid of imaginative names, just issue regional books...
...Instead of dealing with the realities of the region, the author repeatedly attempts to set Minnesota in its world relationships...
...Wherever one travels in Wisconsin and Minnesota," it says here, "one finds the same patient commitment to an exacting belief that out of this war must come a society," etc...
...Minneapolis flour mills pour their white powder into Lend-Lease and garb Siberian peasants in discarded flour sacks...
...The leaders . . . express . . . the people subscribe...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 20
