Harold Rosenberg
ROADSIDE ARCADIA
The small town is the stage set of The American Dream.
Even for the city-born the good life waits in a community with a village
look. There the success drama (enacted elsewhere) reaches its fairy tale
epilogue, in which the hero wins place and recognition in the bosom
of The Folks.
Fantasy of a nation of immigrants and wanderers, the dream small
town has not weakened its hold in the steady movement of population
from the countryside to the cities and suburbs during the past twenty
years. On the contrary, the more people quit the rural setting, and the
more the small town itself sheds its original character, the brighter
glows the imaginary treasure left behind on the porch. I do not hesi–
tate to link with the increasing depletion of the small town America's
new fear of white-collar masses, organization men, consumption-dazed
housewives nudged by hidden persuaders, social-climbing children over–
sensitive to the cues of taste leaders. With the country virtues fading,
what but machines will human beings turn into? The Orgamerican Fan–
tasy is the recoil into nightmare of The American Dream, with its idyll
of neighborliness, naturalness, individuality and face-to-face dealing. An
Arcadia of solid folks and an apocalypse of robotism are the poles of
the contemporary American social imagination.
America's small-town craving is both prophetic and pathological.
Through it the United States undergoes in advance of other countries
the longings, regrets and despairs of an epoch of transformation in which
peoples everywhere have begun to break apart and enter into motion.
Cleansed of the evils of historical communities, the village of The Amer–
ican Dream preserves the warm heart and extended hand of pioneer
caravans and of settlements on the edge of the world. As a social ideal
it is a model of generous moods and relations which the future must
copy: in it classes and rank have vanished, manners are plain and
direct, sociability and hospitality are taken for granted, contribution
to the common good is the only measure. The order of the small town
