PROVINCIALISM IS DEAD. LONG LIVE REGIONALISM!

SITTING contentedly on the banks of the Illinois River in the very heartland of America, Peoria has for years been the butt of jokes, the gagman's tag for Nowheresville. "How come you got married?" "Well, I was booked into Peoria and it was raining." Today that humor is as stale as the idea of Peoria as a backwater of national life. The Peoria of 1966 welcomes more foreign visitors than just about any other U.S. city of its size (pop. 133,000), and sends its citizens abroad to range the world. The bartender at the Pere Marquette Hotel routinely makes change for pounds, francs or marks proffered by the growing number of international customers of Peoria's thriving Caterpillar Tractor Co., the U.S.'s single biggest exporter of machinery. Peorians attend the new $1,000,000 arts and science center at 21 times the rate for the average U.S. cultural facility. The city has modernized 50% of its downtown area at a cost of $50 million and has sent architects and civic leaders abroad to study European parks with an eye to transforming Peoria into an "open-space city."

In the superior view of New York--or even of Chicago, St. Louis or San Francisco--Peoria was so long the butt of jokes because it seemed to embody that gibing epithet--provincial. The word was both an accusation and an insult, for everyone with a dictionary knew that it means "narrow, limited, insular, unsophisticated" and denotes "exclusive or overwhelming devotion to one's province." The description hardly fits modern Peoria--nor does it apply to the vast areas of the U.S. that once fell under its indictment. The cities and towns of America still maintain the pride of place that has always distinguished them, but it is a pride seen in the context of the larger world rather than the old narrowness that stifled exploration and snapped minds shut.

Provincialism is, of course, an attitude--and attitudes are relative. A man can be provincial in the biggest city or cosmopolitan in the smallest. But provincialism in the old pejorative sense--blindness and insensitivity to all beyond a narrow purview--is practically disappearing before the realities of modern U.S. life. It is hard to be narrow when TV shows yesterday's battles in Viet Nam, when one out of five Americans moves each year, when the small-towner can often afford the same cars for his garage or the same clothes for his wife (Norells or Balenciagas) as the old-rich East, when Ohioans or Kansans or Oklahomans routinely take a winter vacation in the Bahamas or cruise the Greek islands in summer.

Main Street & the World

The modern American is a light-year removed from the provincial prototypes who gave the nation one of its richest lodes of comedy and satire. The hayseeds--a word as quaint as Gotham--can no longer be sold the radiator in their hotel rooms. Dodsworth would probably call his p.r. man to get tickets for a hit show, and Eugene Gant, far from being intimidated by the problem of white flannels, would have his Dacron boxer shorts laundered by the staff of the Americana Hotel. Sinclair Lewis' The Man Who Knew Coolidge would be hospitalized for logorrhea long before his train reached Bumpkinsville. The provincialism of Gopher Prairie and booster clubs, of Mencken's "booboisie" and Lewis' Babbittry, which believed that the outside world began at the end of Main Street and thought of Dante as "that Dago poet," is as dead as the America of button shoes and chicken every Sunday.

Its passing was smoothed by the fact that, even at its worst, U.S. provincialism always contained an element of pride that its classical European prototype never had. In Europe the provinces were provinces by virtue of conquest or because a single city--be it Paris, Rome or London--so dominated an entire nation that the outlanders were automatically relegated to inferior status. The U.S. was founded by a bunch of provincials--and triumphant ones at that.

But when it came to forming a national compact, none of the 13 colonies felt themselves provinces within the new nation. Each state joined the union as an act of consent, not of compulsion, and each, as the tide of nationhood moved westward, came to think of itself as more self-reliant than its brothers to the East.

From East to West, West to East, the U.S. of today is knit together in an increasingly common culture that leaves plenty of room for individualism but little for the old separateness. In his Travels with Charley, an account of a trip around the entire continental U.S., John Steinbeck observed: "From start to finish, I found no strangers." Says Historian Daniel J. Boorstin: "Much of what people call provincialism is really a way of attacking this country for not being like Europe, or the Midwest for not being like New York. As a consequence of modern technology and higher standards of living, there has been an attenuation, a thinning out, of the American contrasts between experiences. This makes the idea of provincialism obsolete."

The most conspicuous manifestation of the waning of provincialism and the birth of a new sophistication is what has been called the cultural explosion. Culture used to be thought of as almost the exclusive property of the Eastern Seaboard, which occasionally cast a few blessed raindrops over the cultural desert to the West. Today there is scarcely a city worthy of the name that does not have its own thriving cultural life. Chicago, for example, recently accepted the design for a massive sculpture by Pablo Picasso as the frontispiece for the new city center--a work that even the most hip of critics has had two thoughts about. Some of the most enterprising U.S. opera companies, who have scooped the Met time and again in importing distinguished foreign stars from Callas to Caballe, are in Dallas, Chicago and San Francisco. The Louisville Orchestra has recorded more works by modern U.S. composers than any other orchestra. The town of Columbus, Ind. (pop. 27,500), has a church and bank designed by Eero Saarinen, a school by San Francisco's John Carl Warnecke and a town library being designed by New York's I. M. Pei. And Saarinen's most spectacular building, the John Deere headquarters, stands on a wide sweep of lawns in Moline, Ill.

A major factor in the decline of provincialism is the great postwar population growth and its impact on education. Ivy League colleges, which once comfortably filled their rosters with native sons and sons of native sons, now take a large proportion of their students from across the U.S. Conversely, the new competitive scramble for places has driven many Easterners to colleges their parents had never heard of. There has also been a concurrent upgrading of university standards across the country. Stanford and Chicago, Antioch and Duke are the second choice of many an Ivy Leaguer's son. And Westerners' hearts swelled with pride when, in a recent survey of graduate-school faculties, the University of California at Berkeley was rated the "best balanced" in the country, edging out Harvard.

A Matter of Self-interest

Perhaps most influential in giving more Americans exposure to each other is the increasingly nationwide (and international) character of business. In Atlanta, 410 of the U.S.'s 500 largest corporations have branch offices. The local manager, and many employees, of a big-company branch in practically any city may come from Ohio or Oregon, have just finished a five-year tour in New York or have just returned from a refresher course at the head office in Chicago or--more frequently--a spin around the company's foreign plants. Though a Seattle citizen still prides himself on his knowledge of when and where the steelheads are striking, his horizons have been much widened by the success of the Boeing Co., the city's chief industry. Nowadays, as a simple matter of self-interest, he is usually impelled to consider Saudi Arabia's search for new aircraft, how the Russians are doing with their SST or the state of the Japanese economy.

In the professions, too, most of the U.S. can no longer be remotely considered provincial. The most celebrated heart surgeon in the country works in Texas, the best-known endocrinologist in Minneapolis. Dr. Jonas Salk came from New York City and now works in San Diego, and the nation's most famous psychiatric center is in Topeka. Of the nine members of the Supreme Court, at the pinnacle of the profession of law, only one could be considered a product of the Eastern Establishment.

Even in fashions and fads, the rest of the country no longer waits on the East's lead. One reason: the real trend leaders in today's U.S. are the youth, who tend to break down old geographical barriers in spreading their enthusiasms. The discotheque, the no-bra bra and surfing went from West to East, and one of the biggest sounds in rock 'n' roll is Motown, out of Detroit. There were bikinis on Los Angeles beaches long before they appeared at Southampton, and slacks were common on La Cienega Boulevard years before they became the young matron's routine Saturday-morning garb on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Still, how well a city is doing in many fields is often measured against New York, which is really the commercial and cultural marketplace of the U.S. For better or worse, any artist anywhere has to meet the criteria of New York before he can claim real stature. Touring shows draw small audiences in the hinterlands without the benison of Broadway approval, regional writers do not achieve status until they have run the gamut of Manhattan's cold-eyed critics. In men's suits or women's dresses, in movies, plays, antiques, art or restaurants, the New Yorker knows that he is making a judicious selection among the best that is available.

After all, though, the vast majority of these tastemakers are themselves from other parts of the U.S. and came to New York with the express or subconscious intention of telling the stay-at-homes what provincials they are. Today the stay-at-homes are talking back, and with ever increasing self-confidence. They have seen New York--and probably Paris and London as well. Money, travel and material possessions do not, of course, automatically make them cosmopolitan--as all too many U.S. tourists in Europe have proved--but it at least gives them a base on which to build a greater awareness.

Contributing to the declining awe of New York is the inexorable rise of California, and particularly Los Angeles. California is currently the center of the think tanks and aerospace, and its educational system is probably the most enlightened in the U.S. If its art galleries, museums and theaters cannot yet challenge Manhattan's in resources or variety, every Californian is confident that it is only a question of time. California, its citizens feel, is where the action is. The result is a sense of revision in the heartland's image of itself. Where it once envisioned a constantly downward slope from the pinnacle represented by the East Coast and New York, it now sees an opposing standard on the other coast to which it can repair or, anyway, look.

The National Stream

All this does not mean that provincialism has vanished from the land. Today's provincial may be someone who is not "with it" or not "cool" enough--or a local yokel with bizarre ideas that reside lobe-by-lobe with his business acumen. To the cosmopolitan eye, for example, there remains something invincibly provincial about an otherwise levelheaded Midwestern businessman dressed up in an outlandish costume for Omaha's Ak-Sar-Ben ball or St. Louis' Court of the Veiled Prophet (a good many St. Louisians are also amused). Or about a Texan who will sit absentmindedly through the national anthem but instantly leap to his feet (and reverently take off his Stetson) at the first bars of The Eyes of Texas. And sad to say, many of the U.S.'s total of symphony orchestras (1,400) have seasons of only a few weeks and can scarcely be considered professional in any exacting sense. As an area, the South has been the slowest to emerge from provincialism, largely because of a reflex from the Negro's determined drive for his rights. But even the South is changing and, however reluctantly, being forced into the national stream. Says Novelist Shirley Ann Grau, who lives in New Orleans: "The society that produced Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell is dead. The Snopeses are disappearing. There is no longer that much difference between the people of the South and the rest of the country."

Deep-Lodged Diversity

Does this mean that regional differences are disappearing, that the U.S. is in danger of becoming a blandly homogenized culture? The waning of provincialism has certainly been accompanied by a move toward a more national culture. Styles in clothing, recreation and music quickly achieve national and even worldwide exposure. In domestic architecture, scarcely a vestige of local style remains. What does remain, however, is a deep-lodged regional diversity. Practically every part of the country has its own distinctive values, habits, sights, peccadilloes and prides.

The East, looking toward Europe, still wears the crown of cultural and financial dominance--and its generally faster and more formal pace of life is a form of self-congratulation. In the West, whose population has largely been built by those escaping from somewhere else, the manner is informal, the life more elemental, the thrust toward satisfaction even before material success. The South, complacent in its own subculture, is more like a foreign country than any other part of the U.S.; its hog jowls and black-eyed peas, its gas-station attendants who say, "Y'all come back, y'heah," and its black-white tensions always come as something of a shock to the tourist from another part. The Northwest almost defiantly prides itself on being provincial, by which it means that its men are hardier, its values more down to earth, its women better homemakers than in the more effete parts of the nation. With its timeless scenery and open spaces, the Southwest looks to Mexico for its architecture and its inspiration, and its pace is that of the tortoise rather than the hare. The heart of the U.S.--or, more properly, the kernel--is the vast stretch of the Midwest, where one must really go to discover the soil from which spring the typical American characteristics.

Every region, for all its differences, shares a pride in local accomplishment: pride in a football team that has made it nationally, in a mayor who has stood up to hostile questioners in Washington, in the natural beauties that practically every U.S. region can boast, in a local author who, like William Faulkner in the South, has been acclaimed not only by U.S. but by European critics. It is this proper pride in a region's own particularity that has given a new dimension to what used to be called provincialism. In the day when what a local area had was all it had--and all it wanted--pride was often a barrier to the outside world. Now that prosperity and communications and travel have opened eyes on the nation and the wide world, what once tended to bolster provincialism has become a welcome local diversity, neither unsophisticated nor imitative.

The real provincialism in the U.S. is no longer a matter of geography. It is a provincialism that feeds on lack of education or opportunity, a provincialism of the mind that is expressed in bigotry, misunderstanding or lack of social consciousness. Frequently, it is a matter of class, for the poor in their ghettos are forced to remain provincial in the worst sense of the word. But poverty is not the only determining factor: people who resist the experience of change and advance also qualify as provincial, whether they live on Manhattan's East Side or in Kokomo, Ind. For the most part, those who dwell in the great cities and small towns of the U.S. heartland have lost the sense of separateness and inferiority that once made them close their doors to the outside. They have, in fact, been so transformed by the forward rush of U.S. life that they are willing to discover and accept the whole world as their province.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.