Babbitt Who? The Decline of Small-Town America

Abstract

towns of our cultural imagination are now the schmaltzy vision of Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A., and the parody of The Simpson's Springfield. Small towns hardly register anymore. Even Babbitt, once the symbol of all that was malignant in small-town America, is largely forgotten, his name no longer a sign of anything to most people. Actual small towns, of course, are in dire straits. As Richard O. Davies states in Main Street Blues: The Decline of SmallTown America, America, with its dominant urban culture, has now passed them by, relegating them to the cruel obscurity that comes from being abandoned by a railroad or left off the federal interstate highway map (p. 1). The casual visitor to most of these towns will note this decay immediately. Central business districts are devastated, shopfronts are boarded up, and both streets and once elegant houses are in advanced states of disrepair. It is those features not automatically apparent to casual visitors that constitute the real tragedy of modern small-town life. Populated primarily by the elderly and by families attracted by the cheap rents, towns of less than 10,000 have larger concentrations of the poor, on a percentage basis, than cities do. Health care is generally inadequate, and both underfunded schools and social services are severely taxed, while domestic abuse, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy are on the rise. Richard Davies grew up in one of these towns, Camden, Ohio. Today Camden is caught up in a slow but sure downward spiral, from which there is no escape. The town will not die, but neither will it flourish. A mood of quiet resignation seems to hover over the small valley in which it is located (p. 2). But during Davies' youth, Camden was a very different place,