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