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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."