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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.