(5 of 6)
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.