There was a time when most Americans assumed that the early American settlers were Winners. Early American history tended to be portrayed in heroic terms. The early settlers were adventurers, pioneers, scouts. They were courageous, forward-looking people who heard of the frontier, saw an opening, and raced toward it, fighting for religious freedom and for opportunity.
At about the time that I became socially aware, this image began to crumble, and a realization swept the culture that this was not accurate, or even reasonable. The people who came to America were not the Winners in the places they were before; they were the Losers. The poem on the statue of liberty has it about right: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Most of the people who came to America came here out of desperation, fleeing wretched conditions in other countries and escaping debts that they would never be able to repay and obligations they would never be able to meet—and yes, they were often successful in this country, but very often that success came after a generation or two generations of suffering and sacrifice.
Every sophisticated American knows that, now, and accepts that it is true—but there is a very similar misconception that still dominates American culture today, and which I would bet most of you accept because you have never been challenged to think about it. A hundred years ago more than 90% of Americans lived on farms or in small towns; now, we mostly live in cities or in suburbs. Who was it that left the small towns to go to the cities: the Winners, or the Losers?
Most people, because of bias toward the cities, assume that it was the Winners who left the small towns to find happiness in the big cities. One sees this not infrequently, reflected in social commentary and in political commentary, since America has now divided politically with the city people on one side and the more rural people on the other. It is the city people who write 99.9% of the political commentary. I remember Norman Mailer writing, and rather too often, about the bitterness of the small town losers who were left behind when the cool people moved to the towns.
Think about it rationally. One of the most critical factors driving the population from small towns to cities was: Mating. People who write about the urban migration write about it in economic terms, and tend to assume (and assert) that it was economic forces that drove the population from small towns to big cities. That played some role, yes—but almost all of the economic things that are done in big cities could perfectly well be done in a small town. I would bet that an equally large or larger cause of the urban migration was (and is, in the places where the urban migration is still occurring) that small towns don’t work particularly well in terms of mating.
We look for very specific things, in a mate; it’s a very narrow spectrum. The person we are looking for has to be of a certain age, of a certain look, of a certain background; we look for people who share our belief systems, our interests, our habits. We are a thousand times more demanding when we are trying to select a mate than when we are trying to select a bank or a grocery store.
This is an illustrative exaggeration, but just as a starting point. . .let’s take a town of 200 people. How many of them are young and single? Forty, fifty? Twenty or twenty-five of each gender? What are your chances of finding the person you are trying to find, in that population?
In my graduating class in high school, there were 18 people—13 of one gender, 5 of the other. How does that match up?
OK, that’s misleading for a series of reasons. I grew up in a town of 300 people. First, a town of 300 people isn’t really a town of 300 people; it’s 300 people in the town and 500 or a thousand people living on farms around the town. When you grow up in a small town, you know all of those people and all of their daughters. Second, eight miles from you in any direction is another small town. And third, men have ways of finding women, and women have ways of attracting men.
My father was born in 1907. When he was about 20 years old, he took a course that taught him how to shear sheep. Shearing a sheep is not something that any farmer can do; you have to know what you are doing, you have to have equipment, and you have to be physically strong enough to wrestle sheep for ten straight hours. For two or three years he would make periodic tours around the surrounding counties, shearing sheep for farmers, usually boarding with farm families while he worked with them. My father would never have said that he was travelling around looking for women, and would probably not have admitted it if you had asked him, but. ..what do you think?
My wife’s grandfather was about ten years older than that, born about 1897. He was a Lutheran of German descent. Her grandmother was also a Lutheran of German descent, but she lived in a different small town 50 miles away. We have letters that he wrote when he was courting her. It was very difficult for them to get together. There was no rail line that united the towns, the roads were just mud, really, and to say that the automobiles of that era broke down once in a while would be like saying that Mark Reynolds occasionally strikes out. If he tried to make a 100-mile round trip to see her, he WOULD have car trouble, almost beyond any question; he’d be stuck in the mud, or have a couple of flat tires, or be unable to get the thing started, or something.
We don’t know how these two met—but somehow, he found her; somehow, although she was very shy and never went anywhere except to church, she attracted him. People have ways of finding mates that extend the normal boundaries of their lives.
Still, having said that, a small town was not an ideal institution from the standpoint of finding a mate. In many ways, small towns were tremendously successful units. Comparing small town life a hundred years ago with urban life now, there were many very significant advantages to the former. In most ways small town people were much more tolerant and accepting that city folk; we’ll argue about that another time, but I was there and I know. In other ways they were less accepting, less tolerant. In terms of pressure, tension, fear of crime, security. ..no contest. In every possible way, small town people did a better job of caring for one another than we do today.
But there were a certain number of people in every generation. ….and I was one of those people, and Bob Dylan was one of those people, and Johnny Cash was one of those people, and Willie Nelson was one of those people . .who were just absolutely never going to find a suitable mate in the small town where they happened to be. Think about it: Who has trouble finding a mate in a small town? The banker’s son? The quarterback of the football team? The prettiest girl? The cheerleader? The nicest girl, or the nicest guy?
No, of course not; it was those of with dirt on the back of our necks who had to get the hell out of there to have any chance. OK, a few of us became Winners once we got out of there, but we certainly weren’t the Winners while we were there. Small towns have been driven to the brink of obsolescence not because the Winners left, but because, in every generation, 15 or 20% of the people had to get out of there to have any chance to find their Other Half. Every generation, 15 or 20% of the young people leave. . .it bleeds you dry, after a while. Economics follows yet harsher realities: a community has to work as a mating center, or it doesn’t work.