American Towns Were Isolated Like African Villages: Movement Barriers
Terrible roads, cars and traffic and trains with no privacy and comfort discouraged travel between American towns and cities.
It’s February 18, 1910 in Balltown, Iowa. A young man named John wants to take a gorgeous woman out on a date.
A nice dinner would be a great idea, he thinks, but their family, neighbors and local town folk would recognize the couple anywhere they ate. If locals see John and his date, they’ll spread rumors, so he thinks Des Moines will be a good escape.
So he takes his dad’s Model T to pick up his date. According to one account, here is what John would do to start the car:
He climbs in by the right-hand door (for there is no left-hand door by the front seat), reaches over to the wheel, and sets the spark and throttle levers in a position like that of the hands of a clock at ten minutes to three. Then, unless he has paid extra for a self-starter, he gets out to crank. Seizing the crank in this right hand carefully ( for a friend of his once broke his arm cranking), he slips his left forefinger though a loop of wire that controls the choke. He pulls the loop of wire, he revolves the crank mightily, and as the engine at last roars, he leaps to the trembling running-board, leans in, and moves the spark and throttle to twenty-five minutes of two. Perhaps he reaches the throttle before the engine falters into silence, but if it is a cold morning perhaps he does not. In that case, back to the crank again and the loop of wire.
All this to get the car engine going!
Finally he is at the wheel with the engine roaring as it should. He releases the engine break, shoves his left foot against the low-speed pedal, and as the car sweeps loudly out into the street, he releases his left foot, lets the car into high gear, and is off. Now his only care is for that long hill down the street; yesterday he burned his brake on it, and this morning he must remember to brake with the reverse pedal, or the low-speed pedal, or both, or all three in alternation. (Jam your foot down on any of the three pedals and you slow down the car.)
A laborious undertaking.
Driving on unpaved roads, he moves at 20 miles an hour (state speed limit). Because there’s no superhighway, he drives through local towns and sits through traffic.
Also, his car is not closed. Don’t forget this is February in Iowa. He has to bear freezing temperatures!
John could take the train, but he won’t have such a great experience on that either. Railroad cars were “crowded, grimy, exuberant, banana-smelling,” according to one study of towns in the 1920s.
In Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street, which satirizes small town life, the narrator vividly describes the trip the protagonist takes between a city (in the novel, it is Minneapolis) and a small town. It’s obviously exaggerated, but by the nature of being a satire, it holds truth.
It is September, hot, very dusty. There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns, but the aisle is of bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually tired wives and children who seem all to be of the same age; workmen going to new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined shoes. They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled with grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust into the aisle.
An early-wrinkled, young-old mother, moving as though her joints were dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair of slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin cup, a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed her into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds to a baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs drop on the red plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush.
No privacy and no comfort. Not really the best atmosphere for a date.
A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on the floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts in relief, and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in front of him. An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle’s, and whose hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen, with bands of pink skull apparent between the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it, peers in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily picks it up and opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program, scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely indignant parrakeet in a cage.
Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner’s family, are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays Marching through Georgia till every head in the car begins to ache. The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops. A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter, who grunts, “Ouch! Look out!” The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in garage overalls. The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.
In this period, a 15 mile trip on these trains was considered a “great event.” No man would have fucking taken their date on a train or a car. He’d have to figure something else out for a date, and it’d have to be in his small town.
RELATED: Travel Is Supposed to Be Torture
John, like everyone else, was restricted in how far he could travel. Terrible roads, cars and traffic and trains with no privacy and comfort discouraged trips in and out of small towns, physically isolating them from other U.S. towns and cities.
PART II: The Local Sounds