A Springfield, Illinois, statesman told me on the street with a look of horror in his eyes that “The New Nationalism is a dangerous thing—an exceedingly dangerous thing.” I did not turn pale. I must set myself down as an advocate of the New Nationalism. I am reconciled to what are considered its terrifying features by what this treatise endeavors to describe, The New Localism. The New Localism cannot be described in a paragraph. It is a matter that requires some considerable scrutiny.
The actual capitals of the United States are Chicago and New York. The Lard Men and some Lumber Men live in Chicago. Wall Street is in New York. In Washington is the formal government. The New Nationalism attempts to take Chicago and New York to Washington as it were, and subordinate them to that government. Meanwhile the government undergoes certain other changes in spirit to the betterment of mankind. Whatever happens, whether Chicago and New York be subordinated or not, we shall still be ruled from one or three points away from home. To shake the head at the phrase, “New Nationalism” will not decentralize us.
The most provincial town in the United States, (except on the Blue Ridge), has more luxuries in it that come from Chicago or New York than from its own ingenuity. For instance, I had a gay little excursion to the Sunday-school picnic at the infinitesimal town of Liberty, Adams County, Illinois, not long ago. If there is a place remote, it is Liberty. To get there, I had to travel in a livery rig, twenty miles. Yet the hamlet had the same books, magazines, Sunday-school lesson leaves, wall paper, window-curtains, carpets and the like that could be found on any English-speaking street in Chicago. The mail-order house reigned supreme. There were Chicago newspapers among the bushes and wrapped around the sandwich baskets. And the woods were choked with automobiles, hundreds and hundreds of them. There were about twenty or thirty times as many people at the picnic as ever lived at Liberty at any one time.
The fact that Liberty has held this enormous reunion of the old members of its three tiny churches for fifty years with the devout folk returning from Texas and Canada, is a sign of healthy, passionate provincialism. But all other things indicated that “exceedingly dangerous thing,” Nationalism. In the apparatus of their life they had conveniences in common, and a common outlook with the people all over the country. Like all the rest of us, such people are governed from the two or three great centers.
People like the picnickers of Liberty will not be alarmed to see Washington made the capital. It is inevitable in time, and they will not be fighting it. The reasonable way to amend Nationalism is not to yell against it, but to find the balancing force. The spirit that keeps up the Liberty picnic for fifty years is that force. Let us examine that spirit in its various costumes.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, “The New Localism: An Illustrated Essay for Village Statesmen,” Vision: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetic Appreciation of Life 4 (April 1912), pg. 3.
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