Main Street USA

When I was in the fourth grade, I went to Disneyworld for the first and only time. For the most part it was a pretty standard experience. Like all kids, I was both totally pumped and completely shit-scared on Splash Mountain, I was just as shit-scared on the It's a Small World ride for completely different reasons, and I somehow realized, even then, that the Epcot Center reflected a kind of techno-optimism that already seemed passe, even to a child in 1996.

But my first view of Disneyworld was Main Street USA. This isn't exactly a hallmark attraction, but it's what you see when you first come through the gate, and its equivalent, which I'd experienced much younger, is also what you see when you first come through the gate at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, where I had my formative funnel cake and log-ride experiences.

And maybe that's because the welcoming experience is designed to be a comforting, familiar Americana, reproduced at 3/5 scale. It is an imagined America of the sort that Ronald Reagan invoked in his speeches about the horse-and-buggy days in Dixon, Illinois. We want to believe that at some point in America, there was this transcendent and indivisible notion of community. Nowadays, we think of the 1950s. But when the first Disney park opened, in the actual 1950s, the time of nostalgia was the 1910s, a time when Main Streets were indeed more vital, when small towns were still served by the railroad. And even in the 1910s, in the era of Fords and suffragettes, nostalgists invoked some kind of vaguely Jeffersonian or Jacksonian ideal.

It's hard to escape this particular cultural delusion. Both left and right political currents continue to appeal to “Main Street,” despite the fact that this is by and large a hologram.

Sure, there was a Main Street in my hometown – the “Main Street Cultural District” as it was eventually re-branded. What was “cultural” about it I never quite figured out. What it actually is and was is a strip, a few blocks long, of largely characterless early 20^th Century buildings, occupied by an American Legion hall, full of shops selling things like quilting supplies and diabetic footwear, and a clutch of bars at one end under the shadow of a coal-burning power plant -- an area I remember from my childhood as a vaguely sinister but somehow thrilling strip smelling of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, filled with the sound of clacking billiard balls and the roar of trucks from the nearby lumberyard.

Maybe the people in the 1950s or 1910s thought differently. But even in the 1910s... that was when Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street, the landmark work about the hypocrisy and loneliness of life in a small Minnesota town, considered a classic, but increasingly little-read as that world becomes a memory of a memory.

Yet fewer books have had a greater impact on me. His store-by-store description of the Main Street of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota on a hot summer day, as experienced by the young doctor's wife, Carol Kennicott, of the rotten bananas in the shop-windows, the feckless locals at the saloon door, the rusticated masonry designed to provide a semblance of architectural manners. More than anything else, this seemed to be something that related to what I knew.

At that age, 15 or 16, I devoured books that seemed to get to that idea, reading nearly forgotten writers like Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe and Booth Tarkington – writers whose books I found on dusty library shelves and under cats at used bookstores. And I didn't just love them because they spoke to my experience, I loved them because they seemed to see through the veil in a way that contemporary writers didn't (and still by and large don't, but I'll leave that for another day).

We look to the Main Street iconography nowadays because of the spiritual poverty and hopelessness of the present, in the same way that people of Lewis' and Anderson's day looked to Main Street because it seemed to represent a purer America than the industrial cities. And more often than it ought to, it forms the backbone of a grotesque and reactionary politics.

So I decided to go back to where it all began – not in person, but through the all-seeing eye of Google Street View. And not to Disneyworld's Main Street USA, which is probably the same simulacrum it has always been and always will be, but to the basis for Main Street USA, Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri.

I knew what to expect. Few areas of America have been as thoroughly depopulated over the past 100 years as Northern Missouri, an area of soil too poor to compete with the rich black loam of Northern Iowa and Minnesota, and rangeland too constricted to compete with the plains of Kansas and Texas. Lacking in substantive industry, mineral resources other than a sulfurous coal only suited to steam engines, or towns of any size to serve as hubs, largely isolated from major transit routes, and without the mountains and lakes of the southern part of the state that attract droves of tourists, Northern Missouri, along with adjacent areas of Southern Iowa and Western Illinois, has become a dead zone.

What one sees in Marceline, Missouri, is a town, like many others, destroyed, with a vacated town square, American flags fluttering outside abandoned shops.

 

Meanwhile, in Anaheim and Orlando, and at the versions Disney has exported to its properties in the greener pastures of the Far East, it is still a place of parades and baton-twirlers, barbershop quartets and soda fountains. Somewhere in the distance, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" or "Daisy Bell" plays.

Most of the clientele has never seen a quartet sing in a barbershop, never been to a soda fountain, and the songs that are playing were hits before even their grandparents were born. But the nostalgia is not their nostalgia, it's the national nostalgia. And like most nostalgias, it acts as a cover for the fact that we have given up hope.