America began as a collection of villages and towns, of tribes, settlers, colonists, and later, citizens. We had no indispensable great city, no Rome or London, on which all depended.
We still don’t. Yet, we have changed, so very much, and America is no longer a collection of small, rural towns. When we refer to small-town America, we refer to something now the exception. We’ve become a nation of big cities and suburbs, with rural America more a matter of geography than population.
I live in Whitewater, Wisconsin, a small town of fourteen thousand in southeastern Wisconsin. You may have stumbled on this website one way or another, and are curious about life here.
It may not be what you think. When people ask me about small town America, I often ask them in reply: What do think rural America’s like?
I find people from suburbs or big cities often have two ideas about life in a small, Midwestern town: that there’s a lack of cultural offerings, and that everyone is like something out of Mayberry RFD, happy, honest, and homespun.
Neither’s true. We may lack the prominent museums of major cities, but easy travel and an easier Internet brings art and theater and music to an entire continent, of which we’re no less a part. We’re home to a college campus of the University of Wisconsin system, and we have the benefits of music and theater there.
We’re also a more prickly, difficult, and uncertain place than a Hollywood depiction or local marketing campaign would suggest.
There’s a scarcely noticed irony in Whitewater, a town that proudly describes itself as an exceptional community: the more we insist on our exceptionalism, the farther we fall from what is truly exceptional about small town America, and all America. The insistence on looking good, and insisting that all is good, makes neither truly possible.
Rural America – like all America – was built on genuine principles that required neither embellishment nor insistence. Somewhere along the way, Whitewater (and other towns, surely) lost confidence in the embrace of fundamental American principles of individualism, openness, and accountability.
Beneath the empty cheerleading and shrill insistence that all is well, wonderful, and exceptional, there’s a real town – sadder, harder, less confident, and more troubled.
Yet, more beautiful, too, than any saccharine account. Our town is better, and can be far better still, when we face the truth of our condition. The solutions to the problems of rural America are not hard to find – they’re right before us – in an abandonment of the slogans and gimmicks, and in a return to initiative, enterprise, and integrity.
Over the next month, I’ll describe some of the places and people of our town, looking behind the superficial, to tell you more about what Whitewater, Wisconsin’s truly like.