New Brighton, a small town in New England was pretty much like Thornton Wilder's fictional Grover's Corners. Everything was in its place, settled, and secure. Much had changed since Wilder's time but New Brighton still was a model town where you could raise children, walk downtown, and join your neighbors at church suppers.
Of course there were outliers - Norma Carlson gassed herself with the exhaust of her old Plymouth, Zoe and Edna were lovers, and Doc Hansen got himself entangled in a love affair he never should have begun; but all in all people were content and happy. The town had negotiated the Sixties without too many young people going off the rails, survived civil rights (easy enough because there were no black people in New Brighton), feminism, and made it through the Vietnam War with valor and courage.
Sinclair Lewis pilloried towns like New Brighton in his 1922 novel, Babbitt - towns of patriotism, boosterism 'and every other 'ism' a narrowminded burg like Zenith could muster'. Lewis had no patience for the joviality, Rotary Club camaraderie, and faux jubilee of a town full of itself and men like Babbitt who thought it was the greatest place in the world.
Lewis was kinder in Main Street where a young woman from the big city tries to reform the prairie town of Gopher Prairie but falls afoul of its parochialism, righteousness, and defiant cultural emptiness. She leaves her husband, goes back to the big city, realizes the presumptuous of her ways, and returns to husband, son, and home.
In Dodsworth, Lewis takes on the American bourgeois woman of means who thinks only of joining the swells of Europe before her youth has gone, and of living the life to which she feels entitled. She is a caricature of wealthy disillusionment, of women who can never be satisfied, who haven't the intelligence or insight to appreciate the emerging, unique, commercial culture of America.
Her husband is a Babbitt - a booster of Zenith, a successful businessman with a faith in America and embodying the very spirit that enabled it to grow and prosper - but he is not a pompous fool. He is a good man without pretention, and he suffers at the hands of his vacuous wife.
Small town America has always been the subject of abject ridicule, a dismissive slight without foundation. Small town America was the heart and soul of the new republic - honest, hardworking, entrepreneurial, religious, and patriotic, the very values cited by Jefferson. Yet, as cities grew and along with growth and prosperity came art, literature, and a sophisticated cafe life - a natural home for an indifference to simpler, more foundational values.
At the time of this story, New Brighton like many other small towns in America, found itself squeezed by the big cities nearby - not in terms of land development or radical urban transformation, but culture. Young people in New Brighton wanted big city life while their parents wanted to to conserve the past, to preserve those very American values which were the foundation of America.
Yet the allure of the big city did not just attract the young, it infected everyone. The confines of a small town - inhibiting, cloistering, infantilizing - were seen clearly for the first time, and the town began to change from within.
Sexual propriety, once received wisdom in the town, became a thing of derision, and before long Emma Baker, longtime dutiful wife of the town pharmacist began to take indiscriminate lovers. Harvey Small, the town optometrist punched his ticket every Friday evening for a weekend with Fannie Mae Barker, formerly of New Orleans, now residing, thanks to Harvey, in a small condo on the Upper East Side. Sister Mary Joseph shed her habit, her faith, and her virginity and was the talk of the town.
Civic propriety - obeying the laws, regulations, and stipulations of society - which had long been the cornerstone of New Brighton rectitude - eroded, and the town became a mini-epicenter for money laundering and bank fraud. Harrison Plummer was as canny and deceptive as Enron's Jeffrey Skilling, and used his small independent bank as the fulcrum for much larger doings.
Yet the town somehow maintained its Grover's Corners image. On the surface it was still a model of rectitude, faith, and neighborliness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables wrote of the indelible influence of the past, and almost mystical presence of family and town history which influenced the present; and so it seemed with New Brighton. The worst offenders, those who represented the polar opposite of what the town was a hundred years ago, were still intent on showing the town as it should be. An article in the New York Times as part of a five-part series on small town America, limned the praises of New Brighton:
The smell of freshly baking bread, the cheery welcomes, the friendly, efficient, respectful service at clothiers, barbers, diners, and banks all were signs of a very American spirit that has always been at the heart of the republic. Up and down Main Street, the town displays its pride, its patriotism, and its faith
The greatest boondoggle ever, said most residents who read the article, a masterful charade, a marvelous bit of tomfoolery. New Brighton was indeed an American town, but not that limned by the Times reporter. It had become simply a mini-version of American bourgeois society - rapacious, sexually indifferent, indecent, amoral, and ambitious - and, best of all, had perfected the art of deception. Image was everything. There was enough of a centripetal social consciousness in the town for everyone to hew to its old ethical and moral center.
The residents of New Brighton knew their Bible well. God created Man but soon after the Creation found him wanting, and so sent the flood to destroy all but a select few. Noah and his family would repopulate the world with goodness.
When that did not work, and Noah's descendants turned out to be just as vile, faithless, and immoral as those before him, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in a fiery blaze, a message to the world that order and faith would return or else.
That too failed, the lesson was not heeded, so God sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to earth, to die on the cross for the redemption of all sins and to promise salvation for all who followed him, and that - as the residents of New Brighton and the rest of the world saw - didn't work either.
There are still churches everywhere - a good, Hollywood display of divine mercy and salvation - but they stand alone amidst all the seedy goings-on around them. Image is everything.
New England has never been home to religious revivals, but if it had been, fire and brimstone preachers would have taken to the pulpit to call out the moral degradation of the town and the hypocritical show of good behavior.
As it is, New Brighton remains your typical American town - butcher, baker, candlestick maker up front; Sodom and Gomorrah behind; and a Hollywood happy ending to all.
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