Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America. By Richard O. Davies. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. xiii, 236 pp. Cloth, $39.95, isbn 0-8142-0781-0. Paper, $20.00, isbn 0-8142-0782-0.)

The subtitle of this book suggests that the author reflects and interprets the decline of America's small communities, but Richard O. Davies approaches that focus by examining only one community, Camden, Ohio, a village forty miles north of Cincinnati. Why Camden was selected for intensive study is highly personal: the author was raised there. Camden was also the birthplace of Sherwood Anderson, as Davies points out, but the famous author lived there only one year, and his classic fictional work, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), was based on his recollections of Clyde, in northern Ohio. Nevertheless, there is a kind of thematic connection between Anderson's works and the Davies study, for both reflect the degeneration of small-town life. 1

As Davies asserts in his preface, "The Camden that my research has revealed . . . has always been vulnerable and subject to rapid and substantive change produced by distant forces over which it had no control." In short, regional and national forces have had a big impact on the community. That is not a new perspective on the small town. Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, in Small Town in Mass Society (1958), and other scholars have made the same point by examining other communities, and Davies does not take that view in any new directions. . . .

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