| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard O. Davies. Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 234. Cloth $39.95, paper $20.00.

"Once the very marrow of a young and growing nation, now hollow shells of their former selves," Richard O. Davies concludes, "they [America's small towns] are condemned to live in the shadows of a new America. In his 'My Hometown,' pop singer Bruce Springsteen is not far off the mark: 'Main Street's closing down . . . No one wants to come down here any more'" (p. 195). 1

Around this theme, Davies composes his narrative of the community of Camden, Ohio. He opens his history of this small midwestern agricultural town, located forty miles north of Cincinnati, with its settlement in 1803, the year Ohio was admitted as a state into the union. He sketches the coming of the railroad (1850), the telephone, and electricity; the filling in of Main Street; the building of a school and library; and the development of a range of amenities that made Camden nearly a self-sufficient community on the eve of World War I. Davies then depicts "the halcyon days of the 1920s," when the town baseball team (the center of attention) won games, concrete sidewalks and paved roads replaced the dirty and dusty streets, and the aroma of horse manure vanished as automobiles appeared in ever greater numbers. His narrative, having crossed into the 1930s, when the Republican town learned to cooperate and live with government programs, reaches its apogee in the 1940s (even more precisely, he suggests 1947) when the community could truly celebrate itself. Camden defeated the Depression at home and tyranny abroad. Goods and opportunities abounded. There was almost a car in every garage and a flickering television screen in every living room. It seemed at that moment that Camden belonged to the nation and the nation to Camden. . . .

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