Time Essay: Local Chauvinism: Long May It Rave

San Francisco, last week’s nearby earthquake notwithstanding, still insists that it is the nation’s best city to live in. Virginia smugly assumes the primacy of her heritage as the Mother of Presidents, even though (as North Carolinians like to note) she has not been pregnant since the 19th century. Similarly, the Midwest, beneath that humble mien, firmly believes itself to be the “true America” that many observers have christened it.

Some areas even become perversely vainglorious about their shortcomings; a New Jersey magazine not long ago featured an article revealingly titled: “How New Jersey Became a Joke.”

Despite the many and persistent theories about the homogenization of America, the remarkable fact is that virtually every community and region in the nation remains convinced of its own distinctiveness and proud of what it considers its superiority in one respect or another. In short, local chauvinism is alive and well and residing—where else?—in every best damn state/city/town/county/region in the good ole U.S.

In fact, though hardly new, the chirp and bleat of parochial pride is more blatant than ever. The simple reason: these days the old hooray for the home team gets amplified by all the techniques typical of the age of hype. Localities and larger principalities routinely hire professional publicists and jingle writers to puff up the old image and help sell it like so much soda pop. Provincial self-glorification is both nourished and exported in a growing number of slick regional and city magazines. Moreover, metropolises and counties now go to exorbitant lengths to build spectacular sports arenas, convention centers and cultural palaces, ostensibly to serve the public but also as a form of chest thumping. St. Louis has constructed an enormous and now familiar arch with no clear purpose other than to provide something for the town to brag about besides the Mississippi River. Today, it seems that every place is willing to suffer almost anything to get its picture on television or into films. Chicago, merely to smuggle itself into a new John Belushi movie, has just authorized the film company to tie up vital traffic along Lake Michigan for hours and send a car crashing through the enormous windows of the Daley Center Building.

Even the world’s supposedly greatest metropolis has lately begun to sound like one of those boosteristic burgs that Sinclair Lewis used to deride. There was a day when New York City was so smug, haughty and complacent about its firstness that Author Irvin Cobb thought the place possessed “absolutely not a trace of local pride.” Yet in the 1970s, the Big Apple, as the city now cutely calls itself, has been larding the air waves so much with a treacly, self-addressed valentine of a song (“I love New Yorrrrrrrrrrk!”) that even a tone-deaf statistician might wonder how all the fleeing industries and corporate headquarters failed to get the message.

By its nature, to be sure, the voice of local pride always tends to reek of too much protest. And professional sloganeering is only the froth on the sea of real, continuing chauvinism. The parochial boast occurs everywhere, and its inspiration can be anything: a product, a geographical feature, the weather (good or bad), even notoriety. Many a place, in the Dodge City tradition, has nurtured its morale on a reputation for meanness: Harlan County, Ky., is famous for little else. Arizona hymns its dry air; Louisiana often builds a brag on its murderous humidity. Amarillo, Texas, brags about its yellow dust. Nashville has a swelled head over the racket, only occasionally musical, that it produces; Memphis lauds itself about the special quiet it has enjoyed ever since the late Boss Ed Crump banned auto horns. Apalachicola, Fla.? The oyster is its world. Hope, Ark.? The watermelon is its. If some places—Podunk, Peoria and Kalamazoo as well as New Jersey —take unexpected pride in being the classic butt of vaudeville jokes, others seem to get a chauvinistic glow from the fact that they resemble a distant locale. Birmingham, Ala., for instance, has long saluted itself as the “Pittsburgh of the South.”

This seems even more odd when it is recalled that many a Pennsylvanian, most of them in Philadelphia, has been heard to ask: “Where’s Pittsburgh?”

Local chauvinism habitually thrives on the disparagement of rival places or areas. Thus Minneapolis enjoys writing off St. Paul as though it were a mill village, and Dallas takes malicious glee in depicting Fort Worth as the sticks. South Dakotans often pretend to believe that North Dakotans are an alien race, and northern Californians regard the state’s southerly part as a land of incurable kooks. Chronic twitting, in fact, may be taken as a sure sign that provincial pride is robust.

Everybody, of course, picks on Texas, and rightly so. Texas, after all, has imagined itself to be No. 1 in chauvinism ever since the days of Sam Houston, who proclaimed: “Texas could exist without the U.S., but the U.S. cannot, except at very great hazard, exist without Texas.” Thanks to its flamboyant style of braggadocio, Texas is indeed among the front runners in the American art of blowing hard, excelling in what Edna Ferber called the knack of “confusing bigness with greatness.” Yet the truth is that in patrician Boston the chauvinism is just as dependable, and its expression as fulsome, as anywhere, in the Lone Star State. The chauvinist spirit is more polished in Boston but, after all, it was born close by, at Plymouth.

It had been perfected by the time Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of the Massachusetts statehouse as—get this—the “hub of the solar system.” The same spirit lingers yet in Boston and was glimpsed this year when the city exploded with indignation at a proposal to move its Gilbert Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washington to Washington, D.C. Horrors, said Boston Mayor Kevin White: “Everybody knows Washington has no culture.”

Was the nation miffed by this breathtaking insult to its capital? No, because the larger truth is that self-admiring localism is as American as pumpkin pie. The U.S. got stitched together out of a sprawling fuss of self-contained colonies whose fierce attachment to their little domains provided one of the knottiest obstacles to union. Later, ferocious regionalism helped contrive the nation’s definitive crisis, the Civil War. After poking around in every cranny of modern America, Journalist John Gunther concluded a generation ago that for all its dazzling communications the U.S. was “enormously provincial.”

The fact that the situation has not changed is no cause for alarm. Still, the reality ought to be noted by anybody interested in understanding the mood of the country. President Carter did little harm to anyone but himself in complaining that Washington was an “island,” but it might have been useful if he had remembered that the country is nothing but a miraculous jell of metaphysical islands. Now and then, at inaugurations and wars and such, they act like a single nation. But, day in and out, home for a great many Americans is not only where you hang your hat and scratch where it itches, but the only place on earth worth living in. — Frank Trippett