The Culture Of The New Suburbia

To be contemptuous of the fine arts in suburbia has by now come to seem as “peculiar” as respect for or practice of the fine arts used to be in small-town America. The suburban Babbitt knows that he had better appear to be a cultivated man—by whatever lights and cues his new environment provides him. Artiness, and artsy-craftsiness, if not estheticism and erudition, are de rigueur. Middletown was never like this. Nor was Prairieton nor Plainville nor Winesburg nor any of Thorstein Veblen’s country towns nor the provincial communities so savagely and lovingly satirized by Sinclair Lewis three or four decades ago.

Neither Lewis nor Sherwood Anderson nor the silent movie makers could have envisaged the present situation. Could they have foreseen a population nearly strapped by the high cost of living whose upper middle classes for the first time do without domestic help chiefly to maintain their heavily mortgaged homes and the mechanical appliances they contain? These people, as young parents and total consumers grievously pinched by inflation and taxation, feel obliged to lay out significant sums of money for their own edification and for the artistic instruction of their young. With payments to be made...