Essay: PROVINCIALISM IS DEAD. LONG LIVE REGIONALISM!

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Every region, for all its differences, shares a pride in local accomplishment: pride in a football team that has made it nationally, in a mayor who has stood up to hostile questioners in Washington, in the natural beauties that practically every U.S. region can boast, in a local author who, like William Faulkner in the South, has been acclaimed not only by U.S. but by European critics. It is this proper pride in a region's own particularity that has given a new dimension to what used to be called provincialism. In the day when what a local area had was all it had—and all it wanted—pride was often a barrier to the outside world. Now that prosperity and communications and travel have opened eyes on the nation and the wide world, what once tended to bolster provincialism has become a welcome local diversity, neither unsophisticated nor imitative.

The real provincialism in the U.S. is no longer a matter of geography. It is a provincialism that feeds on lack of education or opportunity, a provincialism of the mind that is expressed in bigotry, misunderstanding or lack of social consciousness. Frequently, it is a matter of class, for the poor in their ghettos are forced to remain provincial in the worst sense of the word. But poverty is not the only determining factor: people who resist the experience of change and advance also qualify as provincial, whether they live on Manhattan's East Side or in Kokomo, Ind. For the most part, those who dwell in the great cities and small towns of the U.S. heartland have lost the sense of separateness and inferiority that once made them close their doors to the outside. They have, in fact, been so transformed by the forward rush of U.S. life that they are willing to discover and accept the whole world as their province.