A Requiem for the American Village. (Book Reviews).

A Requiem for the American Village. By Paul K. Conkin. American Intellectual Culture. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 2000. Pp. xvi, 207. $30.00, ISBN 0-8476-9736-3.)

Paul Conkin, one of the few intellectual historians ever to preside over the Southern Historical Association, took retirement at Vanderbilt last year [2000]. In this volume he gathers together seventeen speeches, lectures, and conference papers from among the hundred or more he delivered over the course of an unusually productive career. The essays were originally meant to be heard, not read; they are only lightly revised and lack citations. Each addresses a different audience. Readers will understandably wish that Conkin had distilled these separate pieces into a single, consolidated study, armored with all the customary apparatus of scholarship so as to hold its own in the rough-and-tumble of critical debate. But life is short and time flies; better a collection of overlapping essays than nothing at all.

The book is as distinctive for its informality and self-revealing character as for the theme of village life announced in its title. We come to know the author intimately, in a manner precluded by the usual impersonality of scholarly writing. Born in the mountains of east Tennessee on the day after Black Thursday, October 1929, and raised in a sharecropper's cabin with neither electricity nor running water, Conkin was truly a child of the Great Depression. He remembers watching through holes in the floor as chickens scurried for food below (p. 37). He fondly recalls a neighbor who kept calamity at bay by choosing not to foreclose on a delinquent mortgage (p. 54). Personal experience vividly colors his discussion of the "nightmares," "marks of extreme insecurity," "mixed guilt and exultation in present prosperity," and "apocalyptic forebodings" felt by those who struggled through the Great Depression, which he believes shaped American lives and personalities more powerfully than any war of the twentieth century (p. 55). Perhaps it is no wonder that his taut little book on the New Deal (FDR and the Origins of the Welfare State [New York, 1967]), which took him a single month to draft, has outsold all his other books combined (p. 52).

Equally personal is the acutely ambivalent lament over the decay of village life that ties the essays together. The theme of self and society is a classic conundrum in American intellectual history. All who grapple with it respond ambivalently, wanting both autonomy and solidarity. But few respond so ambivalently as Conkin. It is characteristic of the man that after coolly dissecting the vanity, self-delusion, and rampant egoism that tore apart utopian communities such as Arthurdale and Burley, he confesses to a nagging guilt over his own failure ever to throw accommodation aside and strive for the realization of some daring dream of communal perfection (pp. 35-36). How characteristic, too, that after telling readers that the fundamental impulse of local communities is and always will be to exclude dissenters and achieve homogeneity, even to the point of becoming "totalitarian," he abruptly claims not to be using that word in a pejorative sense and chides readers who suppose it can have no other meaning (p. 16). In Hyderabad, speaking to Indian scholars, he characterizes the last century of American history as a contest between a cosmopolitan elite, determined to strip local communities of their power to elicit conformity, and ordinary folks, who are now mounting a "Revolt of the Village," sensing--correctly, in Conkin's view--that their way of life is under assault by a privileged and often callow aristocracy. The village has no more eloquent spokesman than Conkin, yet when push comes to shove he sincerely and accurately identifies himself as one of its cosmopolitan detractors (pp. 99, 108-9). At a time when efficiently harnessing scholarship to one good cause or another is said to be the supreme test of its value, Conkin's candor and independent spirit provide us with a model to cherish and emulate.