Even Kansas and Iowa, states that prided themselves on their spirit of improvement, remained culturally backward. William Allen White described Kansas as a "Puritan survival." Although he conceded her civic spirit, her elimination of poverty and crime, and her rising standards of health and education, his account stressed the negative side of "Puritanism." The "dour deadly desire to fight what was deemed wrong" had stunted the sense of beauty. Kansas had produced "no great poet, no great painter, no great musician, no great writer or philosopher," only the "dead level of economic and political democracy." Johan J. Smertenko used the same kind of language in his account of Iowa, a "cautious, prosaic, industrious, and mediocre" place in which the prospects for "cultural expression" were "bleak indeed." Lacking any "generous purpose" or "spiritual background," Iowa was a "dull, gray monotone." "Seldom has a people been less interested in spiritual self-expression and more concerned with hog nutrition."

John Macy, the Nation's literary editor, painted an equally unflattering portrait of Massachusetts, where Yankee traditions had been modified by Catholic immigration without producing anything more than a "complaisant and insignificant conformism." If Catholics "mistakenly and stupidly" abused their "new-found strength" by banning works on the Spanish Inquisition or the novels of Zola from public libraries, their attempt to impose intellectual uniformity marked only a "slight transformation of Puritan zealotry." The "more enlightened citizens of Massachusetts" could take pride in Holmes and Brandeis, but mediocre politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge, David Walsh, and the "yokel" Calvin Coolidge more accurately represented the electorate. The people of Massachusetts got the politicians and the newspapers they deserved. Except for the Christian Science Monitor—a national rather than a local paper—the press exhibited the "dress and cultivation of a boom mining-town."

That states as different as Iowa and Massachusetts could prompt the same kind of disparagement suggests that the conventions underlying this disparagement had acquired a life of their own. The equation of civic culture with progress and enlightenment made it difficult to see anything but arrested development even in a state like New York, depicted by Charles F. Wood as a benighted region dominated by "fear and suspicion" of the modern world. The "backwoods" element, Wood said, had a "throttle-hold upon the state." "Resistance to change is their most sacred

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