The Secret Life of the American Midlands
By Karl Zinsmeister
This issue of The American Enterprise isn’t only about Nashville. A lot of it is about your home town too.
In December we took a team of ten tae editors and writers to middle Tennessee for a full week of intensive interviews and investigating. Before and after, we conducted weeks of additional research.
We chose Nashville because it’s a fine illustration of America’s current prosperity, but we could just as easily have gone to Indianapolis, Phoenix, Dallas, Salt Lake City, or any number of other places. Nashville (which ranks #48 nationally by city population) is a wonderfully tangy place with many distinctive qualities of its own. In a very real sense, though, the Nashville snapshots you are about to encounter are pictures from a more universal American family scrapbook—stories from a broad midland where good and serious and amazingly productive things are accomplished every day without much national acclaim.
Most of the real work, innovation, and cultural preservation being done in America today is carried out by people laboring entirely outside the limelight. Our national media focus their collective gazes to a ridiculous degree on a few narrow (and unrepresentative) swatches of the great American quilt: New York, D.C., Hollywood, Silicon Valley, bits of Boston, Chicago. The rest of the country is mostly blacked out (until there’s a multiple shooting in a McDonald’s, or a dead baby in a dumpster).
Sure, Northeast Corridor snobs have always overestimated their importance, but today the national balance of power has moved so far that their narrow view is becoming a serious impediment to the country’s understanding of itself. Read the essay by Joel Kotkin and David Friedman in this issue and you’ll appreciate why we think it’s important that citizens get more real-life reporting on developments in our nation’s heartland.
So even if you’ve never been to Nashville, never plan to go, hate country songs, and don’t care about Tennessee or the South, you need to know what’s happening to America in a place as dynamic and rippling with energy as “Music City” is today.
The most obvious root of Nashville’s current dynamism is economic: The place is your basic U.S. boomtown. The streets aren’t paved with gold—we spoke to addicts and people in shelters, and visited several neighborhoods where I found myself watching for metallic bulges in pockets, as I used to when I lived by a D.C. public housing project. But the city as a whole has an obvious financial vigor and a rising feel of the Big Time. Within the last six years, Nashville has passed scores of other cities like Houston, Raleigh, Phoenix, Cleveland, and Kansas City in median household buying power. As it continues, an economic burst of this sort will cover a multitude of sins.
Economically, Nashville is an exemplar of something bigger: The shift of national strength southward and westward. In the latest Census Bureau ranking, all 50 of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S. are located in either the South or West. Only a quarter of the individuals on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans now live in the Northeast (New England to D.C.), despite that region’s legacy of inherited old money. The reality of this hasn’t sunk in with East Coast elites, but out in many a province life is now every bit as rich and interesting as it ever was in our great older metropoli.
Following on this economic shift has been a cultural shift. The finest art collection in the country, by most reckonings, now belongs to Ft. Worth’s Kimbell Museum, not New York’s Metropolitan. Leading university science research has migrated away from New England and toward institutions in states like Texas, Georgia, and California. The nation’s favorite form of music, the Harris Poll shows, is now country. Politically, there has been an obvious shift in representation—and agendas—away from the Northeast.
All of this has been characterized by Michael Lind in The New Republic as the “creeping Southernization of America.” And he’s right. But he’s against it, while I, for one, am for it.
Our country is not, thank goodness, homogenized and uniform from sea to shining sea. For a group of reporters arriving from New York, Virginia, Missouri, Connecticut, D.C., and Maryland, Nashville offers plenty of distinctive colorations.
I won’t traffic in stereotypes and claim that Nashvillians were the sweetest people I’ve ever met. Residents of upstate New York where I live are actually much friendlier. And the traffic, while nothing like what one encounters in Boston or Los Angeles, was plenty rushed and rude. It’s a big city.
But the courtly helpfulness of the South was also very much in evidence, as were many other distinctively Southern qualities. When I pulled out my camera at the end of our interview with Jerry Benefield, the hard-driving Nissan usa ceo who oversees the most efficient auto manufacturing operation in the U.S. (see page 68), I was amused to watch him flip a large hunk of tobacco (actually a bitten-off cigar) out of the inside of his cheek.
When we interviewed Governor Don Sundquist a few days later, he exhibited no signs of an oral tobacco habit, but to anyone attuned to empire-building Eastern politicians, the things coming out of his mouth would have seemed almost as startling. Amidst a state-wide economic boom he spoke proudly of keeping his government on an austerity budget: “Last year, we froze employment. We reduced 1,750 jobs in the executive branch. We’re in the process of combining departments. My goal is to go from 22 departments down to 11 or 12. We didn’t give our state employees a raise last year.” What are his ambitions for a second term? “Always: The lowest taxes. Fewest regulations. Least amount of paperwork.”
This is apparently more than just rhetoric, for Tennessee currently enjoys close to the lowest per capita taxes in the entire U.S. The state legislature meets for only two or three months per year, and the whole government is decidedly un-imperial. It’s literally harder to enter my county courthouse than it was to walk into the office of Tennessee’s governor. This is not due to nicer politicians; it’s what the public demands. “We have a tradition in Tennessee of less government,” acknowledges the governor.
Among the numerous war memorials strung around the State Capitol you can find ample evidence of another noble quirk of the American southland: deep respect for martial achievement. The two heavily armed G.I.s who make up the Korean War statue sit on a pedestal with a stern six word inscription: “Where communistic military aggression was defeated.” A behemoth copper form of Alvin York staring down a bayoneted Enfield commemorates the day in October 1918 when “one Tennessean armed with rifle and pistol silenced a German battalion of 35 machine guns, killing 25 enemy soldiers and capturing 132.” They don’t call it the Volunteer State for nothing.
An emphasis on honor is yet another Southern quality with deep roots, and one apparently not dead yet. A plaque prominently displayed at the entrance to the Vanderbilt Student Center reads: “Today I am going to give you two examinations, one in trigonometry and one in honesty. I hope you will pass them both, but if you must fail one, let it be trigonometry.” The center is named for the author of that statement, Madison Sarratt, and the plaque was installed in 1993 by the “Undergraduate Honor Council.”
Probably the aspect of Nashville that is most distinctive (it drives many of these other qualities) is the city’s muscular religiosity. This is a place where religion is very close to the surface of everyday life. You see it in obvious and subtle ways. When we stopped in at Jack’s Bar-B-Que the juke box was playing blues, but there was a nativity scene set up on a table near the exit (it was mid-December). The city’s numerous live nativity scenes are famously grand—some of them featuring hundreds of people and animals gathered in re-created villages.
In all, there are something like 800 places of worship in Nashville—the city has the highest ratio of churches per capita of any place in the nation. And they are packed.
Not only are they packed; they are alive. There is, again, a Southern tradition here. In the South, wrote novelist Flannery O’Connor, religion exists “in a concrete form, known and held sacred by the whole community.... Abstractions, formulas, laws will not serve here.” And this, she notes, has effect. “Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.” After attending numerous church services in a range of venues, your editors can attest that there are hundreds of thousands of Nashvillians still capable of trembling with Abraham.
One of the ways locals put their faith into service is by ministering to the rest of the nation. One of Nashville’s several nicknames is “the Protestant Vatican,” reflecting the fact that the city is home to an astonishing number of church publishers, mission headquarters, and Christian artists who churn out religious products and services for use all across the usa. (See Scott Walter’s article on page 48, and sidebar on page 58.)
Another way residents act on their religious conviction is by living their own lives differently. “This is a city with such high moral standards, a city full of such good people,” says Victor Bautista, a Hispanic immigrant to Nashville. This comes into play in very specific ways. One little instance: There is no state lottery or gambling (that can now be said of only two other states). A deeper ramification is visible in irs data showing that Tennessee is the third most generous state in America (after Utah and Wyoming) when it comes to donating to charity. Apparently taking Jesus’ Great Commandment to “love one another” to heart, locals give away twice as much each year, on average, as New Englanders do.
Another practical effect of an active religious culture can be seen inside the big Baptist Bookstore that sits in the heart of downtown. In addition to books, the store sells a lot of recorded music from its heavily stocked shelves, and there are special procedures that allow for opening and listening to any tape or CD for sale. Literally most titles in many sections had an opened album marked “Demo” in orange. Parents and kids were carefully checking liner notes, and dozens of shoppers were taking advantage of plentiful listening stations to preview the products before buying. This is the intersection of modern consumerism with contemporary Christian culture, and it yields a city where fewer families end up bringing home albums that urge teenagers to “f- - - the police” and “kill the wh- - -.”
As I watched in the children’s book section, another parent very politely pointed out to a manager that one of the store’s picture books on the Ten Commandments left out an injunction, separating another into two parts so there were still ten. “This isn’t right. Some kids still memorize these, and they ought to be correct,” she stated quietly. Then she added with a laugh, “I’m not sure we can make things much better today, but at least we can avoid letting them get worse.” The manager answered that he’d see about returning the books.
As a mecca for country, gospel, bluegrass, western and other forms of “music for the common man,” Nashville has become a rare kind of cultural nerve-center. “Never before has a major contemporary genre of American music had so long and so deeply entrenched a relationship with a single city,” writes author Dan Daley. “The only other such relationship that comes to mind is Hollywood and the film industry.”
And it makes a big difference when a major entertainment industry is located in a place like middle Tennessee rather than, say, Los Angeles or New York. Some prominent Nashville musicians now meet regularly in small groups called “Covenant Artist Communities” where they encourage one another and hold themselves accountable. They ask each other how their family lives are going, what they’re doing to nurture their marriages and their spiritual lives, how they’re handling their finances, how they guard against celebrity temptations.
When an attention-seeking artist strutted down Nashville’s Music Row in 1996 wearing nothing but her cowboy hat and boots, she not only received no record deal, she received a citation for indecent exposure. Describing Nashville as “the patron city of the radical middle,” entertainment industry writer Bruce Feiler says its products are now much more closely aligned with mainstream suburban America than the output of any of our other cultural capitals.
One of the reasons more people listen to country music every week than voted in Bill Clinton is because it’s written for grown-ups. As Americans have aged, they’ve migrated toward themes that have long been Nashville bedrock. Feiler points out in The New Republic that “While most pop music was still focused on sex, drugs, and other forms of license...country pounded out tales of love, heartache, family ties, and middle-aged renewal.” In country music, he notes, “morality is hip” and “despair is surmountable,” lending a “quiet optimism” that is in keeping with the national mood.
Warner/Reprise record executive Eddie Reeves states simply that “country music is about family values and everyday life.” Vanderbilt professor Cecilia Tichi, sounding very professorial, says “country music puts home’s enveloping love and kindness against materialism, social status, hurdles of heirarchy, and all sorts of false values.” Dan Daley argues it is “a music that is fundamentally conservative at its core,” which “satisfies a need to touch, even if figuratively, more traditional values.” Noting that Nashville music is “much more clearly about core American values than anything coming out of Seattle or New York in the last ten years,” Feiler suggests that the popularity of country today is “one of the most vivid examples of America’s reigning backlash against its own culturally liberal past.”
Even performers who are pushing Nashville more in the direction of other pop music (like Garth Brooks) continue to be closer to middle-class values than other popular musicians. When the rock performer Bono spouted at the 1994 Grammy telecast that he intended to “f- - - the mainstream,” Brooks begged to differ. “The message I would send to the youth,” he answered in his own acceptance speech, “is not to screw up the mainstream.” On Brooks’ latest album, Sevens, he continues in a heavily pop-influenced style. But he also records a gospel song written by bluegrass performer Carl Jackson, draws on acoustic traditions through musicians like Tim O’Brien and Benita Hill, includes Christian-music star Susan Ashton as a feature vocalist, and otherwise reveals his Nashville setting.
How steadfastly Nashville’s music-makers will defend heartland values in coming decades is a big open issue. Powerful new forces like Garth Brooks’ marketer-in-chief, Capitol Records ceo Pat Quigley, are now actively working against Nashville’s distinctive culture and trying to produce a music that will appeal more to someone in San Francisco or the Hamptons (see live, and John Meroney’s feature article on page 52). As Nashville has attracted both the sentiments and the discretionary spending of the American public, it has also attracted opportunists from both coasts. The big question is whether they will eat Nashville, or Nashville will eat them.
Bluegrass musicians sometimes use the phrase “Saturday night and Sunday morning” to encapsulate the dual poles of their world. Saturday night produces the smoky creative jams, the honky-tonking love songs, the rowdy, lightning-fast solo instrumental breaks. Sunday morning brings the
sacred tunes, the confessional ballads, the beautiful, spare, tight-harmony “stained glass” repertoire.
As it booms, there is a kind of Saturday night/Sunday morning aspect to Nashville too: There are growth vs. preservation questions, urban/rural poles, Old South/New South tensions. There is the binge-and-purge pattern in the city’s high-visibility entertainment industry. Business people face choices between living well and doing right. Reconciliations have long been necessary in this area between the yeoman/Republican culture of eastern Tennessee and the plantation/Democrat heritage of the west.
Right at Nashville’s core there exists a complicated blend of the sacred and profane. Take the city’s signature landmark, the Ryman Auditorium. Blue-eyed, blond, fast-running riverboat captain Thomas Ryman had it built as a tabernacle for evangelizing and preaching of the gospel, after he’d had his life turned around by the fiery sermons of the dark, mustachioed, chestnut-eyed Reverend Sam Jones. Later, it was converted into the highly commercial home of the Grand Ole Opry (the first national broadcast entertainment built on advertising). Today the Opry has moved on to new digs, and the Ryman is a high mix of church and gin joint in its programming.
Welcome to the American experiment: where Saturday night and Sunday morning, economic and religious, physical and cerebral, high and low are often so intertwined as to become inseparable. Faced with choosing between order and growth, safety and opportunity, morality and riches, personal responsibility and individual freedom, Americans have always answered: I’ll take both. Pulling off repeated syntheses of these competing human impulses is inherently difficult, and we have never been fully successful. But that attempt has been the source of much of our national inventiveness and accomplishment.
The central national act of marrying European refinement with North American vigor has itself been a great synthesis. An excellent Nashville illustration of this is Thomas Nelson Publishers, the world’s largest Bible-seller and a company that makes lots of money publishing religious material like novels, devotionals, cd-roms, and children’s books. The tale begins far away from Nashville, in Edinburgh, Scotland, where Mr. Nelson opened a bookshop and then a print house with the aim of getting Scriptures into the hands of as many poor people as possible.
Nelson was the first book company to use salesmen, the inventor of rotary printing, and the eventual creator of 1,300 different versions of the Bible, including major translations like the Revised Standard Version. But by the 1960s the company had moved away from its religious roots, sales had collapsed, and the old British firm was dying. Then a Lebanese immigrant who had come to the U.S. as a 19-year-old to attend Bible college, become a door-to-door Bible salesman, and eventually an extremely successful (and still very pious) businessman, bought Nelson and breathed new life into it in Nashville—where it now thrives, once again focused on religious material. That is a story of American recombination, renewal, and improvement of an inherited legacy.
In a similar way, many of the basic tunes and emotions of traditional American country music go back as far as medieval-to-Elizabethan-era Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. Lots of the original ballads and melodies eventually died off in Europe, but were preserved and embellished by emigrants in the self-contained hollows of Appalachian America. Eventually, thanks to the technology, finance, and marketing skills of some Nashville businessmen and artists, many of those same chords and vocalizations were relaunched on the world in new forms. Some of them have even traveled back to ancient Europe and stirred the hearts of business-suit-wearing Celts. A strange irony.
Nashvillians are carrying out variations of the great American experiment all around their city—attempting creative recombinations in fields like city design, music, religion, social welfare, politics, and business. Like other successful Americans they’re trying to meld modern forms with ancient truths, economic progress with cultural remembering, personal freedom with private virtue. And so far, most of their executions seem to be working. But this is always a difficult and risky task. It is easy to overshoot, to lose track of first principles.
The best way to navigate between continuity and progress is to let individual actors make their own trials and errors and then carefully separate successes from failures. You simply can’t write a formula for the growth of a new town, or the composition of a moving song, or the evolving of a church’s mission. These things have to be worked out as you go.
On the Saturday night when we visited backstage at the Grand Ole Opry broadcast, there was no discernible direction. Talented people walked on stage, and things just flowed. Likewise, no state development agency could ever do for the Nashville economy what her front-line entrepreneurs are accomplishing today (see Rich Miniter’s article on boom towns).
Nor could any engineer ever orchestrate the millions of processes carried out every shift in the Nissan plant we toured south of Nashville. It’s simply too complex. All you can do is set up good ground rules and then give the plant’s 6,000 individual workers the freedom and responsibility to solve problems one at a time. They are your strength.
Ultimately, Nashville’s success or failure—and America’s—will depend on the subtle judgments her everyday citizens make in the quiet of their workshops and homes and offices. Elites standing in the limelight will, like it or not, have a limited role.
If this issue had a theme song it would be the remarkable sermon by Nashville pastor Stan Mitchell that we’ve condensed on pages 72-3. I urge you not to miss it; you might even read it before anything else in the issue. Mitchell’s insistence on the “glory of the ordinary” is not only a Christian article of faith but also the central insight of American democracy. Our great infantrymen, engineers, mothers, and shopkeepers have a whole lot more to do with us being a great nation than do our presidents, principals, and chiefs. Likewise, it is our Nashvilles far more than our New York Citys that have separated our young civilization from history’s heap.
Unfortunately, the New Yorks refuse to recognize this. They are utterly dismissive of Middle America and show no interest in understanding it. The example of Norman Rockwell—reviewed in an essay at the beginning of our feature section by the distinguished art historian Karal Ann Marling—provides a perfect example of this divide. “Rockwell’s pictures lived in the world of ordinary things,” Marling notes, “ordinary, everyday places beatified by light and by the artist’s scrupulous attention to their angles and corners and timeworn surfaces.” With that in mind, ask yourself: Is there any painter more loved by regular people and more hated by elites than Norman Rockwell? After studying this disagreement at book length, Marling comes to a striking conclusion: The people are right; the elites are wrong.
We must recognize the beauty and power and importance of the everyday. We must trust the radical middle. For when Middle Americans stand and fill their places, the ordinary does indeed trickle up into something glorious.
“We’re betting on the success of our people,” Gov. Sundquist told us.
In the end, so am I.
