When poring over the poetic epitaphs of the late citizens of Spoon River, one may well be reminded of the fictional TV town of Mayberry. Few shows in TV history managed to present such a coherent portrait of the essential “goodness” of a setting quite like The Andy Griffith Show and it spinoff Mayberry, RFD. For many viewers, Mayberry came to represent the ideal of long lost past, but dig a little deeper into the show’ consistent misogyny, overwhelming “whiteness” and an almost total lack of evidence that the world had changed at between the introduction of Mayberry in 1960 and its finally disappearance after the most tumultuous decade of the century and the reality corrodes. Mayberry is all idealized small town with all of its defects conveniently erased from the record.
In other words, Mayberry is Spoon River without the tombstones. The choice of structure may seem like merely a clever sales gimmick concocted by Edgar Lee Masters, but like his fictional little village, appearances are deceiving. The “gimmick” is realization of McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message. Tombstones mark the burial site of truth; all the unrevealed secrets that people take to their graves stay there. The burial of truth can have both positive and negative effects.
At the time that Masters published his poetry collection, many writers were growing weary of what they viewed as a disturbing trend. That trend can also be illuminated by heading back to Mayberry for a moment. On one episode, Sheriff Andy Taylor forces a successful businessman to come all the way back from Raleigh to Mayberry just to pay a small fine. For the Sheriff, it is an action intended to show the bigshot that he is expected to respect the law like anyone else. For the businessman, it is the act of a small time sheriff trying to become a bigshot. And so he sends a reporter undercover to Mayberry, determined to find dirt. The reporter says something that would only provoke laughs today, but was intended and accepted as sincere in the early 1960’s: “Most small town sheriffs are notoriously honest.”
Even though nearly half a century had passed since the publication of Spoon River Anthology by then, the trend which it was designed to fight against still had a firm grasp on the minds of many Americans. In fact, even today it persists. The trend was the portrayal of small towns as bastions of truth and honesty where duplicitous activity and immoral behavior would simply not be allowed to take hold by neighbors joining together for the communal good. This was a motif in literary portrayals both fictional and non-fictional which had originated in the pioneering spirit of neighbors depending upon one another to be honest and truthful in order to beat back the savage enemies of the untamed wilderness in all its forms: land, animals or native inhabitants.
In 1921, literary critic Carl Van Doren coined the term “revolt from the village” to describe the works ff literature like Spoon River Anthology which sought to expose not that the small towns were populated by hypocrites engaged in reprehensible behavior, but that the relative morality and ethical value of a society is unrelated to either the size of its population or its geographical location. Initial reaction to Spoon River Anthology included a substantial amount of criticism directed toward the author that the subject matter was inappropriate for a collection of poetry and that in his attempt to undermine the unwarranted idealization of small town communities, Masters focused too heavily on the dark side, thus undermining his own argument.
