Bonds of fellowship: Imagining, building and negotiating community in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1900--1920 (Sinclair Lewis)

During the early years of the 20th century Americans carried on a national discussion about the meaning of community and where and with whom they could find it. Americans expressed concern about the shift from the earlier experience of place-based communities to the affinity-based ones that were becoming the hallmark of modern urban life. This dissertation explores the contours of this transformation in St. Paul, Minnesota between 1900 and 1920, illuminating the ways in which Americans navigated and participated in it. Rather than merely looking for answers among the written words of those St. Paulites who happened to record their thoughts, this study turns its attention to a variety of cultural products-novels, photographs, buildings, parks and carnivals—investigating the ways they made manifest the complex meanings of community in modernizing America.; The first chapter dissects Sinclair Lewis' 1920 blockbuster novel Main Street. Emphasizing Lewis' shaping of communal relations in St. Paul, MN (the novel's lesser known setting) and discussing them in light of prevailing sociological theories of community, the chapter establishes the ability of modernizing Americans to think about community in a way that separated the experience from a specific venue. The remaining four chapters turn away from fictional St. Paul to compare Lewis' account with life in the real city. In turn they explore the ways in which, on the eve of the modern era, photography, architecture, parks and public spectacles reflected and shaped the transformation from place-based to affinity-based experiences of community—both real and imagined.; Taken together, the evidence demonstrates that in modernizing St. Paul community was never completely separated from locale, but was increasingly linked to demographic variables, especially race and class. By 1920 the communal relationships that shaped people's lives were both narrower and broader than the city limits.