The more things change, the more they stay the same. Thirty-six years ago, Springfield’s mayor was Mike Houston, and the Illinois State Fair was, well, what the fair has always been. I wrote about it in this column of my Prejudices series, which appeared in the IT of August 22, 1980. It varies slightly from the original.
Mayor Houston said something interesting the other day. It was Springfield Day at the Illinois
State Fair, and the Springfield mayor was explaining to a TV reporter that
probably 90 out of every 100 people then prowling the fairgrounds were from
outside the capital city. He knew what he was talking about; as he sheepishly
admitted, he hadn’t gone to the fair on Springfield Day either.
I know very few people who go to the fair. I know
Springfieldians who haven’t wrapped their hands around a bona fide state fair
lemon shakeup since childhood. There was, I confess, many a year during which I
didn’t venture north of Carpenter Street during fair week. I go every year now
— for exactly two hours, which is just long enough to stroll some stock barns,
chow down a batch of Culler’s french fries (made from fresh whole potatoes, an
act of honest commerce almost without precedent at the fair), and play a quick
game of tic-tac-toe at the “IQ Zoo” with Birdbrain, the smartest chicken at the
fair.
But of course it is not Springfieldians per se who do not go to the fair but
rather a certain kind of Springfieldian, a Springfieldian whose counterparts
in Decatur, Chicago, Rockford, and other cities comprise the state’s middle
classes. The middle class makes its presence known in virtually every phase of
the state’s life except the attendance figures at the state fair. Finding out
why and then doing something about it should, one would think, be high on the
list of fair manager Sid Hutchcraft’s agenda for 1981.
It might be useful to begin the debate by asking who does go
to the fair, and why. We are probably mistaken to categorize fairs as rural
entertainment. A lot of farmers go to fairs, to be sure. The State Journal-Register quoted a visiting
New York Times man as saying that
there were more farmers at Springfield than at the Iowa State Fair. But though
farmers have a good time at the fair, it may not be accurate to say they come
to the fair for entertainment. They are social but sober people who are able to
take pleasure from their business. The fair is for farmers no so much a
celebration as it is a seminar.
Most of the 600,000 people who came to the fair this year do
not share farmers’ mania for improvement; if they looked at any livestock at
all, it was the three-headed calf at the sideshow. Their fair is Happy Hollow, foot-long hot dogs, Johnny Paycheck,
mechanical bucking broncs, and ornamental belt buckles that quickly turn green.
That fair is peopled not by farmers but by their working class brethren from
town. (Small towns mainly, although the 1980 census may ultimately reveal that
most small town Americans no longer live in small towns but in small-town
enclaves in bigger cities, like Springfield’s north side.) They are to the
fair what bankers’ widows are to the opera.
Broadly speaking, they fall into one of the three divisions
(high, middle, and low) of the Proletarian social class (proles for short)
described by Paul Fussel in a recent New
Republic essay. Proles’ identifying characteristics range from the use of
painted truck tires as lawn planters to watching “Bowling for Dollars” on TV
and (among the women) flaunting obesity. Social events can be categorized
according to the class of people they attract. The LPGA Rail Golf Tournament in
Springfield, for example, is a middle or upper-middle class affair (though
paying to play in the pro-am is decidedly High Prole). The state fair, as
noted, is unabashedly Prole (as indeed is most of state government), which is
why the Springfield bankers, lawyers, and mayors who crowd the Rail are as hard
to find at the fair as a flushed toilet.
The question for fair organizers eager to boost the gate is,
how to attract the middle classes to the fair. Hutchcraft, Block & Co.
have already taken a big step in the right direction by cleaning up the
grounds. (One’s attitude toward dirt also is a class indicator. The Proles
don’t notice it. Middles recoil from it. Uppers never see any. Farmers — who
are culturally Prole but whose independence puts them several notches above
them — have learned to regard dirt as an unavoidable unpleasantness, rather the
way developers regard [having to pay] bribes.) Most Middles who find filth
charming while on tour in Venice find it disgusting in Springfield.
Much needs to be done, however. Most Middles find the fair
either incomprehensible or unbearably declasse.
They don’t find much there to amuse them except gawking at those who do.
Walking through the Exposition Building is like watching a late-night movie on
WON television from Chicago — a quintessential Prole city, by the way, whose
economy apparently rises and falls on the sale of plastic sofa covers, fake
diamond rings, and burglar-proof glass block windows. Ring toss games offer no
thrills to jaded subdivision kids with computer TV games in their bedrooms. The
appeal of the fair, any fair, used to be that it offered delights more novel
than anything the small town could contrive, short of lynching. Today it is
dull; even in Happy Hollow, the carnival that used to beckon like a tarted-up
slut now appeals because it is so quaint. Nowadays folks who want to indulge
their appetites for vicarious sex and violence merely subscribe to cable TV.
There are exceptions, of course, like the youngish
white professionals who like to go slumming, culturally speaking, when Willie
Nelson is in town, or the types the SJR’s
Steve Slack calls “cotton candy cowboys.” The fair also is popular with
certain intrepid types who take vacations to places like Rome — bold
adventurers whose curiosity about alien cu1tures makes them ignore dirt, noise,
and smells of the type one usually associates with public housing. They would
never wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase, “Is that a pickle in your
pocket or arc you just glad to see me?” (one of many items of soft-core apparel
being hawked this year) but they love seeing up close the people who do. The
more experienced among them have developed iron constitutions which enable
them to survive days at the fair in spite of the fact that one could trudge
for days, from the goat barns to the governor’s tent, and not see a single
fresh green vegetable.
This article appears in Aug 11-17, 2016.
