The reason of these migrations is told by Carol’s story. It is the necessity to escape from puritanical and provincial boredom. How dull the little town in spite of his Morris chairs, his bridge parties and his phonographs! Nothing left to imagination; heavy speech and heavy manner; free thinking smothered under respectability: It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery, self-thought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. Carol Kennicott did not lack critical sense. She tried to explain to herself the triumph of mediocrity around her. She was frightened by its irresistible contagion. She saw the stupendous effects of the melting process on the immigrants from Europe who, at that time, still flooded the Middle West. How quickly they forgot their traditions, their folklore and picturesque costumes. Take the Norwegian women of Gopher Prairie. How light-heartedly they exchanged their red tunics, their pearl necklaces, their black chemisettes lined with blue, their green and gray aprons, their stiff capes (so well designed to enhance their fresh little faces) for icy-white American blouses! How quickly their home cooking was replaced by the national pork cutlets! Americanized, standardized and commonplace, they lost their identity and charm within a generation. Their sons, with ready-made clothes and ready-made college talk, soon assumed a respectable air. The environment made of these picturesque strangers is a banal replica of the world around them. Doubtless all small towns are alike, and have always been in all countries and climes. Isolation causes that. But the worst was that Gopher Prairie wanted to set standards of mediocrity for the whole world, or at least for one hundred and more million Americans: It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.