In March at the Front Porch Republic, Bill Kaufman wrote a very interesting analysis of regionalism, its characteristics, and its effects.

Late in the essay, he observed:

Contrast Reagan with Booth Tarkington, subject of Jeremy Beer’s essay and author of the masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), which is today known primarily as the source of Orson Welles’s studio-mutilated film. Says a character in Tark the non-Shark’s novel The Gentleman from Indiana (1899): “I was born in Indiana, and, in a way, the thought of coming back to a life-work in my native State appealed to me. I always had a dim sort of feeling that the people out in these parts knew more-had more sense and were less artificial, I mean-and were kinder, and tried less to be somebody else, than almost any other people anywhere. And I believe it’s so.”

Booth chose Indiana; Ronnie chose Hollywood and Washington. Which man would a healthy conservative movement revere? Which man does the contemporary conservative movement revere? Funny world, isn’t it?

Kaufman’s point is well taken, yet it’s worth pointing out that Tarkington really hadn’t chosen Indiana at that point, as Harkless, the novel’s hero, had.  Tarkington would live abroad for several years, and would spend a great deal of time in Manhattan through much of the 1920s.  And even when he finally did “settle” in Indianapolis (hardly the bucolic setting of the rural Indiana tale of Gentleman), he spent several months each year in Kennebunkport, Maine.  He even wrote a good number of screenplays for Hollywood films.  Had Tarkington’s primary ambitions remained political, as they had been for a season at the turn of the century, he may well have gone the Reagan route.