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. 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.”Įven 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.

And so he sends a reporter undercover to Mayberry, determined to find dirt. For the businessman, it is the act of a small time sheriff trying to become a bigshot. For the Sheriff, it is an action intended to show the bigshot that he is expected to respect the law like anyone else. 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. That trend can also be illuminated by heading back to Mayberry for a moment. The burial of truth can have both positive and negative effects.Īt the time that Masters published his poetry collection, many writers were growing weary of what they viewed as a disturbing trend. Tombstones mark the burial site of truth all the unrevealed secrets that people take to their graves stay there. The “gimmick” is realization of McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message. 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. In other words, Mayberry is Spoon River without the tombstones. Mayberry is all idealized small town with all of its defects conveniently erased from the record. 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.

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. 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. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.

Spoon river anthology george gray