Where It All Goes Down
Happy Days? Not So Happy Days
U.S. History: The 1950s
Okay, so now you know. America in the 1950s was a mixed bag of prosperity, full of confusion, paranoia, and white bread. Heaven help you if you were an outsider in any way—for instance, if you'd served time in prison. The situation wasn't easier if you were biracial, like Perry.
America in the 1950s was the best time to be a white American male, and Herb Clutter is the perfect representative of that fifties white-male patriarch. He directs his family unfailingly to what he sees as good—weekly church going, 4H membership, and unfailing civic leadership—and away from alcohol, tobacco and marrying Roman Catholics. The schedule of Nancy Clutter's last day on Earth is right out of a 50s sitcom: she teaches a little girl to cook a cherry pie and helps another to play a saxophone solo, all before lunch.
This idealized environment affects both Perry and Dick—in that it doesn't include them. Neither young man has gone to college, and it's a time in which college graduation was a very big deal. In a society that favors the middle class and well-to-do, Dick and Perry didn't stand a chance. Does this get them off the hook? More on that later.
Holcomb, Kansas
Our first sight of Holcomb is as a flat, lonely town of 270 people, on the plains of western Kansas and with an atmosphere that's more Western than Midwestern—cowboy boots and Stetsons. The town's full of run-down houses and boarded up shops. Not much happens there, Capote tells us, and like the train that passes by the town, "drama, in the shape of exceptional things, had never stopped there." (1.1.5)
But while it doesn't seem like an exciting place to visit, it's a great place to live. Everyone knows everyone, the schools are decent, and people tend to be trusting and trustworthy. Families are stable. The residents love their town, which seems to be stuck in time. It's Lake Wobegon with less snow. Capote spends a lot of time describing Holcomb as a way of showing how the intrusion of chaos and evil destroyed the peace of the town and its residents.
The Corner
A third of the book is set on death row in the Kansas State Penitentiary. It's a claustrophobic environment, where "The Corner"—what the prisoners call the gallows room—awaits everyone. It's a strangely intimate environment, and Capote's description of the place can sometimes make us feel we're watching animals in a zoo going about their daily routines. After Dick and Perry's long trip around the country, it's a startling change of scenery to this controlled, confining environment. It represents a complete lack of escape, the end of the line.