Middletown, a study in contemporary American culture

Front matter

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HN 57 .L985 Lynd, Robert Ss.

Middletown a hi }

Foreword

On every hand we hear the admonition, “The study of society must be made objective.’ When one asks what is meant by this, he is referred to the natural and the biological sciences. But while the average man has little difficulty in comprehending what is meant by objective in the study of electricity, bees, etc., he finds himself at a loss to visualize the objects of study in a social inquiry. There is nothing strange in this, because the professionals in social science are still far from confident that they have their hands upon the social reality. True, many attempts have been made to find the basic factors in society, but these factors have been sought, for the most part, in the laboratories of biology and psychology, which is not unlike groping behind the scenes and digging under the stage, disregarding the comedies, tragedies, and dramas in plain sight. On the other hand, experience with social phenomena is bringing us nearer and nearer to a realization that we must deal directly with life itself, that the realities of social science are what people do. Seemingly in full realization of this, the authors of this book have patiently observed an American community and sketched out for us, in the large, the whole round of its activities. No one had ever subjected an American community to such a scrutiny; probably few would regard it as worth while. Rather have we been taught to set store by studies of the individual on one hand, and on the other, on the gathering of intimate statistics as to wages, living conditions, etc., for groups in our national population at large, as coal miners, teamsters, working girls, etc. The first of these seems to have been ordered upon the theory that maladjustments of individuals might be dealt with effectively if one knew a true sample of personal histories, and, in the main, studies of this kind have justified their making. The second seems to rest on the assumption that occupational groups present collective problems which can be dealt with on a national level, the maladjustments in this case arising in the failure of these groups to articulate properly with other groups. Here

Vv vi FOREWORD again insight has been achieved by statistical and analytical studies of wide scope. There remains, however, the obvious condition that the masses of individuals concerned live and function in communities, and that the picture will not be com-. plete until these communities also are made objects of study. Whatever else a social phenomenon is, it is a community affair. The communities that collectively are American are also objective, they are realities, and if, as we are told, we can never know society until it is subjected to objective methods, then here is one place to begin.

So this volume needs no defense; it is put forth for what it is, a pioneer attempt to deal with a sample American community after the manner of social anthropology. To most people, anthropology is a mass of curious information about savages, and this is so far true, in that most of its observations are on the less civilized. What is not realized is that anthropology deals with the communities of mankind, takes the community, or tribe, as the biological and social unit, and in its studies seeks to arrive at a perspective of society by comparing and contrasting these communities; and whatever may be the deficiencies of anthropology, it achieves a large measure of objectivity, because anthropologists are by the nature of the case “outsiders.” To study ourselves as through the eye of an outsider is the basic difficulty in social science, and may be in-- surmountable, but the authors of this volume have made a serious attempt, by approaching an American community as an anthropologist does a primitive tribe. It is in this that the contribution lies, an experiment not only in method, but in a new field, the social anthropology of contemporary life.

Finally, irrespective of the interests of social science, this volume is a contribution to history, not the usual kind of history, but the kind that is coming more and more into demand, a cross-section of the activities of a community today as projected from the background of yesterday, and the authors are to be commended for their foresight in revealing the Middletown of 1890 as a genesis of the Middletown of today, not as its contrast. Every reader of these pages will realize more clearly than before the changes each decade has brought and the imperfect way in which our communities, of which this is a sample, have met the new conditions under which they must function, and incomplete though this record is, its perusal

FOREWORD vil should enlighten the conscientious citizen and serve as a suggestion as to what information is needed by those who attempt to direct the affairs of an American town.

CLARK WISSLER.

American Museum of Natural History.

Contents

FOREWORD . I ¥ ; 3 ‘ é

PREFACE . , : : } ; : INTRODUCTION

NATURE OF THE INVESTIGATION i ;

Appendix

NOTE ON METHOD ‘ ls 4 H :

TABLES e e e se e e e se e

INDEX . i i i r i : i

225 251 202

315 334

344 371

413 435 458 471

505 SII oon

Preface

Behind the tightly filed record sheets, schedules, questionnaires, tables, and maps from which this report has been assembled lie days and nights of patient observation, interviewing, reading old records, and checking and re-checking data on the part of the staff of field assistants:

Dr. Faith Moors Williams Miss Dorothea Davis Miss Frances Flournoy

Their tireless cooperation and ready ingenuity made the study possible. Dr. Williams, in particular, contributed to the planning of the study as it developed and supervised a large part of the statistical handling of the data as well as cooperating in the actual field work. She was directly responsible for collecting the data on cost of living and on the income of working class families.

No one can be more aware than the writers of the shortcomings of the report—the lack of adequate data at certain points and frequent unevenness of method. Furthermore, the field work was completed in 1925; the point of view of the investigators has developed during the subsequent years, and the treatment would be at many points more adequate were the investigation to be undertaken now.

Invaluable counsel has been received from Professor Clark Wissler, Professor L. C. Marshall, Professor William F. Ogburn, Mr. Lawrence K. Frank, Dr. Joseph Chassell, and Dr. Gardner Murphy. None of the inadequacies of the study, however, lies at their door.

To the Institute of Social and Religious Research, which financed the investigation, and to its technical staff, which has been generous in criticism and suggestion, the investigation owes its support.

A final acknowledgment should be made to the patient subject of this picture, the people of Middletown, without whose generous friendship the marrow of the study would be lacking.

Ry Ps SENT New York, June, 1928

Fy : ha i y v

Chapter I NATURE OF THE INVESTIGATION

The aim of the field investigation recorded in the following pages was to study synchronously the interwoven trends that - are the life of a small American city. A typical city, strictly speaking, does not exist, but the city studied was selected as having many features common to a wide group of communities. Neither field work nor report has attempted to prove any thesis ; the aim has been, rather, to record observed phenomena, thereby raising questions and suggesting possible fresh points of departure in the study of group behavior.

The stubborn resistance which “social problems” offer may be related in part to the common habit of piecemeal attack upon them. Students of human behavior are recognizing increasingly, however, that “the different aspects of civilization interlock and intertwine, presenting—in a word—a continuum.” * The present investigation, accordingly, set out to approach the life of the people in the city selected as a unit complex of interwoven trends of behavior.

Two major difficulties present themselves at the outset of such a total-situation study of a contemporary civilization: first, the danger, never wholly avoidable, of not being completely objective in viewing a culture in which one’s life is imbedded, of falling into the old error of starting out, despite oneself, with emotionally weighted presuppositions and consequently failing ever to get outside the field one set out so bravely to objectify and study; and, second, granted that no one phase of living can be adequately understood without a study of all the rest, how is one to set about the investigation of anything as multifarious as the gross-total thing that is Schenectady, Akron, Dallas, or Keokuk?

A clew to the securing both of the maximum objectivity and of some kind of orderly procedure in such a maze may be found in the approach of the cultural anthropologist. There are, after

1A. A. Goldenweiser, Early Civilization (New York; Knopf, 1919), p. 31. 3 all, despite infinite variations in detail, not so many major kinds of things that people do. Whether in an Arunta village in Central Australia or in our own seemingly intricate institutional life of corporations, dividends, coming-out parties, prayer meetings, freshmen, and Congress, human behavior appears to consist in variations upon a few major lines of activity: getting the material necessities for food, clothing, shelter; mating; initiating the young into the group habits of thought and behavior; and so on. This study, accordingly, proceeds on the assumption that all the things people do in this American city may be viewed as falling under one or another of the following six main-trunk activities:

Getting a living.

Making a home.

Training the young.

Using leisure in various forms of play, art, and so on. Engaging in religious practices.

Engaging in community activities.

This particular grouping of activities is used with no idea of its exclusive merit but simply as a methodological expedient.” By viewing the institutional life of this city as simply the form which human behavior under this particular set of conditions has come to assume, it is hoped that the study has been lifted on to an impersonal plane that will save it from the otherwise inevitable charge at certain points of seeming to deal in personalities or to criticize the local life. For, after all, having one’s accustomed ways scrutinized by an outsider may be disconcerting at best. Like Aunt Polly in Donald Ogden Stewart’s Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind, many of us are prone to view the process of evolution as the ascent from the nasty amoeba to Uncle Frederick triumphantly standing at the top of the long and tortuous course in a Prince Albert with one gloved hand resting upon the First National Bank and the other upon

2W. H.R. Rivers in his Social Organization (New York; Knopf, 1924) sets forth a sixfold classification of social groupings identical with the six types of activity employed here. Clark Wissler presents a ninefold culture scheme, in Man and Culture (New York; Crowell, 1923), Chs. V and XII. Frederick J. Teggart criticizes Wissler’s use of a universal culture pattern, but himself implicitly recognizes certain activities as common to men everywhere, in Theory of History (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1925), p. I7I.

NATURE OF THE INVESTIGATION 5 the Presbyterian church. To many of us who might be quite willing to discuss dispassionately the quaintly patterned ways of behaving that make up the customs of uncivilized peoples, it is distinctly distasteful to turn with equal candor to the life of which we are a local ornament. Yet nothing can be more enlightening than to gain precisely that degree of objectivity and perspective with which we view “savage” peoples. Even though such a venture in contemporary anthropology may be somewhat hazy and distorted, the very trial may yield a degree of detachment indispensable for clearer vision.

It is a commonplace to say that an outstanding characteristic of the ways of living of any people at any given time is that they are in process of change, the rate and direction of change depending upon proximity to strong centers of cultural diffusion, the appearance of new inventions, migration, and other factors which alter the process. We are coming to realize, moreover, that we today are probably living in one of the eras of greatest rapidity of change in the history of human institutions. New tools and techniques are being developed with stupendous celerity, while in the wake of these technical developments increasingly frequent and strong culture waves sweep over us from without, drenching us with the material and non-material habits of other centers. In the face of such a situation it would be a serious defect to omit this developmental aspect from a study of contemporary life.®

The further device has, therefore, been adopted in this investigation, wherever the data available permitted, of using as a groundwork for the observed behavior of today the reconstructed and in so far as possible equally objectively observed behavior of 1890. The year 1890 was selected as the base-line against which to project the culture of today because of greater availability of data from that year onward and because not until the end of 1886 was natural gas struck in the city under study and the boom begun which was to transform the placid county-seat during the nineties into a manufacturing city. This narrow strip of thirty-five years comprehends for hundreds of

3 Cf. Rivers’ closing sentence in The History of Melanesian Society (Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 1914) : “It is because we can only hope to understand the present of any society through a knowledge of its past that such historical studies as those of which this book is an example are necessary steps toward the construction of a science of social psychology.”

American communities the industrial revolution that has descended upon villages and towns, metamorphosing them into a thing of Rotary Clubs, central trade councils, and Chamber of Commerce contests for “bigger and better’ cities.

Had time and available funds permitted, it would obviously have been desirable to plot more points in observed trends between 1890 and the present. But the procedure followed enables us to view the city of today against the background of the city of a generation ago out of which it has grown and by which it is conditioned, to see the present situation as the most recent point in a moving trend.

To sum up, then: the following pages aim to present a dynamic, functional * study of the contemporary life of this specific American community in the light of the trends of changing behavior observable in it during the last thirty-five years.

So comprehensive an approach necessarily involves the use of data of widely varying degrees of overtness and statistical adequacy. Some types of behavior in the city studied lie open to observation over the whole period since 1890; in other cases only slight wisps of evidence are obtainable. Much folk talk, for instance—the rattle of conversation that goes on around a luncheon table, on street corners, or while waiting for a basket ball game to commence—is here presented, not because it offers scientifically valid evidence, but because it affords indispensable insights into the moods and habits of thought of the city. In the attempt to combine these various types of data into a total-situation picture, omissions and faults in proportion will appear. But two saving facts must be borne in mind: no effort is being made to prove any thesis with the data presented, and every effort is made throughout to warn where the ice is thin.

Since the field work aimed at the integration of diverse regions of behavior rather than at the discovery of new material in a narrowly isolated field, it will be easy to say of much of the specific data presented, ““We knew that already.’’ Underlying the study, however, is the assumption that by the presentation of these phenomena, familiar though some of them may be, in their inter-relatedness in a specific situation, fresh light may be thrown upon old problems and so give rise to further. investigation.

4“Function” as here used denotes a major life-activity or something contributing to the performance of a major life-activity.

Chapter II THE CITY SELECTED

The city will be called Middletown. A community as small as thirty-odd thousand affords at best about as much privacy as Irvin Cobb’s celebrated goldfish enjoyed, and it has not seemed desirable to increase this high visibility in the discussion of local conditions by singling out the city by its actual name.

There were no ulterior motives in the selection of Middletown. It was not consulted about the project, and no organization or person in the city contributed anything to the cost of the investigation. Two main considerations guided the selection of a location for the study: (1) that the city be as representative as possible of contemporary American life, and (2) that it be at the same time compact and homogeneous enough to be manageable in such a total-situation study.

In line with the first of these considerations the following characteristics were considered desirable: (1) A temperate climate.* (2) A sufficiently rapid rate of growth to insure the presence of a plentiful assortment of the growing pains accompanying contemporary social change. (3) An industrial culture with modern high-speed machine production. (4) The absence of dominance of the city’s industry by a single plant, i.e., not a one-industry town. (5) A substantial local artistic life to balance its industrial activity; also a largely self-contained artistic life, e.g., not that of a college town in which the college imports the community’s music and lectures. (6) The absence of any outstanding peculiarities or acute local problems which would mark it off from the mid-channel sort of American community. After further consideration, a seventh qualification was added: the city should, if possible, be in that common-denominator of

1 The relation of climate to the elaborate equilibrium of activities that ~ make up living is suggested by the late James J. Hill’s motto to which he is said absolutely to have adhered: “You can’t interest me in any proposition in any place where it doesn’t snow,” or, more picturesquely, “No man on whom the snow does not fall ever amounts to a tinker’s dam.” (Quoted in J. Russell Smith’s North America, New York; Harcourt. Brace and Company, 1925, p. 8.) 7

America, the Middle West.? Two streams of colonists met in this middle region of the United States: “The Yankees from New England and New York came by way of the Erie Canal into northern Ohio. . . . The southern stream of colonists, having passed through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, went down the Ohio River.” * With the first of these came also a foreign-born stock, largely from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany.

In order to secure a certain amount of compactness and homogeneity, the following characteristics were sought: (1) A city of the 25,000-50,000 group. This meant selection from among a possible 143 cities, according to the 1920 Census. A city of this size, it was felt, would be large enough to have put on long trousers and to take itself seriously, and yet small enough to be studied from many aspects as a unit. (2) A city as nearly self-contained as is possible in this era of rapid and pervasive inter-communication, not a satellite city. (3) A small Negro and foreign-born population. In a difficult study of this sort it seemed a distinct advantage to deal with a homogeneous, native-born population, even though such a population is unusual in an American industrial city. Thus, instead of being forced to handle two major variables, racial change and cultural change, the field staff was enabled to concentrate upon cultural change. The study thus became one of the interplay of a relatively constant native American stock and its changing environment. As such it may possibly afford a base-line group against which the process of social change in the type of community that includes different racial backgrounds may be studied by future workers.

Middletown, selected in the light of these considerations from a number of cities visited, is in the East-North-Central group of states that includes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The mean annual pea is 50.8° F. The highest recorded temperature is 102° F. in July and the lowest

2“The ‘Middle West,’ the prairie country, has been the center of active social philanthropies and political progressivism. It has formed the solid element in our diffuse national life and heterogeneous populations. . vee has been the middle in every sense of the word and in every movement. Like every mean, it has held things together and given unity and stability of movement.” John Dewey, “The American Intellectual Frontier’ (The New Republic, May 10, 1922).

3 Smith, op. cit., pp. 206-7.

THE CITY SELECTED 9

—24° F. in January, but such extremes are ordinarily of short duration, and weather below zero is extremely rare. The city was in 1885 an agricultural county-seat of some 6,000 persons ; by 1890 the population had passed 11,000, and in 1920 it had topped 35,000. This growth has accompanied its evolution into an aggressive industrial city. There is no single controlling industrial plant; three plants on June 30, 1923, had between 1,000 and 2,000 on the payroll, and eight others from 300 to 1,000; glass, metal, and automobile industries predominate. The census of 1890 showed slightly less than 5 per cent. of the city’s population to be foreign-born * and less than 4 per cent. Negroes, as against approximately 2 per cent. foreign-born in 1920 and nearly 6 per cent. Negroes; over 81 per cent. of the population in 1890 and nearly 85 per cent. in 1920 was native white of native parentage. In the main this study confines itself to the white population and more particularly to the native whites, who compose 92 per cent. of the total population.

The nearest big city, a city under 350,000, is sixty miles away, nearly a two-hour trip by train, with no through hardsurface road for motoring at the time the study was made. It is a long half-day train trip to a larger city. Since the eighties Middletown has been known all over the state as “a good music town.” Its civic and women’s clubs are strong, and practically none of the local artistic life was in 1924 in any way traceable to the, until then, weak normal school on the outskirts.

The very middle-of-the-road quality about Middletown would have made it unsuitable for a different kind of investigation. Had this study sought simply to observe the institution of the home under extreme urban conditions, the recreational life of industrial workers, or any one of dozens of other special “social problems,” a far more spectacular city than Middletown might readily have been found. But although it was its characteristic rather than its exceptional features which led to the selection of Middletown, no claim is made that it is a “typical” city, and the findings of this study can, naturally, only with caution be applied to other cities or to American life in general.

4The census of 1890 shows 62.1 per cent. of the foreign-born in the state to have been of German-speaking stock and 24.5 British and Irish. Belgian glass workers were prominent among Middletown’s foreign-born population in the nineties.

Chapter III

Two major experiences in Middletown antedate 1890, the date taken as the horizon of this study: the pioneer life of the earlier part of the century, and the gas boom of the end of the eighties which ushered in Middletown’s industrial revolution. Both are within the memory of men who still walk the streets of the city.

The first permanent settlement in this county occurred in 1820, and county government was granted in 1827. The memory of one of the oldest citizens, a leading local physician throughout the nineties, reaches back to the eighteen-forties. Within the lifetime of this one man local transportation has changed from virtually the “hoof and sail” methods in use in the time of Homer; grain has ceased to be cut in the state by thrusting the sickle into the ripened grain as in the days of Ruth and threshing done by trampling out by horses on the threshingfloor or by flail; getting a living and making a home have ceased to be conducted under one roof by the majority of the American people; education has ceased to be a luxury accessible only to the few; in his own field of medicine the X-ray, anaesthetics, asepsis, and other developments have tended to make the healing art a science; electricity, the telephone, telegraph, and radio have appeared; and the theory of evolution has shaken the theological cosmogony that had reigned for centuries.*

This local physician whose lifetime so nearly spans that of

1 That this stupendous change within a single lifetime was a phenomenon of the whole country, not merely of a backwoods section, is indicated by the recollections of a man born a year earlier than this physician, under the shadow of Boston State House: Henry Adams writes, “. . . on looking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole, the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year 1... —in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Education of Henry Adams (Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 53.

I0

Middletown, the tenth of a family of eleven, was named, with the characteristic political fervor of the time, General William Harrison K ” The log farmhouse of his father was ceiled inside without plaster, the walls bare save for three prized pictures of Washington, Jackson, and Clay. All meals were cooked before the great kitchen fireplace, corn pones and “‘cracklings”’ and bread being baked in the glare of a large curved reflector set before the open fire. At night the rooms were lighted by the open fire and by tallow dips; there was great excitement later when the first candle mold appeared in the neighborhood. Standard time was unknown; few owned watches, and sun time was good enough during the day, while early and late candle lighting served to distinguish the periods at night. When the fire went out on the family hearth the boy ran to a neighbor’s to bring home fire between two boards; it was not until later that the first box of little sticks tipped with sulphur startled the neighborhood.

The homely wisdom of pioneer life prescribed that children be passed through a hole in the trunk of a hollow tree to cure “short growth’; hogs must be slaughtered at certain times of the moon or the bacon would shrink; babies must be weaned at certain times of the zodiac; the ‘“‘madstone,” “‘a small bone from the heart of a deer,” was a valuable antidote for hydrophobia or snake-bite; certain persons “blew the fire out of a burn,” arrested hemorrhage or cured erysipelas by uttering mysterious charms; a pan of water under the bed was used to check night sweats; bleeding was the sovereign remedy for fits, loss of consciousness, fever, and many other ills; and “in eruptive fevers, especially measles, where the eruption was delayed, a tea made of sheep’s dung, popularly known as ‘nanny tea,’ was a household remedy.”

Social calls were unknown, but all-day visits were the rule, a family going to visit either by horseback, the children seated behind the grown-ups, or in chairs set in the springless farm

2The boy grew up not in the county in which Middletown is situated but in a near-by county. His boyhood environment described here was not that of the rude pioneer villages of the state but of the open country; but the facts that life in the diminutive Middletown of 1840 did not differ markedly in fundamentals from that of the open country around it and that some people in Middletown today grew up under open country conditions not unlike those described are the reasons for the inclusion of this material here.

wagon. Social intercourse performed a highly important service; there were no daily papers in the region, and much news traveled by word of mouth. Nobody came to the home around mealtime who was not urged to take his place at the table —preachers being particularly welcome. Men would talk together for hours on the Providential portent of the great Comet of 1843, or of the time ten years before when the “stars fell.” Men and women went miles and spent days in order to hear champions argue disputed political or religious points. People “got religion” and were “awakened to sin” at camp meetings under the vivid exhortation of baptizing preachers. The “Word” wove its influence closely about everyday acts.

Forty years later, in 1885, before gas and wealth spouted from the earth, bringing in their wake a helter-skelter industrial development, Middletown, a placid county-seat of some 6,000 souls, still retained some of the simplicity of this early pioneer life. “On the streets . . . on fair days lawyers, doctors, the officials of the county courts, and the merchants walked about in their shirt sleeves. The house painter went along with his ladder on his shoulder. In the stillness there could be heard the hammers of the carpenters building a new house for the son of a merchant who had married the daughter of a blacksmith.”’ * Men in their prime who had grown up under pioneer conditions now controlled the affairs of Middletown. They were occupied with such momentous matters as offering “$200 for the scalp or body of any person in the city caught setting fire to the property of another,’ or passing regulations in response to complaints about neighborhood cows running through the streets and destroying lawns, or with badly bungling the job of laying the first town sewer.