Place
Focus on the local as a remedy for civilizational collapse is fraught with complications
It’s a common refrain. It has been for longer than we might initially think, but the current airing it’s getting has a particular vigor.
The basic idea certainly sounds inviting: take care of the people you actually know, foster the civic bonds that so impressed Alexis deToqueville, come together with fellow community members to arrive democratically at decisions on how to enhance one’s area’s quality of life.
As an amelioration of what is obvious to anyone minimally astute - that is, the crumbling of a Western civilization built up over millennia - its effectiveness is not a cut-and-dried matter, however.
This is true for a couple of reasons. The forces causing that crumbling have inexorably bled into the local level. More fundamentally, the white-picket-fence patina that’s employed to convey localism’s idyllic appeal doesn’t tell the whole story of what life in small towns and small cities is really like.
It’s true that unless citizens of a place give attention to the place’s livability, that livability declines. And since not everyone is going to have the same viewpoint about how to proceed with a given aspect of preserving that livability, the local level of civic life provides an excellent training ground for discovering how to democratically come to decisions.
That’s what stirs us when we look at Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting “Freedom of Speech”:
Freedom of Speech depicts a scene of a local town meeting in which Jim Edgerton, the lone dissenter to the town selectmen's announced plans to build a new school, as the old one had burned down,[7] was accorded the floor as a matter of protocol.[8] Once he envisioned the scene to depict freedom of speech, Rockwell decided to use his Vermont neighbors as models for a Four Freedoms series.[9] The blue-collar speaker wears a plaid shirt and suede jacket, with dirty hands and a darker complexion than others in attendance.[10] The other attendees are wearing white shirts, ties and jackets.[11]Edgerton's youth and workmanlike hands are fashioned with a worn and stained jacket, while the other attendees appear to be older and more neatly and formally dressed. He is shown "standing tall, his mouth open, his shining eyes transfixed, he speaks his mind, untrammeled and unafraid." Edgerton is depicted in a way that resembles Abraham Lincoln.[4] According to Bruce Cole of The Wall Street Journal, the closest figure in the painting is revealing a subject of the meeting as "a discussion of the town's annual report".[4] According to John Updike, the work is painted without any painterly brushwork.[12] According to Robert Scholes, the work shows audience members in rapt attention with admiration of the speaker.[13]
Andrew Donaldson, writing at the Fayette [West Virginia] Tribune, makes a recent, consideration-worthy argument for local focus:
It is inarguable that politics in America are nationalized. The rise of mass media and network news, followed by the smartphone revolution and social media explosion, was inevitably going to lead to interconnectivity. News media needing the biggest audience possible naturally focuses on issues of wide-spread importance to the most people possible. The downside to this change is those national headlines and narratives take up bandwidth that needs to be spent locally.
While not as “television sexy” or internet-trendy as whatever wacky thing Washington is up to on any given day, local government still matters. A lot. City councils and county commissions make decisions that directly affect many aspects of life for the citizens they are charged with overseeing.
At the last census, there are over 89,000 government units functioning in the United States today, doing the vital work that keeps communities going. Though virtually all the work of these local governments are public record, the pincer movement of a decline in local reporting and the nationalization of news media means far too many folks are unaware what the lowest levels of government are supposed to do, are doing, or should be doing right where they live.
The audience that is America seemingly focuses on yelling at their screens about things far away while citizen America neglects what’s going on in their own communities.
But there are those vital folks who do keep the wide base of America’s representative government going. Not just those who run for and hold office, but also the employees, staff, and regular citizens who participate, cajole, and support local government. While meetings of city councils and county commissions are full of routine matters, lots of government and legal jargon, and unevenly applied Robert’s Rules of Order, the occasional hot-button issue does fill up seats with people wanting to be heard.
I’d just say in response that community life isn’t static. In fact, the eras one can discern by looking at a place’s history really aren’t very long. The attempts by citizens of a given locale to maintain and build on a current level of quality of life have to contend with this.
Recall a point I made in the most recent post here at Precipice in the course of pointing out the inconsistency of the term “common-good capitalism”:
Consider the “common-good capitalism” that has become a component of the populist-nationalist version of what it means to be right of center. Not only does it have its origins on the left - “greedy corporations took our jobs offshore to maximize profits” - but it assumes that the days of small-to-midsize communities’ economic vitality hinging on one or two big industrial concerns were some kind of status quo. They were not. The town factory driving development and providing security was a model that only had a run of a few decades.
Speaking of a place’s history, those small-to-midsize communities no longer evolve organically. They have formulas by which they now compete with each other for basic viability. They all have to have economic development functions to court new business concerns - often from out of town, or even from another country - that might be able to take up some of the slack for those shuttered town factories. It’s pretty much imperative that they implement bike trails, fieldhouses for fostering sports tourism, and riverfront districts, if they’re geographically able. And, yes, they have to have human rights ordinances. More on that last feature in a bit.
While some do a commendable job of going about this while keeping a cookie-cutter style to a minimum, they all have that stretch by the interstate exit where fast-food chain establishments and big-box stores serve as the welcome sign to those stopping off.
Before I get further into the modern situation these communities face, let’s look at the fact that the model of small-town life we wistfully hearken back to had its detractors even in its heyday.
A 1927 study done by a husband-and-wife team of sociologists of Muncie, Indiana paints an interesting picture. Some of its findings look quaint to us, but some are clearly familiar:
Middletown: A Study in American Culture was primarily a look at changes in the white population of a typical American city between 1890 and 1925, a period of great economic change. The Lynds used the "approach of the cultural anthropologist" (see field research and social anthropology), existing documents, statistics, old newspapers, interviews, and surveys to accomplish this task. The stated goal of the study was to describe this small urban center as a unit which consists of "interwoven trends of behavior".[3] Or put in more detail, "to present a dynamic, functional study of the contemporary life of this specific American community in the light of trends of changing behavior observable in it during the last thirty-five years."[4] The book is written in an entirely descriptive tone, treating the white citizens of Middletown in much the same way as an anthropologist from an industrialized nation might describe a non-industrial culture.
Following anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers' classic Social Organization, the Lynds write that the study proceeded "under 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:"[5]
"Getting a living"[5]
"Making a home"[5]
"Training the young"[5]
"Using leisure in various forms of play, art, and so on"[5]
"Engaging in religious practices"[5]
"Engaging in community activities"[5]
Working
In the 1920s, the Lynds found a "division into the working class and business class that constitutes the outstanding cleavage in Middletown." They state:
The mere fact of being born upon one or the other side of the watershed roughly formed by these two groups is the most significant single cultural factor tending to influence what one does all day long throughout one's life; whom one marries; when one gets up in the morning; whether one belongs to the Holy Roller or Presbyterian church; or drives a Ford or a Buick ...[6]
The study found that at least 70 percent of the population belonged to the working class.[7] However, labor unions had been driven out of town because the city's elite saw them as anti-capitalist. Because of this, unemployment was seen among residents as an individual, not a social, problem.
The city government was run by the "business class", a conservative group of individuals in high-income professions. For example, this group threw its support behind Calvin Coolidge's administration.
Home and family
Eighty-six percent of the residents lived in at least a nuclear family arrangement. Because of innovations such as mortgages, even working-class families were able to own their own homes. Home ownership is considered the mark of a "respectable" family.
Compared to the 19th century, family sizes were smaller, divorce rates were up. However, women still, by and large, worked as housewives. Having children is considered a "moral obligation" of all couples. However, at the age of six, the socialization of these children is taken over by secondary institutions such as schools. Also, taboos against things such as dating have been reduced.
Families tend not to spend as much time together as before. Also, new technology such as supermarkets, refrigeration, and washing machines have contributed to a downswing in traditional skills such as cooking and food preservation.
Youth
Almost a third of all children at the time of the study planned to attend college. High school has become the hub of adolescent life, both social and otherwise. There has been a rise in vocational studies, strongly supported by the community. This is a major demographic shift from the 19th century, when few youth received any formal education.
While the community claims to value education, they tend to disdain academic learning. Teachers are tolerated but not welcomed into the civic life and governance of the city.
Leisure time
Although new technology has created more leisure time for all people, most of this new time is passed in "passive" (or nonconstructive) recreation.
The introduction of the radio and automobile are considered the largest changes. Listening to radio shows and taking drives are now the most popular leisure activities. Many working-class families formerly never strayed more than a few miles from town; with the automobile, they are able to take vacations across the United States.
With the rise of these activities, interest in such institutions as book discussion groups (and reading in general), public lectures, and the fine arts is in sharp decline. The introduction of movies has created another "passive leisure activity", but the most popular films concentrate on adventure and romance, while more serious topics are less popular.
About two-thirds of Middletown families now own cars. Owning a car, and the prestige it brings, is considered so important that some working-class families are willing to bypass necessities such as food and clothing to keep up with payments. A person's car indicates their social status, and the most "popular" teens own cars, much to the chagrin of local community leaders (one local preacher referred to the automobile as a "house of prostitution on wheels").
Overall, due to this new technology, community and family ties are breaking down. Friendship between neighbors and church attendance are down. However, more structured community organizations, such as the Rotary Club, are growing.
Religious activities
Middletown contained 42 churches, representing 28 denominations.[8] The community as a whole has a strong Protestant tendency. A person's denomination is indicative of one's social status: the Methodist church is considered the most prestigious in these terms.
However, strong religious beliefs (i.e., ideas about heaven and hell) are dying out. While the vast majority of citizens profess a belief in God, they are increasingly cynical about organized religion. Also, many of the clergy tend to be politically progressive, and as such, are not welcomed into the city's governance.
The more fundamentalist Christian churches tend to be more political and down-to-earth in their approach to life and in sermons. This is in contrast to the mainline Protestant denominations, which tend to be more aloof and other-worldly. Overall, the city is becoming more secular. Youth are less inclined to attend church, but more likely to be involved with the YMCA and YWCA.
Government and community
The city's "business class" – and therefore most powerful class – is entirely Republican. Voter turnout, however, is down (46 percent in 1924), even considering the recent passage of women's suffrage.
The main reason for this appears to be increased cynicism towards politics, and politicians in general (politicians are considered by many to be no better than crooks). Moreover, the more skilled legal minds in town tend to work in the private sector, not the public sector.
Despite the good economic environment, there is always a small group of homeless. These people are considered the responsibility of churches and organizations such as the Salvation Army – charity is generally frowned upon.
Newspapers serve as the main medium of communication in town, both the morning and evening editions. Due to recent innovations such as the Associated Press, the papers are able to carry more news. Also, journalism tends to be more "objective", in contrast with the highly partisan papers of a few decades earlier.
Overall the city is highly, but invisibly, segregated. Although the Ku Klux Klan was recently kicked out of town, whites and blacks still live separately. However, the largest divide consists of social class lines. Businessmen, in particular, are required to be highly conformist in their political and social views.
We can see that contemporary heartland America is experiencing the acceleration of a lot of trends already in place at the time. Still, institutions - churches, the local newspaper, Rotary Club - were sufficiently strong to give the populace the impression of permanent stability.
Five years earlier, in 1922, novelist Sinclair Lewis had seen this lay of the land and skewered it mercilessly in his book Babbitt. The protagonist is a member of the Lynds’ business class. Babbitt life has a lot of aspects Americans of Boomer age and older will find recognizable: trying to dissuade his college-age daughter from embracing socialism, getting elected as an officer in the Booster Club (a fictionalized version of the Rotary Club), his preoccupation with his white-collar work. In the course of the plot’s unfoldment, Lewis puts Babbitt through some experiences that cause him to rebel against the life he’s fashioned for himself (not unlike Kevin Spacey’s character in the far more recent American Beauty). Alas, Babbitt has occasion to further reassess his life’s pros and cons and makes his peace with it.
Lewis set in motion a denigration of pillar-of-the-community life that saw marked acceleration when the countercultural impulse go underway a few decades later.
One of my favorite books of this century so far is Diana West’s 2007 Death of the Grownup: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization. It actually builds on a subject broached a few years earlier by Joseph Epstein in a piece in the now-defunct Weekly Standard entitled “The Perpetual Adolescent.” I recommend both to anyone interested in investigating that matter, but the relevant passage in West’s book has to do with early-twentieth century pooh-poohing of small-community middle-class life:
Lampooned . . . by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken, and G.K. Chesterton, the Rotary Club was definitively laid to rest as corny beyond redemption by Sinclair Lewis. . . . George Babbitt, Rotarian, remains the indelible face of small-town commerce small-town probity, and small-town prejudice: in short, the face of every social institution that artsy-woolly, misfitting freethinkers have always rebelled against . . .
Everything I’ve mentioned so far, from shoring up of stability via civic institutions to the array of church denominations characterizing the landscape to the economic-development push, is borne out by the way the community in which I grew up has evolved.
Its first spurt of growth was due to nineteenth-century industrial activity - grain milling, leather tanning - that gave rise to the first wave of prominent families. In the early twentieth century, a second wave, which included some truly visionary inventors and industrial-management pioneers, made it the home of several companies with nationally recognized names, one of which is still headquartered here, even though it’s very much multinational and has Fortune 200 status.
I grew up on a lake situated in the hills about fifteen miles west of town. It was developed in 1953 - by one of those industrial visionaries, who saw residential bodies of water as quality-of-life enhancements - and today is one of the area’s most prestigious neighborhoods.
The 1960s, my formative years, saw a lot of changes there. As the decade began, most families just had relatively undeveloped lots, a dock and some kind of fishing boat and motorboat. The fathers generally were either entrepreneurs, running small factories that supplied parts to the large manufacturing concerns, or downtown retail establishments, or white-collar employees of the large concerns: design engineers, production schedulers, etc. People began erecting domiciles, but they were generally humble: A-frames, prefab cottages and the like. Soon a yacht club was formed for sailing enthusiasts, which did much to strengthen the lake’s social cohesion. The younger generation - mine - took to water-skiing, and there was some one-upmanship regarding the acquisition of state-of-the-art slalom skis, as well as gloves, ropes and other accessories.
The middle of that decade started to make plain a kind of sorting-out process. With regard to the hair arguments that the British Invasion made unavoidable in American households, some sets of parents made clear, by various means, that the whole bangs-and-hair-over-the-ears look for the families’ boys wasn’t going to fly. Some tried mightily to make that decree stick, but weren't able to, for various reasons. The illustrative moment in our own household came one Sunday morning when the family was all dressed up to go to town for church, and my father tried to make me wear some kind of goop on my lengthening hair, and I was having none of it. I’ll carry the image of him leaning over the kitchen sink, crying and bellowing “I’m not in charge anymore!” to the end of my days.
The older Boomers started going off to college. They’d return for holiday breaks and summers with books and records that opened the eyes of younger siblings in a lot of cases to other ways of considering how to embark on a life trajectory. The content of area radio programming also went far to have this influence.
As the end of the decade approached, there were the instances of families’ teens inviting town friends out, and the groups of friends including blacks. This led to what’s-he-doing-here-I-want-him-gone type confrontations that, like those about hair, often didn’t end with parental victory.
Then came the 1970s. By the time we younger Boomers were following our brothers and sisters to higher-education campuses, all bets were off. Our parents knew we were taking the family boats for a spin was to smoke weed and fool around with our sweethearts.
Life on this lake certainly wasn’t representative of all the changes going on in small city, but it was an important component. There were also changes such as the depletion of the rolls of mainline Protestant congregations, the increasing globalization of the big companies in town, and increasing attention to ways to make the area attractive to outsiders who might consider it as a place to live, work or locate a business.
The city is now demographically diverse to the degree that it gets national attention for that. Its downtown regularly hosts festivals of many kinds - including, for the past several years, a pride festival - and it boasts two symphony orchestras and several nice locally owned downtown restaurants.
But the established families who trace their roots back to those first two waves of industrialization, as well as the farms which launched the area’s growth, still hold great sway. They are well represented at the local country club and chamber of commerce.
The aforementioned lake doesn’t look much like it did sixty years ago. The original A-frames and prefab cottages have been replaced with McMansions that occupy most of the lots on which they’re situated.
Still, in some cases, the second and even third generations of the original families have settled there, and it has developed its own community ethos, strongly informed by lore and custom.
What is poignant about indulgences of nostalgia on the lake, and in the city more generally, is that the way of life people would like to believe still exists has been permanently changed by phenomena that have appeared on the national scene. Just like everywhere else, not only have mainline church’s pews emptied out, but fewer people attend church generally. Homelessness, which is obviously a result of the easy availability of hard, addictive drugs, is a significant problem. School board meetings have gotten confrontational as issues such as what curriculum should have to say about race and sexuality have surfaced. The big employers have all gone all in regarding ESG and DEI.
There is no substitute for devoting some degree of attention to what is going on where one lives. After all, if one doesn’t attend to it, those who do may impose policies and developments not to one’s liking.
But fault lines beneath the landscape have shifted. Conversations in any arena of community life now have to be delicately handled, as there is no consensus regarding the quality of that life.
So, by all means, citizenship should begin where one’s feet are planted, but it must be informed by an understanding of where that locale is situated - not geographically, but socioculturally.
Wistfulness will be of no help as we try to make Main Street a pleasant place for all.