Small-Town America

Finding Community, Shaping the Future

Robert Wuthnow

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400846498
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rural Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A revealing examination of small-town life More than thirty million Americans live in small, out-of-the-way places. Many of them could have joined the vast majority of Americans who live in cities and suburbs. They could live closer to more lucrative careers and convenient shopping, a wider range of educational opportunities, and more robust health care. But they have opted to live differently.In Small-Town America, we meet factory workers, shop owners, retirees, teachers, clergy, and mayors—residents who show neighborliness in small ways, but who also worry about everything from school closings and their children's futures to the ups and downs of the local economy. Drawing on more than seven hundred in-depth interviews in hundreds of towns across America and three decades of census data, Robert Wuthnow shows the fragility of community in small towns. He covers a host of topics, including the symbols and rituals of small-town life, the roles of formal and informal leaders, the social role of religious congregations, the perception of moral and economic decline, and the myriad ways residents in small towns make sense of their own lives. Wuthnow also tackles difficult issues such as class and race, abortion, homosexuality, and substance abuse. Small-Town America paints a rich panorama of individuals who reside in small communities, finding that, for many people, living in a small town is an important part of self-identity.

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Introduction

IMAGINE LIVING IN A COMMUNITY WITH NO TRAIN, no light-rail service, no buses, and in fact no public transportation of any kind. Not even a taxi. The nearest airport is two hundred miles away. Imagine living in a town with only one small grocery store where prices are high and fresh produce is seldom fresh. The selection of items there is small. The best local alternative to home cooking is a high-calorie meal at a fast-food franchise. A nice sit-down restaurant is forty miles away. That is also the distance to the nearest Walmart and shopping mall. If you are a woman with a college degree, your best options for employment are the public school, the bank, a government office, or the nursing home. Whether you are a woman or man, your salary is 30 to 40 percent lower than if you lived in a city. Your children are likely to do reasonably well in high school, play sports, perhaps graduate with honors, and go to college, but they will not have had advanced placement classes and will find adjusting to a large state college campus as confusing as it may be exhilarating. They are unlikely ever to return as permanent residents of your community. As you grow older, they will come to visit you once or twice a year. You are happy to have a doctor and the nursing home nearby. The doctor is a general practitioner. The nearest specialists are an hour’s drive. If you suffer a heart attack and call 911, the county dispatcher will phone a volunteer, who will then drive to the fire station where the emergency vehicle is parked. If you survive, a helicopter will fly in and take you to a hospital a hundred miles away.

Put this way, it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to live in a small town. Yet at least thirty million Americans do reside in these small, out-of-the-way places. Many of them could have chosen to live elsewhere. They could have joined the vast majority of Americans who live in cities and suburbs. They could perhaps be closer to better-paying jobs, convenient shopping, a wider range of educational opportunities, and specialized health care. Rich or poor, they would then be within minutes of shopping malls, restaurants, and hospitals. They could decide to live as anonymously as they might want to, pick and choose among a wide variety of friends, and enjoy mingling with people of vastly diverse backgrounds. There would be chances to explore specialized employment, entertainment, and leisure interests. But they have opted to live differently.

Why? Is it only because of where they were raised? Did they originate in small places and simply find themselves left behind as others moved on? Are their options limited because of family obligations? By the kind of work they do? Are they stuck in rural America because they lack education? Or have they made a considered decision to reject what they regard as distasteful about cities and suburbs? Have they found local amenities that make up for the lack of better jobs as well as more convenient access to goods and services?

The standard answer to these questions is that people live in small towns because they value community and cherish the support it provides. They might well have chosen to live elsewhere—indeed, many of them have—but they prefer living in a small town because the community gives them a sense of belonging. They know everyone. They see their neighbors at backyard barbeques, school functions, and church. The community is familiar, and a place they know and cherish as their home. Its inhabitants share similar values and lifestyles—ones that probably were more common in the past than they are today.¹

But these easy assertions about community need to be interrogated. Most of what is known about community in small towns is from brief journalistic accounts that focus on newsworthy events, such as a mining accident or shooting spree, or that provide quotes from the hinterland as background coverage of a political campaign. Or it comes from polls in which questions about small-town life are posed in broad terms that give only a general impression of how Americans feel about their places of residence.² Hardly anyone bothers to find out how townspeople actually think and talk about community.

Nearly a century ago, sociologist H. Paul Douglass wrote that small towns—of which there were about twelve thousand scattered across the United States—were popularly regarded as “a sort of unsexed creature” that carried neither the romance of the countryside nor intrigue of the city. This was the sentiment expressed in the saying that God made the country, humans made the city, but small towns were made by the Devil. That view was mistaken, Douglass contended. The hope of America, he believed, lay in the strength of its small towns.³

The questions animating Douglass’s interest in small towns were quite different than the ones that arouse my interest now. He was especially intrigued by the tensions between townspeople and farmers, and the differences between Americans who strolled on sidewalks and those who walked on dirt. It struck him, however, that there was something perennially distinctive about these small communities. It mattered that they were incorporated, and were places in which people worked and lived, not apart from one another as they did in the countryside, but together on a small scale. It was the togetherness that mattered. “There’s a town under every town,” he wrote. To find it was the difficult task.⁴

In the recent social science literature, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the role that social capital plays in communities. There is no question that social capital is important. People who are connected with one another, the research suggests, tend more often to work on community projects, serve as volunteers in their community, vote, pay attention to political issues, and for that matter feel better about themselves. Networking has come to be of increasing interest as data are collected in surveys about friendship patterns and memberships in organizations, and as email and online social networking sites have increased in popularity. Still, social capital and networking are by no means all that matters in understanding community.⁵

Small towns can only be understood by paying attention to the cultural constructions that give them meaning. They exist as ideas or concepts that provide the people who live in them an identity and way of talking about themselves. Only by understanding this cultural aspect of community can we make sense of the deep role that it plays in the lives of small-town residents. Their sense of community is reinforced by social interaction, but is less dependent on social networks than we might imagine. Community is maintained as an identity by symbols and rituals such as town festivals that actually do not take up much of residents’ time. Social network studies would suggest that community is important because people spend a lot of time making friends and visiting with one another. But social network theory does not explain why people behave as if they know one another even when they do not or why a brief exchange at the post office can communicate more about community than a long conversation might in some other setting.

To be sure, friends and neighbors are crucial to people who live in small towns. But so is the fact that they live in a community. The town has an identity as a community. Its meanings are inscribed in particular places and the tangible aspects of these places—the park, school building, and stores on Main Street. The town’s identity is reinforced in festivals and ball games, small acts of kindness, recovering from a disaster, and the stories that are repeated about these events, and by the local cultural leaders who keep the stories alive. Towns are defined as well by that which they are not—cities, unfamiliar places, and big government. The stories and symbolic markers of difference define a place as a community.

Questions about the real or imagined decline of communities also need to be addressed by examining the ways in which community is culturally constructed. Too often the decline of community has been studied by looking at particular questions in surveys because those data happened to be available. Data on memberships in voluntary associations, voting, and spending evenings with neighbors are examples. It is interesting, though, that in talking with hundreds of people, many of whom did in fact think their community was declining or that communities like theirs were disappearing, not a single person mentioned these standard indicators. Membership in voluntary associations, voting, and spending evenings with neighbors simply did not come up. What did matter were the changes that served as public symbols of community. Decline is symbolized by the hardware store on Main Street that now stands empty or vacant lot where the drugstore used to be. Decline is evident in the fact that the school has closed, or if it remains open, is now a consolidated district that goes by a numbered designation and includes children from someplace else. If anything about social networking comes up at all, it is not that volunteer organizations and dinner parties are lacking but rather that there is no longer a crowd on the street on Saturday evenings.

When residents of small towns describe their communities, a rich tapestry of meanings, narratives, family histories, and personal experiences emerges. People tell of moving to a small community to raise their children without the hassles of city life. They confess to having lost their job in a larger place and seeking refuge where housing was cheap. For some, the hope of taking over the family farm when a father or uncle retired kept them tethered to a small rural community. For others, it was a decision to marry—perhaps fraught with ambivalence about giving up an ambitious career—or live near an ailing relative.

Viewed from the inside, community ceases to be a bland abstraction. Townspeople do talk about knowing everyone, but we learn what that means, who is excluded, and how that is reinforced in the small details of sidewalk behavior and expectations about participation in community events. We gain an understanding of how it is possible to say that everyone in town is the same when there is actually almost as much inequality in small towns as in larger places. We see the enormous diversity of lifestyles, occupations, family arrangements, hobbies, and personal stories.

Townspeople are close observers of their communities. An outsider may gain the impression that small towns embrace a slower pace of life than in cities, but it is from townspeople themselves that we learn what a slower pace of life means and why it is valued. A public opinion poll may find that many Americans believe small towns are good places in which to raise children, but what that actually means to people living in small towns requires listening to parents’ accounts of their own experiences.⁶

How community is found in small towns requires paying attention as well to what it lacks. Rosy scenarios entertained by Americans who have never lived in small towns become more nuanced when townspeople themselves describe their communities. Residents are well aware of the challenges they face. When a store closes, the gap on Main Street leaves a psychological scar. Physical damage from a tornado or flood takes a long time to heal. Newcomers find it difficult to assimilate. The difficulties they experience have more to do with learning the subtle expectations of community life than with actually meeting people or making friends.

The hope that somehow America could regain a stronger sense of community if only it could revive small-town values diminishes when townspeople themselves share their insights. They are the first to argue that what happens in small towns is largely a function of size. Knowing one’s neighbors and being known in the community is limited by the size of a town’s population. It also matters that people work in town, share similar occupations and backgrounds, and above all stay for a while. These qualities are not easily reproduced in cities and suburbs.

Small towns are themselves undergoing change. Many are slowly losing population. Some are being absorbed into sprawling metropolitan zones. Others are adapting to immigration along with changing relationships among racial and ethnic groups. Better roads and easier transportation are turning some small towns into bedroom communities. The Internet and shifts in agriculture are reshaping their economic base. In out-of-the-way places one finds novel experiments with sustainable energy and new technology. Small towns are surprisingly resilient. While they preserve the past, they forge new connections with the future. Many of the residents who grow up in small towns choose to stay. Others choose to relocate from cities and suburbs in hopes of finding something lacking in those larger places.⁷

Asking why people live in small towns—and what it means to do so—is a bit like probing the reasons people become fundamentalist Protestants or orthodox Jews. These are the paths not taken by most Americans, especially by ones who consider themselves progressive, enlightened, and successful by worldly standards. The fact that millions of Americans do embrace conservative religious practices poses interesting questions about America as a society.⁸ Are there aspects of American culture that are truly not shared, or indeed that are rejected by a sizable minority? Or is conservative religion little more than an alternative lifestyle grounded in the same essential values shared by nearly everyone? Does it nevertheless matter what religion people choose? Are their chances of attaining education, working as productive citizens, and providing for their families impaired? Do they hold different political opinions and vote in ways that could affect the nation’s policies?

The decision to live in a small town evokes similar questions for our understanding of American society. The fact that most Americans live in cities and suburbs cannot go unnoticed by those who live in small towns. How does that knowledge of being in the minority shape their outlooks? Do they feel as if they are embattled, left behind, or ignored? Are they glad to be in the minority, and if so, what value do they place on having made this choice? Does it influence their politics, religion, or sense of what it means to be a good American?

There are ample reasons to think that residence is associated with distinct attitudes and beliefs. Political candidates say they represent the particular values of small-town America. Pundits sometimes argue that small communities are the guardians of homespun virtue. Maps of red and blue differences in electoral outcomes suggest that states dominated by small towns vote differently from areas populated by large cities. Small towns are stereotypically associated with conservative moral and political outlooks. They differ from cities in factors that further shape beliefs and attitudes, such as racial and ethnic diversity.⁹

Social scientists have been particularly interested in the historic differences between small towns and metropolitan areas. Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Ferdinand Tönnies were among the influential nineteenth-century social scientists exploring these differences. Small towns emerged in these inquiries as places of traditional family values and strong social solidarity, but also as backwaters in the march of modern history compared with the advances of industry and population growth that were shaping cities and suburbs.¹⁰ American scholars in the twentieth century examined the decline of small towns along with the corresponding development of industry, business, ethnic enclaves, slums, the middle class, science, and education in cities. By the 1950s, attention had shifted increasingly toward questions about community life in suburbs.¹¹

But relatively little research has been devoted to small towns since the 1950s. One reason is that cities and suburbs continued to grow and absorb most of the population growth from both natural increase and immigration. Questions of poverty, social welfare, racial discrimination, crowding, urban planning, housing renewal, and transportation all focused attention on urban areas. What had once been considered small-town virtues, such as warm community relationships, were found increasingly in suburbs, as were conservative political and religious values, which shifted the attention of political analysts to those locations. To the extent that they were lumped under the heading of rural America, small towns were viewed as part of a declining sector populated by fewer people, and of interest more as the location of food production and tourism than as places where people still lived. As a result, data have been available from census reports about the number, size, demographic composition, and economic characteristics of small towns, but little effort has been made to learn what residents of small towns think and believe.¹²

The fact that little research has been done does not mean that small towns have ceased to be of interest. Novels, movies, and television programs continue to present fictional accounts of small-town life. Journalists visit small towns in hopes of capturing a piece of Americana. Writers carry on the tradition of looking for down-home wisdom by talking to small-town sages and reporting on insights gleaned from living in remote communities. Increasingly the blogosphere has become a location of lively postings about the glories and deficiencies of small-town life.

From these various sources, two contradictory images of small-to...