Middletown in Transition

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MIDDLETOWN IN TRANSITION

In June 1935 Robert S. Lynd returned to Muncie, Indiana, to conduct a second in-depth sociological study of this "typical" midwestern city. This was to be a sequel to the pioneering work he and his wife, Helen M. Lynd, carried out from 1924 to 1925. Their 1929 report, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, had been an unexpected best-seller. Their publisher, Alfred Harcourt, encouraged them to revisit Muncie to document how the city had changed in the intervening decade, particularly from the impact of the Great Depression.

Muncie was a community of approximately fifty thousand people. The overwhelming majority were white Protestants of native stock. The city contained few immigrants or minorities of any kind. In this striking homogeneity, Muncie was hardly a representative American community. It also was more prosperous than most. Though hard hit by the Depression, its main employer manufactured glass jars for home canning—one of the few industries that thrived during hard times.

The original Middletown study involved extensive data gathering. Lacking both time and funding, the second study was less empirical and more dependent on information gained from local "informed sources." Lynd departed after spending only three months in the field. Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts was published in 1937. It was organized around the same six areas as its predecessor: getting a living, making a home, training the young, using leisure time, religious practices, and community activities. One innovation was an analysis of the power exercised by the Ball family (identified in the book only as "the X family"), who directly employed about 10 percent of the town's workers and supported many of its leading institutions.

The Lynds described a community with deep class divisions. The "business class" dominated local affairs. The "working classes" lacked power and seldom openly gave voice to their grievances. Despite economic setbacks, class conflict in Muncie remained beneath the surface. Trends identified in the earlier study continued but had not altered materially. The Lynds concluded that "basically the texture of Middletown's culture has not changed." One must agree with the Italian sociologist, Rita Caccamo, who asked in Back to Middletown: Three Generations of Sociological Reflections, "What transition?"

The two Middletown studies are widely cited by sociologists as models for empirical community study. Historians have found a wealth of evidence in their pages for the growing impact of advertising and the spread of the consumer culture. The Lynds' portrait of Middle America in the first half of the twentieth century remains a monumental work of social documentation.