Time Essay: Small Town, U.S.A.: Growing and Groaning

The flight from the cities, though it continues, is pretty old news.

Only recently, however, has it become clear where that exodus has been heading. The nation long assumed that the cities’ lost population was piling up mostly in the suburbs and urban fringes. Not so. In a marked reversal of U.S. migration patterns, nonmetropolitan areas have started growing faster than metropolitan ones.

This demographic turnabout may have many meanings, but one is already clear: the small town in America is once again on the rise.

New census figures that will confirm the shrinkage or stagnation of many cities will also undoubtedly show small town America growing at a faster rate than the country as a whole.

The trend first became apparent in the earlier half of the past decade.

While the national population in creased 4.8% from 1970 to 1975, towns of 2,500 to 25,000 rose 7.5%, and the smallest towns, those with populations under 2,500, jumped by 8.7%, nearly double the national rate.

The new migration has surprised demographers, but it can hardly astonish anyone familiar with U.S. attitudes toward urban existence. Americans have always preferred smaller communities, and did so even during the years when the nation seemed bent on emptying its entire population into metropolitan clots. Surveys have consistently shown that a majority of the people, including almost 4 out of 10 big city dwellers, were partial to a life outside the metropolis. Some leaned to the suburbs and others to more rural vistas. But the biggest single dream remained the small town. Now, when more and more are moving to fulfill that dream, is a suitable time to reflect on what they are getting.

The small town as an ideal is familiar. The very notion, as though invented by Norman Rockwell, has always carried with it images of low-key living, easy friendships, neighborly neighbors, front-porch sociability, back-fence congeniality, downtown camaraderie. Small town—the phrase evokes an intimate sense of community, leafy serenity, free of the sinister strangers who menace the cold, grimy canyons of the city. U.S. literature has abounded with ugly portraits of small towns like Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, but the wistful ideal has survived. Americans have always been readier to be pierced by the human loveliness of Our Town than convinced by the grotesqueries of Winesburg, Ohio.

The small towns of American reality have been stunningly varied, as Richard Lingeman makes definitively clear in his new history, Small Town America. Lingeman stalks the dream and the reality from colonial days to the present, from Town Builder William Penn’s hope for “a green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome” to the prepackaged sterility of some of today’s contrived “new towns.” Factory towns, farm towns, railroad towns, cow towns, mining towns, all march through his book. “New England towns with white churches and elm-arched streets … fugitive transient towns with their tacked-on names and mayfly lives.” The aspirations and disappointments of little American towns have come and gone in rich diversity, too, but every town, as Lingeman says, has represented one more lof the many “permutations the dream z of community has undergone.”

America thus knows the small town to be many things. Yet today, given the morbid problems of the cities —the incessant shriek of crisis, the hovering buzzards of bankruptcy, the noise, the crowds, the filth, the violence, the fear—it is easy to imagine that the small town offers, no matter what else, an escape from all that. But does it really?

The answer is a mixed one. The typical small town is free of the city’s unruly ambience but not of its nagging problems. Small towns, just like the cities, struggle constantly with tight budgets and pressing needs that keep rising faster than revenues. “In little bitty towns,” says Frederic Cooper, program manager of the Mississippi Institute for Small Towns, “the entire budget might go to pay the policeman and the light bill at the town hall.” Downtown decay is common place in small town America, as are shortages of housing, medical service, diversions for the young and suitable settings for the lonely aged. It is a rare small town that is not afflicted by poverty; 38% of the black inhabitants of small towns live below the poverty line. Then, too, it is only an unusual small town that does not have a dilapidated neighborhood to which the citified word slum might be applied. Says Anthropologist Clayton Denman of Central Washington University, founder and head of the Small Towns Institute at Ellensburg, Wash.: “Small towns are facing problems that are much the same as the cities’ problems, except for scale.”

No wonder. The self-contained, self-sufficient small town has vanished with the ascendance, in the U.S., of an increasingly singular technological economy from which the entire nation is suspended. By the 1920s the small town was rightly called a “ganglion” of the city, and it is even more intricately tied today to the larger society in which culture flies everywhere by television. Small towns, in short, are racked by some of the same strains that beset the cities.

The migration of people and economic shifts, if they are the fundamental sources of such strains, are also the sources of equally difficult but opposite problems. While many small towns are frantically trying to get more industry or keep what they have, others are groaning under the problem of providing services for the additional people who come in with new industry. Just recently, Colorado’s Governor Richard D. Lamm complained that the energy boom was bringing some of his small towns more prosperity than they could afford. Wrote Lamm: “Craig, Rifle, Meeker—towns that have existed on a stable agricultural base for 100 years—are doubling every two years, every three years. With that growth comes every social pathology; when Rifle doubles in size, juvenile delinquency increases three times; the alcoholism rate increases four times; displaced homemakers increase 4.5 times. The immediate costs are immense, the long-term benefit doubtful.” It is no wonder that some little communities, as Mayor Byron Farwell of Hillsboro, Va. (pop. 135) points out in the journal Small Town, “struggle to stay small.”

If such problems are not widely familiar, it is only because they have long been drowned out by the louder outcry of the cities over kindred troubles. Small Town, U.S.A., is in fact likely to be heard from more and more in coming years. In the past decade, through such channels as the National Association of Towns and Townships and the Congressional Rural Caucus, small towns have begun voicing a more concerted plea for federal assistance. By last December they had prodded the White House, long obsessed with city problems, into issuing for the first time a formal policy on small community and rural development. That act represented, whatever else, official recognition that small town America is far from idyllic.

Little towns do, of course, offer their own special allure. A small community of any one of the wide variety provides a setting for life that is profoundly distinct from the hectic atmosphere of the metropolis. The sense of warm, intimate community may not be universal

in small town America, yet it can be found. Writer Lael Wertenbaker, 71, has discovered just that in Nelson, N.H. (pop. 550). She likes Nelson for many reasons, including the fact that “in winter people know who’s pregnant, and the snow-plow gets there first.” U.S. Representative Wes Watkins of Ada, Okla. (pop. 17,000), chairman of the Rural Caucus, is not being merely windy when he says, “People in small towns are not numbers.”

To grow up in a small town is to have not a number but a name and rank that are known to everybody, and a history too. It is to understand not how Edgar Lee Masters wrote Spoon River Anthology, but how he got his material, how he came to know the secret lives of so many so well. A small town rearing consists, by and large, of getting to know and to be known by everybody, and to feel that intimate communal familiarity as both affectionate support and unrelenting intrusion; the flight from intimacy to the city’s anonymity has often been impelled primarily by a craving for privacy. The bonding that occurs when one’s very history is community property is formidable and, to certain temperaments, oppressive. It is that bonding, that sense of utterly being of and belonging to a place, that makes most true small-towners more suspicious than city folk of strangers.

The small town, then, is one thing to the inhabitants who have a sense of having always been there. The town can seem quite something else to someone who is just coming in. The natives, the oldtimers, are far more likely to be polite than warmly hospitable to new arrivals. Actually, many newcomers find

themselves newcomers for years.

Two years in New Buffalo, Mich. (pop. 2,700), out of Chicago, Newspaperman Robert Zonka says that the only new close friendship he has developed is with another couple from Chicago. Still, new migrants to small towns are likely to find, if only in the lowered risk of being stabbed in a subway, the different “quality of life” that most say they have sought.

Though the new migration represents a significant, probably healthy, readjustment of the nation’s population pattern, it hardly presages an eclipse of the cities. The hyperkinetic metropolis, by sheer energy and the density of its cultural and economic shadow, will continue to dominate American consciousness and style. Yet the small town will always haunt and invite the American mind as both memory and metaphor. Small towns, after all, have abundantly provided much of the cast for the vibrant drama of city life. There will always be many a putative urbanite who inhabits the city in fact but a small town in his heart.

Thorstein Veblen considered the country town perhaps the greatest of all American institutions simply because it had, he wrote in 1923, “a greater part than any other in shaping public sentiment and giving character to American culture.” Has the small town’s historic hegemony in the American psyche appreciably dwindled in the subsequent 57 years? Who would care to answer yes at a moment when the national pre-eminence of a native son of Plains, Ga. (pop. 683), is seriously challenged only by the vaulting ambition of a native son of Tampico, Ill. (pop. 838)? —By Frank Trippett