"Middletown" Revisited

Muncie adjusts to change

Though it sometimes galls the town fathers, Muncie, Ind. (pop. 83,000), is famous for being ordinary. In 1924, Sociologists Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd decided that Muncie was "the typical American city" that could reveal how small-town America had developed and where it was going. The Lynds trained themselves in anthropological methods and descended on Muncie as if it were a settlement of New Guinea headhunters. The result was two classic books, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), that shrewdly foreshadowed the next two generations of American life.

One of the Lynds' findings was that Munsonians--and by implication, most Americans--were living in two different centuries, desperately trying to adjust to rapid industrialization, yet holding on fiercely to the homespun values of 19th century rural America. Wrote the Lynds: "A citizen has one foot on the relatively solid ground of established institutional habits, and the other foot fast to an escalator erratically moving in several directions at a bewildering variety of speeds." Now a new team of sociologists headed by Theodore Caplow of the University of Virginia has moved in on Muncie to update the Lynds with a study titled Middletown III. Though not yet complete, the new study finds that Muncie has not changed much since the Lynds: it still has one foot on the escalator, the other planted firmly in the 1890s.

The Lynds (he died in 1970, she is retired) found a work-oriented town where "getting on" was important, as were self-reliance, civic pride, patriotism and Christian fervor. So did the Middletown III researchers of today. Caplow and Teammate Howard Bahr of Brigham Young University asked Muncie high school students of 1977 the same public opinion questions the Lynds asked 1924 students, and got much the same answers. Last year 50% of the students agreed that "the Bible is a sufficient guide to all problems of modern life," 78% said the U.S. is "unquestionably the best country in the world," and 47% (precisely the same figure as in 1924) said, "It is entirely the fault of a man himself if he does not succeed." Though today's students are more tolerant, say the researchers: "We have not been able to find any trace of the disintegration of traditional social values described by observers who rely on their own intuitions."

Yet young folks in Muncie today manage to juggle traditional beliefs and nontraditional behavior. The students like bubble-gum-blowing contests and marijuana, churchgoing and pornography. Says Muncie Student Danny Stanley, 16: "Yeah, we smoke dope all over, in our cars, walking around before class, any time, but that doesn't mean we don't believe in God or that we'll let anybody put God down. That can get you in a fight."

The Lynds picked up similar signs of cultural schizophrenia in 1920s Muncie: an antidivorce town with a rate of 42 divorces for every 100 marriages, a thrifty pay-as-you-go culture rushing to buy on credit, and a resentment of federal intervention that went hand in hand with a scramble for the federal dollar.

A century ago, Muncie was an isolated agricultural town, the former headquarters of the Northern Ku Klux Klan. By the time the Lynds arrived in 1924, it was industrialized and dominated by the Ball family, who built a thriving fruit-jar industry as well as the local hospital, Ball State University and most of the rest of town. Its population of 36,000--50,000 by the time of the second Lynd report--was 90% white and 95% Protestant, and struggling to cope with layoffs, a new trend toward secularization, women's voting and flapper ideas about sex.

The Lynds, who did not miss much, found roots of the "generation gap" of the 1960s. Backyards were getting smaller and community playgrounds larger, one sign that even young children were spending more time away from home. Sudden change had brought an "early sophistication" to the young and a lessening of parental authority. Industrialization allowed a boy to earn a man's wage and end dependence on his parents at a younger age. Still, says Bahr, there is no evidence that the generation gap is wider today than in 1924: parents and their offspring quarrel about the same amount, and mostly about the same subjects.

One drastic difference from the 1920s is that Munsonians no longer control their own town. The Ball Corp., now a diversified multinational, has moved its important operations elsewhere, and the Ball family itself is scattered, with diminished clout in Muncie. The local economy is now controlled from the out-of-town board rooms of large national and international corporations--and from Washington. Says Caplow: "The Federal Government has in effect taken over all the social welfare functions in Muncie. The care of the sick, the poor, the aged and the delinquent is all controlled by Washington."

The Lynds predicted that secularization and a generation gap would come to Muncie slowly, while citizens clung to the old values. That is just about what happened, according to the new researchers. Says Warren Vander Hill, a historian at Ball State who has worked on many post-Lynd Muncie studies: "First you learn to roll with the punches and accept things that were unacceptable, then you hold onto those very basic ideas about life with an even tighter grip."

One of the punches that has kept Munsonians rolling for a half-century is the changing status of women. The Lynds noted that industrialization was drawing women into the labor force, but reported that females were shunted into traditional "women's jobs" or paid factory wages way below those paid to men. The Lynds warned that over half of Muncie girls "were busily acquiring habits of money dependence [on men] that characterize Middletown wives." Though the Lynds reported that brains were considered unimportant in a Muncie woman, by the time of their second book, Munsonians had dropped their opposition to working women and had begun to educate girls for good jobs. Now, says a member of the Middletown III team, C. Bradford Chappell of Brigham Young, Middletown daughters "are better educated and in higher-status occupations than either of their parents." Teen-age girls, homebodies in 1924, now spend about as much time away from their parents as teen-age boys.

The Middletown III researchers, working on a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are still two years away from presenting a final report. Their central finding, however, seems clear: almost all the social forces shaping life in modern-day Muncie were already present in 1924. It amounts to a startling message about the nation: that American life has not changed very much in 50 years --or at least the kind of American life lived in a town like Muncie. The Lynds, describing the wrenching dislocations that propelled America from a somnolent agrarianism to a modern industrialism, said that if Rip van Winkle had fallen asleep in Muncie in 1885 and awakened in 1929, he would not be able to cope with the new Middletown. The new researchers think his awakening would be far less rude today. Says Caplow: "If Rip van Winkle went to sleep 50 years ago and returned to Muncie today, he would not have too many adjustment problems." -

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