The Legacies of Middletown Introduction

JAMES J. CONNOLLY

When Robert and Helen Lynd chose Muncie, Indiana, as the site of the social investigation that would produce Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, the city was an uncommon place. Like many small eastern and midwestern cities, it had industrialized rapidly over the preceding fifty years, particularly during and after the northeastern Indiana gas boom of the 1890s. Yet its social composition was unusual for a factory town. It was home to families from both the upland South and the northeastern U.S., but, unlike most urban settings outside the South, it had relatively few immigrants. At the same time, African Americans were settling there at a rapid rate—more rapid than that of white newcomers. Muncie during the 1920s was a demographic oddity, proportionately more black and less ethnic than the average northern city and more industrialized than most southern towns.1	1
Despite these idiosyncrasies, the Lynds helped make Muncie "Middletown," a "spectacularly undistinguished" community that has served as a bellwether for social scientists and journalists seeking to discern trends and patterns in modern American life.2 The Lynds did not intend for their work to have such an effect. Indeed, they chose Muncie in part for its distinguishing social characteristics. Although they noted the "middle-of-the-road quality" of the city, chose the generic name of Middletown, and added the subtitle "a study in modern American culture," they also insisted that it was not a "typical" city and that the findings could be applied to the rest of the country "only with caution." Nevertheless, Americans quickly began to view the city as a representative slice of the nation, and scholars, including the Lynds themselves, repeatedly returned to the city to measure the degree of change in American culture and society over the course of the twentieth century.3	2
Muncie's morning newspaper weighs in on the publication of Middletown. Muncie Morning Star, January 11, 1929
The articles collected in this special issue help explain this unintended outcome and consider the tensions connected with it. They were first presented in November 2004 at the fourth Small Cities Conference, held in Muncie by the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University. The conference marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Lynds' first book. It featured scholars from a variety of disciplines who presented recent work on Middletown and who reflected on the origins and development of research on Muncie as Middletown. Included here are Staughton Lynd's keynote address, which links the ideals and experiences of his parents with their choice of Muncie; a revised version of Sarah Igo's provocative paper explaining how "Middletown" came to be seen as the quintessential American community; and John Straw's catalog of the rich set of resources that continue to attract investigators of the Middletown experience. Together they help us understand the legacies of the Lynds' original investigation, including both the difficulties created by the selection of an apparently homogeneous white Protestant community and the reasons why those seeking to understand modern America continue to return to Muncie despite its demographic quirks.	. . .