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From Main Street to Mainstream
Middletown, Muncie, and "Typical America"
SARAH E. IGO
| "No one who wishes a full understanding of American life today can afford to neglect this impartial, sincerely scientific effort to place it under the microscope slide," announced a writer for the New York World. The New Republic agreed, calling it a "book ... that will give the reader more insight into the social processes of this country than any other I know." Even the characteristically cynical H. L. Mencken proclaimed, "I commend [it] to all persons who have any genuine interest in the life of the American people.... It reveals, in cold-blooded, scientific terms, the sort of lives millions of Americans are leading." And The Nation declared, "nothing like it has ever before been attempted; no such knowledge of how the average American community works and plays has ever been packed between the covers of one book.... Who touches this book touches the heart of America."1 |
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Such words were extravagant praise for a book that began its career as a standard religious survey. That Middletown—Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd's 1929 study of Muncie, Indiana—captured the national limelight should be surprising. Social surveys, one response to the challenges posed by a new industrial order and rapid urbanization, would hardly have been unfamiliar to contemporaries. Similar investigations had been fixtures of the American scene since the late nineteenth century, from Jane Addams's Hull House Maps and Papers of 1895 and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro of 1899 to the six-volume Pittsburgh Survey of 1909–1914. These ventures, by turns altruistic and anxious, mapped urban poverty, explored the structures of African American and immigrant communities, tracked transformations in rural life, and examined industrial working conditions. By one count, at least 2,775 such surveys on various aspects of American life had been completed by the time of Middletown's publication. Yet no other study was instantly pronounced a revelatory investigation into the modern United States, a "mirror held up before us," telling Americans "how we live and what we think about." And none would have the impact—or the reach—of the Lynds' survey.2 |
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Indeed, one of the most striking things about Middletown was how many non-experts were aware of it. Readers seemed spellbound by the sweep of the Lynds' findings: that workers rose earlier in the morning than their employers; that schoolgirls preferred silk to cotton stockings; that the newest homes in town lacked parlors; that belief in hell was weakening. A reviewer noted with astonishment in 1929 that "not many years ago it would have seemed incredible that any social survey could achieve the distinction of a big seller in the book trade. This, however, Middletown has accomplished." The book went through six printings in its first year of publication alone, and bookstores and libraries could hardly keep it on their shelves. The range of publications reporting on the study was impressive. Middletown was discussed on the front pages of major as well as minor newspapers and journals—from Florida's Fort Myers Church News, to The American Teacher, to The New York Medical Week—and in classrooms, community centers, churches, and households all over the country. Its publisher, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, was perhaps justified in its advertisements trumpeting Middletown as "the latest and most indispensable word in the new American vocabulary."3 |
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