In 1929, sociologists Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd published the groundbreaking study, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. The Lynds used sociological methods to examine the lives of ordinary American citizens in a midwestern city, Muncie, Indiana. One of the first community studies, Middletown served as a model for sociological research for generations to come. Robert Lynd, a Protestant minister, was committed to the ideas of the Social Gospel, a social movement within American Protestantism concerned with social justice and redeeming the nation’s cities. The Lynds’ concern about the influence of the modern urban world on traditional Protestant values thus became central to the study of Middletown.
The Lynds’ study of Middletown was intended to explore how industry, urbanization, and consumption influenced traditional American values in the 1920s. They chose Muncie as their site for research because it appeared to be less affected by these modern forces. Initially funded by the Institute for Social and Religious Research, a John
D. Rockefeller foundation dealing with the preservation of traditional American values, the Lynds purposefully did not choose an ethnically diverse city. Instead, they studied a “traditional vanishing white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant city, which was. . . the center of old-fashioned American virtue.” The Lynds thought, “The hope for social progress and moral reawakening resided. . . within the original American spirit, the adventurous, strong spirit of the Protestant pioneers of the Midwest.” But when the Lynds found that dramatic changes in traditional American values had already transformed Muncie, the institute distanced itself from the publication of Middletown.
The Lynds found varying institutional adaptations to the modernizing forces at work in Middletown. They claimed that the highest degree of change had occurred in earning a living and leisure-time activities. Both changes were attributed to technological innovations. In the case of work, the rise of the industrial system created two major groups, the working and business classes. Meanwhile, greater organization of leisure time resulted from such technological developments as the automobile and moving pictures. While the informal contact of the past had encouraged the development of close-knit ties between people in the midwestern city, the technological changes in leisure-time activities were creating a highly mobile and organized group life that left residents more isolated in Middletown.
The Lynds found that consumer values had begun to replace the older Puritan values of frugality, austerity, and civic-mindedness. They believed that community members in Muncie, no longer each other’s moral keepers, still retained a strong belief in competitive individualism. In addition, the community was characterized by a class system, divided between the “business class” and the “working class.” The Lynds’ examination of how competitive individualism replaced the older values of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture was a significant contribution that influenced a whole generation of sociologists.
By focusing on traditional American values, the Lynds ignored important trends that were part of Muncie’s development. For example, southern “hillbillies” and African Americans were absent from the study, even though both groups already had become significant minorities in Mun-cie by the 1920s. In addition, critics have pointed out that Muncie’s dominant industrial family, the Ball brothers, were missing from the study as well. Evidently, the Lynds viewed such a dominant family as the norm and not of any special importance worthy of study. Even though their analysis of the class system was innovative, their examination of the decline of Protestant values obscured some of the demographic and cultural subtleties that transformed Muncie. In 1937, the Lynds returned to Muncie to see how the city had changed during the Great Depression. In Middletown in Transition, they concluded that not much had changed.
Finding the values of the citizens of Muncie relatively unaffected by the economic crisis, the Lynds wrote, “The texture of Middletown’s culture has not changed. . . Middletown is overwhelmingly living by the values by which it lived in 1925.”
Further reading: Rita Caccamo, Back to Middletown: Three Generations of Sociological Reflections (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Robert S. Lynd, and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929).
—Glen Bessemer
World History
