QUESTION: Please start by telling the story about Robert Lynd before he was married, in Wyoming, working the oil fields.

STAUGHTON LYND: My parents met at the base of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, on a road called the Dolly Copp Road, which is still there. My father had spent the night at the Appalachian Mountain Club hut at the top of the mountain. He had hiked down and he was walking along with his undershirt drying on the back of his pack. And here in the opposite direction came a very respectable middle-aged gentleman with two daughters, one of whom was my mother. And they got in conversation, and it appears that my mother said something about Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.

And this made an enormous impression on my father, so that when he had continued in his direction and they continued in theirs, he reflected, and he climbed back up to the top of the mountain to look in the guest book to see if he could figure out which of the two young women in the guest book was the one who had been reading Veblen. And I guess he figured it out correctly, because after a time, they met and became engaged to be married.

Now, this is the early 1920s, I'm going to say 1922, although I'm not absolutely sure of the year. And my dad was at divinity school, Union Theological Seminary. And it appears that between the first and second years the custom was for students to sign up for summer preaching assignments. And there must have been a list on a board, and my dad, being an adventurous soul, chose Elk Basin, Wyoming. He arrived in Elk Basin by stagecoach, to find that it was a Rockefeller oil camp where the men - and I think I have this correctly - worked six or six and a half days a week.

And according to an account that he wrote at summer's end, he found a boarding house, but at supper that first evening he noticed a kind of chill in the air and concluded that the men at table, who were working for Mr. Rockefeller, were not excited about the idea of this handsome young man from the East spending the day visiting with their wives. So my dad - this is my favorite thing about him, the thing that I most admire - my dad got a job as a pick-and-shovel laborer and preached in the schoolhouse on Sunday nights.

At the end of that summer, my parents were married. And at some point my father decided not to become a minister but instead took a research job, which was defined as the study of the religious life of a typical American city. And the fascinating thing to me about the research job, even before my father gets to Muncie, Indiana, is that the job was offered him by a foundation controlled by the Rockefellers. And you wonder what was going on, because my dad, after his summer in Elk Basin, had published two articles - and he wrote very well, very forcefully even then - two articles in the Survey Graphic in which he criticized the long hours, the low pay, the social isolation in Elk Basin.

And in fact, the story at our family table was that he wrote a letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and asked him for a contribution to the project of building a community center for the women in Elk Basin, who led rather isolated lives. And the story - I have no way of proving this true or untrue - the story is that John D. Rockefeller replied and said that Standard Oil had had a hard year - and he wasn't in a position to contribute.

So my father had made himself obnoxious in a public, if minor way, for the Rockefeller family, and here comes this offer from a Rockefeller Foundation. And the closest I can come to the dynamics of the situation is that it's like an employer offering a foreman's job to an outspoken shop steward. "This guy has a big mouth, he's attracting some attention, let's hire him." I can only assume that it was as on a shop floor when a particular person is articulate and makes himself available to fellow workers, that oftentimes the employer will offer that man a job as a foreman. I think in short that the Rockefellers may have been trying to buy my father's silence.

QUESTION: How do you think his experiences at Elk Basin influenced his outlook on the Middletown project?

STAUGHTON LYND: We should first of all say that the Middletown project was initially designed as the study of the religious life of a typical American community, a small midwestern city. And two things were true about the way my father went at it. One of them pretty obviously connects with Elk Basin, and that is that he showed a good deal of sympathy to the situation of working people. He found Muncie to be divided along class lines. He wrote a chapter called "The Long Arm of the Job."

The other thing that may or may not be connected with Elk Basin. He refused to study religion as a thing in itself. He took the position that it could only be understood as part of the entire life of the community. And the folks who were paying for the study were very dissatisfied. They thought it was a waste of time. They thought it wasn't going anywhere. And my dad had a tough time sticking to it.

Now, this is before my parents had children. I didn't come on the scene until 1929. But through the mid-1920s my folks were revising and revising the manuscript and the sponsoring committee was steadily finding it unsatisfactory. And at least my mother's story, and I have more confidence in that than any latter day version to the contrary, is that my dad finally said, "Well, look, if I can get it published myself, is that okay with you?" And the committee said, "Sure, but you won't." And the rest is history.

QUESTION: Was Rockefeller interested in religion as a way to address the social rift represented by the labor strikes so prevalent after World War One?

STAUGHTON LYND: I can only say that I believe that to be true, and that the cultivation of religion was of a piece with the cultivation of so-called welfare capitalism, bowling leagues and the like, and of company unionism. That is, these were all stratagems, ideas for defusing the very serious class conflict, which had shown itself, for example, in the steel strike of 1919.

QUESTION: How much of an activist outlook is coming through in Lynd's first book, Middletown as well as the second, Middletown in Transition?

STAUGHTON LYND: I don't want to present myself as an expert on Middletown, but I will add this fact to the stew. The most powerful employers in Muncie, Indiana at the town were the Ball family, who made glass jars for putting up preserves. And my father, in conducting the original Middletown study, kind of went everywhere and met everyone. He talked to the Rotary Club. He sang in church. He shot the breeze with the local socialists, or one of them. And he had a cordial relationship with the Ball family. And again the kitchen table story is that after the second book appeared the Ball family stopped sending Christmas cards. So there came a time when I suppose you would say my dad had to pick sides or at least was perceived by others as picking sides. And certainly his choice was with those who worked, who did manual work in Muncie rather than with the owning class.

QUESTION: Do you think that your father went through any kind of political transformation between the books?

STAUGHTON LYND: There's no doubt that my father had himself become more radical between the publication of the first Middletown book in 1929 and his second trip to Muncie in the mid-1930s. Of course, he wasn't unique in that. That was true of American academics, writers, professionals of all kinds. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he, in fact, were somewhat disappointed in Muncie's lack of, oh, willingness to criticize the foundations of the social system.

First of all, understand that my father was one of a number of persons with a strong background in religion, who went into sociology. That was a common transition, and I suppose up to that point all it meant was being the kind of person who was concerned to create a community center for the wives in Elk Basin. It didn't make one a flaming radical.

But clearly during the 1930s my father - and I'm speaking in very broad strokes - my father moved from someone who read and admired Thorstein Veblen to someone who was very interested in what was happening in the Soviet Union, who made a special trip to the Soviet Union in 1938, who never became a Communist, but who was caught up, as so many others were, in the sense that there were great social changes afoot and that the Soviet Union exemplified them.

There were some more profound ways in which he was radical. He was for years and years and years associated with a foundation called The Twentieth Century Fund. And in the mid-1930s when Senator Wagner and others proposed the National Labor Relations Act, what we sometimes still call the Wagner Act, the federal law that gave workers the right to form unions, the Twentieth Century Fund funded a special study of the law and patted itself on the back that it was so liberal as to say, "This is wonderful because it will equalize the power of capital and labor. The individual worker is not able to stand up to his or her employer, but by associating in unions they will achieve equality."

And my dad withdrew from the study, because he said, just as his son has - (laughter) - it's not true. Even with a recognized union, workers don't achieve equality. It's still the unilateral prerogative of the employer to decide whether to close a plant, for example. So that this is one way in which I think my dad was very radical indeed.

In the late 1930s my father gave a series of lectures at Princeton University, later published as the book, Knowledge for What?, and therein his insistence was that knowledge had to be applied to the great problems before humankind. And, for example, he criticized the field of history, which I later went into, as lecturing on navigation while the ship was going down. And so there were many ways in which I had the clear understanding growing up that my father was a radical, was a person of the left. On the other hand, it was equally clear that he was not a member of any organized left-wing party, and as a matter of fact throughout this period, although he tried to express great sympathy and solidarity with the Soviet Union, he got nothing but lumps from true believers, from Party members, because he also expressed criticisms and misgivings. So he was an independent radical.

QUESTION: Did your father feel he had more in common with people of Muncie than, say, the people of New York or the big city?

STAUGHTON LYND: My father grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He recalled going to Presbyterian church on Sunday not so much as a theological experience, as an experience of community. I remember him often speaking of what it made him feel when everyone would stand up together and sing, something, by the way, that he loved to do and that he did all his life. When he was in Elk Basin he was not only a pick and shovel laborer and a preacher, he was a Boy Scout leader. And I think that's the point, that my father was a person who could go to church and function as a Boy Scout leader and be very comfortable.

Or to say the same thing in another way, it was always a matter of regret to me that he defined himself in his adulthood as an academic, because I think he was so much more than an academic in Muncie. Not exactly that he was an activist but he was one heck of a participant observer. I mean, he would not only go to Rotary Club occasions, he would sing his famous song, "The Huckleberry Picnic." He grooved on it. He was part of it. Whereas as a tenured professor of history at Columbia, particularly after World War II he was much less comfortable in my opinion. My dad wanted to solve problems, to change the world. And I think it was a loss for him when the lecture room and the seminar room became his only theaters of action.

QUESTION: Did he see his role in Middletown as that of a problem solver?

STAUGHTON LYND: Well, remember that the study was to be a study of the religious life of a typical American community. And after all my father was someone who not so long before had graduated from divinity school. He was concerned with the religious life of American communities and indeed several chapters of the book are about the religious life of Muncie.

But I suspect that my dad was still struggling with the questions, still struggled all his life with the question, "What are we doing to do with this society that to a certain extent professes itself not only democratic, but religious?" And in the case of Muncie I would assume overwhelmingly Protestant Christian, but which makes its living by buying and selling and in ways that set one human being against another and leaves some human beings behind, while others forge ahead. I think in the second Middletown book the focus probably had shifted more to, you know, the hopes for qualitative social transformation that were aroused by the New Deal, and was Muncie with its rotary clubs and so forth, part of the action or was it just a kind of backwater? And I think he may have concluded that it was something of a backwater in the larger scheme of things.

Now, by the way, the two field trips to Muncie were very different. I mean, the first time first of all my parents went together. They had a research/secretarial staff of maybe three other people. So you have to imagine getting on toward half a dozen people living in this community for I think on the order of a year and a half. The second book my sister and I were little. My mother stayed at home. My father went and went for a much shorter period, like six months. So that's also part of the picture.

QUESTION: When the books came out, there was a type of criticism that said, this is not an important place, it's just small town life.

STAUGHTON LYND: Well, Middletown could be viewed, no doubt has been viewed as part of a genre, which includes the works of Sinclair [Lewis], of Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, the effort to come to terms with the semi-rural, small town, heavily Protestant backgrounds, which were that from which so many Americans of that period emerged. And looking at it in that way you could say, oh, my goodness, here's this chap who grew up in it, who came back to it, who saw that it was not just onward and upward and a collection of Horatio Alger stories, and the good women of the congregational church helping those who need, but that there was more to it, that there was a class structure in this community and so on.

I mean, I don't think that's an invalid way to see something, but perhaps I could make this analogy. All of us willy-nilly critique our parents in the process of growing up and becoming separate human beings, but that doesn't mean that we look down on our parents. And I feel that at least as far as my father was concerned it was that kind of experience, that, I mean, Muncie was already in him in a way that he knew he would never wholly extricate himself from and didn't want to wholly extricate himself from. But at the same time it was a part of his growing up to look at that with fresh eyes and see things that perhaps as a banker's son growing up in Louisville he hadn't seen so clearly. I mean, you just have to sort of partake of the Horatio Alger aspect of that from which my father came to understand that he would want to both affirm it and to critique it. And that's what Middletown is.

My father in going to Muncie and in spending years of his life stubbornly saying that he wanted to write about Muncie as he felt it needed to be written about, was I think performing an act of criticism and an act of love. He was talking about the kind of earnest Christian background in which he had grown up and which he was certainly not prepared to disavow or ridicule, but which he also thought needed to be looked at in new ways, or that you didn't try to discuss the religion of Muncie or of the United States except in the context of its life as a whole, and you recognized that that life included a class division between blue collar workers and others, and you reached out in love with one hand at the same time you that insisted on seeing it as it is or as it was with the other.

New River Media Interview with: Theodore Caplow Commonwealth Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia Co-Author, The First Measured Century

QUESTION: Explain a bit about the first Middletown study.

THEODORE CAPLOW: Robert and Helen Lynd went to Muncie, Indiana in 1924, with a commission to study grassroots religion. And they came back in 1925 with a marvelous study of social change, having used 1890 as the baseline and gotten all sorts of retrospective information from people who were still alive and from documents. And they constructed the authoritative story of what had happened to a typical American community in that generational period.

It's a wonderful book, Middletown, published in 1929. [It] almost didn't get published, because the sponsors, the Rockefeller Institute for Social and Religious Research were shocked by the fact that the little study of grassroots religion had turned into a comprehensive examination of a whole society. It took the intervention of Clark Wissler, who was chairman of the board of the Museum of Natural History to get the book published.

It then became the first sociological bestseller. It's been in print ever since. The whole 70 years it's never been out of print. It's a great book.

QUESTION: What were the main findings of the Lynds in the book?

THEODORE CAPLOW: They discovered the scandal of class. Most Americans at the time had been brought up to believe that we live in a democracy, where everybody is essentially equal, though admittedly some people are richer than others. The Lynds discovered in Middletown that there was a business class, as they called it, and a working class, and that they were as different as two different tribes. Their conditions of life were different. Their values were different. Their expectations were different. And there wasn't, they thought, much passage between the two. That was what made the book exciting.

But they did all sorts of other things. They looked at the influence of the automobile on the sex habits on the population. They considered the enormous stability that religion had showed from 1890 to 1924. It's a very comprehensive and careful examination.

It is based on not just one kind of sociological data, but everything they could think of, including some of the earliest good surveys that ever were done. Their attendance at all kinds of civic and private celebrations, a great deal of interviewing, a good deal of examination of documents, careful review of newspapers. There wasn't any phase of life in the community they didn't touch. They had a lot of assistance. It represents some thousands of man hours, and it's a very careful job.

I encountered Robert Lynd as an undergraduate of Columbia and was fascinated. I took to haunting his office, and he gave me more time than I'm afraid I would give to an undergraduate these days, and eventually suggested that I change my major from history to sociology and go to the University of Chicago to study with the people he admired there. And I had very little contact with him until he retired in 1959, I believe, and I came back to Columbia and took not exactly his place, but at least I took his office.

Some years after that, one of my graduate students suggested that the time had come to do another study of Middletown. I should have mentioned that Robert Lynd, not Helen, went back to Muncie in 1935 to trace the influence of the Depression on the community. And they published a book called Middletown in Transition. We call that Middletown II. It was a much less thorough job. It wasn't intended to be a thorough social survey. It was a consideration really of one point: what the Depression had down to Middletown. What they found was it hadn't done as much as you'd expect. It's an interesting book.

By 1935 Robert Lynd had a much more negative view of American society than he'd had in 1924. And a great deal of that book is devoted to an exposition of the fact that Middletown had a dominant family, which he called the X family, actually the Balls of Ball Glass. And during the Depression they had used the fact that they still had resources when other people didn't to extend a good deal of control over the community. Even to this day the hospital and the university are named after them.

There were other leading families to which Lynd paid much less attention. Curiously, Muncie in the heart of Hoosier country was in a way the place from which the conquest of the West was furnished, because two of its products, Ball Glass jars and barbed wire, made by Indiana Wire and Steel were the two essential items for the frontier.

The Lynds never talked about consumerism. The term hadn't been invented. And they certainly did not think that anything was bringing the two classes together. They were impressed by the fact that this whole complicated society had sprung up rather suddenly around what had been a market center for an agricultural center thirty or forty years before. You have to remember that most of the people who lived in Muncie in 1924 had grown up on farms.

QUESTION: What kind of criteria were used to select Muncie?

THEODORE CAPLOW: They wanted a place that was as unexceptional as possible, with nothing outstanding about it, and that is true of Middletown to this day; less so perhaps than it was then, because at that time they could say that it had nothing outstanding, no famous historical events that ever occurred there. It had never been the home of a famous character. It had very few foreign-born people and practically no minorities. And that was what they liked about it. They were looking for in a sense the essence of plain Americanism.

The Middletown one study does not really contain a critique of consumerism. It contains a critique of class stratification, and the fact that the business class as they saw it were not only exploiting the working class, but also attempting to control them ideologically. There was a movement called "Magic Middletown." There was boosterism. Lynd devotes a lot of space to how squalid the typical working man's home was. And you have to remember that the great mechanization of the American home had barely started in 1924. Very few working class families would have had either running water or central heat. It's rather hard for us to realize. Since many of them lived in houses that are still occupied today, but the equipment was entirely different.

One of the most interesting trends in the twentieth century in the United States and also in Europe was the extraordinary mechanization of the home, which is now so far advanced that we have trouble visualizing how unmechanized the American home was earlier in the century. But it's important to realize that by 1924, even though many working class families had acquired automobiles, a great many of them had not yet acquired central heat or running water.

QUESTION: What happened between Middletown II in the 1930s, and when the next study, Middletown III, took place in the 1970s?

THEODORE CAPLOW: We are still using the distinction between business class and working class, but two things have happened in the interim, had already happened by 1977, when we did Middletown III, and are even more salient today after Middletown IV [the current study].

The two things that happened were that the relative number of white collar occupations increased greatly between 1924 and 1977, not only in Middletown but in the United States, and not only in the United States but in the whole Western world. The other thing that happened is that many of the differences between the business class and the working class eroded rapidly. For example, in 1924 very few working class parents aspired or expected to send their children to college, whereas practically all business class parents did. In 1977 there was virtually no difference between the two groups in that respect, and the rates of college attendance were not all that different.

To some extent, certainly not identical, but to some - there was some convergence, a good deal of convergence. For example, no working class person would have dreamed of playing golf in 1924. In 1977 it was commonplace. But on the other hand, the incidence of golfers and membership in the country clubs still gave you a pretty sharp division between the two groups.

There is still, for example, a conspicuous difference in exposure to unemployment. It's not as conspicuous as it was. In 1924 it was pretty nearly absolute. That is, Lynd couldn't find anybody in the business class who had been unemployed, whereas it was a normal and routine occurrence in the working class.

There's another very interesting aspect of that, and that is that in 1924 business class women never worked. Married women just didn't work. It was unthinkable. Working class women did quite often, but intermittently, and they went out and looked for work when their husbands were unemployed, because they had to keep food on the table. By 1977, in Middletown III that difference had almost disappeared because about half, nearly half of all business class women were now employed. And by now in 1999 it's considerably more than half who are employed. So that's changed greatly.

QUESTION: What has happened to the Lynds' working class distinction?

THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, you begin to have problems of classification, of course, because in 1924 the distinction was clean. People working with tools and materials were mainly employed in big factories, and a few of them in artisan shops. And the people who worked with symbols and ideas were all employed in offices, a few perhaps in retail stores. So that was easy to do.

It's much harder to do with current occupations. That is, whether a computer repairman should be called white collar or blue collar is a challenging question. But the notion that the working class has disappeared is absurd. For the country as a whole, people currently classify it as blue collar. In 1995, by one careful estimate, 48 percent of the male labor force was blue collar. There's been a great erosion and that's very important. But no one would conceivably describe them, as the Lynds did in 1924, as two separate tribes.

There's been a great erosion of the cultural differences, accomplished by the universalization of high school education and partially of college education, by radio and television, by other aspects of the popular culture, and by the mechanization of the home, because the enormous differences between the comfortable homes of the business class and the squalid homes of the working class have pretty much disappeared. They're still very different in size and comfort, but they have basically pretty much the same equipment.

QUESTION: What had happened to Lynd's own point of view by the mid-1930s?

THEODORE CAPLOW: You could say he'd been radicalized. He was much more critical of what he found in Middletown in 1935, and that possibly had to do with the fact that [his wife] Helen was not with him. This was something he did by himself and did fairly rapidly. He was much more concerned with the politics and he did in some respects find flaws in the community that he hadn't perceived in the earlier study. There is virtually no mention of prostitution in Middletown I. In Middletown II he discovers that for a long time, long before 1924, Middletown had had a large red light district and served as the center for prostitution for the entire local area. So there were all sorts of things that he hadn't seen or hadn't paid any attention to in the earlier study that now appeared to him to be important.

You must remember that in 1935 most American intellectuals were uneasy about the future of our social and economic system. It had nearly collapsed. About a third of the labor force had been unemployed at one point in 1933. The stock market had lost more than 80 percent of its value. Thousands of businesses had gone bankrupt. Europe was in the turmoil of the growth of fascism. And what Lynd and some other people were afraid of was that the tensions in Middletown, the inability to resolve economic problems might lead the country to fascism. Lynd was expecting to find a greater impact than he actually found.

QUESTION: What about religion in Middletown/Muncie?

THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, remember the original idea of the Middletown I study was that it was going to examine grassroots religion. And it only incidentally expanded into a general social survey. So religion has always been at the center of the Middletown studies and it continues to be. And it's fascinating, because in some respects it hasn't changed at all. You can take the sermon topics of 1999, they look almost identical with those of 1924; in many cases, not very different from those of 1890.

If you look at the answers to the critical questions about religion and personal faith in the community survey, the 1999 responses are turning out identical with those of 1977 and those of 1924. Middletown is for most of its inhabitants a place where they practice fairly intense religion.

Now, there are differences. The greatest difference is that in 1924 that they were sure that their religion was the only right religion, and that everybody else should be converted to it. By 1977 they no longer thought so. Another difference is that religion - rules that had nothing to do with religion but were church related, like what you could do on Sundays, had considerable influence in 1924 and very little influence by 1977, but strangely enough they have little more influence in 1999 than they had 22 years ago. Church attendance is higher than it was in 1924, but that's largely because the working class couldn't afford church or couldn't afford the clothes for church back then.

But the phenomenon of Middletown's religion is something that has puzzled sociologists not just about Middletown, but about the United States, because while Western Europe, with whom we share most of our social trends, has been secularizing since World War II, we haven't been going in that direction at all.

QUESTION: What about changing attitudes toward government?

THEODORE CAPLOW: The federal government was simply a distant presence [at the time of Middletown I]. There was a U.S. attorney in Indianapolis, who occasionally made a visit to Middletown, and there was a post office. And that was about it. There was, of course, no social security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no OSHA, no EPA. The federal government was something you tended to every four years when there was a presidential election, and that attracted considerable interest and it had some importance in wartime. There were some veterans of the Spanish-American War, even a few Civil War veterans and a good many World War I veterans who received small pensions. But the federal government was just not an important part of the picture.

In 1977 we counted something like fifty-two federal programs operating in Middletown, and now it would certainly be over a hundred. And a considerable part of the local labor force works directly for the federal government, although they don't recognize any common identity. There is no association of federal employees. People who work for the federal government in one capacity or another have the same general distrust of it that people who don't express it. [But] there's been a dramatic shift from a real resistance to any ideas of federal intervention in local affairs to soliciting grants for various purposes, which the city and county governments do all the time.

What we do find is that with respect to nationalist attitudes, and whether the United States is always right in its dealings with other countries and so on, there has been remarkably little change over this seventy-five year period. The high school students are still surprisingly patriotic, surprisingly if you think of the fact that they are supposed to be disillusioned and that they are very suspicious of government. But the typical Middletown adolescent or adult does not identify the country with the government. They have little confidence in the federal government, but a great attachment to the United States.

In 1977 faith in government was a little higher than it is today, but attachment to the country was about the same. With one qualification, and that is in 1924, female respondents, particularly in the high school survey, were more patriotic and more attached to the United States, more inclined to think it was the best country in the world than male respondents. By 1977 most of that difference had disappeared. By 1999 it has reversed. Women, particularly young women, are far more skeptical and cynical and less likely to express national sentiments than men are.

QUESTION: Can you explain the process of doing the current, 1999 study, what we are calling Middletown IV?

THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, I should make it clear that the 1999 effort, Middletown IV is a very limited effort, compared to Middletown I [1924], or Middletown III [1977]. It looks more like Middletown II [1935]. The current project is restricted to replicating the most important of the Lynds original surveys: one survey of the entire high school population, by means of an administered questionnaire; and the other a survey of a random sample of married women living with their husbands and children; that is to say, women in intact families. Now that's a very small fraction of what we did in 1977 or what the Lynds did in 1924. But it's all we were able to do, and those two surveys have given us more information about trends than any of the other operations involved in this long series of studies. So that's why we did it.

QUESTION: Why do you suppose the Lynds noted class differentiation in the way they did? And does the observation still hold?

THEODORE CAPLOW: It was forced upon them by the fact that they looked attentively at the community. You couldn't help seeing it. It was perfectly obvious that the community was bifurcated in that way. Middletown is only the first of a dozen important studies. The best known is probably the series of studies produced by W. Lloyd Warner and his associates of a place they called Yankee City, which is actually Newburyport, Massachusetts, where they found even more intense stratification than the Lynds did.

Then there's another set of studies by Hollingshead that was a Midwestern community that he called Elmstown. And that too I doubt very much you could have looked at any American community in the 1920s and 1930s and been struck by the enormous gaps between the people on top and the people at the bottom.

[Since then] it's changed in an uneven fashion. With respect to the stratification of income and wealth, in the quality of income and wealth, we made considerable progress from the 1920s to the 1950s. We're now about back where we were in the 1920s with a great deal of dis-equalization going on, particularly in the last decade or so. If you look at the Gini coefficient, which as you know measures the inequality of a distribution, then the United States has now the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any developed country by a very wide margin.

With respect to educational inequality there's been enormous progress, so that while there are still differences that are quite trifling between people of more or less affluence, in large measure that's because the colleges and universities have worked out a system for in effect taxing people according to their means. So if you go to Harvard from a rich family you pay some $30,000-odd a year and if you go to Harvard as some local people have done from a poor farm family, then you pay virtually nothing. The university arranges a packet of financial benefits that get you through. You live more comfortably if you come from a rich family, but you get through either way.

QUESTION: What are the most important changes you can see from the Middletown IV, the current study?

THEODORE CAPLOW: The family has changed enormously and most of the changes have occurred not so much from 1924 to 1999 as from let's say 1960 to 1999.

We see this, when we compare 1977 to 1999 in our surveys that the changes were underway, for example women going to work by 1977, they were well underway. But they hadn't reach anywhere near where they have today.

Let's take some of the most obvious ones. In 1924 married women with children did not work. Period. Just wasn't done. It would have been regarded as criminally irresponsible. Besides, there was sentiment that a woman who worked took away a job from a man. And the only excuse for a woman working was either that she was unmarried and needed to support herself, or that her husband was unemployed and she was working temporarily. In 1999 the great majority of married women with small children work, something over 60 percent. The great majority of married women, regardless of social class, work. Divorced women work even more. The lowest employment rates are actually found among unmarried women with children.

So the whole system has been turned around. That's one great change. In 1924 premarital sexual activity was heavily tabooed, although it occurred. But there were serious sanctions against it. In 1999 there are no sanctions at all to speak of. Curiously enough, that does not apply to extramarital sexual activities. As far as we can determine, adultery is viewed and perhaps sanctioned more severely today than it was in 1924. So there is a very wide gap between the view of premarital and extramarital sex.

In 1924 there are no figures for cohabitation, because cohabitation was legally very difficult, virtually impossible. As a matter of fact, even in 1977 cohabitation is pretty difficult. The Mann Act is still being sporadically enforced, which means that a cohabiting couple going from Maryland to Virginia could be arrested under federal law. In addition, in 1977 you still have laws against false registration in hotels being enforced, and you have the universal policy by banks and other lenders that they would not lend to unmarried couples. So cohabitation was practically very difficult. Now it's easy as marriage, in some respects easier. And this is a vast change in legal and customary practice.

Finally, you have non-marital births. In 1924 they did occur. They were regarded about as favorably as axe murderers. And the child was normally either sent to an orphanage or put up for adoption. But there was no thought that an unmarried mother should raise her own children. Some exception here for the black population, where there were a small number, but very small by modern standards of non-marital births - those children were raised in families that were often two- or three- or four-generation families composed of women. It was a kind of West Indian pattern that occasionally was seen, but it was pretty rare in Middletown.

Now we have a situation where the great majority of black children are born out of wedlock, and about a fifth of white children as well, and without any particular sanctions, in fact without any expectation that there's anything abnormal about this. So here again we see something that looks not like the collapse of the family, because the family is still a very strong institution in many respects, but a drastic change in its rules and regulations.

QUESTION: What about the amount of time spent on housework?

THEODORE CAPLOW: We have a chart which refers to the daily housework reported by Middletown housewives in 1924, 1977 and 1999. And it is pretty spectacular, because just about one-third of the housewives interviewed in 1999 reported doing one hour or less per day. The corresponding figure for 1924 is zero. No way you could keep house with less than an hour's work per day. At the other end of the scale in 1924 almost 90 percent reported four hours or more of housework. In 1999, 12 percent did. So that, of course, is where all that transition of female labor into the paid labor force has occurred.

The details are worth considering. To do laundry in 1924, without any electric washing machines, was an all-day task that had to be done every week. Moreover, we're talking about women in intact families. Work was much dirtier in those days, and clothing was much more difficult to handle. There were no synthetics and no polyesters. And after the clothes had been washed, they had to be dried and there was only one way to do that, which was to hang them out to dry, regardless of the weather. And then when they were taken in, they had to be ironed or they wouldn't be wearable. And all in all, doing the laundry for a family might consume two and a half woman days in 1924. Now, of course, it takes so little time that it's hardly reckoned into the household budget. And the same is true of cooking, food preparation, cleaning. In all respects housework has been drastically simplified and that is why women are now able, at the same time that they are effectively compelled, to join the labor force.

QUESTION: What about time spent with children?

THEODORE CAPLOW: One of the results that looks paradoxical here, because everybody knows about the great pressure that women have in reconciling their work role and their roles as wives and mothers, we find that they spend more time with their children and so do fathers than they did in 1977 and much more time than they did in 1924.

When you look at the details that becomes fairly explicable. Both men and women worked longer hours, longer weeks and longer years in 1924 than they do now. By wide margins. Remember, the work day in 1924 was anywhere from ten to twelve hours and typically five and a half or six days. And we've talked about this enormous commitment to housework that women had. Childcare was also considerably more difficult, because there were more children, the school day and the school year were shorter, and just the mechanics of preparing meals and keeping clothes clean and getting children off to school were more complicated. So there was less quality time, if you like, to be spent with children.

Moreover, outside childcare hadn't been invented. There was no such thing as nursery school. And that great mechanical device for distracting small children, television, hadn't been developed yet. Consequently, both men and women were overstressed by comparison with their successors today; much more so in the working class than the business class because their hours were longer, their resources were less, they had no household help. Their hours, by the way, were spectacularly longer. People who worked in offices worked perhaps a third fewer hours than people who worked in factories at the time. And that's one of the things that's equalized.

So we found in the 1977 survey that working class people were getting up later in the morning than they had in 1924, when most of them were getting up in the dark for most of the year. Strangely enough in 1999 we find the women again moving in the other direction; they're getting up earlier. A surprising proportion get up before 5:00 A.M. But this seems to have to do not so much with the volume of their work measured in work hours, as the difficulty in reconciling different obligations and different schedules: taking children to the doctor, for example, as against meeting the requirements of an office schedule.

QUESTION: What about the role of fathers in parenting?

THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, fathers generally speaking have the same problems with their children they used to have, but there seems to be a shift from father-son conflict to mother-daughter conflict, which plays well for fathers. Like mothers, they spend more time with their children than they used to. There are relatively few problems of any profound sort reported from intact families; that is to say, families where children live with their natural parents. There are lots of problems in single parent families, whether headed by a woman or a man. They are almost invariably connected with all kinds of social and psychological disorder. You also have a rather interesting set of problems in stepparent families; stepfathers seeming to have more trouble than stepmothers. But the relationship of stepfathers with adolescent children is often an unhappy one.

QUESTION: What has changed in family life in general?

THEODORE CAPLOW: What strikes us about the abundant data concerning parent-child relationships in these two surveys is how little they have changed in intact families. The same disagreements, the same values at both sides. Adolescents want parents who respect their opinions. They want parents to spend time with them. Parents are a little less likely to want obedience, but more likely to encourage independence. But they particularly want children who are honest with them.

The sources of disagreement are almost exactly what they were in 1924, things like choice of friends and weird styles of hair and clothing, attendance an un-chaperoned parties, coming in too late at night. It's the same picture. There's very little difference. And we get the same impression that not much has changed in family life over four generations, when we look at the number of evenings spent at home. In 1999 there are slightly more adolescents who spend seven nights away from home - that is seven evenings out - than there were in 1924, but it's not a notable difference, and the average is almost precisely the same. For high school students in general about three and a half evenings outside per normal week.

So not much seems to have changed, except that when we look at another part of the questionnaire we discover that nearly half of these high school students are not living with both natural parents. And that, of course, undermines the picture considerably. However, it must be noted that this nearly half who are living either in single-parent families or reconstituted families still report basically about the same relationships with their parents as those in intact families. As far at least as superficial elements are concerned, there's not a whole lot of difference.

QUESTION: Can we tell anything about political attitudes?

THEODORE CAPLOW: I think what we conclude, looking at the 1999 data, is that it doesn't really make sense to talk about general attitudes of conservatism or liberalism, because the trends run opposite on very specific items. We have a question taken literally from the 1924 questionnaire that was asked in 1977 and 1999 about what is popularly called the Protestant ethic. I think it reads something like, "It's the fault of the man himself if he does not succeed." - and we didn't change the wording out of political correctness, because as far as possible we try never to change wordings. And more young people accept that proposition as true now than in 1977 or even 1924. That's really quite startling.

On the other hand, we have another question about "The fact that some people have so much more money than others, so there's something wrong with this country." And there we get more people taking the liberal point of view in 1999 than in either 1977 or 1924. So you really have to look at each item by itself and realize that the mosaic of attitudes that are current at any given time don't necessarily or normally represent a drift in one direction or another, but the reaction to specific ideas.

QUESTION: What about economic change?

THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, let's take the overall picture. In 1924 you had prosperity, but it was prosperity 1924 style with very frequent unemployment for working class people, and a large part of the population living in what we would now consider the subsistence level. And the 1930s saw about a third of the labor force unemployed and the failure of many local enterprises, and the first signs of federal intervention in local affairs. The 1940s brought prosperity; the war brought a wave of prosperity to Muncie that lasted for pretty nearly the next generation.

When we did the 1977 study, it was sort of taken for granted that the community was well off. Then in the 1980s it was hit by a kind of local depression that was chronicled in a brief documentary film by Ben Wattenberg. Unemployment got up to 18 percent at one point in the early 1980s. And what was happening was that the heavy industry, sort of basic manufacturing industry on which Middletown had always depended, was being phased out. A number of the local plants never recovered. Some of them staggered on for some years. But the Ball Glass Jar company moved away, Indiana Wire and Steel, and the packing houses shut down. The Delco reduced its workforce and eventually shut down. The local glass plants beside Ball began to work half shifts.

By 1999 this process was complete. Middletown is no longer a manufacturing city. It has no major manufacturing plant, none at all. It's still structured in such a way that the whole south side is sort of designed to be the residential area for a factory workforce, but there are no factories to speak of. Nonetheless, it is prosperous. And that represents a shift to service industry that on the whole has been successful by being piecemeal. Nobody completely understands the reasons for Muncie's or Middletown's current prosperity, but nobody's complaining about it either.

Ball State [University] is now the largest employer by far in Muncie, and it, of course, benefits greatly from state and federal funds and from the importation of private funds from elsewhere in the state. So that if you're looking for a single engine that drives the service economy, it probably is the presence in the community of this large university.

QUESTION: How does Middletown III compare to Middletown IV?

THEODORE CAPLOW: In 1977 we tried to replicate the Lynds' 1924 study. In fact, ours lasted three years. The interviews were done in 1977, but we were still working there in 1979. And that meant a very variegated set of data sources, not only the two surveys that we've now replicated, there were nine other surveys, surveys of organizations, surveys of religious behavior, surveys of people's working lives, surveys of leisure activities.

In addition to which we gathered all sorts of observations, attended all sorts of events, followed the newspaper and did content analysis, interviewed people as to the historical events in which they'd participated. And did a great deal of just firsthand observation. We produced two books, fifty papers and have not nearly ever exhausted the material we gathered at that point. So it was a very large enterprise.

The Middletown IV study in 1999 was a shadow of this, because we could only replicate two surveys. We're very glad to have done it, in connection to "The First Measured Century," but it cannot give the same basis of information that the earlier study did. Just as Middletown II could only focus on a few points, so Middletown IV will tell us some things that are useful, while not completely replicating the original studies.

QUESTION: Was there anything surprising in your findings in Middletown IV?

THEODORE CAPLOW: I think the thing that surprised us the most was how well the community had resisted the two great outside interferences: the federal government and network television. They were present, they were visible, but they seem to have very much less effect on the behavior and attitudes of local people than we would have anticipated.

The most interesting thing to me is the question of whether there is still a clear local and regional character to this place. See, it's always been very useful because it somehow manages to track national trends very closely. Almost anything you get, the divorce rate, the average church attendance of Catholics, when you get it from Middletown you probably are pretty close to the national figure. But I've not had enough recent time in Middletown to really sense whether people feel as much integrated into a local culture as they used to. Most people who live in Middletown live there because - can you guess why? Because their relatives live there. That's the principle reason why Americans live where they do, because their kinfolk live there. Also, it's a safe place. The crime rate is perceived as low, even though it's somewhat higher than it used to be. It's a good place to raise children, because they run into relatively few conflicts and disturbances. But then they complain that it's limited, that it limits their horizons, that it doesn't have all the facilities a larger city would have.

New River Media Interview with: Bruce Geelhoed Director, Center for Middletown Studies and Professor of History Ball State University

QUESTION: Tell us a little bit about when Robert and Helen Lynd came to Muncie, Indiana to begin work on what would become the Middletown study.

BRUCE GEELHOED: Lynd came to Muncie in the 1920's with some money from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., by that point a noted philanthropist, with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, several other organizations. One organization that he established was what was called the Bureau of Social and Religious Research. The curious point about this is that what Rockefeller wanted to do with this organization was have studies that would explore the possibility that religion could influence capital and labor, that the strife, the labor strife that was happening in the United States during the 1920's and even before that; he felt that perhaps religion might have a positive role to play in that.

He had wanted the Bureau of Social and Religious Research to focus on that, and indeed, even had set up a study to be conducted that would go in that direction. Robert Lynd came to the Middletown Study, or what eventually became known as the Middletown Study, as the second researcher. The first person that the Bureau wanted to use later was discovered to be unqualified to do the work, and Lynd was brought along to do this.

Robert Lynd and his wife Helen came to Muncie in 1925. The idea for the study that related to the role of religion in mediating the differences between capital and labor sort of got put to one side, because Robert Lynd for a long time had been interested in doing what he called a small city study, where he would observe life in a representative American community and explain that in the context of how ordinary Americans lived out their lives - customs, behaviors, attitudes and that sort of thing.

Muncie was selected, curiously enough, because the Lynds were convinced that it was a community that did not have a dominant influence by any particular ethnic group or any particular family group or any particular economic sector. In that respect, it was seen as somewhat representative. They didn't want to have a community that could be readily identified as being influenced too heavily in one way or another by a given company or a given elite group of people who dominated the life of the community, and so forth.

Later on, Lynd revised that, of course. He acknowledged that the Ball family was more important in Muncie than he originally had thought, and he also saw that the influence of the teachers' college in the life of the community was greater than what he had originally hoped for.

When he came here, interestingly enough, what he discovered was there were really two Muncies. There was the Muncie of the working class. These were the people who, by and large, worked with things. They were the people who lived on the south and on the east side of town. They held wage-type job occupations in the auto industry, in the glass industry, in small business, in light industry, in the commercial trades, as contrasted with the people who were of the business class, and they worked with people. This was the managerial group, the doctors, the lawyers, the professors, the educators, the owners of business enterprises, sometimes the managers of business enterprises, and they tended to live on the north and on the west side of town. And there were entire neighborhoods that reflected those two divisions in the community.

Interestingly enough, if you know anything about the geography of the town, it's the White River that basically separates the north from the south, the east from the west. The working class tended to settle on the south and on the east side, and the business class, from about the 1910's on, tended to settle on the north and the west. And that is a pattern that has continued literally right up to the present day, throughout the entire course of the 20th century.

The working class was much larger, of course, than the business class. Muncie grew substantially in the 1890's. It was a community of less than ten thousand in 1880, and by the turn of the century it had become thirty-five thousand population. By the time the Lynds arrived here, I think it was a population of about fifty thousand people; a large, large working-class community, much more heavily concentrated in the trades than in, shall we say, the elite of the business owners and that sort of thing.

QUESTION: How did the Lynds operate?

BRUCE GEELHOED: No one had done a small city survey of the type that the Lynds proposed to do. They took up residence in Muncie and tried to become part of the fabric of the community. They had a residence from which they operated which wasn't too far from downtown Muncie. They walked the streets. People talk about how the Lynds, who were, shall we say, more cosmopolitan and were from the East and that sort of thing, how they must have responded to Muncie, how they must have seen this as, you know, somewhat unusual in terms of the lifestyle and patterns of the lifestyle. That had some truth to it, although Robert Lynd, of course, was originally a Hoosier. He was born in New Albany, Indiana, far to the south. A different story for his wife, of course.

But he saw a community in the 1920's that was influenced by people who had moved up here from the South, from Kentucky and from Tennessee, from parts of Appalachia. And that's different from small-town America in the northern Midwest, or at least in states of the north of Indiana - Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, that sort of thing; a much different sort of culture. It was a conservative culture, economically, politically, in terms of its racial attitudes and that sort of thing. It was a community that reflected the influence of late nineteenth century southern attitudes, in part.

And then you also had the effect of the modernization movement that was typical of all of America at that time and was somewhat distrusted by, shall we say, the old-line Munsonians who had been here for a generation or two and were more inclined to think in the terms that I just described. A different small-town feeling for Lynd had he been, let's say, in a small town in central Michigan or a small town in western Illinois that had maybe its roots in agriculture or it maybe had its roots in commerce and trade. But here you have one that has its roots in industrialization and people who are coming up from Kentucky and Tennessee escaping that rural background to find steady work in a factory setting and then beginning to form family relationships and associations that tilt in that direction.

Glass manufacturing becomes important for Muncie. Because of that, there's a whole, shall we say, mini-economy that grows around the supply of that type of business. And then after World War I, General Motors comes to Muncie in 1921 with a transmission plant, and in 1928 with a battery plant. That changes things significantly, because not only are the auto companies are expanding tremendously during the 1920s. That's one of the stories of the economic growth of the 1920s is the growth of the automobile. And with General Motors and glass and auto parts and all of that figuring into the equation, you can see how the city develops its industrial profile. It also has a college, of course, and it has all this other, but this is the industrial profile of the community.

QUESTION: What did the Lynds criticize about Muncie?

BRUCE GEELHOED: What the Lynds saw in Muncie that they later became very critical of was this all-too-vigorous embrace of the consumer society. The Lynds were very critical of advertising and of the manipulation of people's attitudes and beliefs. And, of course, much of the 1920's prosperity was conditioned by advertising, convincing people that if they didn't have a certain household item or a particular type of automobile or household appliance and this sort of thing, that somehow they had to have it. They had to have it for their own satisfaction. They had to have it because their neighbors had it or somebody else in their family had it and they were suffering by comparison and all of that.

This headlong dash on the part of the ordinary citizen to acquire more and more consumer comforts or creature comforts, as the term might be, was something that left the Lynds and their research team sort of shaking their heads. They could see it happening. They could understand it happening. But they didn't feel that this was adding anything to, shall we say, the capital of the community, the social capital of the community.

Now, it's all well and good to be critical of that sort of thing. You're observing it happening here. But if Middletown is representative, and I think it was of America in the 1920's, Robert and Helen Lynd could have gone into any other community. They would have seen the same sort of factors at work, because the pervasiveness of advertising was changing people's attitudes all over the country.

QUESTION: What about this class division that he observed?

BRUCE GEELHOED: The two communities, the business class and the working class, historically in Muncie do not ever really come together around a unifying ideal. In other words, as the century progresses, there's not a closer connection between or shall we say a closer drawing together of these two disparate elements within the community. Both of them continue to live out their lives according to the culture of that particular class. For the working class, it's one set of values. For the business class, it's another set of values.

Economically, the south end stays manufacturing; the north end stands as commercial and trade and all that. The south end is Democratic in terms of its affiliation with a political party, with some modest exceptions every now and then, of course, but still heavily Democratic when people go into the voting booth. It's a natural fact of life that there's no desire on the part of one element of the community to embrace the values and the attitudes of the other. The Lynds saw it. It's no different today.

QUESTION: What did the Lynds find out about religion in Muncie?

BRUCE GEELHOED: The Lynds give a lot of attention to religion in Muncie, in both Middletown and in Middletown in Transition, the two books. Now, Middletown, Muncie/Middletown, is in Indiana, a conservative Midwestern state. It is a small community. It is influenced by, shall we say, a certain degree of southern attitudes and customs.

But the big point that needs to be stressed here - and you can see this in Middletown; you can see this in Middletown in Transition also - is that the community is a community of mainline denominations. It is not characteristic of, you know, hyper-conservative, Bible Belt, fundamentalist Christianity of the type that so often gets associated with the revivalist tradition. And that's unfortunate, because people associate that particular religious style or that particular religious preference with small-town Midwestern communities.

And the Lynds noticed, shall we say, the modernist philosophy about religion entering into the teaching and the preaching and the churches at the time on all sorts of things, like the Bible and science as it relates to things like evolution, or do you believe that the Bible is without error and that controversy. What is the role of the clergy in interpreting the Bible for people and all that sort of stuff. So Muncie reflects, probably to a greater extent in religion than it does in economics and politics, the more modern aspects of America in the 1920's and, shall we say, in the 1930's.

The Protestant ethic, sure, that takes root in Middletown like it does all across the United States. What's the Protestant ethic? The Protestant ethic is to say if you work hard and you are honest, and you treat people the way you want to be treated, that by and large you are going to be successful. It also is the idea that by working hard, effectively, productively, that you are also serving the Almighty, as well as serving your employer or serving yourself. That's the religious element to that.

What goes along with that, of course, is that by doing that you will be rewarded, and by not doing it you will be penalized; you will bear the consequences of being a lazy employee or something like that. And if you succeed or if you fail, or your relative economic and social status in the community ultimately comes back to you, and your efforts. The Lynds, confronted with this headlong rush into modernization and modernity and the impersonal nature of all of the forces that were at work during the 1920s, found the typical Munsonian belief in individualism to be just purely astonishing. So individualism and the Protestant ethic as it is practiced in Muncie during the 1920's are very much, should we say, two sides of the same coin. And it is very strongly held. You know, I suppose you could even make the point that today in Muncie a good number of people would like to believe that's the case, that they are going to succeed or they are going to fail based upon their own ingenuity and their own efforts.

QUESTION: What about the black population of Middletown?

BRUCE GEELHOED: Lynd does not pay much attention to the African American population in Muncie in terms of describing that influence in that particular group of people in Middletown, that is in Middletown the book. And he gets criticized for that, they get criticized for that, the two authors. The role of the Ku Klux Klan likewise is something that gets very little treatment in terms of their analysis of the dynamics of the community during the 1920s.

The African American community in Muncie has never been large. It's never exceeded 10 percent of the total population. By and large the African American community has lived on the east side of town. The African American community by and large consisted of working class people who had a variety of jobs in the factories in Muncie, tended to work in or worked in service-type positions. African Americans came to Muncie and found a hospitable climate. But why did African Americans come to Muncie from the South, from Virginia, places like this? They came because they knew that there was work. And usually they would come at the instigation or at the encouragement of a friend or of a family member or someone like this.

If this was a semi-hospitable climate at least for African Americans, what about the Klan during the 1920's? Much of the Klan's activity in Muncie was focused on the community's Catholic element. There is not a large Italian population in Muncie, for example. There is a large Irish American population, but there's not a large Italian. There's a small Jewish population. But the point is that the Klan tended to focus on not just racial but also native anti-immigrant feeling and anti-Catholic feeling - it's not a happy picture, because some of the more respectable people in Muncie belonged to the Klan during the 1920's. But a good deal of its activity - the threats, the intimidation, the economic prejudice and everything like that - was directed not just at African Americans. It's not the tradition that we associate with the Deep South. And you have a period of time when the Klan's influence starts to decline, in Indiana and elsewhere, and the leader of the state Klan organization is arrested, is prosecuted, and is basically dealt with by the middle of the 1920's. So it's a chapter in Muncie that is somewhat notorious.

QUESTION: Do you think Lynd was aligned politically?

BRUCE GEELHOED: Well, Robert Lynd always, from the political and the sort of economic perspective, tended to lean to the left. I think by the 1930's it would not be accurate to say that Lynd was describing himself as a socialist. But he certainly felt that the days of shall we say unbridled, unfettered capitalism were over, and we had to be moving in the United States to some form of collective, not in the Soviet sense, but collective communitarian ideology that blunted the harshest aspects of capitalism, that laissez-faire, individualistic, each man for himself, Adam Smith, by doing the best for yourself you are also doing the best for others - that that approach to economics and politics and sociology was gone. And he believed that the deprivation and the hardships that were created during the Depression were evident of, shall we say, the bankruptcy of that philosophy.

So coming to Middletown in the 1930's, I think he expected people to have the same sort of change in attitude that he had had, that they would question the functionality, the efficiency, the effectiveness, of a modern capitalistic free-enterprise economy and society, and our society built on the individual liberties above everything else, that the Depression simply would force people to change their thinking. This had happened all over the United States - we know that. You know, in Detroit for example, when unemployment reached 50 percent there were unemployment councils that were petitioning political authorities for help. And many members of the Communist Party were leading that whole movement, you know, and nobody felt I guess, shall we say, terribly threatened by that; it was simply saying capitalism the way that you define it in the 1920's and beyond is not the way that things are going to work effectively any longer.

QUESTION: What did Lynd find when he came back to Muncie in 1935?

BRUCE GEELHOED: What Lynd discovered here was that people's attitudes hadn't changed, that there still was belief in quote/unquote "the capitalistic system," individual liberty was still a prized value; and although this was not said a lot, I am sure, some people espoused the philosophy that if you didn't make it and you were out of work, maybe you weren't responsible for that, but the responsibility for getting back on your feet and providing for your family and everything like that was yours and you couldn't necessarily expect someone else to come along and help you do it, or an agency of government to come along and help you to do it. So Lynd was shocked by that.

What would allow Muncie to have those kinds of attitudes when all around people are not holding to that, or at least they are not holding that to that degree? Muncie still has the rudiments of an industrial base during the 1930's. The darkest moment for Muncie's economy probably occurred in 1930 when General Motors closed its transmission plant here, quote/unquote "General Motors moved out of town." And Lynd talks about that a lot in Middletown in Transition and how this was a psychological blow, and economic blow to the community: if they are leaving us we are really in bad shape. And yet General Motors had always held up the prospect - the management of General Motors had always held up the prospect - that if the economy improved and there was a demand and everything like that that they would consider coming back to the community. So the municipal leadership is holding out for the prospect that maybe they will come back.

Ball Brothers Manufacturing Company continued to do business effectively during the Depression and that's not to say that they weren't gangbusters and, you know, they served the company served to underpin the nature of the entire community here. But when times are tight economically people are looking for ways to save. And one of the ways you can save is on food purchasing and all of that, and so home canning as a behavior explodes during the 1930s. Rather than buy it, you know, people will grow it, preserve it, and then eat it when they need it. And so their business remained fairly strong. And as a consequence of that, the family which owned the business still had its resources, and people in the community knew that the family had its resources.

And then in 1935 General Motors comes back to Muncie and starts re-hiring. And that did a couple of things. Number one, it got people back to work; and, number two, it restored the sense of confidence. If they are back, then things are going to eventually stabilize and get somewhat better.

But Lynd is not looking at that in that perspective. He hadn't been here between, say, 1929 and 1935. He hadn't been here during the really awful times. Had he been here in 1933, for example, and seen the county government in Muncie issue four permits for new housing construction, worth $8,500 total for that entire year, he might have discovered some different attitudes on the part of people. Muncie had a million dollars of new home construction in 1929, and in 1933 it had $8,500 worth. There was absolutely nothing happening in that town. That is a statistic that comes out of Middletown in Transition.

QUESTION: Was what was going on in Muncie typical?

BRUCE GEELHOED: It was not representative of what was going on in the country I don't think economically, and it probably wasn't representative of what was going on in the country in terms of the attitudes either. It's interesting politically. Muncie voted for Hoover in 1932. And, you know, that's really kind of astonishing when you think about it, because the evidence of the Depression is all around by that time. There is no doubting it it's there. You had it for three years. It tells you that there is this continuity of the conservative tradition and the belief Hoover was the greatest espouser of rugged individualism that has been in the White House, you know, probably during this century. And Indiana votes for him.

QUESTION: How did the town respond to the success of Lynd's book?

BRUCE GEELHOED: The publication of Middletown probably surprised everybody when it became the bestseller that it did in terms of the readability, and the fact that so many thousands and thousands of people were buying the book. It certainly helped to classify Muncie as sort of the proto-typical representative American city, even though you can read Middletown and you see no mention of Muncie, Indiana in there. It's sort of left to the reader to try to find this place that he's talking about and locate it on the map or get your information from a closer source to all this.

How does Muncie became known as Middletown, that really occurs in the popular consciousness after the publication of Middletown in Transition, when Margaret Burke White comes here in 1937. And she does this photo essay in Life Magazine, which is entitled Muncie is America's Middletown. And that photo essay, four or five pages in length, shows the contrast that the Lynds were talking about between the palatial mansion of a business class person over here and the hovel that a working class person lives in, or the cramped quarters of a working class family, where you might have the grandmother whose husband has died living with the mother, the father and the grandchildren in kind of tight quarters; by contrast with a, you know, roomy, spacious home on the northwest side that only the husband and the wife and the children live in and the grandparents are someplace else, you know, in presumably decent accommodations of their own, probably not even here in Muncie and that sort of thing.

QUESTION: What was the legacy of his work for sociologists and other social scientists?

BRUCE GEELHOED: What Lynd did with the two books was, he certainly came up with a method, a process by which one completes a small city survey or a small city project. And that method I'm sure has been applied in numerous other communities. You know, we regularly get people asking for copies of Lynd's questionnaires, because they'd like to try it in this town in Massachusetts or this town in, you know, you name the place.

Lynd drew the big picture with certainly smaller elements to it. Well, maybe you don't want to take on the Robert Lynd approach in the big scheme, but you want to analyze one aspect of your community relative to, let's say, home ownership or possession of automobile vehicles and see whether that community compares with Muncie as Middletown. He provides you the roadmap by which to do this. So the point is that if you consider Muncie as normative, then you can go to another community, analyze the same sorts of factors and decide whether or not that community is exceptional or normative based on Middletown.

Now, that's happened, I'm sure, over the course of this century thousands of times. That would be, I'm sure, a project that sociologists known and unknown would assign to their students: go back to your home town, take some of Robert Lynd's questionnaires and start throwing those around, see how your home town of Euclid, Ohio or, you know, Kankakee, Illinois, just to cite a few, see how they compare, see how that looks like over a certain period of time, that sort of thing.

QUESTION: How was Muncie revisited in the 1970's for "Middletown III"?

BRUCE GEELHOED: Ted Caplow, Howard Bahr, Bruce Chadwick came to Muncie. Chadwick and Bahr are sociologists of Brigham Young [University]. Ted is a sociologist of course at the University of Virginia. The purpose was to do another small city study on the fiftieth anniversary of the original Middletown study. And they lived here for several years, three or four years, became part of the community in that respect - did a lot of the same kinds of sociological research that Robert and Helen Lynd had overseen back in the 1920s, and to a certain extent the 1930s. Caplow wrote two books that came out of the Middletown III Project. One was called All Faithful People, and that was an analysis of religion in Muncie during the 1970's. Another was called Middletown Families and, as the name suggests, it was a 1970's revisit of the family patterns of life in Muncie during that particular time.

Both of those books emphasized the continuity aspects of Muncie tradition, and obviously always social scientists are always interested in this notion of is it continuity or is it conflict, is it continuity or is it change. And Ted likes to talk about it. He says, you know, continuity wins hands down, that there is this progression of values from generation to generation. Muncie represents those, you know, the continuous nature of that tradition.

What's interesting about Muncie in the light of those studies is that the community had changed so really dramatically during the period of time from let's say Middletown in Transition to Middletown III. By the 1970's the area is considerably larger. It has benefited over the years from an influx of additional manufacturing operations. The college is considerably bigger. In the 1970's it was an institution of about seventeen, eighteen thousand students. Back in the 1930's it was an institution of about a thousand. The dominant force in the life of the community is obviously a combination of higher education and medicine and industry. And back in the 1930's there is not a balance between those; it's pretty much a business-oriented culture as opposed to a service one.

My sense is - and this is certainly not a brilliant observation by any means - my sense is that in a conservative community such as Muncie has always been, is that Muncie will follow trends which have been established - Muncie will be behind the curve so to speak on this. And what is fashionable in terms of clothing styles or music or preferences of one type or another, they eventually will get picked up and they will get absorbed and they will get accepted here in Muncie, but it won't happen as quickly as it would in the urban centers.

QUESTION: What happened to Muncie by the 1970's?

BRUCE GEELHOED: The great story of Muncie in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century is basically the community's de-industrialization. It began in 1962 when Ball Brothers Manufacturing Company decided that it was going to take its glass-making operations and transfer them to other sites in the country. Now, that's not to say that the company left the community. The headquarters was here, and there were some aspects of its manufacturing would still remain. But the big glass-making plant was basically discontinued and the company moved into other areas. Now, in retrospect, that was kind of a signal that maybe the community's best days of industrialization were starting to come to a close. Between 1980 and 1985, Muncie was one of the top twelve counties in America in terms of the number of people who left.

So the community basically sort of de-industrializes because of the, shall we say, changing profile and changing shape of trends in the United States. Industries that were important, like food processing, moved to the South and the West and Southwest. And if you are a manufacturer in that industry, to keep up with your customers you have to move basically from the Midwest and the Northeast to follow that whole thing there. The same thing applies in the auto industry: modernization of plants in Oklahoma and in Kansas and places like that. And when the Midwest is referred to as the Rust Belt in the early 1980s, there is sort of a reason for that, and Muncie and Central Indiana don't escape that.

QUESTION: Talk about the Muncie of the 1999 study, Middletown IV.

BRUCE GEELHOED: The aspects of continuity in the community, what's the same, still a community of mainline churches. There is a vibrancy of religion. The large Methodist churches are still functioning, the large Roman Catholic congregation likewise, the large Presbyterian congregation's the same way. Basketball's big. The Lynds talked about basketball both in Middletown and Middletown in Transition. Basketball continues to be big. Not as big as it once was, of course, because there are other games in town. The youth now [want] cars. They wanted cars in the 1920's but now it was a situation where you hoped that Dad would give you the keys to family car, now it's, you know, I've got my own, and I keeping it going by working a part-time job twenty hours a week and that's enough to put gas in it and help Dad pay for the insurance. But I have to have the car because my mom is working.

There still is an emphasis on the importance of family and families doing things together. The best example of that probably is the whole youth sports scene, with large soccer leagues. Mom and Dad are in a position of being spectators now, but they're all there. That's a phenomenon that's occurring around the country also. It's not just here.

Here is a fascinating statistic, and it tends to get overlooked little bit. Primarily because I guess people don't explore it to any great degree. Muncie has voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1936, with one exception. That's 1960. Middletown voted for Nixon over Kennedy that year, but it voted for Roosevelt in 1936, voted for Roosevelt all the way on through, and stayed with Truman, then it went over to Eisenhower and basically it switched, it swung, stayed with Johnson, but swung to Nixon, stayed with Nixon but then swung to Carter and then swung to back to Reagan, and then swung to over to [Clinton] again in 1992 when he ran against Bush. Sometimes the statistics are so compelling that they just leave you with your mouth wide open.

Now, if that doesn't show that a community is representative and in thinking, in keeping with the thinking of a nation as a whole, I don't know what is. And the community has changed so much. It's not the same community. It's not the same profile of voter that's voting in the 1930's and the 1940's and the 1950's and the 1960's. And yet - this is what the results are. I just find that absolutely fascinating.