Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson Page B

to identify ‘the best,’ but he was unable to stop the influence of his books on others. And he earned perhaps a more enduring accolade than the Pulitzer Prize from academics – sociologists – who, in the mid-1920s, found the phenomenon of Babbitt so fascinating that they decided to study for themselves a middle-size town in middle America.
    Robert and Helen Lynd decided to study an ordinary American town, to describe in full sociological and anthropological detail what life consisted of. As Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History put it in his foreword to their book,
Middletowm,
‘To most people, anthropology is a mass of curious information about savages, and this is so far true, in that anthropology deals with the less civilised.’ Was that irony – or just cheek? 23 The fieldwork for the study, financed by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, was completed in 1925, some members of the team living in ‘Middletown’ for eighteen months, others for five. The aim was to select a ‘typical’ town in the Midwest, but with certain specific aspects so that the process of social change could be looked at. A town of about 30,000 was chosen (there being 143 towns between 25,000 and 50,000, according to the U.S. Census). The town chosen was homogeneous, with only a small black population – the Lynds thought it would be easier to study cultural change if it was not complicated by racial change. They also specified that the town have a contemporary industrial culture and a substantial artistic life, but they did not want a college town with a transient student population. Finally, Middletown should have a temperate climate. (The authors attached particular importance to this, quoting in a footnote on the very first page of the book a remark of J. Russell Smith in his
North America:
‘No man on whom the snow does not fall ever amounts to a tinker’s damn’) 24 It later became known that the city they chose was Muncie, Indiana, sixty miles northeast of Indianapolis.
    No one would call
Middletown
a work of great literature, but as sociology it had the merit of being admirably clearheaded and sensible. The Lynds found that life in this typical town fell into six simple categories: getting a living; making a home; training the young; using leisure in various forms of play, art, and so forth; engaging in religious practices; and engaging in communityactivities. But it was the Lynds’ analysis of their results, and the changes they observed, that made
Middletown
so fascinating. For example, where many observers – certainly in Europe – had traditionally divided society into three classes, upper, middle, and working, the Lynds detected only two in Middletown: the business class and the working class. They found that men and women were conservative – distrustful of change – in different ways. For instance, there was far more change, and more acceptance of change, in the workplace than in the home. Middletown, the Lynds concluded, employed ‘in the main the psychology of the last century in training its children in the home and the psychology of the current century in persuading its citizens to buy articles from its stores.’ 25 There were 400 types of job in Middletown, and class differences were apparent everywhere, even at six-thirty on the average morning. 26 ‘As one prowls Middletown streets about six o’clock of a winter morning one notes two kinds of homes: the dark ones where people still sleep, and the ones with a light in the kitchen where the adults of the household may be seen moving about, starting the business of the day.’ The working class, they found, began work between six-fifteen and seven-thirty, ‘chiefly seven.’ For the business class the range was seven-forty-five to nine, ‘but chiefly eight-thirty.’ Paradoxes abounded, as modernisation affected different aspects of life at different rates. For example, modern (mainly psychological) ideas ‘may be observed